Well, one day of the election campaign is over. And media bias has already become a hot topic, after the Daily Telegraph ran a front cover with the headline “Finally, you now have the chance to kick this mob out” (pictured below).
We’ve all known that the Daily Telegraph is highly conservative for a while now. Yet for some reason, yesterday’s paper brought up the same old tired debates about ‘balance’ in our media, and questions of what happened to ‘good old objective journalism’.
And I understand why. A desire for a balanced media makes sense in an abstract world. If we get all the ‘facts’ in a paper people can then make up their own mind on the issues. “We report, you decide”. And I can also see the concern about the impact of a newspaper as popular as the Daily Telegraph – a lot of the reaction is based on fear of what impact such a headline will have.
But I cannot help but question this desire for a ‘balanced media’.
Let’s start with the obvious – journalists are inherently subjective. We are all born into different worlds and lifestyles and therefore have different viewpoints. To think that we can simply get rid of this the day we become a journalist is foolish at best. As Antony Loweinstein argues:
They (journalists) are humans like everybody else, not exactly a shocking revelation, with experiences and perspectives that shape their world view.
…
We are long past journalists being able to say with a straight face that they’re simply reporting the news as they see it. Objectivity only ever existed in the minds of the deluded.
Journalists, and (more importantly) owners of news agencies are people, and have their own bias (and power base to protect). And we cannot expect that this will change simply because they work in or own a newspaper. And this highlights the much broader problem – that ‘balance’ is a completely unrealistic goal. And that’s simply because there is no real such thing as balance – the whole idea is objective in itself. Look at one of the more curious developments in Australian journalism recently and you can see for yourself.
One of the most interesting things about journalism in recent months has been the growth of ‘fact-checking’ websites. We’ve seen Politifact, the ABC’s fact-checker, Crikey’s fact-checker, The Conversation’s fact-checker and now ‘facts fight back’. But the most interesting thing watching all of this is how controversial these fact checking sites have been. In the early days of Politifact we saw a significant debate over their decision to rate an ALP claim that because of the Government ‘penalty rates cannot be stripped away’ as ‘false’. The same problems have arisen with its US counterpart – with criticism a couple of years ago against their decision to make the Democrats argument that the Republicans budget would be the ‘end of Medicare’ the ‘lie of the year’.
These criticisms highlight a very simple point – that facts are subjective. Fact-checking sites are not some magical ‘objective’ agency – but come with their own bias and approach. Even in a site that is supposed to increase ‘balance’ of reporting, that balance is extremely contestable.
And we can make the same argument about any form of journalism. Fundamentally the idea of balance itself is subjective – what I considered balanced may be very different to what somebody else considered balance. I think that a balanced approach on climate change is to give climate sceptics a tiny amount of the airspace because that is where the science sits, whereas somebody else thinks balance means giving them 50% of the airspace. I think balance means having more than simply two views on policy positions (Government and Opposition) whilst others will be more than happy to hear from the larger players. If even how we approach ‘fact-checking’ is subjective, how on Earth are we going to ever create ‘objective’ political reporting.
And so here is where I think the fundamental problem is. The problem is not necessarily the Daily Telegraph’s main page yesterday, but rather their code of conduct that states that their reporting should be “accurate, fair and balanced”. And it’s not that they contradicted their code of conduct, but rather that they have that in their in the first place.
The simple issue is that ‘accurate, fair and balanced’ are all heavily subjective ideas all open up to many different interpretations. The simple idea that any newspaper could ever reach them is simply impossible. And we should just be willing to acknowledge that.
Antony Lowenstein has argued for something like this – saying that journalists should have to declare who they are voting for. I disagree with Antony because I think voting patterns is a very simplistic way to identify political beliefs, and that it assumes that journalists (a) always know who they’re voting for and (b) don’t change their mind. But other than that I think his argument is sound. Whilst I think there is a range of things that we should expect from journalists, I’m not convinced ‘balance’ is one of them.
And so instead of complaining about the Tele not being balanced, I think we should reframe the debate. That’s about creating a media that allows for contestation of ideas, rather than hoping that our conservative friends will live up to some code of conduct that has never been realistic. And if (as is the case) one perspective has gained more power than others in the media, the solution is not to expect them to change, but to challenge the power base that gives them so much authority (if we believe that they have real influence).
We won’t get the ‘balanced’ media so many of us want, but that will make us honest about it. It will allow for real contention of ideas, rather than some faint hope that we can all just make up our ideas once presented with ‘facts’.