Focus on gaffes misses the real issues

There is something inherently crazy-making about political journalism in the fever of an election campaign. The journalists spin a narrative and by doing so alter the reality on which they report.

Or do they?

Labor Leader Anthony Albanese at the Launceston news conference where he couldn’t cite the unemployment rate.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

It is almost too obvious to need stating, but the democratic purpose of an election campaign is to display and test the policies and capacities of competing candidates and their parties, to help voters make a choice.

And the purpose of political journalism is to help this process.

Political journalism is not, or should not be, like sport reporting.

So how are we to understand these phrases, lifted from the work of some of our leading political journalists over the last week, including some in this newspaper? There has been much commentary on who “won” the first week of the campaign, and who was “match fit” and who did or did not “drop the ball”.

Then there is the journalistic speculation on whether a gaffe – such as Albanese’s admittedly extraordinary failure to call employment figures to mind – will dominate the campaign, without any acknowledgement that journalists themselves largely determine this.

The sands shift and reality is hard to find. For example, the many weighty words declaring Albanese has had a disastrous first week will be taken as confirmed by an opinion poll published today. But what about all the punditry on Morrison’s broken promise on the anti-corruption commission?

And would the polls have shifted if not for the way the journalists reported the error? It’s a loop, and it can make you dizzy.

The opinion polls were uniformly inaccurate at the last federal election, and nobody is really sure that the problems have been fixed, yet their publication steers the dialogue.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison attends the Sydney Royal Easter Show over the weekend.Credit: James Brickwood

What does it mean to say, as several political journalists did this week, that Scott Morrison is a better campaigner than he is prime minister?

If that is true, then surely it is the job of journalists to narrow the gap between those phenomena. If the campaign is not reflecting the quality of the prime minister, and the alternative prime minister, then that’s a problem, and an implicit journalistic failure.

After Albanese’s unemployment figures gaffe, it seemed that media conferences were all likely to include a test of memory on economic statistics. Thankfully, Greens leader Adam Bandt put a stop to that with his “Google it, mate” response to being asked the wage price index.

That killed, for the moment, this variety of performative journalistic watchdoggery. At its worst, this kind of journalism is about little more than which politician performs best in jumping through the hoops erected by the media pack. This is not as useful as we need journalism to be.

Few thoughtful journalists are entirely happy with the worn smooth ruts of political reporting, and there are signs of deliberate attempts to do some things differently. There has been some good backgrounding and analysis. And there is the attempt, including in this newspaper, to devote resources to close-grained coverage of key electorates, including interviews with voters.

Such reporting is grounding, and a corrective to the textual analysis of leaders’ statements and media appearances. But the fear of being beaten to a story, of missing a development still mitigates against a more radical breaking of the mould of election reporting.

It helps to keep a few facts in mind.

If political journalism ever determined an election, it has probably lost that capability. The partisanship of News Corp acts as a magnet, pulling on the national conversation and making it harder for others to find their balance, but repeated studies confirm it is a long time since it has directly swung votes.

The annual digital news report from the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra shows only 13 per cent of Australians are paying for a news service.Credit: iStock

One of the best sources of data on how Australians consume news is the annual report from the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra. It shows only 13 per cent of Australians are paying for a news service – considerably lower than the global average of 17 per cent. Political journalism that is published behind paywalls is no longer really mass media. It informs an elite.

To the extent it trickles through to the majority, it is through influencing the free-to-air outlets where most Australians get their news.

Twenty-three per cent of news media users say social media is their main source of news – and mostly not the accounts of mainstream media and professional journalists. This is fast increasing, across all age groups.

So political journalists are part of an ecosystem. They feed and are fed on by other inhabitants. That is how their influence works.

TikTok videos and the surrounding memes may be at least as influential as political journalism on the roughly 20 per cent of voters who have yet to decide how they will vote. But the memes pick up the vibe of political reporting.

So in this ecosystem, what can journalists most usefully do?

I saw one political journalist suggesting that the media concentration on “gaffes” was the fault of the political parties, because the election contest was devoid of content – few new policies from government and Labor a “small target”.

I’d like to see journalists take on their responsibility to make the contest interesting and relevant. What about the topics neither side seem to want to talk about, such as the state of universities and tax reform and budget repair?

Perhaps there could be less about the leaders and more about the teams. Marise Payne and Penny Wong on foreign affairs; Jim Chalmers and Josh Frydenberg on the deficit; Michaelia Cash and Mark Dreyfus on the independent commission against corruption.

More contest of capacities and ideas, less cogitating and microanalysis of images and words.

Very soon now most, if not all, of the moments of this first week, and all that has been written and said about them will be forgotten.

The test for journalists is to create something useful, that will stand the test of time.

Jacqueline Maley cuts through the noise of the federal election campaign with news, views and expert analysis. Sign up to our Australia Votes 2022 newsletter here.