I do not respect the press conference
In fact, I hate it
This newsletter is in danger of becoming less of a special treatie and more of a Covid depression diary, so I promise to write about something else next week. But for now, what’s the deal with those 11am press conferences?! Here are the reasons I hate them.
1. At the risk of stating the obvious, I’m fucking sick of them. There’s not much else to do, and I know that the news until the next press conference will be an endless rehash of what happened at the last one, so every day at eleven o’clock I go to the ABC live blog, perhaps allowing myself to feel the tiniest bit of hope. It’s Pavlovian. But like the dog who doesn’t get any food, I end up with drool on my face and I want to kill the guy holding the bell.
Could I simply stop watching the news? Yes, but I don’t respect myself enough to do so.
2. Their awful sameness is crushing. Especially now, with “the numbers going the wrong way”. The nightmare blunt rotation of Gladys, Kerry, Gary, Brad. Gladys, Kerry, Gary, Brad. Gladys, Kerry, Gary, Brad.
“I want to thank the people of NSW/Victoria.” “I want to thank the community for coming out for testing.” “Following the health advice.”
The repetition makes them ripe for parody, but also means the parodies are as bad as the pressers themselves. Would it kill Gladys or Dan to shake up the format? Do a little bit of close-up magic? Fancy dress Fridays?
Just throwing stuff out there. No bad ideas in a brainstorm, guys.
(Colley wrote this joke after I wrote mine. He’ll be hearing from my lawyers.)
3. On a related note, the phrase “following the health advice”, which was initially somewhat heartening, is driving me nuts. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but health bureaucrats do not set policy on their own. Politicians gather their input and weigh it up against other factors, then make decisions. This is a good thing!
Health officials are not elected, and their concerns and expertise are very specific. If you’re on Twitter, you would have noticed that some public health experts have quite extreme views about lockdowns and border settings. This is understandable, because they don’t have to balance economic and social concerns, but it’s why we wouldn’t want them calling the shots.
What we have now is politicians pretending that they allow the health bureaucrats to make the decisions as a way of avoiding responsibility for making said decisions. This tension was on clear display last week when Brad Hazzard refused to allow Kerry Chant to answer questions about when she recommended the latest lockdown.
I don’t actually think this advice should be made public (it would completely undermine confidence in the government and its response, which is kinda necessary right now), but it would be ace if our leaders could admit to doing their jobs.
4. They provide platforms for some of the dumbest, most cynical people in Australian public life. That’s right, I’m talking about journalists.
(Just kidding, sort of. I’m some kind of journalist, and the only reason I’m not the kind of journalist who goes to the pressers is that I wasn’t good enough/hard working enough to get a real reporting job. It’s a lot easier to sit at home and write about your >>>vibes<<< than it is to actually go out and ask questions. And a lot of the reporters at these pressers do a good job of keeping politicians honest. Yesterday, for example, the SMH’s Tom Rabe forced Gladys to admit that the 5km movement limit was a request from the cops, rather than the docs).
All that said, there are some absolute gronks in the press pack. They tend to reveal themselves with two related sub-categories of question.
Subcategory 1: Why are people safely having fun on the beach? Do we need to move to a stage six lockdown? Have you considered the prime minister’s offer to deploy MQ-9 Reaper drones in Western Sydney?
Journalists love to say it’s their mission to hold the powerful to account. These questions show them acting in the opposite capacity, cheerleading for the powerful and encouraging them to misuse their power against the weak.
Subcategory 2: Why is Bunnings open? Why is the Reject Shop open? Why don’t you put a ring of steel around Sydney?
Sometimes these questions are asked cynically, in order to advance a particular agenda, but just as often they reveal a fundamental ignorance of how the world works. If you try to answer them honestly, you sound like you’re talking to a particularly dim 10-year-old.
We rely on technology to live our modern lives. Sometimes this technology – toilets, roofs, walls, electricity – stops working. If we do not have a way to repair it, we risk harm or misery. Bunnings is a major hardware chain and sells the things which allow us to make these repairs.
The Reject Shop sells cheap food and other essential items.
Sydney is a very big and spread-out city that is a centre for goods and services needed by people outside Sydney. What even is a ring of steel?
5. Apart from providing specific journalists with a platform to humiliate themselves, they make the press in general look terrible. A few weeks ago, my former RN colleague Jonathan Green tweeted that the daily pressers were damaging the media’s reputation.
I think this is only partially correct, because the press didn’t have much of a reputation to begin with. Perhaps as a member of the media he feels, like I do, that each press conference is like a sex scene in a movie you’re watching with your parents.
It’s degrading and shameful and makes you feel acutely self-conscious. Reporters shout over one another. They’re rude. They ask such transparent and slanted questions you don’t need to read the story (“how many infections have come from intimate partner visits!?”).
The format isn’t journalists’ fault, but we in the media have come to think of it as a disagreeable but necessary (and maybe even kind of cute) feature of the job, much the same way politicians think they look good carrying on in question time, when all the rest of us see is bunch of red-faced losers.
We like to think of ourselves as the good guys, but the image a lot of people have of “the media” is a pack of vultures, a scrum of microphones, a ravenous grime seeking machine. Often we take a perverse pride in this, but that becomes a bit hard to sustain when it’s in your face every day.
6. They remind me of how naïve I was earlier in the pandemic, when I found them somewhat comforting. This was around the same time many otherwise right thinking people were publicly proclaiming that various chief health officers and politicians were daddy af and buying mugs emblazoned with their faces. (I was in Canada at the time and heard a 65-year-old woman call into the CBC to confess she dreamed of brushing Justin Trudeau’s hair and had “a little schoolgirl crush” on Doug Ford).
Obviously that was a very sick and horny moment which should never be repeated or even mentioned. But on a less psychosexually tortured level, I allowed myself to feel reassured by the spectacle. The public servants were fresh faces, the journalists seemed less adversarial and the politicians got a bit of credit just for rocking up every day. It was possible to imagine we had transcended politics, and that everyone was pulling together to get us out of this mess. How embarrassing.
7. Variously: Politicians slagging each other off as if the Coronavirus were a Sydney/Melbourne thing and not a global pandemic. People paying attention to politicians’ clothes. Senior NSW police officers referring to women as “females”. Gary Worboys’ extreme cop energy. The fact that the Gladys filter on Instagram is so low budget. Etc etc etc.
I know the press conferences are necessary, but that’s my weekly whinge and it feels good. Sorry to the good reporters who I like.
Sponsor me to run a long way
I was going to do my first marathon in Melbourne in October but I’m getting strong “that ain’t happening” vibes. So instead I’m going to do a solo marathon to raise money for the Aboriginal Legal Service. All my training will now be within five kilometres of my house, and maybe the marathon will be too! For your enjoyment, I will wear VB footy shorts and a pair of obnoxious sports sunglasses for the big event. Please consider donating, or just click the link to see the sunnies.