Donald Trump’s recent comments about Australia’s Ambassador to the US, former PM Kevin Rudd, generated hundreds of repetitious articles about a story contrived to achieve precisely that sort of response. It is a perfect example of how the media wastes the time of its audience with “news” that is largely irrelevant to their well-being and thus helps explain why so many people actively avoid the news in the first place.
This sort of bombardment degrades the average reader’s experience of news in general, and if a newspaper or news website or radio station or television broadcast is half-full of content people have almost no interest in then they will not just avoid that content, they will avoid the news all together.
If that is the case, why would media professionals allow themselves to cover the story in a manner that drives away their audience? The answer points to a structural problem within the industry, where the interests of the audience and the people producing the news are out of alignment.
It’s a bit like what has happened to the Liberal Party.
Having lost all those “teal” seats to community independents, you would think the party would be listening to the voters in those electorates trying to win them back. Instead, the party has openly abandoned the seats, doubly down on the precisely the issues that drove those voters away in the first place. They are doing this because the Liberal Party has—over many years of restricting the way it pre-selects candidates and promotes people within the organisation—filled up with people who have actively abandoned the “broad church” approach that made the Libs the dominant party in Australia politics since their formation in 1944 and who are instead turning them into a niche party of the far right.
Most media are pursuing a similar niche strategy and for similar reasons: they are run by people who would rather pursue an agenda than listen to what their potential audience actually wants in the way of news. How else to explain the avalanche of Rudd-Trump stories that goes way beyond the level of coverage the story warranted?
All of this is a particular problem for the Australian right, and, in fact, the key section of legacy media’s pursuit of niche right-wing coverage serves to encourage the LNP to go down the same track in a sort of self-reinforcing death spiral. The vested interests on whose behalf right wing media and the LNP operate then double down again, funding the likes of Advance Australia to pursue an extreme version of the same agenda rather than trying to win back the voters they have lost.
Labor are hardly immune to these problems and the net result is that the Australian political class in general has trapped itself in an epistemic dead end. Political parties, the media, and other members of this elite have structured themselves so that they only speak to themselves and, too often, are not hearing what the majority are saying. They are only hearing what they want to hear, and everything from the way the media works to the way political parties work to the way in which governments are lobbied inside and outside the parliament is structured to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.
The Trump/Rudd nonsense doesn’t exactly qualify as fake news or dis/misinformation, but it certainly qualifies as the sort of pap that doesn’t serve the interests of most potential consumers of the news product. It is an example of how the political class structures knowledge around elite interests, driving people away from not just the legacy media but the “major” political parties too.
More and more people are coming to the conclusion that you don’t need to read the news to be a good, well-informed citizen, and in fact, if you just relied on the legacy media for “news” you would likely be misinformed on a number of key topics or at least, overrun with stories that are completely irrelevant to you.1
The issue that often arises in these discussions—and it is the basis of the whole technocratic push of neoliberalism—is that ordinary voters don’t have the necessary knowledge to be able to participate in their own governance and that therefore we need to leave all the decision making to experts and other elites.
Forget for the moment that such thinking leaves our institutions of governance—including the media—vulnerable to the confusion between expertise and self-interest, where those with the power to lobby governments also have the power to commission and construct “expertise” that serves their own interests. That’s a whole other issue, though it is a serious problem.
The key problem with the assumption is that it confuses knowledge with discussion and fails to recognise how people actually become informed. It fails to recognise that the strength of democracy is that it distributes knowledge in a way that allows people to govern themselves and that it does this—when it is functioning properly—not just by public education but by public participation.
The local people who were involved in the kitchen-table conversations and other public events that the community independents (the “teals”) ran in the run-up to the last election learned more about key topics like climate change, political integrity and the role of women in politics than they ever did from reading a newspaper or watching the six o’clock news. They learned more about politics in general, how elections work, how parties work, than they ever would have learned from religiously consuming the news thrown up by the legacy media.
In fact, what happens is that when people become involved in these sorts of community discussions—even online discussions—they become aware of how badly served they are by the media in general. Such discussion and participation drive them to seek out relevant information and when they turn to the media, they don’t find what they want—what they need—they find eight hundred stories about what Trump said about Rudd.
This failure to engage citizens and provide them with the sort of “news” that might be useful to them has huge ramifications for the media, for political parties, and for democracy itself.
So, while it is no doubt important to enact legislation, like truth in political advertising laws, and ways of constraining “fake news” across the entire media ecosphere, the ultimate way to combat dis/misinformation is to encourage people to participate in public forums that bring experts and lay people together in meaningful discussion.
As conservative intellectual Christopher Lasch once put it:
What democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can be generated only by debate. We do not know what we need to know until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy. Information, usually seen as the precondition of debate, is better understood as its byproduct. When we get into arguments that focus and fully engage our attention, we become avid seekers of relevant information. Otherwise we take in information passively—if we take it in at all.2
Political thinking isn’t just a matter of expertise. It ultimately has to deal with means and ends, so while it certainly necessary to have experts to advise us on the best way to pursue political and social goals, the ends themselves—the sort of society we want to create—is something in which we should all have a say. In which we are all experts.
Any system of government that confines its pursuit of knowledge to topic experts and lobbyists and other elites and that stifles the participation of the majority of the people, reducing their role in the process to semi-regular voting, is not only fundamentally anti-democratic, it is depriving itself of most of its brainpower. Political thinking is a social undertaking, and unless as many people as possible are involved in the process we are only using a tiny fraction of our social intelligence.
Instead of handing out thousands of parliamentary passes to lobbyists who are paid good money to pursue the interests of a tiny elite, the government needs to build institutions—a permanent range of citizens assemblies—so that they can hear from the other ninety per cent of the nation’s social brain.
This quote comes from the book Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism, mentioned by Thomas Baekdal in his media newsletter. I am planning a review of the book in the coming weeks.
Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (pp. 162-163). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Trump's comments "generated hundreds of repetitious articles" indeed. I clicked on that link to see the repetitious articles. The AFR has to take the cake for its headline: "Indiscreet Rudd has only himself to blame for Trump outburst". I thought placating bullies only made their bullying behaviour worse?
No, Rudd will continue as US Ambassador until such time as his position becomes untenable. That may happen IF Trump wins in November, AND decides to freeze Rudd out of the Washington circuit. But we're mature adults, we can deal with it then.
The media approached this story in the same way they dealt with the 'conversation' Dutton says we have to have in this country about nuclear power. Make the statement the headline, give no background facts, frame it as a he-said-she-said debate (or, in the case of the Liberals, he-said-he-said) and focus on the political consequence for one or other major party, rather than the substance or merit of the argument.
Rudd tries to get a Royal Commission into Murdoch and a Murdoch stooge feeds a question to Farage to stir shit and the Murdoch media then blows it up, the Liberals scent blood in the water and go on the offensive and the rest of the legacy media, ABC included, follow suit as they always do in response to the confected outrage generated by the angertainment branches of the Murdoch empire.