A day in the life

This is part two in a series of posts looking at some of the problems facing politics and the media in Australia. The first post is here.

Fundamentally, I see the relationship between politicians, the media and the public has become a complete mess. Anabelle Crabb, in a speech to the Sydney Institute in October gave an excellent dissection of the relationship between the media and politicians that highlights many of the issues I go through below.

Media and the Internet - It’s a new era

The rise of freely available information on the Internet is seriously challenging the traditional business models of mainstream media (MSM). In order to sell advertising space, MSM is resorting to sensationalist headlines to grab readers attention. This ensures the facts run secondary to the latest political rhetoric.

As a result, MSM’s appetite for ten second sound bites (or 140 character tweets) has led to a dumbing down of political discourse.

I’m generalising here, there are a number of quality journalists doing excellent in depth analysis of important issues, however they tend to get lost in the noise of “a headline a minute” main stream media. It’s these headlines that tend to shape public opinion and in a seemingly never ending feedback loop, dictate the actions of politicians.

As a result of this broken and fragmented stream of news, the general public has a tendency to fall into two camps. Those with no expertise / knowledge of a given topic see the headlines and fall back to their traditional party lines. Those with a genuine interest in the topic of the day become disenfranchised with politicians and the media for the gross over simplification, apparent lack of understanding of the topic and the constant misinformation portrayed as fact.

Another concern is the vested interests that control much of the MSM media. Murdoch controls much of the Australian media landscape and we are now seeing a potential shift in media ownership with Gina Rinehart taking a stakes in Channel 10 and Fairfax - not to mention the Lord Monckton debacle. Accordingly, we need to be exploring as many new approaches to media generation and consumption to withstand these vested interests controlling public information and debate.

Political Decision Making - It’s Broken

Governments have to make decisions. This involves developing policy and enacting it into law. One would hope that the policies being developed are based on sound research and logical decision making while considering the community’s interests and morals.

Unfortunately the evidence at the moment is to the contrary. Politics appears to be a classical example of the horse leading the cart. In this case, opinion polls leading government policy and any rational thought appears to be discarded as irrelevant.

Where are the experts?

Politicians need to have a close relationship with academics, industry and other experts within their field to make informed decisions. A recent post on The Conversation discussed the struggles of academics and politicians to work together on common goals and highlights the disconnect between what politicians want and what academics want to research.

Without a tight relationship between both parties, how can politicians be adequately informed when making important decisions? Then again, even when there is research conducted that aligns with the governments priorities, they are not necessarily implemented.

The Henry Tax Review made 138 recommendations, while the government only considered a tiny fraction of this number. One of these, the MRRT, turned into a public slanging match between the resources industry and government while egged on by the media (and their advertising sales teams). This resulted in rhetoric and misinformation becoming accepted as fact and a vastly watered down policy. We have seen similar situations with the debate on climate change and asylum seekers, among others.

With so much time and effort put towards this research and so little of it to become public policy, cheapens the research and must surely leave those involved, very disenfranchised with the whole process.

Why are governments making poor decisions?

It could be reasonably argued that our current politicians lack any strength of conviction to develop and enact sensible, well thought out policy and defend it publicly. This is part of the problem, but I also think our political system is flawed and the political process hasn’t caught up with the pros and cons of the information age.

I’m not going to challenge the backbone of Rudd / Gillard / Abbot / Turnbull or outline my issues with our political system (however this excellent piece on The Conversation - resonates well with me). Instead I am focusing on how the interaction between politicians, the media and the public has changed with the advent of the Internet.

There appears to be a line of thought that in the information age, anything more complicated than a ten second sound bite or tweet won’t resonate with the public. Accordingly, politicians struggle to explain complex policy and the rationale behind it — so they don’t bother developing the policy in the first place.

In the fast pace of modern news headlines it is increasingly difficult for politicians to engage the public in a rational, well thought out argument for any length of time. Headlines tend to lurch around in a “he-said, she-said” circle, resulting in the public receiving a small fragment of the actual discussion. This discourse is made even more difficult by the lack of accountability to ensure politicians adhere to facts and maintain a rational argument.

In my next post I will discuss how the public conversation on important issues is highly fragmented and finish with a final post on a new collaborative website proposal that would aim to tackle some of these problems.