My subscription to Crikey is about to lapse. Why should I bother renewing when the media is doing such a rotten job?
Ouch! I gather that you are not alone in asking this question — not just in reference to Crikey, but as part of growing skepticism about the value of the media in general.
Before answering, I should declare a “non-conflict” of interest, in that neither I nor The Ethics Centre receive any remuneration for writing this column (hint to editor).
So, for the time being, I can offer advice, on this matter, untinged by the stain of self-interest.
To begin, I think it helpful to distinguish between two types of media outlet, being: a) the type that primarily intends to entertain; and, b) the type that primarily aims to inform. I acknowledge that most media organisations are hybrids. Even so, I reckon that the distinction holds in ways that matter – not least in relation to your question.
In my opinion, the case for ongoing funding is best made for the second type of media organisation — those that publish the work of professional journalists.
This is because good journalism really matters in a democracy — and as things are today, there is no guarantee that it can survive without the broad support of citizens who are willing to pay for its preservation, either through taxes or subscriptions.
You will note that I have referred to “professional” journalism, to “good” journalism. In this I am trying to highlight the role played by those who are genuinely committed to the truth, no matter how hard it may be to define.
Professional journalists are supposed to subordinate self-interest (and the interests of their employer) in service of the truth.
They do so, in a democracy, not merely to hold the powerful to account. At least as important is their role in ensuring that citizens are able to make informed decisions when contributing to public debate, when voting, etc.
After all, the key to understanding democracy — as opposed to other forms of government — is that the ultimate source of authority lies in the “governed”, in the people.
There are plenty of people who claim the legitimacy of the professional journalist, but who cynically betray the ideals on which journalism is founded.
They do not care about the truth. They do not care to inform. They prefer to spout opinions rather than report facts. They prefer the interests of their employer to those of the public. They deliberately confuse what is “in the public interest” with “what the public is interested in”.
They become partisan ideological warriors and the mouthpieces for vested interests. They froth-at-the-mouth over pretend insults while abusing those they consider their opponents. They are willing to be admired for the glitter of celebrity rather than for the quality of their character.
So, I reckon, there’s the basis for your choice.
Where do you rate Crikey in terms of its intention? Is it primarily there to entertain or to inform? What do you think of its journalists? Are they committed to publishing the truth in the public interest? Or are they just there to earn a dollar, or to sparkle when their byline produces a headline?
If you think Crikey is a platform for professional journalism, then it (like similar publications) is deserving of support. If not, ask yourself if your money could buy better entertainment elsewhere.
PS: I should make it clear that there is nothing wrong with spending a dollar on pure entertainment — I just think that serious journalism makes a greater claim on our support.
Dr Simon Longstaff is executive director of The Ethics Centre. If you need support in addressing an issue or dilemma you can make an ethi-call appointment at: www.ethics.org.au.
Have a question for Simon? Send an email to boss@crikey.com.au and Crikey will select one question to which he will respond each Friday.
Two types of media outlet “a) the type that primarily intends to entertain; and, b) the type that primarily aims to inform”.
This suffers from the problem associated with most definitions: you only actually grasp their meaning once the implications become clear.
Try this. If journalism informs, it must by definition be stating occasionally facts or ideas that you may not agree with. If it reinforces your beliefs, then it is entertainment.
Terrific article and good on Crikey for running it.
I’ve often said that Crikey is far too cheap and I stand by that more than ever now. $200 a year is way under $1 per edition (especially given all the extras). I spend $3.40 a weekday on the SMH (min…often get the AFR and Tele, too) and around $12 on newspapers on the weekend. All of those I do still buy are rapidly becoming not remotely worth that – the SMH since the CH9 take-over is quickly becoming a Harvey Norman/Domain shell containing LNP talking points du jour garnished with tired old pap-prog Boomer grizzles on soft-lefty arty/social trivia. Regardless of content, I will very soon baulk at handing over the price of a cup of coffee purely for the total insult of having to throw away the wrap-around ad that’s now becoming routine (literally, ‘Fake News’….complete with whored-out Masthead and…well, fake front page news. How &*^%$# stupid are professional journalists, to do that to their only saleable asset, their own byline credibility??)
So as soon as the industry can sort out Print on Demand – at the local newsagent, say – for those who will still enjoy the occasional tactile treat of actual newsprint…then I will gladly stop buying print run newspapers altogether. And that will leave me the capacity to at least triple my online subscription firepower…whosever online content I end up buying.
What do I want from Crikey’s? Not much:
1. Honesty. I want to be confident that no matter how much I despise (or love) what this or that byline produces, they will never knowingly lie to me. Will never knowingly write something that they know is not true (or even merely disingenuous), and – crucially – also will always write something that they know is true, and should be written. No sins of omission. So far, mostly, so good with Crikey.
2. When Crikey turns out to be wrong – and it should be bold enough to be prepared to take a chance that they might turn out to be wrong, as stories evolve – they say so, as soon as they know they are wrong. News is dynamic. Facts do change. Stories…unfold. It’s just fine to get them wrong along the way, as long as it’s done in good faith, for good reason, and transparently.
3. Because one of the main collateral damages of this fear of ‘being wrong’ is…the journalistic cancer of ‘objectivity’. So let’s get something absolutely clear, Journalism, once and for all.
Objectivity. Is. Bullsh*t. There’s no such thing. None of you journalists are. Or ever have been. Ever. It’s an impossibility. Objectivity doesn’t exist. Unless you’re God. Are you God, Journalism? No? Good-o. That’s cleared that up, then. (*makes shorthand note, earnest tongue out: Objectivity…for God…alone…if believe in God…journo not God, so not objective…if don’t believe in God…objectivity doesn’t exist, so journo…also not objective….got it…COPY!*)
So…I never want Crikey to try to patronize me with the lie that Crikey is ‘objective’. This is the single most alienating, dishonest, epistemologically catastrophic contrivance of ‘professional journalism’. It’s killed your trade. Made us hate you. Dismiss you as ‘fake news’, unfairly and disastrously (for ourselves, most of all). The impact of ‘contrived objectivity’ is simply to act as a prophylactic on our shared engagement with the material world. Your ersatz ‘objectivity’ acts as a barrier. An excluding, demeaning, superior red velvet VIP fence on Public Discussion, manned by door bitch journalists. Here’s the pompous door-bitch journalist, running spoiler on entry to our precious shared VIP public spaces, going on and on and on about delivering ‘truth to power’ for us…without ever actually saying themselves whether they think something is true or not…loftily refereeing, imperious watchers on the balcony…too craven to put skin in the true/false fight, too self-impressed to notice that while they are stopping the rest of us from gettinginside the VIP area and protesting…behind them the VIP thugs, grubs, liars, grifters, bullies, chancers and creeps are getting away with murder. ‘Journalistic objectivity’ is the Usefully Idiotic Vocational Mirror into which (usually progressive, ‘serious’) journalists preen smugly, while rampant cheats run rampantly cheating riot all around them, scarcely believing their good fortune that journalism (apparently) has no appetite for calling them the rampant liars and cheaters they so obviously are.
Right. I hope that’s clear. No ersatz objectivity. We can handle you calling it as you see it. If it turns out tomorrow that you called it wrong, we can handle that, too.
4. Fierce recognition that content and the material world, not internal style or routine, drives output. If there’s nothing much to say…don’t say it. We don’t ‘have’ to get an edition every day. If there’s lots to say, say it in two editions. If Rundle gets on a roll and spits out 10000 words of pure genius, and it’s good genius (rather than sh*te genius), then…run a 10000 word piece. You can. If INQ hasn’t published in two weeks because its investigation isn’t done…so what. Publish when it’s ready. Publish only when, what and if something is worth publishing. You can. The message is now the message again. The medium has gone back to being its (non-gender specific) bitch.
5. Treat us like adults. This is probably the ‘professional media’s’ most fatal failing. Don’t info-condescend us. We can handle info-errors, getting things wrong, sloppy editing, different views, swear words, offense, even abuse…just don’t take the info-p**s. Especailyl not the meta-info-p*ss. Don’t treat us like we’re information idiots. Don’t treat us like information bloody children. Which includes, by the way, not information-tip-toing around us, for fear that we’ll cancel our subs. Treat us with information respect. (You know EXACTLY what that means.)
6. Most of all, this: treat yourselves with information respect. Take your journalistic vocation seriously. Believe in the sanctity – yes, the sanctity – of words. What they mean – unless they mean nothing, in which case despise them (as blasphemous). Their capacity to connect the abstract human realm to the material human realm. The vocational sanctity, the civic importance of journalism doing that: connecting the abstract and the material worlds for us, with…the integrity of your words.
Be ‘of the record’. No-one else will do it these days, including newspaper journalism, sadly. So…be ‘of the record’, Crikey. Be the ones who write the words that connect abstraction and materiality in a way that we can all agree on, at least enough to function as sustainable, sentient community. Write a story of Australia that everyone has some skin in…and something to lose, should we let it fall apart (as alas it seems to be just now in the US). And I’ll keep backing that with my wallet.
Cheers again, a great piece, SL (and gutsy meta-commission, ed).
Well, as so often with JR’s work, there’s nothing left to add! Why should anyone subscribe to Crikey? I’m too intimidated to say!
But I will report on why I let my sub expire about 18 months ago. Having too much time on my hands in the middle of the day (as is the case often in these Covid lockdown times too) I’d gotten into the habit of reading the comments on stories that interested me while eating lunch, often adding my two-bits worth. I don’t mind robust discussion, in fact I like it it when people put their POVs forcefully with passion and conviction – even when I strongly disagree. I like reading challenging material and I’m no “snowflake.” However I don’t like ad hominen abuse, and in one case I was subject to a savage and prolonged onslaught which consisted of about a dozen pieces from one of Crikey’s regular posters. I should have dipped out right at start, my error… A Crikey moderator did contact me and apologise the next day for not stopping it, and removed the thread, but by then the damage was done. I vowed to let my 10-year long sub lapse.
It did, but of course I was still on the email list for promos, and fair enough, I didn’t mind. So I got all sorts of entreaties and offers for the next 18 months… Eventually they worked, and in a moment of lockdown boredom, I succumbed. For now anyway, I’m back in the fold.
A big reason for that is that I do know that Crikey’s owner has the best interests of the profession of journalism at the centre of his business model. I worked only briefly for him many years ago, back when he was running a successful custom publishing operation – long enough to recognise integrity, passion and enterprise (this isn’t a job application – I’m out the game!). And because, for the most part, the daily newsletter is entertaining… Informative? Yeah, its ok not a match to my other favourites, The Economist, NYT, Slate’s podcasts, The Atlantic amongst others… all of which I also pay for.
Now, if only Simon hadn’t mentioned that he wasn’t being paid for his contribution… Hmm…
Many of the articles here understandably have a common theme of exasperation ,hand wringing and frustration, it doesn’t really help to pat each other on the back and shake collective heads. It is kind of soothing but not really satisfying.
I really want to see more ideas for improving our system of democracy, it is such a breath of fresh air when it happens.
I would like to see you make a stand, not just daily abhorrence of ethical wrongdoing but a body of work that is and can be referenced., that connects the dots. [which in part does happen]
It isn’t enough to have forum posters point out ad nauseum how and what is wrong, for the[broken] record.
Mainstream media being basically public relations for the highest bidder who is entitled to shape the nations opinion. [follow the money]
Lobby groups coercing politicians with bribery, threats and general bullying that has nothing to do with public benefit. Lobbyists should have to present publicly and anything else be illegal.
The Game of Mates that actually has a book by the same name to spell it out.
The value of public enterprise.
What has been lost since Hawke ,Keating , Howard,white shoes, the neo cons.
The stupid selfishness of rampant materialism, the sheer waste.
Educate people as to how this has happened , Edwards Bernays needs needs a thorough expose on how he impacts us today, something that people can reference easily. [Century of the self on Utube is too long and needs updating].
By giving these things air the Labor party may just stand up and acknowledge their involvement and make some real changes.
The small “L” Liberals may well do the same.
You can’t be held libel for assembling facts that are public knowledge.
We are not the United States yet, a news outlet like this can help us reveal our own identity and point out where and when it is under attack. {which you can and do]
Crikey is a fair representation of our countries’ woes, everything we need is here including the knowledge and answers somewhere, but it isn’t assembled in a way that is effective against the neocons and the futility of rampant materialism.
Love the hero image! Yeah, its a stock shot from a library, the sort that I was always looking for during my years in the media business… But it just so perfectly captures the average Crikey reader: In short – A white, affluent educated male boomer (retired from a public service or teaching career) who spends so much time reading and composing brilliant (absolutely brilliant!) comments to Rundle and Keane and witty put-downs of anyone with disagreeable opinions, that his partner is totally fed up…
Nice work, hats off to the art director. If Crikey employs one, that is. Sadly anyone with eyeballs can source photos online nowadays, and my 9 year old gran daughter can format type in a web template. So that once vital (pint media) job, like so many others, is no doubt long gone.
So true! Why didn’t Longstreet account for the amazing triteness of Crikey readers’ opinions in his assessment of the value of subscription?
Like Karl Marx said, who’d want to be associated with a mob that associates with the kind of people that associate with that kind of people ?
well, you two, clearly…subs n’ all to comment, presumably…onya, every little helps 🙂
And in case you weren’t being cute, it was Groucho, not Karl.
” So that once vital (pint media) job, like so many others, is no doubt long gone.”
Usually I wouldn’t bother replying after a certain point (anonymity is too tyre-kicky, I’m far too long-winded, and time is too short for us both). But you’re clearly very decent and intelligent, and your experience is to be respected, ‘But the reality is’ – and I’d bet you were a first class media pro in your day, too. ‘Once vital’ even. I say that with not a shred of condescension, irony or spite.
But Town Criers were ‘once vital’, too. Once, before we could all read, and printing presses were ubiquitous. Now, as you say…for better or for worse, a nine year can do ‘art direction’ to a sufficiently utilitarian standard, thanks to tech and info-literacy ‘moving on’ again. Melancholy, for print art directors, sure. But I used to fly helicopters for a living, and there were a lot of cool gigs in that caper, too…it’s just that many of them are done by drones, now. Turns out being a chopper pilot isn’t as vital (or as cool) anymore as I thought it was.
I suspect that’s what is really dismaying legacy journalists right now. How the changing technology of information is (as it always does) retrospectively highlighting how much of yesterday’s professional information ‘expertise’ (‘Legacy Journalism’ LJ) was really more of a circumstantial reflection of history, technology, incumbency. That doesn’t necessarily undermine its importance and merit, for its times, or LJ’s craft skill and vocational dedication. Often, too, LJ’s courage, physical and moral. But it does illustrate the pompous credentialism of LJ’s lofty claims about the importance – for ‘news, democracy, public debate, etc’ – of its maintained hegemony, still. The reality is, ‘But the reality is’, that ‘Journalism’ as you knew it is now just one among many competing ways of collating and distributing information. ‘Journalists’ – coll./ind. – need to deal with that reality. And make their/its information…good. The best. It’s an information merit marketplace now.
And that’s really why LJ is collapsing, as GR points out elsewhere. Too much of its information is…not good enough information. That fewer and fewer people are willing to buy. Or even waste time on. News Corps, especially, is withering because News Corps…well, deserves to wither, on that information level playing field. Far too much News Corps information is not just ‘not good enough’. It’s now bad information. It’s destructive information. It’s…dangerous information.
It’s a shouted ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre.
Right now, ‘But the reality is’…the reality is that a mob angry about George Floyd’s death is throwing rocks at the Atlanta head offices of…CNN. CNN, whose own camera crew were arrested by overwhelmed/goonish cops while covering a similar angry riot in Minneapolis, just a few hours ago. At its best, the protest underway in the US are democracy and free speech in action. At its worst, what we’re seeing is…nihilist, irrational, anarchic, anti-information violence. Seeing CNN inexplicably targeted is, especially, the worst kind of anti-information violence (outside of unnecessary military actions). It’s beyond rationalizing. But that is exactly where Murdoch’s/FoxNews’s relentless enabling and propagating of Trump’s anti-elite, ‘fake news is the enemy of the people’ trope has got us.
Knowingly, deliberately, as a matter of cynical, strategic intent. As Steve Bannon put it: “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” As he also put it: “Fear is a good thing. Fear is going to lead you to action.”
Nihilist, irrational targeting of exactly the wrong – the fake – ‘fake news’ is this strategy, in action. It’s utterly at one with Murdoch’s lifelong use of his media power, too: divide, frighten, divert, turn exactly the wrong sides against each other. CNN is proper journalism, produced by good professional journalists doing their best to act in the interests of…the very crowd that now attacks them. To me, the Atlanta CNN violence unfolding captures the accumulated corrosive essence of the last thirty years or so of ruthlessly and cynically prosecuted Culture War. A powerful elite few turning the vulnerable non-elite many against those most seeking to protect them.
The reality is, ‘But the reality is’, that at the core of this filthy, lying, viciously self-serving Culture War war…has festered Keith Rupert Murdoch. That’s not a partisan view, that’s just the reality. Yes, I’m white, educated, and male (though not affluent, ex-PS/teacher, or partnered), but I’m pretty socially conservative, so I’m not sure how typical that makes me of a Crikey subscriber. I can easily concede the good journalism that (in my view, anyway) News Corps still produces (far better – more accurate, more rational, more true – on the Pell trial that most, for example).
But I will not mourn the withering of News Corps, at least, among the LJ ranks (of which it is an overwhelmingly majority, in Australia). Not in the regions, not in the suburbs, not anywhere that its far-too-toxic anti-journalism tendrils have extended. Atlanta, right now, is the future that awaits Australian Legacy Journalism, if Australian journalists don’t recognize that News Corps has never truly been a journalism company. I’m sorry, for those regional reporters who have lost their job, but you are better off not being part of the unhinged, surreal-simulcrum machine which the bullying ‘fake journalist’ – who until recently was paying you to be a cog within – has knowingly driven, over the last fifty or so years of toxic raging against a world he fears doesn’t love him enough. If not alone, then very much as the leader of LJ’s – newspaper and TV journalism’s – long march into the fantastical, lying gutter.
As a serious journalist, you should never have worked for his poisonous propaganda outfit in the first place. And you should be glad to be free of it now, however financially it hurts. (Welcome to the world of the rest of us whose jobs have been destroyed from under us over these last four decades, by the ravages of a self-cannibalizing economic delusion.)
Start your own journalism project online. You can. You must.
Chrs & best rgds, BTRI. Yes, far too long (sorry Mods, and thnx if it gets through, as always). Certainly not ‘brilliant’. (I wish.) But…it’s what I think, and I think worth saying out loud.
but the reality is…,
While I don’t quite fit your stereotype quite ,I’m better and worse than that, so it will do, the long suffering better half does wonder why I bother, frankly . I’ve never really comprehended my own or anyone elses righteousness or ego for that matter.
Is my opinion irrelevant because it is so tainted with my status ?
I think the right forums fast track ideas that can spread understanding, has the hundredth monkey hypothetical been scuttled yet?
If you would be so kind as to pontificate on/ direct me to a more useful outlet for my slightly desperate urges to be helpful and relevant , somewhere, please go ahead. Please don’t suggest the lost cats home, I find them lovely but a nasty blight on our landscape, I’m a bird lover, the Gould league then?
Admittedly my glib stereotyping sounded derogatory, Stuart, but I wasn’t being serious. Those were meant to be descriptive demographic categories – ones I fit too. Not the professions, but the rest… (gulp) yep.
And I didn’t mean to belittle anyone’s honest attempt at debate and enlightenment (heaven knows we need more of that), or to be “helpful, relevant” and all the rest. They are noble aims (whatever your better half thinks), Sadly, not everyone commenting on these threads has that in mind…
Thanks ,but the reality is.. I didn’t pick up the tongue in cheek. You’re probably right as a general observation, just maybe this mob can help clarify the systemic abuse of the public’s mental and general health.
Simon, thank you once again for a thoughtful article. Without fundamentally disagreeing, I’d like to try and broaden the analysis in this case.
I think that in general, communications can inform, persuade, provoke or entertain.
As an informatician I’d agree with you that the key value of information is to support better decisions. However, I believe that provocation and persuasion can help us build better wisdom too — and with better wisdom we can ask better questions and evaluate decisions and outcomes better. Provocations can take us out of comfortable assumptions even without any new reporting, while persuasion can let us explore potential hypotheses. And as any cartoonist knows, entertainment can also help alleviate the stresses of dealing with disagreeable and disappointing news so we’re better able to digest it.
But as you rightly pointed out, there’s no excuse for failing to ground key issues in professional journalism: in the capacity for any idea presented to be refutable in facts, and in the diligence of checking to see if it’s at least testable before airing it.
Historically, I don’t believe Crikey’s roots lie in professional journalism but in the ideological whining and tribal lampoonery of a bygone editor. Even now, its staff are often too quick to phone in an article based on self-satisfied beliefs they haven’t checked, or conjectures that aren’t even testable, with arguments long on rhetoric but short on accountability passed off as analysis: in other words, Crikey isn’t an alternative to modern mainstream media; much of the time it is modern mainstream media, just delivered on a smaller scale, through a different medium and with a strong, left-wing perspective.
But is that all it can be? Heck no. Crikey has shown the ability to develop community discussion, undertake its own investigations, argue unpopular positions persuasively and with evidence, provoke accepted orthodoxy, challenge more popular rhetoric and has broken real news.
It isn’t always professional enough but it is often smart enough (for example, how many other news organs invite regular contributions from a nationally-respected ethicist?) and smart can continue to develop as dumb generally can’t.
It’s also patient enough to put up with my sporadic harangues over journalistic professionalism, and at times some of its contributors have even stepped up.
So I think it’s worthwhile funding not just what it is, but also what it could eventually become, provided that’s the direction it continues to grow.
Fair comment!