By Tim Dunlop Posted Thu 27 Mar 2014

Photo: The March in March shows the widening gulf between the internet audience and the big media. (Submitted: Lindy Sparrow)

If mainstream media journalists have an issue with the rise of the audience, that's fine. But don't talk down to us because you fumbled the reporting of the March in March, writes Tim Dunlop.

The organisers and participants in the March In March demonstrations shouldn't worry too much that the mainstream media, by and large, either ignored or ridiculed their efforts. 

The fact is, the media's lame response to an estimated 100,000 citizens showing up on the streets around the country is indicative of a deeper malaise: the rules of news have changed, and increasingly legacy media companies have neither the capacity nor the wit to operate in the new environment.

The key aspect of that new environment is the rise of social media. Or to put it more accurately, the rise of the audience.

Whereas once a newspaper article, or radio show, or a story on the six o'clock news was the end of a process, it is now just the beginning.

This relegation of the mainstream from the pinnacle of the news ecosphere doesn't sit well with a lot of journalists, and I have some sympathy for their position.

I genuinely believe that we still need big, strong media companies full of trained professionals doing the hard slog of investigative reporting and fulfilling that role of national watchdog of those who directly and indirectly rule over us.

What I have no sympathy for is the defensiveness that some in the mainstream media exhibit in the face of this changing environment, especially when that defensiveness turns into snark and condescension directed at the audience itself.

That happens far more frequently than it should, and it leads to a hostility that needn't exist.

This recent article by Fairfax journalist Jacqueline Maley is emblematic. In it, she is responding to criticisms about the way the mainstream media, including her paper, covered the March In March.

What is fascinating is that she openly admits that they (and she) did a poor job:

The Herald didn't blatantly ignore the protest, it sent a reporter along to cover it, and that reporter was me. I wrote a small (and, in hindsight, rather sniffy and unkind) report about it which ran on our website.

But the editors did not include the story in Monday's paper.

So she wrote an unworthy little piece and it wasn't run in the newspaper. Once this failure is acknowledged you would think she would be keen to make amends, but instead we are treated to some classic misdirection.

Over the next few paragraphs she rehashes the usual complaints about how rude people on social media can be, ending with some unnecessary condescension and some incoherent arguments:

[T]he national convener of the rallies on Sunday ... told me more than 100,000 people had turned up to march all around Australia. He told me those numbers were ''confirmed'' and when I asked by whom, he launched into a speech about how his group was used to being overlooked by the ''MSM'' (mainstream media) and talked about the MSM being a puppet of the establishment.

It is strange that people who despise the MSM so much are so angry at being ignored by it. This week the paper received letters from people involved in the march asking why it wasn't covered, one of which was published. I was abused on Twitter for my online story, and also for the fact that it didn't run in the paper. I was criticised for comparing the protest to the infamous anti-carbon tax rallies against the Gillard government.

Like many journalists, I am used to Twitter abuse, and I find it deeply unpleasant.

I am happy to agree that such abuse is unpleasant - I've copped plenty of it myself - but it is hardly a one-way street. Twitter is full of journalists calling people names and otherwise insulting their readers, and it would be nice if journalists would acknowledge this a bit more often when they write on the topic.

Regardless, look at the substance of what Maley says. She openly admits she and her employer did a poor job in covering the marches. If that is the case, why shouldn't people be angry about it?

And why should readers have to put up with nonsense like that line about "It is strange that people who despise the MSM so much are so angry at being ignored by it".

This is obviously meant to be a clever "gotcha" but it actually indicates how badly she has missed the point. There is nothing contradictory about complaining about being overlooked by the media and then being angry about being ignored. Isn't it obvious that one flows logically from the other?

Then we get to the real insight into how "news" is understood by the mainstream:

The lack of coverage of March in March probably had something to do with the fact that, like so much left-wing protest, it was unfocused. The speakers and protesters had a grab-bag of complaints, from asylum seeker policy to gay marriage to fair trade. The only uniting theme was raw hatred of the Prime Minister, and the offensive signs/language about him were off-putting to a broader audience.

For sake of argument, let's accept the contention that the marches were unfocused (and let's let slide the even more unsubstantiated claim that "much left-wing protest" is too). 

To claim this as a reason for a lack of coverage is to simply admit that you can't handle complexity. It is to admit that your definition of news only allows for a single point of focus.

It is the timeless cry for a "hook" or an "angle" on which to hang a story and it is a legacy of traditional understandings of what constitutes news. It is a legacy of the space constraints that applied in the pre-internet world.

At best, it is a reason, not an excuse. I mean, where is the rule that says a protest has to have a single focus?

Maley is right in saying that "[c]ontemporary newsrooms have constrained resources", but that, too, is the media's problem, not the protester's. It is a reason to examine how those resources are allocated, not an excuse to mock the March In March and get angry at them because they didn't provide you with a convenient headline.

More bizarre is the concern over the idea that protesters were united in their "hatred" of Tony Abbott. "Hatred" is a loaded term for a profession that prides itself on its objectivity. But again, let that slide. 

Of course the protesters didn't like Tony Abbott. Maybe some even hated him. So what? Surely the job of a journalist is to unpick why that might be the case, to examine whether there might be some legitimacy to their concerns.

Maley admits there were a "grab bag" of things people were objecting to, so why not examine them?

To focus on the "hatred" itself by highlighting some placards that are deemed rude is shallow. To then say you couldn't report it because "the offensive signs/language about him were off-putting to a broader audience" is a poor rationalisation.

If you're frightened that such things are "off-putting" (and seriously, what does that say about your opinion of the "broader audience"?) there is an available solution: don't report the frippery of the placards. Report the substance of the protest. Delve into the grab-bag.

At the end, Maley says something with which I completely agree:

The whole thing was interesting because it demonstrated the widening gulf between what is popular on social media and the internet, and what traditional media organisations consider newsworthy.

That is exactly right. But she draws the wrong conclusion from it, and washes the whole thing down with a swig of condescension:

Sometimes the two overlap, but whether the bloggers, tweeters and other internet denizens like it or not, newspapers still get to make that call.

We will decide what news is and the manner in which it is reported!

Look, so far as their own organisations are concerned, Maley is right. Of course they get to make the call. 

But if news organisations are constantly at odds with the views of their readers - especially with their most engaged readers, those who follow politics closely - then keeping "control" over the definition of "newsworthy" is an awfully pyrrhic victory.

When Donald Horne became editor of The Bulletin in the 1960s he asked all of the cartoonists to draw a picture of an Aboriginal man that wasn't a caricature. When they couldn't, he fired them.

Maybe it's time for newsrooms to apply a similar test: if your journalists can't write about social media, and the audience more generally, without caricaturing them, maybe it's time to get new journalists.

Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. View his full profile here.

Rage against the mainstream - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)