Labor’s huge win gives Australian media an opportunity to change

Australian voters have done the news media a big favour in their landslide support for a “new normal”, providing it with the opportunity to put down the binoculars of polling-shaped, horse-race coverage — and the opera glasses that narrow politics into drama — and lean into policy complexity.

It should force a rethink of what journalism of accountability might look like in the new multi-channel media environment, with fewer mass media “gotcha” moments, fewer chants of “fight, fight, fight”, and more contextual understanding and deep-digging interrogation.

Less politics-of-the-politics dissection of the entrails of the Liberal leadership and more “what it means” reporting on, say, the intersection of climate, energy and First Nations sovereignty in the North West Shelf gas extension that links the political, business and environmental angles. And less, too, of letting the News Corp tail wag the broader media dog over defence spending (more!) and tax on large superannuation savings (less!).

Currently, the media is struggling with what the press gallery’s outgoing Gray eminence Laura Tingle dubbed the “new normal”, with outlets still grappling to understand the new political narrative, both locally and globally.

Take last week’s chatter about defence spending. On the one hand, we got a headline in The Australian prompted by Richard Marles’ chin-stroking, “very much up for that conversation” response to US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s call for Australia to spend more. On the other, we got a piece in The Guardian responding to Anthony Albanese’s “have a look at themselves” dismissal of a similar call from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

This is a News Corp trap, with Labor offering a something-for-everyone strategic ambiguity that shows it understands the modern media ecology and how to control it.

Today, it’s hard to believe how the narratives of the Liberals as the “natural party of government” and the rise of the teals in 2022 shaped how the media reported on the first Albanese government. Much of 2024 was wasted a-speculatin’ about what a weakened Albanese minority government might look like, or even how Peter Dutton might somehow slide into power.

The media focused on overcooked readings of monthly polls, rather than what was actually happening in the shifting loyalties of different regions and demographics, including in state and local elections. It missed, too, how the government blocked the Dutton push into low-income outer suburbs by jiu-jitsu-ing cost of living into a net positive, with Labor tying just about every initiative to its own “we’re listening and acting on things that matter” narrative, which worked on the Facebook micro-targeting scale.

Legacy news media also largely abandoned the hard work of accountability, instead preferring both-sides reporting of what the government and the opposition parties might say to (or about) each other, elevating “not a good look” quips to the height of analysis, rewarding the most colourful quotes from the crossbench, and leaning into self-interested think tanks or lobby groups (hello again, ASPI) and a select group of finance industry economists for an “independent”, economistic, cost-of-everything/value-of-nothing perspective.

Part of the news media’s slow post-election adjustment is due to the Labor government’s willingness to sit back with a “pass the popcorn” glee over the roiling existential crises in the conservative parties. But the problems go deeper. Much of the criticism of Albanese’s political style (from both the left and right) rings with a footy-nostalgic hankering to “bring back the biff!”, with social-media-friendly hot takes of parliamentary abuse and rhetorical over-reach of, say, a Keating or an Abbott.

But Albanese might be on to something. Seems in the “new normal”, going the biff hurts more than it helps, as the politically cack-handed Jane Hume found when her “Chinese spies” line was quickly weaponised and went viral on Chinese-language social media, helping Monique Ryan hang on in Kooyong and Labor sweep the outer-Melbourne eastern suburbs.

Blame it on the Facebook punt that the drama of political conflict could tease digital traffic on big tech’s platforms, which could then be monetised through advertising or subscriptions (or, in a peculiarly Australian rent-seeking way, by getting the government to lean on the platforms to share the spoils).

Despite a short success in the early twenty-teens, it’s a failed strategy, causing more problems than it purports to solve as it drives up news avoidance and encourages clickbait conspiracy theorising and “truthy” fake news. Still, it’s left a “but it might work for us” ache embedded in the news muscles of legacy media.

It’s no substitute for the accountability journalism that wrenches the news agenda away from government and opposition alike to talk about the things governments do — or should be doing. In her farewell on Sunday’s InsidersLaura Tingle urged the government to engage the gallery in its policy ambitions, just like the gallery’s heyday under the Hawke and Keating governments.

Good advice. But news media — legacy and new — don’t have to wait for the government. Voters have given Australian journalists an opening. It’s not too late to rush through it.