By Shaun Carney
DO YOU often experience a feeling of trepidation when you're watching something on TV or your computer of the ''please don't say what I think you're going to say'' variety? For me lately, it's come when contestants in MasterChef are about to refer to their ''food dream'', whatever that is.
I also experienced it recently when watching the YouTube footage of Bob Brown's stone-cold take-down of a bunch of Canberra press gallery journalists last week. The Greens leader made no effort to hide his disdain for several of the people questioning him, and the organisations for which they work.
One reporter, who works for Fairfax radio, appeared especially exercised, curiously, by Brown's attacks on the Murdoch newspapers, which the Tasmanian senator accused of doing a ''great disservice to the nation'' with their coverage of climate change policy. The reporter suggested a defence of any aggressive tactics towards the Greens with this question: ''On the carbon tax issue, don't you think that we're just reflecting what our audience wants?''
For me, that was the ''please don't say it'' moment, because it provided a window into a mentality that's prevalent within some parts of the modern media.
Brown, bemused, replied: ''Well, if you are, be proud and stand by it. Don't be defensive.''
Reporter: I'm not being defensive.
Brown: Well, it sounds to me like you are.
Reporter: Most polls would suggest that people don't want the carbon tax and that you are on the wrong foot with this issue.
Brown: Well, look …
Reporter: And across the media, not just the Murdoch press.
Then it got worse.
The same journalist asked why Brown was ''so obsessed with the whole issue''. Brown: ''I'm not obsessed with it.''
''You are!'', the reporter shot back at Brown.
Bob Brown can look after himself and it is the case that for too long, until last year, the Greens benefited from undeservedly benign treatment in the media.
The ABC's Chris Uhlmann was thoroughly justified in giving Brown a hard time in a recent interview over the consequences of the Greens' policies on the domestic coal industry; too many of the party's policies have been hidden in plain sight because the media has not worked hard enough at scrutinising them.
But the notion that media treatment of a politician or policy should be dependent on polling deserves short shrift. The logical conclusion is that if opinion polls suggest a policy is popular, it should go straight through to the keeper without media scrutiny and its proponents not questioned. This is not democracy, it is demagoguery.
As the idea takes hold that journalists should, above all, pander to their audiences, the dictates of news-media-as-entertainment become more intractable. There are good guys (polling well) and bad guys (polling poorly), and the need for conflict and disagreement grows.
This process can already be seen in a lot of modern political news, much of which involves one side saying something critical of the other.
The top three stories on the Tuesday morning bulletins on ABC radio this week, for example, hinged on the federal opposition attacking the government, which it does every day. Yesterday morning, a top story was Labor minister Anthony Albanese asserting that there were leadership tensions in the Liberal Party - as if he would know.
Predictable rhetoric today more easily finds itself near the top of the bulletins and on the front pages of papers than in the past, when news values more strongly favoured developments and occurrences. This is of a piece with the most corrosive development in political coverage in recent years - the aforementioned addiction to opinion polls, which are tricked up as news.
Many in the political media were correct to criticise the Labor government last year for its pathetic over-reliance on polling and focus group research in the lead-up to the 2010 election. But the media needs to own up to its own excessive dependence on polling, and the way it affects political coverage and debate, a point explored by the Australian journalist George Megalogenis in a Quarterly Essay published late last year.
It is also part of a wider critique of the Australian media by former Labor minister Lindsay Tanner in his book Sideshow, published last month. Tanner's book is not blemish-free. Because it was written quickly - with journalistic speed, you might say - it involves a few short cuts, and wide generalisations about journalists and their professional practices.
But it's very hard to argue with its central tenet, which is that although there is more political coverage nowadays, there is less attention to policy and greater focus on politics as reality show-type theatre. Tanner is also on strong ground in highlighting the modern media's habitual use of florid language to boost the impact of ho-hum stories - the ratcheting up of a problem into a crisis or a mistake into a debacle. Essentially, he diagnoses a relentless increase in the use of marketing tactics within everyday journalism.
The published reactions from some political reporters and commentators to Tanner's book has been reflexively negative - or, to borrow Bob Brown's term, defensive. Within some sections of the public, however, especially discomfited Labor supporters, there has been a ready embrace of the ''sideshow'' epithet to describe any journalism they don't like. They blame the media for federal Labor's woes.
The truth is that the government has become the target of a media feeding frenzy. The truth is also that this is a government that is very poor at communicating with voters, confused about its political mission and burdened by evidence of past incompetence, with a leadership group that on many days looks incapable of fighting its way out of a wet paper bag, underpinned by a distressingly low and disaffected party membership that has not advanced Labor's argument in the community since the 2007 election.
The media did not create that latter truth. It is possible to have a troubled government and an underperforming media simultaneously.
Shaun Carney is an Age associate editor.