a standing army of newswriters – today’s australian
Australia’s only national broadsheet, The Australian, is one of the best sources of real news and analysis in the country. Unfortunately it is also utterly biased, not only in its editorial section but also its news and features.
Today’s effort however, a vicious hatchet-job on Labor’s industrial relations policy as announced yesterday, goes above and beyond the usual pro-Government, pro-big business effort. Here is a breakdown of the newspaper’s reporting on the IR issue.
Front page:
- -”Rudd will kill jobs: Howard”
- -A story about a small business owner who (surprise surprise) doesn’t want workers’ rights restored
Page 4:
- -Labor’s industrial relations plan will cost “billions” in transitional costs according to “employers”
- -A continuation of the page 1 “kill jobs” story
- -A story about a worker who is very happy on an Australian Workplace Agreement (i.e. the current Government’s system)
- -A story about how Labor’s policy was “cooked up in cahoots with the unions”
- -”Left-wing unions wary of Labor plans”
- -A small story about how Industrial Relations is in reality actually hurting the government extremely badly in the polls
Page 5:
- -”Labor’s IR stand risks jobs: business”
- -”ALP changes worry big employers”
- -’Analysis’ of why businesses are scared of Labor’s proposals
- -A single-column story in which a university professor criticises the economic justification for WorkChoices
Page 10 (Opinion):
- -The former deputy leader of the Liberal Party tells us a Rudd government will be “in bed with the unions” and will “wreak havoc on the economy”
- -”Let’s not forget Work Choices is unpopular” (perhaps this should have been an internal memo?)
Page 11 (Opinion):
- -Lead editorial: Labor remains beholden to the union movement and has no economic credibility
Page 12 (Features, back page of main section of paper):
- -A full page article entitled “Short Changing Small Business” emphasising the negative effects of Labor’s proposed policy on “business battlers”
So, the totals look like this: 11 stories in which it is either directly suggested or suggested by a third party with an interest in the issue that Labor’s IR policy is bad or the current Government’s IR policy is good; 3 stories which remind us that Labor is ‘beholden’ to the union movement; 2 stories which focus on the fact that the majority of Australians do not like the current Government’s IR policy and that IR is a key reason that Labor is currently thrashing the Government in the polls; and 1 lonely story which actually says something negative about the current Government’s IR policies.
If we simplify even further and consider which way, if any, each story would encourage a dispassionate reader to vote, 12 favour the Government, 2 are neutral (in that they merely comment on the current state of the polls and the statistically measured unpopularity of WorkChoices), and 1 favours Labor insofar as it is critical of the Government.
On this analysis, one could be forgiven for thinking that WorkChoices was utterly wonderful and so self-evidently in the best interests of the country that no-one would think of voting Labor. Which makes it surprising that Roy Morgan research, who actually go out and talk to people to find out their views on things, found that Labor’s massive lead in current polling can be explained partly because:
The Coalition Government’s unpopular industrial relations laws continue to strengthen the Labor Party’s support base
and that
The IR laws and dislike for John Howard are two key themes to emerge from Labor supporters
“Labor supporters” in this context is nearly 60% of Australians according to all recent polling from Newspoll, Morgan, and AC Nielsen.
The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.
- Thomas Jefferson
What struck me about all this so-called coverage was the inference that any further changes to workplace legislation would cause unrest and uncertainty out in the labour market. There is a supposition that people are starting to ‘get used to’ workchoices and therefore we should ‘leave things as they are’ for the ‘good of the economy’. It doesnt matter what Rudd offers up to the Australian public, it will always be bad for business and therefore the economy according to JH and co. ‘Who gives a toss what it actually means for working families – does it make any money?’
What The Australian fails to address is the fact that had the government consulted PROPERLY with the people of Australia instead of ramming through some hastily thrown together rubbish in a rush of hubris and self-serving ideology, we wouldnt be faced with a need to ‘yet again’ make changes to IR policy in this country. THAT is what people will remember on election day, JH and his cronies thumbing their noses at the general public saying ‘take it or leave it’. Its pretty clear from the polls that we as a nation are saying ‘We choose leave it thanks, so on your bike Little Johnny, we’re finished with you now.’
Top Blog, keep up the good work.
[...] Looks like I wasn’t the only one to notice The Australian’s little effort yesterday: Crikey ran a similar piece here. Filed under: spin, 1984, australia, media by Paul | [...]
Yes – I don’t recall mass hysteria in the Murdoch press about the unrest and uncertainty caused when the new legislation came in in the first place.
I couldn’t agree more. By excluding unions and employees generally from the process, the Government succeeded in creating an extremely unbalanced law. I wonder if it occurs to them that, if they’d just taken the edges off a little more by thinking about it from both sides, then this wouldn’t be such a potent weapon against them now (at least it looks that way).
The media coverage is a real concern though. I don’t think that The Australian necessarily changes people’s voting intentions directly, but the media can create myths which end up as ‘truths’ in the public’s mind.
Seriously Paul, I don’t think anybody is listening to the Australian at the moment. They know where they are coming from and are happy to skip the ranting to get to the good parts.
Personally I am able (after 2 decades of reading the Oz) to decide the slant of an article after reading the first sentence. If it is the usually anti-Labor crap or it is a rehash of a US conservative pundits ginger article that the leftish US blogs had comprehensively chewed over and spat out 4 months ago, I’ll leave and go onto the next.
Sadly that means that somedays you only got 50cents worth of your buck-twenty, but thems the breaks.
zebbidie – well, they presumably wouldn’t write it if no-one was listening (although that doesn’t apply to blogs, I guess…
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I’m sure that many people can and do notice the slant in the reporting and opinion, but there are many subtler ways that a newspaper can be biased – story selection, for one, story placement, repetition, and so on. And I’m equally sure that many people don’t pick up on the bias, but do pick up the ideas – I have had long arguments with people who insist the Australian is not pro-Government, but who also tend to wheel out expressions and political cliches that they have picked up from reading the very same.
I see The Age and the SMH are abandoning the true broadsheet format – I hope that we will not be left with only one true broadsheet in this country…
[...] On the other hand, it would be most interesting to see what the crusaders at News Ltd have to say on the subject of media outlets which consistently report one side of an issue, and which report opinion as ‘news’. Of course, Mr Murdoch’s organisation would be the same one in which all 175 editors of his newspapers across the world supported the Iraq invasion. And that would be the same Mr Murdoch involved in this exchange: Murdoch was asked if News Corp. had managed to shape the agenda on the war in Iraq. His answer? [...]