Op-eds — opinion pieces that took their name from being published on the opposite page to a newspaper’s editorial — were designed for pluralism and diversity. Now, they’re another tool in the culture wars waged by the right.
This is fundamentally hurting the journalism such pieces were designed to enrich. An atomised media, where each story stands alone to be discovered through social media or search, fractures the once clearly understood distinction between news and opinion — and trust in journalism is undermined as a result.
All movements need to manage doctrine to make sense of a changing world. In the People’s Republic of China, it’s Wang Huning who integrates Maoism into the thought of Xi Jinping for the guidance of party members. In conservative Australia today, it’s the opinion writers within News Corp who have to try to make sense of the modern ideology of the right for their own true believers. This is an ideology that meshes neoliberal economics and populist ethno-nationalism with a smearing of Trumpist “thought”.
The tool of choice? Op-eds that articulate the talking points of the right, identify enemies and keep the Liberal Party leadership toeing the line. Want some practical examples? Take a look at Maurice Newman’s recent columns on climate change.
“Trad socialists go Caracas — Queensland’s Labor government is taking the state down the same path as Venezuela.” Here, the opinion writer is armourer in the climate wars, making the ideological bullets that get fired off in the shoot ’em up panels on “Sky After Dark” or spread through that murky world of Facebook shares, likes and comments.
Or take: “Climate ‘emergency’ plot”. Crikey has written before about News Corp’s holy wars: the front-line fighters need enemies or, better, conspiracies. Here, it’s the apex of globalism, not quite black helicopters, but still the UN.
Then there’s: “Political elites face wrath — If Scott Morrison is to consolidate power he must keep faith with the populist revolt”. It’s ideology as discipline, keeping the Liberal Party leadership in line with the right’s populist project.
It’s good work if you can get it. A leaked email last year revealed that Judith Sloan is paid $357,000 a year for her columns.
But this is not how op-eds are supposed to work. In Australia, at least, they spread in the 1970s as an embrace of pluralism, a recognition that media had a responsibility to host contested debate about public issues. It was always, in part, a transactional arrangement where academics, parliamentarians, business leaders and priests brought their social status to the less elevated journalistic Grub Street. In turn, newspapers offered the mantle of public intellectual to rising stars like a George Pell or a Mark Latham. (That’s a role now played by Q&A, Twitter and The Conversation.)
There were always exceptions: The Wall Street Journal op-ed pages were long used to enforce an ideological purity in print as The Australian does now in digital.
The secret sauce of News Corp across the English-speaking world is its ability to adapt traditional practices and norms of journalism to their demands of their political goals, while pretending that nothing has changed.
The company has taken the “free speech” that once underpinned the idea of op-eds to showcase diverse opinions, and weaponised it into a demand for priority of conservative views over diversity, an assertion that right-wing talking points are an essential “balance” to the irrefutable facts of the news pages.
Perhaps, News Corp’s second greatest skill is to convince other media to take them at face value and end up sharing their culture war talking points.
In Nine mastheads just this month, Bettina Arndt enlisted suicide in the men’s rights cause and the lunch-with style of opinion piece gave historian Geoffrey Blainey an opportunity to promote the talking point questioning anthropogenic climate change. At the ABC, News Corp opinion warriors often turn up on Q&A and The Drum.
This mattered less when opinion was sequestered from news on the op-ed pages. But now each masthead story — fact or opinion — stands alone, disintermediated through social media.
The danger now that “journalism” is no longer structurally distinguishable from fact-free “opinion” is that all stories are being judged accordingly.
I find most of the SMH ones interesting until the let a politician or ex politician in. Unfortunately they also have TomSwitzer, but he writes such rubbish I doubt anyone takes him seriously. Seeing Blainey blathering made me wonder what the hell he knew about climate and that is something the papers need to fix. The op ed writers need to have some basic understanding of what they are on about and politicians with their multiple opportunities elsewhere should be banned completely.
The Blainey one was more an interview than an opinion piece.
Switzer isn’t much good, but it’s Amanda Vanstone, talking-point regurgitator, who really is a waste.
Every once in a while Vanstone has a very thoughtful article and I think there is hope, but then she goes and spoils it all.
Both ex IPA scribblers and scrawlers.
Op-eds, advertorials, editorials – opinion as news – professional/paid social media hectoring?
The last few daze in our Curry or Maul :-
* Thursday “Politicians car expenses don’t pass pub test” = a dissertation of condemnation of Shorten outspending Morrison (Opposition leader for 12 months compared to Morrison’s PMship of 7 months – and ignoring “analysis” of what Morriosn spent as Treasurer for those other 5 months?), Keating and Bandt? No editorial embarrassment for Coal-ition MPs?
* Sunday – Aged care/abuse? Harking back twenty years to lessons still not learnt – kero baths yes : but no mention of Howard’s Minister for the Aged, Bron Bishop or the watering down of subsequent “unannounced audits” giving time to tidy the shop?
* To trying to sell the state on “The Joys of Hosting the 2032 O’lumpics” – something we (Australian) tax-payers will have to spend to provide facilities, so that US Citizen Murdoch’s family can make money broadcasting them?????
Editorials are no more than op-ed pitches to try to influence voter perceptions of “fitness to govern” and the benefits of projects that benefit the likes of Murdoch or his pet projects.
I think you’re stretching things suggesting op eds are somehow different and disconnected in the internet / social media age. The influence of these mastheads has been slipping for years and anyway is preaching to the converted spreading influence ? Does anyone under forty read this stuff much any more ?
There’s a plethora of non expert opinion free on the net so why pay for the oaywalled stuff. More importantly there’s a lot of expert opinion and analysis for free too further devaluing the bleaters.
I’d be interested in a fact check on Judith’s pay. The poor love hasn’t had a new idea or thought since 1979 so it really is money for old rope whatever they pay her.
I don’t and won’t subscribe to the Australian – it is too hard to find the sensible commentary buried within the right wing ideological claptrap. Even when I am over at the neighbour’s place and get to read their copy, I refuse to read any of Sloan’s abject and biased drivel.
I don’t subscribe to the Advertiser, my “local,” as it is largely of such poor quality – I would guess that at least one-third of its content is supplied by opionistas and I don’t support the Crows or the Power, so even the sporting pages have nothing I wish to read. I sometimes read a copy of the Advertiser when my wife’s parents are finished with theirs, but I can usually “read” it cover to cover in a few minutes. Occasionally, Tory Shepherd does a decent piece, but invariably she then seems to get a slagging several days later when morons write to the editor complaining that she is a “leftie”. Proof, if any was needed, that we do in fact get the politicians, and the papers, we deserve and that when people use terms like “a leftie”, they have no idea what the term means, beyond that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a “leftie”.
I think the biggest issue with these op-ed is the airing of highly unqualified opinions. Obviously all the usual characters like Latham and Arndt, bu take your Blainey example. He’s an Australian Historian. What expertise on global, anthropogenic climate change beyond a few historical tidbits? It gives the air of expertise which is utterly undeserved.