Andrew MacDougall: We need adults keeping tabs on our politicians again
Without the 'parenting' of the media, our leaders can, and will, revert to acting like children. They already are.
By: Andrew MacDougall
My eldest daughter is nine. Her little sister is five. The little one adores her big sister and believes everything she says.
I, on the other hand, am 49. My eldest often tries to convince me of things. But I am a skeptic when it comes to the things my children tell me, as any good parent should be. And because I push back on the eldest’s arguments, she often comes back moments later with much sharper ones. Sometimes I even change my mind.
Yes, this is a parable about the media and its role in public life, including during this federal election. And yes, we can debate the mechanics of media — who gets access, how many questions, and so on — but this is to both bury the lede and miss the story. There is much more at stake than whether the Toronto Star or the Globe gets a question at a tightly-managed press event.
What’s at stake is whether anyone in power will ever again have a parent to satisfy. Or whether those in power will be nine-year-olds, forever seeking the smoke blown up their asses by the five-year-olds in their life.
The ability to act like a nine-year-old in power is an entirely new phenomenon. In the Before Times, when a politician (or corporate leader) used to have to exchange credible arguments with a member of the media in return for access to the distribution network of their publication or broadcast, serious conversations were par for the course. It wasn’t perfect, no, but it was an adult time. There was no point rocking up to the microphone with a wild ad hominem attack, or armed with a list of faulty facts, because it wouldn’t have passed muster. There was no rolling 24/7 coverage, and easily discredited arguments wouldn’t have made the cut in what was then limited news real estate. Now, thanks to social media, there is an infinite and constantly updating canvas. You don’t even need a credit card, let alone an argument, in order to access and speak to your audience — and then tell them any damn thing you want, no matter its level of adherence to the truth.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In their pre-algorithmic infancy, the major social media platforms promised access and connection. In this more gentle, less attention-hogging iteration, the major benefit of the social media platforms and other owned channels was that they allowed you to go — unfiltered — to your intended audiences. A clean message, straight to the target voter. What politician wouldn’t want that? How could that be a bad thing? Well, other than the fact that politicians and other people in positions of power have been known to lie and try to cover up bad things.
And this is the problem: society needs people (preferably many) whose sole and dedicated job is to scrutinize the major organs of power. A political and/or corporate system free from scrutiny and challenge is condemned to a flabbiness and villainy. This is the consequence — the society altering consequence — of the decline of the traditional news media. Yes, the current iteration of the press is weak versus the better-resourced versions of the past. The product is often crap. Important stories get missed. Good questions go unasked. But the function remains important. And the function — accountability — is dying and not being replaced, or at least not in sufficient numbers.
Even worse, the major social media platforms have transmogrified into attention-sucking black holes. The platforms of the now Attention Economy (e.g. Meta, X, TikTok, Snap, YouTube) only make money when we are active on their platforms. Gone are the days where a one-time, point-of-purchase sale brought the money in. Money now has to be brought in continuously; humans are now mined for attention so it can be sold to advertisers. And when attention is the key metric, addiction becomes the business model and product sold. They literally cannot afford for us to be elsewhere.
And what keeps humans’ eyeballs on these platforms? It would be nice to think it’s factual reporting about events that actually happened, featuring commentary from people with expertise in the relevant area. But it’s not. Sure, for some it is (thank you for reading). But it is more likely to be spiky commentary (again, thank you for reading). It’s conspiracy talk. It’s Andrew Tate or boobs, not Robert Fife or whatever boob is anchoring the 11 o’clock CTV News broadcast these days. It is a place where emotion does better than facts or reason. The platforms of the Attention Economy are like a casino; it’s a place where the house always wins, even if people are using fake currency to gamble. Even if society is forced to pick up a stiff bill for their chaos.
Which brings us back to being children. The incentives of the new attention-powered information economy encourage the people in power to be the worst version of their nine-year-old selves, when what we need are systems that encourage them to be proper adults. And before journalists get too smug, it also encourages the worst in their cohort, too. Journalists know the clickbait version will outperform a drier take. We all dance to the tunes now called by technology.
But as the Stoics liked to say, your muscles don’t get stronger by lifting lighter weights. Life is about overcoming obstacles and challenges, whether in argument or life. Politics is about persuasion as much as it is mobilization. Or, at least, it ought to be. Our brains don’t get sharper by preaching to the converted, or cocooning in bubbles. We need to be able to run the gauntlet with our arguments, not look for a route free of obstacles.
We need to be adults, not nine- or five-year-olds.
Andrew MacDougall is a director at Trafalgar Strategy and former head of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
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For those of us who became accustomed to holding a broadsheet newspaper in our hands to read quality political content this is a pretty sobering article.
Mr. MacDougall notes that there are many serious questions that the media are not asking politicians anymore, and that is a damning statement of a decline of a quality product. A follow up to that is, ya but what if the questions are asked and the politicians dodge them with non answers or spit balls that insult a mature adult who knows what’s going on? Where is the leverage to get politicians back to a level playing field where serious questions are asked and answered? I certainly don’t know, other than to weed out the worst offenders at the ballot box.
Why does it take months and months to even obtain answers that are self evident? (See: who availed themselves of a $7,000/night luxury suite to attend the Queen’s funeral?) Some responsibility for that lies with the politicians themselves, who need to pass proper access to information laws that compel the government to provide timely information regarding expense matters. Spending money is not top secret, nor is who was on a guest list to attend a government sponsored event. Hiding behind privacy laws to cover up abuse of expense accounts is giving everyone the middle finger.
Lastly, is the erosion of public trust in the media playing into the hands of politicians? Is the poor treatment of reporters by politicians linked to the disdain that many Canadians have for what they read, watch or hear?
The mainstream legacy media’s troubles with being accountable and holding politicians to account seem pretty directly correlated with some of the mess Canada now finds itself in. Thank you to the Line and others out here working at creating something new.