When Audiences Attack: Lessons from the Australian Poll Wars

Dr Axel Bruns Dr Jason Wilson Barry Saunders Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, Australia [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] http://snurb.info/ http://mad.beds.ac.uk/nmrg http://investigativeblog.net/ http://gatewatching.org/

During the interminably slow lead up to the Australian Federal Election in 2007, a remarkable conflict played out across the pages of the national daily newspaper The Australian and a number of citizen-led media outlets. The Australian is a publication of News Ltd., the domestic arm and foundation stone of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp empire. In recent times it has positioned itself as a loyal supporter of the incumbent, conservative Coalition Government of Prime Minister John Howard, and as generally favouring centre-Right political positions. It has maintained these positions even in the face of opinion polls (some by News Ltd.’s own polling agency, Newspoll) which throughout 2007 have consistently shown both a commanding lead for the opposition Labor party over the Government on a two party-preferred basis1, and a strong preference for opposition leader Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister. If such polling were reflected in the election itself, it would result in a landslide of support away from the government and towards the opposition (see e.g. Newspoll, 2007; Roy Morgan Research, 2007). In spite of the Government’s political problems, The Australian’s commentators have continued to put a positive spin on polling results: they have declared ‘the end of the honeymoon’ for Kevin Rudd several times over the past months, foreshadowed a delayed ‘budget bounce’ in opinion poll results once positive impacts from the June federal budget became notable in voters’ hip pockets, and (in a line also repeated by government ministers) suggested that voters were only using their responses to pollsters as a way of ‘letting off steam’ before returning to the conservative fold on election day (see e.g. opinion pieces in The Australian by Political Editor Dennis Shanahan, on 11 May, 26 May, 18 June, 10 July 2007). In this process, the commentators’ interpretation of poll results did not always meet scientific standards: small poll movements in the Government’s favour were described more often than not as another sign that ‘the honeymoon is over’ for the opposition leader, while movements in the opposite direction were explained away with references to the polls’ margins of error. As a case in point, a 10 July front-page piece by Dennis Shanahan was headlined “Howard Checks Rudd’s March” and described John Howard as ‘drawing level’ with

1 Australia’s Federal House of Representatives – the “lower house” where governments are formed – is elected by a system of preferential voting. Polls therefore usually record both “primary votes” – each party’s numerical share of the raw ballot, and, for the major parties, a “two party-preferred” vote that predicts their respective share of the vote after the distribution of preferences. Kevin Rudd in voter sympathy, even though the poll results themselves still showed at least a 1% gap between the two politicians, and a massive 12% gap in party voting intentions; notably, the online version of the same article was later retitled “Rudd 'Relaxed' about Howard's Poll Comeback” (Shanahan, 10 July 2007b; see Ramsey, 2007, for further commentary). Australian political bloggers and citizen journalists, meanwhile, have made great sport of analysing and critiquing such commentary (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, that of other newspaper and broadcast journalists). Dubbing The Australian the Government Gazette (see e.g. Bahnisch, 11 July 2007), bloggers examine the editorial pages and their online counterparts and find them wanting on an almost daily basis. Many of the paper’s editorial pieces are also published on News Ltd.’s News.com.au Website (combining material from The Australian and other Murdoch papers around the country) and there featured direct commenting and discussion functions for users. As a result, a significant amount of criticism also finds its way onto the News Website itself, and is displayed immediately alongside The Australian’s editors’ and commentators’ opinions. Preliminary research into Australian news and political blogging networks indicates that a majority of influential Australian bloggers at present favour leftist political causes (see Bruns, 2007a), perhaps as a result of the longevity of the current conservative federal government and the government’s generally good relationship with the majority of Australian mainstream news media; such bloggers’ sustained criticism of one of the flagships of the Australian print media is therefore hardly surprising. Ultimately, however, the persistence and vigour of this grassroots criticism appears to have had a surprisingly strong impact on the news media in general, and on The Australian in particular: on 12 July 2007, the paper published an extraordinary article openly attacking bloggers and other “sheltered academics and failed journalists who would not get a job on a real newspaper” (The Australian, 12 July 2007), ostensibly for daring to voice their disagreement with The Australian’s own journalists’ and pundits’ interpretation of the political mood of the electorate. Understood to have been authored by the paper’s editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, the article denounces grassroots online commentators as “out of touch with ordinary views”, and culminates in the remarkable statement that “unlike [political commentary site] Crikey, we understand Newspoll because we own it”. It should be understood that The Australian’s assertion of “ownership” of Newspoll in this connection is not an objection to it being quoted and discussed by other media outlets. Indeed, the fortnightly Newspoll normally sets the agenda for political reporting across the news media, including outlets not owned by News Ltd., precisely as it is intended to do. It can also influence political events, as seen in the near-implosion of the Howard Government in mid-September 2007 after Newspoll showed it trailing the opposition by sixteen points after preferences. News and The Australian want readers, and especially other journalists, to talk about the poll figures; what The Australian’s lead writers could not accept were the consistent, ongoing challenges to the newspaper’s authority to interpret those results and predict the political future. The intention is not to guard “ownership”, in the sense of the intellectual property that inheres in the poll results. Rather, this is a struggle over the prestige, authority, and cultural capital which is accorded to professional journalism and maintains its influence and audience. The Australian’s decision to “go” (Australian slang for attack) the bloggers over their polling interpretations can be seen as indicative of a range of underlying tensions. It perhaps shows how much some writers at the paper have riding on an unlikely Coalition victory, and how much heat there is remaining in Australia’s left-right “culture wars”. Newspoll chief executive Martin O’Shannessy has acknowledged that he made a mistake in weighing into the emerging debate by writing an op-ed piece in The Australian on 11 July that supported the paper’s interpretation of the polls. That he was asked to do so indicates the sense of panic amongst News Ltd. journalists about being called on their interpretations: political news site Crikey reports that O’Shannessy said at a panel discussion a month later that “he very much regretted writing in support of the newspaper's position, something he had done only at the urging of Dennis Shanahan, ‘my mate Dennis’” (Crikey 9 Aug. 2007). Some weeks later, Shanahan followed up on the debate with a piece which appeared to be “challenging the representation of polls and their accuracy” in general (4 Sep. 2007) – in essence reversing the earlier line to now state that ‘we understand Newspoll’s numbers are not to be trusted because we own it’, as some of the bloggers commented. With owners like these… Together, such events show the pressure that the Rudd ascendancy is bringing to bear on right-of-centre opinion-makers, who have until now been able to claim – like Howard – a special insight into the mind of “mainstream Australia”. To be fair, Shanahan himself suggests that it demonstrates how much writers at The Australian were offended by the personal vitriol with which they felt were attacked in some quarters (and here it should be said that some bloggers – both left and right – do take a severely jaundiced view of the “MSM”). The fact that it is polls rather than issues that generated the argument might be, as politicians like Senator Andrew Bartlett suggest, a sad reflection on the state of Australian political discourse, which places a premium on theatrical competition and “the contest” rather than the analysis of policy content (interview with Jason Wilson, 25 Sep. 2007). Importantly, though, it also suggests that attitudes towards blogging, citizen journalism, and citizen-led media in general have some way to mature in Australia. The response of mainstream media in Australia to blogging and citizen journalism thus far – when it is not outright attack as in the 12 July incident – can largely be described in terms of a few varieties of “cherry-picking”. Occasionally, mainstream news outlets source in- demand content covering fast-breaking events from multimedia-equipped citizens, as in events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Here, as in other events such as the London bombings on 7 July 2005, images and videos of the event taken with mobile phones were sought and used by major media outlets. Soliciting and featuring such content is often done on an ad hoc, event-driven basis; when the disaster subsides, there is no ongoing outlet for the work of citizen journalists. In summative uses of citizen media content, the “best” of what the bloggers are saying can be used in ways that do not recognise the conversational dynamic of blogging. As in UK papers such as The Guardian, publications may carry topical excerpts from selected blogs in supplementary sections. Such uses of blogging tends to be gestural, recognising the existence of a public affairs blogosphere, but not engaging with the dialogic structure and temporality of blogging. A variant of this is using online user forums to collect short opinions on particular issues, and featuring the “best” of this on the letters page. Often this may be done – as in The Australian – by putting questions on the “blogs” of established journalists and columnists. While this is an effective way of diversifying sources of feedback, it still places the print newspaper at the heart of the conversation, and reasserts the primacy of professional, credentialed industry writers. Rarely, news organisations may incorporate existing ’A-list’ bloggers into their own news websites. This is exemplified by News.com.au’s employment of Tim Dunlop (the operator of popular blog Road to Surfdom) or Fairfax Digital’s employment of freelancer Jack Marx. Such approaches seem less opportunistic and appear to acknowledge some bloggers’ talent and importance as independent public voices, but these arrangements are often troubled because the structures and processes of industrial journalism struggle with the ethos of bloggers who are accustomed to making their own editorial, publishing, and political calls. The 12 July incident underlined these problems as well. When News.com.au’s lone leftist blogger-pundit, Tim Dunlop, posted an article condemning The Australian’s editorial, it was removed from the site within hours of publication. Rather than silencing the debate, however, that retraction served only to emphasise The Australian’s inability to cope with grassroots criticism of its journalistic standards especially from within the organisation. (Adding insult to injury, a watchful commentator at the political group blog Larvatus Prodeo reposted Dunlop’s article in full almost immediately upon its removal from News.com.au; see Larvatus Prodeo, 2007.) When interviewed by us some time after the event, Dunlop deadpanned that following the incident he was “not very happy”, even to the extent of reconsidering his position as a News blogger, but that readers persuaded him that the experiment was worth persisting with, if only because he was a reliable if lonely left-of-centre voice in the organisation (interview with Jason Wilson, 18 Sep. 2007). Dunlop himself thinks that large news organisations are too complex for us to claim that one or another is inherently “pro-” or “anti-blogging”, and points to Rupert Murdoch’s boldness in his statements about citizen media as evidence that accommodation is possible (Murdoch, 2006). Notably, at least one article in a Murdoch publication – in Brisbane’s only daily newspaper, the Courier-Mail – recently drew substantially on the opinion poll analyses provided by leading Australian psephologist bloggers (Atkins, 26 Sep. 2007). Unless and until the boss’s enthusiasm catches on more broadly at middle management level, though, and structural changes are made, it is likely that the space and time given by mainstream media to bloggers and citizen journalists will remain relatively token. Indeed, such gestures as mainstream industrial journalism does make to its citizen counterpart may be doomed to fail; it is unlikely that citizen journalism can contained by traditional news processes simply by subsuming its most visible proponents into the mainstream process. While individual news bloggers or other citizen journalists might be able to be converted to industry-style pundits, this ignores the fact that citizen journalism’s main source of impetus is the distributed effort of its overall community, and not the contribution of a handful of key practitioners. Individual community members may do little more than contribute what Lasica has famously described as “random acts of journalism” (2003), engaged in a practice of gatewatching which highlights interesting bits of information as they become available, comments on them, and shares them with a wider interest community (Bruns, 2005). But in participating in the community in this way, each member acts as a hybrid user/producer of journalistic content and commentary and contributes to a wider process of communal produsage (Bruns, 2007b/c, 2008) – and it is this open-access, ad hoc, and open-ended model of news produsage which (framed as citizen journalism) is fundamentally challenging the traditional model of mainstream journalism. Responses from the journalistic incumbents have even served to help its cause: whether by incorporating an increasing amount of citizen journalism content into their news products, or by attacking their new grassroots competitors in ever more hysterical tones, industrial journalists are pointing only to the shortcomings of their own production processes, as well as inadvertently pointing out to audiences the alternative sources of collaboratively prodused news that are now available to them. All of this shows that industrial journalism’s traditional models of operation, and even some of the revised models of operating along traditional lines in the new online environment which have emerged, are under increasing pressure from the economic as well as social realities of the information age. Journalism and most information industry professions will have to contend with a burgeoning of collaborative, collective produsage efforts, within and beyond their industries. In the long run, a refusal to engage with these new models of content creation will be counterproductive. Instead, journalism would do well to re-imagine its audience and re-invent its professional practices, much in the same way that parts of the software industry already have in the wake of open source (another produsage-based alternative to conventional industrial practices). In both industries, there is still an important place for professionals, but their role now is one of guide rather than leader, of (complementary) service provider rather than (sole) content producer. From now on, professional journalists will participate most effectively when they contribute original research and promote public debate, rather than acting as gatekeepers who foreclose on those debates. In much of the developed world, there now exists a continuum of journalistic models and practices which stretches from industrial gatekeeping to citizen gatewatching, with a strong pull at present perhaps towards the central, hybrid space. Industrial journalism which continues to ignore or denigrate citizen efforts is increasingly left behind public sentiment, but citizen journalism which shows scant regard for journalistic ethics or professional conduct similarly undermines its own position as a credible alternative. As Bardoel and Deuze describe it, this shift in our understanding of journalism “redefines the [professional] journalist’s role as an annotational or orientational one, a shift from the watchdog to the ‘guidedog’” (2001: 94) – journalists no longer ‘simply’ inform citizens of the news, but work with citizens in developing a shared understanding of the news, just as members of the public move from a position as informed (but perhaps passive) citizens to one as active, monitorial citizens (Jenkins, 2006: 208). This shift in their role may be anathema to many dyed-in-the-wool members of the journalism industry, but ultimately it is likely to be an inevitable transformation. The monitorial, watchdog role is being reclaimed by a multitude of bloggers, citizen journalists, and citizen activists who cast a critical eye both on politics, social institutions, and on mainstream journalism itself. For industrial journalism to reinvent itself as guidedog, though, requires not only a change of attitude, but new skills, procedures, and approaches to news reporting, commentary, and citizen engagement. The example of The Australian’s severe disconnect from popular sentiment clearly illustrates how that paper currently acts not so much as a trained guidedog but as a blind dog attempting to guide a sighted citizenry. To resolve this problem does not mean to slavishly follow mainstream public opinion wherever it may lead, of course, but it does require journalists to treat their audiences, their users, their newfound citizen-journalist peers, with the respect they deserve. Otherwise, that audience might develop its own, uncomfortable view as to who excactly are the “woolly-headed critics” indulging in “smug, self assured, delusional swagger” (The Australian, 12 July 2007).

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