event mechanics

EDIT 22/02/12: Annabel Crabb has a new show on the ABC: Kitchen Cabinet. Blurb from the show’s ‘About’ page:

A half-hour entertainment series that serves up a delectable combination of political discussion and good food. Each week one of Australia’s most respected political commentators – Annabel Crabb – takes a plate and leads us into the homes and hearts of some of our most notable and engaging politicians. She sits down and talks food, recipes and carbon tax with MPs from both sides of the fence.

Food and politics are never separated for long. The best plots are hatched over lunch. The best stories are told over dinner. In Canberra, dinner bookings are an anthropological study in themselves. If you go for a walk around Manuka or Kingston during a sitting week, you see a graphic illustration of the capital’s power shifts. Why is that minister sharing noodles with that factional opponent? What is that disenfranchised bunch of back benchers plotting? And the best way to get to know a politician is to break bread with one.

Kitchen Cabinet will deliver a refreshing human touch, as we watch our politicians drop their guard and go about their daily life at home.

I transcribed part of a panel discussion from last year’s #NewsNews event at the Melbourne Writers Festival primarily for the students in my online news classes. The panel was titled Outsiders and involved Belinda Hawkins, Greg Jericho and Jay Rosen. I took an interest in the panel when following the hastag for the #NewNews event and noted much tweeting and retweeting when Belinda Hawkins joked that to get people to engage with political journalism parliament should be turned into a cooking show. I downloaded all tweets with the #newnews hashtag using The Archivist software. It allowed me to figure out precisely what was tweeted and when, then track down the panel name and eventually the video of he panel. The video of the panel is here. Below is the transcript of the relevant sections of the panel. It begins with a section from Rosen about how his keynote to the panel, which he had made publicly available before delivering it, has been critiqued by a working political journalist (I think this is the critique Rosen is referencing). It is this comment that is later referred back to when an audience member asks the panel about engagement. It is worth reading both sections to get a proper sense of Rosen’s example (at the end of the transcription below) from This American Life.

Video Time: 30:13 -35:08

Jay Rosen

In this piece, and it’s kind of a long analysis from someone who does political journalism, and he makes the point that you make, he says “Look… what lots of these academics don’t understand…” And I knew it was going to be good when someone starts lecturing me about journalism, this is going to be good… “is that the market for political journalism is actually very small. It’s a small number of people, often you hear this phrase ‘political junkies’…” You know, ‘For all those political junkies out there’ who sort of really, really care about politics. You could never really build a business on it, because it is such a tiny percentage, and most people, you know the larger percentage of the public, is, you know, watching other spectacles, is interested in entertainment, whatever… umm, and when you realise that you’re reporting for this small group of people who are intensely interested, then what the insiders are doing to manoeuvre and manipulate this larger body of people is actually what these political junkies want to know about.”

And so he’s saying is that ‘people like Rosen don’t understand how political journalism works because they think the entire public is like hanging on our every word, when actually we’re just addressing this…’ ok? He has a very elaborate defence, even though, yes, much of the time it is a bunch of crap… I think this is really interesting, because it goes back to like classic debates in the 1920s about the nature of the democratic public. I think there is a tension when we come upon a tension like this when we come across two different ways of perceiving this.

One is to say, basically, he’s right. Most people don’t care. They’ve got lives to lead and they’ve got other things to do and basically the best they’re going to do is pay attention a little bit for the vote. Yeah, they’re going to be shaped by advertising and stereotypes, but that’s just the nature of the world and we have to be mature and admit it. Right… And then we can found our ideas about politics and journalism on an honest assessment of them. So that’s one point of view.

Then the other point of view is.. Well, wait a second; in a democracy the only legitimate basis for government is the consent for the government and if you are actually saying that people can’t actually know enough to give their consent, then what you are really saying is that we don’t have a democracy, we have a kind of aristocracy which has the appearance of the consent from the governed is there, but actually most people are just manipulated masses.

So this journalist says “No, is true that it’s hard to get people engaged in politics. It’s true that there’s many competing interests, it’s true that we have to be realistic and modest in our expectations we also have to continually try to interest the broader public in what matters to them. If you work in politics, if you work in journalism and you don’t think that’s important anymore, because really it’s a small group of people who are interested in politics, then you’re in the wrong business… Ok? And I tend to come from the second perspective and a lot of people in political journalism really take the first perspective, which is why they’re always telling me you don’t understand how it works.

Video time: 46:44

Question from Audience

I just had a question about what Jay was talking about before, about how it is too difficult to get… to engage people, umm… I wanted the panel’s thoughts on how you actually… ‘cause, in a sense, we’re all here today, because we’re actually, you know, on a Saturday morning talking [Jay Rosen starts nodding] about media and politics and [inaudible, ‘blogging issues’?]… the people who are living in middle… middle Australia , I’m not sure how interested they’d be, so how do we reach out to the people…

Belinda Hawkins

[Interrupting] I know the answer… I’m telling you I have the answer [Rosen looks very sceptical, Greg Jericho is amused] In television you’ll gauge whether people are watching you or not by ratings. Stories about certain topics do not rate, we know they do not rate, we run them, we look at them, we go into them because there is a wider purpose at the ABC than just thinking about ratings, um…

The story on Four Corners about abuse of animals in abattoirs in Indonesia did not rate, there was a huge turn off factor, and yet it generated an enormous amount of discussion and it was invaluable because of that.
Stories on Australian Story that I do about politicians, we know.. we go into it… except for the one about Julia Gillard before she was Prime Minister, every story I’ve done on politicians didn’t particularly rate… Politics is a turn off. So what do you do to fix that?

You turn parliament house into a cooking program. [audience laughter] MasterChef… [audience laughter] MasterChef is destroying current affairs on a nightly [inaudible] on the ABC. Everything needs to be couched in terms of a cooking program… and there’s no reason why parliament couldn’t be done that way [audience laughter]
No but seriously what do you… [gesturing]

Jay Rosen

I think that this is a really really hard problem for the reasons that you just heard articulated and I go back and forth on it. This American Life is probably the best radio program in the United States by the brilliant Iva Glass is a story-telling program and lots of times the show will be about… people have bizarre relationships with their mothers… people that cross cultures. It’ll be people… This American Life is about stories of real people. But every once and a while they’ll do something completely different than that and their most famous recent program, actually its older that than that it is three years old now, which was The Giant Pool of Money. Which was a one hour documentary on the [inaudible, ‘bank crisis’?].

It started when Ira Glass, who’s the host, kept hearing these stories in the news about sub-prime mortgages and the collapse of banks and they didn’t know what was going on and they were befuddled like any other citizen would be, because they’re not economics correspondents and so they decided to try and explain – what was happening and why we had this crisis that ultimately cost the treasury hundreds of billions of dollars – to themselves. And their one hour documentary, The Giant Pool of Money, is overwhelmingly, by a factor of ten to one, the most downloaded program they’ve ever done and it’s about the intricacies of the mortgage market. So when you come upon things like that, it makes me think, ‘Well there is a way to engage a larger audience, you just have to help them understand and that that’s actually harder than reporting the news, because that’s what that program was, ‘We’re going to help you understand this really complex, strange, bizarre event that cost you hundreds of billions of dollars, right… And the key to the program was that the people making it began in the same position as the overwhelmed ignorant public and they travelled to competence [inaudible, ‘by observation’?] and looking back to where they were when they started, and how they achieved mastery, they told the story so others could have mastery as well. So sometimes I think that if sometimes we had journalism like that we could expand the circle.

This passage from unknowing to knowing (and the affective character of the non-formal knowledges produced) is best captured in the ‘how to’ or ‘instructionable’ style of article. My current work is begins to develop an archaeology of ‘how to’ articles. Why are there not far more socio-political ‘how to’ articles? ‘Pol Inst’ anyone?

Nikki Usher‘s 2010 article in New Media & Society “Goodbye to the news: how out-of-work journalists assess enduring news values and the new media landscape” examines the goodbye letters, emails, speeches, columns and blog postings — “final musings” — of journalists who have been laid off, taken a ‘voluntary buyout’ or who have left the industry. Usher’s piece is somewhat polemical in tone at times, not that this is necessarily a problem, it just needs to be taken into account when digesting her arguments:

[A]ll these goodbyes reveal a silver lining – those that are being let go may be let go for business reasons, but they may also be the people failing to see the opportunities for new media and those who are unable to help newspapers be entrepreneurial in their attempts to come through the crisis they face. (924)

Usher analysed 31 ‘final musings’ as presented on the Poynter.org blog by Jim Romenesko. The terrific irony of this for anyone following the current state of journalism in the US is that Romenesko resigned from the Poynter Institute late last year after being accused of improper attribution by allegedly not using “quote marks” appropriately. The Romenesko blog was rebranded Romenesko+ and is now simply Media Wire. It is a brilliant example to use in my first lecture for my Online News unit this semester, in concert with Usher’s piece as a set reading, as we introduce and explore with students the role of ‘online news’ in the tensions of the current journalism industry.

Usher’s piece is a useful way to frame traditional understandings of journalism in the context of structural change. The analysis is useful for locating the prevailing culture of legacy print journalism in terms of the relation between individual experiences and the structural shifts that in part form their context. From a Foucaultian perspective Usher is isolating a ‘discourse event’ in the point of inflection between two discursive regimes and correlative compositions of power relations (dispositifs). Usher draws on Fredric Jameson’s conceptualisation of ‘nostalgia’ and Barbie Zelizer’s notion that rather than ‘profession’, US journalists should be understood as belonging to an ‘interpretive community’.

Usher’s use of Jameson’s ‘nostalgia’ begins with her arguing that journalists now work in a ‘post-modern news era’ (914). (What would be absolutely fascinating for me would be to revisit the so-called ‘Media Wars’ of the late-1990s in light of such a description. On the face of it, Keith Windschuttle and his ‘traditionalist’ supporters have lost.) She is mostly describing the shift Fordist modes of news production, which includes changes to reliable occupational routines of ‘newsroom’ work practices and changes to the status and function of the audience. The inherent double movement of Jameson’s nostalgia is that it is backwards oriented and forward directed. Nostalgia produces collective memories of the past while at the same produces a potential of a better future. The nostalgia of journalists, Usher suggests, also masks reality in that bias, corporate control and so on are not constitutive elements:

They are nostalgic for a time when journalism meant stability and economic security, and deeply believe that traditional print journalism contributed to democratic discourse and public service – masking the reality, perhaps, that their work may have helped sustain and perpetuate power structures. The old way of doing newspapers is threatened, and journalists are uncertain about the future. But significantly, they also fail to be forward-looking even as they are backward-looking: their nostalgia is self-limiting because it fails to produce a vision of the future that catapults traditional journalists into the new media world and new media economics. (923)

The current transformations to the legacy news industry serve as an example of what Zelizer calls the ‘interpretive community’. Usher writes:

Discourse about the changes in the news industry creates a discursive community of journalists. This, then, shapes shared meanings about the trials and tribulations journalists face and takes on the collective memory of ‘professional journalism’ in a pre-web, pre-blog, pre-newspaper slump era. (915)

Usher’s analysis is structured around four main areas of journalists’s discourse functioning as an ‘interpretive community’: 1) ‘Journalism as an ideal’ (916-9), 2) ‘New Media Economics’ (919-21), 3) confusion around what is being challenged or changed, mostly in terms of technology (921-2), and 4) a failure to be ‘forward thinking’ (923-5).

The basic tenets of journalism as an ideal are that journalism works in the public interest, it remains impartial, serves the voiceless and provides a crucial link in democracy (916). The ideal of journalism is to serve as ‘public service journalism’. Mark Deuze defines public service journalism as:

Journalists share a sense of ‘doing it for the public’, of working as some kind of representative watchdog of the status quo in the name of people, who ‘vote with their wallets’ for their services (by buying a newspaper, watching or listening to a newscast, visiting and returning to a news site). (447)

Deuze (2005: 448) notes that journalists can learn to have more responsive attitude to their ‘publics’ and therefore use this “age-old ideological value” as a wau to maintain the power relations of the status quo while learbing how to adapt to changing conditions. As Usher describes it, in the context of ‘prestige papers’ (such as the LA Times or New York Times), “these individuals want to reassert their claims to defining the public interest and determining what public service journalism is, rather than creating a more open conversation with a newly engaged audience of news producers and consumers” (917).

In the context of smaller, local newspapers this public service ideal is described in terms of a newspaper being a (more paternalistic than patronizing) ‘caretaker’ helping a public “interpret difficult ideas” and also sustaining local community by reproducing existing routines of newspaper communication and correlative power relations. Usher’s point is that this does not take into account those on- and off-line practices that reproduce ‘community’ that do not have the newspaper at the centre (918). Newspaper in general are seen to be arbiters of democracy in the idealized practice of highlighting the power relations that underpin existing governmental and market-based power relations. There was a general lament, Usher notes, that transformations to journalism are understood in terms of catering to the ‘market’ rather than ‘democracy’. ‘New media economics’ (and ‘new media technologies’) therefore become a threat to the democratic role of public service journalism. Political writer Michele Jacklin’s final column captures a sense of this when she writes, “As a substitute for hard news and insightful analysis, readers are served up a steady diet of splashy graphics, celebrity gossip and stories with the heft of cotton candy.”

In the Australian context, this tension between hard news and insightful analysis versus forms of content designed to increase website visitors and ‘hits’ is represented from the other side of the conflict by NineMSN.com’s online news editor Hal Crawford in his commentary about the Australian Federal Government’s Independent Media Inquiry posted to mUmbrella.com.

Real time data tell you exactly how popular a story is, and to maximise your audience size you need to weed out stories that no one wants to read. This kind of brutal treatment can be hard for an old school journalist to take.
Initially you may get upset that no one is reading the ‘important’ stories, but that arrogance fades quickly. Truly important stories rate. If some piece of news is going to change lives or become socially necessary or is just plain interesting, it gets traffic.

The NineMSN submission to the inquiry similarly seeks to problematise ‘quality journalism’:

The traditional view is that a key role for the news media is to be an independent monitor of government power and therefore quality journalism requires truth, accuracy and independence. We think it’s also important to acknowledge that that news media serves diverse roles. [...]
For ninemsn the most important indicator of quality content is that it is trusted. Trust is the key concern for our news team because trust equates to brand reputation which drives of audience. [...]
The traditional media are no longer small elite who serve as the gatekeepers of the news. Value in the digital news media is increasingly generated by interactions with users including the use of social media to provide commentary, share stories and drive traffic. News produced for digital platforms has to be a quality product if we want people to engage with our stories, to contribute their own insights and to participate in their dissemination.

The discourse surrounding ‘new media economics’ in Usher’s analysis is less important to my Online News unit this semester, but will be central to the second semester unit organised around ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurial journalism’. The second semester unit is designed to prepare students for a more market-oriented, audience-driven form of journalism at the level of producing individual stories through to the level of creating standalone ‘online media enterprises’. Usher’s analysis notes that individual journalists generally take structural shifts personally, and see their respective departures as a failure of ‘owners’ or ‘Wall St’ to recognise talent. This is important in an educational context because ‘talent’ is still recognised, of course; it is more a question of the character of the ‘talent’ and of the mechanisms of ‘recognition’.

Jacklin’s comments are also interesting in the context of the socio-technical practices and technologies that Usher suggests will assist journalism. She lists a number of “recommendations as the possible salvation for traditional journalism’s problems: increased social networking, conections with the audience, more multimedia platforms, crowd-sourcing, better forums, flash-graphics, newspaper-hosted community blogs and hyperlocal reporting, to name a few” (922).

Lastly, Usher notes that the article odes not mean to say that other journalists are not reconsidering with the public and “are deeply engaged in trying to understand what such things as user-generated content, blogging, comment boards, data-mining, crowd sourcing and the like might mean for their newsrooms” (924-5). She ends with a provocative question: “to what extent are non-traditional journalists concerned with the discourse about traditional news values and the idea of what it means to be a journalist?” My response, shared with other educators, is to work on developing units that hope to empower students when they hit the job market.

Over the weekend I led a session as part of a workshop camp training youth media advocates for ReachOut.com. ReachOut.com is an advocacy group that seeks to raise awareness about issues relating to youth mental health and suicide, and is part of Inspire.org.au. I was very happy to donate my Saturday morning and the couple of days it took to put together my session. Like most people, I’ve had some personal experience with a loved one struggling to overcome the ‘black dog’. It has been good to see depression and mental health issues receive proper media attention over the last few years as struggles with mental health issues transcend social and cultural boundaries.

In my session I introduced the youth advocates to the concept of a ‘complex media environment’. It builds on well established concepts within media studies from key figures such as Marshall “The medium is the message” McLuhan (see this video of McLuhan in Australia from ABC Open) and Neil “Media Ecology” Postman. The key outcome from my session was to get the advocates to realise that as media advocates they are no longer simply ‘consumers’ of media content, but nor are they properly ‘producers’ within the media industry. Instead, they are somewhere in between, what I described as being ‘operators’.

ReachOut.com’s own media advocacy kit for the workshop was put together (EDIT: 13/12/11) under the direction of co-manager Nathalie Swainston by Phoebe Netto and it is a brilliant practical guide for working with journalists and other content producers within the media industry. For example, it presents the well known values of news worthiness (timeliness, proximity, impact, etc) in an inverted form so media advocates know how to position their message so as to be useful for journalists working on producing a story.

I built on the media advocacy kit by reaching out to the youth media advocates’ existing mode of engagement with the media — as mostly ‘crticial consumers’ — to point out ways this could be extended and intensified so as to spot and plan for ‘opportunities’ for their message. I focused on two methods for doing this. The first involves working within the constraints of the journalistic ‘news cycle’ and also tracking the rhythm of the media activities of other social institutions, such as governmental authorities or the NGO sector publishing relevant reports.

The second involves appreciating the strucutral dimensions of the media industry. The commercial media industry basically operates as an ‘apparatus of capture’: it produces content so as to ‘capturre’ an audience, and then sell this audience to advertisers (or others). The questions the media advocates need to work through are, what sort of audience can I help produce and who would want the traffic/metrics/listeners/viewers/readership that my message can help deliver? The session after mine was delivered by the lovely and talented Pheobe Netto (who also took the phone camera snap above during my presentation!) and it was about the practical skills of crafting one’s media message. The ‘complex’ bit of the ‘complex media environment’ comes from the structural changes that the Australian media industry has undergone over the last decade or so. There are increased opportunities for engagement for those with the necessary skills to turn out good copy for many media outlets.

One of the qualities of this complex media enviroment that I discussed in my session was the way media stories can cascade across multiple channels and platforms. Most people are familiar with the concept of an ‘echo chamber’, but a more general example of a similar phenomenon is the way various media outlets will pay attention to what other media outlets are reporting on. This doesn’t only happen amongst competitors (or ‘co-opetitors’) but also sub-jacently related channels, such as local radio stories picked up by larger ‘talkback’ radio, picked up by print journalist, picked up by TV journalists, etc.

I think it was a very good day and the feedback I’ve received from participants is that they found my session to be very productive.

In my Media Inquiry submission I attempt to isolate a problem that is emerging involving the fabrication of debate in the specific context of the complex media ecologiez of cross-platform media enterprises. One way to think about this is that journalists or media personalities operating as part of different platforms address each other in such a way as to produce a micro ‘echo chamber’. I describe this as an ‘apparatus of capture’ as it is a way to use niche or specialist media channels and correlative media platforms to assemble a ‘mass’ audience from the aggregated niche audiences.

This can happen ‘accidentally’ as a ‘real’ news story can emerge that is actual news and to some nonsense propaganda produced for the purposes of shifting, for example, political discourse. An example of this is the current furor over Kyle Sandilands’s comments about a News.com.au journalist. How is this an example?

Original story by Alison Stephenson published on News.com.au

Sandilands abusive on-air comments. Sandilands writes for News Ltd platforms.

Story broke by mUmbrella, a non-News Ltd online media enterprise servicing the advertising and media industries.

There were a number of tweets about the mUmbrella story last night. If I have time when I am not at a conference, then I’ll add links to these.

David Penberthy (@penbo) at the News Ltd publication, The Punch, launches a resolutely vitriolic attack at Sandilands and his on-air behaviour.

News.com.au editor Paul Cogan publishes a ‘breaking’ story at roughly 10am the day after that addresses Sandilands’s comments.

As more is published I shall return to this post and add more detail. It will be interesting to see which media outlets publish stories on this.

Political correspondent for Crikey, Bernard Keane, has an interesting piece published yesterday addressing ‘how the internet messes with the game of media and party politics’.

Below are some remarks on Keane’s piece. First, some context: I’ve been teaching my third-year Online News journalism students about how to address a similar set of problems. Their major assessment is to come up with a case-study length pitch for an online media enterprise that targets a niche audience. Their first task was to isolate a specific area of interest around which organises a community of interest, and then build on it from there. Targeting a specific area of interest is relatively familiar to the broader media industry; it is what most magazines do. It is relatively unfamiliar for an ‘analog’ news industry still operating with a ‘pre-Convergence’ mindset, however. I am not sure what a news-based media industry would look like when targeting specific areas of interest as there is no direct homological relation between the news-based content-audience relations and what happens in magazines, or at least there isn’t yet. Except, of course, in the financial industries…

I think some more focus on what Keane means by the ‘community-generating power of the internet’ is needed as it is not properly explained in his piece. He provides an example (Occupy Wall Street protests) and describes one of the qualities of such communities (no longer geographically anchored, or using a phrase from McKenzie Wark, they exist in a ‘virtual geography’). I want to describe two of the primary ways the internet is different from print or broadcast era media for directly contributing to the production of communities. Then I’ll look at how these apply (or not) to the news-media industry.

The first way the internet contributes to the production of communities is best explained by pulling apart what is meant by ‘interest’ in the phrase ‘community of interest’. There is a continuum of ‘interest’ from passing attention-grabbing interest that quickly dissipates to the enduring and sometimes agonistic practices of enthusiasts. This distribution of interest was described by community practioners researching local community groups in Britain in the 1980s as ‘Organising Around Enthusiasm’. Online communities form where enthusiasts search for useful information that will help them solve a problem (what I call a ‘challenge’) combined with an actual community of congruent interests. In terms of ‘community’, the now-classic ‘online forum’ is the established form.

A great deal of research into not only online groups but off-line and pre-internet groups indicates that there is a minority of participants that do the majority of work in these communities. These people may not be the most engaged ‘enthusiasts’ in the sense of the ‘best’ enthusiasts who know how to solve a large degree of problems, rather they are the most involved in communities. It makes sense to talk about communities with strong or weak ties (ala Gladwell, and the risks invovled in participation online vs off-line), but a community only makes sense if you know what challenges characterise a given enthusiasm. What mobilises enthusiasts into action?

The two major reports of the excellent mid-2000s Newspaper Next initiative (2006 and 2008) framed what I am calling ‘challenges’ in a slightly different way. Basing their program for newspaper innovation on the work of business academics Clayton Christensen and Clark Gilbert, they discussed ‘jobs to be done’, rather than challenges:

The concept is surprisingly simple. It holds that customers do not really buy products, they hire them to get jobs done. For example, Intuit’s QuickBooks software made it easy for small business owners to accomplish an important job: Make sure my business doesn’t run out of cash. Some alternatives, such as pen and paper and Excel spreadsheets, were not good enough. Professional accounting software packages were too good — confusing and filled with unnecessary features. QuickBooks did the job better than any alternative and quickly took over the category. [...]
Using the jobs-to-be-done concept requires first understanding the problems a customer faces in life or business. The most promising problems are those that people do often and consider important and where current solutions leave them frustrated. (20-21)

‘Jobs-to-be-done’ certainly makes sense for someone who comes out of a ‘business administration’ background. Translate this in a social or political context. Think about the most popular online communities, ‘jobs to be done’ stemming from parenting, working on cars, cooking and foodie culture, information technologies, etc. What ‘jobs-to-be-done’ are there for the Occupy Wall Street protesters? There is the everyday work of maintaining the protest spaces across the world and there are the larger ‘political’ jobs-to-be-done that haven’t not yet been properly articulated, i.e. a list of demands. One of the main jobs-to-be-done of the protesters in say Melbourne or Sydney is to perform solidarity for those in New York. That is, by the way, why I prefer ‘challenge’, as a ‘challenge’ can be articulated or repeated in a number of different ways and still be a singular event.

Secondly, online communities produce multiple publics, but not publics imagined following ‘public sphere’ discourse. The problem with the ‘public sphere’ discourse, adapted from the work of Habermas and others, is that ‘rational deliberation’ or ‘consensus’ is not a challenge — well, it is for people who are insane… — therefore understanding ‘civic engagement’ understood as a function of producing ‘connection’ only addresses one part of community building. The capacity to articulate and then service the challenges that mobilise populations into action is absent.

The current media industry assumes that the mechanisms of liberal representative democracy function properly, therefore their only task is to produce a ‘voice’ or a ‘visibility’ (in the Foucaultian sense) for a given population to air their views in a ‘public sphere’. Rational debate allegedly then happens and a decision is taken that is derived from this debate. Politics does not function like this, if it ever did. Politics is not a mission to produce consensus; that is the challenge of politicians, not the challenge of politics. To appropriate Plato, ‘producing consensus’ is a game of projecting shadows on a wall in a situation designed to fix subjects in a seat of citizenship. Here is the shadow of ‘participation’ produced by airing your views, etc. It is the myth circulated by Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle and his comments regarding #OccupyMelbourne protesters having ‘enough time’ to ‘make their point’. Their challenge was to not to express a point, but to occupy a space in solidarity.

To reiterate this point: The shadow game is the challenge of politicians, but it is not the challenge of politics. Politics is a mission to articulate a given challenge that implicates an already concerned cohort of the population so as to mobilise the population and address the challenge, hopefully solving it. The Greens get this. Labor has tried to, but is terrible at articulating the challenges it is engaging with. I have no idea about what challenges the Coalition thinks it needs to address; they seem to be politicians devoid of politics, existing purely within the shadow game. Strangely, the only politician who has done anything innovative about this recently (and I don’t agree with much of his party’s social policies) is Bob Katter. To appropriate Waleed Aly, politics is not like professional sport. I couldn’t care less about what some foolish sportsperson got up to on the weekend and how this might affect their career, but I know others find this interesting. Politicians are tools for addressing the challenges that can not be addressed by individuals, they are not celebrities trying to address ritualised forms of challenge (i.e. sport). By covering politics like sport, the challenges that politicans are meant to address instead become ritualised into ‘goals’, ‘good moves’, etc following a meta-language that an audience is familiar with. By covering politicians like they are playing a sport, the media ritualises that challenges of politics.

Beyond the commentariat no one cares, and my language can not be too strong on this point, about the personal challenges faced by politicians (who will be leader, etc.). The utter stupidity of the MSM’s lampooning of Allan Asher and the Greens for the Senate estimates debacle is a classic example. The media narrative produced in the MSM focused on some alleged indescretion by Asher and Green’s Senator Hansen-Young. Is this the ‘challenge’ that the population is interested in? Some nonsense ‘sideshow’ political stoush? Why did Asher do what he did? What ‘challenge’ was he trying to articulate that lead to him getting ‘resigned’ by the Federal Labor government? Surely this is the only question worth asking for a serious political journalist? The rest is playing the shadow game.

In summary: First, talking about community without a discussion of the challenges that mobilise this community is missing the political point. Second, the current MSM seems content to focus on the challenges faced by politicians, and do not focus on the challenges faced by communities.

We need a news-based media worthy of the challenges faced by an entire population, not worthy of the personal challenges faced by professional politicians. I’ll be very happy if the internet is messing with the shadow game of MSM and party politicians.