It is an election year in Australia. Three states, starting with Western Australia and Queensland next month, both territories and the Commonwealth all have elections.
In all of these elections, the vast majority of people will get most of their information about the candidates and their parties from the media. The exception is perhaps the Northern Territory. It has a single-member system in a tiny population. This results in electorates of only several thousand voters. A hard-working candidate in an urban seat could talk to almost every voter in an election year – it would only be ten a day.
Even in the tiny ACT, the media will play the crucial role in giving voters the raw material upon which to base their decisions.
It means politicians will have to rely on media outlets to get their message across. As that happens, the media will put each politicians’ message in context – in context of what the other side is doing, on what the politician’s own side is doing, on what that politician said in the past, on what that politician or his side of politics said in another geographic area. When that happens a simple message by one politician that this little pocket of Australia will get this goodie, will get (in the view of the politician) warped. One goodie given here is one less given there. A goodie for one group (land-clearing for farmers) is a horror for another (greenies).
In short, as each politician tries to be all things to all people, the media will point out the inconsistencies and contradictions.
Politicians call this bias.
People in the media call it doing our job.
Also, as campaigns wear on, politicians tend to do more and more extraordinary things to get their point across. They dive with scuba gear into shark-infested aquariums. They dive into cake shops. They drive around the country in large trucks with the national debt figure emblazoned on the side and so on. Also, they put the best possible light on whatever malfeasance or stupidity comes out, contorting the language to say black is white without actually saying so.
Media people call these things stunts, spin and manipulation.
Politicians call it doing their job.
Stunts, spin and manipulation are increasing. Politicians are granting themselves ever increasing numbers of staff – now greater than the numbers in the press gallery (itself ever expanding). Government politicians are also granting themselves ever increasing amount of money to advertise their policies – sorry, I mean to dispassionately inform the public of necessary details of new policies. The appalling Working Nation advertisements before the 1996 election and the squandering of taxpayer funds before the 1998 election on advertising A New Tax System (which had not even passed the Parliament) are good examples.
The accusations of bias go back a long way in Australia. The accusations seem to get strong the longer one or other side is out of government. When Labor was in Opposition for 23 years up to 1972, it was convinced there was institutionalised bias against it by the big media proprietors, especially the three big newspaper groups: Herald Weekly Times, Packer and Fairfax. These giants of capitalism were obviously biased against a party that espoused socialism and instructed their journalists to write accordingly, Labor thought.
Conversely, when the Coalition was in Opposition for 13 years up to 1996, it thought the media was been congenitally biased against it. The allegation was of a different sort of bias. It was not one that resided in proprietorship. Rather, Coalition politicians thought that the vast majority of individual journalists were Labor supporters who actively propagandised in favour of Labor. In the case of the ABC, the Coalition thought, the bias was institutionalised.
It is interesting that both Labor and the Coalition when in long-term Opposition thought that the Public Service was also biased against them. Whitlam’s Labor thought the Public Service was incapable of delivering a reformist social program. Howard’s Liberals thought the Public Service was incapable of delivering a reformist privatising, free-market agenda.
Long periods in Opposition obviously engender paranoia.
But more on elections.
Politicians and media are competing for public attention. Media organisations are not going to bore readers, listeners and viewers. To do so invites commercial failure, or in the case of the ABC, loss of ratings and relevance. It is not a relentless chase for numbers because different media organisations have different audiences, some quite small, which attract commercial success. The Australian Financial Review, for example, attracts advertisements for Mercs that pay for quality journalism that appeals to a narrow market.
But politicians and media need each other – though we often detest each other. It can be an awkward symbiosis. In that symbiosis, the politicians are more desperate. Their livelihood depends on it. The day the election, the journalist returns to work no matter who wins.
On the subject of bias, surveys in Australia and the US show that journalists tend to be more left-leaning, insofar as that has any meaning any more. It seems they are more excited by change and ideas than average. In the 1960s and 1970s that would have made them more Labor. In the 1990s, however, a lot of journalists embraced economic reform, which tended to favour the Coalition.
Every journalist votes, so there is that bias. But professionally, journalists put that aside. A good story is more important than personal political preference. In the recent US election, there was a feeling among Washington journalists, that journalists put their (generally Democrat) biases aside to the extreme. They went to soft on George Bush. They did not question his inconsistencies and ignorance enough.
The politician’s response to the biases of individual journalists, is to go to ones they think are not biased (or biased their way). Hence the migration to talk-back radio, where the questioning is softer, and where production is live and unedited. But politicians have still not evaded scrutiny, biases or editing. TV does seven-second grabs from the radio interview and print still analyses what is said and puts it into context.
And that is what people want. If they did not, they would flock to the political parties’ internet sites and read the policy detail unexpurgated and newspapers would fall dead from the press.