FED:Drowning in election comment

AAP General News (Australia)
08-10-2010
FED:Drowning in election comment

By Don Woolford

CANBERRA, Aug 10 AAP - One of the more famous aphorisms in journalism is C.P.Scott's
"Comment is free, but facts are sacred".

The precept of the long-time editor-owner of that great journal of British liberalism,
the then Manchester Guardian, was - perhaps still is - taught in journalism schools.

Wonder what Scott would think of Australia's election campaign, where everyone drowns
in comment and even apparent fact is a slippery matter.

Google "Australian election 2010" and you get about 11,600,000 results, which no doubt
will have grown by the time this rave is finished.

A tiny percentage will be pure fact and a bit more will be sensible and serious analysis,
based on fact.

Most will be just someone's opinion. Nothing wrong with that, everyone's entitled to
an opinion. But do the rest of us need this Sargasso of half-baked prejudice from all
the blogs, all the social networking, all the tweeting, bleating and excreting.

And that's just the new media.

The old media (or is it the middle-aged media?) has been reinforced by ABC 24, Australia's
first free-to-air 24-hour news channel. It joins Sky News as a purveyor of constant news
or, more usually, views.

This has made that most baleful of developments, the 24-hour news cycle, more demanding
and frenetic than ever. Baleful because politicians feel obliged to constantly feed it.

They yap and they stunt all day and much of the night. Babies and garden gnomes have
never been in greater peril. Much of the media report and discuss their antics in excruciating
detail.

The politicians should retire to a cave for most of each 24 hours, wherein they would
think at leisure about policy which, in due course, they would announce and subject to
informed questioning.

The 24-hour television news service has also, and necessarily for 24 hours is a dreadful
amount of time to fill if you can't use soaps and game shows, brought a flood of that
other baleful development, journalists talking to journalists.

How seriously many take themselves; how grave their tones.

With them in full flight the campaign is in danger of disappearing up the commentariat's
collective rear end.

Newspapers (the aged media?) are perhaps the least affected. Many - including some
of the biggest and most regionals - don't get unreasonably excited by elections.

However the so-called opinion leaders slaughter forests daily to bring us the latest.

Well, not exactly the latest. More angled follow-ups - product differentiation, as
the marketers would say - of what's already been on radio, television and many websites,
including their own.

That usually means a melange of fact and comment, often not easily separable.

And even if a politician's words are reported straight and unadorned, it's only fact
at a superficial level.

After all, the average political utterance has much the same relationship to the journalistic
verities of truth and balance as Peter Pan has to reality. But once a journalist tries
to interpret said utterance, out comes comment.

There's a strange irony in all this.

Whatever you might think of the volume and variety and sheer nonsense that the wonders
of the information age have brought us, it does add up to a glorious anarchy.

It's way beyond the control of the political geniuses who direct modern campaigns.

Yet these geniuses try to exert ever tighter control over the political leaders and
the media who report them.

Staying on message and being risk averse matter hugely. So does - what a laugh - being authentic.

But we shouldn't get too high-minded about betraying Scott's noble vision. He was a
British MP for 11 years while continuing to edit his paper -- what would now be thought
a gross conflict of interest.

Television was still experimental when he died in 1932. He said (according to Wikipedia):
"Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it."

AAP dw/rl/mm

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