This was emailed through from a source of my own...
Most self-respecting, right-wing bloggers are reassuring themselves about Labour's key falability this year: that the party is somehow unfit to govern. In fairness, this is a view perhaps not altogether countered by the efficiency of the Labour machine to date; the party's poor online security perhaps the most recent example of a public blooper, although not in my view one capable of casting aspersions over its leadership or direction.
But it has me thinking about the role our media will play in the coming campaign and how they might influence the result.
Many of the commentators and journalists covering this election will come from two opposing camps. There'll be the selection with their own well worn seats in the parliament's press gallery, older folk who not always but often work for the print media and who have stories to tell about everyone up to the 2005 election, and then there are the easily dazzled but attractive selection of generally younger journalists, who can still get lost around the parliamentary precinct and who rely on key contacts to spread the news.
Neither will serve us especially well.
The former are overly rigid and have become embittered on seeing their headlines replaced by so-called "tits-and-teeth" reportage. They pick this bone with just about everyone they can. They are deeply cynical and can sometimes be quite unpleasant to be around. They genuinely and passionately believe that they have the read of parliament, but losing their hold means losing their voice and that scares them half to death. And they are losing their hold.
The latter are innocent enough, but are too easily lead astray by the bedazzling nature of the job. Reporting on parliament is truly an honour, and on being issued their security key, many of these reporters find themselves taken in by the grandeur of their surroundings. They are preyed upon by party media machines and develop "sources" that really only feed them key lines and conspiracy theories.
Ultimately, the voter will be called on to cast a ballot informed by their reporting. The "issues" of this campaign have already been decided, with only the scandals left yet to be seen (this is because they need to be manufactured when the opportunity presents). The narrative, of the smile and wave prime minister and the robotic, almost awkward leader of the opposition, is set. All that remains for the country's editors is to find space for the stories between advertisements.
The role of the media is paramount to any democracy. Without an effective media, you cannot have anything other than an invisible bureaucracy that exists only to encourage corruption and keep an array of bureaucrats salaried, reward for their dutiful obedience. We do not have an effective media.
In fairness, we don't have an altogether hopeless media either, making this blog post perhaps all the more pointless. But we do have a lazy media, made up of actors relying on their prejudices or their sources, feeding us about three-quarters of one per cent of fact, with the difference made up by hearsay, rumour and sometimes just plain fiction.
This is where the internet presents perhaps the greatest threat to the well-monied establishment of Australian and Asian investors running most (but not all) of our mainstream media. Most of these investors are too lazy to worry themselves about political happenings in little old New Zealand, so this doesn't quite reach Manchurian Candidate-type proportions. But they do expect profits, and profits for these media outlets rely on advertising.
This gives the advertising industry the incredible opportunity to literally influence the type of journalism we get. Advertisers know that sex sells, and the sexification of our news media over even the last decade is astounding. Advertisers also know that people like scandal, intrigue and suspicion, and so these qualities influence reporting. Advertisers know that people want a fight between good and evil, which informs a lot of crime and criminal justice reporting, as well as the contest played out between politicians.
The problem with having a media influenced by the advertising industry is the latter aren't exactly renowned for their moral integrity. The job of the advertiser is to sell the client's product. They can perhaps refuse to sell those more morally objectionable products (although those are often the ones with the clients who pay the most), but they are otherwise obliged to exaggerate, speculate, and inflate (sometimes even create) a product's benefits. They cannot be trusted with the Fourth Estate.
And this is why we need the bloated love of a public broadcasting service; why the commercialisation (actually, the privatisation) of our news media is a bad, bad idea. Bad for our governments. Bad for our communities. And bad for our civilisation.
Here endeth today's rant.
