How would you characterise the mainstream media’s performance during the election campaign?
At a time when our leading scientists are continually spelling out the massive and urgent threats that climate change, biodiversity loss and other aspects of the global sustainability crisis pose to the future of human civilisation the most charitable thing I can say is that quality journalism was almost completely missing during the election campaign
Instead of detailed analysis of the climate change and environmental policies put forward by the various parties we had a never ending media focus on personality, gaffs, and the numbers generated from highly questionable polls.
Instead of journalists holding our potential leaders to account for providing workable solutions to the massive challenges that we face they kept their heads firmly buried in the sand with most explicitly or implicitly advocating that continuing with business as usual is somehow a rational thing to do. Personally, I find it impossible to understand how and why it is that the vast majority of the media have engaged in such a wilful denial of the crises that we face. When did the most important aspect of a journalist’s job stop being about investigating and reporting the truth on matters of vital importance to the public?
If the media’s coverage of the federal election was the best that our current crop of journalists can produce then I think it is time that they retired and let a new crop have a go at actually doing the job that society and humanity desperately need them to do. The children of today and tomorrow whose futures we are currently destroying deserve a drastically better media than the one we currently have.