adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Politics

Albanese wants to change the way politics is done. This means the way politics is reported will have to change too – The Conversation

Published

 on


If politics really is to be done differently, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised, then the way politics is reported will need to be done differently too.

This is because the media’s power to portray will determine how the electorate perceives whether change is happening.

It is a reciprocating process. The way politicians perform influences the media’s portrayal of them, and how the media portray politicians in turn influences political practice.

300x250x1

One benchmark for helping us assess whether the promised change materialises is provided by academic Judith Brett’s characterisation of the Morrison administration:

The blame shifting, the careless inattention, the failure to prepare, the blatant favouring of Coalition and marginal seats with government largesse, the focus on announcements with little follow-up, the absence of serious concern about corruption and integrity […]

But that benchmark takes into account only the performance of the politicians. What about the media?

The media do appear to be in the early stages of changing the way they report federal politics. But this change is tentative, patchy and uncertain.

For instance, the coverage of the government’s actions on foreign policy has on the whole been straightforward and informative. That was until someone in the media pack travelling with Albanese in Europe asked why the prime minister’s visit to Ukraine was not equivalent to Morrison’s holiday to Hawaii during the 2019 bushfires. Albanese slapped down the comparison as “offensive”.

The on-the-road media pack had a bad election campaign disfigured by exactly this kind of juvenile “gotcha” reporting. Clearly in some parts of the media, the atmosphere of anticipated change has not penetrated.

Some in the media are still struggling to adapt to the change of government.
Lukas Coch/AAP

In other parts of the media it clearly has, but there is an undercurrent of tentativeness, understandably so. Politics done differently suggests politics with fewer culture wars, fewer scandals, more policy focus, more incrementalism.

Moreover, a good deal of ideological steam has gone out of the political discourse as issues such as religious freedom, Safe Schools and transgender discrimination have faded from view. Climate change is now accepted by enough mainstream politicians, and media, to make the remainder look like cranks.

There has also been a dramatic structural change in the composition of the parliament, with the crossbench now representing a powerful third force. How will the media adjust from two-horse politics, so the crossbench gets a voice commensurate with its level of representation?




Read more:
How the ‘reality-distorting machinery’ of the federal election campaign delivered sub-par journalism


All this implies the need for a shift in the priority given by the media to the various news values that turn content into news. Two of the most powerful news values, negativity and conflict, have been in plentiful supply since the collapse of the Rudd prime ministership in 2010.

Politics done differently, with a focus on policy formulation and implementation, makes the news values of impact and significance more salient. But this is not the stuff of clickbait, eyeballs, social media agitation and tabloid headlines.

This is a challenge at a time when every click and eyeball counts for a media industry still trying to recoup some of the devastating financial losses inflicted by the internet.

Will editors and news directors – and media proprietors – be up for the challenge? It is too soon to say. Conflict or negativity can always be manufactured, so there is no guarantee a more civilised and constructive political conversation will be reflected in more civilised and constructive coverage.

However, there are a few early signs of recognition in the media that change is in the air.

Author and freelance journalist Julie Szego seems to be onto it. In a column for The Age, she made the sardonic observation that Australian politics was suddenly boring. Once upon a time, she wrote, it was like the Danish TV drama Borgen, a world of cheap publicity stunts, the selling out of cherished principles, and morally bankrupt spin where a prime minister “creepily” washed a woman’s hair for a photo op. “But now it is all one big yawn.” Yet this was worth celebrating, she said, because it had produced a “background hum of steady-as-she-goes, the not un-genuine bid for consensus, the incremental steps toward something better”.

Covering the first sitting day of the 47th parliament, The Australian on its front page tried kicking life into the issue of construction union thuggery, based on a parliamentary question from a Liberal backbencher. But its editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, wrote reflectively on the need for competence in government and for Albanese to break the cycle of first-term failure.

Whether this ‘new style’ of politics holds remains to be seen – but the media must be able and willing to adapt.
Mick Tsikas/AAP

Katharine Murphy, writing in The Guardian Australia, described the first day of the new parliament as conveying “a sense of a corner being turned”.

She noted that Scott Morrison was absent, preferring to attend a conference of conservative politicians in Tokyo. This was perhaps for the best, she added, since the style of politics he indulged in had been “repudiated in myriad ways”.

Whether this change in atmospherics illustrated by these examples of the newspaper coverage percolates into television news is an open question.

However, if change is to occur in how politics is portrayed to the public, the performance of television is crucial. This is because television news is still the most general source for Australian news consumers, with 66% saying they watch TV news and 42% saying it is their main source of news.




Read more:
How much do mainstream media matter in an election campaign? (Spoiler: more than you might think)


Television news is also the most formulaic of all professional mass media: tight scripts allied to footage that may or may not assist the viewer’s understanding, and grabs of people speaking, all compressed into short packages. There is little scope for reflecting anything except the most superficial elements of a story.

Even so, the wording of scripts, the way they are read, and the choice and juxtaposing of grabs do allow for change to be reflected.

Regardless of the medium, absorbing and implementing change like this takes effort, and the difficulty of breaking old habits should not be underestimated. Journalists and audiences alike are accustomed to established ways of telling stories, just as medieval minstrels and their audiences were. No departure from the established script is easily tolerated.

But if it turns out that tomorrow’s politics are indeed done differently, it would be a serious disservice to the public if the media overlaid on them the news template of yesterday.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Politics

Opinion: Canada's foreign policy and its domestic politics on Israel's war against Hamas are shifting – The Globe and Mail

Published

 on


The vote in the House of Commons last week on Israel’s war against Hamas represents a shift in both Canada’s foreign policy and its domestic politics.

The Liberal government is now markedly more supportive of the rights of Palestinians and less supportive of the state of Israel than in the past. That shift mirrors changing demographics, and the increasing importance of Muslim voters within the Liberal coalition.

Both the Liberal and Conservative parties once voiced unqualified support for Israel’s right to defend itself from hostile neighbours. But the Muslim community is growing in Canada. Today it represents 5 per cent of the population, compared with 1 per cent who identify as Jewish.

300x250x1

Although data is sparse prior to 2015, it is believed that Muslim Canadians tended to prefer the Liberal Party over the Conservative Party. They were also less likely to vote than the general population.

But the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper deeply angered the community with talk about “barbaric cultural practices” and musing during the 2015 election campaign about banning public servants from wearing the niqab. Meanwhile, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was promising to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada if elected.

These factors galvanized community groups to encourage Muslims to vote. And they did. According to an Environics poll, 79 per cent of eligible Muslims cast a ballot in the 2015 election, compared with an overall turnout of 68 per cent. Sixty-five per cent of Muslim voters cast ballots for the Liberal Party, compared with 10 per cent who voted for the NDP and just 2 per cent for the Conservatives. (Telephone interviews of 600 adults across Canada who self-identified as Muslim, were conducted between Nov. 19, 2015 and Jan. 23, 2016, with an expected margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points 19 times out of 20.)

Muslim Canadians also strongly supported the Liberals in the elections of 2019 and 2021. The party is understandably anxious not to lose that support. I’m told that Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly often mentions the large Muslim community in her Montreal riding. (According to the 2021 census, 18 per cent of the people in Ahuntsic-Cartierville identify as Muslim.)

This is one reason why the Liberal leadership laboured so mightily to find a way to support last week’s NDP motion that would, among other measures, have recognized the state of Palestine. The Liberal caucus was deeply divided on the issue. My colleague Marieke Walsh reports that dozens of Liberal MPs were prepared to vote for the NDP motion.

In the end, almost all Liberal MPs ended up voting for a watered-down version of the motion – statehood recognition was taken off the table – while three Liberal MPs voted against it. One of them, Anthony Housefather, is considering whether to remain inside the Liberal caucus.

This is not simply a question of political calculation. Many Canadians are deeply concerned over the sufferings of the people in Gaza as the Israel Defence Forces seek to root out Hamas fighters.

The Conservatives enjoy the moral clarity of their unreserved support for the state of Israel in this conflict. The NDP place greater emphasis on supporting the rights of Palestinians.

The Liberals have tried to keep both Jewish and Muslim constituencies onside. But as last week’s vote suggests, they increasingly accord a high priority to the rights of Palestinians and to the Muslim community in Canada.

As with other religious communities, Muslims are hardly monolithic. Someone who comes to Canada from Senegal may have different values and priorities than a Canadian who comes from Syria or Pakistan or Indonesia.

And the plight of Palestinians in Gaza may not be the only issue influencing Muslims, who struggle with inflation, interest rates and housing affordability as much as other voters.

Many new Canadians come from societies that are socially conservative. Some Muslim voters may be uncomfortable with the Liberal Party’s strong support for the rights of LGBTQ Canadians.

Finally, Muslim voters for whom supporting the rights of Palestinians is the ballot question may be drawn more to the NDP than the Liberals.

Regardless, the days of Liberal/Conservative bipartisan consensus in support of Israel are over. This is the new lay of the land.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Politics

Recall Gondek group planned to launch its own petition before political novice did – CBC.ca

Published

 on


The third-party group helping promote the recall campaign against Mayor Jyoti Gondek had devised plans to launch its own petition drive, as part of a broader mission to make Calgary council more conservative.

Project YYC had planned with other conservative political organizations to gather signatures demanding Calgary’s mayor be removed, says group leader Roy Beyer. But their drive would have begun later in the year, when nicer weather made for easier canvassing for supporters, he said.

Those efforts were stymied when Landon Johnston, an HVAC contractor largely unknown in local politics, applied at city hall to launch his own recall drive in early February. Since provincial recall laws allow only one recall attempt per politician per term, Project YYC chose to lend support to Johnston’s bid.

300x250x1

“Now we have to try to do door-knocking in the winter, and there’s a lot of preparation that you have to contemplate prior to starting. And Landon didn’t do that,” Beyer told CBC News in an interview.

Project YYC has helped gather signatures, created a website and erected large, anti-Gondek signs around town. It has supplied organizational heft that Johnston admits to lacking.

Their task is daunting.

According to provincial law, in order to force a recall plebiscite to oust the mayor before the term is up, they have two months to gather more than 514,000 signatures, an amount equal to 40 per cent of Calgary’s population in 2019.

They have until April 4 to collect that many signatures, and by March 21 had only 42,000.

Beyer criticizes the victory threshold for recall petition as so high that it’s “a joke,” and the province may as well not have politician recall laws.

So if he thinks it’s an impossible pursuit, why is he involved with this?

“You can send a message to the mayor that she should be sitting down and resigning … without achieving those numbers,” Beyer said.

Project YYC founder Roy Beyer, from a Take Back Alberta video in 2022. He is no longer with that provincial activist group. (royjbeyer screenshot/Rumble)

He likened it to former premier Jason Kenney getting 52 per cent support in a UCP leadership review — enough to technically continue as leader, but a lousy enough show of confidence that he announced immediately he would step down.

Gondek has given no indication she’ll voluntarily leave before her term is up next year. But she did emerge from a meeting last week with Johnston to admit the petition has resonated with many Calgarians and is a signal she must work harder to listen to public concerns and explain council’s decisions.

The mayor also told the Calgary Sun this week that she’s undecided about running for re-election in 2025. 

“There used to be this thing where if you’re the mayor, of course you’re going to run for another term because there’s unfinished business,” Gondek told the newspaper.

“And yes, there will be unfinished business, but the times are not what they were. You need to make sure you’re the right leader for the times you’re in.”

The last several Calgary mayors have enjoyed multiple terms in office, going back to Ralph Klein in the 1980s. The last one-term mayor was Ross Alger, the man Klein defeated in 1980.

Beyer and fellow conservative organizers launched Project YYC before the recall campaign. The goal was to elect a conservative mayor and councillors — “a common-sense city council, instead of what we currently have,” he said.

Beyer is one of a few former activists with the provincial pressure group Take Back Alberta to have latched themselves to the recall bid and Project YYC, along with some United Conservative Party riding officials in Calgary. 

Beyer’s acknowledgment of his group’s broader mission comes as Premier Danielle Smith and her cabinet ministers have said they want to introduce political party politics in large municipalities — even though most civic politicians have said they don’t want to bring clear partisanship into city halls.

Although Beyer admits Project YYC’s own recall campaign would have been a coalition effort with other conservative groups, he wouldn’t specify which ones. He did insist that Take Back Alberta wasn’t one of them.

A man in a grey baseball cap speaks to reporters.
Calgary business owner Landon Johnston speaks to reporters at City Hall on March 22 following his 15-minute conversation with Mayor Jyoti Gondek. (Laurence Taschereau/CBC)

Johnston says he was approached by Beyer’s group shortly after applying to recall Gondek, and gave them $3,000 from donations he’d raised.

He initially denied any knowledge of Project YYC when documents first emerged about that group’s role in the recall, but later said he didn’t initially realize that was the organizational name of his campaign allies.

“They said they could get me signatures, so I said, ‘OK, if you can do it by the book, here’s some money.’ And it’s worked,” he said.

Johnston has said he’s new to politics but simply wants to remove Gondek because of policies he’s disagreed with, like the soon-to-be-ended ban on single-use plastics and bags at restaurant takeouts and drive-thrus.

He’s no steadfast conservative, either. He told CBC’s Calgary Eyeopener that he voted for Rachel Notley’s NDP because one of its green-renovation incentives helped his HVAC business.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Politics

Larry David shares how he feels about Trump – CNN

Published

 on


Larry David shares how he feels about Trump

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Larry David shares how he feels about former President Donald Trump and the 2020 election. Watch the full episode of “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” streaming March 29 on Max.


03:21

– Source:
CNN

Adblock test (Why?)

300x250x1

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending