Malcolm Turnbull

On February 12, the Prime Minister stood in parliament to deliver the annual Closing The Gap report, which despite being spun as “the most promising” report since 2011, showed that the gap between non-Indigenous and Indigenous health, educational and economic outcomes remained, for the most part, stubbornly unclosed, and in some cases widening. Luckily a “refresh” of Closing The Gap was underway to fix things and address the fact that some of the targets were expiring.

Unfortunately, February 12 was also a few days after the media broke the story of Barnaby Joyce’s relationship with a former staffer, and the day the then-deputy prime minister decided to make a statement about that, beginning a second week of a scandal that has preoccupied the media ever since.

Closing The Gap only gets attention once a year. The rest of the year, issues around Indigenous health, or educational attainment, or mortality, are more likely to be reported opportunistically in terms of crisis. The refresh process receives minimal attention, despite the efforts of good journalists like The Australian’s Stephen Fitzpatrick to explore the problems with that process. Joyce completely obliterated the one chance for a detailed debate about Closing The Gap to dominate the political space.

It was only the most egregious example of what might be called the media’s symptom obsession — a relentless focus on detailing the symptoms of political malaise without any effort to explore the actual conditions producing the symptoms. This obsessive symptomologising is impossible when it comes to, for example, Indigenous health — so constantly have we heard about the gap in life expectancy and higher morbidity of most health problems among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island that any discussion must immediately engage with the structural, economic and cultural issues that produce the “gaps”. It is impossible to cover these issues without examining the need for Indigenous community empowerment, an Indigenous health workforce, greater resourcing of evaluation, and acknowledging the continuing impact of occupation. It’s complex stuff.

In contrast, despite efforts to portray the issue as about one of gender power dynamics, the Joyce-Campion scandal — even if we accept the assertions that there was a public interest in its revelation — is merely something we’ve seen thousands of times before — which is probably a reason why, many months later, we’re still getting hot takes, recaps and “interview fallout” pieces.

The problem of symptomologising isn’t normally as stark as on February 12; it’s usually more subtle and occurs within particular issues. Take wages growth: the collapse of wages growth across the West in recent years is one of the most politically significant events of the last four decades, because it has exposed the fundamental tendency to inequality and ever-growing corporate power innate to neoliberal economics, and driven a fierce backlash from voters resentful that neoliberalism has stopped delivering for them while continuing to deliver for corporations.

A similar dynamic has played out on a smaller scale in Australia. Yet few economists and fewer journalists have been willing to explore the underlying causes of wage stagnation even as year after year of over-optimistic predictions from the policymaking elite have failed to eventuate. The causes — the decline of unions, the tilting of the industrial relations playing field against them and the growing power of market-dominating corporations  — receive little attention despite their impacts jolting political establishments in Washington, Europe and right here. It should be the biggest story of the era, but it’s usually an afterthought for the business pages.

A different kind of symptomologising plays out on another policy issue: the relentless increase in powers of government security agencies at the expense of the rights of citizens. There, there’s no failure by journalists to go beyond the symptoms; but instead of focusing on the actual conditions that have produced the constant diminution of rights, the symptoms are blamed on an invented disease of an existential threat of “hate us for our freedom” Islamist terrorism. This “disease” isn’t even internally coherent as an explanation — we are apparently less safe than ever despite decades of curbs on civil liberties, because laws constantly need to be further tightened and more money spent, and the treatment for “they hate us for our freedom” is to endlessly curb that freedom.

A proper diagnosis would note the alliance of interests between politicians, security bureaucrats, defence companies, the media and terrorists themselves to perpetuate a War on Terror and the tendency of bureaucratic systems to clone, perpetuate and justify themselves without external guidance or scrutiny. Instead, on national security laws and surveillance issues, most of the media are like medieval doctors explaining disease on an imbalance of humours and insisting the treatment is ever more leeches.

This is not, however, yet another bag-the-media piece. This is the most difficult moment in the history of the media in the West. The business model has collapsed. The sheer level of resourcing deployed by corporations and governments aimed at lying is overwhelming. A diminishing number of journalists must produce more content across more platforms than ever before. It’s easier just to describe the symptoms rather than do the hard work of determining the disease that’s causing them. As Closing The Gap shows, the latter is more complicated, harder to condense to 500 words, and less likely to generate clicks than a hot take on Barnaby Joyce, another screw-up by Michaelia Cash, or a social media outrage.

Good journalists can do both, of course. We are well served by some journalists and commentators who both “report” and who are curious about the underlying causes of what they report on. A non-exclusive list in the political/public policy realm includes Katherine Murphy, Phillip Coorey, Mark Kenny, Peter Martin and Peter Van Onselen. Ross Gittins is the exemplar of that approach in economics. But they are a too-small minority. The result is a media that is not merely struggling as a business, but struggling to meaningfully serve its users and the polity. Whether it’s the creeping but ceaseless erosion of our liberties, our failure to address Indigenous disadvantage, or the economic failures of late-stage neoliberalism, citizens are more on their own than ever.