Blair Cottrell was last week’s outrage; Fraser Anning this week’s. People are lining up to say outrageous things for a very simple reason: it works. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, according to proverb, but that is not true for everyone. It doesn’t apply to "insiders", be they major-party politicians (Barnaby Joyce, Emma Husar), companies (the big four banks), or the rich and powerful (Steve Smith, Ben Roberts-Smith). But it is true for "outsiders" whose very appeal is acting the renegade. There can be no better example than Donald Trump. Has been known to wield a dead cat: Boris Johnson. Credit:Bloomberg Boris Johnson is another. He once wrote about the insight of his Australian campaign mastermind Lynton Crosby who perfected the "dead cat on the table" strategy. When you wanted to avoid an issue, you said something outrageous - throwing a dead cat on the table, so to speak - to change the media cycle. Back then it was a temporary diversionary tactic. Now, though, the tactic has become akin to cat armageddon: dead cat after dead cat after dead cat. Keep manufacturing outrage. Never apologise. Soak up all the free media coverage you can get.

Changing how journalism is done

In his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore caused journalists to re-evaluate their methods by famously pointing out the dangers of what is now often referred to as "false equivalence". He contrasted the overwhelming consensus among scientists about mankind’s effect on the climate, with two-handed media reports where journalists, in their eagerness to be balanced, kept quoting sceptics who represented an extreme minority of views. Journalists were just doing what they’d been taught to do - show objectivity - but their approach was shown to be flawed. Gore’s calling it out helped improve awareness of the issue, at least in regards to climate change, even if it still persists as a problem. Here again, we have an example of journalism’s principles urgently needing revisiting. A focus on conflict is ingrained into journalists. As an exercise I dug out my old first-year journalism textbook. “The most important news value may well be conflict,” Len Granato wrote in 1991. “If there is a conflict between forces or ideas or values, then the chances are good that a story about it will appear in the news media.”

But maybe not for much longer. Finally it seems journalists are waking up to how they are being co-opted by the outrage machine. A few months ago, US author Whitney Phillips published a report entitled, The Oxygen of Amplification, in which she wrote that US news media was hijacked from 2016 to 2018 to amplify the messages of hate groups. The Oxygen of Amplification by Whitney Phillips details the ways in which the media is being manipulated. Credit:Illustration: Jim Cooke She recounted how many journalists and editors wrestled with the decision to publish, trying to balance competing demands such as respect for free speech, a desire to dispel false information and commercial pressures. Often the problem is in the quantity and prominence of coverage of fringe views, but even measured responses worked to the benefit of outsiders, garnering them more attention. “The issue isn't that the media system is broken; the issue is that the media system is working as it was designed to work," she wrote. "We must find ways to defend against narrative hijacking, targeted antagonisms and media manipulations." Last weekend, German broadcaster ZDF tried one innovative method, inviting far-right political leader Alexander Gauland on for a 19-minute interview, and then wrongfooting him by not asking a single question about refugees. The interview, criticised by Gauland afterwards as biased, highlighted his party’s lack of policies on many of Germany’s key issues.