Rebirthing Media Watch

Keeping more bastards honest

Media Watch is an Australian institution. The ABC’s 15-minute media analysis TV show has excoriated journalists, editors and media owners since 1989, when it was launched by reporter and lawyer Stuart Littlemore.

The show’s remit is to keep the bastards honest, including its own ABC bastards, and it’s done that well over the years. 

Media Watch’s anecdotal surveillance of mainstream media no longer works. In order to remain relevant and continue to fulfill its remit, it must move beyond being a TV show and become a story-led project informed by data. 

The alternative is to become a living fossil: legacy media policing legacy media.

The essence of Media Watch

The show airs every Monday at 9:20pm. Current host Paul Barry has been in the chair for the last 11 years, making him the longest-serving presenter. He will retire at the end of this year. Leaving with him is Executive Producer Tim Latham, who’s been there for a decade.

An eight-person team produces the 15-minute show and an additional 2-3 minute story released on social media each week.

Eight people plus overheads for 18 minutes of video a week may sound excessive, but it’s justified by what the show does. There’s a lot of original investigation, and the stories need to be watertight. There’s an opportunity to expand the work to reach more and younger people.

Why it’s good

This week Media Watch has shown why it’s worth rebuilding. Stand-in host Janine Perrett covered the ABC’s dodgy editing of a video on alleged special forces war crimes in Afghanistan. While the original angle - that extra gunshots were added to footage - came from Channel 7, Media Watch discovered that a complaint about the editing had been sent to the ABC’s legal department two years ago. Apparently the letter was not passed on to news. If it had been, news management could have taken the video down and avoided Channel 7’s exposé.

Now the ABC is conducting an independent review. Perrett was strident:

“We think it's critical this independent review will take in ABC News and the legal department - both key players in the defamation case against [special forces commander Heston] Russell that backfired so badly and ended up costing the ABC around $2.8 million … Hopefully, a full external inquiry will not only provide answers, but also some accountability, because this hasn't just cost the ABC plenty of money, but also its trusted reputation.”

The Media Watch piece itself helps rebuild trust. In order to facilitate stories like this one, Media Watch does not sit within the News division of the ABC. It has an independent reporting line up to the Managing Director.

Story-led and data-driven

You may think “story-led and informed by data” sounds like marketing crap, so let me explain.

At the moment, the Media Watch team is focussed on making a TV show. That’s the big deal, the structure that’s shaping what the team does. It’s “show-led” because the key output is that 15 minutes of broadcast video, recorded some time on Monday and transmitted that evening.

I think shifting focus so that the story is the main output is the way to go.

This means stories are released - on digital platforms - through the week as they are produced. The TV show becomes a “best of” collection and the bright line between the TV and digital output (currently branded “Media Bites”) disappears. This allows the team to respond through the week, and increases opportunities to break news.

Even more important is using data to inform the stories.

At the moment, Media Watch is like a spotlight, highlighting media wrongdoing item by item in a dark room.

The audience is left to guess whether whether a particular misdemeanor is one-off or systematic. There is no sense of overview, and little coverage of natively digital news platforms.

Using data would switch on the light in that dark room.

Data does not mean numbers

I’m not saying Media Watch should be full of stats and numbers. That’s industry-centric and boring. Media Watch only works if its geared to a general audience.

Just scanning newspapers, radio broadcasts and TV bulletins misses a lot. In a digital world, you need data to know where you should be looking to find stories.

For example, the Digital News Report from Canberra University collects data on the political leanings of publications’ audiences. Media Watch could expand its remit to include highlighting, in a systematic way, what stories were covered and not covered by publications of different political persuasions.

This is already effectively done by Ground News in the US, but is missing in Australia.

Media Watch needs data capability because 74% of Australians under 26 get news from social media. It’s the nature of algorithms that the news being served this way is opaque, it’s not part of a public agenda.

From Digtal News Report: Australia 2024, Canberra University

Developing this capability could be done in collaboration with universities and other institutions. It would move understanding news beyond intuition and anecdote.

At the moment, it seems to me that the prevailing attitude towards digital media at Media Watch is negative. That’s counterproductive when the majority of your potential audience lives there.

In terms of its own digital numbers, Media Watch stories get good engagement on Youtube, averaging 101k views per video this year. The popularity of these videos is down from the heights of 2022 - see the monthly rolling average line in red in the graph below - and it looks more or less flat over the past year.

Data extracted from Youtube Media Watch playlist 25/9/2024 (Crawford Media)

A new institution

The opportunity here is to reframe what Media Watch is. Right now, it’s a show. It could be seen instead as an ongoing project that builds understanding of news rather than just takes down targets. Many aspects of the ABC have already moved to “digital-first” production. It’s time for Media Watch to go there too.

Have a great week,

Hal