Sideshow Alley – The West Wing edition
If you thought that the media death spiral couldn’t have been any worse than 2011 then think again. On Wednesday 25 January the media kicked off the political reporting year in earnest, and kicked their coverage right into the ditch.
Greg Jericho outlined in this Drum article how bad the year is looking for the development of good policy.
Based on the reporting of Minister for Transport and Infrastructure Anthony Albanese’s speech to the National Press Club, journalism is in for a shocker of a year as well.
Reading the media stories that came out of the National Press Club lunch on Wednesday did not fill this young student journalist with a lot of pride for the profession that he would like to enter.
The first speaker at the National Press Club for the year, Albanese came to do three things. Talk up the Government’s previous successes, outline the changes that will occur in his portfolio this year, and get a few sledges off at Tony Abbott.
If the media stories that covered it were any indication, then he only managed to succeed in getting through the last message.
The big news out of his speech yesterday was not that the harmonisation of 23 different law jurisdictions into one would save an estimated $30 billion in compliance costs for freight companies. It was not that the Government had spent more money over the past five years on urban infrastructure projects than every other government since Federation combined. It was not about a second airport for Sydney, or further investigations into a Canberra to Brisbane very fast train.
It was that he quoted some lines out of the Aaron Sorkin film “The American President” and didn’t attribute them.
His exact words were “In Australia we have serious problems to solve and we need serious problems to solve them. Unfortunately Tony Abbott is not the least bit interested in solving them. He is only interested in two things, making Australians afraid of it and telling them whose to blame for it.”
Pretty much word for word the same thing that Michael Douglas’ character said in the film.
Fairfax, Nine, the ABC, News Ltd. They all focused almost exclusively upon the fact that the lines were from the movie. The Coalition was happy to play along with Abbott, Hockey and Pyne all getting in on the act of criticising Albo over it. The Daily Telegraph even somewhat amusingly named it a “controversy“.
While ripping off lines is certainly not something to be encouraged (at university we would fail the unit or even get kicked out if we plagiarised somethinbg), the relevance of it to the public’s understanding of public policy and governance is somewhere between nil and zilch.
The “controversy” has made three things obvious. The first is that almost nobody in the Parliamentary Press Gallery has the foggiest clue or interest in transport policy or reporting on it.
The second is that if you are a political hack and are going to pull lines out of The West Wing or any other of Aaron Sorkin’s series or movies for a speech then you’d better reference them.
The third is that if you are a political hack and need your minister to defend a stuff-up then just slip a few Aaron Sorkin lines into their speech and *don’t* reference them. When the media find out that the minister plagiarised a line from The West Wing it’ll be the only thing that gets reported. Crisis averted!
The newswire AAP were just about the only ones to write about anything other than the movie quote.
