Quality of politics and political reporting is a two-way street

Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese recently bemoaned the decline in the quality of political reporting in Australia. Albanese is not the first current or ex-politician to question the standard of reporting. Many politicians – federal and state – have accused journalists and the organisations they work for of bias and incompetence, or both. But Albanese’s statement is interesting in that it links the decline in the reporting of politics to the enormous technological and structural changes that have transformed the media in recent years. It is further interesting in that it comes now that Albanese is in opposition. Would he be so inclined to call for an increase in the number of political reporters working out of Parliament House if he were a minister in a government that was subject to intense, perhaps even negative, media scrutiny?