(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

Don’t blame the journos for the media stumbles… or not just the journos at any rate. They’re caught in a tricky moment, a campaign when all politics is local — electorate-by-electorate local — and all news is, well, not.

Welcome to campaigning in Australia’s news deserts.

With the still-recent death of local media coupled with the decade-long slashing of journalistic resources, journalists have been forced to hack their way to a solution, holding out to both their polarised readers and the party leaders a safe critique of performance that could link the two sides together in a national narrative.

Seemed a safe enough solution — neutral, equally fair (or unfair) to both sides, rendering their reporting safe on gaffes and stumbles that are the least political part of modern politics. It sorta kinda worked for a while. But now our centralised news media and our local politics are pulling in precisely opposite directions, and tearing journalism apart in the process.

After three years of fires, flood and plague — those horsemen of the Anthropocene apocalypse — readers aren’t having it. In their communities, these past three years have splintered politics and, for many, generated an urgency for policy reporting that meets their expectations.

With Australians hit in different ways, depending on where they live, politics has become significantly more local than it was just three years ago. Different electorates, it turns out, have different wants and needs.

Savvy reporting that seeks to craft a national narrative out of gaffes and stumbles can’t meet the diverse news needs of the burnt-out communities of southern NSW, the flooded communities of south-east Queensland and northern NSW and mine workers of the Hunter Valley in between.

And that’s before the myriad ways the post-COVID care demands, the climate emergency, engrained discrimination against women, corruption (petty and otherwise) and the First Nations demand for voice-truth treaty play out across (and within) the country’s 151 different electorates.

Blame it on the business: while politics has become more local, traditional media has abandoned local news, particularly in the suburbs of the big cities where the election will be won and lost.

In the early days of the pandemic, News Corp stopped printing the free weekly suburban newspapers that had provided local communities with (at least some) local information. In 2021, it folded the local mastheads’ digital ghosts into its paywalled, big-city tabloid chains.

Meanwhile, big media that decides what’s “news” has centralised its national coverage, with fewer reporters pushing the same take on the news out into every city and town.

There’s not just less diversity. There’s less reporting due to the compounding impact of decades worth of closures and redundancies that have left traditional media without the resources to report across the range of issues that are affecting votes in different ways.

Australia’s established metropolitan media has long lost a handle on many of its communities. The further out a suburb is, the more it becomes somewhere that news — crime usually — is reported from, rather than for.

There’s a remaining handful of reporters in big media clinging on, still turning out important journalism. There’s a handful of new digital players trying to fill the gap. The ABC is attempting to report about and for the suburbs and SBS for diverse communities. But we saw the weakness of media reporting on suburban communities in the pandemic. We’re seeing it again now.

Come the election, the media doesn’t ignore all local contests. Live close enough to the CBD (in one of the electorates where most journalists live — like, say, Wentworth) or live in an electorate that’s historically marginal enough to be interesting and the local campaign will get a makeover once or twice in the election coverage.

And as the Liberals have found in Warringah, local candidates can deliver great value when they can be mined for gotcha moments that fit into the media’s national gaffes-and-stumbles narrative.

Three years ago, Morrison weaponised localism with rewards for loyal voting with a commuter carpark here, an upgraded sporting facility there. This time around, he’s confronting different local anger over unfulfilled commitments over bushfire relief and slanted commitments over flood assistance.

Last time around the media missed the local story. Looks like it’s missing it again. But tell me again why Albanese’s brain-block in Tasmania is the story that matters.