The thesis of Sideshow can be summarised succinctly: that the media, under commercial pressure to entertain, regularly travesties weighty issues, both by wilful misreporting and compulsive trivialisation, forcing helpless politicians to dance to its tune with policies that are primarily about appearing to do something rather than actually doing it. The 2010 election campaign was this phenomenon in excelsis, both major parties tiptoeing delicately around matters of substance in favour of slogans, sound bites, and stunts.

You’re nodding, right? Journalism tacky and superficial? You betcha. Quality of public debate impoverished? With you all the way. Oh yes, there is much about the premise of Sideshow with which one’s first instinct is to express wholehearted agreement, and to laud its author for speaking truth to power. These sensations do not survive the experience of reading it. Sideshow is a rambling, repetitive, question-begging book that belies the author’s reputation as un homme sérieux of Labor politics.

For a start, Sideshow more or less exonerates Tanner’s peers, who only collude unwillingly in the debauching of debate, and who only practise their techniques of media management (‘spin’) in response to the media’s ‘need to entertain’. But politicians and media practitioners are born codependents, and natural collaborators. They live or die by their publics; they are both in the business of courting popularity, and in receipt of constant feedback about their fluctuations of fortune (politicians have polls, media outlets ratings and circulations); politicians might even be felt rather better off, in Australia at least, inasmuch as there is compulsory voting, but no compulsory reading or viewing.

Political and media professionals move back and forth across a blurred frontier, media staff performing investigative work on political opponents, columnists acting as shameless shills. You can mount a respectable argument that reverses Tanner’s – not that the relationship between politicians and the media is too adversarial, but that it is not adversarial enough; that both spend too long tickling one another, and insufficient time at loggerheads, brooding on their respective duties to the public. I have often felt that a give-away of this collusion is the title of the ABC’s Sunday morning journo talk-fest, Insiders. Admirable though the show is, journalists have no business being insiders, except on the most temporary of bases; when they forget that, they aren’t worth a damn.

While Tanner acknowledges that ‘there was no golden age of politics when politicians rigorously and objectively explained the strengths and weakness in their positions’, he believes things are worse now than when he arrived on the scene twenty years ago: ‘The media were central to national politics then, but they are much more dominant now.’ Yet he also finds the volume of political coverage considerably diminished. To his mind, the besetting sin of Today Tonight and A Current Affair is that they scarcely evince any interest in Canberra and its works at all. How does this correlate to dominance?

Tanner’s abiding preoccupation is the Canberra press gallery, and also with newspapers generally, despite his seeming awareness of their waning and frankly spent force. This is more telling of the state of Labor than of democracy in general. The Howard government prospered in spite of a frequently querulous and hostile gallery by selling messages direct to the public via live media such as talkback radio, which Tanner doesn’t get round to addressing until page 194 of Sideshow, with a vague comment that it provides ‘some hope’. When Tanner airily addresses ‘new media’, too, it is far from clear that he knows whereof he writes, because he groups newspaper websites and pay television in with ‘blogs and tweets’.

Sideshow is also larded with more quotations than an Alan Ramsey column – quotations, moreover, often saying more or less the same thing, and stuffed in seemingly for the sake of parading the author’s erudition, but at some stages constipating the narrative to the point of unreadability. Quotations alone are not evidence; deployed here in such quantities, they steadily draw attention to Tanner’s substitution of assertion for argument, and the book’s one-note tone.

The effect is aggravated by Tanner’s irritating stylistic tic of introducing each individual with a two- or three-word descriptor that is either bland (‘British writer’, ‘American writer’) or redundantly detailed (‘inventor of the Ethernet and Infoworld columnist’). Robert Hughes is a ‘cultural writer’  – who knew? Jeremy Clarkson is a ‘security commentator’ – say what? Michael Parkinson is a ‘popular interviewer’ who thinks Australia is infected with a ‘celebrity virus’ – Tanner is somehow deaf here to the ear-splitting irony. Perhaps the most annoying is the framing of Daniel Boorstin as an ‘American researcher’. What on earth is a ‘researcher’? Boorstin was a superfine American historian and cultural critic whose analysis fifty years ago of the rise of the ‘pseudo-event’, The Image, traversed the terrain explored by Sideshow and far, far better.

Nor do Tanner’s anecdotes and complaints always serve his argument. He cites, for example, a Daily Telegraph article in 2009 relying on figures from the government’s AusTender site to the effect that spending on consultancies had increased during the Rudd premiership. In fact, complains Tanner, the data was not definitive: ‘A change in reporting methodology, contracts between government agencies, multi-year contracts, and contracts incorrectly described as consultancies all made it impossible to rely on figures drawn from the website.’ But why run a website with data that was ‘impossible to rely on’? Those who knowingly make confusing information available have little right to complain when confusion arises.

Elsewhere, Tanner faults Age political editor Paul Austin for criticising John Brumby’s decision during the recent state election campaign to match his rival Ted Baillieu’s commitment to increase police numbers while also claiming that crime rates were falling. ‘If Brumby is right and Baillieu is wrong, why has the premier now decided to match the Liberals and promise an extra 1700 police?’ asked Austin. ‘The answer to this rhetorical question is simple,’ Tanner responds tartly. ‘Given the way the media cover these issues, John Brumby clearly believed this was an argument he could not win, irrespective of the facts.’ Turns out that the ‘facts’ were dodgy, and Austin was right to intuit a contradiction.

The quaintest judgement of all is Tanner’s conviction that Kevin Rudd was a ‘victim’ of the ‘sideshow syndrome’; of ‘the dominance of media imagery and the machine politics it encourages’. Tanner here leaves out too many steps. For most of his ascendancy, Rudd was a huge beneficiary of the superficiality of political journalism. The gallery was dazzled by his poll numbers, and deaf to his growing unpopularity among colleagues. What was the 2020 Summit but the phoniest of pseudo-events? Who can forget that photograph of Rudd sitting on the floor, all studied informality and faux humility, as Australia’s Great Brains studiously inched their way to ineffectual conclusions? It wasn’t fear of ‘irresistible media pressure’ that doomed his prime ministership; rather, it was it his lack of factional support when the public twigged belatedly that he stood largely for his own prestige and advancement.

Lastly, Tanner takes for granted the idea that a fully informed and engaged electorate is integral to democracy. But there are grounds for believing that Australia’s democracy has been so successful and continuous precisely because we have seldom cared much for politics or politicians; it is in a covetousness of power and an intense attachment to ideology that lie the seeds of corruption and tyranny. A switched-off citizenry may, it is true, tend to shy from grand reform and creative change, but it may also counteract tendencies among its political élites toward adamantine certainty and grandiosity.

Tanner’s arguments against compulsory voting – which, on balance, he decides he just favours – overlook regular evidence in Australia for the wisdom of crowds. Time and again, it seems to me, voters in this country get it just about right. They worked out that John Hewson was a desiccated calculating machine; they sensed that Paul Keating was a busted flush; they guessed Kim Beazley’s laziness, Mark Latham’s nastiness, and John Howard’s eventual emptiness and inanition. In Victoria, voters punished Joan Kirner’s government for ineptitude, Jeff Kennett’s for hubris, and Brumby’s for staleness; in New South Wales, they waited as long as it took the Liberals to promote someone besides a half-wit, then kicked the Carr–Iemma–Rees–Keneally junta into well-merited obscurity. The ultimate triumph was to award the last federal election to nobody, a verdict whose fairness Tanner can scarcely dispute.

In favour of Tanner’s Sideshow, it should be said that it is a useful argument starter, and concerns a worthy subject. The media could and should always do better. It has nurtured and encouraged ‘gotcha’ journalism, elastic ethics, and obsessions with the cosmetic and counterfeit. There are unprecedented commercial pressures on key media institutions at the moment, though Tanner overestimates them as a daily contributor to the modern malaise: current affairs has always pitted reporter against reporter in a cliché competition, with the spoils to the contestant finding the shortest direct route to a pre-existing prejudice.

Tanner actually gets close to a perennial problem, before sadly sheering off in another direction: the poverty among journalists of specialist knowledge in the areas they write about. Lacking the qualifications and training to ask probing questions about science, the law, medicine, accountancy, and other areas requiring actual expertise, political journalists default naturally to transacting in images, polls, and quotes. For decades, media outlets have been hiring graduates with useless degrees in journalism, media studies, and communications, as though journalism is itself a profession rather than essentially a technique or a knack. This conduces to a ‘star system’ in which individuals advance because they turn a pretty phrase rather than because they actually know or care about any of the policies they are pretending to evaluate.

Perhaps the only arena other than journalism in which one may rise to prominence without knowing all that much about anything in particular is, well, politics. Especially in Tanner’s own party, members advance largely on the basis of ambition, patronage, and influence, and their involvement in the right union or a favoured faction; ministers span giant portfolios they can scarcely know in detail, and swap as soon as they attain the slightest familiarity with; they announce policies and read speeches prepared largely by others, affecting voters they know chiefly by poll numbers, and into whom they bump every three years. Tanner might profitably have set his own house in order, in fact, before starting on criticising his neighbour’s.