Truculent. Defensive. Stumbling on detail. No, not Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese. It’s Australia’s media, already the clear loser in the election campaign as they sacrifice the issues their audiences need them to explore for the lure of the viral moment.
The result? The media has lost scarce time, wasted on explaining and justifying their decision to prioritise the Labor leader’s blank-out over the deep policy explainers that make a difference in the lives of voters.
As John Howard said in his immediate — and most honest — response: “So what?”
So what? Here’s what. On social media, in lengthy columns and in on-air commentary, some of Australia’s best journalists have been wasting their time — and that of their audiences — trying to answer the Howard question, earnestly explaining the intricacies of why journalism “gotcha” practices matter.
It’s been the most inside of insider-dom, closing out voters who right now need the media on their side — on the outside looking in.
Those commentators need to remember the words of the great communicator Ronald Reagan: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Or maybe think of the tree falling in the forest: if Australians don’t instinctively grasp the meaning of the moment without explanation, does the moment have any meaning at all?
These first few days of the campaign suggest that Australia’s media has learnt next to nothing from the failures of covering an election campaign as a horse race, where tipping the winner is seen as more important than informing their audience about the issues that matter.
It abandons the core responsibility of journalists in an election: to stand in the shoes of the public, to ask the questions that they need answered, to empower them to choose which party, which leader, is best able to deal with the serious challenges the country faces — from global warming to the post-pandemic care crisis.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s great theatre. But these election-time gotcha moments cover a multitude of moments, some helpful, some not.
The conceit of the ambush question is that by catching the politician off guard, it exposes some deeper truth about their character. In its modern form, it dates back to the sly “What’s the price of milk?”, first thought to have been asked of president George HW Bush in the 1992 US election campaign.
It’s been reprised globally from Spain to Lebanon. A recent version tripped up Morrison at the National Press Club. Before it become a cliché it was a strong outside question: get it wrong and… gotcha! You’re out of touch! It delivers a political pie-in-the-face moment that makes for great slapstick television, although colour me unconvinced that three decades later it tells us anything other than the calibre of the politician’s pre-questioning prep.
Australian campaigns have their own history of hard questions about difficult policy choices, where the politician’s stumble can illuminate: most famously, Mike Willesee’s questions about the impact of the proposed GST on a birthday cake during the 1993 election campaign. The floundering response by then opposition leader John Hewson was not so much a gaffe as the exposure of a supposedly simple new tax system’s inherent complexity.
There’s plenty of similar questions to be asked of our political leaders about the policies of the moment. Trivial Pursuit-style questioning about random macro-economic indicators this week is not it. They tested little except the ability to dredge up the unexpected fact under questioning.
No one (other than Morrison, of course) is suggesting they truly tell us anything about Albanese’s grasp of the economics of the moment. That’s because the questions threaten to mislead by confusing “information” — isolated factoids — with “knowledge”, the synthesis that informs public policy.
(An aside: it reminds us that, among the political class, News Corp still retains the ability to set the press gallery agenda.)
The consolation? Gotcha moments like this rarely have any impact on a campaign out in the real world, where voters are making up their minds. In this social media age, it can be embarrassingly viral. (On the Monday night footy talk shows, it was already a joke.) By election’s end, expect Albanese to have turned it into a self-deprecatory moment to demonstrate connection to the disengaged who are still deciding what to do.
Are you bored silly by the reaction, or overreaction, to Albanese’s stumble? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
