CAAANBRA: Fair & Balanced

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have no doubt that Rupert Murdoch, that former Australian and worldwide media boss, prefers the conservative side of politics. He’s made no attempts to hide it; in fact, many of his News Limited/News International/News Corporation news outlets actively promote a conservative agenda. Fox News is so far to the right, they're the least trusted news organisation in America.

Nooooo, scream the conservative consumers of Mr Murdoch’s newspapers and television interests. In their view, conservative is “normal” and the rest of us are lefty communist stirrers. Hmmm. What you perceive really does depend on where you stand, but regardless of your position on the political spectrum, few would argue that Mr Murdoch’s news organisations are more conservative than most other news organisations.


Headlines and leaders from News Limited today

With new Newspoll and Neilsen federal opinion polls being released today, the headlines are telling. Fairfax's online titles, including the SMH, the Age and the Brisbane Times, are running the headline “Gillard Budget Boost”, while Murdoch’s press prefer to point out that the Coalition still has an ALP-slaughtering lead. Fair enough too – we need different perspectives on our world.
It's not just the Aussie press, though. Rupert Murdoch is not holding back. He has a personal twitter account, and this morning Mr Murdoch tweeted the following:

“Oz polls show nothing can save this miserable govt. Election can not come soon enough. People decided and tuned out months ago.”

With all due respect, I don’t accept that. The polls Mr Murdoch refers to are the Neilsen and Newspoll  numbers released overnight. Both sets of numbers are either stable or slightly positive for the government and for Ms Gillard as preferred PM, in a post-budget context where ALP votes should’ve been lost, not gained.
Internationally, political pollsters aren’t having a great run of late. In British Columbia, all of the media-aligned pollsters were wrong in their recent election. Every single one of them said that the Liberals would romp home and they didn’t. They lost. According to CBC News British Columbia: 

Angus Reid forecast in its last poll before the election that the NDP was the party of choice for 45 per cent of decided voters and leaners, with the governing Liberals in second place with 36 per cent support.

But in Tuesday's election, the Liberals won 44.4 per cent of the popular vote while the NDP ended up with 39.5 per cent. The win gave the Liberals 50 of the province's 85 seats, five more than the party had going into the election.

Back in Australia, Neilsen’s numbers this week show the Coalition leading the ALP 44-32, a slightly larger gap than was reported in British Columbia, but the BC polls were taken just prior to the election, not 4 months out. There were other similarities too: both leaders were fairly unpopular, and the economy was a key election issue, at least according to the pre-election polls.
The same inconsistencies were a factor in poor polling accuracy in the 2012 American Presidential elections. Gallup, one of the world’s oldest and most respected polling organisations, are holding an internal investigation into how and why their results all pointed to a Romney victory last November. Less than two weeks before the election, Gallup predicted a solid Romney victory; he was leading in the polls by 4%. The final result saw President Obama re-elected by the same margin. In polling terms, that's a big mistake. Huge.

Fox News's Bill O'Reilly, deep in denial on Election Night

Politico has put together a handy summary of some major polls conducted up to Election Day, and few of them had Obama in front.

Remember the faces at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News when it became increasingly apparent that the Republicans would lose the election convincingly? Less than a month out from the Presidential Election, Fox News ran the story of Los Vegas bookie who was predicting a Romney landslide.  The conservative media in the USA was so sure that their man would win that they were visibly shocked when he didn’t.

The headline doesn't reflect the content of the story.

But Nate Silver, statistician, author and commentator, predicted the election so accurately, he called the result in every one of the fifty states, and DC. He had a look at the Australian situation when he was here in January this year. He predicted a Coalition victory, according to a headline in the Murdoch-stabled Australian.

What he actually said was that the ALP government would be the underdog:

In his first Australian interview after arriving in Melbourne yesterday, Silver said given the recent Australian polls, "clearly the government would be the underdog" but "the most important variable is not how many polls are taken but when the polls are taken relative to the election".

My lefty tendencies aren’t giving this election away just yet. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, perhaps it’s the weather or some hitherto unknown clairvoyant powers, but this federal election is still up for grabs. Don’t be surprised if, come September 15th, we see more sad Murdoch employees - Andrew Bolt, Janet Albrechtsen, Piers Ackerman, Dennis Shanahan and the rest - wondering how it all went so wrong.

Fox News - America's least trusted news source

Just the Facts, Ma'am

Once upon a time, in a generation not too far ago, journalists were respected, news presenters were trusted, and politicians were at least, polite. Those were important times, easy times, when you could watch the news at six o’clock or seven o’clock or both, and you could believe what Brian told you.


Journalists were never in that same league of trusted professional as perennial winners nurses and paramedics, but they weren’t bundled in with the lowest of the low either.

Politicians were always a bit further down the list of trustworthy professionals than the journalists who reported their stories; they have a vested interest in telling people what the people want to hear. In this year’s poll of the most trusted professions, newspaper journalists, television reporters and radio talkback hosts were ranked 20, 21 and 22 respectively. Federal MPs ranked 25 and state MPs ranked 26…out of thirty. The only professions ranked lower than politicians were real estate agents, advertising people and car salesmen.

Poll upon poll, list upon list, the story remains the same. Journalists aren’t trusted much more than the politicians they report on. How do you know who to trust? Paul Murray on Sky News promises to tell you what “really happened”, Bill O’Reilly refers to his show, The O'Reilly Factor, as the “the no-spin zone” and our own ABC News tells us that they’re “more than the headlines”. And that’s just television.

Please don’t take this the wrong way; I’m not suggesting that the fourth estate is unrelentingly shonky. The miserable fact is that enough reporters have been untrustworthy enough to build a perception that we should question the news we’re provided. High school students are being taught to be critical consumers of news. Scepticism is hardly surprising in an global news environment dominated by Rupert Murdoch's right wing Fox News and bumbling CNN on one side of the Atlantic and the now-defunct News of the World and the rest of Murdoch’s News International on the other.

And what of Australia’s media? More Murdoch, a relatively small population and a ridiculously high concentration of media ownership makes for easy targets and large ripples. If you control the media in Australia, you control the Australian agenda.

Never was that more evident that in the reporting of our Prime Minister crying in parliament yesterday. news.com reported the tears as being the result of stress, until Sky News’s David Lipson tweeted a card from some of Queensland’s disabled population, thanking the Prime Minister for making the NDIS a reality. But of course, News Limited’s first instinct was to show Ms Gillard being weak, rather than showing her being compassionate. They interpreted what they saw and reported it through their lens of right wing negativity.

And what are we talking about today? Julia’s tears, of course. 612Brisbane’s breakfast producer Anne Debert was not impressed with Ms Gillard’s tears, yet couldn’t explain why it annoyed her so much. The fact is, we are talking about whether it’s appropriate to cry in the workplace, whether it’s a gender issue, and if it is, is it one we should embrace, or one which deserves censure. How has this become the talking point of budget week? Most of our news outlets have led with stories of the PM being “reduced to tears" or “driven to tears” or even “moved to tears” rather than discussion of the Federal Budget, the actual DisabilityCare scheme, or any of the other valid news stories of the day.

And before anyone makes the obvious gender related gags, allow me to remind you of Bob Hawke, crying on television during an interview about his private life and again, during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Malcolm Fraser cried the night the Liberals lost power in 1983. Kevin Rudd cried the night Ms Gillard replaced him as Prime Minister. There’s a long tradition of Prime Ministerial waterworks in this country and beyond. The Sydney Morning Herald chronicled just some of it in 2010, after Mr Rudd’s final press conference as PM, and observed then:

It seems we have finally come to accept such outbursts of emotion from our male political leaders as displays of genuine human feeling. And yet, for many women in business life, crying is still seen as a sign of weakness.

If the tear ducts of our first female prime minister runneth over at any point, I wonder: will it be interpreted as weakness or strength of character?

I love that the question was asked, for runneth over they did. Few media types attributed it to weakness, though. Initially, it was reported as a reaction to stress; later, as compassion, and more recently, opinion writers have written their defence of tears. 

National Nine News seems to have an opinion on tears.

So where does that leave us, the news consumers who don’t have a front row seat and rely on the accuracy and objectivity of news professionals to keep us informed? With the federal election now less than four months away, is it even possible that votes will be decided on the basis of whether the tears of the PM are conveyed as a strength or a weakness? Why are we talking about this, when it's not even the first time Prime Minister Gillard has shed a tear in the house?

The millions of choices made every day by our news media about which word to use here and what tone is needed there will influence the votes of many Australians. Like Anne, you might not be all that keen on a teary PM, but if those tears are reported as a sign of emotional fragility, it could be a vote changer for some. If the report suggests it’s a sign of strength and compassion, different votes might change.

A vote or two here or there won’t make a difference, and isn’t that the beauty of democracy? If you change enough minds, you change a result. The consistent messages - just a few words, or a blaring headline supporting the Coalition - has continued over three years now, and has thrived during this hung parliament. A daily avalanche of negative spin will change minds.

This stuff matters.

Some get it right, some don’t. American Democrat and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts.”

From PolitiFact's American election coverage in 2012

Apparently that’s not entirely true any more; it seems that the Climate Change Denialists like the Galileo Movement are entitled to make up their own “facts” – but 97.1% of peer reviewed scientific papers still agree that climate change is real and we’re making it worse.
All of which leads us to PolitiFact Australia, the first international incarnation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American fact-checking website. According to their own website:

PolitiFact Australia is a non-partisan, independent journalistic venture run by Peter Fray, the former editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald, and staffed by experienced reporters and researchers.

Our goal is to bring greater accountability to the federal election campaign.

We want to help Australian voters make better-informed decisions.

We want to help keep our politicians honest.

We want to restore faith in the political process — and the role journalists play in it.

Journalists exist to hold the powerful to account. PolitiFact in the US and now in Australia is an affirmation of that deep tradition.

I’d like to proclaim publicly my support for our truthy new overseers, but you see, there’s this pesky thing called Social Media which is making life interesting for politicians and journalists, and now for PolitiFact Australia. Their judgment has already been questioned on social media.
And isn’t that how it should be? In a mature society we should hold eachother to account. In fact, we should strive for a higher standard? When, for whatever reason, the news media falls for the line which today’s politician is peddling, we have a team of professionals who are spending their discretionary time checking facts…and if they get it wrong, social media will let them know it.

The world will change, just a little, for those paying attention.



All of these images were borrowed from social media: thanks to those who created and posted them.

Family Assistance

What did you learn during the Easter break? If you read the papers, you probably learned that Tony Abbott's daughters love their father, and Tom Waterhouse's mother loves her son. I'd like to thank News Limited for sharing both of these pieces of breaking news with their readership. It's important not to take even the most brain-numbingly obvious relationships for granted.


The whole Tom Waterhouse persecution story simply too silly too pursue. In summary, a grown man with a multi-million dollar business is attracting negative attention because the multi-million business in question is gambling and Mr Waterhouse's profile is ubiquitous. Everyone from Mummy Bloggers to politicians is concerned about the amount of screen time Tom Waterhouse commands as his polished voice gives sports viewers the latest odds on the horses, the footy and anything else that can be wagered upon.

It’s a serious issue which has been creeping into our media during the last few years. A mention of the odds here and there goes almost un-noticed until it starts happening more and more…and suddenly, the insidious incursion of gambling promotion into our family viewing time has a name and a face. It is Tom Waterhouse, with his clean-cut young-man-about-town appeal, his fine cotton shirts and ties and his infamous surname, all bundled together with some brilliantly strong branding - he almost owns the colour teal these days.

Tom is also his own worst enemy. I hate to think what his media budget must be. All of those paid television ads, in combination with neat little deals that see him on screen with the sports commentators, adding his brand of gambling-commentary to the soundtrack. The problem is that the sheer volume of ads and personal appearances on sports telecasts is what has got him noticed. He may have avoided the 'over-exposed' tag had he run a more subtle campaign.

Meanwhile, out here where reality bites hardest, Australians struggle with a gambling culture that rates as one of the worst in the world. We have banned the advertising of cigarettes at sporting events and on television. We have regulated the advertising of liquor. It seems gambling goes untouched. We don’t seem to care about preventing gambling addiction; we just make well-meaning though under-resourced attempts to mop up at the other end. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

And some of us are. Peter FitzSimons, himself a former sports star and now successful author, found the simplest of truths:

…instead of having the tagline of ''I was born to bet,'' it should have been ''I was born to take money off mugs who bet.

Poor young Tom has been copping criticism for months, since his profile during some broadcasts became more memorable than the game or event itself. That's a problem so serious for Tom that his horse-training mother Gai has splashed herself across the front pages, begging readers to stop picking on her darling boy, and promoting her son as a genuine commentator and lover of sports.
No, Mrs Waterhouse. Your son is promoting his business. The family business.

Like so many others, I would've have preferred that those column inches were devoted to covering gambling as the crippling national epidemic that it is. The simple fact that enough of us are disturbed by the Waterhouse gambling factory to have caused Gai to defend her baby boy suggests that gambling in Australia is an issue that warrants front page coverage.

Unsurprisingly, News Limited got the right story from the wrong angle. The only thing to surprise me more is that the online version of the story appears surrounded by TAB ads. In fact, there are no other advertisers on the screen at all.

Which brings us to two of Tony Abbott's daughters who are speaking out on controversial political issues. Bridget and Frances Abbott have confirmed their support for marriage equality, despite their father's unwillingness to deviate from the party line. Those opposed to same sex marriage must be relieved to know that neither one of the Abbott Girls interviewed have been elected, and seem to have no influence over their father.

So why is the Murdoch press splashing this utter non-story? Why does the story exist in the first place?
 
Somehow I doubt that the two Abbott girls approached media to state their positions on same sex marriage, regardless of how hurt they may have been when their father was branded a misogynist last year. It’s far more likely that this lovely little piece of PR was dreamed up by the communications team at Liberal HQ. They seem to like using the women in Mr Abbott's life, including Margie, the three daughters, and Chief of Staff Peta Credlin. And why not? From the outside, if you discount the fact that it's irrelevant, the story looks like a win-win for the Libs

It links the Liberals to a story about support for same sex marriage (even though their position hasn’t changed)

It marks Tony Abbott as a man who is comfortable disagreeing with women while still respecting them

It dilutes the perception that Tony Abbott’s robust Catholicism will dictate his policy decisions on certain issues

It’s certainly not a win-win for Frances and Bridget, who are being used as part of their father’s political campaign. Sure, they may have agreed to it, may have been eager to help their father, yet there are consequences. By allowing themselves to become media figures, they allow themselves to be ‘fair game’. They don’t control the media, and the media will be more than happy to use two attractive girls who just happen to be related to someone important: look what they did to Pippa Middleton.

I honestly can’t remember a time when the family of an Australian politician has had such a media profile as the girls are developing. It could be that they add an attractive, youthful element to the Liberal brand, but I doubt it. There were a handful of shots of Penny Wong and her baby, and a generation ago, Hazel Hawke and Margaret Whitlam had public profiles, but I don’t even remember Mrs Janette Howard making the news over her views on social reform. Surely the opinions of the family of a politician are irrelevant, even if given freely?
 
So responsibility for this story must be shared between News Limited and the Liberal campaign team. Get used to it, Australia. Frankly, I feel sorry for Bridget and Frances. At 21, they don't realise what they're in for.

I have no sympathy for Gai Waterhouse or her son. Both Gai and her son Tom come from privileged stock, and have run into challenges as a result of their career choices. Gai overcame hers by force of will and was eventually granted the trainers licence she had been denied when her husband was implicaated in the Fine Cotton scandal.We're yet to see whether Tom has the strength and determination to see this through.

Personally, I hope he doesn't.