It’s been a big week at News Corp’s outrage factory, with one of Australia’s significant cultural thought leaders having been called to order for colouring outside the lines of what the US company decrees as the acceptable limits on the hot issues of race, migration and refugees.
The actual words of Laura Tingle at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on the weekend were too hot to report straight, too dangerous to confront with reason. Instead, each called for a cranking up of resentment and indignation through News Corp’s old friends: diversion, misrepresentation and amplification.
In The Australian, outrage was quickly diverted to “partisan rot” at the ABC, misrepresented as an “attack on Australia” and active campaigning against Peter Dutton, amplified through the opposition frontbench commentary.
To the surprise of no-one, ABC management stumbled, then fell to the occasion. Fresh off last year’s staff revolt over the public broadcaster’s failure to defend Indigenous journalists during the Voice campaign, ABC leadership rewarded News Corp with a mealy-mouthed sniff that Tingle’s “conversational” comments “would not have met the ABC’s editorial standards”.
News Corp’s pile-on was more than just another skirmish in the Murdochs’ long-running war on the ABC. Policing the tone about migration — and migrants — with an “it’s not racism” deniability is central to the strategy for winning next year’s election.
They’re reaching for the well-worn register of the dog whistle, eager to keep on the not-THAT-racist side of the debate while arguing that (as per Tingle’s truncation of Dutton’s comments) “everything that’s going wrong in this country is because of migrants”.
It’s a difficult path to tread, one that relies on political reporting that accepts — or, at least, pretends to accept — that the opposition is acting in good faith and responding to genuine community concerns (from housing to traffic snarls, apparently, among other things).
The greatest threat to the right’s plan is the one enduring mass voice in Australian journalism, the ABC. This isn’t just because of what and how the ABC reports, but also because its reach across all programming shapes the poorly understood way the news-lite and news-avoidance audience form their collective opinions (or what US social media users might call “the vibe”).
That’s why political and media wings of the right work the ABC refs so hard, exploiting the performative objectivity embodied in the ABC’s editorial practices and forcing the broadcaster to turn from truth-seeking to refuge-seeking. As New York University’s Jay Rosen puts it: “That’s what ‘he said, she said’ reporting, the ‘both sides do it’ reflex, and the ‘balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon’ are all about.”
Anyone paying attention could see in real-time how this refuge-seeking distorted the ABC’s coverage of the Voice to Parliament, driving it to manufacture, for example, a false balance between the overwhelming majority of Indigenous voters who supported it and the small proportion who opposed it.
To have a commentator of the status of Laura Tingle call out the right’s strategy threatens to undermine their cunning plan. She’s an opinion maker within the Canberra gallery and a rare unifying influence within a usually fractious ABC.
In Canberra, her words threaten to break through the traditional media’s cautious prevarications with all that to-ing and fro-ing about numbers that, so far, have stood in for critique of the Dutton plan. Within the ABC, the News Corp attacks — and the ABC’s failure to defend her — will reinvigorate the frustrations that endure from last year’s ruckus. Indeed, within the indefensible social context of racism in Australia, it is plain embarrassing that the traditional media continues to nod to the savvy politics of the opposition on migration.
Tingle has long been a target of News Corp. It’s little comfort when you’re in the middle, but her endurance and continued influence demonstrate both the strengths of her work and the spreading weakness of the News Corp attack.
What do you think of the ABC’s handling of Laura Tingle’s comments? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
