It’s time we all stopped running around and slowed down for a bit. It’s time that we realised that having pride in the end result often means taking a few more steps to get there. It’s time that our media and our politicians realised that being faster isn’t necessarily being more efficient.

I’m not a huge fan of mainstream media these days. Check out the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald website (a once reputable news source) and you’ll find stories of celebrity scandal, and innocuous events that are written to invoke a reaction, but don’t actually contain any content. A noticeable exception to this has been the ABC News website – which has been responsible for producing factual and interesting news stories for some time now. But even they are not innocent of the desire to produce fast and punchy news stories.

I’ve been following some of their latest stories on the latest media sensation that is Twitter. Boy, when the media gets a sniff of something that is considered in vogue, they do hang onto it with both hands. Recent stories on this most popular of topics have included Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tweeting for advice on whether to see Julie and Julia, and a bunch of Twitter users complaining that their iPhone alarms don’t work. Still, this isn’t as bad as the doyen of trashy Twitter stories that the Sydney Morning Herald supplied us with: Kevin Rudd tweeting about eating a biscuit. Apologies for the atrocious pun, but I’d hardly consider that a cracker of a information worth spending time on.

Twitter is an interesting and foreign topic to many, no doubt, but is this really the best manner in which to cover it? How about the various ways in which politicians use Twitter – some effectively to increase interaction with the community, others to produce token efforts that they are in touch with technology and youth (no fingers pointed, Uncle Kevin)? How about a story about whether Twitter and other social media is improving our inter-personal relationships or lessening them?

Garnered by my dismay at reading these stories, I wondered to myself: “What could be the possible reasons of this onslaught of poorly planned and rushed stories?”

I’m sure there are many reasons but I can think of two off the top of my head:

1. The lack of sub-editors is leading to less control over what kind of stories are being published

2. The 24 hour news cycle is driving an increased push for quicker and more regular stories, but not necessarily more informative stories.

The second point is worth expanding on. You may recall recently the recent trials of Dennis Ferguson, a convicted paedophile who had been relocated from Queensland to a quiet, family suburb in Sydney’s North West, only to have vehement and vindictive local residents in uproar over his placement. This is an entirely fascinating topic in itself, but in the week or so that this story was big news, no less than 7 news articles over the space of 24 hours was published by ABC News. Now really, can there be that many developments over a 24 hour period that justifies 7 separate articles?

Even worse than this was the response to this dilemma from the NSW State Government, who conveniently changed a previous law which stated that they were unable to relocate criminals such as Ferguson. This can only be described as a knee-jerk reaction to the Housing Minister David Borger’s previous statements that Ferguson would be quickly relocated, only to find out that, bugger – I don’t have the legislative power to do that.

So what we have is media overproducing stories, a housing minister rushing out a statement that he could not actually back up in practice, and a State Government making policy on the run to compensate for this frenzied activity.

The question remains – is this rush of ADHD-like behaviour in media and government a product of society’s demands for a quick response, or is society being influenced and conditioned by media and the government to act this way? In reality, it’s probably a little bit of both.

Unfortunately, rushing around and trying to produce results before they are ready can only lead to one thing, and that is disaster. We need politicians who are able to provide foresight further than the next election, and media who don’t act like excited little schoolkids passing on the most recent bit of gossip.

Tags: Dennis, Ferguson, media, policy, twitter

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 7:03 am and is filed under Current Affairs, Editorial, Keep n Busy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.