Yesterday I came across a fairly innocuous story about the seafood industry on AM.
It is headlined (on the website) and introduced thus.
Australia’s seafood capital under pressure from imports
TONY EASTLEY: Port Lincoln calls itself Australia’s seafood capital. On South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, it’s home to the nation’s largest commercial fishing fleet.
It’s a major exporter of both wild and aquaculture products, but it’s coming under increasing pressure from imports.
For instance, it’s reported that around half of the barramundi consumed in Australia comes from Asia. Barramundi is known by many around the world as Asian seabass, although its scientific common name is barramundi perch.
Then the actual story begins.
TIM JEANES: Sitting by a boat ramp next to the city’s maritime museum, one of Port Lincoln’s pioneer tuna fishermen Hagen Stehr looks out to the waters of Spencer Gulf and sees good times ahead thanks to China.
You might notice that contra to the introduction, Mr Stehr seems neither “under pressure”, nor concerned about imports. In fact, he seems very positive about the future of his industry. You may even notice that Port Lincoln’s Barramundi industry is much more impaired by the difficulties a tropical fish faces in the Southern Ocean than the spectre of imports.
In fact, the entire premise of the introduction is not supported, and indeed is only tangentially related to the actual report.
I don’t get why our media does this. I don’t know why casual dishonesty leaks through every aspect of what they do.
You might ask why this matters. Surely this is an innocuous and harmless topic, buried in a morning program, unlikely to influence anyone in service of any ideology or vested interest? After all Mr Stehr, the relevant vested interest here as the unidentified founder of Cleanseas, is not asking for protectionism here but a reduction of trade barriers.
So who decided that a “under pressure from imports” framing was called for, and why are we told, without any support at all, that this is the case?
It is the sheer lack of reasons to distort the story that makes it so disturbing. It’s dishonesty in service of no-one. It’s become such a routine part of the practice that one needs not a proprietor, some vested interests or ones own reputation as a player to spark it. You don’t even need the conceit of a clever “angle” to sex up a story to attract the shrinking pool of people who accept the bullshit. It’s just how things are done.
If we can’t trust them to cut back on the bullshit on even the most unimportant, innocuous topics, how can we ever hope to trust them on anything that really matters. We don’t have the energy to scour each line of an article to check whether the quote in the headline was actually said by anyone except the journalist. We don’t have time to check whether the accusation in a story has any actual evidence, or indeed an identified source. We don’t have time to see if the bold pronouncement of a headline is supported by anything in the article itself, as in this AFR (paywalled) article which bases its pronouncement of current fact on a future hypothetical by Trevor Cook at the end.
So people tune out.
It loses them respect, it poisons debate, and it is sending them bankrupt[1]. So why do they do it?
My only guess is that the banality of bullshit is so great that they know no other way.
[fn1] Except regrettably the ABC, who can maintain the iron tropes of inanity in perpetuity.
I agree with you. The falseness of the media has seen my subscriptions to all (Australian, SMH, Econ, FR,) cancelled. I skim them on the net and bypass the paywall if interested enough.
The corruption, because that is what it essentially is, concerns me on many levels. It has corrupted any chance of public discourse because so many of the public who rely on print and TV are both actively ill informed and also taught/modelled to think in an obfuscatory and illogical fashion. They lack the tools to understand the essentials a citizen must understand.
The essential falsity is accepted and promulgated by the education system at all levels. Any attempt to cut to the truth is protrayed as harsh and judgmental and therefore offensive to the relativism of education values. Cloaking words in nonsense was what Orwell warned us about. Lies and nonsense to cloud the mind.
I dispair of helping the teens in my neighbourhood read newsprint and magezines to inform them of what is going on the the world- only blogs seem to be able to be counted on to promote a view and counterview explicitly and honestly of the world. Maybe I’m just mourning for a world that has passed.
Great post Richard,
I’d add just one thing. I don’t agree that this race to the bottom is harming the newspapers. What you are witnessing is the second and third generation affects of journalism being entertainment. Every journo knows this in their bones, and it takes the conscious effort of journalists not to fall into this. Most journeyman journos don’t make that effort. So they know that a ‘story’ has to have a story and it will rate higher if the story is immediately recognisable from a few words “imports threaten industry” will do it.
So while I’m in sympathy with your indignation, I think it’s a tiny minority who have stopped buying papers on this account. Most have stopped because they are too busy and can pick up the news in the ether – on Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
And I’ll quote myself from a thread which made bullshit studies respectable on this blog ;)
Garner Ted, eh ? Well, back when I was in Forms I and II (as years 7 and 8 were called then), I used to listen to Herbert W and his ‘Plain Truth About the World Tomorrow’. DGSS (Different Generations, Same Sh…).
But then I also listened to Alistair Cooke’s Letter From America (same reason: cadence and tone), however I always believed that Alistair had at least some connection with intersubjective reality.
And the point to this wave of nostalgia ? Have things really gotten any worse than they’ve always been ? I remember The Age (before Fairfax) in its very pro-Liberal Party days, I remember the Melbourne Truth … and others of the time.
Have things really gotten any worse or do we just have slightly better reality filters now ?
Richard,
let me give you the john dory as you appear to be CARPing around or at least FLOUNDERing.
All fisherman are SOLE traders. They obviously make NET profits!
The point you are trying to make is that people are swallowed HOOK, LINE and SINKER.
now that is a ROD for your back!
“the iron tropes of inanity” – lovely. I’ll have to remember that phrase.
“Structural reforms [are] more important than ever for a strong and balanced economic recovery”
OECD – the other day. Direct from the “then was the time for complacency” school of politics and rhetoric.
Surely we should keep our reform powder dry.
Its weird to bring up fishing as an example also — given the state of the world’s fisheries, I imagine the next time there will excess fish of this type will be about the time that humans disappear from the planet (and last time I checked Barramundi was also about $30 per kilo). It’s also not like people are going to want to eat Chinese fish either if they can afford something from slightly cleaner waters (especially Chinese people).
Yes, a great post. I read it after flicking through the ‘quality papers’ and I probably saw half a dozen great sounding headlines is search of a robust underpinning.
I agree with NG, there is no mens rea for the bullshit, it’s stupidity. “Someone’s talking about trade, hmmm, what do I know about that? Aha, exports and good and imports are bad!”
Does a day go by without some stupid media story about the horrible effects of competition on businesses?
Nice example, Richard. I think Nick is right when he says the main reason for this is that media is entertainment. Why bother with unpleasant expensive-to-get truth when things feel so well? Another factor is the declining ability to get as revenue out of news, squeezing the budgets for reporters. Gossip and fantasy are cheap, and the people writing it are cheaper too.
you have made it to Around the Traps.
if I can say in an immodestly way the premier look at the best blogs of the week.
yes it is a blatant plug but David Glasner reads it!!!
It is a problem!
AM spectacularly buried the lead – which is that Port Lincoln is suffering from so much prosperity that people are losing the will to pick up the next dollar. From a resident at the bottom of the story:
We should all have such woes at 70.
It’s unclear whether Tim Jeanes himself was confused about his story, or whether someone else worked hard to push it into the ABC current affairs template marked “the place is going to hell”. Either way, the result is bizarre.
But not as bizarre as The Age’s story, which is essentially a page three yarn about an unsupported claim by one person about what she’d been told by someone else who might or might not have talked to someone who knew something.
Or to look at it another way: Australia is suffering a shortage of fresh trouble, and it looms as a potential disaster for the national fretting industry, of which these stories are just one disturbing symptom.
If this is true, then we can only hope, for the sake of a generation of journalists and academics and think-tank staff, that this is a mere cyclical downturn rather than a structural shift, and that our long national nightmare of good news will soon end.
It’s either that, or the media will have to start covering indigenous issues.
Crap journalism, golly… dog bites man.
Rumour has it, that’s their job, but you can’t believe every rumour you hear.
Its only a thought …. but would not be that surprised if it turned out that who ever
editedthe story, cut and pasted it together , did not actual read any of the main part of the text.