Democracy and its discontents — part 2
If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend it. See you back here in 5 minutes.
tldr
- the internet has forced news organisations to build new business models
- the people we live with are less likely to consume the same news as us
- trust in news and politicians is at an all-time low
- how do we progress without a clear understanding of the truth?
Senator, we run ads
I was still explaining to people on election day that there was no death tax.
It was really hard to convince them. They’d seen it on Facebook.
Brian Owler
- Unsuccessful candidate in the Australian 2019 federal election
The Museum of Australian Democracy is housed in our previous house of parliament. It’s a fine old building directly opposite the current Parliament House. The upper floor of the House of Representatives was previously the press gallery. It is an incredibly cramped space with noisy typewriters, ashtrays and other artifacts of a previous era. As you’d expect in a museum, explanatory panels accompany the exhibits, and one covering the era 1927–1988 struck me:
I smiled a faint smile to learn how reporters considered television such a threat when it was first introduced. What a slippery slope we’ve come down!
I’ll believe it when I see it
Editors, producers and journalists, just like politicians, craft stories around their audiences’ desires. They mine the deepest prejudices and fears of a particular demographic group, and regurgitate them dressed up as news.
Lindsay Tanner
- Australian member of parliament 1993–2010
In the early stages of the Falklands War, I listened to a commanding officer being interviewed by the BBC imploring the audience to trust what they saw on television and not necessarily believe what they read in the newspapers. His contention was that if you could see it, it was more likely to be trustworthy.
Fast-forward 35 years to 2017 when research conducted in the UK showed that only 5% of adults ‘trust the news media a lot’. Along the way you will have whizzed past many triumphs of the free press but also some tragic failures:
- Paparazzi hunting down the Princess of Wales in a Parisian underpass
- False pretexts leading the US and the UK into an unwarranted war in Iraq
- A global financial crisis which saw thousands of people lose their homes while financial institutions and car manufacturers were bailed out by the US government
- Phone-hacking-as-journalism in the UK
- Wall-to-wall coverage of the circus of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential campaign eclipsed any semblance of rational debate over important economic policies
During this time Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning came forward, but thousands of journalists lost their jobs and news organisations shut, sold or downsized — victims of the internet. They were the lucky ones: colleagues in Russia and elsewhere were murdered.
Fast-forward another two years and throw these into the mix:
- Emmanuel Macron’s approval rating plummeted within three months of his assuming the French presidency
- Cambridge Analytica taught us to rethink our social media habits
- Donald Trump has made 13,435 false or misleading claims within 1,000 days of assuming office and stopped holding press conferences
- The US government debt has reached an eye-watering $23tn
- Despite winning the last election, six months on, the Australian treasurer, Josh Frydenberg continues to tweet debunked figures and smug memes:
Journalists were supposed to uphold democracy by holding our politicians to account. The internet came along and hit them like a bowling ball. Not only do politicians now speak directly to netizens without the filter of the press pool, newspaper subscription revenues have withered and attention spans have shortened.
Whereas an earlier generation might have sat down to watch 30 minutes of news and weather every evening — perhaps as a family, from one of a handful of TV channels — we now all have our own feeds / tribes / bubbles / channels and our own devices. A community that previously shared a common understanding of local issues, and consumed news items that were alternately noteworthy and mundane, now drifts apart in a flood of information, each of us clinging to a different piece of the puzzle.
At a post-retirement award ceremony in June 2019, Kerry O’Brien, one of Australia’s most treasured journalists said,
[W]e the journalists have to share the responsibility for the great failures of our time. A time of enormous ferment and challenge, failures of politics, failures of journalism, failures of society in the end. For instance 40 years after powerful evidence first kicked in that human-caused climate change threatened the world with an existential disaster, we’re still stuck in the mire of drab, dishonest arguments that will come at great cost to future generations and we the journalists have not cut through the fake news effectively. We have not properly held politicians to account.
Little wonder then that trust in the news and politicians is low, and expected to get worse.
The new Luddites
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
Douglas Adams
- Author
So do we just wind back the clock, break up the looms and tax Google and Facebook more equitably? Should we fashion more caps and implore our communities to Make ___ Great Again? Should we just hope that next time around we elect better leaders? How does a strong, unbiased, publicly funded news organisation do its job when it is pressured by the government? If it is not wealthy enough to cover foreign news, the diplomatic service is defunded and journalists are targeted, how can citizens know what is truly happening elsewhere in our world?
Q: How does a blind person walk across an unfamiliar road?
A: Very tentatively. So when there’s a truck coming, we have a problem.
In Part 3…
I’ll suggest some ways we can shore up our democracy and reverse democratic decay.
