TOM RICHARDSON

Yesterday I gave a speech to a group of first-year politics students at Flinders University on the relationship between politicians and the media. This is an edited transcript:

SOME time during the pre-season, after making a preliminary final (and almost a grand final) the previous year, Crows’ coach Brenton Sanderson confidently predicted the club was in for a big season.

Despite the turmoil then surrounding the team, and the messy departure of a certain key forward who will remain nameless, most supporters were of a mind to believe him. It was that high expectation, happily courted by the club, that appears to have magnified the disappointment now felt by so many supporters, with the team on the wrong side of the win-loss ledger and facing the remainder of the year without its most important player.

It’s all very well to build expectations, but the consequence of that can be to invite greater scrutiny and conversely to enhance the sense of betrayal when those expectations aren’t met.

That realisation was certainly behind Jay Weatherill’s recent concession that the state Labor Government has “overspruiked” certain major projects over the years, an acknowledgement it is now reaping the electoral backlash after so many of its most hyped hobby-horses have limped back to the starting gates.

In 2011, Mike Rann, who had led Labor to three successive victories, was forced to stand aside by his own party, to make way for a leader who suited the times. Weatherill is certainly that. Gone is the bombastic self-promotion, the feel-good factor that state governments can only get away with when their coffers are awash with GST revenues from Canberra. Instead this Labor Government Mark Two is earnest, serious and deliberately underwhelming.

Rann was dubbed Media Mike; in a similar lecture to Flinders University students last year he partly explained why. As a former journalist, he was a keen student of the media. He observed how it had begun to shape political contests. In the 1960 televised debates between presidential aspirants John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon – debates that were the first of their kind – the audience listening on radio judged Nixon the winner. But the far more populous television audience preferred Kennedy – the camera loved him and so, consequently, did the electorate.

That ability to communicate with a mass audience began to shape political dialogue. Politicians would blank out their schedule to do all kinds of stunts or go on far-flung ventures to colourful backdrops if it meant a 20 second grab on the nightly news.

Over time, the grabs got shorter, the stunts more elaborate, the backdrops more colourful. And the mass media became more diffuse. People began increasingly to get their news and information from other sources, particularly the internet, and their entertainment from digital and pay TV.

Rann too, recognized the latent potential of the emerging social media (although, I don’t think he made the most of it); he took to Twitter early and with aplomb, for which I thank him, since it forced me to apprehensively sign up to keep an eye on him, which allowed me to appropriate my own name as a twitter handle, free from any annoying numbers or underscores.

All of which has served to subtly change the relationship between politicians and the media, and quite dramatically change the way the traditional media (or “old media”, as he sneeringly referred to us) operate.

Rann bemoaned the current climate as an age wherein “fact, analysis, commentary and opinion is mixed together rather than separated” and “the old demarcation line between reporting and editorial has long been broken”.

But he also talks about selecting the perfect backdrop to allow his message to cut through on the nightly news, of mastering the perfect succinct grab that would deliver a punchy message, of “peaking” at the right time in the electoral cycle. In other words, of manipulating the media to your own political ends.

The truth is, he says, “if the story and the visual image is powerful enough the media will find it irresistible… It’s not wrong if it helps you get re-elected so you can continue to deliver what you believe is best for your constituents”.

I believe the trend towards injecting analysis (analysis, not editorial) into reporting stems from the politicians’ mastery of exploiting the media, and the necessity to untangle the facts from the rhetoric.

It is not enough to simply throw up two opposing viewpoints and let the audience judge them. Politicians have become too canny for that. It becomes necessary to “decode” the news, rather than merely report it.

Explaining as best we can to the audience why, for instance, a politician makes an announcement at a certain time of day (to capture a certain audience via a particular medium, for instance) or uses a particular turn of phrase can help unclutter the political speak that has become so inherently disingenuous.

As a rearguard action, politicians have embraced new media that allow them to circumvent the press gallery, at least on occasions.

As Rann explained in his lecture last year: “I was one of the first Australian politicians to use Twitter. I was pilloried by some in the mainstream media when I started…(but) I found this technology gave me an opportunity to send ‘telegrams’ directly to people without having to go through the gate-keeping filter of the media. Those who resented it are now using it themselves.”

Yep, that would be me!

I did have some issues with the medium, and continue to do so. I dislike, for instance, its reductive effect on arguments and on language. As a spelling and grammar pedant, I bristle at the constant crimes against both. But I also feel Twitter’s a great medium for bringing people up close and personal, for broader engagement. It is limited, of course; the character cap makes profound philosophical discourse a little perfunctory, to say the least. But there is a great joy to write something about, say, President Barack Obama, or Taylor Walker, or Charlie Sheen, and be able to tag them into the conversation.

They rarely actually write back, of course, which is where the illusion of engagement ends. And that’s where I feel Rann underutilised the medium. He talked about it as a platform for direct democracy, but he rarely, if ever, actually engaged with constituents, particularly those who disagreed with him.

As with all media, it has its place, but it is not the whole story. The best informed of us take news from a variety of sources, and from a variety of ideological viewpoints.

But the social media’s impact on the old or traditional media is profound. You can see the hashtag emerging into common parlance, as though it were a full stop or a question mark.

Not so long ago, when big news broke – say, a famous person passed away — news reporters would scramble for their contact books to ring relevant acquaintances for comment. These days such tribute pieces are full of what those same people have tweeted. Instead of spontaneous quotes, news outlets will literally run a screen shot of a tweet, complete with social media jargon and abbreviations.

You can see why, of course: it’s easy, it’s quick, it’s far less awkward and intrusive than actually ringing real grieving people.

But it’s also sanitized. It empowers the “interviewee”, who used to have to think about what they were saying when they answered questions. Twitter gives them back control of the medium.

That’s why sporting organizations (such as, yes, the Adelaide Crows) are these days breaking their own news on Twitter and their club websites, rather than through media conferences or press releases.

They don’t enjoy scrutiny, they don’t like their utterances being analysed and dissected.

In many ways, the media is trying to grapple with the radically changing landscape in which it operates, just as politicians are.

And the current administration is very much symbolic of the changing dynamic in the relationship between politicians and those who report on them.

If political leaders are effectively salespeople for their party’s policies, and the press conference represents their sales pitch, then the trajectory this has taken mirrors that of the advertising industry over the preceding decade or so. When on-air advertising was in its infancy, the message was hardly subtle. It was wholesome, and while it was suggestive, it was unambiguous in its bid to entice viewers to buy in.

As viewers became slowly more cynical and more wary or advertiser’s motives, the message changed. Ads began experimenting with irony, self-reference, appealing beyond stereotypes or, indeed, mocking them.

Similarly, as electors become more cynical, wary and weary of politicians incessantly chasing their votes, the political sales pitch has subtly adapted. Not all that subtly, of course, as one can gather when one gauges the current level of debate and engagement currently emanating from Canberra. The corny picture opportunities, the stage-managed press conferences, the non-core promises are all still there. But there is another layer of intricacy to the pitch.

Back in 2001, when two hijacked planes flew into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre, one of then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s advisors got into hot water when she emailed colleagues instructing them to immediately release any bad news, as it would be buried – the problem was, the email got out too.

These days no-one would get into trouble for such a crass proposition, not because political operators are so much purer, but because it’s just simply too obvious.

This is the age of the mea culpa, the prodigal politician seeking forgiveness for their profligacy, the Premier lamenting the standard of parliamentary debate and political “bulldust”, while his ministers snark and sneer across the chamber.

It’s an age of diminished expectations; not just because the economy is tight and spending is constrained, but because people are weary of vapid promises and empty hyperbole.

And yes, the media has played its part in that as well, and must logically be culpable (since we are agreed on the premise that our relationship with politicians is a symbiotic one).

If one revisits many news stories from Rann’s halcyon days, there was frequently an uncritical air, a faint sense of the underpinning narrative that the state was ‘on the grow’, an inflated aura of misty-eyed optimism that suited the political and economic climate. Of course, that optimism was largely predicated on massive commonwealth revenues that have now largely dried up. The salesman the ALP chose to deliver that more sombre message needed to be, likewise, more sombre, more diffident.

The ultimate aim, of course, remains the same – re-election.

But the means to do this is now to avoid hyperbole, to keep a lid on things, and hope the electorate rewards their “transparency”.

And it may just work, if a few other things fall their way – the outcome of the federal election later this year could be a game-changer. If Julia Gillard loses, as well she might, it will leave South Australia as the only mainland state retaining a Labor Government, and voters are historically wary to give one party a monopoly on political power.

But at this stage, I’d give Weatherill about the same odds as I’d give the Adelaide Crows to make the eight. The odds are against him…but anything could happen.