Opinion- 26 October 2006 |
An Addict Turns on His Own Kind: Harry Robinson Calls the Media to Account |
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Two Articles of Faith:
1. No social flaw, no matter how bad, is all the fault of the media.
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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.