The Naked Truth? Media and Politics in the Digital Age*
Andrew Leigh MP
Federal Member for Fraser
www.andrewleigh.com
‘Challenge Your Mind’ University of Canberra Public Lecture Series
1 August 2012
The Truth, Naked
At the end of 1992, a team of us got together at Sydney University to run for the student
newspaper, Honi Soit. We needed a name with a hint of journalistic credibility and a
bucketload of electoral appeal, and so we opted to call ourselves ‘The Naked Truth’.
We threw ourselves into the campaign with the kind of frisky eagerness only a dozen 20 yearolds can muster. By day we sang our campaign song to bemused classes, removing much of
our clothing to reinforce the team name. By night we put up posters and chalked ‘The Naked
Truth’ around the campus. One of our team, Verity Firth, even brought along her younger
brother Charles to help out. A class of medical students promised to vote for us en bloc if a
member of the Naked Truth team would streak through their lecture hall. One of us obliged.
And so my year as a journalist began. I interviewed Andrew Denton, Henri Szeps and
Dorothy McRae-McMahon, went inside Long Bay jail and a submarine, spoke to a magician,
a monk and a basketball commentator, and wrote about child sponsorship, biblical literalism
and virtual reality machines. In a display of youthful chutzpah, I also reviewed a handful of
sports cars, making me (I hope) the only motoring writer in the history of student journalism.
When the 1993 election came around, I managed to get Keating and Hewson to answer
twenty questions apiece.1 The year even got me my first article in the Sydney Morning
Herald, on illegal street racing.
I loved journalism, but even at the level of student journalism I found it hard. Pitching stories.
Separating beef from bulldust. Staying objective. Since writing for Honi, I’ve written
hundreds of thousands of words in newspapers: all of them opinion.
Because of that, I approach the topic of journalism with a modicum of trepidation. Plus,
because I’m a politician, you should probably regard my views on journalists as akin to the
views that a kangaroo has about gun ownership.
The New Economics of Journalism
The first thing to say is that journalism really can change the world. Emile Zola’s letter
‘J’Accuse’ did more than win the freedom of Alfred Dreyfus; it changed the political
character of modern France.2 In their reporting of Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein
brought down a President. In Australia, reporting by the Courier Mail and the Four Corners
program ended the Bjelke-Petersen Government and led to the jailing of three ministers.3 In
1
2005, a newspaper article brought down NSW Opposition Leader John Brogden, and
probably changed the outcome of the 2007 NSW election.4
Journalists make wonderful company. Not many people are great listeners and splendid
raconteurs – but my journalist friends all meet that description. As a reader, I delight in the
wit of Annabel Crabb, the global view of Peter Hartcher, the economic nous of Peter Martin,
the eccentric curiosity of the late Peter Veness, and the forensic reporting of Neil Chenoweth.
Watching Emma Alberici grill Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov about his nation’s
disgraceful position on Syria made me proud of our public broadcaster. I could add dozens of
other examples, but I’ll sum it up with this: I’d happily put Australia’s best journalists up
against any in the world.
For the most part, my argument today will not be about individuals. Sure, I wish there were
more great journalists and fewer crummy ones, and I’m sure they’d say the same about my
profession. But there isn’t much point in politicians and journalists engaging in a namecalling exercise. Right now, the share of the Australian population that rates either profession
as highly ethical and honest has fallen to one in ten.5 So we need to start thinking
systematically.
As an economist, that’s my natural inclination. Human agency can be important, but pivotal
changes are generally the result of technology and policy, not individual actions. People
respond to incentives – so if you want better behaviour, improving the incentives generally
works better than moral exhortation.
The big technological shift in media has been the falling cost of disseminating ideas. Cable
and digital television have expanded the number of channels. Digital radio will have the same
effect on that medium. Ubiquitous broadband has allowed news to be conveyed through a
host of electronic media. Among Australian adults who are online, almost all use social
media, with 76 percent using Facebook, and 10 percent using Twitter.6 About half of all
Australian politicians tweet.7 After undertaking a month-long randomised trial at the start of
the year, I joined them.8
The effect of this has been increased competition in the media market. By international
standards, the Australian media – particularly our newspapers – are not especially
competitive.9 So competition from new outlets has come as a particular shock to incumbent
players in the Australian media market.
One of the main places you see the impact of competition is the contest between outlets to be
first with the story.10 Under the old model, papers told you the latest news as of 12 hours
earlier, while the evening television news told you what had happened during the day. But
competition from online news outlets and 24-hour news channels has made that increasingly
unsustainable. Increasingly, people are choosing faster-paced media. Asked their most
important sources of news information, 31 percent nominated commercial TV, 30 percent
said the internet, and 13 percent said a daily newspaper.11
2
As Tony Blair has pointed out, his 1997 election campaign took an issue a day, while his
2005 campaign ‘had to have one for the morning, another for the afternoon and by the
evening the agenda had already moved on’.12 In the 1980s, Treasurer Keating would go on
the road to sell the budget for a full month. In the 1990s, Treasurer Costello would take a
fortnight for his budget tour. But by the time Costello left office, the budget roadshow had
shrunk to about a week. This wasn’t anyone’s fault – it’s simply a function of the national
attention span.
Information Inequality
My central thesis in this speech is that the technological changes in media have led to greater
inequality in political information than ever before. For engaged citizens, there’s never been a
better time to be a news consumer. You can watch press conferences live on Sky, and get
transcripts of radio programs in different cities. You can access the opinions of thoughtful
bloggers and sassy tweeters. Engaged citizens are better informed now about political news
than they’ve ever been before.
And then there’s the remainder of the population: some who are too busy with family and
community to bother with national politics; others who are more interested in Lara Bingle
than Laurie Oakes; and those who don’t seek out political information, but let it come to
them. For this group of disengaged citizens, there is a growing disconnect from the political
process. For example, at the last election, 6.8 percent of voters failed to cast a ballot, and 5.5
percent voted informal. That’s over 12 percent of the electorate who didn’t participate in the
democratic process. I believe that changes in the media are one of the factors making this
group of Australians more disconnected from politics. In effect, technology has widened the
information gap between the most-informed and least-informed members of society.
The notion that technology can have different impacts across society is a familiar one to
economists. We use the term ‘skill-biased technological change’ to capture the idea that some
technological innovations both help high-skilled workers and hurt low-skilled workers. For
example, while computerisation was making lawyers more efficient, it was making their
typists redundant.
The thing about skill-biased technological change is that if you’re among the group that
benefits, you can easily miss the negative side. And my guess is that many of you in this
room will be engaged news consumers, who most keenly feel the upside – the wealth of new
information now at your fingertips. But it’s important to also take account of the impact
across society if we’re to get a full picture of how the media has changed people’s views of
politics.
From the perspective of the most engaged citizens, the media is more abundant, diverse and
accessible than in the past. Yet that’s not how things look to many Australians. Taken as a
whole, the media has become more opinionated, nastier and shallower. The shift has not
taken place because individual journalists have grown horns and forked tongues, but because
the technological changes have privileged those kinds of voices. Opinion, nastiness and
shallowness have always been there – but they have flourished over recent decades.
3
Problem 1: Too Much Opinion
Let’s start with opinion.13 Most of the new political news websites that have emerged over
recent decades are dominated by comment. These include The Drum, The Punch, The
Conversation, Crikey, Inside Story, The National Times, Australian Policy Online and Online
Opinion. In fact, the only political news website that has not increased the overall
opinion/news ratio is The Global Mail (which generally does not print opinion pieces).14 On
television, stations such as Sky and ABC24 thrive on commentary. In some cases, guests on
these shows are print journalists, who may sometimes do multiple interviews in a day, as well
as writing for the web and print editions of their newspaper.
As former press secretary Lachlan Harris has argued, ‘every year the number of journalists
goes down and the number of commentators goes up.’15 In 1990, the Parliamentary Press
Gallery had 252 journalists working in television, print and radio. In 2010 that had decreased
to 179.16 One factor is simple economics: journalism costs money and comment is often
free.17 And as comment proliferates, there is a temptation to blur the boundaries between
news and opinion – to take the small but significant step from arguing that a policy could be
implemented to arguing that it should be; to make oneself a ‘player’ not merely an impartial
watcher from the sidelines.
In a world where economic policy gets steadily more complex, and Australia’s future is
close-knit with the Asian region, I worry when I see journalistic resources diverted from
making sense of policies and events to commentating on the events of the front page. We
seem to have devalued good reporting. Recently, Yale University journalism students were
asked how they would have gone about investigating Watergate. To the shock of their guest
speaker (Bob Woodward), most students essentially said that they would Google ‘Nixon’s
secret fund’.18
In Australia, I must have read a hundred comment pieces about the politics of asylum
seekers, but I don’t recall a single journalist having asked the Malaysian government why
they’ve chosen not to sign the Refugee Convention. Rather than endless speculation on the
relationship between opinion polls and interest rates, wouldn’t it be worth exploring what an
interest rate cut is likely to do to the price of an imported television? Again, this comes down
to information inequality. The engaged news consumers see opinion as merely adding to the
smorgasboard; but disengaged news consumers are increasingly finding themselves getting
fewer facts and more commentary.
Perhaps my view of this is somewhat shaped by an email that a senior opinion writer sent me
a couple of years ago. Allow me to quote a few lines:
‘I am prepared to spend my last dollar and effort of energy to avoid having you
purporting to represent my views in parliament. And that is quite apart from the fact that
you are a crap statistician. … You are a fucking disgrace – the more so because your
electorate has a higher standard than you – and I will not lose a moment saying so, in any
audience, in any place, and to everyone who asks my opinion.’
4
In case you’re wondering, I had emailed the journalist to say that since the two of us had
never spoken, perhaps we should have lunch together.
My concern about comment is not mostly about ideological bias. Sure, the ALP isn’t exactly
having a dream run in the mainstream press at present, but I know enough history to
recognise that the worm turns. Curtin won his 1943 landslide election with Packer and
Murdoch against him. In the early-1980s, Hawke was backed by most of the mainstream
media. In 2003, Howard Government minister Richard Alston made 68 official complaints
against the ABC for allegedly being biased against them in reporting the Iraq War. My own
systematic study of media bias (co-authored with University of Toronto professor Joshua
Gans) found that during the period 1996 to 2004, most outlets adopted centrist positions.19
My chief concern about the rise of opinion is the risk that it leads to an increasingly polarised
electorate.20 In one experiment, Stanford’s Geoffrey Cohen asked students to rate a
hypothetical social welfare program. The article described the program, and said whether
Republican or Democratic leaders supported it. Cohen found that what mattered were the
party leaders’ views, not the policy itself. ‘If their party endorsed it, [Democrats] supported
even a harsh welfare program and [Republicans] supported even a lavish one.’ As New York
University’s Jonathan Haidt puts it, ‘once group loyalties are engaged, you can’t change
people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments’.21 My fear is that the rise of opinion
threatens the information commons, and threatens to split people into increasingly extreme
echo chambers. In one US survey, 77 percent of respondents said the press tended to favour
one side, up from 53 percent in 1985. 22 I find the rise of MSNBC as worrying as the advent
of Fox News.23
Problem 2: Nastiness
The second trend that concerns me is nastiness. In her address to the Sydney Institute last
year, Annabel Crabb argued that ‘there is a hostile, scratchy feel to politics at the moment’.24
In the latest Quarterly Essay, Laura Tingle contends that ‘Australia’s politics and our public
discourse have become noticeably angrier’.25
Now there have always been people saying ungenerous things about politicians. And very
often, those people are politicians themselves. Bob Hawke famously refused to withdraw the
claim in Parliament that Malcolm Fraser was a liar. Paul Keating popularised not only ‘J
curve’ and ‘Banana Republic’, but also ‘grub’ and ‘scumbag’.26 Mark Latham was so proud
of his insults that he used one of them as the title of his book of quotations: A Conga Line of
Suckholes. Barry Cohen’s books of anecdotes are replete with examples of parliamentarians
calling one another drunks, fools, and philanderers. In other countries, the history is worse
still. Any discussion about the character of US political debate today needs to bear in mind
that this is the nation where a former Treasury Secretary once shot and killed the sitting VicePresident in a duel.27
But there are two features of the technological shift in the mass media today that have
accentuated the nastiness in political reporting: competition from online outlets, and
anonymity.
5
The impact of competition from online outlets is to reduce the time that outlets have to carry
out their fact-checking process. When tabloid papers published on their front page fake nude
photos of Pauline Hanson, their haste was partly due to a concern that if they didn’t rush to
print, they would be scooped by an online site.
Competition from online outlets can encourage outlets to exaggerate. One of my favourite
tabloid headlines of recent times is this one from July 2011: ‘Workers struggling with a
carbon tax are about to be hit with a second wave of Greens-inspired tax pain’. Not only was
the carbon price nearly a year away, but federal and state governments had ruled out
imposing congestion pricing. Yet when deadlines are tight and competition is fierce, you can
see how people end up cutting corners. Other oft-repeated errors include the claim that
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s reaction to the death of an Australian soldier was ‘shit
happens’ (he was in fact summarising another soldier’s view), or that Australia has an
‘economy wide’ carbon price (it covers about 60 percent of domestic emissions).28
Another way that technology can accentuate nastiness is through anonymity. Increasingly,
letters to the editor are being replaced by website comments, blogs and tweets. While letters
carried the author’s name, social media is often anonymous or pseudonymous.
In Disconnected, I noted the evidence on how anonymous technologies can turn interactions
nasty.29 In one psychology experiment, students at the University of Texas in Austin were
placed in separate booths, assigned a pair and asked to exchange emails to get to know each
other better.30 In many cases, the conversations quickly became either lewd or rude. As the
researchers noted at the end of their article:
[T]he male experimenter who conducted the sessions debriefed the participants
immediately after the interactions without reading the actual transcripts. He noted that
the students were always low-keyed, unassuming, and moderately interested in the
study. No participants appeared embarrassed, shocked, or in the slightest way, upset
or angry. At the conclusion of the project, when he was given the opportunity to read
the transcripts, he was astounded—even overwhelmed—to learn what these polite
students had been saying to one another.
If you have ever said something more vitriolic over email or social media than you would
have been willing to say in person, you know how this can happen.
Even text messages provide a shield behind which poisoned darts can be hurled. In The
Australian Moment, George Megalogenis describes how 2GB’s Alan Jones read out text
messages before the Cronulla riots, such as this one ‘This Sunday, every Aussie in the Shire
get down to North Cronulla to support Leb- and Wog-bashing day.’ As Megalogenis argues,
‘The commonsense filters that were used to keep the letters-to-the-editor page civil, and to
prevent the cranks from getting on air, don’t apply in cyberspace because the medium
rewards those who generate the most outrage.’31
The problem, as Tony Blair noted in a wide-ranging speech on the media, is that ‘Something
that is interesting is less powerful than something that makes you angry or shocked. …
6
attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgment. It is not enough for someone to
make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial.’32 One academic study found that
individuals are more likely to be persuaded by political arguments that play on their fears
even when they are told counter arguments.33 Again, this is a matter of information
inequality. If genteel discussion is your thing, you now have instant access to Productivity
Commission reports and new sites like The Conversation. But for more disengaged news
consumers, public debate has become noticeably scratchier.
Problem 3: Shallowness
My third concern is that new media technologies are driving towards a shallower national
conversation than in the past. One manifestation of this is the rise of ‘showman politicians’
(and yes, I do mean showman), who are known more for their exaggerations and snappy
grabs than their thoughtfulness. Waiting one day to speak to reporters on the doors outside
Parliament House, it occurred to me that the 24/7 media cycle has the same effect on the
political system as if we offered a cash prize for the parliamentarian who could come up with
the most outrageous line of the day.
Another aspect of shallowness is the emphasis on ‘gotcha’ questions, like ‘will you rule
out…?’, ‘will it increase…?’, ‘do you promise never to…?’. In one of my first media
appearances after being elected, I was asked whether I would stand up for every public sector
job in Canberra. I replied that it would be silly to do so, given that some public servants are
dismissed for cause. A newspaper article the next day omitted the qualifier, simply quoting
me as saying ‘I'm not going to stand up and fight for every public service job in Canberra’. It
was a useful lesson about where straight-talk can lead. In the US, gotcha journalism has
reached such a stage that spokespeople for both the Obama and Romney Presidential
campaigns routinely speak to media outlets only on the condition that they have the right to
subsequently edit their quotes.34
And yet the most interesting policy questions are rarely about whether something will go up
or down, but the size of that increase. Chances are you’re less interested in whether you’re
getting a pay rise this year than how big it will be. You don’t want to know whether this
speech will ever finish – you want to know when. Deep reporting focuses on magnitudes.
Shallow reporting focuses on whether something is positive or negative.
Shallowness can also manifest in picking examples that aren’t representative of the broader
context. The current inflation rate of 1.2 percent is the lowest in over a decade. But you can
always run a ‘cost of living’ story by finding items or households for whom costs are
increasing rapidly.35 Similarly, the current unemployment rate of 5.2 percent is low compared
with recent decades. But a journalist who wants to write about job losses will have little
difficulty finding examples. On the average working hour of the average working day, about
1530 Australians lose their jobs, and 1550 find a new one.36 In discussing school funding, the
core question of principle (‘what’s the best way to improve student performance?’) risks
becoming sidelined by trite jibes about ‘hit lists’.
7
Another feature of political journalism that has become increasingly ubiquitous is a focus on
the ‘horse-race’ element of politics through the lens of opinion polls. As technology has
reduced the cost of carrying out opinion polls, their frequency has increased from quarterly to
monthly to (in some cases) fortnightly. The trend could easily continue: in the United States,
Gallup now conduct daily opinion polls. A typical poll-watching story tells the reader how
the poll has changed since it was last taken, and then discusses how the events of the previous
weeks can explain this result. Increasingly, polls are becoming the lens through which many
journalists view politics.
The problem is that polls are notoriously inaccurate. In an analysis of election-eve opinion
polls from 1993 to 2010, Murray Goot found that across three major pollsters (Newspoll,
Morgan and Nielsen), the average prediction error ranged from 1.4 to 2.0 percentage points,
with a median error of 1.8 percentage points. Goot noted that ‘if in 1993 an enterprising
rogue had set up a pseudo-poll that conducted no interviews but simply worked on the
assumption that at every election Labor would get 50 per cent of the two-party preferred vote,
he or she would have … an average error of just 1.8 percentage points’.37 Unsurprisingly,
polls conducted earlier than election eve have larger errors.38
Statistical analysis of volatility in opinion polls also suggests that polls suffer from sampling
problems that magnify the true margin of error – perhaps by a factor of two.39 Journalists who
report small movements in opinion polls (eg. 1 or 2 percentage points) without
acknowledging the margin of error may well be misleading their readers.40
Superficiality isn’t something that’s emerged in the last decade or so.41 But it does pose a
particular challenge for reforms that are non-intuitive. The arguments in favour of free trade,
foreign investment, a floating dollar, a goods and services tax and a price on carbon are all
more subtle than the arguments against them. Lindsay Tanner calls this the ‘sideshow
syndrome’, and argues that it poses a ‘direct threat to the nation’s well-being’ – constraining
our ability to discuss major reforms.42 For politicians, the technological changes in the media
have made reflection, doubt and subtlety more difficult than in the past.43
A major driver of the shift towards shallowness is the rise of television and the decline of
newspapers. Television news bulletins tend to provide less depth than newspaper reports. In
1970, there were more daily newspapers bought each day than there were televisions in the
country. Now, there are four televisions for every newspaper purchased.44 The internet didn’t
kill newspapers (their circulation was declining by the 1980s), but the shift of advertising to
the web has dealt a brutal blow to the economics of newspapers. For the most engaged, the
conversation may have become deeper and richer; but for disengaged citizens, the trend has
been in the opposite direction.
Solutions
So what should we do about it? From the perspective of regulation, the Finkelstein Report
(which the government is currently considering) makes the point that when technology
changes, legal regimes need to adapt. Take smh.com.au and ninemsn.com.au, two of the most
popular news websites. Right now, content on the Sydney Morning Herald website is largely
8
created by a newspaper, which operates under a voluntary code of conduct, regulated by the
Australian Press Council. By contrast, content on the NineMSN website is largely created by
a broadcaster, with complaints directed to the Australian Communications and Media
Authority, a statutory authority. ACMA may consider the ‘suitability’ of a person who seeks
to hold a broadcasting licence. A newspaper proprietor is not subject to such a test. If we
were starting from scratch today, it’s far more likely that we would have created something
like Finkelstein’s proposed ‘News Media Council’ than the current regime.
But complaints-handling bodies are only part of the challenge. In my view, a more significant
problem is sustaining the economics of quality journalism. Financial pressures at Fairfax will
only accentuate the problems that I’ve spoken about, and will make it more difficult to
sustain innovations such as investigative journalism, a readers’ editor, 45 or high-quality
pattern journalism that puts a story into its proper context.46 Google’s Hal Varian is right
when he urges newspapers to ‘experiment, experiment, experiment’ – but when newspaper
sales have been trending downwards for a generation, it’s hard to imagine experiments that
will bend the curve back upwards.47
For university journalism schools, I think the current environment presents a unique
opportunity. As well as training the next generation of media professionals, I’d like to see
more public interest journalism produced out of university journalism schools. While some of
this occurs already, there is considerable scope for it to be expanded.
Another proposal, put forward by both Lindsay Tanner and Malcolm Turnbull, is to provide
subsidies to quality newspapers.48 Tanner proposes direct grants, while Turnbull suggests
providing tax-deductible gift recipient status to newspapers that subscribe to ‘a code of
conduct analogous perhaps to that subscribed to by the ABC’.49 Naturally, such a proposal
would need to pass a reasonable cost-benefit test, but I am inclined to think that the benefit of
a better-informed public would be likely to justify the cost of the subsidy. In implementing
such a proposal, it would be important to think about how to ensure that public money
increased the amount of political information among those who are disengaged from politics.
If the problem is information inequality, there’s little point subsidising content that is only
consumed by those who are already engaged.
As an economist, I’m naturally drawn towards using price signals rather than regulation to
achieve any given aim. This is particularly the case in an area where there’s considerable
controversy over defining what we mean by quality journalism. I’m not sure you can legislate
good journalism any more than you can legislate good taste. But appropriate subsidies may
be able to get us there.
Lastly, there’s the question of how progressive politicians should behave in a changing media
environment. The changes that I’ve spoken about pose a particular challenge to progressives.
Looking around the world, we’re living in an era when social democratic governments are
particularly thin on the ground. I’m not sure it’s a coincidence that this is happening at a time
when the media landscape is fragmenting. The changes afoot aren’t ideologically neutral:
9
they’re particularly beneficial for populists and libertarians, and confronting for long-game
reformers.
But for those of us who believe in progressive reform, it’s vital that we continue to talk about
big ideas. In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell argues that you only
get to the top of your profession after 10,000 hours of practice. A similar argument may apply
to reform. Critical reforms like Medicare and universal superannuation, expanding university
places and dropping the tariff barriers didn’t happen by themselves. They were the product of
passionate and painstaking advocacy. My guess is that politicians who manage to implement
major changes are invariably those who’ve chalked up at least 10,000 hours of advocacy.
Progressives also need to get better at linking the reforms of today with the events of the past.
Too much reliance on talking points and ‘lines’ can win the battle, but lose the war. Humans
are fundamentally storytelling creatures, and stories are a powerful way of persuading people
about the importance of change. Reform isn’t about uprooting our history – it’s about
allowing our values to endure in a changing world. It is about identifying the golden threads
that run through our history.
Conclusion
George Megalogenis compares the changes today to the insecurity of the stagflation decade.
Yet he argues that while the 1970s saw the media emerge as perhaps the only institution to
play a constructive role, the media is today ‘an intrinsic part of the problem’.50 Given the
transformation that technology was already imposing on the media, the News of the World
scandal could hardly have come at a worse time.
And yet there are good reasons to be optimistic. We can never return to the old way of doing
things, and need to learn to manoeuvre our way in this new environment. The Fourth Estate is
going through perhaps the biggest transformation in the past century. For highly engaged
citizens, there’s never been a better time to be a news consumer. Here’s hoping we can
eventually say the same for the rest of the population.
10
Notes
*
I am grateful to Trudy McIntosh for outstanding research assistance; John Hirst for
supplying me with some historical examples; and Michael Cooney, Louise Crossman,
Stephen Dziedzic, Damien Hickman, Rick Kalowski, Matthew Ricketson and Nick Terrell
(among others) for valuable comments on earlier drafts.
1
Asked for their ideal dinner companion, Keating responded with conductor Rudolf Kempe
(who died in 1976), while Hewson named Norman Gunston. Asked their epitaph, Keating
responded ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice’ (Christopher Wren’s epitaph, which
translates as ‘If you require a monument, look around you’). Hewson responded with ‘He
tried his best’.
2
For a beautifully-written (if somewhat inaccurate) account of the episode, see Henri Szeps,
Wish I’d Said That, Phoenix Education, Sydney, 2012.
3
For a seminal account of Queensland corruption in this era, see Scott Prasser, Rae Wear and
John Nethercote (eds), Corruption and Reform: The Fitzgerald Vision, UQP, Brisbane, 1990
4
For a plethora of other examples, see ABC Radio National, Media Report, 9 December
1999, available at www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/mediareport-1999/the-bestaustralian-journalism-of-the-20th-century/3566498.
5
Roy Morgan, Image of Professions Survey 2012, Finding No. 4777. Journalists are rated
highly ethical and honest by 12 percent of respondents; federal MPs by 10 percent.
Incidentally, those in my former profession (university lecturer) are rated highly ethical and
honest by 65 percent of respondents.
6
comScore report, It’s a social world, October 2011
7
See official lists of federal politicians on twitter from @AttheHouse and @AuSenate.
Analysis on the tweets of the top 10 politicians during the 2010 election showed that over 50
percent of tweets were ‘broadcast messages.’ Jim McNamara, ‘Pre- and post-election 2010
online: What happened to the conversation?’, Communication, Politics, Culture, vol.44, no. 2
8
Of my 3000 or so Twitter followers, I’d guess that less than half live in the Fraser
electorate. Traditional campaigning, such as newsletters, public meetings, mobile offices and
appearances on mainstream media still remain the bedrock of the interaction between
politicians and voters.
9
According to Ray Finkelstein, 2012, Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Media and
Media Regulation, Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy,
Canberra (hereafter the Finkelstein Report): ‘Australia’s newspaper industry is among the
most concentrated in the developed world. An international collaborative research project …
has generated data on the newspaper industry in 26 countries including Australia. One of the
measures used is the proportion of daily newspaper circulation controlled by the leading
firms in the industry. Australia is the only country in which the leading press company
accounts for more than half of daily circulation … With a share of 86 per cent, Australia also
ranks highest by a considerable margin when considering the share of the top two companies.
The share of the top two companies exceeds 60 per cent in only six of the 26 countries’
(pp.59-60)
10
For an excellent discussion of this issue, see Rodney Tiffin, 2012, ‘Spin Doctors, News
Values and Public Interest – the Bermuda Triangle of Policy Debate’ in Matthew Ricketson
(ed), Australian Journalism Today, Palgrave, Melbourne (as an aside, Tiffin was very tolerant
of my poor class attendance while I was an editor of Honi Soit).
11
Essential Media poll, November 2011, cited in the Finkelstein Report, p.87
12
Tony Blair, ‘The Prime Minister's Reuters Speech on Public Life’, 12 June 2007.
11
13
Had space permitted, I would have explored the difference between attack commentary and
constructive opinion pieces. For simplicity, I have ignored that distinction here.
14
Having written a couple of hundred opinion pieces, one might reasonably ask whether I
ought to desist, if I believe that too much opinion is a problem. While I’d prefer to see a fall
in the opinion/news ratio, I’m aware that my opinion pieces are only displacing those of
other people, rather than adding to the sum total of published opinion in Australia.
15
Lachlan Harris, Keynote address at Public Relations Institute of Australia’s annual
conference, as quoted at ‘Lachlan Harris: Rise of the opinion cycle makes Andrew Bolt the
most influential man in media’, mumbrella, http://mumbrella.com.au/opinion-cycle-lachlanharris-andrew-bolt-pr-62272
16
Calculations based on the listing of the Press Gallery names in Parliament House
Communications Directory from 1990, August 2000, 2010.
17
One consequence of the rise of opinion has been an increase in the weight accorded to
special interest groups.
18
Martin McKenzie-Murray, ‘Democracy Running Low on Ink’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14
June 2012.
19
The exceptions were the ABC (which was right-leaning on one measure) and the Age
(which was left-leaning on another measure). See Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, ‘Multiple
Measures of Media Slant’, Economic Record, Volume 88, Issue 280, pages 127–147, March
2012
20
For good discussions of this issue, see Paul Starr, ‘Governing in the age of Fox News’, The
Atlantic, 2010 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/governing-in-the-ageof-fox-news/7838/; Alan S. Gerber, Gregory A. Huber, David Doherty, Conor M. Dowling, ‘
Personality Traits and the Consumption of Political Information’, American Politics
Research; Eszter Hargittai, Jason Gallo, Matthew Kane, ‘Cross-Ideological Discussions
among Conservative and Liberal Bloggers’, Public Choice, (2008) Vol 134, No.1/2,
21
Both Cohen and Haidt are quoted in Ezra Klein, ‘Unpopular Mandate’, New Yorker, 25
June 2012, pp.30-33.
22
Pew Research Centre, ‘Press Widely Criticized, But Trusted More than Other Information
Sources’, September 2011, as accessed at http://www.people-press.org/2011/09/22/presswidely-criticized-but-trusted-more-than-other-institutions/?src=prc-headline
23
For two studies providing causal evidence that slanted media can change electoral
outcomes, see Gerber, Alan S., Dean Karlan, and Daniel Bergan. 2009. "Does the Media
Matter? A Field Experiment Measuring the Effect of Newspapers on Voting Behavior and
Political Opinions." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 1(2): 35–52; Stefano
DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan, ‘The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting’ Quarterly
Journal of Economics (2007) 122 (3): 1187-1234
24
Annabel Crabb, ‘An audience, an audience, my kingdom for an audience’, 19 Oct 2011,
The Drum, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-19/crabb-an-audience-my-kingdom-for-anaudience/3578344
25
Laura Tingle, Great Expectations: Government, Entitlement and an Angry Nation,
Quarterly Essay 46, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2012
26
A more comprehensive list of Keating insults has even earned its own website. See
http://www.webcity.com.au/keating/
27
To take a twentieth-century US example, New York Post editor Steve Dunleavy ran a
campaign against gay rights, apparently even ordering a reporter in the 1980s to write that
AIDS could be transmitted by kissing: ‘Let’s not be too technical mate – it’s a good yarn.’
David Marr, ‘The Politics of News (Review of David McKnight’s Rupert Murdoch: An
Investigation of Political Power)’, The Monthly, February 2012, pp.62-63.
12
28
The Abbott example is drawn from Nicholas Gruen, ‘Beyond Vox Pop Democracy’, in
Helen Sykes (ed), More or Less: Democracy and the New Media, Future Leaders, 2012. For a
thoughtful discussion of the role of reporters in challenging assertions by public figures, see
Arthur Brisbane, ‘Should the Times be a Truth Vigilante?’, Public Editor’s Journal, New York
Times, 12 January 2012. For some odd reason, the challenge of correcting factual errors in
Australia reminds me of the line from Wodehouse’s Psmith, Journalist: ‘Cosy moments
cannot be muzzled’.
29
Andrew Leigh, Disconnected, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2010.
30
Kate G. Niederhoffer and James W. Pennebaker (2002), ‘Linguistic Style Matching in
Social Interaction’ Journal of Language and Social Psychology 21: 337-360, cited in John
Freeman (2009) Shrinking the World: The 4000-Year Story of How Email Came to Rule Our
Lives, Text Publishing, Melbourne, p.154
31
George Megalogenis, The Australian Moment, Penguin, Sydney, 2012, p.363
32
Tony Blair, ‘The Prime Minister's Reuters Speech on Public Life’, 12 June 2007.
33
Kevin Arceneaux, ‘Cognitive Biases and the Strength of Political Argument’, American
Journal of Political Science, (2012) Vol. 56, Iss. 2.
34
Jeremy Peters, ‘Latest Word on the Trail? I Take It Back’, New York Times, 15 July 2012.
35
Indeed, you can even use social media to do it, like the Sunday Telegraph journalist who
put a message on the Source Bottle website in January: ‘I need a gorgeous Sydney family
who is outraged at the fact their electricity bill has skyrocketed… Ideally not eastern
suburbs’.
36
Bruce Chapman and Kiatanantha Lounkaew, ‘How many jobs is 23,510, really?’,
Technical Brief No. 9, June 2011, The Australia Institute.
37
Murray Goot, ‘To the Second Decimal Point: How the polls vied to predict the national
vote, monitor the marginals and second-guess the Senate’, in Marian Simms and John Wanna
(eds), Julia 2010: The Caretaker Election, ANU E-Books, Canberra, 2011.
38
My own work, with Justin Wolfers, finds that polls conducted a year before an election
have average errors of around 4 percentage points. Justin Wolfers and Andrew Leigh, ‘Three
Tools for Forecasting Federal Elections: Lessons from 2001’ (2002) Australian Journal of
Political Science 37(2): 223-40
39
Andrew Leigh and Justin Wolfers, ‘Competing Approaches to Forecasting Elections:
Economic Models, Opinion Polling and Prediction Markets’ (2006) Economic Record,
82(258): 325-340
40
The Australian Journalists’ Association Code of Ethics begins “Report and interpret
honestly, striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts. Do not suppress
relevant available facts, or give distorting emphasis.”
41
For example, in the 1983 election, Paul Keating was discussing the Accord to John Laws,
and said ‘I’m not sure we can make it work but we’re going to give it a good shot.’ He was
promptly pilloried by then Prime Minister Fraser for his ‘extraordinary’ admission. See Anne
Summers, Gamble for Power, Nelson, Sydney, 1983, pp.162-163.
42
Lindsay Tanner, Sideshow: Dumbing down democracy, Scribe Publications, Melbourne,
2011, p.7
43
One of the best treatments of these issues is Leigh Sales, 2010, On Doubt, Melbourne
University Publishing, Melbourne. See also Andrew Leigh, ‘Progress rarely plane sailing but
dare to do it anyway’, The Australian, 25 July 2012.
44
Andrew Leigh, Disconnected, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2010. By comparison, a landmark
study of Sydney adolescents in the 1950s found that 88 percent read a newspaper each day:
W.F. Connell, E.P Francis and Elizabeth Skilbeck, 1959, Growing up in an Australian City:
A Study of Adolescents in Sydney, ACER, Melbourne, p.141.
13
45
The only Australian papers to have a readers’ editor are the Sydney Morning Herald and
the Sun-Herald, who share readers’ editor Judy Prisk.
46
For an excellent discussion of the ongoing value of long-form journalism, from Tom Wolfe
and Hunter S. Thompson to Margaret Simons and David Marr, see Matthew Ricketson, 2012,
‘The value of long-form journalism in a short-form world’, in Matthew Ricketson (ed),
Australian Journalism Today, Palgrave, Melbourne.
47
The Finkelstein Report notes that newspaper sales per 100 people were 38.6 in 1947, 32.1
in 1967, 28.8 in 1977, 21.9 in 1987, 14.1 in 1996, 13.0 in 2000 and 9.7 in 2011.
48
For a detailed summary of subsidies to the news media in Australia and other developed
countries, see Annexure K of the Finkelstein Report. Chapter 12 of the Finkelstein Report
discusses the threats to accountability and democracy posed by a decline in quality
journalism.
49
Malcolm Turnbull, 2012, ‘Politics, Journalism and the 24/7 News Cycle’ in Helen Sykes
(ed), More or Less: Democracy and New Media, Future Leaders, Sydney. In a similar vein,
Andrew Crook argues that tax deductibility could encourage the rise of more investigative
journalism, though antipodean equivalents of the US ProPublica: Andrew Crook, ‘The case to
make donations to non-profit media tax deductible’, Crikey, 11 July 2012.
50
George Megalogenis, The Australian Moment, Penguin, Sydney, 2012, p.361
14