A Sydney newsreader solemnly intones a story about a future bid for a World Cup. He ‘crosses live’ to a journalist standing outside the city’s largest stadium, for a thirty-second discussion that adds no new information. The journalist, standing alone but for a film crew in front of an empty sports arena, is thanked by the newsreader, who moves on to the next item.
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A political leader dons a high-visibility vest and a hard hat while visiting a construction site. Across town, or in another city, a rival leader dons a high-visibility vest and safety goggles while visiting a factory, where she announces a policy relating to the relevant industry. Evening news bulletins carry images of both politicians talking to workers, or nodding thoughtfully while listening to them. ‘This is about creating real jobs,’ one of them says.
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An email is distributed to journalists from a public relations firm offering the results of a survey about the products of one of its customers. In addition to the link to a media release, the PR firm has included links to graphics, ‘case study’ examples to support the survey, contact details for a blogger willing to comment about the product, a summary of the survey and suggested ‘angles’ for the story for journalists. The following day, major newspapers carry a short item mentioning the product and the survey.
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A political journalist laments the unwillingness of contemporary politicians to go beyond carefully constructed talking points in their public statements, saying it is contributing to public disillusionment with politics. The following day, a senior minister’s offhand remark on an issue is interpreted as evidence of division with the government, and declared a major gaffe.
That Australia’s media is awful is an argument likely to unify a diverse group of people. Progressives complain of the right-wing bias of the mainstream media and of the dominance of News Corporation, a company openly and aggressively hostile to progressive political parties and, for that matter, much of reality. Conservatives complain about the left-wing bias of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Media aficionados talk of the decline of traditional journalism caused by a shrinking print media. Political junkies moan about the poor quality of political journalism; readers with a science background laugh and cry about the dismal quality of science journalism and other technical rounds.
And Australians don’t trust their media; they rank journalists at about the same level as politicians in terms of trustworthiness and the only outlets they consistently trust at a high level are the national broadcasters. Nor are Australians alone in their distrust. In the US, trust in the media fell to an all-time low in 2012 and only slightly recovered in 2013. In the UK in early 2013, less than one-third of people said they trusted the media (albeit in the wake of one of history’s greatest media scandals).
Okay, so far, so anodyne. Journalists have always ranked with used-car salesman and advertising executives in public esteem. But the Australian media, following international trends, is finding innovative ways to be more awful or, more correctly, to achieve a new kind of hollowed-out awfulness. This would no more be a cause for concern than the decline of any other industry, except that we rely on the media to provide a space for public debate about important issues and to hold the powerful to account. An intelligent, sceptical media is one of the core defences of a society against the kinds of Stupid that we’ve seen throughout this book. The fate of the media, therefore, is the fate of much of our public debate and our ability to fight Stupid, and increasingly our media isn’t a defence against Stupid but part of the problem of Stupid.
One of the excellent conceits of Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One is his ‘stragglers’, zombies who don’t seek to rend the flesh of the living in stereotypical undead style, but who remain fixed in place, forever poised to undertake some action from their past, some ritual or behaviour apparently randomly recalled from their days of living. It’s an apt image for much of the Australian media, permanently re-enacting the journalistic rituals of the past, or at least the past as communally remembered by the industry itself. The live cross to a journalist with nothing to say, at a venue only vaguely related to the story at hand, mimics the traditional ‘breaking news’ report from a journalist ‘at the scene’. The pre-packaged story from the PR consultant, complete with infographics, suggested journalistic angles and ‘independent’ commentary, mimics actual analytical or investigative journalism. Media conferences by politicians in which nothing of substance is said, and no questions answered, re-enacts traditional media scrutiny of political leaders. All are symptoms of, if not looming death, then at least serious and permanent damage to the news industry.
The live but meaningless cross is said by TV insiders to be an effort by news producers to counter the havoc social media has wrought on their business model. In essence, that model was gathering people who wanted to know what’s going on—which used to be a large chunk of the population—together at one time so they could be advertised to. Television journalism is expensive, and subject to strict regulation, but can still garner large audiences and is traditionally seen as key to a strong prime-time line-up. But now, the people formerly known as the eyeballs can be informed whenever they want, and don’t have to wait until 6 p.m. to be provided with information in between efforts to convince them to buy stuff. Worse, they may well get better live coverage of events via social media or online sites than via broadcasters several hours later. Moreover, online users now only have to consume the news they’re interested in, whether it is sport, politics or entertainment, without any danger of being exposed to annoyingly irrelevant content, even to the extent of having to flip past it in a newspaper or wait for the next story in a carefully structured TV bulletin.
Faced with this mutiny by their once passive audiences, television news producers try to match the immediacy that online news reports or social media provide by offering the drama of live coverage, albeit coverage of empty stadia or deserted streets where a newsworthy incident occurred hours before. It’s a ritualistic mimicry of traditional breaking news events where live coverage would be relevant.
Online competition is also the reason why PR companies are happy to issue pre-prepared stories for the media, confident that even if one journalist angrily throws it back in their face, there’ll be someone, somewhere who will use it. Newspaper companies are under greater pressure than ever as a consequence of the erosion of their revenue by new media, and are employing fewer journalists and demanding that those journalists whom they do employ cover more rounds and produce content around the clock and across multiple platforms: a print journalist might now produce stories both for a morning print edition and, during the working day, do video segments, conduct interviews for affiliated radio companies, and is probably covering a number of rounds compared to analogue-era journalism, when they might cover one or two. Media companies are also becoming more editorially risk-averse: the pockets that once funded defences against legal action by those they sought to hold to account are now much shallower. This is one area where citizen-journalists and social media can never match the mainstream media: it is only large media companies that can afford to fight defamation actions and suppression orders. As media companies lose revenue, so they lose the capacity to hold the powerful to account.
As a consequence, there’s been both a decline in expertise and in the time and effort journalists can physically bring to their craft, making them an ideal target for PR companies peddling fictitious ‘reports’ of the kind we’ve previously examined, or pre-prepared stories, even though they’re of no news value. A survey in 2010 found that over 50 per cent of all stories in major Australian newspapers in a one-week period originated as public relations, with one senior News Corp editor explicitly blaming the shift of resources away from journalism and towards PR. In this particular front of the fight against Stupid, the resources Stupid can bring to bear are outmatching those of its opponents. And the result is more media self-mimicry, with outlets behaving in ritual fashion—even slapping ‘exclusive’ on a story if they’ve been given privileged access to it—without any actual news content or journalistic effort applied.
Such mimicry is that of the straggler, representing the lingering race memory of what the mainstream media used to be like, in the analogue days. Before the internet and the bad times.
That media environment, which was in place for much of the twentieth century, had several important characteristics. It was, most importantly, a highly unified space: most consumers tended to consume the same products; they watched the same programs and read the same papers, no matter where they were or how they voted. Commercial broadcasters networked and affiliated their operations so that most people, even if they lived far apart, got the same radio and, especially, television programs; publicly funded broadcasters in countries like the UK, Australia and Canada provided national services to all citizens, and even though newspaper circulations fell over the course of the second half of the century in Anglophone countries, even as late as the 1970s three-quarters of Western households were getting a newspaper every day.
The environment was also controlled by a relatively small number of companies and national broadcasters that wielded substantial influence and often operated across some combination of newspapers, television and radio. Commercial mass media created a passive role for audiences and readerships, whose only function was to absorb the advertising directed at them, having been lured into the commercial firing range by the promise of content. And journalists, editors and producers played the role of gatekeepers, determining which information would be conveyed to people—particularly overseas news, which before the internet was heavily controlled by media companies with contracts with overseas media outlets.
In political journalism, this role was not so much gatekeeper as priest-like. Political reporters—usually men—worked in close proximity with politicians and then translated and interpreted their statements and actions for the masses; the only access to the pseudo-divine workings of power for voters was through such journalists, who alone possessed the training and wisdom to mediate and explain the doings of the high and mighty. As neoliberal policies took hold in the 1980s, political journalists also assumed a sacerdotal role in relation to the explanation of economic reform to voters, even if few fully comprehended the divine mysteries of economic deregulation.
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.
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.
But if we understand what the media demand for authenticity is in response to, if we know what authenticity is not—it’s not the bland careerist who has only ever worked in frontbenchers’ offices since she left university—it’s harder to know what it is. Authenticity can be faked—or, more correctly, its characteristics can be faked. A politician’s language and lexicon can convey authenticity, but can easily be faked as well—at least sometimes.*
If language can be faked, so too can inarticulacy, which in the US and Australia is linked to political authenticity every bit as much as a capacity for great rhetoric—so much so that many politicians have emphasised or cultivated their inarticulacy as a key tool of their image-making, contrasting themselves with their glibber, more polished rivals. George W. Bush, following Ronald Reagan, tapped into America’s long political tradition of anti-elitism and cleverly used a propensity for malapropism as part of his folksy charm (Dubya, the third generation of his family to pursue politics, has a BA in history from Yale and an MBA from Harvard Business School). One of Australia’s most effective political communicators was 1970s and 1980s Queensland premier and crook Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who pioneered a number of innovations in media management in Australia, as well as cultivating an aura of plain-spoken inarticulacy to the point of rambling self-parody.* Australia’s least articulate and most authentic political figure of recent decades was Pauline Hanson, advocate of xenophobia, protectionism and a clutch of bizarre economic policies sourced from the remainders bin of right-wing bookshops. Hanson routinely insisted she was ‘not a politician’, an important part of her authenticity for the regional blue-collar people attracted to her politics; this non-politician went on to become a serial election candidate garnering extensive public funding each time she stood, even though she was never elected.
If not inarticulacy, what about ideological consistency? Doesn’t authenticity include a willingness to stick up for certain principles regardless of their popularity? But rare is the successful politician of any stripe who hasn’t adjusted his or her position on significant issues or whose actions have never been at odds with their rhetoric. Those that don’t in time look like relics, not politically savvy and authentic. And politicians with a reputation for authenticity are just as susceptible to such flexibility. Ronald Reagan (an actor before entering politics, and a better one than commonly given credit for) preached small government but presided over an increase in the size of the US federal government and a massive increase in US government debt. There was also a significant gap between the rhetoric of neoliberal icon Margaret Thatcher and her actions: the lady who was ‘not for turning’ presided over an expansion in the British welfare state, and the level of taxation as a proportion of GDP under the Iron Lady only fell from 40 per cent to 39 per cent.
More recently, John McCain, celebrated ‘maverick’ and passenger on, if not driver of, the ‘Straight Talk Express’, was wildly inconsistent in his position on major issues such as tax cuts, and seemed to veer between conservatism and moderate positions depending on whether or not he was running for the US presidency. Former Australian prime minister John Howard also liked to sell himself to voters as a straight shooter, declaring ‘you may disagree with me but you know where I stand’. But he was also notorious for carefully parsing his own words to explain inconsistencies, and as a professed small-government free marketeer oversaw a dramatic rise in taxation, government spending and middle-class welfare while prime minister. So, one might conclude that ideological consistency is only properly ‘authentic’ when a politician can, regardless of what they actually do, create an image of stubborn adherence to principle, because the reality is unlikely to be there.
The more closely we examine it, the more authenticity appears an entirely subjective judgement: one voter’s authentic politician is another’s inarticulate bully. Our own beliefs inform what we judge to be authentic, not merely in politicians but in others generally. Conservative voters will thus invariably find conservative politicians more authentic, while progressive voters will see a fake, and vice versa. Authenticity is a construct, another simulacra, generated not merely by a politician but by voters themselves, with all the epistemological rigour of ‘I know it when I see it’.
This explains the risibly Stupid outbreak of Shopfloor Chic among Australia’s major party politicians in recent years, in which they don high-visibility vests, hard hats, eye protection and other accoutrements of the factory floor at staged media events.* This elevation of labouring occupations as a key signifier of political credibility was borne out by an unusual speech by then Labor prime minister Julia Gillard in 2011, at that point trying to define her prime ministership as one focused on fairness and reward for hard work—preferably of the manual variety. Gillard, similar to her predecessor Kevin Rudd, liked to name-check ‘tradies’ as a favoured occupation in her government’s eyes, and one type of tradesperson had a prominent role in her speech. ‘[W]e have always acknowledged that access to opportunity comes with obligations to seize that opportunity,’ Gillard said. ‘To work hard, to set your alarm clocks early,* to ensure your children are in school. We are the party of work not welfare, that’s why we respect the efforts of the brickie and look with a jaundiced eye at the lifestyle of the socialite.’
Not content with directing a sinister yellow gaze at the glitterati, Gillard also attacked the party nibbling away at Labor’s left flank, the Australian Greens, who would, she declared, ‘never embrace Labor’s delight at sharing the values of everyday Australians, in our cities, suburbs, towns and bush, who day after day do the right thing, leading purposeful and dignified lives, driven by love of family and nation’.†
This apotheosis of manual labour, delivered, appropriately, at Sydney’s Luna Park, had as much reality as the live cross to nowhere. The economies of Australia, the US, the UK and Canada have all seen big falls in manufacturing employment since the 1970s, as have other Western economies and Japan. Meanwhile, service industries have grown rapidly as employers of large numbers of workers. In Australia, manufacturing is a relatively small employer compared to a generation ago: it is now only Australia’s fourth-biggest employer and on the verge of being overtaken by both education and professional services. Construction remains a key sector of the Australia economy in terms of generating growth, but it is still smaller than retailing and Australia’s (and the United States’) biggest employer, health care. Gillard holding aloft the calloused hand of the brickie as the champion of honest toil was about as authentic as a beer ad.
The politician in the high-vis vest sneering at the social set is thus an even more surreal simulacra than the mainstream media’s news rituals; a person trying to portray themselves not merely as something they demonstrably are not, and most likely never have been, but aping an outdated representation of the real experience of ordinary voters, invoking a past that, to the extent it ever existed, has long since been replaced by an altogether different economic world.
Where this hyperreality becomes particularly ironic—hyper-hyperreality, perhaps—is when it is understood as a reaction not merely to historical changes like the arrival of the internet or the professionalisation of politics, but to the central message of Anglophone economic policy since the 1980s. The economic changes that have rendered politicians in the garb of manual labour about as meaningful as a carnival cut-out are the ones wrought by politicians themselves. All English-speaking countries have embraced liberal capitalism, to varying degrees, over the last thirty years, deregulating their economies, reducing taxation, privatising publicly owned infrastructure and service delivery and reducing industrial protectionism, accelerating the historic decline in Western manufacturing.
This abandonment of regulated economies that distributed the burden of supporting traditional public sector and blue-collar jobs across the whole community in favour of market-oriented economic individualism lifted living standards in deregulated economies for all income groups, although the main beneficiaries were high-income earners. But it also adversely affected some sections of the community, such as manufacturing workers—primarily blue-collar males, but female-dominated industries like textiles were also severely affected—who struggled in the transition to the service industries that increasingly dominate Western economies.
The message from political leaders who pushed these changes, and from the media that encouraged them, to those groups left behind by economic reform and to the whole community—never stated bluntly but built into the entire reform program—was that they were, henceforth, on their own. The days of a communitarian approach to economic policy, in which governments would support industries or continue to own assets in the name of maintaining traditional jobs, were over, unless your industry was particularly influential and could successfully demand continuing support, like the heavily unionised, male-dominated car industry. The days of maintaining some sort of handbrake on dramatic wealth inequalities were also finished: if you could make millions, good luck to you—the tax system was about enabling wealth creation, not redistribution. Economic assistance was now an entitlement that corporations and unions bid for, rather than the whole basis for a nation’s economic policy. The individual was elevated over the communal.
This economic atomisation complemented that already achieved by the unified media environment of the twentieth century. The mass media created from newspapers, radio and television had worked to dissolve lateral bonds between individuals and replace them with a bond between individuals and the media, albeit a one-way bond in which the individual had two simple roles: to consume, and to choose what to consume, courtesy of the advertising delivered via the media.
The atomisation inherent in the liberal economic reform program, however, focused on the individual’s role as a worker or producer rather than consumer, removing or reducing the community’s support for uncompetitive industries or government-owned services, allowing areas like manufacturing or traditionally public-owned services like rail transport to fend for themselves in a global marketplace while service industries thrived.
The abandonment of communal economic values and their replacement with individualism—admirably summed up in Margaret Thatcher’s declaration ‘there is no such thing as society’*—also created a kind of values vacuum that different groups have sought to fill and/or exploit, creating a search for authentic social values and principles beyond those of the market, which have been deemed as socially insufficient by most non-libertarians. Individualism and consumer choice, it turned out, were insufficient as social glue, the philosophical equivalent of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Some on both the left and the right thus yearn for a return to a closed, protected economy and a traditional social order. In Australia, the most vocal parliamentary advocates for greater protectionism are found in the Greens and the rural conservative Nationals and ex-Nationals, and regional Australia has produced successive waves of right-wing protectionism coupled with conservative social policies and xenophobia over the last two decades. More mainstream social conservatives, lamenting the rise of an entirely materialist and individualist society, tried to hold the line in privileging heterosexual, religious men and their dependents, advocating social regulation wholly at odds with their economic philosophy. As we explored in previous chapters, many progressives embraced paternalism as a replacement for large-scale economic engineering.
Conservative political parties also embraced nationalism and militarism, and did so much more successfully than progressive parties. The left, whether traditional or cultural, remains uncomfortable with nationalism, which is notionally antithetical to traditional Marxist analysis, but deemed useful during the twentieth century if it contributed to the class struggle. Accordingly, nationalism for the traditional left is good if it involves minority groups in other countries whose separatism may be contrary to the interests of Western countries or Western-aligned leaders (thus, Basque separatism good, Kosovan separatism bad). Domestic nationalism in Western countries, however, is seen as unpleasant populism and kitschy jingoism, at best an instinct with all the class of a flag bikini, at worst something subtly or not-so-subtly racist.
All of these replacement values try to mimic or return to the communitarian characteristics lost with the abandonment of regulated, protected economies, with varying degrees of success. Economic traditionalists can no more restore a closed economy than go back in time to the 1970s. Social conservatives struggle with the problem that their preferred family model, married heterosexual couples with children, doesn’t reflect the reality of most Western households. Paternalism specifically proposes to demonise and alter the traditional behaviours of the community, not celebrate them. Militarism is now profoundly unpopular in the aftermath of two disastrous Western military ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Only nationalism has been successful, at least in countries where it isn’t contested by indigenous groups.
Even nationalism, however, raises more questions than it answers when it comes to authenticity. What does it mean to be proudly Australian, or British, American, Canadian? The answer gets complicated once you go beyond a reflexive assertion that each is ‘the greatest country in the world’. Nationalism in any meaningful sense must be code for other values and thus another simulacrum of a reality that doesn’t exist for many, and possibly most, citizens. The American way is, stereotypically, about individualism, opportunity and innovation, however much that may contradict more than ever the experience of tens of millions of desperately poor Americans. But Australian nationalism still relies on values like ‘the fair go’ and ‘mateship’ (held, generously, to apply to women as well as men), which in any pragmatic sense derive from equity and communitarianism. In the UK, at least, ‘British values’* come with a longer list and more depth, reflecting institutions, traditions and national characteristics long attributed to or specifically developed by the British. You don’t get to develop political liberalism, parliamentary democracy and global imperialism without having some substance to your list of core values. But this redefines nationalism as institutional and historic pride. Either way, we end up chasing our tails in pursuit of ‘authenticity’ again.
And undermining this drive to find replacement values is that individualism is being reinforced and yet altered by the internet. After sixty years of atomisation by the mass media and thirty years of individualism driven by economic policy, people are now being offered the opportunity to connect up to whatever relationships, values or communities they can find online. This reverses the atomisation generated by mass media but replaces it with something very different from the community ties undermined by the mass media in the twentieth century. Individuals use online interconnectivity to form their own communities—communities that differ significantly from analogue-era communities. Before the twenty-first century, the communities we formed were dictated almost entirely by geography and kinship: our relationships and our communities were based on where we lived, our families and our workplaces. To choose a new community, you had to move somewhere else or change jobs. Now, individuals can select from a global range of communities those they wish to directly participate in, reflecting their own ideological, personal, spiritual and recreational beliefs and world view. Individuals can, using the internet, choose which community feels most authentic to them, rather than having one imposed on them by virtue of where they’re born, what they do and what media they’re exposed to. Moreover, there are multi-billion-dollar corporations entirely dedicated to monetising this process of community selection: the individual is no longer materialistic—that’s a banally analogue way of thinking. Instead, under digital capitalism, the individual is now the material itself, their very process of personal self-discovery and self-definition an online consumer transaction, if that’s not too grandiose a term for an ad for that one odd trick to lose belly fat.
Older commentators ill at ease with the internet still like to argue that this online engagement is in some, perhaps indefinable, way qualitatively poorer than real-life interaction—real-life relationships and interactions are, they maintain, more authentic than online relationships and interactions. There’s a decided tone of get-off-my-lawn and back-in-my-day to such arguments, and they tend to be made by people without substantial experience of social media, for whom, say, a like on Facebook and fully fledged online activism are the same thing. They’re also ahistorical: that non-face-to-face relationships are less real than face-to-face ones would come as a surprise to, say, nineteenth-century frontier communities in the United States, where long-distance engagements and marriages were very common and held together by letter-writing, or for that matter to anyone who has endured a long-distance romance, particularly now that the internet enables much fuller communication between separated partners than the phones and letters of the analogue era.
It also overlooks that, particularly for people under forty, there is an increasing unity—not just complementarity—of online and offline worlds: when you’re permanently connected to your community online, no matter where you go, via a mobile device, the online and offline spaces you inhabit become more difficult to separate, and claims that one is more authentic than the other become harder to understand, let alone verify.
The new era of self-selecting your community conversely reinforces yet another form of fragmentation, in which one’s own personal experience is elevated to the apex of public debate as the narrative that trumps all others, no matter how soundly based they may be. For many social and political issues, this undermines the very capacity to have an intelligent debate: if you haven’t lived (or lived through) something, your arguments are automatically less valid, less authentic than the arguments of those who have. Want to argue that crime is falling? Try wandering the streets of *insert name of major city* at night. Are you a white middle-class heterosexual feminist? Then don’t speak about women of colour/gays/low-income earners—your analysis doesn’t apply. Oppose regulation of junk food? Wait till you’ve lost a family member to diabetes. That is, you may have evidence, you may have logic, but unless you have lived experience, your arguments are automatically, well, inauthentic. And there is, ultimately, no logical response to such arguments: either you have the relevant experience or you do not.
Once this approach is teased out, however, its problems become clearer: experience isn’t necessarily a guarantee of authenticity. Experience must be interpreted, and can be misinterpreted (thus, ‘false consciousness’, not to mention anyone who has ever enjoyed Nickelback) and subjected to dictation by others; most experiences central to identity politics are either innate or imposed, but some are a matter of choice, and increasingly so as the internet provides greater opportunities for interconnectivity for people who in analogue times might have been cut off by geography or culture from others with whom they identified. Nonetheless, this sort of thinking is part of the logic behind politicians’ Shopfloor Chic—how can you announce an industry policy if you don’t look like you’ve worked in a factory? And it’s immensely appealing to the media as well, because individual anecdotes and personal opinion are automatically more appealing than hard data.
When you elevate lived experience to centrality in your socio-political critique and politics, you delegitimise the contribution to debate from other perspectives; if the traditional logical fallacy is appeal to authority, since the 1990s appeal to experience has come to rival it, creating a hierarchy of analysis with lived experience at the apex of authenticity. Moreover, as the phrase ‘check your privilege’ implies, it is not merely that a non-experience-based contribution to a discussion lacks legitimacy, the possession of other forms of experience creates an illegitimacy that is impossible to overcome: the scoring systems used to allocate ‘privilege points’ can be neatly flipped into a ‘how illegitimate is your opinion’ scale, depending on the colour of your skin, your sexual preference, your income and your gender.
The result is a further fragmentation of public debate on issues, with fewer voices heard and greater unanimity among those voices given the imposition of dominant narratives even within sub-groups. The result is also a lesser willingness among generalists, and particularly media practitioners, to genuinely engage on policy issues arising from or including identity politics, for fear of being labelled racist/misogynist/homophobic/middle class/transgenderphobic/ableist/fattist/perpetrators of rape culture. They live in fear of fatally missing some critical nuance that would reveal them as inauthentic, or worse.
So, we may no longer be atomised as we were in, say, the 1980s, but we control which communities we now cluster into and control the information we receive. In the smoking remains of the single media space of the twentieth century, an ever-shrinking number of journalists perform rituals mimicking the behaviour of their ancestors, with little of the content the old mass media produced, or waging war on whoever has been identified by their company as this week’s target. In politics, the incentives are increasingly structured to discourage complexity, empiricism and nuance, and encourage simplicity, inconsistency and negativity. In discussing complex social issues, we deem experience to be more potent than logic or evidence.
The consequence: informed public debate as a whole of the kind that was, with all its flaws, a feature of the analogue era is becoming difficult to achieve. It has been replaced with a fake environment, a stage backdrop painted to resemble a vast landscape that no longer exists, populated by actors playing roles that once may have held meaning but which are, increasingly, empty and ritualistic. In such an environment, the propagation of Stupid becomes ever easier, because Stupid isn’t playing pretend. Stupid is for real.
BK
* The level of vituperation some of the most eminent Founding Fathers directed at each other in the press might give pause for thought to anyone who thinks the tone of modern-day politics is unusually rancorous. Dick Cheney might have shot someone but no one has ever matched the achievement of Jefferson’s Vice-President Aaron Burr, who shot Hamilton dead for a perceived smear.
* Of recent Australian political figures, only former senior Labor figure Lindsay Tanner and Liberal Malcolm Turnbull routinely spoke like both they themselves, and audiences watching them, have IQs above room temperature and are capable of grasping nuance and complexity.
* It was also on talkback radio that one of the most famous policy moments in post-war Australian history occurred: Paul Keating’s ‘banana republic’ warning in 1986.
* In particular, me: I fearlessly predicted Abbott would in effect destroy his own party.
* While prime minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd (who actually grew up in poverty in a Queensland country town) tried to demonstrate his working-class credibility by robotically uttering phrases apparently randomly selected from the films of Chips Rafferty, like ‘fair shake of the sauce bottle’.
* One of Bjelke-Petersen’s staff, Clive Palmer, now a mining magnate and politician himself, uses similar techniques.
* Shopfloor Chic seems to have at least momentarily supplanted the passion for ‘noddies’ at politicians’ media events, where colleagues, staff or anyone who could be roped in would stand behind or beside a politician at a media conference and furiously nod in agreement as they spoke, as if that would somehow convince viewers watching the footage of the veracity of what was being said. Whether this actually worked, and what the cost of treatment for the resulting cervical spine damage was, is unknown.
* A phrase stolen/plagiarised/paid homage to by British deputy PM Nick Clegg, who briefly and worryingly claimed he was standing up for ‘alarm clock Britain’.
† A minor oddity there is that the Greens are even more aggressively protectionist in their attitude towards manufacturing than Labor itself.
* Often claimed by Thatcher’s defenders to have been misquoted, or taken out of context, betraying a nervousness about the bluntness of Thatcher’s message rather inconsistent with that prime minister’s boots’n’all political style. But as we noted above, Thatcher’s rhetoric was often a poor fit with her achievements in government.
* Or, as they may become, English, Welsh and Cornish values, depending on whether Scotland elects to depart the Union.