How the media shame game is replacing what used to be called reporting

News Corp’s tabloids have been using their front pages as a modern-day pillory, a device for holding COVID rule-breakers up to public shame. And the mainstream media through its self-regulator, the Australian Press Council, says it’s totally fine – once the story is out there, what’s the harm in amplifying it?

Maybe so last century, when today’s newspaper could be brushed aside as tomorrow’s fish-and-chips wrapping. But in today’s virtual world the added power of social media can quickly mutate public shame into abuse.

The old media blame game has been transformed; it’s no longer “just the facts” reporting. It makes the media responsible for putting public shaming at the heart of public health compliance.

In shrugging off complaints over The Courier-Mail’s notorious “Enemies of the State” bannering of two young women of colour for COVID breaches last year, the council determined that their conviction was a matter of public record and therefore “their reasonable expectations of privacy had been diminished”.

Shaming was the point, with the council acknowledging “the headline is provocative given the language used and the prominence of the women’s images… the reporting reflects the seriousness of the women’s actions and risk to the community”.

Although the report triggered widespread racial vilification and death threats, the council seemed comforted by News Corp’s assurance that “it was difficult to anticipate social media responses to reports”.

Maybe it was difficult to anticipate — for anyone who hadn’t spent any time on Facebook or reading the newspaper’s own comments over the past decade.

There was, the council said confidently, no racism involved as the reporting was “not due to any personal characteristic of the women involved”.

President of Queensland’s African Communities Council Beny Bol was unconvinced: “It’s a very disappointing outcome because it sanctions racism, it sanctions racial vilification, and it sends a message that you can publish an article targeting a particular racial or religious group and that’s OK,” he told SBS.

Not to be outdone by its Brisbane sibling, Sydney’s News Corp tabloid The Daily Telegraph went a step further last week when it not only reported but apparently generated the COVID breach conviction of the driver who had been identified as the first local case in the current Sydney outbreak, having been infected while transporting visiting freight aircrew.

Stumbling across the driver standing apparently alone and mask-less at a Sydney bus stop, the paper snapped him and forwarded the picture to NSW Police, who charged him under public health orders. With that, the Tele had its full-page pic for Wednesday’s front page — restricted only by the now-standard Clive Palmer anti-lockdown ad strapped across the bottom — complete with the most literal of puns “BUSTED” and “LIMO DRIVER UNMASKED”.

The Australian, meanwhile, was overriding cultural sensitivities by reporting the name (and criminal record) of an Indigenous man who died of COVID in western NSW. In Melbourne, the best of the Herald Sun are still searching for the shame to own them all: the mysterious bonking security guard.

It’s the aesthetic of scolding that masquerades as accountability journalism: the marker of the worst of the journalism of these plague years.

Journalism has been grappling with punch-down shaming for decades. Way back in 1978 when the internet was just a gleam in the US Defence Department’s eye, The Sydney Morning Herald found itself at the beginning of a 38-year conflict with its own community when it published the names of protesters arrested in the city’s first gay and lesbian mardi gras.

It was not until 2016 that then editor-in-chief Darren Goodsir apologised, saying: “While it was routine to publish court attendance lists, these particular actions were a stark illustration of the harsh reality of the time — that the media was part of a broad array of political and social institutions that perpetuated the oppression of lesbians and gay men.”

The convention of reporting court lists, findings and convictions was a staple of 20th century “journalism of record” reporting. But now the convention is more selectively applied, it has become just another input tossed on to the production line at the social media outrage factory.