The unbiased view of journalism - balancing act

 

When Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin went to the great commune in the sky to begin his Infinity-Year Plan of Production Quotas, Sydney's Daily Telegraph announced the news in an appropriately respectful and sober manner.

 “Stalin Dead – Hooray” read the paper's newsstand posters.

Then owner Frank Packer, Kerry’s dad, insisted on adding the "hooray" much to the displeasure of the print unions, who refused to put the poster out. 

I think it eventually did get distributed and displayed but can't find an image to confirm that.

Despite such relatively recent shenanigans it's not to hard to find people bemoaning the appalling decline in journalistic standards.

However, not all ol’-timey newspapers, even the "reputable ones", were reliable bastions of fairness, accuracy, integrity and impartiality.

For much of its run the New York Sun was considered a serious broadsheet, roughly on a par with the “Grey Lady” New York Times, but in its early days it broke the frankly unbelievable story of bat-men living on the moon.

Credited author Andrew Grant described these incredible lunar creatures, who co-existed with bison, goats, unicorns and tail-less beavers, which could all be spotted with a powerful new telescope.

There was no Andrew Grant and the articles are now known as the “Great Moon Hoax” but the paper never printed a retraction and apparently the articles were a welcome boost to circulation.

So, where does the idea that newspapers are meant to be impartial and scrupulous collectors of facts and competing opinions come from?

In the 1850s Australia had a riot of newspapers. 

Tasmania had 11, a number which also corresponded to the number of literate people in the colony then and now*.

Eventually this was whittled down to often just or two major mastheads in bigger cities and regions.

With a near or actual monopoly hold on the mass reading audience the papers also commanded that market for ads and classifieds, reaping what Fairfax used to call “rivers of gold”.

To keep a wide general audience it was in the mastheads' interest not to alienate those of left or right or any other political persuasion.

Straight down the line reporting helped papers remain authoritative and respected, while some titles ran alternating commentators of different political persuasions to keep everybody happy.

If you watch Hollywood movies or TV shows or enjoy other fantastical works of imagination such as the ABC Friends charter you will know the main threat to editorial independence are ruthless advertisers forever threatening to pull their business from the paper.

While that might have been the case for smaller titles or those in “company towns” in the bigger cities the advertisers needed the needed the papers more the papers needed them.

Papers had the audience, so one advertiser could be replaced with another or an aggrieved advertiser would most likely have to come back.

This allowed a pretty solid separation between advertising and editorial – or between church and state as it was sometimes called.

It was also a pretty cozy monopoly/oligopoly business model and allowed press barons to grow very rich.

With the onslaught of the internet ads and classified were rudely shorn from newspapers and given their own platforms.

At the same time competition opened up for newspapers to compete against, well, potentially every other newspaper on the planet plus a million other online things.

Those only interested in sport, or even just one football code, they can go to specialist websites rather than buying a bundle of other stories and content.

Newspapers have been forced to replace ad money with subscriptions, which traditionally were only a small part of their revenues.

With abundant news sources the incentive was to create a product tailored towards a more niche audience.

Rather than trying to pick up readers across the political spectrum newspapers are starting to cater more for their "type of reader".

This has traditionally been the model in the smaller more centralised European nations, where national papers can be easily categorised as by readership.

In Australia, obviously News Corp is the most conspicuous source of right-leaning news and opinion.

Ninefax sits somewhere towards the political centre, although they were noticeably more left-wing before Nine took them over.

Before that The Age in particular could seem like a marginally better laid out version of a student paper.

The other likely reason Ninefax titles have moved to a more centre ground is that The Guardian has outflanked them on the left.

.Catering to a specific audience carries the risk of eventually kowtowing to them in terms of journalist judgments.

It was a particular concern when The Age demoted their most celebrated cartoonist Michael Leunig from the op-ed page for an "anti-vax" and anti-government cartoon because he was "out of touch with the readership". 

You might say Leunig was a sitting duck but it doesn't bode well for principle that newspapers should "speak truth to power" even when the most vocal part of the readership don't like it.

Some would contend that what we need is more publicly funded news media because it can deliver “quality journalism”, covering what is in the public interest rather than only what interests the public or smaller sections of the public.

However, even outlets that don’t necessarily live by the amount of traffic, such as the ABC or SBS, still want to justify their existence by pleasing an audience.

Unfortunately that audience can start to basically look like themselves and people just like them, as I argue in this blog.

Also it is a stretch to say publicly funded media is ever truly independent whatever arm’s length funding arrangements there are.

A government unhappy with a publicly funded broadcaster can always find way to argue for belt-tightening or conversely offer to shower more tax-payer largesse.

The Guardian, which to date has been largely funded by a tax-free trust created out of selling a classifieds for CO2-emitting planet-destroying conveyances, has tried another method to keep its content “free” – begging.

Presently the plea implores readers to “Lend us a hand” to fund “fearless independent journalism” free of “shareholders or a billionaire owner”.

So, basically it is “crowd-funding” but the pitch is not always so neutral.

During the last big Climate Change Glasgow gabathon, and the previous UN one, the Guardian took a somewhat different approach.

The UN-timed appeal had this heading: “Support urgent climate journalism”. 

The first line read: “Guardian reporting - independent, rigorous, science-led and open to all - is a critical tool to confront the climate crisis.”

It's concluding “call-to-action” was: “Together, we can continue to give the emergency the sustained prominence it requires.”

It's an interesting assumption that “science-led” reporting will not lead in any direction other than being a “critical tool to confront the climate crisis”.

The concluding sentence blankly invites donors to partner with the newspaper in biasing the news agenda.

This is not journalism according to any traditional definition of it being a disinterested pursuit of facts and following them where-ever they may lead.

It’s true The Guardian has no billionaire owner telling them to add a celebratory touch to the death of a tyrant.

However, instead they have asked readers to buy into using the paper’s “reputation” to push a shared political belief.

I don’t think that is worth a “hooray” at all.

* Maybe not now. Don't believe everything you read!

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