Kingsmillism

FRAN KELLY IS TO return to the airwaves at Radio National after having, three years ago, retired. She will replace Sarah Macdonald. Edit: she will present a new 6pm program. This is our media labour economy in a nutshell; absolutely dominated by three or four major institutions (the ABC, Nine-Fairfax, and the Murdoch papers) which combine to form what is effectively a cartel for media, and within that, explicitly hostile to young people and new entrants.

There's no question Kelly is a good journalist. She's even likely to be the best journalist for this role and for this audience. She would meet any set of criteria for meritocratic appointment. But a broader pattern of older, more qualified, more experienced, people, being appointed and reappointed to positions in institutions, is not a positive overall. Think of Richard Kingsmill, the former Triple J presenter, programmer, and manager, who remained at the 'youth' radio station well into his late middle age: it's no fault of his that he got old, but it said a great deal about the station--and our media culture--that his being there, for decades, effectively closed a promotion ladder to generations of younger presenters, and with them, their ideas. It's not just Triple J. This broader pattern, which we might call Kingsmillism, where meritocratic appointment without a countervailing system of moving those appointees up-and-out, closes institutions to new people, new systems, newness generally.

It's a classic example of preference for the best, over the good enough. This is fundamental, though, to meritocracy; that because it seeks to ideologically justify, having made, the appointment of people, it's also a logic of exclusion, exactly working against the notion of a fair-go. That meritocratic processes tend also to be ones that act against social mobility, creating classes of meritorious people and keeping them in place, is a paradox that a lot of fair-minded people won't honestly admit. So much more when the meritocratic choice is selecting authority figures, whether political or cultural.

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