Social media platforms demand an unending stream of content. Journalism has reshaped its message to meet that need and politicians have worked out how to keep the supply running.
The fact-free thought bubble
In the past week, John Howard troubling over multiculturalism, Scott Morrison nattering about China and Tony Abbott’s unsurprising repudiation of the climate emergency at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London all hit their mark.
There’s nothing new or newsworthy in any of it, but once the comments were dressed up as news grabs, they fizzed and bubbled across social media before elbowing their way into the weekend’s serious commentary on both the right (“Reclaiming Western civilisation’s values”, pondered Paul Kelly in The Australian), and the left (“Pouring fool on the fire”, Jonathan Green punned in The Monthly’s politics newsletter).
It was left to Australia’s cartoonists to pull the media up. “Back by unpopular demand,” quipped Fiona Katauskas in Guardian Australia.
Why do reporters play dumb?
Remember back when Peter Dutton jerked the Voice debate into a fantastical vision of the future with his promise for a second, reconciliation-lite poll? It was, even at the time, bullshit (in the purely philosophical sense, that is) and didn’t last more than 48 hours past polls closing.
For those few days mid-campaign, the stunt’s pretence of seriousness lit up the news cycle with the power of its undiluted chutzpah. It’s the look-over-there political distraction painted as news. (By the way, did you see that Scott Morrison is in Israel?) Yet, as Judd Legum wrote in his Substack Popular Information last week, reporters do know better — they’re just playing dumb.
‘When you’re a star they let you do it’
That’s the man who broke the US media, of course, Donald Trump. He was speaking about sexual assault on the Access Hollywood tapes, but he could just as easily be talking about journalism, with his intuition that if a politically prominent person says something catchy, funny, clickbaity — true or false — it will get reported.
It was a lesson Trump learnt from Rupert Murdoch in 1980s New York when the (*cough*) Australian was becoming American and remaking US media in his tabloid image. Murdoch wanted celebrity news. Trump delivered, bringing the two together in a now decades-long parasitic symbiosis.
In Australia, the News Corp tabloids have taught the same lesson to Australia’s revolving door of right-wing political leaders. Much of the rest of Australia’s media have fallen into line — on the left with a headlined shock horror, on the right with a laugh-off suggestion to take it “seriously, not literally”.
In the US, the Murdochs have discovered their approach comes with a billion-dollar price tag (in Australian dollars anyway) with the failed defence that they were just reporting the false claims that allies of the US president were saying about Dominion Voting Systems.
No sense? No problem
How do you adapt into journalese that rambling, grammatically awkward, non sequitur-laden manner of speaking of the right-wing populist? How do you capture the hidden codes that hint at racism, misogyny and conspiracy theories?
By editing the rambles into the shortest of possible comprehensible grabs that render them fit for broadcast on television and radio and circulation through social media posts. The edits sand off (or just ignore) the coded edges or smooth their impact with after-the-event fact-checking.
Make me serious, but not yet
Australia’s media hunger for the serious politician, but reward politicians for the unserious spiciness of their takes. This week’s Insiders on the ABC tried to walk the line with the, um, serious journalists on the panel tut-tutting the lack of seriousness in the opposition’s “Airbus Albo” swipe, while the show rebroadcast the more social media-friendly unserious commentary from the opposition.
The ubiquitous hyperbole of the ever-present adjective
Twentieth-century journalism worked hard to drive the irrelevant adjective out of everyday writing: “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,” thundered Strunk and White in the craft’s bible, The Elements of Style.
Still, I’ve always loved a good adjective, one that does its job of clarifying intent by modifying its noun — particularly the playful-multi-word-almost-phrasal-mock-German hyphenated adjective. But social media has cluttered up written language with the adjective of hyperbole that guts the power of the noun, making, say, an act of war too understated unless coupled with the adjectival “brutal”, “violent” or “bloodthirsty”.
The diminishing returns of empty calories
The result is too often a journalism of empty calories, where an ever-renewing snack buffet of stand-alone factoids get served up minute by minute coupled with a constant attempt to game the platforms’ algorithms into boosting the take through search engine optimisation (SEO). But as social platforms show increasing signs of quitting the news (and readers seem to be following them out the door), the news media seem to be getting exactly the wrong message.
Faced with diminishing returns, expect the media to keep doubling down.
