A snapshot from my media consumption over the past couple of days:

- Jon Stewart interviewed Barack Obama on The Daily Show.

- Joe Hockey did yet another terrible interview with Tony Jones on Lateline.

- Steven Conroy and Malcolm Turnbull are having one hell of a debate about the National Broadband Network. None of these things appears to be directly linked or even relevant to any of the others, except for their current location somewhere near the front of my brain. Bearing in mind that, at first blush, this appears to be the only real link between them, I shall now nevertheless explain why I think these three things matter, and how they are all a direct symptom and/or cause of our current political malaise.

Joe Hockey usually does bad interviews on Lateline, no matter how hard he tries. This is the man, after all, who was handed the greatest hospital pass of the Howard years when, as Industrial Relations Minister, he tried valiantly, over and over again, to sell Workchoices to an electorate that knew a “flexible” workforce just meant a workforce that was easier to sack.

As Shadow Treasurer he’s been pretty awful, and this is evidenced by his 9-point plan full of levers or something that he would, or Wayne Swan should, use to pull the banks into line, or something. Maybe it’s a good plan, maybe it’s utter dog-snot; the way things are going, we will never know, because he’s doing such a bad job of explaining what his plan actually is. Thanks to the self-perpetuating death-lock that politicians and the mainstream media (MSM) are in, the story now is Hockey’s performance, not the policy itself.

So a journalist of Tony Jones’ ability only asks Joe a few questions about the 9 buttons (levers, toggles, press-studs), and doesn’t hammer him for more detail when he fudges or avoids. Instead, Jones focuses on what a bad job Joe’s been doing of explaining the policy, what the banks are saying about it, and why Tony Abbott wouldn’t explicitly support it at a door-stop earlier that day. (As Bernard Keane pointed out in Crikey it’s not really fair to ask Joe Hockey over and over what’s going on inside Abbott’s mind when Abbott himself appears to have very little idea a lot of the time).

Which leads me to the Conroy/Turnbull debate. I put Conroy second-last on my Senate ballot paper because of the Internet Filter, and I still believe he should be immolated just for that. However, he has shown recently that he knows his portfolio, and he is one of the government’s strongest performers in the Senate and in TV interviews; even when he’s trying to push the filter, he’s coming across as less of a zealot, and his arguments for it, while still thin, have at least evolved beyond accusing its critics of being supporters and probably manufacturers of kiddie porn.

Malcolm Turnbull, as we all know, is made of awesome and coated in fabulous, and, as a former barrister and all-round smarty-pants, knows how to have a proper argument. So the NBN debate is just that: a debate between two people who know what they’re talking about and know how to argue without descending into the usual name-calling, sophistry and hysteria that has passed for debate in Australia for far too long. While Turnbull and Conroy are doing their jobs of kicking each other in the balls as often and as hard as possible, they’re also doing something that most politicians and journalists have forgotten how to do: getting information out there for the rest of us to digest and analyse on our own. We can go through their interviews and speeches, and work out what the hell the government’s NBN plan actually is, as well as the Opposition’s alternative, and in numbers and facts and stuff, not just slogans like “The Other Guy’s Plan Will Steal Your Grandmother And Grind Her Into A Fine Powder”.

We are getting information, and no thanks to the MSM, who are simply circling like a bunch of lazy sharks, waiting for one of the players to swear, or get a decimal point in the wrong place, or say something less than sycophantic about his leader. Turnbull and Conroy are doing what politicians used to do, by debating each other on the issue at hand, not on what News Ltd dictate is issue of the day, and the MSM have fallen arse-backwards into this big pile of data and fact and ready-made analysis, and are regurgitating it all for us the way they usually just regurgitate press releases and sound-bites.

Which is a good thing, but it makes you wonder about Joe Hockey’s 9-point plan, and the Resources Super Profit Tax, and the Emissions Trading Scheme, and Green Loans, and a dozen other policies and reforms that got totally fucked up or never even got off the ground at all because they weren’t sold well enough, and the MSM were too stupid and/or lazy to give us any story about them other than “Phew! Hasn’t Penny/Kevin/Peter/Joe done a bad job at explaining this policy?”, without bothering to do a few hours’ work and explain it for us.

And then we get Barack Obama on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Before I wax too lyrical, I have to acknowledge that, yes, The Daily Show audience loves Obama, and yes, there were no questions on specific fuck-ups like Afghanistan or the continued existence of Gitmo; it was a bit of a puff-piece, Obama plugging Stewart’s March To Restore Sanity, and Stewart congratulating POTUS for being a great guy, gently prodding but not eviscerating him for delivering so short of expectations.

It was the language they used that blew me off the couch and through the wall into next door’s driveway. Everyone knows the political system in the US is sickeningly corrupt, as are most democracies around the world, including our own. But can you imagine Tony Jones or Laurie Oakes uttering the following sentence to Julia Gillard or any other Prime Minister, ever?

“You came to Washington with the promise of fixing this corrupt system, and, while you’ve made a lot of progress, you haven’t quite achieved as much as we’d all hoped.”

For a start, no MSM journalist in Australia would have the guts to say that to one of our politicians, but if they did, they wouldn’t get into the second syllable of “system” before the interviewee interrupted with glib homilies about our great democracy and that we should be proud of it and blah blah let me just repeat today’s message for the fourteenth time.

Obama didn’t even blink. He accepted the premise of the question, and answered it, implicitly acknowledging that yes, Washington is filthy and that despite his best efforts he hasn’t been able to achieve the cleaning-out that he wanted.

We just don’t see interviews like this in Australia. The closest we get is the ABC’s Insiders, where a bunch of journalists talk about what they think about what each other thinks about what one of them had to say about what another one of them had to say about a story that one of them had written about something that happened in Canberra that week (with apologies to First Dog On The Moon).

I don’t know what we can do to fix it, other than what we’re already doing: we’re buying fewer newspapers, watching less TV news, and absorbing more blogs. This is irritating the MSM no end, as they see more and more of their once-captive audience forming our own opinions based on rants like this one and the thousands of other, better ones, such as Piping Shrike, Grog’s Gamut, the Fourth Estate, Crikey, and Pollytics to name just a few.

Having said that, I’m wondering if we actually need to fix it. The MSM, in league with the political class, have evolved a product that we don’t want or need; we’re just not interested in horse-race political journalism anymore.

We want to get beyond “He said/she said/I think”, and we are. The MSM, however, seem incapable of moving away from their steady diet of sound-bite, press release, and “I knew this before anyone else” point-scoring.

Unless and until we start getting journalist-cum-satirists of the quality of Jon Stewart on TV, and somehow, from the primordial slime that is our current political class, a new creature with ten percent of the intellect and integrity of Obama drags itself out of the water and onto the land, we’re stuck with Leigh Sales congratulating Laurie Oakes on getting his hands on the 1980 budget 12 hours before anyone else.

Sales can and does do better than that, I wish the same could be said of more of our journalists and politicians.

+ 1

+ 1