Media Guide: what is and isn’t ‘controversial’

Following this week’s news involving court cases, criminal allegations and Glastonbury; I’ve been asked by newsroom editors to lay out what is and isn’t ‘controversial’.

Before we begin, I should clarify that there are different types of controversial. Of course any newsroom or tv channel in the country would tell you that when it comes things like platforming racists or just general fuckwits, that is the good type of ‘controversial’ as it garners social media attentions for the low price of your long term credibility.

Oh and of course whatever harm you cause to a marginalized community, but let’s be real, if you became the editor at an Aussie outlet, you got to that role by not caring about that anyway.

First of all, our news teams want you to know that sharing reputable sources about a genocide is ‘controversial’, even if legally they can’t fire you over it. Although they do argue that it shouldn’t be considered ‘controversial’ for them to spend millions of dollars to argue that they should be allowed to fire journalists for it.

Fighting to shut down facts is the only way to appease lobbyists, or ‘maintain impartiality’ as we like to call it.

Next it is of course ‘controversial’ to protest a genocide and should receive wall to wall scrutiny. Whether at a music festival or outside a weapons manufacturer, we must remember that the people doing the genocide are people too and we don’t want their feelings hurt by the big bad protesters.

Committing a genocide is potentially controversial. To know whether it is just remember to check whether the country doing it is considered an ally to our nation.

Regarding the recent discussions about gendered violence and child sexual abuse, this is a tricky one. Many experts in the field want us to talk about their ‘evidence based reform solutions’ to prevent the violence, which suffers from the issue of not being controversial enough.

Much of what experts want is stuff that people would assume is already the law, meaning they are boring ideas. It’s a real snooze fest to go ‘hey government’s, why aren’t you listening to experts’. So instead the right thing to do is create your own controversial coverage, that’s where the clicks are.

All you have to do is completely sell your soul, then find someone to give a hot take so that the discussion can instead be about that hot take, and the different takes on that hot take, completely drowning out any of that yucky expert analysis and boring nuance. I mean what’s more important, fighting the problem or you getting clicks?

If in doubt on how to do this, refer to how coverage of bigotry and climate change has been done over the entirety of the media. Worst comes to worst, when covering the biggest issues plaguing society today, as a journalist you can always just pretend that meaningful change is scary and hard.

If you fear that you might misstep in the bid to adhere to these guidelines, don’t worry as your bosses have been given a get out of jail free card. They can simply say that it was ‘not in line with their values and standards’, despite the approval stages that led it to happen which all would have decided it was.

Maybe they make you do a retraction for your hot take, but no one reads retraction notices anyway so who cares? You still got to boost your profile.

Important to note that this approach will not be used if you are from a marginalized community however, in that case I would suggest getting knee pads and a helmet for support in case you are thrown under a bus.

Remember, the goal of talking about important issues isn’t to find the truth, it is to get complaints from both sides and pretend that it somehow signals that you are doing a good job.

Hopefully soon we can do what journalism is really about, winning awards for investigating the preventable issues in society. And we can’t win those in the future if we help stop those issues now.

Yours,

John Delmenico

Professor of Journalisming

(This is from The Chaser Weakly newsletter, sign up for free at: chaser.com.au/weakly)

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