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You can imagine the relief. All the noise, the mess, the chaos, the crossed purposes, the convincing, the sweaty uphill climb to get anything done. This damn inefficient business they call democracy. You can understand the lure to just send in the goon squad, prod those paper pushers and make them answer questions for a change. It proved irresistible.
After it all, Peter Dutton, in Sri Lanka to discuss people smuggling, must have put down the phone and threw open the hardwood doors of his taxpayer funded rented villa to step out onto the balcony and bask in the fresh and uncontested silence.
To understand the AFP’s raid on the ABC last week, it’s important you avoid considering the national broadcaster a credible counterbalance to a government with authoritarian leanings. But for 4 Corners like some failing light on a hill, the ABC not. Rather Aunty’s ability to speak truth to power has been long since enfeebled by repeated budget cuts and a pivot towards infotainment and lifestyle. It was not her role as democracy’s guardian that made our national broadcaster a target but its business model.
When other public services like healthcare and education were hollowed out by years of underfunding in the drive towards economic rationalism, the ABC’s core service to a functioning democracy remained immune. Not so anymore. What the AFP raid signals is that the federal government feels the balance of power has shifted so it can now operate like a commissar of a Central Asian republic. After all who is left to protest?
Certainly not the private sphere. NewsCorp has become a caricature of a media organisation, an outrageously pro-Coalition juggernaut that has made a joke out of journalistic integrity. Sure the house of NewsCorp journalist Annika Smethurst was raided too but the proof is in the product - When do we ever see NewsCorp publish an investigation that questions the status quo? Why would they? Kingmaker Murdoch put them there in the first place.
In the essay The endless reign of Rupert Murdoch Richard Cooke paints a picture of the Murdoch press as a titanic political force the anglophonic sphere, so potent as to make elected politicians quake. The towering verticality of his various media empires, where endlessly cloned senior editors think, talk and bully just like the Uberboss is terrifying in itself. Yet when this remains unchecked by media ownership laws or rival voices things get really scary. So how did we end up here?
It’s no secret that since the turn of the millennium, the non-NewsCorp, non-digital Australian media landscape has been experiencing unprecedented and spectacular decline. Across the board audiences are dropping while ad revenue is being swallowed whole by social media. Last year’s watershed was the merger (read unholy union) of Fairfax and Channel Nine. This was more than the end of the legitimate Australian broadsheet. It was the death knell of a daily, relatively non-partisan paper as a viable business model in Australia. Again the relationship between impartiality and money is important. Beyond print, commercial television is a joke and nobody listens to the radio (except talkback). No wonder the AFP felt safe storming the doors of the national broadcaster.
“Independent Always” it says beneath the Fairfax masthead and they used to mean it too. Now we live in a political era in which the truth has been weaponised and to speak the independent and objective truth is the ultimate act of subversion.
To the Australia idealist, especially one with a memory beyond 30 years, truth at a price is a cynical idea indeed. We have been pampered by the spectre of free public healthcare, free education and free truth. None of these things exist as they did.
Yet perhaps nothing has demonstrated what happens when we stop truth-funding more than the last federal election. Scott Morrison squeaked in a victory not on the back on competitive policy platform but a scare campaign on taxes that barely existed.
A scare campaign is a visceral thing. It demands reptilian emotion cloud reason and while it need not necessarily depend on a lie, a cool head is anathema to it. And what is independent media if not a cool head?
Richard Denniss in the article above, observed, surprise surprise, a stark disconnect between voter’s interests and voting patterns. His was a cool head, albeit one with a leftward bent that arrived too late. That lower income voters vote against their interests is a cliche uttered by a frustrated elitist doesn’t mean it is not proven true in election after election. But this one was different. Denniss is not referring to “interests” in the usual ideological vain - they are not long-term institutional investments like education or healthcare that could take decades to pay off. Instead the simple matter of immediate tax cuts were voted for by those who would not receive them: “Even on the issue of franking credits, the 10 electorates with the biggest swing to Labor get four times the amount of franking credits each year as the 10 seats with the biggest swing to the Coalition.” How could such a disconnect remain unchallenged in the public sphere?
Without a well-funded and impartial media serving as ballast, credibility goes to the party willing to spend the most on advertising. On a back of the napkin tally FriendlyJordies figures the coalition spent around $268 million versus Labor’s $31.8 million on the most recent election. Even though Clive Palmer spent a cool 60 million of that with minimal results he made enough sweaty jowled racket to distract from Labor’s core message.
So this is the Australian political battlefield of 2019. See the wreckage of earnest media both public and private funded still smouldering? And what can you do to help?
Truth is that truth is in desperate need of patronage. Like many public services in 2019 it is whiteanted by b-grade knockoffs that eat into the margin of the genuine article. To emote and to wring your hands online is to support social media, that is to feed the very platform that turned the media landscape into a monotonic moronic monoculture in the first place. Far more effective is to understand that truth costs money. We can prove by contradiction - the current state of fake news relies on ignorance. If you live in the middle of a major Australian city and feel the need to agonise online about “where we at” - please don’t. What we suspected has been proven true once and for all - clicktivism is a sham to pay for ads. Far more effective is to support independent media. It’s sad but it’s true that your dollar carries further than your voice ever will.