Dear Media, it’s not them, it’s you.
Or at least it’s not just or even mostly them. When the media gives way more oxygen to stunts and shenanigans instead of meaningful analysis of policy and proposed legislation, then the Opposition in particular is going to continue pulling stunts and shenanigans, and just because the public’s eyeballs are drawn to those stories, it doesn’t mean that they like what they see.
The House is not sitting for the next two weeks, so the potential for stunts and shenanigans is mercifully limited for a while (although no doubt various door-stop soundbites will be given far more attention than they deserve). I’ll be interested to see whether it makes a difference in the next polls.
This morning “Rudd is the only leader who can win the next election for Labor” was being trotted out again in the brief check of MSM to see what the weather was going to be before the cartoons went back on. Gah, eyeroll etc, just phoning it in on the exasperation these days, I seemed to have reached peak exasperation with that particular meme.
Peak exasperation sums it up perfectly. The media coverage is so damned repetitive, and there is hardly any depth to it at all.
I think that the media is reflection of the general population. The media live and die by ratings and they give us what we want whether its good for us in the long term or not. Quality media coverage that has good analysis of situations simply doesn’t rate high enough to justify the cost and time. So we get cheap, superficial coverage with the media playing up conflict where they can because it rates well.
Possum has a good article on how politics and media have ended up in this bad state:
http://kingstribune.com/current-issue/1516-the-great-unhinging-revisited