The gotcha question has returned to the already damaged election campaign news coverage and reporters, and consumers of their reports, will suffer.
It’s a branch of what I call rudeness journalism, a close cousin to the style of some radio shock jocks and after-dark TV presenters who cultivate a confusion between shouty-ness and authority.
The flimsy basis for this style is: the bigger the bellow, the greater the truth.
The immediate aim of the press conference gotcha often is to establish the superiority of the questioners over the candidate. It enables the practitioner to implicitly strive to identify who is in charge, and it’s not the candidate.
A disturbing element of Labor leader Anthony Albanese this week being caught unable to outline his own NDIS policy was the unnecessary and unseemly discourtesy of the questioner from the Nine television news network. The reporter clearly wanted to be the star of that press conference, not the alternative prime minister.
The gratuitous countdown on a pointed finger was a crass exercise in self promotion which revealed the central intention was to create a “look at me” moment.
Further, his loud talking over the Albanese response and tone raised sympathy for the gotcha victim among those who decided he had not been given a chance to properly respond.
None of this exculpates the gotcha victim entirely.
Albanese should have known the unemployment rate, he should have been able to briskly list all six points of his NDIS policy.
His shortcomings on those two matters allowed Liberal leader Scott Morrison to intensify personal attacks on the competence of his rival, and was seen to substantiate internal ALP grumblings that Albanese doesn’t do his homework.
“Get across the detail, Labor MPs tell Albanese,” read the front page headline of Friday’s the Australian.
“Albanese forgets Labor’s six point NDIS plan,” said the Financial Review.
And on the Nine network news the questioner was given the space usually reserved for heroes as he promoted himself and his gotcha triumph.
The lack of detail could have been exposed without rudeness journalism.
Morrison wasn’t a gotcha target when he mixed up the daily jobseeker daily benefit payment with the weekly rate. That was merely a self-engineered display of incompetence.
Questioning backed by substance rather than by random baiting, by informed directness rather than by opportunism, is more effective in revealing the weaknesses of the candidates.
Few statements have condemned Morrison more than those he has volunteered, such as his painfully thin fear of a “public autocracy” were a federal anti-corruption body to examine pork barrel projects.
There is an argument that the paltry content of both the Liberal and Labor campaigns — one a caravan distributing Albo empathy, the other a series of ScoMo pretend jobs — has left space for reporters to come up with their own dynamics.
Thus the gotcha and rudeness journalism which were so potent against then Labor leader Bill Shorten in the 2019 campaign.
The danger is that these tactics don’t leave much space for genuine policy discussions and parlaying of information needed by voters. Any entertainment factor limits the lifespan of information.
If the vacuity continues for the final two weeks of the campaign, the press conference aggression will intensify and might follow the applause given the gotcha gang of reporters.
The anti-gotcha hero of this campaign was the Greens leader, Adam Bandt, who on 13 April curtly dismissed an attempt during an appearance at the National Press Club when he was asked whether he knew the current WPI (wage price index).
“Google it mate,” he told a questioner from the Australian Financial Review.
Bandt continued: “Politics should be about reaching for the stars and offering a better society.
“And instead … there’s these questions that are asked about, ‘Can you tell us about this particular stat?’”
Unfortunately, there has not been much reaching for the stars in campaign coverage so far.
Malcolm Farr is a political journalist
