The news is still out there. It's not Abbott's job to supply it Nick Cater on the journalists now complaining about a lack of press releases from the Abbott Government: The ABC's Barrie Cassidy writes that Tony Abbott's approach "is working just fine now," but adds a warning: "The political class will eventually claim back their relevance." Yet the grumbles about this exceptionally unforthcoming administration mask a problem closer to home... Journalism has succumbed to a culture of dependency... Criticism of the government's so-called media-management strategy misses the point; Abbott's approach is less a case of management and more of laissez faire. The Rudd and Gillard administrations took a Keynesian approach, intervening heavily in the market and attempting to control the flow of news. It invested heavily in a state-owned media enterprise, the ABC, encouraging it to compete more aggressively with the private sector. When all else failed, it tried to regulate the market through legislation to control the press.Abbott, by contrast, is behaving like an ultra-dry economic conservative and is letting the news market rip. The critical condition of modern journalism has been exposed.