Incisive reporting and good governance go AWOL in world of clickbait

In the end he lost, but Peter Dutton’s two challenges last week raise important political and media issues.

Malcolm Turnbull conducts his farewell press conference at Parliament House in Canberra on Friday.

Queenslander Peter Dutton’s two challenges to former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull last week raise important questions for the future of media and politics even though he eventually lost to former Treasurer and sitting NSW MP Scott Morrison.

Voters are sick of elected politicians focusing on self-interest over the national interest. And they want better media. Journalists with no background in political writing and politicians and staff members with no background in journalism have produced an orgy of mistake-ridden commentary.

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Why did so few in the Canberra press gallery see the disunity within the Liberal Party and its potential consequences? Why were so many journalists prepared to blame former prime minister Tony Abbott when the problem is clearly a long-festering split between conservatives and moderates, a split the News Corp papers and Sky News have been discussing for more than a year?

At some media organisations the bar for reporting on leadership challenges is too low. Once — before the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd-Abbott-Turnbull years — political reporters wanted certainty when predicting leadership challenges that they were not being used, and that what they wrote would occur. Now people who never even speak to politicians write pieces calling on the prime minister to step down. And commentators pronounce with great force facts that are not facts.

Some examples? Many claimed — defending Abbott’s opposition to the Paris carbon emissions reduction targets he com­mitted to three years ago — that the Turnbull government ratified the Paris treaty within days of Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, “when Trump pulled out of Paris”. Not so. Trump announced in June 2017 he planned to pull out of the Paris Agreement. But the US does not leave the agreement until November 4, 2020, the day after the presidential election.

Or how about criticisms based on Labor’s energy spokesman Mark Butler saying he had a copy of the government’s proposed legislation to mandate a 26 per cent emissions reduction target? Commentators alleged this proved Turnbull trusted Labor more than his own colleagues. Political editor Dennis Shanahan, a stickler for getting it right, sorted it out on Credlin on Sky News on Monday night. One of the Labor states negotiating with the government over the national energy guarantee leaked it.

Then there is the misuse of political polling. Polls are not predictive. They are a statement of voting intentions at the time. As Scott Morrison told Leigh Sales on the ABC’s 7.30 on Monday night, John Howard came from 55-45 down to win against Labor’s Mark Latham in 2004.

The destabilisation of the past fortnight will have a self-fulfilling effect on polls. Yet before the latest destabilisation, polling showed the gap between Labor and the government had narrowed to 51-49. That narrowing was probably at least part of the motive for Abbott’s criticism of his own Paris targets. Before the Longman by-election on July 28, many former leaders on both sides thought the Coalition could still win the next election.

Of course, this is political karma because Turnbull used 30 losing Newspolls in a row to justify his September 2015 challenge against Abbott.

Turnbull then prevaricated about a snap election and won the July 2016 election by only one seat after a bad eight-week campaign, proving yet again that challenging a first-term prime minister is not a good idea.

Abbott would have done better because he would have attacked Labor over power prices, links to trade union corruption and being soft on people-smugglers.

The same criticism can be made of polling used to dislodge Kevin Rudd in 2010. Rudd had enjoyed the highest approval ratings in Newspoll history, but his first negative Newspoll on May 4, after backflipping on his proposed emissions trading system, was used by his deputy Julia Gillard as a catalyst to challenge on June 23. She retained government at the subsequent election, but only with the help of independents Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor and the Greens’ Adam Bandt. Rudd almost certainly would have won more convincingly.

Much of the deskilling of the media is down to changes to the business model that have forced experienced political journalists into early retirement. The rise of social media and online comments during the same period has only exacerbated problems.

While supporters of social media activism argue it empowers ordinary citizens, it has contrib­uted to a rise of feelings over facts and the downplaying of expertise. The digital business model rewards traffic — stories readers click on — over credibility. This produces self-reinforcing media narratives and generates competition to follow them from other media, even if they are completely untrue. In the end this clickbait will destroy media credibility.

Can any of this be redressed? For politicians the way forward is to return to basics: learn to advocate strongly for policy positions and stand up for what they believe. Parties need to take more care to elect leaders with genuine leadership qualities. Turnbull, like Rudd, is a managerialist with little emotional intelligence. He failed to see how his repudiation of the conservative tradition damaged his government.

Media websites need to be governed by the editorial principles their newspaper, television and radio iterations are ruled by. Critical thinking must be at the centre. Why have so many journalists reported unchallenged the views of Queensland Liberal National Party president Gary Spence on how the federal Coalition can fix its problems in the Sunshine State? This is the branch that presided over the fiasco in 2015 when Labor, under Annastacia Palaszczuk, came from the debacle of only seven seats at the 2012 election to unseat premier Campbell Newman after one term.

Even if Dutton could have lifted the Coalition vote in Queensland at the expense of One Nation what damage would he have done in NSW, Victoria and South Australia? And will Morrison be able to do better in Queensland than Turnbull did?

Last week underwrote the prospects of what will be the most left-wing Labor government in our history. Bill Shorten will double renew­ables and protect high immi­gration. He will run a class-war agenda to soak retirees’ superannuation.

And he could be a long-term prime minister if the Liberals cannot heal the schism between their conservative and moderate wings.