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reviews | Jamie Cooke

SWITCHED OFF: AUSTRALIA’S MEDIA

Michael Gawenda: American Notebook: A Personal and Political Journey (Melbourne University Press, ISBN 052285253X, $32.95)
David Salter: The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate (Melbourne University Press, ISBN 0522854206, $34.95)

Unfortunate as it may be, Michael Gawenda has a point in American Notebook: A Personal and Political Journey when he says “there was no more important and interesting international story to cover than the United States at the beginning of George W. Bush’s second term”. Any informed discussion of the state of the States and their self-proclaimed status as the global sheriff of democracy is both welcome and necessary, despite the author’s protestations that the book is “not a polemic” but merely “one journalist’s view”.
     While it offers nothing new in terms of commentary, American Notebook presents Gawenda at his journalistic best. He is particularly insightful, though at times overly measured, in his account of Bush’s bizarre first visit to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans and on the peculiarly paternal relationship between Bush and Howard.
     It’s the personal framework that becomes the book’s Achilles heel. While at first lending Gawenda’s commentary a distinctive voice, the attempt to ground the political in the subjective soon becomes both tedious and indulgent.
     Gawenda uses American Notebook to justify the Age’s support, during his tenure, for Australia’s involvement in the Coalition of the Willing. However, nowhere does he acknowledge his – or the paper’s – error in taking the government’s justifications at face value, and his account of the controversy comes across as both bitter and tired.
     It’s interesting to note, then, that in The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate David Salter sees the particular failing of the media industry as its self-importance and myopia: “the media in Australia spend a disproportionate amount of time and space talking to each other about themselves”.
     Salter’s caustic dissection of the social (and economic) transaction between the media and the public paints the industry as at once masterful in its manipulation of sentiment and dangerously out of touch:

It would be easy to explain this disconnect in the familiar, shop-worn ‘alienation’ terms of contemporary sociology. In truth, the switch off is mutual. Many of the media’s more prominent concerns have, indeed, drifted away from matters of genuine popular consciousness and sentiment. This is partly no more than a reflection of the media’s natural abhorrence of the mundane: everyday events and problems aren’t notable – otherwise they’d be ‘news’. The more worrying disconnect stems from the gap between the social standing and lifestyles of the people who create our popular newspapers and television programs and the audiences they are employed to serve … This disengagement is reflected in the slow but steady declines of newspaper circulation and free-to-air television audiences. A shrinking proportion of our population maintains sufficient interest in public affairs to be regular consumers of factual material.

While The Media We Deserve is a thorough and unapologetic critique of the state of the industry in Australia, Salter does at times appear to steer the evidence in line with his own agenda. Of the internet, he says, “its disadvantage is that this vastness tends to destroy any real sense of scale or relative news value”, but fails to recognise that with the move towards digital media come different ways of reading the news and a less hierarchical restructure of news headlines. The sheer scale of the information available might be daunting but doesn’t tend to destroy a sense of the value of that information so much as create a more involved and selective reader.
This criticism is minor, however. For the most part, the book is a considered, wonderfully contemptuous and revealing look at the state of the media industry in Australia.

Jamie Cooke is a writer and an intern at Overland.

Overland 189 – summer 2007, p.87.

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