A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  Then the internet arrived, and this Edenic world fell apart. People fell out of the habit of buying a physical newspaper given they could read it online—newspaper companies having foolishly made their early online products free—and began using the internet first to do something other than watch TV, and then to download content they previously would have watched on TV (in Australia, usually months or years later, when broadcasters could be bothered showing it). Better yet, they could select the news sources they preferred, filtering out things they didn’t want to hear rather than having no choice but to be exposed to them in a unitary media environment. Many media users prefer using news sources that they know they will agree with, rather than having to endure views and news they don’t like.

  Accordingly, the ‘rivers of gold’™ from advertising that characterised the newspaper industry began to dry up, and what were for generations licences to print money in television became a less sure bet. Media outlets tried to keep up appearances, doing the same things they did when there was a unified media environment and they completely controlled both the content and the manner in which it was consumed by consumers, as if simply repeating the ritual would somehow bring back the analogue good times.

  We’re deep into the hyperreality of Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco here: these media rituals—the cross to nowhere, the pre-fabricated story, the rolling coverage of non-events—are simulacra of things that increasingly have no real-world existence, events simulated to look like the memories of earlier journalistic culture, but having no substance or reality.

  Some media companies reach back further, to older traditions, in an effort to protect against the erosion of their revenues. Some—News Corporation’s newspapers, and its Fox News service in the US, are the best but not the only example—abandon the pretence of objectivity and pursue a more aggressively partisan and campaigning line in their news reporting. For newspapers and radio, this tends to mean becoming aggressively right-wing, because those remaining users of print newspapers and radio tend to be old and conservative. This accounts for the get-off-my-lawn tone of much of, for example, News Corporation’s newspaper coverage in Australia, which is dominated by a prostatariat of old white male journalists writing for old white male readers. Again, the rituals of journalism are carefully enacted—complete with ‘exclusive’ slapped on them, often for stories that are entirely fictional and heavily biased to suit the outlet’s political agenda.

  While this may infuriate those who disagree with the politics of, say, News Corp’s newspapers, or MSNBC, it is a sound business decision: partisan media matches the demonstrated consumer need to select the news sources they prefer, it has a distinctive voice and cut-through appeal in a cluttered and fragmented environment, it allows better targeting of particular demographics, and it costs much less to run ceaseless commentary and ideological campaigns than to provide quality journalism. News Corp’s newspapers in Australia are losing circulation very quickly—but certainly not as quickly as those of its print rival Fairfax, which is itself becoming more strident.

  Moreover, such partisanship was one of the original media business models in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although much of News Corp’s ideology might have been considered extreme even then. While weekly newspapers in England existed before 1700, the eighteenth century saw a huge expansion in this new industry as papers went daily and went local, multiplying and dramatically expanding their readerships—from around two million at the end of the seventeenth century to sixteen million at the start of the nineteenth, despite the relatively high cost of newspapers because of taxes. In a similar period, the number of London mastheads alone went from twelve to fifty-two, serving a population that went from about half a million to just over one million. In this crowded market, newspapers consciously adopted an oppositional tone in their political coverage, while others were subsidised by government ministers during the long period of Whig rule in the first half of the century.

  Partisanship wasn’t necessarily a guarantee of success, however, given it limited the potential readership of a masthead and many papers ignored, or had no capacity to report, local news anyway (even covering parliamentary proceedings was illegal until the second half of the eighteenth century, a restriction those regularly exposed to federal parliamentary proceedings in Australia might endorse). The early decades of newspapers resembled the early years of the internet, without so many cat gifs: papers relied strongly on commentary and on recirculating and repackaging news from other sources and newspapers. Colonial-era American newspapers, which were far fewer in number, also relied on second/third/fourth/fifth-hand news, commentary and literary efforts or humour—Benjamin Franklin, one of many printers who started or bought a newspaper to keep his presses busy, first achieved fame with his pseudonymous humour and political writing, which 250 years later would have been known as blogging.

  After the American Revolution, however, American newspapers became intensely partisan. Founding Fathers like Alexander Hamilton and John Adams adopted noms de plume to excoriate their opponents (the pen names were always classical in origin, to give an air of republican virtue to the accusations of treason, imbecility and corruption they levelled at each other). Hamilton, Madison and Jefferson established and bankrolled partisan newspapers. Jefferson deserves some sort of acknowledgment for the rare political feat of establishing, using government funds, a paper with the explicit task of attacking a government of which he himself was a senior member, the first Washington administration. Not to be outdone, Alexander Hamilton wrote and encouraged attacks on John Adams, a fellow Federalist, to undermine his prospects of succeeding George Washington.*

  For most of the nineteenth century, there were low barriers to entry into the newspaper industry in the US, no copyright laws to stop the reuse of content and strong population growth that could support a constant supply of new titles in frontier communities and multiple mastheads even in relatively small cities. Newspapers reflected their editors’ and proprietors’ world views, and readily aligned with one or other of the major political parties; in the absence of rapid information networks like the telegraph, the emphasis of newspapers was still less on journalism and more on commentary. Also, crucially, neither political parties nor many editors felt any compunction about making and receiving undisclosed press subsidies.

  It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that the growing concentration of newspaper ownership, changes in printing technology and pressure from politicians saw fewer newspapers and greater pressure for ‘balanced’ and ‘objective’ journalism of the kind twentieth-century citizens came to believe should be the norm in the media; the first schools of journalism began opening early in the twentieth century in the United States. But the tradition of a partisan press persisted in the UK, where to this day major papers are unabashedly politically aligned. It was the arrival of electric media—first radio, then television, both far more tightly regulated on content than newspapers—and the rapid development of networks controlled by a limited group of companies (in Australia, the most powerful newspaper companies) that created, for seventy years or so, a cohesive media environment for citizens consisting of local and metropolitan newspapers, local radio and networked television and, except in the United States, a national broadcaster of varying levels of dominance.

  Twenty-first-century partisan media, then, looks a lot like eighteenth- and nineteenth-century partisan media, albeit with less facial hair and slightly more diversity of journalists and editors.

  Travails in hyperreality

  While the coverage of politics in the media has undergone a cycle, political journalism itself has also changed: the rituals of the analogue era live on but are ever more hollow. Despite the growth of twenty-four-hour news channels, there are fewer journalists covering politics than there used to be. And politicians have long since found other ways to reach voters than via press galleries, even before the advent of social media; in Australia, mechanisms like FM radio, talkback radio
or TV chat shows offer politicians a softer, less filtered environment in which they can deliver their message. But politicians are now also trained to face media scrutiny more effectively by sticking closely to a pre-prepared set of talking points, usually tailored with key phrases that form part of their parties’ political tactics, and limiting opportunities for concerted questioning by the diminishing number of well-informed journalists. In Australia, political parties now closely manage not merely what senior ministers say but what backbenchers say as well, sending out key messages and daily talking points for use by any MP coming within range of a journalist.

  This means political media conferences now consist of much the same hyperreality as the live cross to nowhere and the pre-packaged news story: the ritual of question-and-answer is observed, but little information is provided; rather than priests, journalists are reduced to the role of acolytes at a ceremony the purpose of which is not information provision or media scrutiny but a re-enactment of the memory of political accountability, a Holy Communion in which, sadly, no transubstantiation of rhetoric into responsibility ever occurs. Events such as a politician giving the media free rein to ask questions as long as they like, a politician regularly ignoring talking points in favour of intelligently responding to questions,* or, conversely, a politician being so poorly prepared that their discipline breaks down under journalistic probing, are now highly unusual.

  In response, the media has also adjusted its thresholds for newsworthiness. Faced with politicians who rigidly adhere to talking points in Australia’s tightly controlled party system, journalists now seize on the slightest deviation or slip from the anodyne as evidence of either division or an error (invariably a ‘gaffe’, ‘stumble’ or even ‘debacle’). This in turn prompts politicians to confine themselves ever more doggedly to their talking points, aware of the febrile overreaction that will accompany even the smallest slip. Hyperreality begets hyperreality as the process of political scrutiny becomes ever less meaningful.

  Another incentive for politicians to say less is the decreasing capacity of the media to adequately cover policy issues. Fewer journalists, with more rounds, more deadlines and poorer resourcing, mean less coverage of policy issues, especially if they are complex or in areas regarded as dull. This is especially the case in television, where political journalists and their editors and producers have to compete for time in network news bulletins with hyper-local non-stories, car accidents and celebrity news. Labor’s Lindsay Tanner has said that he increasingly found that talkback radio shockjocks were the only section of the broadcast media prepared to devote extended periods to discussing policy issues with a popular audience base.*

  This tilts the incentives in political journalism as a whole away from policy coverage and towards personality-based political coverage, or what is derisively termed horse-race journalism (the best political journalists can do both well). Speculation about parliamentary party leadership, for example, or likely future presidential candidates in the US, is far easier than policy coverage, which requires background knowledge or good research skills, and consistently attracts more interest from readers and viewers than policy stories. Better yet, policy stories that can be interpreted through the prism of horse-race-style coverage can give the illusion of depth while requiring little policy understanding. A constant stream of opinion polls, many of them commissioned by the media themselves, facilitates this, providing political journalists with endless material with which to discuss which side, and which personalities, are winning and losing.

  It also rewards politicians who offer simplistic messages over those with policy substance who lack the celebrated trait of ‘cut-through’, encouraging those with a skill for simple messages regardless of content and discouraging those who want to pursue complex policy in a contested environment.

  This is one of the reasons for the success of Tony Abbott, now prime minister of Australia, who destroyed two Labor prime ministers in a four-year campaign of brilliantly effective political communication. Abbott, dismissed as a disaster waiting to happen by some commentators when he first secured the leadership of his party,* proved himself an immensely skilful political communicator capable of cutting through with targeted, negative messages to which his opponents had no answer.

  Moreover, Abbott, a former journalist, understood that inconsistency was not merely the hobgoblin of little minds but irrelevant as well: he repeatedly and routinely changed his position on key issues. On climate change, for instance, Abbott publicly argued every possible position on climate change over a relatively short space of time in opposition. He variously claimed the world was getting cooler, that climate science was ‘crap’, that humans had little role in climate change, that he ‘accepted the science’ and that he wanted to ‘give the planet the benefit of the doubt’. He also articulated every position on what action to take on climate change, from an emissions trading scheme to a carbon tax (‘the intelligent sceptic’s way to deal with minimising emissions’), which he then campaigned against, and a big-government style grants program. On another totemic issue, he went from opposing paid parental leave ‘over this government’s dead body’ to supporting a scheme so extravagantly generous his own colleagues opposed it as a ‘Rolls-Royce model’.

  Abbott’s genius for almost randomly shifting policy positions inevitably placed him at odds with the evidence relating to some important issues, but that too, he knew, was no impediment; contrary evidence was ignored, wished away or dismissed as a fabrication; eventually he claimed that his assertions were correct because ‘they just are’. Abbott became the leader not just of his parliamentary party but of what could be termed the Assertion-Based Community, a philosopher-prince whose postmodern take on politics freed him from the shackles of consistency and evidence, allowing him to say whatever he liked, whenever he liked, unencumbered by the ordinary rules of political discourse. Abbott is the poster boy of the new media environment that favours cut-through over logic, simplicity over nuance and assertion over reality, the first postmodern prime minister for whom truth is whatever is politically convenient at that moment.

  The level of Stupid in public debate has accordingly risen in Australia, and significantly so, given the media—whose traditional role it has been to enable debate about public issues—is increasingly fragmented and incapable of, or unwilling, to accurately report matters of any complexity.

  Many in the media, however, lay the blame elsewhere. In recent years, the political class as a whole in Australia has been assailed by the media and interest groups for their unwillingness to embrace complex economic reform like the celebrated governments of the 1980s and 1990s. It’s a criticism that ignores the greater difficulty of explaining complex ideas to voters when there is less interest on the part of the media in participating in that process, when significant sections of the media will launch partisan attacks regardless of the merits of a reform, and negative, simplistic politics are the most effective tactics in winning office.

  Political journalists also lament the lack of ‘authenticity’ of modern politicians. They want more ‘real’ politicians, ‘straight shooters’ who don’t communicate with talking points and the repetition of tactically appropriate phrasing but ‘say what they think’, plain-speaking politicians in touch with ordinary voters, who don’t rely on an unrealistic public image, who are ‘themselves’, or perhaps even ‘mavericks’. In short, politicians who will do their job for them of attracting eyeballs to political journalism.

  Putting aside the irony that the media is itself creating the conditions that make it more difficult for politicians to behave with ‘authenticity’, there is some substance to this demand given how few politicians don’t rely on talking points and back themselves to communicate intelligently. And it is not merely the ubiquity of media training that has bleached all the colour out of political communication, but the professionalisation of politics—professionalisation not in the sense of a lifting of standards—but in the establishment of politics as a career,
complete with its own structure and promotional ladder.

  There have long been dynasties for whom politics was the family trade; labour movement-based parties have long channelled people into parliamentary politics via trade union politics, politicians have often worked for others or in their parties before being elected themselves. However, increasingly in the UK and Australia, an entire career in some form of public life is possible—participating in student politics, taking a job as a political staffer, media adviser or trade union official, obtaining preselection, winning a seat, securing a frontbench spot, and then after retirement or losing one’s seat, appointment to a statutory body, working as a lobbyist or taking a board position in an industry one regulated as minister to add to one’s hefty parliamentary superannuation. One may even meet a partner in the course of such a career—a recent deputy prime minister of Australia is married to a former NSW deputy premier.

  In the US, the professionalisation of politics has been seen more in the growing length of time politicians at the state and federal level now spend in office. This has been helped by gerrymandering by both sides to make electoral districts politically safer, so that they become lifelong sinecures for those who can get them, although they may face challenges from within their own parties to keep them. But compared to generations ago, contemporary politicians are less likely to have had another occupation prior to parliamentary politics, more likely have worked for other politicians or within their own parties first, more likely to have already established alliances or joined factions within their party, and more likely to have had long exposure to political techniques such as targeted communication. The result is more polished, less communicative and above all more cautious politicians, for whom politics is a career and income source, rather than a period of public service after a successful job in another field.