Do you report Trump as the deranged, possibly senile, definitely moronic old lecher and conman he has been for some time, or do you have to take him seriously because he’s the president in the USA?
I think the likely answers are a bleak reflection on the state of play in journalism, which I regard as rather more dead than alive in a media landscape filled with ego, ignorance, and confected spectacle to the deliberate exclusion of ‘news’ or the craft that can bring it to audiences.
If you’re in the USA, corporate interference with nominal press freedom has long been a barrier, and certainly since Trump, courage, intellectual integrity, or even constitutionally-imposed duty for courts and legislators to supervise and limit executive power appear extinguished in the nation’s rapid descent into tyranny. The USA today, as portrayed by its own media, is a pastiche of cheap superhero comic book dialogues, Dan Brown tropes, and drug-fuelled, paranoid conspiracy theories so dumb they make mediaeval superstitions seem sane.
Unconstitutional behaviour by Trump’s junta is unopposed. Armed gangs of thugs with badges are running around, like overfed versions of a cross between the Gestapo, KGB, and Iran’s morality police, arresting, detaining, and disappearing people, seemingly at whim, without a hint of due process. Their SOP is clearly more Heinrich Müller than constitutional and black letter law. Media outrage at this debasement of American constitutional democracy is almost as muted as integrity and intelligence in its congress.
There is reason to be fearful. The rich and powerful can stifle or end careers. Which is all the more reason for anyone who really is a journalist, as opposed to merely being a media worker, to show some courage in applying journalistic principles: independence, transparent analysis, and questioning everything, including one’s own assumptions and biases. That’s still happening in places, but journalism is actually being displaced by satire as the main source of news and truth in the USA.
In Australia the journalistic imperative is less clear. The local media cartels have long abandoned journalistic principles for a kind of consensus bourgeois banality: courage only when critiquing the powerless, but cowardice always when the rich and powerful might react to scrutiny; analysis only according to a media-owner endorsed formula of pro-plutocrat, neoliberal, bourgeois platitudes; and integrity only as lip-service. This rather putrid consensus applies quite evenly across News Corp, Nine Entertainment, Seven West Media, and Paramount Global (Channel 10).
News Corp does stand out a little from the pack. It has employed all the fascist agitprop, hysteria-mongering, misinformation specialists it can lay its hands on, and for decades that seemed to be a reasonable investment for the return of docile governments, carrying out every wish of the Murdoch family. Mainly in the form of subsidy, destroying public institutions, and turning blind eyes to moderately creative tax evasion. But that ROI calculation must seem a little risky these days.
In this media landscape, the ABC has essentially become a social media influencer network, too afraid to do much journalism, and only the people at SBS can answer for its magazine format approach to not reporting news of consequence in Australia rather than producing decontextualized stories targeting only minority audiences in the hope they will see some relevance in the irrelevant.
The remaining online/press presence in Australia does contain patches of journalism at times, but they shine rather rarely these days. The rich and powerful can get away with most transgressions for years before a media worker suddenly discovers what the rest of us have known for years. Some examples include the collective blindness of the ‘press corps’ to Barnaby Joyce’s adultery until after his ‘citizenship’ re-election, or the rather obvious proclivities of Alan Jones, or the Robodebt fraud conspiracy. But the list is really quite long. And always displaced by celebrity gossip, the irrelevances driving the sports industry, and the confection of conveniently timed outraged about some non-issue every time some actually newsworthy event occurs that gets zero coverage.
So, why would anyone with a comfortably-paid position in that media landscape risk practising real journalism? I would suggest there is now such a small niche in real journalism that there is room for people with an ounce of integrity to make names for themselves, and quickly. But they have to be educated, smart, capable of analysis under pressure, and mostly less concerned about their own egos than the stories they tackle.
How would such people report on Trump, and his Australian analogues? I would suppose you have to report what he says, but always in which contexts. You have to try to fathom why he says what he says, and how it will be received in the US media landscape, which is the only one he’s deliberately trying to manipulate. There’s so much fun to be had with the astonishingly silly justifications for the incoherent drivel of the president by his own administration and so-called commentators that I’m amazed not more media workers have specialized in that area alone. And then you have to step back far enough to see the words for what they are, as if not spoken by Trump. Finally, you might have to guess at how the known bourgeois drudges in the Australian media landscape will interpret such words, and whom they serve with their interpretations. In the negative: who is not served by local interpretations?
But that’s not enough. When I said ‘educated’, I don’t mean you have a university degree in journalism, or economics, or law; those are guarantees only that you know how to follow a paint-by-numbers formula. You have to know something about a wide range of subjects, including especially history, political economy, philosophy, art and literature. Not so you can be a snob, but so that you can ground current events in their historical settings of causes, effects, consequences, and contexts. Even more than that, you have to know enough about the history of your own craft to break away from the deadening assumption that your audience is always full of semi-literate morons. Prose and scripts should aspire to the literary, not to the drably utilitarian. People who are ignorant and functionally illiterate should have to work to understand your diction, grammar, allusions, and similes. Your audience should be assumed to be adult, smart, and engaged rather than infantile and with the attention span of a guppy. If any or all of these characteristics are missing, it’s not really journalism. It’s just entertainment or straight-up propaganda.
Reporting Trump, then, has to be as much about reporting what actually happened, in what context, and what is not said, and why that’s far more important than what the bourgeois media drones will regurgitate as meaningless, decontextualized snippets, like confetti thrown at some ghastly bourgeois Christmas party where everyone is secretly half-cut on cheap booze and eager not to see any bad behaviour by others, in the hope their own misdemeanours will go unnoticed, like Chris Dore’s drunken excesses since last getting sacked for them.
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