The Australian today publishes some interesting figures on what punters think about ABC bias:
- About one in six (17 per cent) of the population believe the ABC coverage is favourable to the ALP.
- This view is also held by 33 per cent of those who voted Liberal/National in the 2010 federal election and who also intend to vote Liberal/National this year.
- Just 5 per cent of the population believe the ABC is favourable towards the Liberal/Nationals.
- Of those polled who say they intend to vote Labor at the next election, 13 per cent say the ABC is favourable to the Coalition.
- 15 per cent say they believe ABC coverage is slanted in favour of climate change believers.
This is a fair enough question to ask. As a tax-payer funded media shop, the ABC should be held to account for its editorial quality and point-of-view. However, there are a range of hidden assumptions in the approach of The Australian to this question which reveal much more about it than about the ABC.
There are two fundamental biases embedded in The Australian’s approach. The first is the use of an opinion poll to gauge the answer at all. That does not tell us anything about the ABC, only the predilections of the body politic.
Related and more salient, why would we gauge the existence of bias in the national broadcaster against political party voting blocks? Does The Australian honestly believe that the policy matrices of the major parties and their most loyal supporters are a reflection of the truth of the world?
Let’s imagine the ABC operated in a time radical right-wing ideology. The government of the day is a nationalist union of corporations and socially reactionary libertarians. The Opposition is a Nazi Party. When polled, 75% of the Government’s supporters see the ABC as Left-leaning and 100% of Opposition supporters agree. Does that tell you anything about the ABC (besides that most of its staff are about to sent to the Eastern front in New Zealand?
The objectivity of the ABC can only be judged against the truth of the issues that it covers. What various political groups choose to believe on any given issue for their own ends is quite beside the point.
The questions about climate change again make this point. If one political party is skeptical of climate change, is the ABC obligated to give equal time to climate change skeptics in a context where the vast majority of expert scientific opinion, which is itself based upon data and reasoning, is that it is real? No it is not. If the arguments of climate change skeptics develop the force of truth via data and argument in the scientific community then the ABC’s reporting should, and I’m sure would, change.
All media outlets have an epistemology; a frame of reference from which they draw conclusions about what is worth covering and how it should be covered. Media is an intersection of views where values, authority and ideology wrestle over the truth.
In my view the ABC’s value-system is for the most part derived from that of Australia. It is embedded with the centrist “fair go” culture that both political parties dare not desert lest they be shoved out the door. This does not preclude discussion of the benefits of liberal ideologies. Indeed, it is one. And provided it aspires to report as truthfully as possible, the national character is a more than fair charter from which to work with tax-payer dollars. Even if, at times, that means unrepresentative coverage for one interest group or another. If, on occasion, the national character is itself a problem then I’m sure the ABC is big enough to figure that out.
As part of a privately owned media firm, The Australian’s own epistemology is more simple: it is answerable only to its owner and his values and objectives. That the paper thinks it useful to judge the ABC via the yardstick of political party bias tells you all you need to know about the contemporary frame of reference of what was once a fine liberal paper.
