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Years ago, the US columnist Art Buchwald wrote a spoof of how the modern White House press corps would cover the Gettysburg Address. The article hung above my desk for years, then got lost in an office move.

Buchwald was poking fun at the house reporting styles of various news organisations, but what stood out to me was that virtually none of the “reports” quoted Lincoln’s great exhortation that his listeners ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth".

Even as a young gallery journalist I enjoyed the joke that most of the mock “news reports” were so full of phrases like “in what White House aides described as a stump speech” that they didn’t actually tell readers what Lincoln had said.

At the time I was working for The Australian, which had a strong commitment to be a paper of record: when major political figures spoke, you reported the text of their speeches at length.

A couple of decades on, there are so many speeches (often saying so little) that no-one feels it incumbent upon themselves to report direct speech at any length. The priorities of newspapers have also changed.

Responding to commercial pressures and the immediacy of the electronic media and the web, newspapers have moved into “value adding” through commentary and other stories – so much so that often the basic story isn’t told. It’s a sad reflection of the Buchwald joke universe.

This is what is at the heart of Lindsay Tanner’s book Sideshow.

Tanner documents, from a politician’s perspective, what it is like to deal with the modern media. He argues that the media itself has a lot to answer for in its complaints about the shallowness of what politicians are prepared to say these days.

Plenty has been written about political spin, but not so much about the media end of the transaction. Tanner documents not just his experiences of this, but international trends in the way the media works.

The reaction to Tanner’s book from the Australian media – and particularly the Canberra gallery – has been strikingly defensive and sour. Tanner has been accused of all sorts of crimes, including that he is shifting the blame for politicians not having much to say on to the media. That he is shooting the messenger. And that he shouldn’t be complaining because he always got a good run.

I don’t think Tanner is particularly guilty of any of these crimes (even if many of us seriously doubt whether a lot of politicians have anything significant to say).

If anything, the reaction to his book has been much more a case of shooting the messenger by the media, in a rather spectacular example of thin skin and glass jaw. It does not reflect well on journalists that they seem unable to consider that such a critique of the way they operate might have a point.

Tanner quotes me in his book, along with a number of other journalists. One of these was approached by a gallery member after Sideshow came out.

“You and Laura are setting yourself up as being superior to the rest of us,” he was told.

Tanner’s book is not particularly belligerent in its message, but it makes observations about the way the media works, which for outsiders can be a revelation.

For example, there’s his take on “media templates” – Tanner’s term to describe everything from tabloid articles about MPs’ pay and entitlements (which I’d class as staple stories rather than templates) to stories framed in simple terms of good guys/bad guys or winners and losers.

I think this second group of templates is much more insidious, because such ideas reduce stories to their simplest (which isn’t always a bad thing) and create a mindset that allows no opportunity to explore the interesting parts of any story – the bits in between.

Take the live cattle export story. At one end, there are those who want the live-cattle trade banned; at the other, cattle producers who have thousands of stock they can’t move and can’t feed. In between, there are the complexities of trying to resolve the immediate crisis and set out a long-term framework for the trade.

In the political realm, the current template of this story is whether the Government is stuffing up its handling of the issue and how successful the Opposition is being in attacking it. Cut out of the unyielding template are complex questions. Why does Australia think it can regulate another country’s cattle industry? How does it realistically do this? Is it possible to reopen trade with a few abattoirs in Indonesia (which just happen to be Australian-owned) without facing accusations of being racist? What should be done with thousands of head of cattle that weren’t bred for the domestic market and which are thousands of kilometres away from that market?

These are the sort of complex issues that the political process is set up to solve. Yet so often these days, we don’t cover them, because there aren’t pictures, because we think they are too complicated for our consumers, or because they don’t fit with the simple narrative of Julia versus Tony.

This is why Sideshow is an important contribution to the political debate.

The truth is that politics is – and isn’t – driven by the media. As Tanner says, politicians spend too much time trying to “feed the beast” of the 24-hour news cycle, and the result too often is politics first, policy second. It feeds into the process via focus groups which try to anticipate how “lines” (arguments) will play out, inevitably leading to politicians following opinion rather than leading it.

This doesn’t excuse politicians for having shallow policy responses. And you don’t have to agree with all that Tanner has said in his book about the dumbing down of politics. You don’t even have to take it personally. But it should provoke all of us to think twice about how we cover the news, and even how we define it.

Laura Tingle is political editor of The Australian Financial Review