Graeme Turner,
Ending the Affair: The Decline of Television Current Affairs in Australia.
University of New South Wales Press, 2005.
ISBN: 9 780 86840864 4
AUD$34.95 (pb)
184pp
(Review copy supplied by University of New South Wales Press)

Affairs to Remember

The first thing that should be said about Graeme Turner’s latest contribution to Australian media and television studies appropriately entitled Ending the affair: The Decline of Television Current Affairs in Australia is that it is welcomed. The book is yet another addition to Turner’s prolific publication output across a wide range of contemporary media related subjects and is timely, relevant, engagingly presented and insightfully written and argued throughout.

The book adds positively to the sadly thin library of critical literature about Australian television current affairs programs and their history and place in the news and television landscape. It also further advances the view, widely held in some sectors of the academic and broader community, that television current affairs programs have become journalistically impoverished and that their relationship with audiences is in a parlous, even terminal state.

While some parts of the book have been previously aired in academic journals, especially chapter two on This Day Tonight and small sections of two other chapters – this is a valuable consolidation of that previous work and essential in the overall context of this book. Turner makes no claim for the book as a complete history of short form current affairs programs but rather seeks to examine the contemporary situation of the genre and the influences that have brought the genre to its current situation.

Of particular interest in this evolution, according to Turner, is the commercial re-organization of the industry in the late 1980s following the changes in federal media ownership legislation in Australia. He asserts that these changes had market driven consequences initiated by the high cost of corporate realignment which forced the emerging national networks into a simultaneously relentless pursuit of ratings and an abandonment of their public information responsibilities. This, he argues, was a direct consequence of needing to capitalise on the programming economies of scale provided by national networking and maximizing the subsequent opportunities in gaining national advertising revenue in a new highly competitive advertising market.

Central to the new networks in this context were the popular current affairs programs which functioned as individual network ‘flagships’ and which, up until that time, knew and served their local/state audiences well.

This was the beginning of the decline as the new nationally networked current affairs programs failed to register with their new national audiences who were more interested in local state issues. The new national networks further compounded this failure by deliberately excluding national politics (the one link all audiences did have) from program story line-ups as they considered it was not popular with audiences and, instead embraced a lighter more entertaining approach to current affairs.

It could be argued that the real value of this book is that its call to ‘end the affair’ is a provocative call which at its heart is about the exercise of taste and the style of television current affairs and journalism that is and/or should be valued in the new, seemingly politically uncommitted suburbia of Australia. This is also a problematic call, which may open a debate directly questioning some of the assumptions, implied in this volume and hopefully improves the nature of popular current affairs programming in the near future.

Few would disagree with one of the central claims of the book, that current affairs programs should play an “effective role in scrutinising the ‘behaviour of government, private institutions, business and the society at large” (156). However, it also hard to avoid a hint of ‘the media as agent of social decline narrative’ sprinkled throughout the text here as well, with its common tenets of ‘the past was better and commercialisation has caused ruin.’ This is more difficult to accept.

The contradictions inherent in popular current affairs programs and television as a form also suggests the idea advanced by Turner, that minimal political coverage is undertaken by the commercial channels is overstated and ignores the subtle nature of some contemporary political engagement.

Not all politics is about national top-down adversarial debates. The real politics of daily life in the suburbs has dramatically, indeed, irrevocably changed as has the nature of political discourse and cannot be served by the kind of programs for which Turner has such fond longing, such as, those of the ‘golden years’ of This Day Tonight, if they were ever really thus. For example, few current politicians or senior public servants would appear on national television today without adequate public relations training or departmental briefings and often will not risk public exposure without a prior list of questions and agreement as to the tone of interviews.

This ‘now standard’ contemporary situation has little resemblance to the earlier ‘golden days’ of television current affairs. Television then held a peculiar advantage because it was new to Australia and its impact under-estimated by the political class and political parties who considered newspaper pages the appropriate site to wage the rhetorical battles of the national political agenda.

Even with the advantage of hindsight and the historical legacy, which access to surviving programs of the period provides to our media and political history, it is still difficult to grasp the manifest media naivety of many politicians in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Time after time, they appear as inadequate as they confront the savvy media skills of young, ambitious, often legally trained journalists who had the advantage of regularly going ‘live to air’ and control over the medium and to a large degree the ‘rules of engagement.’ Such inequalities in media representation in the complex vortex of national politics could not survive. This was also a time when political affairs were much more sharply divided on party and ideological lines and ultimately more adversarial than the managed usually pre-recorded ‘media opportunities’ which pass as political dialogue in the issues based politics of today. Now the issues under consideration are not limited only to staged studio debates on strategies to achieve a full employment policy or the macroeconomic management concerns as was the case in the 1970s and 1980s but, as the union movement has already discovered, for example, are about the conditions of work and employment, which are ultimately always experienced individually. This is the domain of the personal political story – the field where the personal, intimate narrative model of popular nightly current affairs storytelling excels.

They are also about the new and continual evolution of the status and function of the family and children. This is an area of particular interest to women and carers as the health system struggles to cope with an ageing population and young families wait on childcare lists. It is within this context that young Australian families re-define the experience and meaning of the term ‘family life.’ Again, from even casual observation, this subject is the discursive core of many commercial current affairs stories and one which draws/creates an empathetic sense of identity and recognition from audiences (especially females) nationwide. These are ultimately stories from below, from the suburbs and the streets told by the people living the stories not by politicians considering their departmental policy on the issue.

Politicians discussing these policy areas and ‘others people’s problems’ are still widely available in a variety of other television formats, such as the ABC’s Lateline and Network Nine’s Sunday. Nevertheless, popular nightly current affairs programs continue to draw substantial audiences, although not as large an audience as in the past, as Turner documents. Despite the cultural criticism, the labels of tabloid journalism and even competition from new media, online and specialist radio and print resources, they still survive.

This is eventually the question, which lingers in Turner’s book that could be summarised in the following statement. If these programs are in decline, as Turner and others suggest, then why do they still have such a large loyal audience, albeit not as big as in the past, and why do the major networks still value them as the stepping stone into prime time viewing each evening?

This is just one of the many questions which flow from this book which should be consulted by all those interested in Australian news and currents affairs television. Why is ‘ending the affair’ so important? There are clearly reciprocal issues of communication, trust, familiarity, pleasure and certainty between audiences and programs as well as a long history of advocacy by various programs of their audiences’ interests. Much still remains to be written on this truly alluring moment of popular television which invites us to another appointment tonight. … or is that a rendezvous?

John Benson,
Media Program, La Trobe University, Australia.

Created on: Sunday, 9 December 2007