Press Influence: Who Shapes Whom and Who Pays for Lunch

Press Influence: Who Shapes Whom and Who Pays for Lunch

The Canberra Press Gallery: Where Journalism and Political Theatre Share a Building and Split the Difference

The relationship between Australian politicians and the journalists who cover them is one of the great symbioses of democratic life: each side dependent on the other, each side pretending otherwise, and both sides operating in the same building in Canberra’s Parliament House, separated by a glass wall and approximately forty years of mutual suspicion. Politicians need journalists to communicate with the public. Journalists need politicians to give them something to communicate. The public needs both of them, or at least believes it does, which amounts to the same thing for everyone’s purposes.

The Canberra Press Gallery – the body of journalists accredited to cover federal parliament – numbers roughly two hundred at any given time, a figure that has been declining for twenty years as metropolitan newspapers have reduced their Canberra bureaus, online outlets have expanded their political coverage, and the economics of journalism have produced an industry that is simultaneously consuming more political content than ever and employing fewer people to produce it. The journalists who remain are, by institutional selection, among the most informed observers of Australian politics alive. They are also people who have attended so many budget lockups, doorstop interviews, and leadership spill countdowns that their capacity for surprise has been professionally optimised away.

The Murdoch Question: An Observation the Textbook Is Required to Make

No account of Australian media and politics is complete without noting that News Corp Australia – part of Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire – owns a significant proportion of the Australian newspaper market, including the sole metropolitan daily in several capital cities and the national broadsheet The Australian. The editorial positions of these publications have, over several decades, tended to favour conservative governments, oppose Labor governments, and approach climate policy with a scepticism that the scientific literature does not share but that the editorial literature has found sustainable.

Whether this constitutes undue influence over Australian political life is a question that generates debate calibrated precisely along political lines: those who believe it does are, statistically, people who tend to vote Labor or Green, and those who believe it doesn’t are, statistically, people whose preferred parties have benefited from favourable coverage. The Centre for Media Influence Studies and Carefully Worded Conclusions has been studying this question for fifteen years and has found that media ownership matters, that editorial position shapes coverage, and that the full report is available to subscribers.

The ABC – the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, publicly funded and required by its charter to be independent and impartial – is described by conservative governments as institutionally left-wing and by Labor governments as insufficiently supportive, a pattern of bipartisan dissatisfaction that the ABC’s defenders cite as evidence of impartiality and its critics cite as evidence that both sides are being insufficiently critical of the other.

The Headline vs The Story: A Survey of the Gap

A study by the Institute for Political Headline Accuracy – which exists in this paragraph – analysed 500 political news stories across Australian mastheads and found:

• 78% of readers could accurately recall the headline twenty-four hours later
• 12% could accurately recall the main finding of the story
• 6% had read past the third paragraph
• 4% had read the full story, understood the nuance, and formed a view that differed from the headline’s implied conclusion
• 0% had read the correction published three days later, because corrections are published on page fourteen and headlines are published on page one, a discrepancy the industry describes as "standard practice" and media critics describe as "the problem"

The implication – that political reality is substantially constructed by headline writers operating under time pressure with space for twelve words – is one that journalists acknowledge privately and resist publicly, on the grounds that the alternative to imperfect journalism is no journalism, which is true and does not resolve the problem.

The Leak: Democracy’s Unofficial Press Release

Much of what the press gallery reports does not come from press conferences, ministerial statements, or official documents. It comes from leaks – information provided, on background, by sources with a political interest in the information becoming public, who share it with journalists they trust to use it in ways that serve the source’s purpose while appearing to serve the public interest, which it sometimes does, which is how the arrangement persists.

The leak is the primary mechanism by which internal government disputes become public knowledge, by which ministers destabilise each other, by which leadership challenges are telegraphed and then denied, and by which governments occasionally discover that their own decisions are more controversial than their internal processes suggested. The journalist who receives a leak must assess its accuracy, its motivation, its newsworthiness, and whether publishing it serves the public interest or merely serves the person who provided it – a judgment made in forty-five minutes on deadline by someone who has three other stories due and whose editor is calling.

For a companion study in press-political relationships conducted in conditions of similar mutual dependency and mutual suspicion, The London Prat’s lobby correspondent chronicles – prat.uk – covers Westminster’s lobby system, in which the same dynamic has been operating since 1884 and has produced outcomes broadly consistent with "complicated."

See also The Daily Mash on the enduring question of whether political journalism holds power to account or merely holds power’s press releases to a slightly higher standard.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com