Today in brief: A national campaign to promote reading throughout September., Detaining boat arrivals defies reason, writes human rights campaigner. and What's wrong with political journalism, and how to fix it.
As part of the 2011 Melbourne Writers Festival, a two-day conference called ‘New News’ was held at the Wheeler Centre last weekend. The keynote speaker was Jay Rosen, who chairs the journalism faculty at New York University. Jay has published his address on his blog, Press Think. Here’s an excerpt.
Imagine the entirety of the political reporting and commentary produced by the New York Times or the political staff of the ABC and plot it on a grid. On the left side of the page: appearances. On the right side: realities. On the top of the page: arguments. On the bottom: facts. Appearances, realities, arguments and facts. All political news should be divided into these categories, and journalists should organize their daily report into my four quadrants.
Under appearances we find everything that is just that: the attempt to make things appear a certain way. All media stunts. Everything that fits under the management of impressions. Or politics as entertainment. The photo ops. The press releases issued in lieu of doing something. […]
My suggestion is to report appearances as just that: mere appearances. Which would be a way of jeering at them, labeling them as not quite real. So the appearances section would be heavy on satire and simple quotation. In the US, Jon Stewart has become a huge star by satirizing the world of appearances. This would be a way to get in on some of that action. Appearances, then, means downgrading or penalizing politicians who deal in the fake, the trivial, the merely sensational. In other words: “watch out or you’ll wind up in the appearances column.”
Under realities we find everything that is actually about real problems, real solutions, real proposals, consequential plans and of course events that have an integrity beyond their fitness as media provocations. This is the political news proper, cured of what Tanner calls the sideshow.
But then there’s my other axis. Arguments and facts. Both are important, both are a valid part of politics.
A new paradigm for journalism, courtesy of Jay Rosen’s blog, PressThink
So imagine my four quadrants.
Bottom left: Appearances rendered as fact. Example: the media stunt.
Top left: Phony arguments. Manufactured controversies. Sideshows.
Bottom right: Today’s new realities: get the facts. The actual news of politics.
Top right. Real arguments: Debates, legitimate controversies, important speeches.
Now imagine all of today’s political news and commentary sorted into these four quadrants. This becomes the new portal to political news. Appearances and realities, arguments and facts. To render the political world that way, journalists would have to exercise their judgment about what is real and what is not. And this is exactly what would bring them into proper alignment with our needs as citizens.
You can read the entire post here, and you can watch or listen to the video/podcast of a Wheeler Centre event of earlier this year, ‘Dumbing Down Democracy’, featuring George Megalogenis in conversation with Lindsay Tanner following the publication of Tanner’s book, Sideshow.
Julian Burnside has written on the High Court’s decision overturning the government’s Malaysian solution on the ABC’s The Drum. Here’s an excerpt of what he wrote:
In the past 15 years, most boat arrivals have been Afghan Hazaras fleeing the Taliban, Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein, Iranians fleeing the theocracy in that country, and Tamils fleeing genocide in Sri Lanka. Not surprisingly, a very high percentage (approximately 80-95 per cent) of boat people ultimately establish an entitlement to protection. […]
It is therefore difficult to assume that anything done by Australia will make any appreciable difference to the arrival rate of boat people.
If things are left as they are, Australia will continue to face the following problems associated with the present system: needless infliction of mental harm on detainees and damage to Australia’s reputation as a nation which cares about human rights. And don’t forget the huge cost: mandatory detention costs us about $1 billion a year.
There is simply no merit in the idea of detaining people indefinitely just because they have arrived in Australia by boat. Asylum seekers also arrive by air: typically they arrive on short-term visas such as business, tourist or student visas. Once in Australia, they apply for asylum. Once their initial visa expires, they are given a bridging visa pending assessment of their claim for asylum. This may take years, but they remain in the community while it happens. Most of these asylum claims fail on the merits (only about 20 per cent succeed). By contrast, about 80-90 per cent of boat arrivals ultimately succeed in their claim for asylum, but they are detained during the entire process.
The arrival rate of asylum seekers who come by air is two or three times greater than the arrival rate of boat people.
A question inevitably arises: what is the justification for detaining boat people indefinitely, at vast expense, when most of them will ultimately succeed in their claim for protection but will be damaged more or less severely by the process? To this question, it seems that the only genuine answer is an appeal to political advantage.
The fifth annual Get Reading! campaign kicks off this week, hoping to get people reading one or more of 50 books throughout the month of September. Get Reading! is a month-long, nationwide campaign – formerly known as Books Alive – to encourage more Australians to discover or rediscover the pleasure of reading books. There’s a free reading guide (50 Books You Can’t Put Down), book giveaways, author events and Get Reading Rooms in choice city locations across the country. Research suggests 25% of participants claim they will buy more books (and 20% claim they will borrow more books) as a result of their participation in the federal government-funded campaign.
The list of 50 books that form a part of the campaign is designed to offer something for everyone, from prize-winning Australian authors (like Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance and Gail Jones' Five Bells, also nominated for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards) to crime doyenne Lynda La Plante. There’s a memoir of Kasey Chambers, comedy by Fiona O'Loughlin, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and rescue, the new novel by Anita Shreve, who’s also appearing at the Wheeler Centre on 14 September.
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