There’s a concept in anthropology and political philosophy — older than modern democracy, older in some ways than literacy — that concerns the role of the witness. Not the witness in a purely legal sense, although the parallel is instructive, but the witness as a structural function: the one whose presence ensures that power cannot act in total darkness or secrecy. Journalism at its most serious occupied that role. It wasn’t just a profession. It wasn’t an industry. It was a covenant with the idea that those who held power over others could be seen, reported upon, and held — however partially, however imperfectly — to account.
In Australia that covenant, in significant portions of commercial media, has been abandoned. What remains wears journalism’s clothing while performing something closer to its opposite.
Understanding why this matters requires moving past the familiar inventory of grievances. The complaints are well-founded: the sneering dismissal of elected prime ministers by first name while opposition figures are wrapped in institutional titles; the nightly panels that mistake manufactured outrage for analysis; the reflexive framing of any structural reform as economic catastrophe; the steady replacement of reporting with ideological performance. These are real, documentable, and corrosive. But they are symptoms. The deeper injury runs beneath them.
Journalism, as a modern institution, rested on a set of implicit promises. Not always honoured, not always even articulated, but structurally present as organising assumptions. The first was that reporting existed to inform the citizenry rather than to manage it. The second was that scrutiny of power would be applied wherever it resided, rather than selectively directed at approved targets. The third, perhaps most basic, was that the media’s social authority derived from its relationship to demonstrable truth, not from its relationship to commercial interests or political allegiance.
These were never utopian ideals. Journalism has always operated inside commercial structures, with editors beholden to proprietors, proprietors beholden to markets, and markets shaped by the same concentrations of wealth and influence that journalism was supposed to interrogate. The covenant was always partly fictional — a legitimating myth. But legitimating myths carry genuine weight. They create accountability precisely because deviation from them becomes visible, nameable, and contestable.
What has changed is that the deviation has become the norm, and the myth has been quietly retired.
When a substantial portion of the media apparatus operates as a permanent opposition research unit for one political predisposition — amplifying its grievances, softening its contradictions, and assisting its electoral projects while treating the other side with institutional contempt — it is no longer true journalism in any meaningful sense. It’s performing politics while claiming journalism’s authority. This is a structural distinction. And it has consequences that reach well beyond any particular election cycle or policy debate.
The most serious of those consequences concerns what political theorists sometimes call the symbolic function of institutions. Institutions don’t simply perform practical tasks — they also enact meanings. A court doesn’t only adjudicate disputes; it ordains the idea that disputes can be adjudicated impartially, under known rules, and before neutral authority. The enactment matters independently of whether the ideal is ever perfectly achieved. When the enactment collapses—when courts are seen as merely transactional, or tribal, or corrupt—the institution loses both credibility and function.
Journalism’s symbolic function was to enact the possibility of a shared epistemic commons. Not agreement — democracies are built more on friction than on agreement — but a shared engagement with evidence, a common world of verifiable facts within which disagreement can meaningfully occur. Citizens who read different newspapers, held different values, and reached different conclusions could nonetheless be said to inhabit the same reality if they were drawing on reporting that took accuracy and completeness as non-negotiable obligations.
That commons is in serious decay in Australia. Not because social media arrived and fragmented attention — though it did. Not because citizens became more tribal — though they have. But because significant institutional actors within the media themselves abandoned the commitment to evidence as anchor and replaced it with affect as product. Outrage, fear, contempt, and tribal solidarity are not byproducts of bad journalism. They are, in significant precincts of commercial media, the product itself.
Australia’s situation is acute because of the extraordinary concentration of its media ownership. No comparably advanced democracy permits such a small number of commercially and politically aligned entities to exercise such disproportionate influence over the national political conversation. What concentration produces is not simply bias – a skewed lens through which reality is reported. It produces agenda dominance: the power to determine which questions are worth asking, which concerns register as legitimate, which politicians are treated as serious actors and which as figures of ridicule. Over time, agenda dominance reshapes the public’s understanding of what is normal, what is contestable, and what lies beyond the threshold of serious consideration.
When that dominance is exercised by entities with direct commercial interests in preventing certain kinds of structural reform — tax reform, media reform, climate policy, and wage policy — the conflict of interest is constitutive. The media’s political positions are not formed and then subsequently aligned with its commercial interests. They emerge from those interests, shaped at the proprietorial level and transmitted through editorial culture, staffing decisions, and the subtle incentive structures of employment in politically charged newsrooms.
Senior journalists who spent decades within these institutions used to carry an institutional memory that partially counteracted this tendency – knowledge of what was said, what was promised, and what was previously reported; a feel for legal and ethical terrain; and a capacity to identify when editorial pressure was bending coverage beyond defensible limits. The gutting of those senior ranks across the industry during the redundancy waves of the 2010s removed the most significant internal check on these dynamics. What followed was not just a skills deficit. It was the erasure of institutional conscience – the quiet disappearance of the people who remembered what the work was supposed to be for and were senior enough to say so when it drifted.
There’s a way in which this essay risks being interpreted as a partisan complaint — as though the criticism of commercially concentrated, ideologically slanted media is itself a position of one political tribe against another. That reading should be resisted, because it falls into precisely the trap that the degradation of journalism has constructed.
The argument here is not that conservative politics should be subject to harsher scrutiny than progressive politics. It is that the covenant of journalism requires scrutiny applied with structural consistency regardless of which faction holds power. A media that systematically failed Labour governments while giving Coalition governments an easy passage would be a failure of journalism. A medium that did the reverse would be an equivalent failure. The fact that the current imbalance runs predominantly in one direction does not make the critique tribal — it makes it accurate.
What is at stake is not whether any particular government receives favourable or unfavourable coverage. Governments can withstand criticism, even unfair criticism. What is at stake is the capacity of citizens to form political judgements on the basis of something resembling reality. Without that capacity, democratic choice becomes a performance of preference rather than an exercise of considered will. The theatre of politics survives, but the substance is carved out.
The degradation of journalism’s symbolic function has another dimension that deserves examination: the treatment of democratic institutions themselves as raw material for contempt.
When a prime minister — any prime minister, of any political persuasion — is addressed with institutionalised disrespect by those claiming the authority of journalism, the damage extends beyond the individual. It extends to the office. And offices are not merely administrative roles. They are concentrations of social meaning, repositories of the trust that citizens extend to the structures through which they govern themselves. To systematically strip that meaning through relentless belittlement is to erode the trust itself.
I am not advocating unquestioned deference. Rigorous, adversarial, even aggressive journalism has an essential place in democratic life. The distinction is between adversarial journalism — which challenges power’s claims, demands accountability, and speaks hard truths — and contemptuous theatre, which treats democratic institutions as entertainment fodder and political opponents as enemies deserving humiliation. The first strengthens democracy by keeping power uncomfortable in a legitimate manner. The second weakens it by cultivating the popular sense that democratic institutions are inherently ridiculous, inhabited by frauds, and unworthy of serious engagement.
The pathway from there to disenchantment is short. The pathway from disenchantment to something uglier is shorter still.
Australia needs structural reform of its media environment — ownership concentration broken up, public interest journalism properly resourced, and transparency obligations enforced with teeth rather than administered with gestures. These are necessary conditions. But they address the circumstances within which journalism operates, not the covenant itself.
That restoration — if it comes — can only come from journalists and editors who decide that the legitimising myth is worth defending because without it the work amounts to nothing. It must come from the recognition that authority and credibility are not granted by ownership or audience size or the volume at which opinions are held. They are earned, over time, through demonstrated commitment to accuracy, consistency, and the kind of institutional respect for democratic life that makes journalism worth protecting in the first place.
The witness who watches only the enemies of those who pay the witness is not a witness. That is a scout. And a democracy has no use for scouts embedded in its media.
What it needs — what it has always needed — is people willing to watch everyone, to report what they see with precision and without favour, and to honour the covenant that gives the act of witnessing its meaning. That covenant is not yet dead. But it is in serious jeopardy. And the urgency of its renewal is, at this moment in Australian civic life, considerable.