Once a critique, conflict has become the media’s how-to go-to. Is there a Swift way out?

The feel-good, cross-generational, bubbling enthusiasm of the Taylor Swift Eras tour sweeping from Melbourne to Sydney has carried along even the most gimlet-eyed of journalists and writers in its flow. Maybe (we can but hope) it will encourage Australia’s conflict-addled media to, in the irresistible quote of the moment: “shake it off”.

The unadulteration of the reported joy surrounding the event has been a blessed relief from the decades-long deterioration of Australian reporting as it’s slid from understanding that conflict makes news to thinking: if there’s no conflict, there’s just no news at all.

Worse, the no-conflict-no-news syllogism has driven us to the end point where no event can be considered newsworthy without the artisanal crafting of clashing disagreeableness to wrap around it: whether culture wars, political polarisation or plain old institutional headbutting.

The Swift moment washed through Australian news as the academic world and peace movement was mourning the death last week of Norwegian peace studies founder Johan Galtung, considered the first person to recognise the bleedin’ obvious — that journalists and editors worked off a set of mental short cuts — “news factors” he called them — that led them to decide what to write (or what not to write) about.

“How do events become news?” was the question that Galtung, together with Mari Holmboe Ruge, sought to answer in a 1965 paper analysing Norwegian reporting of four global crises, published in the then-obscure academic Journal of Peace Research that Galtung had founded the previous year.

Although the answers they found (elite actors, personification, negativity) are now commonplace (and their article remains the most cited work on news values), as their thinking filtered through academic and media circles, the idea came as a shock to journalists — a challenge to the secret craft knowledge of “we know it when see it”. (The traditional media’s reluctance to recognise criticism from the outside long endures — his death went largely unreported, journalistically at least.)

The 1960s, after all, were the heyday of the self-confidence of newspapers as rigorously objective “journals of record”, of The New York Times‘ brag “all the news that’s fit to print” as well as the more honest Rolling Stone tagline: “All the news that fits.”

Now, again, the exuberance of Swift and the Swifties suggests there’s a yearning for something more from Australia’s media, something less polarising than the fractious squabbling that passes for so much of its reporting. 

Even the News Corp mastheads got on board: “Taylor Swift and the cultural phenomenon she’s whipped up in Australia this week is undeniably a force for good,” conceded leading culture warrior Geoffrey Blainey. Remarkably, the usually grumbling comments agreed.

Sky News went further, claiming Swift as a culture war ally, as it “lashed The Saturday Paper for its ‘self-indulgent rant’ about Taylor Swift’s ‘whiteness’.”

The News Corp embrace of Swiftism here in Australia came as a surprise given the bizarre twist in the US Fox-led culture wars that painted the singer as a deep-state psyop threat to the candidacy of Donald Trump. Maybe there’s hope that our own News Corp readers are a touch more sceptical than their American counterparts

The Swift effect seemed to wash over the ABC’s Insiders on the weekend too, with a program more focussed on the policy questions of the higher education review than on the usual gotcha questioning (although not without some hysterical conflict highlights — ”wealth tax!” — from the voice of Sydney’s wealthy north shore, the University of Sydney).

Or maybe the program was shaken into action by last week’s X critique from the respected former editor in chief of The Australian David Armstrong, who tweeted that host David Speers is “a lightweight who underestimates his audience. He is interested in superficial political analysis because he is incapable of delving deeply into policy”. Ouch!

Galtung came to regret journalism’s embrace of his contribution to the idea of news values. His article was, he told The Guardian in 2019, meant as a criticism, not a how-to guide.

“It’s a complete misunderstanding,” he said then. “Our work from the early 1960s was meant to be a warning of the consequences for the way news media filtered the world. But the Western news industry believed I was describing how things should be done, instead of what is being done.”

No wonder his passing went unreported.