ideas: on media

Frontline of TV still pale imitation

There is nothing more to say on commercial so-called current affairs television. It is like shooting fish in a barrel; as easy a target as the petty crooks pursued by these programs.

Certainly, there was no more ground to cover after the brilliant Frontline pilloried television current affairs in the mid-90s. So successful was it, TV producers cut to the core by the satire stupidly went on to copy the tricks so laughable nobody imagined they were actually performed. Suddenly the shows themselves became much funnier than the send-up.

Jana Wendt, for so long the queen of this tabloid TV in the days when it still found a little time for political interviews and real journalistic endeavour, admitted as much in a scathing critique of the black magic she once practiced giving the Andrew Olle memorial media lecture in 1997. The speech served me well in many a university essay, and is a must-read for any consumer of commercial television. She said:

“Despite some journalists’ reluctance to admit it, the satirical program Frontline was based on the foundation of all pungent satire: that is, reality. It accurately isolated then targeted the venality and hypocrisy behind much of so-called current affairs. Unfortunately, it took satire to reveal the truth. Regrettably, it will take more than laughter to fix the problem.”

Wendt was embittered and vicious and sunk her teeth firmly into the hand that once fed her a salary she admits was obscene. On her former livelihood:

“At its worst, journalism as we approach the new millennium is contemptuous of the principles that used to form its core values. At its worst, it is deceptive in the claims that it makes to sell itself. At rock bottom, it is no better than the small-time conmen it often smites with phony outrage. Principles like objectivity and fair-mindedness have been replaced by cheap opinion and popular prejudices.”

All true, no more so than today. But that’s the problem – nothing has really changed.

Some can’t let it go. George Negus, another who remembers fondly the golden days of Channel Nine when Kerry Packer cared about breaking news, took to the media again last week for another attack on his former employer. Channel Nine and others, he said, should “stop and take a bloody good look at yourself”. The Herald Sun had him saying:

“They need to get clear and decide that there’s certain things that are just not current affairs – they are froth and bubble.”

Negus makes the same point as Wendt did years ago: that commercial television executives underestimate the intelligence of the audience. As much as I’d like to believe this is true, it’s just not that simple.

Why, then, does a combined audience approaching 3 million people tune in for their daily dose of diet stories, wonder bras, neighbourhood disputes and back pain cures via TT and ACA each night? To suggest their intelligence is being mocked is to say they are mindless drones who can’t seem to change the channel – a charge even more insulting to the audience.

Producers of these programs, too, will rightly claim ’serious’ news simply doesn’t rate. A political interview can be ratings suicide – all measured in incremental periods of time that allow producers to pinpoint just when its audience switched over. To say this is a pure ratings game is a gross understatement.

The debate over the worth of these programs, and the news model in a cutthroat and rapidly shifting commercial environment, is long redundant. Instead, there are two bigger questions. What can be done to encourage proprietors to invest in quality informational programming? And if they don’t, does it really matter?

On the second point, it probably doesn’t. Consumers, of course, are not starved of very good television journalism. The internet age allows news junkies to beam in any news channel across the world, while our public broadcasting model has the ABC and SBS producing journalism to the highest quality, free (largely) of commercial compromise. Negus should be content fronting Dateline on the multi-cultural broadcaster, a show that brings the world to Australians more vividly than any other, and does so on a shoe-string budget deploying one-man-band video journalists likely to become the norm for coverage abroad and at home in cash-strapped times.

Free-to-air television networks and cable channels are compelled to invest in Australian-made drama and children’s programming by government regulation. Could a similar quota system be put in place for quality news and current affairs? The networks will argue they produce hundreds of hours of news programming every year; what is ‘quality news’ is as a subjective choice as that between Tracey Grimshaw and Matthew White.

In the United States television licences stipulate a requirement for “educational and public-interest programming”. There is a grand tradition that says the airwaves belong to the people who should be able to hear its government and institutions speak; the President, after all, has the power to instruct all networks to carry a prime-time speech of national importance. Any such tradition in this country died along with Packer, who genuinely supported a thriving news division quite separate from bottom line results. The Sunday program, the last vestige of investigative journalism on commercial television, would never have been boned while Kerry roamed the mortal polo fields.

No, if it really does matter that commercial television is producing current affairs that lives up to its name there is only one way to force that on them – for people to change the channel or, as is increasingly the case, turn off the set entirely. Certainly old-model television is haemorrhaging viewers, but those that remain are still strangely transfixed on Tracey and Matt each night.

For an audience supposedly smart enough to realise they’re being served info-tainment dross each night,  there seems not a great deal of urgency to reach for the remote. And what that says about an engaged democracy, rather than television, is the real worry.

© 2009 importance of ideas….