Bernard's right

Media coverage of Gillard election date | Crikey

Bernard Keane complains (as did Barrie Cassidy on Insiders on the weekend) that journalists seizing on the announcement of an election date as if it means this is an immediate election campaign are just nonsensical:

...many journalists just don’t seem to have been able to process what has happened regarding the election date. They are convinced we are now in an election campaign — a “record-breaking seven-month election campaign” as The Australian described it this morning or “a marathon 227-day campaign for both leaders” as another Australian columnist called it. That’s by no means News Ltd bias — an ABC journalist declared Australia “set for its longest federal election campaign on record”; it was an “extended election campaign”, Fairfax journalists said. Others settled, a little less disingenuously, for the term “unofficial election campaign”. 

That misconception might be understandable for the UK Telegraph but not for local hacks. One journalist asked the PM on Saturday about a “sort-of faux caretaker principle that applies because of the announcement of the election date so far in advance” (public servants, of course, would love nothing more than to spend the next eight months doing nothing but tweaking their election briefs and surfing the internet).
 
But you can see the appeal: framing everything through an “election campaign” prism makes journalism easier. Election coverage is, at least the way it is normally done now, easier than regular coverage, because it focuses exclusively on politics — who’s up, who’s down, who’s stumbled, who’s made a gaffe, what do the polls say, who has strayed off-message, who will win. It’s an excuse to abandon content in favour of race-calling.

Framing everything within an election narrative means anything unexpected, or unusual, that doesn’t fit the narrative, either gets ignored (the PM’s speech) or treated, reflexively, as a stumble/gaffe/debacle/disaster. Thus the government was said to be in “chaos”, and “disarray”, suffering “body blows”, because two long-planned resignations were announced on the weekend (Nicola Roxon a “body blow”? Really?).