Newmania: Hostile Territory

The Courier Mail, Brisbane’s only newspaper and for so many years the defender of the conservative political cause in Queensland must be feeling a change in mood. This morning, the Courier Mail ran with one of the many recent media offerings designed by PR hacks and image-makers. The objective is to soften King Campbell’s image as an axe-wielding job-murderer.

Twelve months ago, even six months ago, the Comments page on a story about King Campbell's insomnia would have been full of confident, boastful, and poorly punctuated statements, crowing about how King Campbell would clean up the mess created Anna Bligh (complete with accusatory spelling like “Blie” and “Blier” that even predated Alan Jones “Juliar” attack).

King Campbell was the Can-Do Man. The LNP was going to win the election because the time had come for change. It was King Campbell’s CanDo-ness that secured the LNP a record-breaking majority.

Now, just seven months into a three year term, even the Courier Mail readers have turned on King Campbell, with a barrage of eye-scorching negativity and poor spelling. The reason, of course, is the horror-movie brutality of his cuts to the Public Service, and his uncaring, tactless attitude. Of the first 65 comments, only 12% were supportive of King Campbell. The other 88% included former public servants who had been sacked, and current public servants who have been living under the Sword of Damocles for the past six months. Their pain shows.

 

With the exception of a handful of LNP supporters, the mood of the Comments pages ranged from disillusioned to furious to defeated. Obviously comments on a news website have little credibility as a measure of the public mood. In this case though, regular readers will have seen a complete change in alignment, from anti-ALP to anti-LNP, although there's no trace of pro-ALP sentiment either. I can’t believe the readership has changed that much, so it’s the allegiance of the readers that has moved.

In a delicious twist, it was just this weekend when the Courier Mail’s own state political correspondent Steve Wardill suggested that King Campbell needed to back away from the carnage and show his humanity. It’s a good point, Steve, and most first-year communications undergraduates would offer the same advice.

But, as the cuts crusade draws to a close, Newman needs to show another side beyond his other persona, spruiking three-worded election rhetoric such as "back on track" and "four-pillar economy".

Showing compassion for the wider community is a big part of being a premier. It's what sets the job apart from the rates-and-rubbish politics of local government and the big-picture federal arena.

Mr Wardill is wrong. Playing the compassionate leader and crying woe-is-me in this atmosphere is so incongruous in light of his actions as Premier that it’s not credible. The public has become more cynical, but also more knowledgeable about the world of politics. Spin is spin.
We have political wonks – a relatively new word to describe the growing number of people who immerse themselves in the world of politics and politicians as others might follow Morris dancing or cockroach racing. It’s intense and potentially antisocial in many circles, and just a little...weird? (Did you know that “wonk” is the word “know”, but backwards?)

We also have social media, where groups informally coalesce like bubbles in a lava lamp, tweeted opinions spread exponentially, emotions are a dime a dozen, and political wonks congregate and hatch plans for "Wonk Drinks" (yes, it's a thing), boycotts, petitions, protests, campaigns to Destroy the Joint, and events like SlutWalk.

My advice to King Campbell would be to forget about the photo ops with babies and cute furry animals, and stop talking to the media about anything that isn’t policy-related. His personal popularity right now is such that few would if he never sleeps again. He should continue to be this cold, emotionally detached sub-human wrecking ball with a mandate…but do it quietly, and do it until the job is done. Then, rebuild, and let his actions speak as eloquently as they have since Election Day in March.

The problem now for King Campbell is that he doesn't have that kind of time. The hatred is strong. King Campbell has much more to do, and if he continues to act with such little regard for people, he will lose.

Is it possible that just seven months since his election, he's set himself and the LNP on a road back into Opposition? Is this a one-term government?

Honestly, I doubt it, if for no other reason than because the election left the ALP shattered and as such, there is no opposition. Literally. The sporting commentator's favourite cliche, the "rebuilding phase", was custom-made for the ALP in Newmania in 2012.

King Campbell would have learned in the army that it’s wise to make yourself a smaller target, as small as possible, invisible...especially when people are shooting at you. Right now, he’s making himself a bigger mark, and millions of Newmanians are shooting in his direction.

Newmania: The Slippery Slope

The Courier Mail is, like its News Limited sister publications, a little right of centre. It plays to the classic reactionary talk-back style of tabloid newspaper, which is obvious from both the content and tone of the online reader comments. News Limited publications carry the southern commentary of such well known shockers as Andrew Bolt, Piers Ackerman, Janet Albrechtsen and Miranda Devine – the radio equivalent of Alan Jones and Ray Hadley. They appeal to a certain audience and in a self-sustaining cycle of misinformation, shouted from tinny kitchen radios and preached from between the inky pages of the morning editions, then fed back to the media in the most vicious of circles.

News Limited, and particularly the Courier Mail, which was allowed to exist for far too long without competition here in the land of Joh, land on the side of the Coalition, and now, the LNP. It’s what their readers expect.

So confident was the Courier Mail in the ultimate success of the new Campbell Newman LNP Government that it proudly ran a chart of Newman’s first 100 Days In Office. The graphic was of concentric green circles, with green ticks to mark success as measured against the tasks listed in the LNP’s own 100 Day Action Plan…

…Until it became Impossible to hide their problematic truth, that King Newman will not be able to tick off all of the items in his 100 day Action Plan within his hundred day schedule. Suddenly, around the first week of this month, the chart stopped appearing in the Courier Mail. Rather than admit, or even worse, publicise the LNP’s failure to meet their own KPIs, they heaved the graphic altogether.

They seem to have replaced it with Newman’s Razor, a blood spattered image chronicling the latest cost cutting measures. As images go, there’s a huge emotional variance between a bright green target festooned with ticks, and the new image, with the red splatters and photos of Newman and his team wearing Mafia style hats. The paper could have chosen a positive visual to portray the progress of cost-cutting, but they chose instead one that suggests old fashioned values, violence, goodies-versus baddies – just the kind of imagery to appeal to the Courier Mail’s dedicated readers.



Most telling, this image does not contain any key performance indicators – no dates or amounts, no charts or timelines. Let’s not let facts contaminate the beauty of the blood splatters.

It’s not just the imagery, either. The Courier Mail’s reader Poll hasn’t gone according to plan. They’ve been asking readers whether they support the LNP’s changes to the existing Civil Partnership legislation. As at 11:00am today, 55% of readers disagreed with the changes. These are Courier Mail readers – conservative and supportive of the LNP.


Furthermore, in a quick tally of the first 100 comments on the Courier Mail Reader Online section regarding King Campbell’s televised speech last night asking Newmanians to support state-wide belt-tightening, 62% of respondents were sceptical of government’s motives, their willingness to tighten their own parliamentary belts, or their chances of success. Of the 38% who sided with the government, many took the opportunity to blame the previous Labor Government, and snark the public servants whose jobs were under threat.

It’s easy to understand the frustration, when on the one hand, Costello’s Audit squawked a warning about the deficit of $100b, a fact which Sue Lappeman explains in the Gold Coast Bulletin.

There is no argument the previous Labor Government screwed up royally and the state's finances are in bad shape.

But there is no $100 billion debt. I repeat. There is no $100 billion debt.

That is a figure Mr Costello came up with as a possible outcome by 2018 if the spending of the past few years continued spending that included vast investments in major infrastructure including the Gold Coast's new hospital and the massive cost of catastrophic natural disasters and the global financial crisis.

To help manage the non-existent $100 billion debt, King Campbell has terrified every public servant by stating that we can’t afford to pay about 20,000 of them … while at the same time, engineering his team so that every LNP MP gets an $8000 bonus for being a committee member. Okay it’s around half a million dollars for the LNP members versus over $1.5 billion dollars in public service salaries, but as so many readers of the Courier Mail had commented, it’s the principle.

Meanwhile, King Campbell is still planning to spend an unspecificed amount of money to knock down existing buildings in the Brisbane CBD, have private companies build new buildings on the prime riverside land, and then lease the office space back from the private corporations to house the government departments. It was originally a Labor Government initiative, but I wonder why it’s still on the table now, when we’ve been told to brace ourselves for rough times ahead.

Or – Shock! Horror! – is King Campbell considering selling assets? Isn’t that what killed the Bligh Government?

I wonder if there are plans afoot to cancel the Queensland Government’s hundreds of subscriptions for the Courier Mail? That’d just about pay for the 60 seconds that King Campbell of Newmania had his head on television last night.

The Courier Mail versus the ABC

Last weekend, the Courier Mail ran an editorial with the provocative headline, "ABC has Failed to Deliver".

It's no secret that I'm a fan of the ABC, so I was appropriately provoked by the headline. I'm rarely a fan of Queensland's only statewide daily, either - also public knowledge. Here we go, I thought. My respectable and respected ABC is up against the lowest-common-denominator tabloid Courier Mail. Quite prepared to be transported by a wave of righteous indignation on Aunty's behalf,  I started reading the editorial.

Nothing happened. No rising blood pressure, no bad out-loud words, no urge to hurl my precious iPad against the nearest wall. Nothing. 

It certainly wasn't that I agreed with the Courier Mail's editorial attack. I don't accept the premise of the criticism; it feels more like a manufactured opportunity to undermine a rival.

I blinked, and wondered who the Courier Mail thought had been failed by the ABC, and what constituted an editorial-worthy failure.The answer is in Paragraph 2:

The ABC's journalistic presence in Queensland is disappointing. It has walked away from news breaking and retreated to basic coverage of some news events.

So says the Courier Mail editorial. Okay.

Where does my ABC stand? What is the ABC's responsibility as a news organisation? Are they failing by their own standards, or is this a standard being imposed from outside the tent? 

But we should expect more of such an important public institution which is benefiting from government largesse to expand in every area but its core of local news coverage.

"Benefitting from government largesse"? It's a little more than that; the government funds the ABC. In return for funding, the ABC is required to provide certain services. The basic requirements can be found here.   It's relatively short - about the length of a Courier Mail editorial - and I encourage you to read it. I have, and there is no mention at all of journalistic presence or breaking news in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983 (Section 6 - Charter). 

Digging further, I read the Act in more detail, as it pertains to provision of news services.  It's every bit as dry and non-specific as you'd expect the Act to be, and in amongst the legalese you won't find any obligation or objective to fulfil the the requirements suggested by the Courier Mail.

And yet, they are disappointed. Has the ABC somehow failed to meet the standards set down by the Courier Mail?

I suspect that David Fagan and his team at the Courier Mail is judging the ABC against its own objectives. The Courier Mail - and all of its News Limited cousins in Australia - are part of a now-infamous global operation headed by Rupert Murdoch. The ultimate objective s profit. 

Nowhere on the Internet was I able to find a News Limited equivalent to the ABC's Charter. There's simply nothing on display to indicate what News Limited staff should look to as guiding principles. Where's the Mission Statement? The poster with the Company's Values? Yes, they're a corporate cultural hangover from the end of last century, but they mean something.

Okay then. So it's not that the ABC is failing to meet the Courier Mail's standards. Perhaps then, it's the personnel at the Courier Mail who are disappointed. 

I can't answer that, other than to suggest that a newsroom is, like any workplace, a hothouse environment. Every input is filtered through a unique lens of industry and employer: what does this mean for me, for my colleagues, for my employer? Do i need to recalibrate? If the Courier Mail is committed to breaking news, is there a simple expectation that the ABC must be committed to the same goal?

I'll leave defence of the ABC's news service to Mark Scott, who responded to the editorial. Here's part of his response:

The ABC Queensland news team comprises more than 130 radio, TV, online and specialist current affairs reporters including the hardworking people in our 11 regional newsrooms who provide vital news and information for those in rural and remote communities.

I could indulge us all in a spiteful round of favourite preschool games, headed by It's My Train Set (So We Play By My Rules), ranging through You Started It, and finishing with My Dad's Bigger Than Your Dad. I won't. I crashed a tricycle at preschool 40-something years ago. I still have a scar on my left knee, but I've grown up. Let's do this the grown up way.

News isn't generic, and neither are the consumers of news. We can - and do - choose how and when we want our news delivered. Online technology allows us to tailor our content even further. In short, we can get the news we want.

If the ABC news service disappoints the editorial team at the Courier Mail, then that's okay. It's their opinion. It's not mine. I believe the ABC is a modern news service that meets the needs of its audience now, and is positioned to continue to meet the changing needs of it's audience into the future.

What you see depends on where you stand.