Tim lawson
Running in the student elections for the editorship: my experience
March 31st 2010 04:04
I slept restlessly the night I heard the election results. My dreams were vivid and verged on the edge of nightmares, one person in particular haunted them; not as himself, but as a morphing mixture of himself and Mephistopheles, the demon in the Faust legend. The next day was uneventful, as I slept through most of it: an easier sleep than the night before, but far from peaceful.
As the sun was beginning to set, I walked to a nearby Catholic church but did not enter. Instead I knelt at the front steps, clasping a silver chain: the chain was a gift from my parents, shortly before my mother died, and I always associated it with her, as it was the last thing she gave me. I am a spiritual person, but I do not follow any one particular faith. As I knelt and prayed, a verse from an Immortal Technique song reverberated through my head, “My mother always told me that placing my faith in God was the answer, but then I hated God because he gave my mother cancer, killing her slow like the Feds did to the Black Panthers. The genesis of genocide is like a Pagan religion, carefully hidden, woven into the holidays of a Christian. I had a vision of nuclear holocaust on top of me, and this prophecy, the words that I speak from my lungs, the severed head of John the Baptist speaking in tongues. Like Che Guevara my soliloquies speak to a gun, pain is slow motion like trees that reach for the sun.” I have no idea why that verse replayed in my heard so often that night. Although from a Catholic background, my mother was not an overly religious person – in fact I remember her actually telling me that perhaps the Pope was one of the most evil people on Earth for condemning the use of condoms and the right to abortion. Nevertheless, I have always placed my faith in God, something that I questioned sharply when my mother died of breast cancer at a very young age:; she was in her early forties.
As I knelt and contemplated the events of the last few weeks, I realised that part of my motivation that helped propel me through the arduous nuances of running an independent ticket against a well established machine was the, perhaps subconscious, belief that this is something my mother would have been proud of me for. And so I continued to kneel, and mourned both the death of my mother and the death of the fourth estate at Monash.
The real beginning of my story came at the start of this year. Prior to the commencement of the academic year at Monash, I contacted the editors of Lot’s Wife. I expressed my desire to become involved with the paper, and stated my experience as a writer and a journalism student. I was warmly welcomed and told that I would be added to the writers list, so that I could contribute. At the time, Operation Cast lLead was being carried out by Israel, and the assault on Gaza permeated the mainstream media. I decided to write an objective background to the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the hopes of educating people about the history of the conflict and the main people and parties involved, so that they could better understand the images and news stories that pervaded their televisions and newspapers. I spent roughly thirty hours researching the background of the conflict, and finally felt ready to write my article.
Shortly after submitting my article I received an email from the editorial team complementing me on the thoroughness of my research and the highly objective nature of my piece. The next edition was a retro edition with a nineties theme, so I chose one of my favourite albums from the 90’s, Illmatic by the Queensbridge rap artist Nas: arguably one of the most influential and defining hip hop albums of the 1990’s. I submitted my article to the current music editor, who complimented me on my descriptive and analytical reflection of the impact of the album as well as its content. She informed me that she was going overseas and suggested that I apply to the editors for her position as editor of the music section.
After faithfully working on the paper throughout the year in my new position, I received an email in late July titled ‘So who wants to be editor next year’, detailing the election process and the responsibilities as well as the pros and cons of the position. One particular sentence in that email caught my imagination “you will never again have the creative and editorial freedom that you get in this position”. I applied for the position and was thrilled to be told that I would be endorsed by the current editorial team.
I along with two other talented writers Andrew Moriatis and Rafael Ward formed a team and engaged in discussion about how to best move into the position. We were highly doubtful that any of the major groups in the 2009 Monash Student Association (MSA) elections, of which the editors of Lot’s Wife positions are part of, would be putting up people for the positions, so we decided to run as an independent ticket which we named Student Media.
To our dismay one of the major tickets Go!, a ticket aligned with the left faction of the Australian Labor Party, who have dominated the elections for the past few years, put up candidates against us. Two first year students whom had never contributed to Lot’s Wife before or ever attended a writers meeting. We had verbally arranged to have the endorsement and support of the two next strongest tickets, Left Action – a passionate, dedicated and active group of students dedicated to social issues within Monash and within the national and international community and Connect, an equally dedicated group of students representing the Labor Right and Liberal end of the political spectrum.
We were confident that with the support and endorsement of these two groups we would put up a very strong fight against the candidates of Go!.
Andrew, Rafael and I started working on our policies and ideas for the layout and format of the paper. We decided to base our main arguments on two main premises. Firstly, that we had a greater deal of experience than the candidates put up by Go! – Andrew and I both being Journalism students and sub-editors who had worked all year with the current editorial team and Rafael being a regular contributor and President of the Creative Writing Club as well as a contributor and editor for other publications such as Voiceworks and Readings. Secondly, but more importantly, that we were not formerly affiliated with any political group and therefore would be able to uphold the role of the fourth estate.
Jefferey Archer, the English novelist, in his work The Fourth Estate, explains that "In May 1789, Louis XVI summoned to Versailles a full meeting of the 'Estates General'. The First Estate consisted of three hundred clergy. The Second Estate, three hundred nobles. The Third Estate, six hundred commoners. Some years later, after the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, said, 'Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.'"
The notion that the Press is the fourth estate is based on the idea that the media's function is to act as a guardian of the public interest and as a watchdog for the activities of the government. Varying views of the media see this as either, self-serving rationalisation , or an important part of the checks and balances that form part of a modern democracy. Personally I believe that the role of the fourth estate is to watch over the actions of the government and inform the citizens of that the government purports to represent of anything that is done that affects them, I believe that it is an important pillar in the foundation of a democratic society.
The late US president John F. Kennedy in his address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association on the 27th of April, 1961, stated that “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings.
The extent that advertising and media ownership interfere with this role is at the very least troubling; although, for the relevance of this article it is not something that need be pondered. Monash University Clayton is a microcosm of any western democratic society, yet there are small differences nevertheless. Lot’s Wife is the primary form of the press for the university; therefore, it is charged with upholding it’s role as the fourth estate and watching closely and then reporting on the spending and actions of the MSA, which receives roughly 1.5 million dollars a year from the university.
Lot’s Wife has had a very antagonistic relationship with the MSA over the past few years and I believe this is hinged on the very nature of its role as the fourth estate. From the perspective of the people running the MSA, nobody likes people watching over them and reporting their actions and spending, but this is something that goes with that role.
As the campaigning period drew closer, Left Action made it clear to us that they would not endorse us unless a cross-endorsement deal was arranged, this would violate the one condition that Connect had imposed on us – that we remain independent and do not endorse any of their opposition.
Now we had to make a very hard decision, we were pushed into a corner: we could sign a cross endorsement deal with Left Action and lose Connect’s endorsement, or we could sign a cross endorsement deal with Connect and lose the endorsement of Left Action. We were upset that Left Action had reneged on their earlier verbal agreement to support us, but in the end we decided to sign with them because it was indicated to us by many that they were the better choice. Also, one of our current editors, Rosie Pham, was running with Left Action as their candidate for President, so there were already rumours that we were in league with Left Action, although this was not the case. Another reason that signing a cross-endorsement deal with Left Action was really repugnant to us was that it took away some of our credibility of being an unaffiliated and objective ticket: we recognised this immediately and posted a message on our Student Media Facebook page explaining why we had to sign a deal with Left Action and that this deal meant that if we win, no special treatment whatsoever would be given to Left Action as far as what is printed in Lot’s Wife.
Now the situation became even worse for us. By no means do I mean to belittle the struggle of the Palestinian people by this comparison, but I felt akin to them now. I felt like we, Student Media, were armed with a rock, fighting against tanks and Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcons, aka the Go! machine.
I remember the point at which the scales holding my personal ambition on one side and my desire to fight for a truly independent media on the other tipped in favour of the latter. It was when I asked the current president of the MSA “Why do you want Lot’s Wife so badly?”- at this stage Go! had pushed the issue of Lot’s Wife to the forefront of their campaign agenda. He replied “We want it as part of our empire”. This disgusted me and filled me with indignation and gave me the zeal to push forward with the campaign with every ounce of mental and physical energy I had.
Campaign week crept up on us with amazing alacrity, but we were as prepared as we could be. I had personally invested around $1100 at this stage and we had 100 t-shirts, 3,000 pamphlets and 100 A3 posters. My enthusiasm drained as we endured the campaign week, at most times we had less than three people campaigning for us, and now I felt like Che Guevara must have felt in Bolivia – the passion was there, but we just didn’t have the numbers. I look at his bullet ridden body and sympathise, I was deeply affected by the election result.
Apparently we did very well for an independent ticket, but not well enough to win; now, Lot’s Wife will be controlled by Go! in 2010. I only hope that the new young editors have the foresight to do their job properly and act as the press should, I really would hate to see Lot’s Wife get turned into a propaganda leaflet for Go! and the ALP.
My primary motivation for writing this article is to attack the current system. I believe that having the editor positions of Lot’s Wife as elected positions as part of the MSA elections is counterproductive to one of its primary roles, that of the fourth estate. It is a potent breeding ground for corruption when one political group, especially one as established and dominant as Go! can win all 20 positions, as they did in the elections this year, including those of the Lot’s Wife editors – the only major source of alerting students to the spending and actions of the MSA. The constitutions of many other university student unions prohibit political groups contesting the editorship of the student newspaper and other positions in the union concurrently, and the MSA’s electoral regulations should be changed to mirror the situation at these universities
And so for now, I continue to mourn the death of the fourth estate at Monash, although deeply upsetting, it is a being that can be resurrected and hopefully this will be the case sooner rather than later.
As the sun was beginning to set, I walked to a nearby Catholic church but did not enter. Instead I knelt at the front steps, clasping a silver chain: the chain was a gift from my parents, shortly before my mother died, and I always associated it with her, as it was the last thing she gave me. I am a spiritual person, but I do not follow any one particular faith. As I knelt and prayed, a verse from an Immortal Technique song reverberated through my head, “My mother always told me that placing my faith in God was the answer, but then I hated God because he gave my mother cancer, killing her slow like the Feds did to the Black Panthers. The genesis of genocide is like a Pagan religion, carefully hidden, woven into the holidays of a Christian. I had a vision of nuclear holocaust on top of me, and this prophecy, the words that I speak from my lungs, the severed head of John the Baptist speaking in tongues. Like Che Guevara my soliloquies speak to a gun, pain is slow motion like trees that reach for the sun.” I have no idea why that verse replayed in my heard so often that night. Although from a Catholic background, my mother was not an overly religious person – in fact I remember her actually telling me that perhaps the Pope was one of the most evil people on Earth for condemning the use of condoms and the right to abortion. Nevertheless, I have always placed my faith in God, something that I questioned sharply when my mother died of breast cancer at a very young age:; she was in her early forties.
As I knelt and contemplated the events of the last few weeks, I realised that part of my motivation that helped propel me through the arduous nuances of running an independent ticket against a well established machine was the, perhaps subconscious, belief that this is something my mother would have been proud of me for. And so I continued to kneel, and mourned both the death of my mother and the death of the fourth estate at Monash.
The real beginning of my story came at the start of this year. Prior to the commencement of the academic year at Monash, I contacted the editors of Lot’s Wife. I expressed my desire to become involved with the paper, and stated my experience as a writer and a journalism student. I was warmly welcomed and told that I would be added to the writers list, so that I could contribute. At the time, Operation Cast lLead was being carried out by Israel, and the assault on Gaza permeated the mainstream media. I decided to write an objective background to the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the hopes of educating people about the history of the conflict and the main people and parties involved, so that they could better understand the images and news stories that pervaded their televisions and newspapers. I spent roughly thirty hours researching the background of the conflict, and finally felt ready to write my article.
Shortly after submitting my article I received an email from the editorial team complementing me on the thoroughness of my research and the highly objective nature of my piece. The next edition was a retro edition with a nineties theme, so I chose one of my favourite albums from the 90’s, Illmatic by the Queensbridge rap artist Nas: arguably one of the most influential and defining hip hop albums of the 1990’s. I submitted my article to the current music editor, who complimented me on my descriptive and analytical reflection of the impact of the album as well as its content. She informed me that she was going overseas and suggested that I apply to the editors for her position as editor of the music section.
After faithfully working on the paper throughout the year in my new position, I received an email in late July titled ‘So who wants to be editor next year’, detailing the election process and the responsibilities as well as the pros and cons of the position. One particular sentence in that email caught my imagination “you will never again have the creative and editorial freedom that you get in this position”. I applied for the position and was thrilled to be told that I would be endorsed by the current editorial team.
I along with two other talented writers Andrew Moriatis and Rafael Ward formed a team and engaged in discussion about how to best move into the position. We were highly doubtful that any of the major groups in the 2009 Monash Student Association (MSA) elections, of which the editors of Lot’s Wife positions are part of, would be putting up people for the positions, so we decided to run as an independent ticket which we named Student Media.
To our dismay one of the major tickets Go!, a ticket aligned with the left faction of the Australian Labor Party, who have dominated the elections for the past few years, put up candidates against us. Two first year students whom had never contributed to Lot’s Wife before or ever attended a writers meeting. We had verbally arranged to have the endorsement and support of the two next strongest tickets, Left Action – a passionate, dedicated and active group of students dedicated to social issues within Monash and within the national and international community and Connect, an equally dedicated group of students representing the Labor Right and Liberal end of the political spectrum.
We were confident that with the support and endorsement of these two groups we would put up a very strong fight against the candidates of Go!.
Andrew, Rafael and I started working on our policies and ideas for the layout and format of the paper. We decided to base our main arguments on two main premises. Firstly, that we had a greater deal of experience than the candidates put up by Go! – Andrew and I both being Journalism students and sub-editors who had worked all year with the current editorial team and Rafael being a regular contributor and President of the Creative Writing Club as well as a contributor and editor for other publications such as Voiceworks and Readings. Secondly, but more importantly, that we were not formerly affiliated with any political group and therefore would be able to uphold the role of the fourth estate.
Jefferey Archer, the English novelist, in his work The Fourth Estate, explains that "In May 1789, Louis XVI summoned to Versailles a full meeting of the 'Estates General'. The First Estate consisted of three hundred clergy. The Second Estate, three hundred nobles. The Third Estate, six hundred commoners. Some years later, after the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, said, 'Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.'"
The notion that the Press is the fourth estate is based on the idea that the media's function is to act as a guardian of the public interest and as a watchdog for the activities of the government. Varying views of the media see this as either, self-serving rationalisation , or an important part of the checks and balances that form part of a modern democracy. Personally I believe that the role of the fourth estate is to watch over the actions of the government and inform the citizens of that the government purports to represent of anything that is done that affects them, I believe that it is an important pillar in the foundation of a democratic society.
The late US president John F. Kennedy in his address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association on the 27th of April, 1961, stated that “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings.
The extent that advertising and media ownership interfere with this role is at the very least troubling; although, for the relevance of this article it is not something that need be pondered. Monash University Clayton is a microcosm of any western democratic society, yet there are small differences nevertheless. Lot’s Wife is the primary form of the press for the university; therefore, it is charged with upholding it’s role as the fourth estate and watching closely and then reporting on the spending and actions of the MSA, which receives roughly 1.5 million dollars a year from the university.
Lot’s Wife has had a very antagonistic relationship with the MSA over the past few years and I believe this is hinged on the very nature of its role as the fourth estate. From the perspective of the people running the MSA, nobody likes people watching over them and reporting their actions and spending, but this is something that goes with that role.
As the campaigning period drew closer, Left Action made it clear to us that they would not endorse us unless a cross-endorsement deal was arranged, this would violate the one condition that Connect had imposed on us – that we remain independent and do not endorse any of their opposition.
Now we had to make a very hard decision, we were pushed into a corner: we could sign a cross endorsement deal with Left Action and lose Connect’s endorsement, or we could sign a cross endorsement deal with Connect and lose the endorsement of Left Action. We were upset that Left Action had reneged on their earlier verbal agreement to support us, but in the end we decided to sign with them because it was indicated to us by many that they were the better choice. Also, one of our current editors, Rosie Pham, was running with Left Action as their candidate for President, so there were already rumours that we were in league with Left Action, although this was not the case. Another reason that signing a cross-endorsement deal with Left Action was really repugnant to us was that it took away some of our credibility of being an unaffiliated and objective ticket: we recognised this immediately and posted a message on our Student Media Facebook page explaining why we had to sign a deal with Left Action and that this deal meant that if we win, no special treatment whatsoever would be given to Left Action as far as what is printed in Lot’s Wife.
Now the situation became even worse for us. By no means do I mean to belittle the struggle of the Palestinian people by this comparison, but I felt akin to them now. I felt like we, Student Media, were armed with a rock, fighting against tanks and Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcons, aka the Go! machine.
I remember the point at which the scales holding my personal ambition on one side and my desire to fight for a truly independent media on the other tipped in favour of the latter. It was when I asked the current president of the MSA “Why do you want Lot’s Wife so badly?”- at this stage Go! had pushed the issue of Lot’s Wife to the forefront of their campaign agenda. He replied “We want it as part of our empire”. This disgusted me and filled me with indignation and gave me the zeal to push forward with the campaign with every ounce of mental and physical energy I had.
Campaign week crept up on us with amazing alacrity, but we were as prepared as we could be. I had personally invested around $1100 at this stage and we had 100 t-shirts, 3,000 pamphlets and 100 A3 posters. My enthusiasm drained as we endured the campaign week, at most times we had less than three people campaigning for us, and now I felt like Che Guevara must have felt in Bolivia – the passion was there, but we just didn’t have the numbers. I look at his bullet ridden body and sympathise, I was deeply affected by the election result.
Apparently we did very well for an independent ticket, but not well enough to win; now, Lot’s Wife will be controlled by Go! in 2010. I only hope that the new young editors have the foresight to do their job properly and act as the press should, I really would hate to see Lot’s Wife get turned into a propaganda leaflet for Go! and the ALP.
My primary motivation for writing this article is to attack the current system. I believe that having the editor positions of Lot’s Wife as elected positions as part of the MSA elections is counterproductive to one of its primary roles, that of the fourth estate. It is a potent breeding ground for corruption when one political group, especially one as established and dominant as Go! can win all 20 positions, as they did in the elections this year, including those of the Lot’s Wife editors – the only major source of alerting students to the spending and actions of the MSA. The constitutions of many other university student unions prohibit political groups contesting the editorship of the student newspaper and other positions in the union concurrently, and the MSA’s electoral regulations should be changed to mirror the situation at these universities
And so for now, I continue to mourn the death of the fourth estate at Monash, although deeply upsetting, it is a being that can be resurrected and hopefully this will be the case sooner rather than later.
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