Opinion- 26 October 2006

 

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An Addict Turns on His Own Kind: Harry Robinson Calls the Media to Account

 
 

 

Two Articles of Faith:


1. No social flaw, no matter how bad, is all the fault of the media.

Credit: John Pritchett


2. There is no such thing as the media, sometimes pronounced 'Thuh Media.'

There is a big variety store in which many mediums or media may be found. Media workers range from slips of girls who write captions for pictures in girly mags to nattering nabobs who write sententious pieces for the op-ed pages of self important newspapers.

I am about to turn on my own and attack the nattering nabobs. For a half century I lived in and off media not because I had any illusions about my colleagues forming an elite but because I couldn't help myself. Working, if that's the word, in media was an addiction. I knew my fellow soldiers in the media army were lightweights, scroungers. But it didn't seem to matter.

Now it does matter. Our nation is at a crossroad. They -- the priests of op-ed -- are doing nothing to save us. For this revelation we can thank Senator Penny Wong. Her fellow senators had been droning on, reviving memories of my days as a junior reporter long, long ago. I had to take my turn to sit in the Senate press gallery and cover events on the floor. No event ever occurred. The greatest challenge was to stay awake because the Senate then was an exercise in futility. It has been overhauled and is now alive and occasionally a force. Senator Wong took a quick tour of public spending on education since 1995. While Europe, the UK and the US had increased their expenditure by 30% and 40%, the Australian spend had gone backwards by 7%.

Backwards.

Down.

The Wrong Way.

Of course the figure did not tell the whole story. It covered only money from public purses. You had to add HECS figures, fees paid from private pockets. Still, the arrow pointed the same way.

Backwards.

'Wow!' I thought naively. 'That will stir up the commentariat, the pundits, the nabobs of the OPED pages. They'll make the government throw in a few billion to enlighten our young.'

I scanned the papers for several days. I listened to Radio National. Watched the 7.30 Report. Watched Jenny Brockie on SBS's Insight.

Nothing. Not a word about our 7% slide. Even a naïve mind like mine could not miss the significance -- the media are as much to blame as the government.

Education gets only sporadic treatment in media. If there's a kafuffle about pre-school places, space and time are suddenly showered on how awful it is not to provide enough places and the government should do something. When claims are made about teaching history badly, media men and women see a chance to whip up indignation -- and increase their own audiences. In the same vein they hug themselves with delight when rows erupt over state and private schools. It's the stoush that counts. Likewise, donnybrooks over national curricula. The treatment is all for stirring argument, never for rational analysis.

Media's latest gambit is 'the skills shortage.' Here's grist to the audience building mill. Apprenticeships, jobs for mechanics, drivers, plumbers, fitters -- all essential to the nation but not by themselves. The skills shortage never extends to mathematicians, biologists, CAD architects and other such people.

There's media time and space for education as a way to the workshop floor but very little if any discussion of education as a continuum from infancy to post graduate years.

I am turning on the people of my old craft for failing to give more than skin-deep attention to the only force that can deflect our urgent threats -- climate change and the fast approaching energy crisis.

To appreciate the shallow opportunism of op-ed people you may tune to ABC News Radio at 11 am Sundays. They replay the audio of the panel discussion from Barrie Cassidy's Insiders telecast earlier on ABC TV. You hear without the distractions of pictures. With much excitement and energy the op-eds argue about adversarial party politics . Who tricked whom in question time, which faction has the upper hand in this or that dispute, what the prime minister really meant, whether the opposition has a chance. Pol-talk yes, enlightenment no.

For ten years we have had a philistine government and we have known it. For ten years we have been once more The Lucky Country. The boom in China's demand for our raw materials has carried our finances into prosperity. 'Good management,' crowed the government and never admitted it was also good luck. From time to time a few writers murmured that we ought to treasure the moment and think about our dangers. But they did not murmur loudly, certainly not loudly enough to put the brakes on a philistine government becoming an anti-intellectual government. One which encouraged Brendan Nelson to impoverish universities, one which caused public expenditure to slip backwards by 7% while the rest of the western world went ahead. You'd never have known it from 'thuh media.'

What could they have done? They could have analysed our intellectual and economic health rigorously and they could have written criticisms loud and clear.

The government has been nasty and the media has failed to call it out. Media must wear part of the blame, but only part. Some blame attaches to the education community itself.

 


Harry Robinson -- for 25 years worked in television journalism in Oz and the US and was for several years air media critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald.