[mediawatch] Curmudgeons

International readers will be in ignorance of the interesting week in NZ politics. Don Brash, the leader of our right-wing opposition party National, resigned. (To my immense satisfaction; I’ve sent hate in his direction before, more than once, mostly for his eagerness to deploy racial division as an election strategy.) His resignation was clearly a pre-emptive response to the pending publication of a book he had tried to suppress, and which was widely expected to bring down his leadership. Brash claims the events are unconnected, of course.
(Aside: claiming the events are unconnected is an interesting demonstration of the Bush-junta style of spin – just come up with an alternative explanation, no matter how unlikely it may be; the objective isn’t to actually convince anyone, it’s to give a narrative to people already on your side. If you already have a narrative, you resist a damaging counternarrative much more easily.)
The book, indie journo Nicky Hager’s ‘The Hollow Men’, does appear to contain much damning revelation about activities within National. What first intrigued me, however, were the accusations leveled at Michael Bassett, an ex-politician and newspaper columnist, that he was secretly advising and stagemanaging many of the things Brash did that he would then put over in his newspaper columns as evidence of supreme common sense. Hager’s accusation is that Bassett was claiming to be an independent and impartial analyst of current events in his column, when secretly he was hip deep in the political machine.
Even if true, I’m not sure how damaging a claim this is. (The fact that Bassett denies it strenuously suggests that it is quite damaging.) Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to going over the accusations in a bit more detail and I’m childishly excited by the possibility that Bassett will get slapped down, hard.
I don’t like the man, not at all. He’s a horrific example of the ‘curmudgeon’, that species of opinion writer so beloved of New Zealand’s/the world’s print media. And this event gives me the motivation to dig up and present a blog post begun but left unfnished back in February or so. Here it is:

Curmudgeons. Why do newspapers have these people? You know, the grumpy old male right-wing voice of ‘common sense’, whose opinions often turn on thinly veiled bigotry and usually amount to no more than that?
Karl du Fresne’s column in the Dom Post is even named ‘curmudgeon’. He’s not the worst offender – Michael Bassett and Frank Haden both fill the same role in the same paper on different days. Bassett even had a full day’s editorial piece devoted to defending him from criticism after he wrote an incredible column about the lower class’s habit of irresponsible breeding. He ‘asks the tough questions’ or some such nonsense.
(Aside: Tired curmudgeonry is never a ‘tough question’. It plays to people’s stereotypes and bigotries. Anything that encourages reaction without reflection is the very opposite of a tough question. The liberal movement in society in the last few centuries has been built on asking the actual tough questions. The banalities of curmudgeons and right-wing pundits the world over can only be spun as ‘tough questions’ because they are so out of step with the difficult, complex, intelligent questions at the heart of liberalism. What they perceive as horror at asking a question so challenging is in fact horror at the degree of wilful and damaging ignorance on display.)
Okay, I know why newspapers have these people. They get people reading. They get grumpy curmudgeons to say, “hah! That’s telling it like it is!” And they get idealistic lefties to say, “oh noes! Why is he brimming with such hatred?” And so everyone reads. And no, I don’t want all newspapers to become voices of the One True Liberal Way, etc etc. But the reification of the grumpy old man columnist to become the Grumpy Old Man Columnist Position is, I think, of note. There’s a self-awareness to it that didn’t used to be there when Frank Haden was pissing me off ten years ago.
Newspapers have created these little performance spaces, and the curmudgeons are more than eager to throw a little moronic bile around to live up to their billing. It’s a vicious cycle in action, and it makes me a bit sad.

And, yes, it does make me a little sad. There is a lot of prominent media space given to the curmudgeon voice; precious little given to any other voice than the grumpy old white man. (The presence of Tze Ming Mok in one major paper is so unusual that it only serves to show up how pervasive this trend is. That the only other prominent young woman with a voice is the curmudgeon-in-a-mini-skirt Cactus Kate rather undermines the whole enterprise, too.)
Oh, for a world where the barmy curmudgeons would be fenced in with all the lunatics in the letters to the editor, where they rightfully belong.