Spinning Bartlett’s ALP Conference Speech

BOB BURTON
David Bartlett’s speech on Sunday to the ALP State Conference — promising an expansion in irrigation schemes, touting wind, wave and geothermal energy projects, promising improved broadband access and an education and skills strategy — raises many questions.

But Bartlett wasn’t taking questions after his speech.

“I’m not doing a doorstop today. Speak to one of my media advisers,” he said. It wasn’t that Bartlett had to rush off to another engagement, as he had time to casually chat with conference delegates.

Bartlett’s chief media adviser, Matt Rogers, repeated the message that Bartlett wouldn’t be taking questions. Why not? “He’s just not,” he said, before suggesting that Bartlett would probably be doing a doorstop on Monday.

The refusal of Bartlett to take questions after a major speech is symptomatic of the determination of the government’s spin doctors to limit the chances that journalists will report anything that strays too far from the government’s preferred “message” of the day.

In putting Bartlett off-limits to questions for the day, the government’s media minders aim to confine media reporting to only the sketchy outline provided in his speech. In this way, television news only has images of his speech and his upbeat Presidential-style entry and the enthusiastic reaction of the party faithful.

Newspapers might have more space to cover stories, but if there’s next to no detail provided, it is hard to take the story far, especially on a Sunday. By pushing any opportunity for questions off for 24 hours, the government will be hoping to get two days of stories out of the one speech. And even if a critical spin-off story does emerge, it will be interpreted against the backdrop of the overwhelmingly favourable coverage of the speech.

The success of the ‘no questions today’ tactic relies on journalists not reporting Bartlett’s refusal to take questions. (I am assuming that other journalists did have questions they would have liked to ask).

The addition of one sentence “Premier Bartlett declined to take questions on his speech” would alert media consumers that the government was trying to spin the coverage in its favour. But few journalists ever add a sentence like this, leaving citizens with the misleading impression that there are no questions that deserve to be answered.

As long as Bartlett’s evasion remains invisible, the government’s spin doctors will keep on employing the ‘no questions today’ tactic. And journalists will have no one to blame except themselves.

Postscript: This morning I was advised by David Bartlett’s media office that he will not be doing a doorstop on his conference speech as, following the completion of Cabinet, he will be travelling. The only media appearance he made this morning was an interview on Tim Cox’s “Statewide Mornings” program.

Read the speech:Here

Bob Burton is a Hobart-based freelance journalist and author of Inside Spin: The Dark Underbelly of the PR Industry, Allen & Unwin, August 2007.