Our lives working with ‘d*ckhead magnets’

WE GET abused on the streets and are less trusted even than politicians. How did it come to this and why do we do it?

ON AN otherwise quiet Monday morning, in the relatively sleepy Victorian regional city of Ballarat, a young man driving down the street decided to park his car, walk up to a young woman standing on the footpath and start hurling abuse at her.

He called her fat, ugly and a bitch and gesticulated wildly at her with his middle-finger. Yet as far as she knew she had never met him before in her life.

Indeed, even in his vicious expletive-laden spray the man himself admitted there was no personal basis whatsoever for his random attack. He was abusing her for one reason and one reason alone: Because she was a journalist.

The journo, Channel Nine reporter Maggie Raworth, was doing a simple piece to camera outside Ballarat Court, not bothering a soul. She could have been reporting on an accused murderer or paedophile or rapist for all this guy knew but it was her he hated most of all — more than anybody in fact.

“F**king journos, lowest of the low,” he said, among other things.

Nine News reporter Maggie Raworth abused by a stranger. Source: Facebook

Sadly, as any journo knows, these sort of encounters are par for the course, to the point where TV cameras are jokingly referred to as “d*ckhead magnets”.

There is probably no other profession that is so distrusted, except of course for politics. Which makes it little wonder politicians and journalists both constantly point the finger at the other for being untruthful and yet still seem to cling to each other for comfort.

There is also probably no other worker less equipped to combat random abuse. Cops suffer appalling attacks but at least they have guns and handcuffs to deal with the bastards and even the pollies have a couple of minders and a driver to spirit them away.

Journos, on the other hand, are typically armed with little more than a hangover and a notebook. Sure, there might be a burly cameraman nearby but we all know it’s his job to keep rolling. At least that way if things turn really bad you might at least get a posthumous Walkley.

And so how did it come to this? How did a role that is still widely regarded even by its targets as a fundamental pillar of democracy, and a job that is completely geared towards giving the public exactly what it wants become so reviled by the same public it is so desperately trying to serve?

A recent Harvard University poll in the US — whose founding father Thomas Jefferson once declared “the only security of all is in a free press” — found that almost two-thirds of Americans now believed the mainstream media was awash with “fake news”.

Indeed, even the term “fake news” has gone from being virtually unheard of just a couple of years ago to now being used to describe virtually any report that its subject or audience disagrees with.

The media is now almost certainly more hated and distrusted than ever. And the cause of this, it is sad to say, is the media itself.

In the first place it has been the astronomical, unforeseen and unfiltered explosion of social media, an almost instant global phenomenon that in just a few short years has radically transformed how information is communicated and politics is conducted.

Probably the only comparable touchstone in human history is the invention of the printing press and the accompanying publication of the Bible in people’s native tongues, a twin event which was both brilliantly liberating and brutally bloody.

Suddenly people were able to read everything from Genesis to Revelations for themselves without any censorship but also without any context. And we all know what happens when people interpret holy books literally. Religious hypocrisy gave way to religious fundamentalism.

Likewise the great flood of the so-called “information age” has washed away the media’s ivory towers but also many of the basic tenets that even the most one-eyed reporter would adhere to, let alone the lawyers we all have to get through.

The range of media now isn’t from the morning paper to the evening news but from rape allegations about politicians spread on Twitter to fabricated stories about paedophile rings designed to get shares on Facebook to right-wing propaganda disguised as legitimate news sites to orchestrated left-wing lynch mobs baying for the heads of anyone they disagree with.

In the old days this would have been clearly identifiable as blackmail or smut or even just good old fashioned activism but now it’s all media because everyone with a mobile phone is now a publisher and a broadcaster. No wonder the line between real news and fake news has all but disappeared.

Obviously the mainstream media has never been without its faults — and no one is more aware of that than its practitioners. But it is also worth noting that finding, filing and then compressing every event in a city, a nation and sometimes the world into a single newspaper or TV bulletin isn’t exactly a walk in the park. And there are people who still do it for bugger-all money every single day.

And now, thanks to the miracle of the world wide web, there are people doing it for news sites like this one every minute and every hour of the day, solely so everybody else can know what the $%^& is going on in the world at any moment of their choosing.

Of course a lot of people don’t like what’s going on but for genuine journalism that’s the whole point. Indeed, the BBC this week unveiled a statue of its erstwhile employee George Orwell, whose plaque bore his famous quote:

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

And even in death Orwell was still at it. His son told the London Telegraph his father regarded the BBC as “a mixture of a girl’s school and a mental asylum”.

I look forward to the letters on that one.

The greatest irony of the current media age that there is more diversity than ever and yet this has only straitened people’s views. The most active consumers have never been more ideologically aggressive nor more terrified of contrarian views.

Why? Because anyone can now get whatever news they want. In an era where the once hypothetical notion of an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards is increasingly becoming a reality every single person is increasingly getting news that is increasingly tailored to them. Or, more accurately, whatever they want the “news” to be.

You would think that this near-infinite range of expression would be the ultimate victory for free speech but, as Orwell observed, it is in fact the opposite. Far from people being told what they do not want to hear they now instead have limitless avenues to be told precisely what they do want to hear. Indeed, they never have to be told what they don’t want to hear ever again.

Now this sounds all very lovely if you just want to relax with a nice cup of tea but when you have nations or ideologies or religions or races simply picking the facts they like instead of actual facts, you end up with a massive and unpredictable tectonic clash whenever these sequestered groups have to come out of their bunkers. Such as, for example, elections.

I have no doubt whatsoever that it is this new fractured and tribal media landscape that has caused the shock results that never seem to end in once boringly predictable Western democracies. The populist Trump and Sanders phenomena in the US, the Brexit vote in the UK followed by the bizarre Corbyn juggernaut and collapse of Cameron and May, the out-of-nowhere centrist third party explosions in Canada and France, the simultaneous far-right expansion across Europe, the blindsiding election of Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and of course the cyclical collapse of governments in Australia over the past decade and erosion of the two-party base.

The funny thing about civilisation is that it depends on us listening to the people we don’t agree with, not the people we do.

If you really want to know if you’re being bullsh*tted just think about the last place or person you went to where you always agreed with every single thing they said. That is the real fake news.

And if you think that you’re reading fake news right now, don’t worry: You’re right about everything.