Over the past two weeks, Crikey’s Spinning The Media series has quantified the extraordinary degree to which the Australian public relations industry has infiltrated the Australian media industry.

What the series doesn’t fully reveal, though, is how most arms of the popular media are dependent on, or even addicted to, the PR drip. Not just through the routine of press releases, briefings and media events, but far more insidiously through the drug that gives the mass media its biggest fix — celebrities.

For without a constant supply of celebrities — the full array from actors to sports stars to politicians to wannabes — most of the popular media simply would not function.

A revealing example of this cycle of dependency can be found in Saturday’s edition of Good Weekend, the high-circulation Sydney Morning Herald/Age inserted magazine.

kewell

Like so much carefully orchestrated PR-driven journalism these days, Good Weekend’s cover story — an “insider” interview/profile of Australian soccer star Harry Kewell on location in Turkey — is explicitly and only a publicity event. We know that because the writer, Greg Bearup, reveals the PR angle in the story. Explaining that Kewell’s big sponsorship deals with international companies such as Nike and Pepsi have all dropped off, now “the sponsorship deals are all Australian-focused,” writes Bearup, and as a result “Harry is being made available to the Australian media …”

Then at the foot of the story is another PR fingerprint: “Greg Bearup travelled to Istanbul courtesy of Politix” (the clothing company that sponsors Kewell).

The most surprising aspect of the Good Weekend-Kewell-access-for-publicity deal wasn’t that it happened — this kind of arrangement in various forms is the modus operandi of most media and PRs a lot of the time — but that the arrangement was made visible to readers who don’t usually get to see how journalism gets its fix.

This, then, is where we have arrived. At the junction in journalism where financially strapped media companies addicted to a constant supply line of celebrities intersect with public relations handlers dispensing little white packages containing someone or something to sell.

It’s not so much Spinning The Media as a mutually dependent media injection room.