In the wake of the hilarious post-election “journalism” and what is seemingly becoming an ever more unashamedly partisan press platform, I’ve decided that if there’s one thing in particular that’s going to motivate me, that’s having some goddamned truth in journalism, even if it means I have to write it myself.
There have been some absolutely incredible and some downright disingenuous claims made by our representatives in parliament in recent weeks. Those claims in and of themselves are nothing out of the ordinary, but the problem is much greater than that and it lies with the people reporting these claims, Australian journalists. Or at least, Australians that are currently employed as journalists. Instead of fact-checking a statement and adding those clarifications to a politician’s statement, our “journalists” are simply reporting that someone has made those claims.
For example (and this is purely an example, not something that has actually been said) : “Tony Abbott recently stated that the government’s radical leftist agenda was never discussed before the election, effectively cheating people out of their democratic right.” Take it to News Ltd and you’ve got two inches of column space filled, syndicated in newspapers across the country, facts be damned.
Or you could imagine another reality where the journalist asks a follow up question along the lines of “But Mr. Abbott, the Australian Labor party, while to the left of the Liberal Party, are not by any means an economically or a socially ‘leftist’ party, and their policies were not only freely available on their website, but were discussed as much as possible outside of the asylum seeker debate in the lead up to and during the election, often with key marginal electorates being told of substantial infrastructure projects in their districts. Are you saying that Australians are not exercising their democratic right because they are not voting for the Liberal Party?”
Or, the journalist could print what Mr Abbott had stated, and then added an addendum along the lines of “Our research has shown that both major parties received almost equal coverage, with an average of 23.7 policies discussed per week during the election campaign.”
In either of the two final scenarios, the statement of reality as one politician sees it is either being taken to task for not actually being a clear representation of the facts, or is clearly stating that people had equal access to information from the media’s standpoint. Sadly for Australians, the first scenario is by far the more common and this type of “journalism” is weakening our democracy and our level of public political discourse.
So why is this actually a problem? Why shouldn’t the public simply be told what their leaders are saying and make up their own minds as to the truthiness of the statements? It’s because a) politicians have absolutely no disincentive to lie if no-one is ever going to call them out on their lies, and, b) reality just doesn’t work that way. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but that doesn’t make them entitled to their own facts.
Let’s look at a recent example of a politician claiming one thing, when the reality of the situation clearly signifies something else. Let’s look at Liberal Senator for South Australia, Cory Bernardi’s most recent blog post. (Coming in the next article, and boy, is it a doozy!)
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