How the sausage is made: what the ‘Mean Girls v Kitching’ saga says of Australian journalism

For two weeks now, insider gossip about who said what to whom in the battle of Kimberley Kitching versus the “mean girls” has dominated Australia’s political news. In the end, we know a little bit less about what really matters and a little bit more about the always ugly political sausage-making.

And we know a lot more about Australia’s media crisis. It’s become a story that in its reporting has brought together just about everything that’s wrong with the Australian media. Here’s why.

What else is there?

The Morrison government has just stopped doing, well, pretty much anything. That’s a disaster for short-staffed media that have come to rely on federal politics to fill the “this matters” content quota. Morrison knows this: he’s built his regular-as-clockwork announceables schedule around it.

In the fortnight leading into the federal budget, we expect the news out of Canberra to be full of agenda-setting teasers and tips and tactical leaks about what is expected to be the centrepiece of the government’s election pitch. And what have we’ve got? A sometime submarine base. Um… maybe coal for Ukraine.

Into that Morrison-sized policy vacuum has fallen the regular amuse-bouche of Labor preselections.

Conflict: man bites dog in both-sides scandal. Exclusive!

Journalism works on heuristics — mental tick-boxes that help journalists recognise news-worthiness when they see it. Suddenly here’s a story that ticks not one but five of those boxes.

Tick one: conflict — and particularly internal party conflict — is always newsworthy. And there’s nothing more conflicting than jobs at stake in preselections.

Tick two: death of a public figure is shocking, unsettling — and rare. (There’s been about one parliamentarian die per decade over the past 40 years.) When the shocking happens, journalists by instinct ask, what’s the explanation?

Tick three: unexpected role reversal. As the famous saying goes (allegedly by New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, among many others): “If a dog bites a man that’s nothing; but if a man bites a dog, that’s news.” After 18 months of rolling scandals about the abuse of women by conservative men, suddenly we had roles flipped: alleged bullying by Labor women.

Tick four: the story was broken by a journalist — and one of the gallery’s A-team that’s been holding the government to account over treatment of women — Samantha Maiden from news.com.au. A genuine exclusive by a rated reporter: that demands follow-up, particularly from the same organisation. News.com.au’s sibling mastheads in News Corp have been particularly eager. The Nine mastheads and digital media have been more cautious.

Tick five: a both-sides-do-it moment (at last!). Australia’s media (particularly, ahem, the ABC) engrain a belief that both sides are as bad as each other — or, at least, have to be presented as such as a shield against that most shocking of accusations: political bias. If the government has gone all pear-shaped, then even an opposition apple, looked at in a certain light, will suit as a both-sides comparison.

News Corp and the news agenda

News Corp is not just the country’s biggest news-maker — it remains an agenda setter. Within the traditional media, at least, it remains trusted, and even admired, for its news instincts, even when it’s distrusted for its political bias.

Competing reporters have to balance seemingly contradictory ideas (apparently the sign of a first-rate intelligence, according to F. Scott Fitzgerald): News Corp is beating up the story largely fact-free in its tabloids for political gain and the story as reported must be largely true.

There’s a world outside Canberra?

Political stories are owned by the gallery. They bring a deep knowledge of what’s happening inside the parliamentary triangle. Outside that? Not so much. Here, the gallery has been reporting with a Canberra focus on Senate tactics and parliamentary relationships.

The core of this story has been happening far away in Melbourne. Not surprisingly, Melbourne-based reporters with deep experience reporting in that city have been closer to its essence, such as Shaun Carney at the SMH, Virginia Trioli at the ABC and Guy Rundle here at Crikey.

What’s the takeaway?

The past 18 months of reporting and campaigning over the mistreatment of women in politics has hammered home the truth that the personal is political. Maybe the lesson from this latest story is that, sometimes, the political just ain’t personal.