Sidestepping the issues
Jakki Trenbath, NSW state government senior policy officer, writes about the trivialisation of public debate – as featured in a recent Sydney Writers’ Festival panel discussion, and Lindsay Tanner’s book Sideshow.
Over the past few years, something strange seems to have happened to our Prime Ministers and senior politicians. Why do these seemingly intelligent people talk like robots? Why do they keep repeating themselves in interviews and not answering the question? To reach so high in their parties surely they must have once been eloquent and charismatic, so why do they now seem incapable of stringing together a spontaneous sentence?
Perhaps the political advisors are to blame – over-coaching their charges and insisting that they keep to the party line. If only the politicians could be left alone they might be able to speak like humans again.
A panel discussion at the 2011 Sydney Writers Festival, entitled Spin Cycle, threw some new light on this issue. It was a fascinating discussion about the changing ways language is used by media and politicians to influence people’s feelings and opinions. The contribution of one participant, Lindsay Tanner (former federal minister of finance under Kevin Rudd), was particularly enlightening on the relationship between politicians and the media.
Sideshow
Lindsay Tanner has a new book out, Sideshow – dumbing down democracy, which argues that the situation is far more complicated than we assume, and that political advisors are just players in a game whose rules no one really controls. The book shows how the media is driving the Australian political process further and further away from issues, from the national interest and from serious political debate. It is an attack on the toxic interaction between politicians and the media and the willingly participating public.
Sideshow reveals how it feels to be a politician faced with a media bent on maximising audiences by focussing on the entertainment value of an issue, not the real substance. Tanner blames the media for forcing politicians to react to how the media portray them. They are getting more and more defensive because of "gotcha journalism" and are drifting into a world of “flimflam, stunts and gimmicks, announceables and spin, both to protect themselves and also to stay in the media’s eye”. He says that the media has changed over the last 30 to 40 years from informing to entertaining the public in order to sell more papers or improve ratings.
The focus on entertainment has meant that, in the media, real debate on important issues has been supplanted by a focus on the silly, the quirky and the gaffes. Journalists quickly learn how to produce a story their editors will like by distorting, exaggerating and trivialising issues. A minister may make a speech unveiling a major new policy but the only thing the media will report is that she mispronounced a name or fell down the stairs on the way out.
Inflating the facts
Tanner quotes Tony Blair writing about the media’s use of linguistic inflation: any problem is a “crisis”; a policy that encounters a setback is “in tatters”; criticism is a “savage attack”. Standard nouns used by political journalists include “fiasco”, “turmoil”, “scandal” and “chaos” while common verbs are “bickering”, “lashing out” and “slammed”. In the great majority of cases, the use of these rather extreme terms is not justified by the circumstances and creates a distorted image of the content being reported.
It could be argued that the relentless drive to turn everything into entertainment is just a harmless bit of fun, but Tanner gives examples of how it affects real people and how real money is spent. There was the media hype regarding the Y2K problem causing a huge overreaction, and the swine flu panic leading to a public response that, Tanner argues, was out of proportion to the threat. At the beginning of the Global Financial Crisis, Tanner was Minister for Finance and felt that the media was gleefully talking up the crisis which then had a self-fulfilling effect.
Unwarranted intrusion, or decent exposure
The recent News of the World phone-tapping scandal in Britain has exposed the lengths to which tabloid journalists will go to get a good story. The politicians’ response to the scandal has vindicated Tanner’s arguments – they had become so scared of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers nailing them that for a long time they did nothing. It took a public outcry before the politicians had the courage to address the issue in parliament.
When dealing with the media, politicians are faced with two terrifying prospects. Firstly they will be ignored and therefore become invisible in the eyes of the electorate. In this case they have to come up with silly stunts to get any media attention. Alternatively they will be misrepresented or caught out. To avoid this they become defensive and cautious. They speak according to a prepared speech and keep repeating the “key message” robotically, no matter what they are asked.
Lowering our brows(e)
Tanner says that Australia and its people deserve much better than the carefully scripted play acting that now dominates our nation's politics. But a country gets the politicians it deserves. The Australian public is also guilty of creating the situation that Tanner describes by accepting the silliness that passes for news reporting. Not only accepting, but seeking it out and turning away from the more serious content.
We now have far more choices of media than a generation ago, and the temptation to watch the lowest brow, most entertaining option available seems to be overwhelming. Tanner describes the pressure due to falling revenues on the “old media” sector (newspaper and TV) with the emergence of blogging and online news and entertainment. By the end of the book I started to understand the media’s motives, and almost sympathise with them for turning everything into cheap entertainment.
Tanner’s book is engaging and easy to read. Observers of language and communication will find it interesting and may find that it will change the way they watch the TV news and read the newspapers. Personally, I have stopped condemning the Prime Minister’s robotic delivery on TV and now see someone with the look of terror of a wild animal caught in the headlights.
Sideshow: dumbing down democracy, by Lindsay Tanner. Scribe Publications, 2011.
ISBN (13): 9781921844065. RRP: $32.95 |
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