People might know that I go back a long way with journalist Margo Kingston, back to her days running WebDiary for Fairfax, which launched in early 2000. In my first book, The New Front Page, I cited WebDiary as the seminal move by the mainstream into the world of online media, even if most of her bosses and colleagues at the time were too ignorant to recognise its importance.
I was thinking about Margo today because I listened to her most recent podcast with pioneering ABC journalist Peter Clarke (a podcast I sometimes contribute to) and I heard her say something that, to me, defines precisely why she has always been a great journalist. It happens in an exchange where they are talking about the sorts of attacks the Republicans are likely to launch against Kamala Harris and Peter asks Margo how Harris will likely respond.
“I don’t know,” Margo says. “I don’t know.”
My ears pricked up when I heard that and it was a little epiphany for me. How often do you hear a journalist say that? That they don’t know?
A willingness to admit uncertainty speaks not to just a basic honesty, but to a journalistic frame of mind of that allows the journalist to be open to possibilities that others miss. It is no coincidence that Margo was almost singular amongst mainstream journalists in recognising the importance of Pauline Hanson to our politics back in the day, and, more importantly, one of the few to take seriously the concerns that Hanson’s supporters were trying to express.
The same willingness to listen and learn—“I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m going to find out”—meant Kingston also cottoned-on earlier than almost anyone to the importance of the community independents, and the evidence for that is all over the archives of her NoFibs website. It is full of interviews with candidates and organisers of the Voices Of movement going back to the launch of Cathy McGowan’s 2013 campaign in the seat of Indi, a treasure trove of political history that no major media outlet can match.
This approach has always been part of Kingston’s journalism and you can see it in her books, articles, or in those always-intriguing discussions with Phillip Adams when she did the “Canberra, Babylon” segment on Late Night Live. As Kingston wrote in her mighty assessment of the Howard years, Still Not Happy, John:
No one has “the truth” any more. We all know it, in our hearts, though so many of us pretend not to, for fear of what that means, and the consequences that might follow for our careers if we dropped our pretence.
…This is a time of vulnerability and fear. Thinkers can exacerbate those feelings or facilitate honest conversation to help rebuild community spirit and regenerate a shared value system. The people in this country and this world need to trust, and need to hope. The left–right debate doesn’t engender either.
Could we start again, please?’
Kingston, Margo. Still Not Happy, John! . Penguin Random House Australia. Kindle Edition.
There is a humility and depth in this modest approach that lays bare the weaknesses of the “insider” model of journalism that dominates most of our mainstream.1 The insider approach encourages a top-down mindset of false certainty that can distort the reporting in ways that the I-don’t-know approach does not.
The insider approach encourages the use of frames and narratives that develop amongst the “insiders” themselves that risk ossifying into an unchallenged received wisdom that doesn’t match reality.
A perfect example of this was seen on—where else?—Insiders last week when David Speers was interviewing the Member for Goldstein, independent Zoe Daniel.
Speers asked a question so loaded with “insidery” presumptions that Daniel gave quite a cheeky grin as she listened:
Speers: I wanted to ask you—there's been some question…around what the teal platform will be at the next election. Last time you had Scott Morrison to campaign against; he's not there this time. And some of those issues that you campaigned on: Labour's moved on climate change, transparency, integrity, and so what will be the pitch this time?
Daniel pointed out straightaway that “There is no ‘teal’ platform. ‘Teal’ is a media construct and the independents operate individually.”
The issue here isn’t just the fairly harmless idea of using “teal” as a convenient shorthand.2 Speers specifically used it in the context of what he called a “teal platform” and at that point the moniker moves beyond convenient shorthand into the realm of distorting and misleading frame. Such usage imposes an outdated party logic on the independents that simply doesn’t apply, and the point is that such usage subtly misinforms. Or not so subtly given the frequency with which it is repeated and trotted out by journalists like David Speers.
Daniel was right to challenge this “construct” and assert the independence of the independents.
She also did well to challenge the presumptions in the rest of Speers’ question, responding rhetorically, “Has Labor really moved on from all of those things?” and set out a strong case showing that neither Labor nor the LNP had moved on from anything.3
The other bit of received wisdom she rightly challenged was Speers’ use of the term “hung parliament”, a term I have been railing against for years given the baggage it carries with its unchallenged assumptions of the norm of two-party politics.
Daniel said, “…I'd like to call it a balanced Parliament rather than a hung parliament. [L]et's get away from the negative language. The crossbench is there to make that Parliament function more effectively and I think that's working and let's see whether they (Labor) can do better with the policies they put on the table between now and early next year.”
A lot of what I’m talking about here is really about our relationship with uncertainty, and I read a rather lovely piece the other day that investigates this idea and I’d recommend it to you all. The author is talking in the context of US politics, but his concerns are universal, I think:
Often I feel like I just don’t know what the fuck is happening anymore. Joe Biden dropped out of the race just about 36 hours ago. In the build up to that inevitable turn of events, there was much discussion of how to proceed with some kind of democratic process for deciding upon a candidate. James Carville offered an uncharacteristically reasonable proposal for a series of “town-hall” meetings that would encourage actual deliberation among party members and activists. Yet somehow, after just a day and a half, the “Kamala for President” posters have already been printed and distributed, and all it took for her nomination to become a fait accompli was a thumbs-up from a few of the party’s power-brokers, and also, crucially, a rechanneling her way of massive amounts of oligarchic donors’ money. Everyone on MSNBC is ecstatic that there is now a presidential candidate who brings “joy” and “love” to politics. They are using the language of “heir apparent” and of “succession”, insouciantly forgetting, at least for today, that that’s not quite how it works.
The language of everyday politics itself, in other words, contains so many presumptions and giveaways that we have to allow ourselves a moment to unpack them and to admit our doubts about the reality such language is seeking to impose.
I’m fumbling around with all this because I have been questioning my own ability to get my head around what is happening in the world at the moment, here in Australia and overseas. Over the last year, I have been reaching back into history to try and contextualise the present and have read (am still reading) way too much about Adolf Hitler. The contemporary resonances are powerful, and useful, I think, especially in regard to the failures of media during the Weimar period. But we (or I) have to be careful not to get too comfortable with the parallels. As historian and journalist Michael Socolow noted in this CJR interview on Monday, “History should be humbling. We shouldn’t be confident; we shouldn’t say, Oh, history tells us to do x, y, and z.”
There is such power and decency in this lack of confidence and I am going to be more circumspect in my Hitler comparisons, while taking onboard this further warning from Socolow:
The process of earning a PhD in history made me realize, for instance, just how much historical contingency there is—how many different ways every single situation might have turned out. That’s a humbling process. When somebody stands up and announces, History tells us x, it presumes, a) that there’s one story of history that everybody agrees on, and b) that history can be simplified into a moral or ethical lesson rather than a serious consideration of all the other alternatives that may have happened.
And look, sure, sometimes it is worth saying something aloud and with confidence just to see the pushback you get so you can adjust and rethink. Traditionally, this is exactly how I have used social media, as a way of surfacing criticisms I mightn’t have otherwise thought about. But I doubt that is what most commentators are doing with their hot takes. If they were, if they were genuinely trying to learn, they wouldn’t repeat things like “teal agenda” with the frequency with which they do. They would occasionally—more than occasionally—admit to their own uncertainty.
We are going to be told—are already being told—that minority government, if it emerges after the next election, will be filled with uncertainties and therefore chaos, making the country ungovernable. One of our key channellers of the political status quo, Phillip Coorey at the AFR, set it out the other day with that ineffable insider certainty.
This sort of thinking is just setting us up to fail and the best bulwark against it is not to seek the “certainty” of majority government by a single party—which is the strong implication of such articles—but to embrace the deliberative uncertainty of what Daniel called a “balanced parliament”.
Democracy isn’t just a form of government, a set of institutions for electing people to parliament. It is a way of thinking about the world. It’s strength, at least theoretically, is that it opens the process of opinion formation to as broad a range of arguments as possible and allows us to think with the whole of the social brain and not just a tiny corner of it sequestered in Canberra. Or in the priestly presumptions of the political class.4
We have, for instance, gone through a period where too much heed has been given to the power of markets to generate, in Hayek’s words, an efficient “use of knowledge”. This is the basis of the neoliberal straitjacket we are just beginning to wriggle out of. As Lisa Hertzog argues in her book, Citizen knowledge: Markets, experts, and the infrastructure of democracy, “Complex modern societies need different mechanisms for dealing with knowledge, instead of relying on the market mechanism alone.” She alights on three keys “for creating, transmitting, and processing different forms of knowledge: markets, expert communities, and democratic deliberation.”
I would emphasise deliberation.
That's why I argue that the Citizens’ Assemblies I have written about are so important. They can institutionalise this process of thinking, a process that reveals the unexamined certainties of the various knowledge priesthoods, including journalists, and the political class more generally. It exposes them to the lived uncertainties of the population at large.
I wouldn’t dare try and summarise John Keane’s immense work The Life and Death of Democracy, but let me pull out a favourite paragraph:
When democracy takes hold of people’s lives, it gives them a glimpse of the contingency of things. They are injected with the feeling that the world can be other than it is – that situations can be countered, outcomes altered, people’s lives changed through individual and collective action. The South African novelist Njabulo Ndebele (b. 1948) puts it to me like this: ‘Democracy blurs the relationship between certitude and uncertainty. It gets people used to the experience of formulating a position in the morning, changing their minds by the afternoon, growing angry, sleeping it off, feeling different again about the same matter next morning. Democracy breeds possibility: people’s horizons of what is thinkable and doable are stretched, and it is for that reason exciting, infuriating, punctuated by difficult, quarrelsome, ugly and beautiful moments.’ I ask him what’s so good about it. He replies: ‘Democracy is not a good thing in itself. It is what makes good things possible.’
Keane, John. The Life and Death of Democracy (p. 853). Simon & Schuster UK. Kindle Edition.
Journalism has always been a part of democracy’s epistemological process, even if it is the most corruptible form of knowledge formation we have. Corruptible but essential. Yes, journalism requires a degree of professionalism and specialist knowledge in order to function, but journalists have to guard against their hard-earned knowledge calcifying into lazy generalisations and frames of convenience. Unless they are willing, occasionally at least, to do a Margo Kingston and admit “I don’t know” they will find themselves misinforming the public they are meant to serve.
Not just journalists, but politicians too. Part of Senator David Pocock’s appeal and success is his willingness to admit he doesn’t know but that he is willing to find out.
That, too, has its problems because, after all, “teals” is not used to describe all the crossbench independents, but a fairly ill-defined subset of them. It clearly doesn’t include, say, Rebecca Sharkie or Andrew Wilkie, but does it include Dai Le? If not, why not? Can it include other independents who might run at the next election? Why? What’s the actual definition?
Her full answer is worth listening to: “I mean, they've been sort of pathologically unambitious on pretty much everything. Not enough action on climate…giving with one hand taking with the other in terms of new fossil fuel developments and, squibbing it on environmental reforms.
“And then from the point of view of the opposition, what's changed since the 2022 election? What's changed in their climate policy? If anything, they've walked it back. What's changed in regard to gender equality, safety of women, women's economic empowerment? And that goes to unions as well, by the way, because the vast majority of union members in Australia are women. And accountability and integrity: whistleblower protection, the effective working of the NACC. We have a NACC ; I'm not convinced it's really doing much yet. So what's actually changed?
“The pitch is you need independents to make the government more ambitious, and to make the opposition more ambitious, to make them better, to keep them honest, to make them strive to provide vision for the country. Particularly in an environment where you may well end up with Donald Trump leading the United States, going down the path of isolationism, nativism and division. And we can make a decision as a country not to do that, to differentiate ourselves with a vision for our future, and I'm looking for that from both major parties. And I'm not seeing it.”
Let alone the risks involved in handing over decision-making processes to artificial intelligence and other algorithmic interventions. See, for instance, this recent paper.
"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain.
I was thinking "Insiders" well before getting to that point in the pst