Australian TV News: New Forms, Functions, and Futures

First published in the UK in 2013 by

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Forms and functions

Research methods

Notes

Chapter 1: The new news

Tabloidisation and the ‘narrative of decline’

The power of the popular

Another way

‘Fake’ news

Countering FOX

Partisan?

Fifth estate

Breaking the rules

Notes

Chapter 2: Waking up with friends

What is Sunrise?

Breakfast time

‘Real people have nicknames’: The hosts

‘The family’

(Extra)ordinary News

Notes

Chapter 3: Sunrise: Infotainment and the ‘televisual sphere’

Genre

‘Dumbing down’?

Depth of news

The televisual sphere

Notes

Chapter 4: The democracy of conversation

The Panel: A short history

Fun news

Authenticity

Discursivity

Democracy

Notes

Chapter 5: Weapons of war

Waging war on everything

Pushing the limits

‘It’s like Jackass…’

Political satire

‘It’s about culture...’

Hitting the limits

Notes

Chapter 6: What have we learned from The Chaser this week?

Media satire

Critical intertextuality

Dissecting the tabloid

Chasing reporters

Media sceptics

Making sense of the news

Notes

Chapter 7: Journalism in crisis?

Cultural chaos

A holistic perspective

Winning the arms race

For fun, not money

Notes

Conclusion

Journalism education after ‘journalism’

New methods

Appendix: Research participant information

References

Acknowledgements

Index

Legal Disclaimer

Several passages from this book were used without permission or attribution in the Introduction and Chapter 3 of Milissa Deitz’s book Watch This Space: The Future of Australian Journalism (2010, Cambridge University Press: Melbourne). Dr Deitz and Cambridge University Press wish to confirm that Australian TV News: New Forms, Functions, and Futures is an original work of authorship created entirely by Stephen Harrington, and apologise for any reputational harm or other difficulties experienced by him as a result of these previous omissions.

Author’s Note

Some readers may be aware that the ideas in this book have spent many years in development. And, some early iterations of those ideas have been published previously in the form of:

Harrington, S. (2005) ‘The Democracy of Conversation: The Panel and the Public Sphere’, Media International Australia, no. 116, pp. 75–87.

____ (2008) ‘Future-Proofing Journalism: Youthful Tastes and the Challenge for the Academy’, Continuum, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 395–407.

____ (2008) ‘Popular News in the Twenty-First Century: Time for a New Critical Approach?’, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 266–84.

____ (2010) ‘Chasing Reporters: Intertextuality, Entertainment and Public Knowledge’, Media International Australia, no. 134, pp. 121–30.

____ (2010) ‘Waking up with Friends: Breakfast News, Sunrise and the Televisual Sphere’, Journalism Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 175–89.

____ (2012) ‘The Uses of Satire: Unorthodox News, Cultural Chaos and the Interrogation of Power’, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 38–52.

I am grateful to the editors and publishers of these journals for permission to re-develop and re-use some of that material for this book.

Foreword

A television critic from one of the broadsheet newspapers once wrote a scathing piece about the Sunrise and Today coverage of a natural disaster. In a nutshell, he claimed television presenters should be shackled to the studio desk and autocue. They should never venture anywhere near a viewer let alone an actual news story otherwise they descend in to amateur dramatics and hyperbole. It was like saying all the pages of broadsheet newspapers should just contain news coverage. Get rid of journalists having opinions, they should just give the facts. Drop the movie and theatre reviews, forget the fashion and food supplements and do away with the car guides and cartoons too. It was a scornful assessment of an entertaining and, importantly, consumer-driven news platform that relates to the everyday Australian.

Breakfast television was arguably the first television news genre to actively connect with viewers. The first to encourage email comments, to launch interactive websites, to initiate loyalty programmes. And viewers have responded. Gone are the old days where media sits in their ivory tower and decides what the masses should or shouldn’t be shown. Customers (yep they are customers) have other choices and will go elsewhere. The only measure of success is whether your customers like what you produce. Media is no different to any other business. You listen to viewers and do your utmost to provide them with the best possible product they want.

Because media diversity means Australians have choices. There’s no right or wrong, or good or bad, decision. It’s what suits you.

I’ve been involved in breakfast television for ten years now as the co-host of Sunrise, and worked in the papers before that, so I know a bit about the way the media monster works. You don’t connect or become part of someone’s life if you sit there like a stunned mullet reading an autocue. That is so outdated and archaic. You have to engage the audience and draw opinions from them to really achieve relevance. Hear what they want and how they want it and respond candidly to that. This is especially important in the busy breakfast television market we vie for. People have very set routines in the morning in terms of getting ready for work, or getting the kids off to school or whatever. We provide a more casual, personable alternative to traditional straight-laced news platforms that our time-poor viewers can tune into and catch up on what’s happening each morning. Having them tune in for just 20 minutes each morning is greatly appreciated. Traditional rolling news formats have a strong following and those broadcasters do a terrific job, we’re just different. News and current affairs programmes don’t have to be exactly the same as each other, do they? How boring would that be?

A lot of these valuable lessons we’ve learnt from the most personal of all media genres, radio. The best radio hosts are the ones who connect and listen to their customers, who become part of their audience’s lives. After all, just like radio, you can’t hide during three hours of live daily television. You just can’t pretend to be something you’re not. Yes you say stupid things sometimes, but that’s life. What you see is what you get and that’s why we love doing it. We’re not afraid to get out and host seven hours of live television, commercial free, without scripts or autocue. If a story is unfolding we go with it. Our viewers love that we do and the thanks we get from those communities for being there and caring is overwhelming. They’re grateful that we’re there to show the rest of the country what they’re going through and to inform worried friends and relatives elsewhere. Australians care about others doing it tough and so do we.

We have a directive to inform, entertain and care for our viewers and that’s exactly what we try to do. If the frowning, straight-faced news junkies don’t like the way we do it, that’s fine, they can change the channel, or even better, read this book.

After hearing such a bitter pocket of the media take the sword to the way we go about giving the news on breakfast television, it’s refreshing to read some empirical evidence validating our format. In Australian TV News: New Forms, Functions, and Futures, Stephen Harrington takes an incisive look into the direction of television news in Australia and how the programmes of today are challenging outdated assumptions about the form it should come in and the function it should serve. In an environment where we’re being bombarded with more news through more channels than ever, Harrington’s study is an interesting insight into just what exactly it is about news television that makes consumers tick. As he summarises so well, news formats have become democratised, less hierarchical and more colloquial. The delivery of news nowadays is contested by so many different media outputs that ultimately, the consumer has the final say in which formats flourish and which ones flounder.

Understandably, it was heartening to learn from the study that shackling me to the studio desk and autocue isn’t on consumer’s cards going forward. Because, after all, they’re the ones that make us do what we do the way we do it.

David Koch

To Rebecca, Edward and Owen.

The three loves of my life.

The conventions under which journalism operates are rooted in historic and practical circumstance, but unlike medicine or engineering or other professions, they are not governed by immutable rules of biology or physics or other mandates of nature; journalism’s conventions are only tangentially governed by the laws of man.

Davis ‘Buzz’ Merritt (1998: 17)

Introduction

On Thursday, 6 September, 2007, what appeared to be a motorcade carrying Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was waved though a police security checkpoint established in Sydney’s central business district to safeguard delegates attending the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). The main passenger in this convoy was, in fact, not Stephen Harper, but Osama bin Laden, leader of the terrorist network al-Qaeda and the world’s most-wanted person. After passing another police officer – who did not check anyone’s identification – the convoy found itself only metres away from the InterContinental Hotel, which was hosting then-US President George W. Bush during his stay in Australia. Fortunately for authorities, the motorcade contained only a group of satirists (comedian Chas Licciardello was dressed up as Osama bin Laden), not an al-Qaeda sleeper-cell. It was merely an elaborate hoax, executed for the ABC show The Chaser’s War on Everything.

While The Chaser Team¹ had already become well known in Australia for their mischievous public antics, this unexpectedly high-profile stunt had unwittingly² exposed a ‘potentially dangerous flaw’ in what had been widely touted as Australia’s largest-ever security operation (Powell 2007b; Wright 2007). Their passing through heavy security where others – including a senior member of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) (Powell 2007a) – had failed, quickly spread around the world to much amazement (Balogh 2007; Gibson & Baker 2007). APEC organisers then spent several days defending their operation, and were repeatedly forced to explain how a team of comedians had entered the APEC meeting’s ‘red zone’ without appropriate security clearance (Casey 2007c). Some, especially New South Wales Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione and then-Police Minister David Campbell, took the intrusion very seriously. To them, it was an unnecessary, potentially dangerous prank that completely overshadowed Australia’s ‘chance to shine on the world stage’ (Conway 2007), and they did not ‘see a funny side at all’ (Kirby & Stanley 2007). Eleven members of The Chaser production team (including two of its stars, Chas Licciardello and Julian Morrow) were arrested and charged over the incident, and at one stage faced a potential jail sentence of up to six months, although all charges against the group were later dropped (Baker 2008).

The Australian public, however, viewed this event quite differently to authorities. Almost 90 per cent of respondents to an online poll conducted by the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper found the incident humorous, not irresponsible (Gibson & Baker 2007). One newspaper commentator went so far as to call The Chaser’s supposedly ‘reckless’ actions ‘perhaps the greatest piece of political commentary ever seen in Australia’ (Fine 2007). The incident quickly turned into an opportunity for journalists covering the APEC summit – during which time Sydney residents were given an extra public holiday to help ease disruption caused by security efforts (Conway 2007) – to begin vigorously questioning the real value of the multi-million dollar, taxpayer-funded operation:

Despite spending more than $250 million (or about $10 million [per] arrest) on steel fences, concrete barriers, [a] water cannon, thousands of armed police, repressive laws granting extensive new powers to public authorities to detain citizens and who knows what else, there were giant holes in a security envelope cracked by pranksters, attracting widespread media attention here and overseas. We once looked to a free press to check the actions and puncture the puffed-up pretensions of those in power, both public officials and corporate mandarins. Today, the powerful threaten The Chaser team with jail time rather than offer it kudos for revealing the charade that passed for security at last week’s APEC conference.

(Burgess 2007)

Although it occurred over half a decade ago, this stunt was truly The Chaser’s finest hour. It signalled a genuine shift in the role that entertainment media play in Australian public life. Here, a group of comedians managed to challenge power and authority far more convincingly than any ‘serious’ journalist, and drew international attention to their actions. This one stunt, I think, very clearly exposes the rapidly changing relationships between popular television, ‘traditional’ journalism, politics and the public that we are still struggling to fully comprehend.

Forms and functions

This book aims primarily to examine and understand emergent forms of TV news in Australia, and how these forms are changing and affecting audiences’ understanding of politics³ (or politicians), the public sphere and our culture more broadly. In order to do this, it explores three different programmes in fine detail: Sunrise (2002–present), The Panel (1998-2004) and The Chaser’s War on Everything (2006–07, 2009). Each one of these shows has in some way provided a useful challenge to longstanding assumptions about what form TV news should take, and the functions it ought to serve. Perhaps because journalism is still seen to serve a ‘vital democratic function’ (Schudson 1998: 33), journalism scholars, particularly in Australia, have been too narrow in their views about what counts as journalism and therefore failed to notice these significant changes in news production practices over the last two decades (Harrington 2012a). Many are, unfortunately, still working with a very idealised conception of journalism:

[T]he conception of journalism which [many theorists] promote […] is a very narrow one and accounts for only a small portion of that which in a practical, empirical sense constitutes contemporary journalism. […] The discourses, in other words, are increasingly unsuccessful in accounting for journalism as a whole by only referring to and legitimating only one particular form.

(Dahlgren 1992: 7)

Although all three shows discussed in this book fall well outside the widely-accepted parameters of ‘quality’ journalism, they are (or were) used by audiences as sources of news. They are highly unorthodox, but nevertheless legitimate and valuable forms of public knowledge production that throw into question the way that journalism has traditionally been theorised, taught and researched. In essence, if the day’s news ‘is [now] processed in new ways by new voices’ (Jones 2005: 4), then the time has come to start exploring (without prejudice) who these voices belong to, and how they contribute to the sense-making practices of ordinary Australians.

The arguments in this book, while focussed primarily on Australian examples, are indicative of larger structural changes to the ways that information interacts with culture. News formats globally have become democratised, less hierarchical and more colloquial. ‘Traditional’, authoritative forms of journalism are still inherently valuable in this new global public sphere, but have become less central in the everyday news-gathering practices of ‘ordinary’ citizens because information moves with less predictability, and at a massively increased speed. With the significantly greater amount of information now available to the public, and cultural hierarchies of production now flattened considerably (thanks mostly to advances in technology and more widespread technological literacy), journalism’s position within society is more ephemeral, and contested by a range of different media outputs (including, of course, entertaining shows like Sunrise, The Panel and The Chaser’s War on Everything).

In order to adopt a far more inclusive perspective on the way news is ‘used’ in our culture, this book does away with narrow definitions of news, and aims to understand those TV forms which have gone largely unrecognised by journalism scholars. It adopts what Jones (2006: 370) calls a ‘cultural approach to the study of mediated citizenship’, which emphasises the plurality of political media, and that the interplay of various news forms creates an aggregate picture through which citizens ‘make sense of the world’:

A cultural approach foregrounds the ways in which popular media shape public experiences with and dispositions toward politics, including our civic values and democratic imaginations. To do so is to recognize that this shaping occurs through many different media forms (beyond news) that offer a variety of meanings, each with the potential for multiple means of individual and communal interaction (beyond information acquisition).

(Jones 2006: 379)

While this cultural approach to the relationship between media and politics has been examined extensively in relation to US television, this book is among the first to adopt a specifically Australian perspective on these matters. Although many other scholars have previously acknowledged journalism as a larger cultural practice than the core of the profession often recognises (see, for example, Baym 2005; Carpignano et al. 1993; Hartley 1996; Jones 2005; Katz 1992; Mano 2007; Turner 1996c; 2005), few studies have attempted to qualitatively understand how audiences use these unorthodox news forms as a means of keeping themselves informed in their daily lives.

Research methods

To fully understand the changing landscape of TV news in Australia, and go beyond merely clever textual observations, this book draws heavily on qualitative audience research, which is ‘triangulated’ with textual analysis and interviews with industry professionals involved in the shows’ production (see Nightingale 1996: 112–13; Turner 1996a: 150). Rather than make observations in a haze of ‘ever-more-abstract theoretical narcissism’ (Bird 1992: 250), this book examines Sunrise, The Panel and The Chaser’s War on Everything in a way that is grounded by an empirical understanding of audience readings of the shows.

The main audience research method used in this book is interviewing, either through focus groups, or with individuals. Participants for the study were recruited using the ‘snowball’ technique (Schrøder et al. 2003: 151), in which the researcher distributes a call for participants within pre-existing social networks. In total, 45 people were recruited for the study (see Appendix for basic demographic details), ranging in age from 17 to 57 years. All of the focus groups and interviews were semi-structured (ranging in length from 25 to 80 minutes), so as to permit the participants a great deal of freedom in the direction of the conversation, and to allow for the possibility that there were aspects of the programmes not considered when the questions for the interviews were written.

Although the participants’ experience in a research situation such as this is never entirely ‘natural’ (Hansen et al. 1998: 263), like Hobson (1982: 107, original emphasis) I suspect knowing they were going to be asked about the programmes ‘seemed to sharpen the awareness with which they watched [them]’. Unlike some qualitative research, the aim of this project was not to undertake a quasi-psychological interrogation of ‘hidden deep meanings’ when analysing the participants’ responses (McKee 2006: 525) but to examine the transcripts⁴ as a text to be analysed like any other.

In addition to this audience research, this book also draws upon interviews with key members of the production teams of all three shows (eight interviews with 10 people in total), which provided further evidence for – and a different perspective on – the research.⁵ These interviews were a very important step towards analysing the shows in question and better understanding how their producers think about their audiences.

Of course, conducting qualitative audience research can be plagued by some common issues. The three main problems that tend to occur are making broad generalisations based on an unrepresentative audience sample; respondents giving information that does not accurately reflect their attitudes or opinions (either influenced by the ‘sub-text’ of questions, or by saying what they think the researcher wants them to); researchers’ data analysis being guided by their own pre-existing hypotheses (Schrøder 1999: 52) or over-identification with participants – what Berger (2000: 161) calls ‘going native’. Accepting such dangers, however, and remaining methodologically aware throughout the entire research process, can be an effective way to best manage them. I strongly argue that it is far better to conduct a study that has limits and acknowledges them, than to be gripped by ‘a paralysing (if vertiginously thrilling) trance of epistemological nervousness’ (Morley 1997: 136) and never undertake any empirical research whatsoever. While I do acknowledge, for example, the at-times constructivist nature of researching audiences as though they were a ‘unified aggregate of similarly endowed individuals’ (Radway 1988: 360) who are ‘out there’ to be studied, it is important to push past these ontological debates. While Hartley argues that conceptions of audiences are mere ‘invisible fictions’ (Hartley 1987; see also Bertrand & Hughes 2005: 55; Allor, in Bird 1992: 250), Morley (1997: 124) offers a much more useful alternative, proposing that ‘it is possible to recognize the necessarily constructivist dimensions of any research process without claiming that audiences exist only discursively’. It is possible, therefore, for audience research to be ‘rooted in real experience without being slavishly positivist’ (Bird 1992: 253):

Even as we acknowledge the importance of global and national economic and political forces in constructing mediascapes in which we live, we don’t all need to become political economists. The ‘on the ground’ perspective […] is still crucial, and offers a dimension that no other approach can duplicate. […] We should not be abandoning the