Australia’s media is failing western Sydney — again

The media is failing the hard locked-down communities of western Sydney with a journalism of irrelevance that privileges open-mic rants about open Bunnings stores, mask-less eastern-suburbs beaches and city curfews. 

It needs an urgent pivot to a reporting that breaks through the blinkers of pre-fab narratives about lockdowns too hard, too soft, too slow, too fast to focus on the hard economics of the people who work in the industries that sustain our cities and the marginal lives that confront many families.

Right now, the western Sydney Delta outbreak is setting up as the first real-life test case of how an increasingly national news media will manage big moments in the news deserts in Australia’s suburbs. So far? It’s an F.

The moment calls for a respectful journalism that reflects the realities and information needs of the communities affected, grounded in the communities it’s reporting on.

Instead, media are parachuting in reporters for on-the-ground photo ops and vox-pop grabs as exotic seasoning for the national storyline served out of Canberra and the city-centre bases of mainstream media.

The locked-down suburbs have become a journalistic terra nullius, a click-and-collect remote storehouse for factoids that can be ordered up, picked over and hammered into the broader meta-narrative that’s frozen Australia’s COVID reporting.

The result may be entertaining theatre — but just because something’s done well, that doesn’t mean it’s worth doing in the first place. It’s largely useless for the communities affected. Worse, all that journalistic hammering seems only to bend the arc of public health into the dead end of policing and compliance.

About 2 million people live in the eight hardest-lockdown local government areas. That’s a “city” bigger than greater Perth, not much smaller than greater Brisbane. They’re not an undifferentiated suburban demographic: they’re younger, more likely to be economically disadvantaged and culturally and ethnically diverse (or “vibrant”, to apply the current code word).  

That makes them communities that need a different sort of journalism that speaks to and for that complexity, not a journalism that transforms the communities into colourful backdrops for other people’s stories. 

The media failure in western Sydney is part of where we are now — a disrupted business model and monopoly ownership that links once-were-local media into lookalike national franchises that dress up national storylines with the pretence of localism.  

That trend saw western Sydney lose most of its once free local media in News Corp’s mass print closures in April last year and the subsequent rolling of their digital remains into the heavily pay-walled Daily Telegraph.

It’s part, too, of a decades-long failure by mainstream media to speak from, to and for the city’s diversity. The Sydney Morning Herald has always been a paper for the city’s comfortable east and north, the Tele for the established Anglo-Celtic middle-ring (despite claiming a cardboard-cut version of the west). 

Commercial TV and radio broadcast into the west from high up on the North Shore ridge, with “local” stories about crime-gang shootings, drug busts and car crashes. 

The ABC is more mixed: while its national programming tends to entrench exclusionary national narratives, its data work and its reporters on the ground, largely working through its state-based radio, speaks from and to the community where they are. (The two trends clashed awkwardly on Insiders this week.) Expect the ABC to get better as it shifts staff to new premises in the west.

The failures twist national stories, underplaying, for example, the deep value to these communities (often casuals or gig-workers without sick leave) of Albanese’s proposed $300 boost to vaccination. (Short odds by the way that, despite the initial huffing, Morrison appropriates the idea as soon as he works out how to make it his own — and to focus it on marginal seats.)

Reporting, too, is missing an all-too-rare political moment: a state Liberal government spending political capital in the interests of safe Labor-voting communities. Breaking with modern political orthodoxy of looking only after your own, it’s taking the heat for redirecting scarce vaccine resources from conservative voters in regional NSW to Year 12 students in the Labor-voting suburbs of the south-west. 

It lit up the refusal of Labor premiers and Morrison to support the needed vaccine surge into the south-western Sydney hot spots as a triumph of state-based parochialism and political partisanship over the solidarity-based priority of need that the Labor movement claims to own.