Alright — take a seat. The house lights are down, the band is ready, and for some reason the national broadcaster is headlining a cabaret where applause counts more than accuracy.
This isn’t a funeral for journalism. It’s a talent show where everybody forgot what the prize was. We gave the ABC a public cheque and a solemn job: tell us what’s true, even when the truth is dull as dishwater. Instead, a lot of what’s coming out looks suspiciously like a vaudeville act — big gestures, dramatic pauses, and the kind of mic drops that get retweeted into oblivion.
You’ve seen the chatter — the hot takes that scream louder than evidence. People are accusing the broadcaster of everything from “making up sexual-assault claims” to “adding gunshots to videos” and “doing personal deals while in power.” Wild stuff. Some of it’s paranoid. Some of it’s furious. All of it is fertilizer for a circus when a journalist aims for spectacle over sourcing.
Enter the modern gotcha reporter: same haircut, faster edits, shorter patience. John Lyons — a pro with a polished delivery — isn’t the arsonist, but he’s been flicking matches around the barn. He’s chasing the moment the way a magpie chases chrome: sees a flash, swoops, steals the headline. That flash feeds a crowd hungry for outrage, and the crowd feeds back a thousand wild accusations. It’s a merry, messy feedback loop, and the public ends up paying for front-row seats.
Here’s the punchline: spectacle scales. A single staged moment gets more oxygen than a month of patient reporting. Editors start to watch metrics like bingo cards. Producers swap careful editing for montage melodrama. The newsroom stops asking “Is this proven?” and starts asking “Will this trend?” If you want confetti, that’s the playbook. If you want truth, it’s the wrong channel.
So what’s the fix, between the jokes and the entitlement? Short list, no fluff:
• Stop treating outrage as a KPI. Reward the boring grind. Pay the reporter who files three tightly sourced pieces nobody shares in the first hour.
• Publish your receipts. Open the notebooks. If you ran a clip that made people yell “fabrication!”, show the raw footage, timestamps, sources. Make the correction louder than the mistake.
• Change what you praise. Celebrate persistence, not punchlines. Hire people who like digging more than they like limelight.
• If you insist on theatrics, at least be honest: relabel the slot “Opinion Variety Hour” and stop pretending it’s impartial news.
This isn’t a call to sanitize; it’s a call to stop hosting a talent contest with taxpayer dollars. If you want theatre, stage it — but don’t call it a mirror. A broadcaster funded by the public owes us more than a halftime show. It owes us the kind of messy, precise, sometimes-boring work that actually builds a shared reality.
So to the showmen: put your toys down. To the editors: extinguish the quick wins. To Lyons and any other mic-hungry pros — if you really want to hold power to account, do it with detail and stamina, not with a cymbal crash.
– The Hollow Centre
