Social media debates not a substitute for journalism skills

Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” in 1958.

Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” in 1958. Much misunderstood, McLuhan was not so much concerned about media technologies in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He was thinking about how media change humans.

Changes wrought by media on society have peaked with social media, where Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat now divide whole societies, local communities and international politics and media along shrill partisan lines, but with little reflection about substantive issues. Rather, social media capture and instantly reflect the emotional reactions of different communities of interest to different events.

The results often have all the sophistication of an Abbott and Costello movie. Reaction to ­particular controversies, whether on progressive Twitter feeds like those of public broadcast journalists or conservative feeds such as Donald Trump’s, is seldom troubled by facts.

Individual social media users attract either thousands of “likes” or hostile partisan counter reaction, sometimes on a global scale.

News Corp journalist Shannon Molloy.

Last week we saw a young gay man, Shannon Molloy, hounded off the board of the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby simply because he works as a journalist for News Corp. We also saw gay secular saint Morrissey, former lead singer of The Smiths, denounced for voicing the quite understandable feelings of most Mancunians about the killing by Manchester- born, Libyan-descended suicide bomber Salman Abedi of 22 mainly young people at last Tuesday’s Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.

While worlds apart, the two cases show how the progressive groupthink of social media can even turn on its friends. Molloy had written pieces in favour of the Safe Schools program criticised by many of the News Corp papers. He has covered many gay causes. Morrissey has been a preacher for secular tolerance for three ­decades.

Molloy cut to the heart of the treatment he was facing on Twitter in a piece in this paper when he argued he had not been so badly bullied since childhood. Crikey on Saturday claimed he was only supported by News because he was young and handsome. Truth is this newspaper has had many gay staff and senior executives for at least the 35 years I have been ­associated with it.

Social media can also backfire on conservatives. A modern culture war erupted last Monday night between the stalwart magazine of the right, Quadrant, and the progressive Fairfax and ABC journalistic establishment.

ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie.

It was all over a silly — but tame by the standards of left Twitterati — comment by Quadrant digital editor Roger Franklin who wished someone would bomb the ABC’s Ultimo offices in Sydney. He was upset by a discussion of terrorism on Q&A that had played down the risks in Western democracies. Observers who follow mainstream ABC commentators on Twitter will have noticed the outrage of ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie about a Quadrant post that would have been seen by very few people has not been replicated by her in response to similar violent thoughts expressed regularly against their perceived political enemies by ABC talent.

The furore was unfortunate for Quadrant, a small-circulation monthly that gives space to thoughtful, long-form essays more people should read. Its May issue included a brilliant piece by Professor of Pediatrics Dr John Whitehall on gender dysphoria among children, another by researcher Jeremy Sammut on why the political right needs to support government social spending to alleviate underclass issues. There was also an entertaining interview with Canadian author and stirrer Mark Steyn, as well as lots of original poetry and prose.

The lesson surely was that even such a thoughtful publication can be trapped by social media stupidity, in this case its own on its web commentary section.

The leader of the free world is surfing — if often wiping out on — the social media wave. I wrote in this column last year that Trump was neither the saviour of civilisation the right thought nor the devil the left imagined. Smart journalists needed to wait and see how he performed in office, I argued, to much abusive online feedback from readers certain he was already a great president.

The left now proclaims his imminent impeachment while the right diagnoses Trump derangement syndrome by his critics. Truth is, impeachment is unlikely, but the President has not settled into office as well as supporters had thought.

Trump himself claimed last year that he owed much of his electoral success to Twitter. Yet he surely also owes many of his troubles in office to his habit of tweeting before thinking in the wee hours, an unusual pattern for a teetotaller.

Renowned UK conservative journalist and author Peter Oborne has now co-written a new book about Trump and his Tweets: How Trump Thinks: His Tweets and the Birth of a New Political Language. Oborne was interviewed about the book by my friend and former opinion editor of this paper Tom Switzer on Radio National last Sunday morning. It is worth listening to on the RN homepage. Oborne does not really approve of Trump but loves the way he has used Twitter to bypass the cultural gatekeepers of US society — CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post.

I would add Hollywood, a place where overpaid actors parade their moral virtue by looking down their noses at the concerns of ordinary working men and women. Oborne said many presidents had made their way on new media of their time. He cited Franklin D. Roosevelt’s radio fireside chats and John F. Kennedy’s TV interviews.

Free of all media on many long walks in the MacDonnell Ranges west of Alice Springs, and at Kings Canyon, I have been thinking about all this and its effects on journalism. I had been feeling unsettled by a play I saw in Sydney before flying to Alice Springs. The play, Talk, by Johnathan Biggins was not well reviewed and I did not think it particularly amusing. But it was eerily accurate in its understanding of modern social media, talkback and news radio, and modern tabloid newspapers.

I won’t spoil it by revealing too much but the talkback host played by John Waters takes the laws against child abuse into his own hands. He has the state’s premier on a string. Sounds exactly like Sydney. At ABC radio news, the jaded, soon retiring journo Taffy, played — well by John Howard — is determined to find the truth of the case being championed by Waters. Taffy has a new young female social media journalist offsider.

She cannot understand why he wants to get to the truth of the story. Waters has triggered a social media sensation and for her that is the story. Taffy gets facts from contacts in legal circles and by speaking to real family members of the alleged pedophile at the centre of the talkback storm.

His female junior does not want to follow these facts. She wants to report what is trending on Twitter. This is, I think, McLuhan’s media message for modern journalism.

Social media has nothing to do with journalism and less to do with the truth. Journalists must talk to real people and develop real contacts, rather than follow people’s self-focused social media mental doodles and poses. Privilege facts over feelings.