Reprinted from Global Media Journal

Abstract

This paper discusses the problematic influence of technological determinism in popular news media coverage and analysis of the Arab Spring events of 2010-11.

The purpose is to develop insights into how and why elements of a ‘soft’ technological determinism inflect both journalistic practice and news discourse in relation to the Arab Spring. In particular it discusses how the ‘bias of convenience’ and a journalistic obsession with the ‘continuous present’ connect with this determinist inflection to create a potential distortion in the journalists’ ‘first rough draft’ of history in relation to significant and complex events such as social revolution.

Debates about the significance of social media and communications technologies more broadly in generating mass outbursts of protest and even violence have raged in the popular news media for the past decade at least. A wave of interest in ‘theories’ about how and why new services like Facebook and Twitter may create or enable mass protest was generated by the revolutionary events in Iran following the June 2009 elections (Hirst, 2011). Many of the arguments then and now, in coverage of the Arab Spring, are suggestive of a form of technological determinism that is coupled with other underlying and little-investigated assumptions inherent in most forms of news practice and discourse.

The question of the influence of technological determinism within journalism studies is a far from settled debate and this paper follows Mosco’s argument and suggests that the idea of a social media revolution is a myth of the ‘digital sublime’ (Mosco, 2004). At best social media is a new battleground in the struggle for information control. At worst it can blind activists and commentators to reality (Morozov, 2011).

Introduction

…we don’t investigate things that everyone knows.
(McArdle, 2011)

Journalists are often very busy and, in the middle of a revolution, they are going to be very, very busy. In the field when there is sometimes gunfire and ever-present danger, a reporter has a lot to think about. Not only are there the pressures of survival; there are concerns about how well the gear is going to work; will there be an Internet connection and electricity when you need them; will your fixer turn out to be a dud or a diamond; and how do you go about trying to understand something when your language skills are limited and everything is moving at speed (Murrell, 2009). However, it is precisely at such critical times, in the middle of history’s making, that reporters need to be on top of their game. As one prominent Australian historian put it, journalists can ‘shape the public mood’ about an issue and later commentators or, indeed, historians, ‘follow the contours of what they define as important’ (Lowe, 2012).

However, there is a great paradox in journalism; news often happens when reporters are not there to see for themselves. Outside of staged events – such as the Japanese surrender at the end of World War Two – journalists are rarely present when historic events occur (Flanagan, 2012). The 2010—2011 Arab Spring uprisings that began in Tunisia and spread to several other countries in the Middle East and North Africa may have been sparked by events not always witnessed by Western reporters, but within weeks the region was flooded with correspondents. The revolutionary moments they reported on were spread across several very different political and cultural landscapes crisscrossed with ethnic, religious and economic divisions. Events moved at speed and for the thousands of reporters parachuted into Cairo and other parts of the region, the subtlety and detail can perhaps become lost among the difficulties.

In such situations many reporters will fall back on what they know; they come to rely on the obvious and what is easy to see. Perhaps, also slightly disoriented by the seemingly invincible discourse of determinism, reporters were also soaking up the ever present ‘ambient journalism’ (Burns, 2010; Hermida, 2010a, 2010b)– a heady brew of social media activism; scarce official pronouncements and revolutionary romanticism that coursed through the souks and through social media. Throughout the Arab Spring the use of social media by the overwhelmingly young activists, to provide a crowd-sourced commentary and even to organize their actions, became one obvious and easily understood trope that could enliven a news narrative and connect with Western audiences. The situation also took on the appearance of being an occasion of ‘ambient journalism’ – the audience itself becomes part of the news process and produces ‘small pieces of content’ (Hermida, 2010a). There is some truth in the idea that social media contributed something to the various uprisings that constituted the Arab Spring, but it is far from the whole and complex truth. It has led to the danger that in writing the ‘first rough draft’ of the history of the Arab Spring, reporters could privilege technology, rather than the actions of the many and varied participants.

A persistent, though perhaps ‘soft’, form of technological determinism permeated much of the coverage of the Arab Spring and has become one narrative stream of the ‘first rough draft of history’. It manifested itself in several forms of bias evident in the news coverage – the perpetual present and the bias of convenience. These are explored in the first section to demonstrate how the journalistic discourse is inflected with a strong current of soft technological determinism.

The perpetual present

…our political journalism mired in a sort of ‘perpetual present’ in which what happened two days ago, let alone two years ago, is forgotten.

(Keane, 2010)

Journalism is often described as the ‘first rough draft’ of history, but for some it is the only draft. The history of the ‘rough draft’ aphorism itself is instructive here. For many years it was attributed to Phil Graham, publisher of The Washington Post. Many sources, including his widow Katherine Graham, had written that the phrase came from a 1963 speech by Phil Graham:

So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never really be completed about a world we can never really understand…

However, it seems that Mr Graham may have read an earlier work in which the phrase was first used. In 1943 journalist Alan Barth used similar words: ‘News is only the first rough draft of history.’ By 1963, it transpires, Phil Graham had used a version of the now famous (if mangled) quote several times; particularly in 1948 and 1953. The connection between Barth and Graham is strong; Barth worked on the Washington Post in the 1940s as a senior member of Graham’s editorial team (Shafer, 2010). Most sources still attribute the phrase to Phil Graham, demonstrating how the historical record can be distorted when assumptions trump journalistic skepticism. Each time an incorrect source is quoted it reinforces the error and moves the narrative further from the truth in a confirmation of the continuous present.

In the context of the Arab Spring the continuous present is manifest as an ahistorical view of contemporary events. If the Egyptian revolution took the West and Western media professionals by surprise as Michael Binyon suggested, it must only have started once we were looking. Before the moment at which Western journalists turned their gaze to Benghazi, Tunis, Cairo and Damascus (among others) there must have been stasis – nothing was happening.

For writers like Michael Binyon (2011) the ‘tumultuous events’ began at ‘the start of the year [2011]’ and ‘telephones in the hands of angry young men and women’ broke the ‘political stasis’ in Tunisia. This is a dehistoricised view that relies heavily on a determinist narrative. However, if unchallenged it has the power to become the popular version of the Arab Spring in which ‘the mechanical arts’ are endowed with world-changing properties. The view that telephones or social media were key to the revolution may yet prove to be an acceptable draft of history, ‘embodied in a series of exemplary episodes, or mini-fables, with a simple yet highly plausible before-and-after narrative structure’ (Smith & Marx, 1994, p. x).

Of course it is patently absurd to think that the events in Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Syria only began in January 2011 as if there was a political explosion out of nothing. As Sameh Naguib (2011, p. 3) argues: ‘The Egyptian revolution did not come out of thin air’. Since then, in a race to catch up with history, reporters and analysts have eventually been made to give Western news audiences some of the background and the historical information.

A key area in which this bias of the present is obvious is the lack of previous coverage of the Egyptian workers’ movement and activist protests between 2003 and the end of 2010. Naguib (2011, p. 8) points out the first rehearsals for the occupation of Tahir Square in January 2011 occurred in March 2003 when it was occupied for 24 hours after an anti-war protest by over 40,000 people. The democracy movement and the workers’ movement – like all such formations – went through periods of upturn in struggle and periods of repression and retreat, but these were not news in the West. As long as Mubarak’s regime was stable and compliant with US wishes in the region (support for Israel) internal opposition was not particularly newsworthy.

When it comes to coverage of industrial action and workers’ political demands, we should not be surprised that Egyptian events did not seem an important story in Western media. Coupled with an overt Orientalism in the worldview of Western media is the built-in pro-business and pro-capital bias with which most journalists frame the world. This inevitably means that strikes and workers’ demands are only reported when industrial action creates an inconvenience for consumers, commuters or users of a particular service. Strikes have to become huge and public sentiment firmly behind the workers before the news media will cover industrial action favourably. The last time this happened in Australia was during the 1998 maritime union dispute when the Howard government and the stevedoring companies lost the public relations battle by using thugs in balaclavas and guard dogs to protect scabs on the waterfront (Milner & Coyle, 2010). An understanding of what Eric Lee and Benjamin Weinthall called ‘the truly revolutionary social networks’ is a powerful corrective to the bias of convenience, the perpetual present and technological determinism. Lee and Weinthall (2012, p. 283) describe the history of trade union action in both Tunisia and Egypt as the ‘most overlooked’ story in the media’s coverage of the Arab Spring: ‘it was the old-fashioned working class that enabled the pro-democracy movements to flourish’. In place of this more nuanced explanation of the Egyptian events, the media coverage might suggest was a vast network of connected individuals united and made brave by the anonymity of social media. This propensity to attach greater importance to convenient and easy explanations also links to a form of determinism when it comes to reporting the Arab Spring.

The bias of convenience

…while an expert can miss information because they assume they already know what there is to know, a newcomer can miss information from not knowing enough to know what there is to ask. (Wallace, 2010)

There is a quiet bias in journalism that is not overt, nor even always intentional, but it is a skewing of the story at hand to fit preconceptions, or, indeed, to fit the available facts as commonsense would present them. The former ABC correspondent Peter Lloyd talks about this phenomenon in the immediate aftermath of the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami. Lloyd was in the Thai holiday resort of Phuket along with a large contingent of reporters who relied on the ‘endless supply’ of agency and amateur videos of the waves’ impact and ‘played safe in order to feed the beast of hourly deadlines’. Lloyd provides a rare insight: ‘the more we report, the less we are reporting’ (Lloyd, 2010, p. 93). This is the trap of the 24-hour news cycle with its continuous deadlines, the beast is fed by recycling and embellishing what is already known, but it prevents any new information being uncovered.

This problem of journalists not knowing what the story is really about until it is on top of them is evident in coverage of the Arab Spring. As one columnist noted four months later, the February 2011 events in Egypt, ‘caught the West off guard’ (Binyon, 2011). Not only were diplomats blind-sided, but many reporters too had little previous experience or insight on which to base their coverage. The positioning of social media as the key driver of revolution in the Middle East is an example of how the Western media responded to being caught ‘off guard’. As Hugh Tomlinson (2011) wrote in The Times, the contribution of social media had, by July 2011, become ‘one of the most compelling’ narratives around the Arab Spring. In the same week another Times columnist provided further evidence of why this occurred: ‘the Arabs suddenly understood the power of the new media’ (Binyon, 2011).

The trope of the Arab Spring being, or at least being attributed to, a social media revolution covers up the lack of preparedness and historical knowledge among correspondents who come to rely on an easy to digest narrative based on available facts and not requiring any difficult historical contextualizing. The Princeton historian Edward Tenner is credited with coining the phrase that best describes this type of bias: ‘the bias of convenience’ (Rosenberg & Feldman, 2008). In journalism this bias can be brought to a story unwittingly for a number of reasons; it can be a matter of time and speed, or linked to a certain level of groupthink and the well-documented pack mentality that can occur among reporters (Tiffen, 1989). It might also be that the angle on the story has been predetermined by head office. Another explanation could be that the journalist is out of his or her depth in relation to the topic. Alternatively, the cause may well be hubris – the reporter thinks that they know more than they actually do know; or it could be fear of being found out by competitors or superiors. Lane Wallace provides an example from a press conference she attended where most of the reporters did not fully understand what they were dealing with – in this case, a new technology product from an established firm in the field:

They just appeared to think they knew the subject well enough, or had a set enough idea in their heads as to what this kind of story was about, that they pursued only the lines of questioning necessary to fill in the blanks of that presumed story line. (Wallace, 2010)

Whatever its cause, the bias of convenience creates problems because it reduces the reliability of the reporting and it can also create a false historical trail when the story is later analysed, or used as background for ongoing or subsequent coverage. Another way that a bias of convenience may have relied on a determinist view of social media in relation to the Arab Spring is the simple fact that outside of Egypt and for many days (if not weeks) television networks were reliant on social media for information not tainted by association with the regimes under attack: ‘professional satellite TV fed off online citizen journalism’, is how Timothy Garton Ash (2012, p. 277) reported events in The Guardian on 19 January 2011. Garton Ash’s own soft determinism is evidenced by his comment that communication technologies ‘did not cause [the uprisings] but they helped’.

The bias of convenience can also be the product of worldview or ideological perception. It is a common charge on both the left and the right that political bias renders one’s opponents wrong on every issue and proposition. This type of bias is particularly dangerous when reporting the mundane politics of the everyday; it can be profoundly misleading when it comes to the reporting of unprecedented events like the Iranian uprising of 2009 or the Arab Spring of 2011. (For a full account of the so-called Twitter revolution in Iran see Hirst, 2011, pp. 131-144)

Journalist Megan McArdle (2011) sums up issues with a bias of convenience in relation to her own work:

Before I was a journalist, I used to wonder why journalists were suppressing obvious important facts; after I became a journalist, I realized that it’s often incredibly hard to know that there’s a fact you’re missing.

If a reporter is working within the bias of convenience they may not even recognize it; they may not know that there are facts or angles that are missing from their story. However, the consequences can be far-reaching; it becomes what McArdle (2011) calls an ‘epistemological question’. The mis-reported information becomes the factual basis for further stories; ‘pseudofacts’ become reality in the eyes of the ill-prepared reporter. The question is: How to prevent the wrong data from informing all, or even some, subsequent stories?

The epistemological question in relation to the Arab Spring is: How much has technological determinism and the bias of convenience contributed to misreporting and therefore misunderstanding of the social dynamics in play? In this regard the hoax ‘Gay Girl in Damascus’ incident is illuminating. As Josephine Tovey noted in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘if Araff did not exist, we would have had to invent her’, which is exactly what happened. The reason so many Western journalists and others fell for the trick was that the character of ‘Amina Araff’ matched the worldview of ‘many liberal-minded people’ (Tovey, 2011) whose perceptions of the Middle Eastern ‘other’ were ideologically constructed around the still operative principles of Said’s famous ‘Orientalism’ thesis, which posits that a set of simplistic generalisations and stereotypes substitutes for a lack of understanding of, and empathy for, the Middle East and Islam in media discourse (Said, 2003 (1978)). In the ‘Gay Girl’ scam, the fictional Armina Araff became the ‘queer heroine’ and ‘apparent victim’ rolled into one character with a ‘compelling personal story’ (Tovey, 2011) that appealed to unsupported prejudice and desires among a Western audience. What emerges from this incident is that the convenience bias created the conditions in which latent Orientalism combined with a soft technological determinism to generate a believable – only because some people ‘wanted to believe’– and easy to comprehend narrative that fit with pre-existing conceptions and presented a ‘palatable face of the uprisings’ to Western audiences (Tovey, 2011). The bias of convenience, reporting in the continuous present and a lack of historical context combine with soft determinism to present a one-dimensional view of complex events; however, it is technological determinism that holds together this truncated explanation of social revolution.

Technological Determinism

…will the technology of the computer and the atom constitute the ineluctable cause of a new social order? (Heilbroner, 1967, p. 336)

In a determinist view, technology takes on an active ‘life of its own’ and is seen to be a driver of social phenomena, rather than implicated itself in social relations. The American economist Robert Heilbroner poses technological determinism as a question in ‘Do machines make history?’ According to the affirmative argument, technology stands outside of social relations and human action – the machine itself appears to be ‘alive’, or at least capable of directing human behaviour. Our attention is drawn to the consequences of technological innovation rather than its genesis: the new machine or device ‘seems to come out of nowhere’ (Smith & Marx, 1994, p. x). In this way complex social events are seen as the ‘plausible result’ (p.xi) of technology rather than human agency. Additionally, the social content of technology appears as a natural phenomenon and is itself masked by determinism (Medosch, 2005).

There are several aspects of both technology and determinism that must be addressed in order to consider an effective use of technological determinism in the discussion of social media and news reporting of the Arab Spring: the first is ‘What is technology?’ and the second is to consider the intensity, or strength, of the forces of determination. As Bruce Bimber put it in a widely-cited discussion of determinism, accounts of its power ‘differ as to why and how technology is so influential’ (1990, p. 336). The third question – which is at the heart of our discussion is: How might technological determinism manifest itself in journalism practice and news discourse about the Arab Spring?

What is technology?

In very simple terms, technology is a piece of machinery, or a device, that enables us to carry out tasks and functions that add value to production or improve our lives. We often think of technology making our lives easier. A mobile phone or iPad is considered a ‘piece’ of technology. Technology, in this sense, consists of objects. These objects, tools and artifacts are seen as the inevitable product of what have become known as technological revolutions. This objectified approach also tends to flavour common understandings of revolution as something outside of rational human control. It is an ideological view of social change that is closely aligned with what Karl Marx called the fetishism of commodities: a tendency in capitalist society to see social relations through the prism of things. In volume one of Capital Marx wrote that manufactured objects (including technology) take on a commodity form and thus become ‘a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ in which ‘the social characteristics of men’s own labour’ appear to be properties of the objects themselves. It is these commodity forms, not their human producers, that take on the ‘socio-natural properties’ of relations between people (Marx, 1990 (1867), pp. 162-164). It is easy to see how determinism can enter the picture at this point.

However, a complication is inserted into this debate when we consider multiple definitions of technology (Bimber, 1990). If technology literally means machines and only machines (fax machines, computers, mobile phones etc.) then the question of determinism is relatively clear-cut and we can say “Yes” or “No” to Heilbroner’s simple query. On the other hand, if the definition of technology is broadened out to include ‘modes of organization as well as machinery’ (Kreimer, 2001, p. 120) the simple yes/no dichotomy breaks down.

Bruce Bimber regards the broadening of definitions of technology as problematic for a discussion of determinism because to include ‘knowledge’ or ‘systems of organization and control’ tends to conflate dependent and independent variables and weakens the analysis (1990, pp.340-341). However, we need to understand technology in three forms to come to grips with the concept of ‘soft’ determinism and ‘media determinism’ as set out in this paper. The first form of technology is an object or system of objects that provide a practical solution to a common problem. The second is technology as technique or branch of knowledge. The third is to see technology as a set of objects and practices that exist only within certain social relations, particularly in the production process – the forces of production – but also more widely. For example, the ways in which mobile phones are adopted, used and adapted within different cultural and social contexts constitutes the fullest understanding of the technology of mobile phones (For a fuller discussion of this see Hirst & Harrison, 2007, pp. 58-69).

Marxism and technological determinism

Was Marx a technological determinist? This oft-quoted passage from The Poverty of Philosophy is used to make the case that he was:

The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

However, in the context of his polemic against the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and taken in context, it shows that Marx was actually making the case for human agency:

M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations.

Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. (Marx, 1847, p. 49)

It is the acquisition of new technology (productive forces) in the context of existing social relations of production that ‘forces men’ to change the mode of production. It is a process of dialectic and agency; not simply one of the technology creating the change of its own volition. Bimber makes the point that Marx (and Marxism) cannot be reduced to either technological or economic determinism: technologies (as broadly defined in this paper) and the division of labour that accompany the birth and consolidation of capital are in ‘no way…independent of social history’:

The introduction of technology into the labour process is contingent upon preceding social organization, specialization and aggregation of wealth. (Bimber, 1990, p. 345)

In other words existing class relations determine the development and deployment of technologies that then, in mutual constitution (Mosco 2004), impact upon social relations and create the conditions for further technological and social change. It is the social drive to accumulate capital and the necessary division of labour into ever more specialized fields that creates and feeds the process of reification, which sees labourers increasingly alienated from the products of their labour, including technology. Technology becomes ‘thingified’, objectified and cut out of the social context in which it exists. It becomes fetishized in its commodity form and it is then re-presented to us as a series of object or artifacts (Chandler, n.d.)

Hard or soft determinism?

In a long career, Robert Heilbroner (1967, 1994) wrote two important articles on technological determinism in which he elucidated a distinction between what he called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ determinism. Importantly, these points are at either end of a continuum. A hard determinism would argue that social structures emerge, adapt, evolve and grow in a specific response to technological developments. It is a view that suggests ‘scientific laws…in their inexorable application, produce technology’, which in turn sets the limits to the exercise of agency or free will (Bimber, 1990, p. 338). Yet Heilbroner struggled with a purely machine-made view of history when reflecting on ’Do Machines Make History’ nearly 30 years later. The link between technology and changed circumstances in the ‘socioeconomic order’ is not so straightforward and translating ‘changing technology into behavioral responses’ proved difficult. Determinism becomes ‘a mechanism of a near-alchemical kind’ and economics must enter the equation of determinism as a ‘force field’ (Heilbroner, 1994, pp. 70-71).

A ‘hard’ form of technological determinism, at the extreme, would posit that technological and social evolution – or indeed social revolutions – occur in a ‘logical sequence’ along a fixed historical path that is somehow ‘predetermined’ and oblivious to ‘human intervention’ (Bimber, 1990, p. 341). With one or two exceptions, even the most excited and optimistic reports of the role of social media in the Arab Spring could not be held to this standard of determinism. It is the ‘soft’ end of this continuum where technological determinism sits in relation to the news media and the revolutionary role of social media the Arab Spring. Here any direct ‘mechanical linkage’ is eschewed in favour of a matrix that includes ‘social and political preconditions’, but in which it appears that the technology is determinant in the last instance (Heilbroner, 1994, p. 76). One good example of this is a piece by BBC correspondent Paul Mason. He wrote a column for The Guardian that typifies a medium-soft technological determinism:

Technology expanded the power of the individual – their sense of injustice, social and personal – and the whole recent history of revolt, from Iran to Egypt to the French banlieues, is driven by this. (Mason, 2012, p. 283)

As with much of the commentary that favours this soft determinist view there is a grain of truth in Mason’s analysis. But it is a dialectical truth in which myth overtakes history through the ‘transcendent characteristics’ of technology (Mosco, 2004, p. 24). A technological expansion of individualism – mobile computing, the always on social network and continuous access to continuously scrolling information – is also an expansion of alienation and a further embedding of commodity fetishism into our daily lives. It is a double-edged sword. In the context of convergence culture and communication, Vincent Mosco calls this phenomenon of ignoring or downplaying the dialectics of technology the ‘digital sublime’. In terms of communication technologies the myth-making takes the form of a promise (which remains unfulfilled) ‘of a new sense of community and widespread popular empowerment’ (Mosco, 2004, p. 25).

The digital sublime: Soft determinism or mutual constitution?

Rather than see determinism (hard or soft) as a one-sided mono-causal process that privileges technology in some way, perhaps it is better to view the relationship of technology to society through the lens of the dialectic.

In this sense we can observe a process of combined and uneven development at work; or what Mosco calls the ‘mutual constitution’ of social relations. The process of mutual constitution – also called ‘multiple determination’ – is explicitly counterposed to technological determinism. Mutual constitution proposes that causality in the social world is complex and lies in the actions of one force on another that is also pushing back in both a linear and non-linear fashion best characterized as ‘combined and uneven’ development (Mosco, 1996, pp. 6-11). In these accounts, based on an interpretation of Marxism that is not technologically determinist, social relations and conditions create the determining force, not technology: ‘the forces of production do not enjoy causal primacy over aggregate human factors’ (Bimber, 1990, p. 335). In Mosco’s interpretation there is interplay between ‘culture and political economy’, including technologies (2004, p. 83).

I would argue that the process of mutual constitution is partially hidden from most journalists because they operate within the unconscious ‘bias of convenience’ that tends to ignore a dialectical worldview. It seems obvious, factual and a product of commonsense that the introduction of new communications technologies – mobile phones, social networking, micro-blogging – would create a social as well as a technological revolution.

This tendency to rely on the obvious occurs when real meaning is hidden behind a process of reification (Love, 1999, pp. 56-58) that creates an ideological perspective so embedded in the technologies of communication that the process of multiple determination is rendered invisible to most reporters and editors. It is this ‘taken-for-granted’ nature of digital technologies that reinforces Mosco’s ‘digital sublime’ – mobile phones and social media applications are imbued with almost mythical qualities and powers. The key argument to make against this commonsense view is that in the triadic movement of the dialectic, it is social relations, not technological artifacts, that is determinant in the last instance:

…technological change is always cumulative, but always under the influence of the prevailing social conditions…a series of contradictions, conflicts and resolutions. (Hirst & Harrison, 2007, pp. 64-65)

A contemporary ‘turn’ in the philosophy of technology debate seeks to argue that blunt determinism has been replaced with a more nuanced form of technological ‘constructivism’ that acknowledges cultural differences in the assimilation and application of technologies (Feenberg, 1999); however, I would contend that constructivism is a form of soft determinism that continues to privilege technologies as being primarily causal. While social relations are identified as context for technological development, it is the technology itself (and the artifacts in which it is embedded) that remains at the centre of a constructivist worldview (Kallinikos, 2004). Even a ‘mild’ form of constructivism reinforces the primacy of the artifact by suggesting that the social forces that contribute to a particular technological age are ‘embodied’ within the technology itself (Brey, 1997). This debate has not yet found its way into journalism studies, but it might provide a useful avenue for further consideration, particularly in the context of social media, user-generated news-like content and the news cycle. As this paper demonstrates there is an observable determinism evident in what passes for journalistic commonsense. The Arab Spring certainly brought this to the fore in news accounts; perhaps because many journalists are not sufficiently learned in the process of social upheaval and revolution.

Technology and the repertoire of protest

[I]t is hard to find an aspiring social movement, new or old, of left, right, or center, without a website, a bulletin board, and an email list.

(Kreimer, 2001, p. 125)

Seth Kreimer’s outline of how American protest groups (from the Ku Klux Klan to the anti-globalisation movement) have taken advantage of new and emerging communication technologies and the removal of legal/organizational constraints on communication makes the point that sub-altern movements rely on relatively sparse resources to fund their activities. Protest groups – by their nature anti-establishment – have no (or limited) access to ‘large capital expenditures’ (Kreimer, 2001, p. 122).

Kreimer’s discussion is focused on the Internet and the spaces it has created for social movements to establish a web presence. A lower cost base creates some necessary conditions for sub-altern groups to enter the public discourse over issues: ‘global access in turn facilitates challenges to the status quo’ (Kreimer, 2001, p. 125).

Though written a decade ago, Kreimer’s analysis is central to the discussion of the role of social media and determinist arguments in the news discourse of the Arab Spring. He makes an explicit connection between the availability of alternative means of communication (websites) and disaffection with mainstream news coverage:

In the past, intermediary institutions stood astride access to the mass public. Those who controlled newspaper chains or political parties could filter or block insurgent messages.

…today, insurgent websites make directly available to potential listeners information and analysis that is not carried in the mainstream press. (Kreimer, 2001, pp. 125-126)

The central argument in this context is that the emergence of the Internet means that governments can no longer totally suppress dissent within or across physical borders and that activists can now bypass the mainstream media. As Kreimer puts it, conservative news organisations can no longer prevent information leaking out to a wider public audience; the added benefit is that the web also enables ‘two-way linkages’ between activists and audiences potentially creating active sympathisers, rather than passive watchers. In this passage Kreimer prefigures the evolution of citizen journalism: ‘Every sympathizer or movement member becomes a potential reporter’ (Kreimer, 2001, p. 130). There is no doubt that this tradition of alternative news and journalism is important to our understanding of activist media today even if institutional forms such as Indymedia have been largely overtaken by less formal and decentralized information flows such as the problematic use of ‘activist’ video from Syria and other places that are difficult for MSM journalists to access.

The limits to online activism

Kreimer is not a starry-eyed optimist; instead he offers three conditions that impose a very real limit on the efficacy of online activism: the ‘digital divide’; the ‘digital attention deficit’; and the ‘vices of visibility’ (2001, p. 140).

The digital divide has narrowed somewhat since Kreimer wrote his essay in 2001, the sale and distribution of PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones shows no sign of slowing down and as prices fall, availability increases. However, there are still divisions across the world. For example, across the Middle East, with a total population of around 217 million, there are some 78 million Internet users or roughly 35 per cent of the population. By contrast, in North America, the population is around 347 million and Internet usage is 273 million or 79 per cent (Internet World Stats, 2012). On top of this geographic divide we also have to add an economic dimension; while the cost of technology and access is falling, it is still relative to other cost-of-living and income factors. The third aspect of the digital divide is literacy levels and while digital literacy is growing across the world it is an uneven process linked to both geography and relative social wealth.

The ‘digital attention deficit’ is Kreimer’s way of describing the problem of information overload. The number of web pages exceeds the world’s population and content competes for eyeballs. Today, even more than in 2001, activist sites and social media efforts are competing with a forest of free content from news alerts to celebrity tweets and everything in between; from the annoying – product placement on Facebook – to the merely distracting – YouTube videos of cats. In order to establish ‘cut-through’ in this crowded visual marketplace, activist groups have to expend greater amounts of energy and the unit cost of reaching its core audience (or attracting a new audience) is quite high.

The ‘vices of visibility’ refer to the increasing opportunities for both surveillance and counter-surveillance that the Internet creates:

Precisely the qualities of the Internet which enable insurgents to reach previously unaffiliated constituencies allow opponents to track and counter insurgent activities. (Kreimer, 2001, p. 162).

We are familiar with this in authoritarian states, such as China and Iran; it has also been a feature of the ‘Arab Spring’ in many countries where Internet access was sporadically curtailed or entirely blocked for periods of time in an attempt to stifle both online and offline dissent.

Technological determinism and the media

Technological determinism has a strong hold over the media imagination and, therefore, the public imagination. It is in this sense that I am using the term ‘media determination’ to represent an unconscious trope that colours news accounts and that can influence the actions of journalists in defining or shaping a story. Part of the reason for media determinism may well be that the media itself is constituted as a group of technologies; everything from writing and literacy through to the printing press, radio, television, computers, the Internet and of course digital communication devices of all shapes and sizes (Chandler, n.d.). Marshall McLuhan’s famous trope ‘the medium is the message’ is an example of how this determinist essentialism colours everyday views of the mass media.

The context of McLuhan’s aphorism provides the first clue to the determinist essence of his argument:

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. (McLuhan, 1967, p. 23)

A few lines further down the technological determinist nature of this passage is confirmed: ‘it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action’. In a later passage he returns to this theme: ‘the formative power in the media are the media themselves’ (McLuhan, 1967, p. 66). We see this trope repeated in contemporary debates about social media and journalism today. There is a continuum of soft determinism in suggestions that it is the real-time network technologies themselves that are creating ‘distributed’ journalism (Hermida, 2010a). The debate about the influence of technological determinism on media practice and on theoretical understandings in journalism studies is not resolved. A soft media determinism is still present in popular journalism and in academic studies.

McLuhan’s mentor, the Canadian economist and media theorist Harold Innis provides some insight into the roots of media determinism in media and journalism studies. For Innis each medium has an in-built technological bias. Older and heavier technologies – such as stone – were space-based and very location-dependent; on the other hand newer technologies – such as paper and broadcasting – are time-based; they are lighter and less location-dependent (Innis, 1951). Innis’ determinism is evident in his key text Bias in communication in which he argues that the adoption of a new communications technology will eventually lead to ‘the emergence of a new civilization’ (1951, p. 34). According to one influential critique of Innis and McLuhan, they both saw communications technologies as ‘crucial determinants of the social fabric’ and also as the engine of social change (Carey, 1967, pp. 5-6). The pervasive presence and mimetic qualities of much of McLuhan’s work – expressed in easy-to-digest aphorisms in the media and popular culture – go some way to explaining, or at least excusing, technological determinism in media accounts of the world. It is also useful to note that McLuhan’s determinism was accentuated and hardened into an almost official ideology of progress in 1960s America by the Bell Commission on the Future (Medosch, 2005, p. 16).

Reification of technology in the media

People seem all too willing to believe that innovations in technology embody humanity’s choice of its future. (Smith & Marx, 1994, p. iv)

Reification is the process of disembodying thought and action from human agency and reflecting it back as an ahistorical axiom of commonsense or perceived wisdom. It is linked to a process of ‘forgetting’ (Jay, 2008), but it is more akin to having not known about something, or perhaps having an understanding of something that prevents true knowledge of it. Reification is the philosophical twin of commodity fetishism and it is important in creating the myths of technological determinism. The media plays a crucial role in this process. Smith and Marx (p.xiv) pose a question that sets this dilemma in context: Is that choice (real or not) ‘an expression of freedom or an expression of necessity’? Marshall McLuhan captured the impact of reification on the human psyche in a classic phrase in which he describes a man ‘hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form’ (McLuhan, 1967, p. 25). The important influence of social forces upon human history remains hidden behind the curtain of reification and the attendant celebrations of technological power. Machine power (or the power of social media) disguises the basic principle of Marx’ humanism and materialism: ‘whatever natural or inherent effects technology tends to produce are overcome by willful human actions’ (Bimber, 1990, p. 348). Jameson (1979) offers an insight into why reification – the turning of the world on its head – plays such a role in journalism; the commodification of all cultural artifacts in late capitalism – from novels, to theatre, movies and many forms of leisure – also applies to narrative forms such as the news. It is the process of commodification of information itself that allows the reified worldview to dominate. It is my contention that we have seen this process at work in coverage of the Arab Spring: a soft determinism came to dominate much of the news discourse and therefore become the first rough draft of its history.

Technological determinism in the coverage of the Arab Spring

For years, bloggers, political activists, and more recently Facebook activists would plan a day of protest, send thousands of text messages, get tens of thousands of virtual supporters and on the planned day a few hundred of the usual suspects would show up, sometimes reaching the magical number of one thousand. (Naguib, 2011, p. 13)

As academic and activist Sameh Naguib observed, if Facebook alone was the trigger for revolution, we’d still be waiting for the Arab Spring. Our willingness to believe in the power of social media, particularly in relation to the Arab Spring, also creates a willingness to suspend some of our critical faculties. The trope of the Facebook revolution in Egypt was so powerful that the world was suckered by an online hoax of stunning simplicity, but that was successful for several months from February to June 2011. As Josephine Tovey (2011) wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald when the ‘Gay girl in Damascus’ blog fraud was revealed, there was one simple reason people believed the increasingly outlandish posts for nearly five months: ‘As someone who was suckered, the best answer I can offer is: because we wanted to.’

Within weeks of the Arab Spring journalists were jumping on the social media causes revolution bandwagon. In May 2011 The Times reported on the Scottish National Party (SNP) unexpected win the parliamentary elections in flowery terms comparing the victory to the overthrow of Mubarak:

A Scottish summer has begun that feels every bit as vibrant to these party workers as the Arab Spring felt in Egypt. (Wade, 2011)

The comparison is justified says reporter Mike Wade because the SNP used social media ‘to stunning effect’. It appears there may be some truth in this, according to statistics supplied in the article the party’s interactive social media hub site registered over 35 thousand users or nearly three times the SNP’s membership. What is evident is the vast amount of effort by party workers to make the technology work for them; it was the content, not the software (technology) that delivered the votes.

Was the Arab Spring the beginning of ‘a strengthening borderless digital movement’ that will ‘disrupt powerful institutions’? This is the optimistic view presented by Jose Vargas (2012) in a review of Wael Ghonim’s Revolution 2.0. Ghonim is an important figure in the debate about the role of social media in the Arab Spring. The Google executive is credited with sparking an online revolt when he established a Facebook page ‘We are all Khaled Said’ – a reference to a young activist murdered by the Egyptian secret police. Vargas even marks the date, June 8, 2010 as a milestone in the history of the ‘embryonic, ever evolving era of social media’. Ghonim himself appears to have a good grasp of the dialectics involved in mass struggle. Writing about the ‘We are all Khaled Said’ campaign, he notes that actions on the street – such as the ‘Silent Stand’ on June 19, 2010 – led to an increase in activity on the Facebook page; a sign that the protest action was giving young Egyptians confidence, rather than the more passive action of liking or commenting on a Facebook page (Ghonim, 2012, pp. 84-85). It is also worth noting that Arabic reporters who had good local knowledge were less inclined to view the January-February events as a result of online protests. Writing in The Observer five days after the occupation of Tahir Square began, Mona Eltahaway (2012, p. 274) noted: ‘the internet didn’t invent courage…when the dictator shuts the internet down protestors can still organise’.

In March 2011 Twitter turned five, an occasion that was noted in a Times editorial just one month after the Egypt protests had forced the resignation of Hosni Mubarak: ‘Social media did not cause the Arab Spring, but have certainly facilitated it.’ The editorial described the use of social media ‘the stuff of nightmares’ for tyrants across the Middle East (The Times, 2011). How did this trope of social media causality, reification and soft determinism take hold in the news media’s coverage of the Arab Spring?

Bruce Bimber’s paper ‘Karl Marx and the three faces of technological determinism’ provides some useful insights into the process of normalization that promotes the acceptance of a technologically determinist discourse within news and journalism. He summarises an argument from Jurgen Habermas which has as its focus ‘norms of practice’. A capitalist society that values efficiency and progress above other human qualities, valorises the reified appearance of ‘the social relinquishment of control over technology’ (Bimber, 1990, p. 337). Control is not relinquished in any real sense, but the locus of control – in the social relations of capital viz labour – is hidden from view behind the veil of ideologised notions of progress and efficiency:

As surrogates for value-laden norms and judgments, efficiency and technique lead to the technological society. (Bimber, 1990, p. 337)

Technological determinism can manifest itself in the working practices of journalists in their reliance on reporting with a ‘bias of convenience’ and from a perspective the ‘continuous present’. This explanation can be supplemented by acknowledging the news media’s reliance on emotionally compelling discourse of recyclable clichés ‘guaranteed to extract a gut response’ (Flanagan, 2012).

Conclusion

Social media did not cause the Arab Spring, but have certainly facilitated it…Today the masses can speak with voices to match the mighty.
(The Times, 2011)

As the Times editorial highlights, the soft determinist position on social media and revolution in the Middle East was thoroughly mainstream only a few weeks after the February events. At the other end of the scale, the Times editorial argues, we perhaps knew little about events in Libya ‘because so few Libyans tweet’. I would argue that the bias of convenience and an addiction to the continuous present may have been more salient factors. The rhetorical flourish of ‘voices to match the mighty’ is typical of the conservative Times, but perhaps rather more grandiose than realistic.

Jose Vargas (2012) locates the beginning moments of the Arab Spring with the Facebook protest organized by Wael Ghonim, creating something that ‘inevitably spilled onto the streets’ ; but other accounts suggest that the social media revolution had other, earlier moments of genesis that quickly died out, or did not deliver their promise. Hofheinz notes that as early as 2008 Facebook protests had emerged in Egypt, including up to 70,000 joining a group in solidarity with labour strikes. However, there was no follow up action on the streets, perhaps due to repression, but other activists pointed out then, and since, that successful protests depended on ‘grassroots movement on the ground, rather than a mouse click on Facebook’ (Hofheinz, 2011, p. 1419).

There is no doubt that social media can play a role in offline as well as online mobilization. Seth Kreimer noted in 2001 how what he calls ‘insurgent’ activists successfully used the Internet to initiate political action that involves protest marches and other forms of street protest. Today we expect this to be routine and organisations like Avaaz can claim millions of ‘members’ around the world without having any real centralized physical presence.

Despite another decade of technological advance – Facebook and Twitter were only wishful thinking in 2001 – Kreimer’s conclusions still resonate today:

The potential for ultimate democratization, however, is only a potential. I have, I hope, demonstrated that the Internet bears risks as well as rewards for insurgents, and in this area as in others there is at most a ‘soft technological determinism’ at work. (Kreimer, 2001, p. 170)

In the context of the Arab Spring, Jose Vargas provides an adequate summary of the power of social media:

Technology, of course, is not a panacea. Facebook does not a revolution make. In Egypt’s case it was simply a place for venting the outrage resulting from years of repression, economic instability and individual frustration. (Vargas, 2012)

Even Wael Ghonim recognized that true mobilization must move beyond Facebook pages and the Internet: ‘“Reaching working-class Egyptians was not going to happen through the Internet and Facebook,” he notes’ (Vargas, 2012).

Rather than relying on a determinist view of social media, this paper has argued that it is more productive to examine the relationship between technology and social revolution in a series of dialectical moments. The relationship is not a simple one-to-one correspondence between an ever advancing technological ‘know-how’ and a consequentially increasing level of revolutionary feeling. It is, rather, as Mosco argues in The Digital Sublime, a process of combined and uneven development: technology and social relations – particularly those of production – dance with and around each other, taking turns to lead.

This becomes clear when we introduce issues of surveillance, repression and social control into the equation. Seen through the prism of combined and uneven development, social media loses its revolutionary mystique; it can be equally a tool for regimes to fight-back, or to cling to power (Bell & Flock, 2011; Tomlinson, 2011). The dialectical process of analyzing the relationship of combined and uneven development in the social uses of technology is apparent in Edward Tenner’s work on ‘unintended consequences’ (WW Newsletter, 2011). Rather than seeing the Arab Spring as a direct result of a technologically determined path of historical development, we should perhaps characterize it as an unintended consequence of the historical dialectic tensions between technological development within the political economy of Egypt and the region and the social trajectory of the Middle East for the past 30 to 50 years (which is also the approximate time-scale of the regimes that have been, or are in the process of being overthrown). Seen in this light, determinism in the media coverage of the Arab Spring, represents one of the many paradoxes of technology (Mick & Fournier, 1998). One paradox is that the important history of class struggle in Egypt – for so long hidden from the gaze of the world by a mis-informing media – has now been pushed onto the front pages and is leading global news bulletins. For now, technological determinism has shown it is no match for the more powerful story of the streets and squares of Cairo and other centres of revolution across the Middle East.

The implication is, of course, that journalists and media scholars will need to learn more about the social causes of revolution and upheaval if they are to help adequately explain the trajectory of the world in these critical times. At the same time, a more thorough examination of both technological determinism and technological constructivism within journalistic praxis and news discourse will shed more light on this issue.

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About the author

Martin Hirst – Deakin University, Australia

News Media (Self regulation) Bill 2013

There is one simple purpose to this legislation and it is not to stifle freedom of the press. Instead this bill simply creates the conditions under which the Public Interest Media Advocate (PIMA) can declare that an organisation is a “news media self-regulation body”.

The definition of a self-regulator rests on one condition: the body must have a self-regulation scheme that is binding on members.

The only other function of this bill is to remove a news organisation’s exemption from some provisions of the Privacy Act 1988 if it is not a member of a self-regulatory body recognised by the media advocate.

The effective clause of the Privacy Act is 7B(4) and as it currently stands, a news media organisation is only exempt from some Privacy Act provisions if it adheres to public standards. This new bill changes nothing in that regard.

That is it; that is all this legislation is aimed to do. The self-regulation scheme proposed in the bill is no tougher than the current rules and membership requirements of the Australian Press Council.

Business as usual for the Press Council

Under the terms of self-regulation bill, the self-regulatory bodies will still devise their own standards; investigate breaches, handle complaints and apply sanctions. The “remedial direction” available to the self-regulatory body (not to the PIMA) is either an apology or a correction. That is exactly as it is now.

Contrary to the screams of impending doom and horror from the news media bosses and their hired guns, this legislation does not imply any form of censorship over content.

The PIMA’s advocacy role is limited to assessing the effectiveness of any proposed self-regulation scheme and standards.

Even this has caused hand-wringing and weasel words from the news media. Why?

The legislation mentions “community standards”, which are notoriously hard to define. However, at the end of the day, common sense tells us that community standards are fairly relaxed and comfortable.

Whatever they are at any given time is surely a measure of the community’s tolerance and limits of what is acceptable. Why should this frighten the horses?

The PIMA’s ability to suspend an organisation – that is to revoke its status under the legislation – is also limited to circumstances that currently apply anyway to the Australian Press Council: failure to pay registration fees, or failure to comply with a remedial direction.

It is important to remember that remedial orders are not given by the advocate, but by the self-regulatory body. This is no different from the situation today.

Any move by the PIMA to disallow a media self-regulation body must only follow a period of full consultation; it is not the sword of Damocles we’re talking about here.

There is also an important clause in the legislation that signals clearly that the intent is not to shut down news media hostile to the current, or any subsequent government:

14: Implied freedom of political communication This Act does not apply to the extent (if any) that it would infringe any constitutional doctrine of implied freedom of political communication.

Finally, the lifespan of the legislation (if passed this week) is limited to three years; after which time it is to be reviewed.

Public Interest Media Advocate Bill 2013

The second piece of legislation being debated this week is the bill to establish the public interest media advocate (PIMA).

The advocate has a limited range of functions: (a) such functions as are conferred on the PIMA by: (i) the Broadcasting Services Act 1992; or (ii) the News Media (Self regulation) Act 2013; (b) to do anything incidental to or conducive to the performance of those functions.

The advocate will be appointed after a period of consultation with the industry and other stakeholders. It will only be a part-time position so will not really be able to interfere very much with anything.

There is no provision for the PIMA to be told what to do by governments and there is no provision for a large bureaucracy to be built around the office. The advocate will not be a media ‘tsar’ and there won’t be any gulags for miscreant columnists.

In spite of the mild language in the 5,500 words contained in both of these bills at least 20 times that amount have been written to bolster claims that this is an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (Convergence Review and Other Measures) Bill 2013

This bill amends other legislation to bring it into line with the realities of convergence and to overcome the techno-legal time-gap that exists between analogue laws and digital technologies.

The key pieces of legislation affected are the Broadcasting Services Act 1992; the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983 and the Special Broadcasting Service Act 1991.

The effect of the changes are: • to ensure there are no more free-to-air network licenses granted; effectively limiting Australia to three FTV networks (7,9,10) • to slightly increase the Australian content quota required for free-to-air television networks’ • to bring the digital services of the ABC and the SBS into the coverage of their respective Charters.

The Australian content quota will increase over the next three years to be not less than 1460 hours per year in 2015.

Broadcasting Legislation Amendment (News Media Diversity) Bill 2013

It is this legislation that perhaps most upsets the bosses at News Limited because a major implication of this bill is that it will bring subscription television services and platforms – such as Sky News and Foxtel – under the auspices of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992.

Other amendments to the BSA 1992 include adding digital services to sections of the act where previously only newspapers were mentioned. This is another simple tidy up from analogue to digital realities.

This bill also introduces the PIMA and relates it to ACMA by allowing ACMA to disclose material to the advocate if it would assist her/him to carry out specified duties. This is a standard boilerplate clause in legislation of this type as it merely allows the machinery of the bureaucracy to mesh cogs effectively. It does not represent a draconian increase in powers. However, there are other changes to the ACMA legislation as a consequence of the new bill.

A new clause has been added to the Objectives of the Broadcast Services Act 1992 and it is this that is upsetting the media bosses:

(d) to encourage diversity in control of the more influential sources of news and current affairs;

This specifically references news and current affairs providers for the first time. However, it is not, as far as I can tell, the thin end of the wedge that will lead to government control or censorship of news and current affairs.

The real angst generated by this legislation is the joining up of the ACMA and BSA acts with the new office of Public Interest Media Advocate. This occurs in a new Part 5A of the 2013 bill that amends ACMA 2005. Helpfully, the bill provides the following simplified summary of the intentions of the new section.

This Part prohibits a transaction that results in a person becoming the controller of a registered news media voice unless the Public Interest Media Advocate has approved the change of control.

• The Public Interest Media Advocate must not approve a change of control unless:

(a) the change of control will not result in a substantial lessening of diversity of control of registered news media voices; or
(b) the change of control is likely to result in a benefit to the public, and that benefit outweighs the detriment to the public constituted by any lessening of diversity of control of registered news media voices that would result from the change of control.

• Each of the following is a news media voice:
(a) a commercial television broadcasting service that provides news or current affairs programs;
(b) a commercial radio broadcasting service that provides news or current affairs programs;
(c) a subscription television service that provides news or current affairs programs;
(d) a subscription television platform;
(e) a print publication that has news or current affairs content;
(f) an online service that has news or current affairs content.

• A registered news media voice is a news media voice that has been registered in the Register of News Media Voices.

• A news media voice will be registered if the size of its audience or customer base exceeds 30% of the average metropolitan commercial television evening news audience.

This is the new set of rules that gives the PIMA its power to intervene in the transfer of ownership of significant ‘news media voices’in the Australian market. The figure of 30 per cent of the average evening news audience is an interesting choice.

Channel 10, for example, has an average evening news viewing audience nationally of about 690,000. So on that basis a news voice that attracts anything over about 200,000 readers, viewers or unique visits. On that calculation, if the number is based on audited circulation figures, The Australian might not qualify, its audited circulation is less than 150,000 per day. Nor would the Fairfax Media newspapers either. Only the Melbourne Herald-Sun has a strong Monday to Friday circulation of around 450,000 per day. It really only makes sense if the calculation is done on readership.

Minister Conroy said that the cut-off point would be a media organisation about the size of the Australian Financial Review. However, the legislation already contains a list of registered news voices and all the major Australian news media outlets on AM (talkback) radio, television and in print are listed. The only exception is the Northern Territory News.

Perhaps the NT News is too small, or in the view of the drafting bureaucrats, its contents don’t qualify as news.

Controversial ‘control events’

The news media diversity bill is perhaps the most controversial for the current media owners because it introduces a ‘control event’ which triggers PIMA action under the news media diversity provisions. If a person effectively controls a news media voice and is likely to be in a situation to control another registered news media voice then the PIMA can look at that situation.

If the transaction that triggers the control event is not approved by the media advocate, the legislation creates an offence with a 20,000 point penalty, which equates to a fine of $3.4 million dollars.

You can see why this has got the attention of Kerry Stokes, Kim Williams and Greg Hywood; all of whom have been in Canberra to lobby various parliamentary committees. It is here where the much-discussed ‘public interest’ test becomes relevant in Clause 78CB(3).

Under this provision, the PIMA can approve the control event transaction if there is no lessening of diversity in the control of registered news media voices, or if there is a nett benefit to the public interest. There will be an opportunity for public submissions to the PIMA in relation to any determination of a control event.

It is this section of the new legislation (assuming it survives this week) that is likely to be tested first. There are already rumours of possible mergers involving the big networks and smaller regional players in the television market which will trigger control events.

And to ensure that no transactions occur to circumvent the legislation there is a reverse grandfathering clause that allows the PIMA and ACMA to act on control events that might happen before the legislation is gazetted. The big media companies that supply news content are also upset that aggregaters like Google are not caught within the legislation too.

Television Licence Fees Amendment Bill 2013

The purpose of this bill is to provide a financial sweetner to the commercial television networks by reducing their licence fees by upto 50 per cent. It has no other purpose.

There are also consequential amendments within the new raft of bills. Most importantly to alter the Privacy Act 1988 to reference the News Media (Self-regulation) Act 2013. This is in relation to exemptions for properly regulated news media organisations.

These bills might be clumsy, or unnecessary, and it is true that the whole exercise of introducing media reform has been badly handled by Minister Conroy and Julia Gillard, however, there is no fundamental threat to Rupert Murdoch or anyone else in this legislation. Nor is there, as far as I can tell, any reason to think that freedom of the press (for what it is worth) is going to be lessened.

Given the limited changes that these bills give effect to, it is valid to wonder why they have even been drafted in the first place.

Australian print and online news organisations will continue to be self-regulated through voluntary membership of a press standards body, which is likely to be the tame-cat and toothless Australian Press Council.

The announced reforms are the government’s official response to the Convergence Review and Finkelstein Inquiry into the media in Australia. But the proposals are watered down, wishy-washy and look like something the cat dragged in.

Watered down Finkelstein is no change

Among the proposals is the creation of Public Interest Media Advocate, who would oversee mergers and acquisitions of news organisations, and a new Public Interest Test to ensure that diversity of voices is considered when mergers take place.

Minister for Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, said news organisations that join up to a press standards body will be rewarded with a special exemption from certain sections of the Privacy Act.

A press release issued by Senator Conroy’s office said the reforms include:

• A press standards model which ensures strong self-regulation of the print and online news media.
• The introduction of a Public Interest Test to ensure diversity considerations are taken into account for nationally significant media mergers and acquisitions.
• Modernising the ABC and SBS charters to reflect their online and digital activities.
• Supporting community television services following digital switchover by providing them a permanent allocation of a portion of Channel A.
• Making permanent the 50% reduction in the licence fees paid by commercial television broadcasters, conditional on the broadcast of an additional 1490 hours of Australian content by 2015.

The government will also convene a new parliamentary committee to consider abolition of the 75% reach rule, which puts limits on the proportion of the population one network can reach.

My initial response is that, as a package of changes supposed to lift the standards of Australian journalism it’s appalling and ridiculously weak.

Calling for stronger self-regulation is an oxymoron, it doesn’t make sense. Either you have self-regulation or you don’t. How is this different from what the Australian Press Council is already doing?

On the exemption from the privacy legislation – these news organisation already get that. Bona fide news gathering is already exempt from some provisions of the Privacy Act, so it’s not like this is hugely new.

One thing that could happen would be if there is tighter regulation in the form of a mandated body that news organisations have to join is that bloggers and freelancers and citizen journalists would most likely not able to prove they are legitimate news gatherers. If you are not employed by one of the big news organisations, you would no longer be covered by that exemption from the Privacy Act.

At the moment, the exemption is for legitimate news-gathering activities and there is no specification that it only applies to professional journalists.

On the SBS and ABC charters, let’s see what they come up with;though they already have internal policies to deal with social media.

The allocation of a permanent channel for community television is fantastic. It’s 20 years overdue. We already have some community stations but they are not permanent. They have been temporary licenses since they started in the 70s.

There is very little of Finkelstein in here and that was always going to be the case. Anything Finkelstein has in his initial recommendations got watered down by the Convergence Review anyway.

Finkelstein was calling for a super press council that was publicly funded and for legislation to beef-up the Press Council’s standards.

The abolition of the 75% rule has been on the cards for a long time anyway. It is meaningless to argue that broadcast organisations should only be able to cover 3/4 of the national market. Channel Nine in Darwin, Perth, Brisbane or Oodnadatta is still Channel Nine and now that there is streaming and view-on-demand from the Internet, there is saturation coverage.

this package is really not much more than a slight rewarming of what exists with a bit of tinkering around the edges. I agree with Terry Flew’s analysis on The Conversation. Nothing here addresses the fundamental disconnect–what I call the “techno-legal time-gap”–that has beset policy wonks for the past decade or so.

As Terry Flew says this is analogue thinking to deal with seemingly intractable digital problems. It is “media reform lite”.

This package of measures is hardly the “new policy and regulatory framework” the Convergence Review believed was the necessary response to technological and audience changes rendering the existing legislative framework redundant.

Yes, the new policy recommends changes to media ownership, news standards, public broadcasting and Australian and local content that are largely with the convergence review recommendations, but these still largely sit within the established media “silos” of print, broadcasting and online media.

More radical proposals, such as setting content standards for Google, or eliminating broadcasting licences altogether, are clearly off the agenda.

Terry Flew, “Low-key Conroy proposals are media reform lite”, The Conversation 13 March, 2013

A public interest test? Really?

The public interest, simply defined, is the maintenance of the general social welfare of the population. There is general agreement that the public interest is operationalized as an alignment of social policy with ‘a common concern among citizens in the management and affairs of local, state, and national government’ (West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, 2008).

The concept of a public interest is an aspect of the social contract philosophy articulated in the 18^th century by the great bourgeois thinkers of the day. The principle also relies on an argument about the ‘greater good’, ‘in essence asking that we put aside individual differences for the benefit of the best outcome’ (Sjovaag, 2010, p. 879).

Journalists and editors make a strong claim to be representative of the public interest and acting for the greater good in almost everything they do; it is particularly effective in the pursuit of corruption or malpractice by government and business leaders. But how do journalists and editors know what is in the public’s interest? It is not that easy to pin down the public interest in practice. The fourth estate role of the press requires it to be a critical (but not too critical) and loyal opposition.

This tension is well expressed in relation to government-funded broadcasters like the BBC, but it is evident in all major news media outlets. The ideology of professionalism requires the public interest to be defined through the eyes of the State. In this regard, the news media’s critical role is constrained by the ideological need for it to be esteemed as ‘a bulwark of the national interest’ and ‘a voice of the established political and social order’ (Frost, Hutchings, Miazhavich, & Nickels, 2011, p. 224).

Daniel Hallin (1989) has provided one of the most robust critiques of media complicity in substituting State and national interest for a broader definition of the public. He called it the sphere of consensus and limited controversy. There are core ideological beliefs that lie beyond challenge and then an agreed radius of allowable criticism that should never extend to an attack on the consensus ideals.

The Overton Window

Hallin’s idea is resurfacing today, but in some discussions it is referred to as the ‘Overton Window’ after the political scientist James Overton who first described it. Definitions of the Overton Window are remarkably similar to Hallin’s spheres of consensus and limited controversy:

for any political issue, there’s a range of socially acceptable positions that’s narrower than the range of possible positions. Positions within the Overton window are seen as mainstream and uncontroversial, while those outside it are viewed as shocking, upsetting, and dangerously radical. (Lee, 2011)

Daniel Hallin defines consensus and limited controversy in very similar terms:

Within this [consensus] region journalists do not feel compelled to offer competing views [and] play an essentially conservative, legitimizing role…Beyond [consensus] lies what can be called the sphere of legitimate controversy…where objective journalism reigns supreme…Beyond [legitimate controversy] lies those political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of the society reject as unworthy of being heard. (Hallin, 1994, pp. 53-54)

The public interest is problematic, not just because it is linked to the much narrower State interest of the ruling elites; it is problematic because defining exactly what ‘the public’ is has never been easy. In fact it is the media that helps to define the public in ways that suit its own needs, not necessarily those of the public interest.

The ‘public’ is often reduced to ‘an inchoate mass’ in media representation (Coleman & Ross, 2010, p. 5); alternatively, the public interest is assumed to be the same as the interest of the consumer in the marketplace and not constructed around the real social relations that actually link individuals into communities of interest.

The public is defined as if it is monolithic when clearly it is not; it is measured by opinion polls and surveys that attempt to generalise about the public mood. Ultimately it is ideologically constructed to marginalise dissident voices.

The working class is the real public interest

In a capitalist world this means individuals or groups who do not measure up to the normative standards arrived at through polling techniques or media construction can be ‘justifiably marginalised and excluded’ from public discussion (Coleman & Ross, 2010, p. 31). The public interest is not really knowable to most journalists; rather its existence is assumed and then reified into a normative ideological construct that justifies the status quo.

The real public interest-which will NEVER be realised in terms of this media reform package-is that of the absolute majority of the population bound by something they have in common.

It is the economic and social interests of the working class, formed on the basis of their common position as exploited labour within capitalist relations of production.

But that is the kind of revolutionary talk that sends the likes of Chris Mitchell and Andrew Bolt into fits of apoplexy.

Glad to be of service fellas.

Coleman, S., & Ross, K. (2010). The public and the media: “Them” and “Us” in media discourse. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Frost, C., Hutchings, S., Miazhavich, G., & Nickels, H. (2011). Between impartiality and ideology: the BBC’s paradoxical remit and the case of Islam-related television news. Journalism Studies, 12(2), 221-238. doi: 10.1080/1461670X.2010.507934

Hallin, D. C. (1989). The “uncensord war”: The media and Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hallin, D. C. (1994). We keep America on top of the world. London; New York: Routledge.

Lee, A. (2011). Moving the Overton Window.  Retrieved from http://bigthink.com/daylight-atheism/moving-the-overton-window

Sjovaag, H. (2010). The reciprocity of journalism’s social contract: The political-philosophical foundations of journalistic ideology. Journalism Studies, 11(6874-888). doi: 10.1080/14616701003644044

West’s Encyclopedia of American Law. (Ed.) (2008).

The re-launch of The Age as a compact was never about being the biggest selling newspaper in Melbourne. There’s no way The Age can compete with the genuinely tabloid Herald Sun.

The Herald Sun is a modern giant among Australian newspapers: its audited Monday to Saturday circulation hovers around the 450,000 mark. That adds up to more than a million readers every weekday.

The Age sells roughly one-third: Monday to Friday (157,000) and about half (227,000) on Saturday. Readership is about half too: 566,000 Monday—Friday and 720,000 on Saturdays, according to Audit Bureau figures.

So the driver of this week’s move was re-attaching Age readers who’ve let their subscription lapse, or who hated the unwieldy broadsheet.

Value for money journalism? Not for Ted it’s not

Fairfax management insist the papers will hold to broadsheet values and resist “tabloid” comparisons. The change of size is not a shift downmarket, says editorial director Garry Linnell.

However, to make the change work in its favour, Fairfax needs a boost from the switchover and this means competing with Murdoch papers in both Sydney and Melbourne.

Luckily, or perhaps with a hint of “intelligent design” behind it, the re-launch of The Age coincided with a big Herald Sun splash: “SECRET TAPES BOMBSHELL”.

Monday was a big news day in Melbourne and the Herald Sun scoop certainly out-shone a rather lacklustre front-page on The Age.

Tabloid Gold

The Victorian Premier, Ted Baillieu, was caught in the soft light of late-night office politics. One of the Premier’s senior staff, Tony Nutt and Deputy Premier Peter Ryan were implicated in a scandal. This was tabloid gold for the Herald Sun and a great scoop. On Tuesday, Baillieu tried to ride out the storm; but his inept handling of the tapes affair was to be a disaster.

The Age was playing catch-up and had a reasonable scoop of its own on Tuesday, broadly implicating some of the key players in the week’s unfolding Liberal Party dramas. Potential future leader, Matthew Guy, was implicated in a cash-for-comment style fund-raising scheme.

Despite good work by Baker and McKenzie, Tuesday belonged to the Herald Sun; just for the front page headline alone: “PREMIER’S MEN PROBED”.

The Hun also showed why it is the nation’s top-selling tabloid. It is perhaps (along with its Sydney stablemate, The Telegraph) the closest we have to the infamous British red-tops. The “PROBED” headline says it all.

This week, The Age has certainly done a good job with the 20 or so news pages at the front of the book. In this it is competing with the Herald Sun very well. With more international news and a daily Arts news section, The Age will give some readers what they are looking for.

The new format also seems to be working with newspaper buyers too. There’s been quiet praise for the compact, particularly among commuters.

Bikie wars conquer hump day blues

Wednesday’s comparison is interesting because the Herald Sun chose to go with a sure-fire winner’: a crime and gang violence yarn. “Laura Norder” got a big run with Vicpol’s announcement that it was launching a crackdown on bikie gangs and their criminal connections.

The Hun’s not-so-subtle combination of fear and “Ahh”-factor stories left state politics off the front page.

In contrast, The Age stayed on the Baillieu story with the telling headline “Baillieu ‘one stuff-up’ from leadership fight”.

But the headline gives away one flaw with The Age’s new-look front page. It’s too long and the font is too small.

To continue selling well to buyers who’ve come back or are picking it up out of curiosity, The Age needs to brighten its front page and give more prominence to a good strong headline.

One-term Ted the real victim this week

It was the dramatic events of Wednesday evening that brought the Herald Sun and The Age closer than they had been in a long time. Premier Baillieu is the biggest loser out of this week’s newspaper battles.

Both newsrooms had about six hours to put together coverage for Thursday morning. I’d say both did a reasonable job. Liberal sources were not going on the record and the party room has so far maintained solidarity. This meant that there was little new material to go on.

Neither paper gained much advantage from Wednesday night. On Thursday The Age had seven pages of news coverage of Baillieu; the Hun had nine, if you count Andrew Bolt’s column.

The ‘bikie war’ was now deep into the newsbook in both papers.

Ted Baillieu’s resignation leveled the playing field in Melbourne this week; though the Herald Sun can rightly claim the Premier’s scalp.

Friday’s papers were evenly matched again with their follow-ups. Rogue MP Geoff Shaw was front page news. It was his defection from the Liberal party room that triggered Baillieu’s resignation. Now it seems he wants some sweetners before he agrees to support the new Premier Dennis Napthine.

All in all, The Age can be pleased with its performance this week. It may not have won many battles of the front page, but it seems that the compact may be popular. The question is: Can Fairfax Media sustain its numbers in coming weeks and months?

Lose the battle, win the war?

Win or lose the headline wars this week, The Age cannot be complacent. The real strategy behind the move to compact formats for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald is three-fold and it’s all about money.

The broadsheet format simply became too expensive. Paper costs, printing costs, delivery all added up to a giant hole in the Fairfax bottom line.

The newsrooms were expensive to run too. The recent round of redundancies will eventually help cut long-term costs, but the short-term hit to both finances (payouts can be costly) and to productivity and morale in the newsroom will take their toll.

The company is also rebranding itself; it’s not just about newspapers with digital bells and whistles. Fairfax Media sees itself as a multiplatform digital information and entertainment provider.

Fairfax wants its news operation be a whole-of-market value proposition for advertisers and to do that it has to appeal to eyeballs in hardcopy and across as many screens as possible.

An exclusive sport story can then appear in both Sydney and Melbourne papers with minimum fuss and effort.

The rebranding of Fairfax Media is also about the future company paywall. It has already signaled this is coming in the not too distant future.

The paywall is the real game

The re-launch of The Age and SMH as compacts is part of a digital strategy. The papers will never compete with their Murdoch cousins in terms of street sales and on-the-paper eyeballs.

Instead, the purpose has to be to turn the casual and returning readers of the hard-copy into subscribers. That way, for the time being at least, there is a guaranteed rate of eyeballs across all Fairfax Media news properties. This will boost advertising revenues (it is hoped) and stave off the inevitable reduction in Monday-to-Friday newspaper coverage.

Another potential hurdle in Fairfax’s way is the imminent launch of The Guardian in Australia. The digital-only local edition is being backed by Graeme Wood, who also launched The Global Mail just over a year ago. The Guardian is a good brand and Woods says he aims to make money out of his investment. I’m sure some of it will come from Fairfax advertisers. That too, could be an interesting story.

Republished from The Conversation

Front page JPEGs from Australian Newspaper Front Pages

Though, having said that, it seems that The Age has picked up some new readers this week. At my newsagent’s pick-ups of The Age have more than doubled and are now equal to, or a bit better than the Herald-Sun. That could be an anomaly; I  live in an area where there is a likely majority of Age-types given the number of private schools, Merc, Audis and Beemers that litter the neighbourhood.

Today’s editions (Thursday, 7 March ) might even the score for the Fairfax Media title in the stand-out competiton; but the full page picture of Ted Baillieu on the Hun might attract the mouth-breathers who like big pictures more than big words.

At least today The Age has learned that headlines should be short and sweet, but four words is still twice as many as two. Yesterday (Wednesday) it was seven words in a two-deck headline for The Age and four words in three-decks for the Herald Sun; the Hun also uses a much bigger typeface.

The issue here is that The Age is trying very hard not to look like a tabloid; it wants to be a smaller broadsheet and so it’s front pages are text-heavy.

This is OK as long as Age readers are happy to have the key elements of one or two stories related on page one. The Herald Sun is sticking to its formula of fear and emotion being the main drivers of sales based on front page scans.

Wednesday’s Herald Sun front page was a classic in that genre it had heart-string plucking sick baby Linkin Fauser and warring bikies raising “Police fear public could be caught in cross fire”.

At least The Age was back in the game yesterday with its own Baillieu stuff up story detailing secret fund raisers and the ongoing fall-out from the secret tapes affair that ensnared the Premier and his deputy in a rolling maul that was getting closer to the business end of the pitch.

But The Age was always playing catch-up on the secret recordings story. It seems likely that the Herald Sun had been sitting on this little box of dynamite for a while and deliberately played it out as a spoiler to the launch of The Age as a comp-loid on Monday of this week.

That is certainly how a smart newspaper executive would play it, both to boost sales and to let the opposition know that life in the tabl-act trenches would be bloody and tough.

Today it just got bloodier and tougher because it is the first time this week that we can do a full comparison on coverage of the same story. It was an even playing surface for both titles; they heard about Baillieu’s resignation at the same time (about 7.25pm last night [Wednesday 6 March] and so had about six hours to get the story ready for this morning’s papers.

The Herald Sun is rightly claiming Baillieu’s scalp and today reveals how political editor James Campbell dropped the paper’s bomb on the Liberal party late on Sunday afternoon.

It was the Hun’s story; though as I mentioned, The Age did well on Wednesday to get its own exclusive angle of the rorting and alleged corrupt shenanigans at the core of Baillieu’s incompetency.

The Hun wins today’s battle because as the front page strapline says: “SECRET TAPES CLAIM PREMIER”.

Having said, that the depth of coverage was about the same in both mastheads and apart from the Hun’s own boasting about Sunday’s Spring street squirmfest neither paper had anything substantially new to add.

Friday’s papers will be telling. Does the Herald Sun have more dirt to dish?

If so it would be a hands down winner this week.

So for now, the Herald Sun gets to count coup, but The Age could have the last laugh.

If my newsagent is right and the new compact is walking out the door this week, then The Age may win the circulation battle.

The hope in the Fairfax Media offices along Spencer street is that novelty-factor sales turn into subscriptions.

There’s a long way to go yet before that score can be counted.

Yes, shocking, I know.

All of the other Australian dailies are tabloids. Or, if you prefer the Fairfax Media spin, most of the others are tabloids and two of them are ‘compacts.

The compacts are the former broadsheets: The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (published in Melbourne).

The last broadsheet to tabloid conversion was when Brisbane’s Courier-Mail made the switch in 2005. Today the Courier-Mail is indistinguishable from its News Limited stablemates in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. The Courier-Mail embraced the whole essence of becoming a tabloid. It has adopted the big double-deck headline technique with a large photo-splash and it has eagerly turned itself to tabloid news values as well.

But this is something that Fairfax Media says it won’t do; at least not yet. While it is clearly competing head-to-head with News Limited in Sydney and Melbourne, Fairfax honchos have said repeatedly–and whenever asked about it this week– that The Age and the SMH will not become tabloids, driven by celebrity, gossip and the sort of low-level moral-panic inducing campaigning journalism that characterises all the Murdoch mastheads.

So how will Fairfax compete with News Limited?

This week I am looking at the Melbourne papers The Age and the Herald Sun to do a daily comparison. Yesterday I looked only at the front pages; comparing layouts and lead stories. I reckon the Herald Sun won on Monday with a stronger story and a stronger sense of how a tabloid front page should work–bold, brash, shouty and colourful. The Age didn’t quite meet the challenge. Others called it “dull but worthy”.

Over the next few days I want to extend that analysis inside the two papers.

So far, Monday and Tuesday, I would score it pretty even in terms of page allocations. The Age had 20 news pages on Monday and 17 on Tuesday. The Herald Sun had 19 news pages on Monday and 20 on Tuesday. The Age had four pages of World News on both days and the Herald Sun had one on Monday and two World News pages on Tuesday, but it was nearly all devoted to the car crash in New York that killed a pregnant woman and her husband; the couple’s unborn baby dramatically survived.

The differences kick in towards the middle of the book–as you’d expect.

The Herald Sun had to find room for Andrew Bolt on Monday and and a gob-smackingly awful column by Susie O’Brien on Tuesday. Here’s a taste, remember it’s written in the first person plural ‘We’.

“IF YOU come to our country, you must abide by our laws.

It’s as simple as that.

There must be only one law for all Australians.

…we do not want people coming here and insisting their values and laws should take precedence over ours…

We do not think a self-styled Muslim Imam should be allowed to send offensive, derogatory and hurtful letters to the families of dead Diggers in the name of free speech.

And we do not think innocent children should attend rallies holding up signs with slogans such as: “Behead all those who insult the prophet”…

In fact some of the comments on my own Herald Sun blog show the hatred and antipathy towards Muslims…

Such views are regrettable, but they will continue to spread until Muslim leaders rein in members of their own communities.”

Extraordinary stuff. It is all ‘their’ fault because Islam is radical. Did Mr Wilders do a powerpoint for these assholes at News Limited. No thought at all that inflammatory rhetoric, like O’Brien’s own in this column, might also dog whistle some of the dribblejaws who infest the lower reaches of News Limited blogs and breed anti-Muslim racism.

But that’s a digression; we all know this vein of opinion runs deep in the News Limited trenches. I have exposed the groupthink before so there’s no need to re-hash it here. But if you’re looking for a reason not to buy the Herald Sun, then the vile columnists and reactionary editorial lines could be a good one.

Both the Herald Sun and The Age give us around four pages of news features, op-ed and columnists and about the same amount of business news–that is a lift-out section in both papers. Other specialist pages are also found in both mastheads: kids (Herald Sun, Tuesday); education (The Age, Tuesday). The Age will also keep its popular lift-out lifestyle sections.

The Age has an obits page, the Herald Sun a list of in memoria ads that kick of a still healthy classifieds section. The Age doesn’t do classifieds.

When too much sport is barely enough

The Herald Sun is fiercely competitive about its AFL coverage and that is the key–many people say–to the newspaper market in Melbourne.

It will be interesting if it can maintain that dominance now. On Monday the Herald Sun had 23 sport pages (including racing and results); on Tuesday it was a more modest 15 sport pages; that was all The Age could manage on Monday.

So footy-mad Melbournians (about 3.5 million people I believe) may well opt for the Herald Sun on Mondays once the AFL season proper gets under way. The Age had a meager 13 sports pages on Tuesday; I wonder if this clear athletic advantage for the Herald Sun could the the game-changer?

The daily winner on Tuesday was probably the Herald Sun again. The front page headline is the tipping point for me; it lets off a subtle double entendre that might bring tears to the eyes of sensitive blokes and it continues the story from Monday that has embroiled the Baillieu government in a shit fight.

PREMIER’S MEN PROBED

A winner every time; but The Age was also trying harder with a good front page exclusive that also targeted the Liberal government.

The real loser this week could be Ted Baillieu. It’s being suggested (at least in the Melbourne newspapers) that he might face a challenge to his leadership this week.

It would be a funny thing indeed if the Liberal premier was a casualty of the first 21st century newspaper war in Melbourne.

Even in this relatively affluent suburb, the newsagent expects to sell more Herald-Suns than copies of The Age.

The second comparison is also easy and perhaps explains the first: the Herald-Sun is $1.20 and The Age is $2.00. Price-conscious newspaper buyers will probably prefer the cheaper product.

The canny Herald-Sun buyer also gets more bang for their buck-twenty. The Murdoch ‘tabloid’ has 80 pages and the Fairfax Media ‘compact’ has 72, plus a 16 page insert that is numbered differently.

But how do you tell a tabloid from a compact? It’s not that easy because technically they are the same size: 30X40 centimetres.

Perhaps it’s in the layout and use of colour on the front page.

The Age has retained its signature royal blue, but the masthead is superimposed reverse in white on blue. The Herald-Sun uses a verdant green and a superimpose/reverse white, but it’s masthead block is deeper coming 14 centimetres down the page. The Age masthead is a shallow nine centimetres.

The Herald-Sun also uses its masthead to promote a “Superstar Footy DVD” give-away and incorporates action pics of two AFL stars who I don’t recognize, but who I’m sure would be very familiar to Aussie Rules fans.

As you would expect the Herald-Sun has a brighter more ‘tabloid’ front page with a bold headline in four centimeter solid capital letters: “SECRET TAPES BOMBSHELL”        . Over the top of that is a white-on-red banner also in heavy caps: “POLICE CRISIS ROCKS GOVERNMENT”. Just below the headline is a series of three ‘pointers’ also in block caps: “KEY STAFFER PAID $22,500”; “JOB HELP AT ODDS WITH PREMIER”; “BAILLIEU ADVISTER SLAMS DEJPUTY PREMIER”.

The kicker is that readers are invited to “Now listen to the recordings heraldsun.com.au”

The copy itself, across five columns is about 350 words and the story is continued across four pages (4-7) inside.

At the bottom of the page there’s three ‘skybox’ promos for contents inside the paper. This is a great tabloid front page and if you were buying the paper on its shelf-appeal, you would probably go for The Herald-Sun.

By contrast The Age seems dull, if worthy.

The lead story in The Age is also an ‘Exclusive’, by Melissa Fyfe about Black Saturday fires in 2009. The first 329 words of this story appear on page one and it’s continued inside on page six.

The headline is too long and lost against the dark blue-grey background of a fairly nondescript photograph: “New evidence challenges cause of Kilmore firestorm”. The typeface is a small modern serif – a sort of ‘squared-off’ Times-Roman.

There’s a second story on page one of The Age – so perhaps this represents more value to the casual buyer in the newsagent’s; but it means that the front page has a lot of type, about 200 words more than the Herald-Sun.

Interestingly The Age has an ad running across the bottom of the page, “launch partner” BMW with the two-deck tagline “STILL THE AGE STILL THE ULTIMATE”. It’s telling that this is the most exciting element on an otherwise bland page one.

You’d have to say the Herald-Sun won the battle of the front pages today. The story was stronger, more newsworthy and more timely; and it certainly made a bigger splash. ABC news and other Melbourne radio stations lead with it for most of the morning, but not so many picked up the ‘firestorm’ exclusive from The Age.

Fairfax Media’s group editorial manager for metro titles, Garry Linnell and Age editor-in-chief Andrew Holden are insisting that the shift to ‘compact’ will not reduce the broadsheet quality of The Age and they back this up by reference to focus groups and reader feedback.

The view from inside the Fairfax Media bunkers is that they can maintain quality and continue with longer stories than are usually found in a tabloid and so far, on day one, they have got the formula right. But the design will have to lift it is to compete with the more experienced Herald-Sun.

Not that Fairfax isn’t without some history with the tabloid—ahem, ‘compact’ formula. The Financial Review’s been doing it for years, but it has a specialist audience and puts more stories on the front page.

If you can make any assessment based on the opinions of talkback callers then the new-look The Age has won some fans—and new readers—today. At least among it’s target demographic—people who listen to Jon Faine on the ABC. Faine had Andrew Holden in the studio this morning and he did a good job of defending the changes.

Most of the call-ins who were on air while I was listening liked the smaller size. The common thread was that it made reading The Age a little easier.

There was some disquiet about the lack of sections—apparently this makes it harder to share the paper with your morning bed partner; but the response was positive.

One listener made a very interesting comment. She didn’t mind paying $2.00 for quality journalism and Holden agreed. He said of his opposition if you buy one dollar’s worth of greasy chips or two dollars; you still get greasy chips.

An interesting digression on the ‘chip wrapper’ view of yesterday’s newspaper; and a signal, perhaps, that Fairfax Media is willing to go toe-to-toe with News Limited.

Are we in for an old-fashioned newspaper war in Melbourne and Sydney? Time will tell.

The advertising slogan that Fairfax has adopted continues this theme: ‘easier to pick up, harder to put down’. It’s early days yet and perhaps we should not rush to judgment on the first day, but it is hard not to judge a book by its cover when standing in the news agency queue.

That’s not such bad news if the stock is actually worth something. But when the fall is from 80 cents to less than 40 cents, it’s a calamity piled onto a disaster.

However, you wouldn’t necessarily get that impression from the soothing opening remarks by chairman Roger Corbett, who told the small Melbourne audience of shareholders that despite the ravages of an “annus horribilis”, Fairfax Media is in good shape and in good hands.

That’s like Monty Python’s black knight claiming “it’s only a flesh wound” as he bleeds out, limbless on the forest floor.

Over the falls in a barrel

Corbett could make going over the falls in a barrel sound as safe and delightful as a pleasure cruise. Fairfax chief executive Greg Hywood followed up with a calm and lucid explanation of the new digital strategy.

But some shareholders were squirming as Hywood outlined a strategy of “structural change” that is designed to strip $235 million out of Fairfax’s costs, including cutting staffing levels by an average of 20% across the board and by 30% in the key metropolitan mastheads.

Hywood also reminded Fairfax investors that the strategy means closing two printing plants, moving to smaller compact formats and installing a metered paywall across online news assets.

Hywood’s performance resembled the classic serene swan gliding across a pond. What the swan keeps hidden is the frantic paddling that powers its smooth progress.

After listening to these opening speeches, you might think that the changes underway at Fairfax are the result of good business decision-making and represent a “steady as she goes” approach.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Fairfax Media is in financial meltdown. To put this into perspective, the share price has fallen by more than 90% since October 2007. The most recent high point was now more than a decade ago; the share price was $6.10 in March 2000. Fairfax shares have not been above $5.00 since April 2007 and since October 2008 they have not gone above $1.99. It’s been all downhill from the now deliriously good-looking $1.79 per share in March 2010.

The shareholders, the board, and the staff must miss those fabled “rivers of gold” that came with a near monopoly on classified advertising in the once-proud Fairfax newspapers.

What has gone so horribly wrong?

Well for a start, we stopped reading newspapers in huge numbers, and we don’t advertise in the classifieds much anymore. It also doesn’t look like Fairfax Media’s digital strategy is doing the company much short-term good either.

Print circulation is down in the latest figures available. Average weekly circulation for the SMH and The Age is down about 30,000 (or 15%). Where a comparison is possible with 2011, for example in tablet downloads and digital unique views, the numbers are moving in the right direction. Both show a big increase over last year, but in terms of net daily average digital circulation, the numbers for both mastheads are less than half of the print edition.

If Fairfax is going to turn its fortunes around, the number of digital subscribers must grow rapidly. Whether or not the pay curtain strategy that comes into play next year will improve bottom line is still a known unknown.

But as of this week, there is no good news for Fairfax Media investors. All of the key performance indicators are trending down from the last financial year. Cash flows from trading were down 15%; underlying EBITDA down 16.7%; after-tax profit down 25% and revenue down 6%.

On the back of these numbers, the value of the company was written down by some $2 billion in August this year. In his Chairman’s report during the annual reporting season, Roger Corbett indicated that the board had little confidence that the business would improve in the near future.

With so much to discuss — and with Australia’s richest woman lurking in the wings — we might have expected today’s AGM to be a seething racket, as disgruntled shareholders got stuck into a board that seems to be in stasis and unable to move ahead.

Paying for “success”?

In the build up to the meeting the most contentious issue was thought to be item 7 on the busy agenda – the levels of executive remuneration.

The Australian Shareholders Association led a campaign to have executive pay levels (including of chairman Corbett) reined in, and the two proxy advisory firms were split on the issue.

The ASA argued that Corbett, Hywood and the board had “presided over substantial destruction of shareholder value” over the last financial year and therefore should not be substantially rewarded at the expense of investors.

“It appears that shareholders have suffered a lot more financial pain than Mr Corbett,” the ASA wrote in its voting intention notes.

That would certainly appear to be the case; Roger Corbett “earned” over $400,000 for his efforts as chairman, and chief executive Greg Hywood was paid more than $2.6 million for working hard on delivering “structural change” at Fairfax.

The elephant in the room

The ASA was represented at the AGM by Stephen Mayne, who managed to ask a couple of embarrassing questions of Roger Corbett, but at the end of the day, the weight of history was on the side of the institutions.

Mr Corbett would not make any admissions of mistakes in the past, nor would he engage with Mayne’s questions about the competence of the board. Other small shareholders also commented on the trashing of shareholder value.

Former Labor senator, Chris Schott, hit the nail on the head when he noted that “in purely capitalist terms”, the efforts of the board and chief executive had been “an appalling performance”.

Schott also made reference to the “elephant in the room”. What is Gina Rinehart, the company’s biggest shareholder, up to?

The mining baroness was not in attendance, unfortunately, so we will have to wait a little longer to learn what her intentions might be for Fairfax.

Her proxy was at the meeting and voted against the executive pay motion leading to a rough 65 to 35 per cent split among shareholders.

The remuneration package was accepted, but under ASX rules it is a “first strike” against the board and signals that Rinehart is not a happy investor.

A slap on the wrist for Corbett, but surely, no more than a mere “scratch”.

You might vaguely recall the Finkelstein inquiry…yes, rings a faint bell?

It’s OK, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d forgotten most of the details.

What do you remember?

Oh yes. Finkelstein, isn’t he the guy who wants to throw the champions of the fourth estate in jail for telling the truth about the nasty and unloved Ju-Liar government?

That’s right, that’s exactly right. Here’s a free online subscription to the Heart of the Nation.

According to many ‘exclusive’ stories in The Australian newspaper, the sole aim of the Independent Media Inquiry was to impose heavy sanctions on the news media because the Gillard government doesn’t handle criticism very well.

Take this story from media commentator Mark Day on 26 April 2012. It is so important it got top of page 1 treatment;

A new regulatory body, funded by government and with powers to impose fines and sanctions on news outlets is a key proposal of the long-awaited Convergence Review of the emedia sector.

Unfortunately, this story was wrong, wrong wrong.

The Convergence Review rejected any idea that there should be any such government-funded organisation with anything like the powers suggested in this breathless lead par.

However, since this story was published it has become standard operating procedure to continue the lie.

It is only possible to conclude one of four things:

a) the budget is so tight at News Limited that as many words as possible have to be recycled on a daily basis which means that key phrases are used over and over again to save money

b) the koolaid in the LimitedNews bunkers is real tasty and no one’s yet cottoned on that it is the source of the medicine that results in obligatory groupthink

c) there is a deliberate mis-information campaign going on designed to fool Australians into demanding Stephen Conroy’s head on a platter.

d) we are being fed a bowl of chump bait with fear-causing additives so we don’t see what’s really going on.

It’s probably a combination of all four.

If we’re stirred up about bloody attacks on ‘our’ freedom of speech and we can be made to think that only The Australian and the Institute of Public Affairs stands between us and a Stalino-Fascist dictatorship of ‘befuddled’ Greens from the ‘tofu belt’ aided and abetted by the ‘soft-Left media’ then maybe we’ll be goaded into action.

Seriously, you couldn’t make this stuff up even if you called yourself Chris Mitchell and spent your days dreaming of a world in which you could wield the absolute power that corrupts absolutely.

News regulation: A compromise we had to have

It seems that Julia Gillard and the media gang of seven have buried their respective hatchets. I suppose Stephen Conroy’s head was as good a place as any.

The Prime Minister and the media moguls have reached a compromise on media regulation. It will be business as usual behind the starched-up fig leaf of tougher self-regulation.

“Tougher self-regulation.” This must be the oxymoron of the year and it would rate well in best cliché competitions too.

We should remind ourselves that tougher self-regulation is exactly what Ray Finkelstein wanted from the Independent Media Inquiry. He was unable to put it in his recommendations because at that time the gang of seven was against it.

A number of them and their deputies marched into the inquiry and gruffly demanded that it do nothing.

You might not remember this because it has conveniently fallen down the memory hole.

Who’s attacking free speech exactly?

In fact, it really is as if nothing’s happened. We’ve gone up the ladder and been taken back down in a Python-squeeze of over-excited adolescent group hysteria about a non-existent attack on free speech.

The Media Inquiry report does not make wholesale recommendations for the elimination of freedom of the press, or free speech. However, it recognizes the ethico-legal paradox at the core of the job it was asked to do and it attempts to find a balance. Fore example, paragraph 2.94 on page 53 notes the following:

This is the situation this Inquiry must address: how to accommodate the increasing and legitimate demand for press accountability, but to do so in a way that does not increase state power or inhibit the vigorous democratic role the press should play or undermine the key rationales for free speech and a free press.

Ray Finkelstein acknowledged this difficult balancing act and throughout the public hearings he made clear, time after time, his preference for a regime of self-regulation that would meet the demands for accountability, but ensure that the underlying market mechanisms were not disturbed.

Finkelstein was far from the anti-free speech monster the gang of seven portrayed him as. It is fair to say that the Media Inquiry itself suffered from bad press.

Claims from the likes of David Kemp and Andrew Bolt that the review’s recommendations amounted to a return to Fascism or Stalinism are no more than far-fetched scare tactics and perhaps themselves evidence that the news media should be more closely regulated and held to standards of accountability and public interest.

Since the release of the Finkelstein report in February there has been an ongoing campaign against its authors and its recommendations. This has been general across most media, but there can be no doubt it is led and coordinated by senior executives at News Limited.

The Australian newspaper in particular has been relentless in pursuit of its own corporate interests – no change to the status quo of soft self-regulation – and vehement in its opposition to any further means of accountability.

The Australian has published at least 12 editorials alongside innumerable opinion pieces and letters to the editor lambasting the Media Inquiry and anyone who might dare to suggest a bit of media regulation could actually be a good thing. I read The Australian every day and I can only recall one article, by the ABC’s Tom Morton, that defended the idea of regulation or more accountability.

This comment is typical of the editorial line taken in The Australian. It describes the proposed media regulator as:

a government-funded star chamber to pass judgment on newspapers and broadcasters… Journalists refusing to sacrifice their independence by bowing to its edicts would risk fines or imprisonment.

Free speech must be protected 24 July, 2012

I have read the Finkelstein report and I cannot find any reference to a recommendation that journalists be fined or sent to prison under proposed regulations. But that myth has been around for a while. As I mentioned at the start of this post, Mark Day had it in the first par of a front-page story about the Convergence Review on 26 April, before its report was even available.

In fact, the media inquiry report is actually heavily in favour of what it calls ‘enforced self-regulation’. On page 287 the report gives some detail about what this might mean:

11.33        Enforced self-regulation has the following benefits:

• It has no state involvement in appointing members of the regulatory body, in the setting of standards or in decisions regarding breach of standards, thus minimising the risk of potential attempts for state interference with, or control of, speech.
• It retains almost all the benefits of self-regulation, but ensures a more robust and effective operation of the system.
• Governmental funding of the statutory body (which is ordinarily what would follow) ensures adequacy of funding, which promotes independence from those it regulates.

What Finkelstein actually recommended is that the government help the news industry to put in place a better system of self-regulation. This is also what is proposed in the later and more influential Convergence Review report.

No one is recommending a government-controlled or appointed body to regulate the news media (you heard it here first).

No fines or penalties or jailing of journalists

We should not take likely the threat of journalists being arrested and  jailed. It is an all too regular occurrence in too many countries. Sometimes the fate of brave reporters who challenge authority is worse than imprisonment; it can be torture and even death. In places like Sri Lanka or Mexico disappearances are common as they are in many other nations with despotic and dictatorial governments.

But for the LimitedNews papers to suggest that it would happen in Australia if there a tiny bit more regulation of the news media is despicable and belittles the actions of those who have suffered this fate.

Crying ‘wolf’ under these circumstances – when any sensible editor at The Australian would know it is never going to happen – is cynical manipulation of public opinion. It is dog whistle politics designed to stir up the usual dribblejaws who guzzle down this nonsense because it feeds their own prejudice.

The Finkelstein report explicitly rejects the imposition of fines or other financial penalties at paragraph 11.76 (p.298).

There is no provision calling for the jailing of journalists, but in an effort to give the proposed co-regulatory body some ‘teeth’, Finkelstein did recommend remedies at law for refusal to comply with a Media Council determination. Here’s what the report says about this at paragraph 11.77 (p.298)

There should be a legal requirement that if a regulated media outlet refuses to comply with a News Media Council determination the News Media Council or the complainant should have the right to apply to a court of competent jurisdiction for an order compelling compliance. Any failure to comply with the court order should be a contempt of court and punishable in the usual way.

Now you’ve seen this, it is possible to draw the conclusion that The Australian has not been totally honest in its depiction of the Media Inquiry report. The idea that journalists would be fined or imprisoned for a breach of some outlandish code of practice is pure rubbish. The report is quite clear; it is media outlets and their managers who would be liable for any refusal to comply and that this refusal would be dealt with under the rule of law. The words ‘jail’, ‘prison’ and ‘gaol’ do not even appear in the report and the word ‘imprisonment’ only occurs in two quoted sections of other documents; one of them is the News Limited Code of Conduct (see p.432).

However, if you read The Australian it would be easy to think that Ray Finkelstein urged the power to fine or jail reporters be given to the proposed Media Council. News Limited CEO Kim Williams made this claim in a speech to the Adelaide Press Club on July 13. The speech was reproduced in the Weekend Australian under the misleading headline “Fining and jailing of journalists a threat in over-regulation”. Here’s what Williams said in his speech:

Under Finkelstin’s recommendation, journalists can be fined and even jailed, with no appeal rights…The super-regulator does not have to publish reasons for its decisions.

Well, this second part is misleading too. The report clearly says that any regulatory body would be expected to publish decisions, but that it could choose not to do so for legitimate privacy or other reasons.

However, don’t expect to see any kind of correction any time soon. Providing misleading implications about the Media Inquiry is stock-in-trade for Murdoch’s senior opinionators at The Australian.

Worse still, it is actually OK to go back and rewrite any inconvenient facts out of the record.

A column by Janet Albrechtsen published on 11 July this year, with the headline “Silencing critics in seven illiberal steps”, said this in the print version I have in my office:

Largely based on opinion surveys, [the Media Inquiry] recommended a new body, the News Media Council, to license the press and censor news reporting and political commentary. Under its recommendations, there would be no appeal from council findings. And those who disobey the council findings would face fines or imprisonment.

This is pretty damning. The Finkelstein report suggested licensing the press, censoring news and stifling political debate. That’s terrible, we should do something about it. I’m sure you’re as outraged as I am.

But wait, as always, there’s more to this story than at first appears.

On 16 July a small correction was published on page 2 under the headline “News Media Council”. The correction referred to the Albrechtsen article and noted “In fact the [Finkelsetin] report explicitly recommends against licensing of the press.”

Yes, it does and just in case you’re suspicious and think that The Australian was forced into this correction, here’s the clause in question:

11.26 Licensing the press should also be rejected, because in a democratic society the government should not be involved in controlling who should publish news. (P.285)

Never mind, the Albrechtsen story no longer carries this mistake – it was edited out. The online version of Albrechtsen’s column has been, umm, shall we say “amended”.

Largely based on opinion surveys, it recommended a new body, the News Media Council. The report explicitly recommends against licensing of the press both in the body of the text and in the executive summary. Nonetheless, the model set out in Chapter 11 of the Report effectively advocates a licensing system of the media by recommending a government-funded, super-regulator with the power to make non-appelable [sic] findings against news and commentary. And those who disobey the council findings would face fines or imprisonment.

Probably all fakes

There you are, all good and we can keep the original wrong imputation because we use “Nevertheless”. Our get out of jail free card.

Well, not quite. It is not a licensing system and the report quite clearly says that the regulatory body should set, maintain and supervise the standards itself, not government.

By the way, will the real Janet Albrechtsen please stand up.

The issue of appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal is also a red-herring spun to sound sinister by The Australian. The simple explanation is that complaints resolution should be a speedier process than it is now (sometimes taking months). Instead the report suggests review by the legal system (“judicial supervision”), which is exactly the case now (although the Press Council requires complainants to sign-away that right before it will hear their complaint).

So, what are we to make of the stories this week that the Prime Minister is seeking to appease the gang of seven and backdown on media regulation?

It was always going to happen. Stephen Conroy was only able to take a knife to a gun-fight at the High Noon saloon. The rest of the Labor cabinet is too spooked to back him up.

The gang of seven has the look and feel of a lynch mob and you don’t pick fights with blokes who buy ink by the tanker-load.

A version of this article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.