Feeding the chooks?

Earlier today here at Troppo, Nicholas Gruen picked up on outgoing British PM Tony Blair’s op-ed lament about the instatiable appetite of the modern mass media for continuous sensational crisis stories. Not surprisingly given his recent 1Q question about the relevance of motives to policy, Harry Clarke has also embraced Blair’s hand-wringing, especially this bit:

‘….scandal or controversy beats ordinary reporting hands down. News is rarely news unless it generates heat as much as or more than light. Second, attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgement. It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial’.

‘… there will often be as much interpretation of what a politician is saying as there is coverage of them actually saying it. In the interpretation, what matters is not what they mean; but what they could be taken to mean. This leads to the incredibly frustrating pastime of expending a large amount of energy rebutting claims about the significance of things said, that bears little or no relation to what was intended’.

It’s an entirely valid concern, and a point I should have conceded in my response to Harry’s 1Q gambit.

But I can’t help asking the obvious chicken and egg question. Did all this start with the media chooks demanding to be fed more often, or with the calculating development of scientific chook-feeding strategies by the politicians? The notion of the permanent campaign is most often associated with Bill Clinton’s Presidency, but also to a significant extent with Tony Blair. Fuelled by opinion polling and focus groups, governments seek to control public debate by dominating and shaping media coverage through pumping out stories on a daily (and more frequent) basis that either create an issue or “frame” or “spin” it in a way that is advantageous to one’s own side (usually in an attempt to discredit opponents or create a distraction to divert attention from a story that might otherwise dominate and provide negative momentum for one’s own side). In the circumstances, Blair’s op-ed is quite breathtaking in its hypocrisy.

Although the permanent campaign is most often associated with Clinton and Blair, these strategies in fact began to develop quite a bit earlier. Sydney Blumenthal first coined the expression in 1982, and US Democrats consultant Wally Clinton (no relation AFAIK) explained it like this in 1983:

Whether we like it or not, the day of the Endless Campaign is here. No longer can an incumbent simply go about his or her business after winning an election, waiting until a few months before the next election to think about campaigning. In fact, any official who intends to stay in office would be wise to view his or her victory speech on election night as a kick off-off speech for the next election.

More recently, in The Permanent Campaign and Its Future edited by Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann (1998), the editors explain the phenomenon this way:

We live in the era of the permanent campaign, in which the line between campaigning and governing has been nearly erased. As Hugh Heclo makes clear in the opening chapter, even if campaigning and governing are inextricably interlinked in American-style democracy, the process is distinctly different now from what it was some decades ago. Sidney Blumenthal popularized the term permanent campaign in 1982, but the change in governing style goes back further. Systematic and sophisticated polling in presidential campaigns nearly reached its full bloom in 1960, but the process of tracking public views, or of politicians garnering support from the public for their priorities, is not what we mean by the permanent campaign. Rather, we mean, as Heclo suggests, “a nonstop process seeking to manipulate sources of public approval to engage in the act of governing itself.” In this era of the permanent campaign, the process of campaigning and the process of governing have each lost their distinctiveness. Just as significant, the process of campaigning has become in many ways the dominant partner of the two.

Milestones along the road to the permanent campaign were provided by the Hawke Labor government’s mastery of interest group manipulation (famously encapsulated by Richo’s immortal “whatever it takes” line) and marginal seat strategies which place heavy reliance on the use of detailed database information about voters, not to mention the “attack dog” campaign strategies perfected by the US Republicans in the late 1980s and early 90s. All these developments were embraced, extended and elevated to an art form by the Clinton administration in the US and Blair’s New Labour in the UK (not to mention the Howard government here in Australia). Hence their extraordinary political success during the 90s (and on into the current century in the case of Blair and Howard).

The significance of the emergence and seemingly universal acceptance of permanent campaigning is explained by Ornstein and Mann:

Campaigning intrinsically is a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser. Governing, ideally, is an additive game that tries to avoid pointing fingers or creating winners and losers in the policy battles.

The advent of the permanent campaign makes any such aspiration towards constructive, co-operative national governance well nigh impossible. As Brady and Fiorina comment in one of the chapters in Ornstein and Mann’s work:

The motives of todays members revolve around destroying their enemies rather than developing a legislative product broadly acceptable to the electorate.

Of course, it is naive to think that there ever existed halcyon days in the past when politicians generally co-operated harmoniously in the business of legislation and governance except during short election campaigns when the gloves figuratively came off in ritualistic but still fairly gentlemanly verbal combat. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to imagine Howard and Rudd enjoying the sort of mutual regard that apparently existed between wartime Labor PM Curtin and Bob Menzies, at least as portrayed in the recent ABC docu-drama. I’d be very interested to know whether Senator Andrew Bartlett has detected a deterioration in the level of practical co-operation and civility between opposing political parties even in the time he’s been in federal Parliament. I suspect he would confirm such a trend.

I’m by no means suggesting that our political parties are the sole contributors to the simplistic, crisis-based, tawdry motive-ascribing reportage of public affairs in Australia today, or the resulting dearth of serious, sober analysis of policies and issues that Harry Clarke laments. The media is at least equally to blame, with its insatiable appetite for sensationalist tabloid headlines and black-and-white characterisation of issues which invariably actually involve levels of complexity and subtlety that are simply ignored in favour of pursuit of the cheap shock-horror angle. Moreover, we members of the public are equally complicit: the shock-horror stories (and the tacky Paris Hilton beatups and NT News crocodile stories) are the ones that sell newspapers and attract eyeballs to screens. You can’t really expect the commercial MSM to publish reams of serious, worthy analysis if almost no-one bothers to read it. Politics have become the ‘bread and circuses’ of a sedentary age.

I don’t pretend to have any magical answers to this depressing contemporary phenomenon, nor did any of the political scientist contributors to Ornstein and Mann’s book. It’s difficult not to dismiss what passes for modern public political discourse as mostly an empty, meaningless and increasingly nasty theatre of the absurd. Perhaps some marginal hope lies in the accessibility of some of the more thoughtful, analytical Australian political blogs (including this one). And in the continuing constructive role of the Australian Democrats in the Senate, highlighted by Cam Riley (also earlier today here at Troppo). But those are just about the only bright spots I can perceive. Maybe some of our more optimistic readers can cheer me up?