Media
The Australian: Gunning for the Greens
So is there a new paradigm in politics or will it be business as usual?
Well, as far as The Australian is concerned, there’s still a war out there and enemies must be attacked…
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Since it became clear The Greens might hold the balance of power The Australian has been targeting them with a succession of negative articles, including this old-fashioned smear on new Greens senator Lee Rhiannon – who 20 years ago was a hardline Socialist…
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And there was this little beauty on new Greens MP Adam Bandt…
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But it was more the sheer number than the nastiness that caught the eye.
The day after The Greens and Labor agreed their historic pact – and the Treasury found a $7-$11 billion hole in the Coalition’s costings – The Oz pushed the big story to one side and led the front page with one of seven news stories about The Greens of which six were clearly negative.
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So, is The Oz gunning for The Greens?
Well, leader Bob Brown certainly thinks so. Last week he told the ABC’s Lateline that The Australian was trying to wreck the fragile new government.
Three days later Brown repeated the accusation to Laura Tingle…
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True or not, this is similar to what Malcolm Fraser – our former Prime Minister – told the ABC’s Q&A two weeks ago.
In his opinion our democracy is being damaged by too many focus groups and polls and too much pressure from News Ltd.
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So is it all a fuss about nothing? Or is The Australian running a campaign?
Well, who better to answer that question than The Oz itself?
“Greens leader Bob Brown has accused The Australian of trying to wreck the alliance between the Greens and Labor. We wear Senator Brown’s criticism with pride. We believe he and his Green colleagues are hypocrites; that they are bad for the nation; and that they should be destroyed at the ballot box.
— The Australian, Editorial, 9th September, 2010″
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Great thing about the Oz, they never leave you in doubt about what they think.
And don’t for a minute expect them to change.
Editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell told Media Watch:
“Just as The Australian refused to be intimidated by Mr Rudd last year, we have no intention of bowing to Bob Brown’s bullying this year.
— Response from Chris Mitchell (Editor-in-chief, The Australian) to Media Watch, 10th September, 2010″
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Bob Brown’s bullying. You’ve got to be kidding.
Now call me old fashioned but I’ve always thought opinion belongs on the opinion pages and NEWS is meant to be NEWS.
And I don’t believe the news agenda should be driven by a determination to attack people whose politics you dislike.
The Australian clearly does.
Full report with all links, HERE
Crikey: The Australian announces that it wants to “destroy” the Greens
September 9, 2010 – 6:00 pm, by Jeremy Sear
Until today, I’d never seen a national broadsheet with pretensions to fair and balanced reporting actually admit that it wasn’t just biased against a party supported by 14% of the country, it wanted to “destroy” it. But that’s just what The Australian did in its editorial today:
Greens leader Bob Brown has accused The Australian of trying to wreck the alliance between the Greens and Labor. We wear Senator Brown’s criticism with pride. We believe he and his Green colleagues are hypocrites; that they are bad for the nation; and that they should be destroyed at the ballot box. The Greens voted against Mr Rudd’s emissions trading scheme because they wanted a tougher regime, then used the lack of action on climate change to damage Labor at the election. Their flakey economics should have no place in the national debate.
Well, there you are. You can take pretty much everything The Australian says about the Greens in that context: they are not interested in giving them a fair hearing, or listening to what they have to say, or presenting their arguments for public assessment: they want them “destroyed”.
Everything you read about The Greens in that paper can now be almost completely discounted by that fact. You can only conclude that if there’s a smear, they’ll run it. If there’s a positive story, they won’t. If there’s a way of presenting the Greens’ policies in the most damaging, least accurate light, that’s how they’ll be presented. The Greens will not be given fair opportunity to respond to critics’ claims about them (including the asinine ones made in that editorial). It will be relentless, one-sided, hostile propaganda.
Anyone who seeks to rely on The Australian for information should be aware that whatever they’re told about the Greens will be subject to the most extraordinary, deliberate bias, with the express purpose of having them “destroyed at the ballot box”.
I know it’s hardly news that Hardly News has an axe to grind against the left in general and the Greens in particular: but this admission, this defiant declaration today is extraordinary. They genuinely think the right so victorious that they can without commercial consequence announce their utter contempt for anyone who believes otherwise. Screw you, progressives who believe in public services, civil liberties, a social democratic Australia. You’re the fringe, and the country’s biggest media empire is working to make sure you are no longer represented in parliament.
This is The Australian openly eschewing reporting for advocacy; nearing the completion of its transition into the Fox News of Australian media.
UPDATE: Maybe the Australian’s editors are right: maybe their readers won’t in any way be concerned about being openly led around by the nose. After all, many of them voted Liberal even after Tony told them that you couldn’t believe what he said – something they bizarrely cheered as being “refreshing honesty”. Maybe they will, without irony, applaud the Australian promising to dedicate its reporting about the Greens to telling them what they already – because they believe what the Australian tells them about the Greens – believe about the Greens.
The Australian, Tuesday:
THE Greens have threatened to use their historic alliance with Labor to stop billions of dollars of planned uranium projects from securing government approval, in the first sign of the party’s push for greater influence over government policy.
Greens nuclear spokesman Scott Ludlam told The Australian his party would use its new-found leverage to attempt to stop all new uranium mines, including those planned in the next few years by BHP Billiton and Canadian giant Cameco. Read more HERE
And, Major parties deserted for independents: Newspoll
VOTERS have validated the decision of the independent MPs to back Labor to form a minority government, although the ALP’s primary vote has fallen to a five-year low and an election held now would be likely to deliver another hung parliament.
While more voters, 48 to 36 per cent, agreed with the formation of a minority Labor government, a clear majority, 59 to 31 per cent, believe the government will not serve a full term and Australia will return to the polls before the three years agreed between Labor and the independents.
At 34 per cent, down four percentage points since the August 21 election, Labor’s primary vote under the newly elected Julia Gillard is below the level of Kevin Rudd’s entire leadership and back to what it was under Kim Beazley in September 2005.
Primary vote support for both the Coalition and Labor has dropped since the election, while backing for the Greens and “other” candidates has surged in the three weeks of independents’ haggling over the hung parliament.
According to the latest Newspoll survey conducted exclusively for The Australian, Labor’s primary vote has gone from 38 per cent at the election to 34 per cent last weekend and the Coalition’s primary vote fell from 43.6 per cent at the election to 41 per cent.
With the Greens and independent MPs in the political spotlight, the primary vote for both the Greens and “others” rose from the election-day vote of 11.8 per cent to 14 per cent and 6.6 per cent to 11 per cent respectively.
After a knife-edge election result on two-party-preferred terms of 50.1 per cent to Labor and 49.9 per cent to the Coalition, the two-party-preferred result last weekend was dead even at 50-50.
Labor’s primary vote of 34 per cent is a point below the 35 per cent under Mr Rudd when Labor moved against him as leader.
In the hectic weeks of negotiations to form a government, Tony Abbott’s personal rating jumped back to its highest, with a six-point jump in satisfaction to 48 per cent and a 12-point drop in dissatisfaction to 38 per cent.
The Opposition Leader now has a net positive satisfaction rating of 10 points, 48 to 38 per cent, equal to his best rating in February this year when Mr Rudd backed off the emissions trading scheme in the face of Mr Abbott’s opposition to what he called a “great big new tax”. Read more HERE
And the Oz defends itself, by quoting other Meedja …:
Our robust stance on Greens defended
* Geoff Elliott, Media editor
* From: The Australian
SENIOR media professionals have defended as free speech and opinion The Australian’s stance on the Greens.
The defence came as the media war over this newspaper’s coverage continues to excite political and journalistic debate.
The Nine Network’s director of news and current affairs, Mark Calvert, said newspapers had a long history of championing a robust view.
While stressing he was not criticising the Greens and was impartial as a news director, Calvert said it was an “odd thing to do to criticise a newspaper’s opinion and editorial pages, particularly when it is open and transparent”.
“Backing a party, policies and politicians as well as criticising them is healthy for a free press,” Calvert said.
“As long as news reporting is impartial and fair, I can’t see why a newspaper shouldn’t take a stance.”
Calvert made news himself during the election campaign when he publicly backed chief political correspondent Laurie Oakes’s criticism of his own network after it hired former Labor opposition leader Mark Latham to report for 60 Minutes on the election.
Peter Meakin, Seven Network’s veteran news director, said “politicians should expect newspapers to be robust”.
“Politicians are not the best judges of bias,” he added.
And Michael Gawenda, former editor of The Age and now director of The Centre for Advanced Journalism at the University of Melbourne, said “a newspaper with a strong opinion in its editorial and opinion page is its right”.
Like Calvert, he said it was “important that a newspaper news pages are fair and accurate”. “While you might question news judgment on any given day, I didn’t see any inaccuracies on the stories on the Greens.”
The ABC’s Media Watch, hosted by Paul Barry, criticised The Australian on Monday night for its coverage of the Greens, saying “since it became clear the Greens might hold the balance of power, The Australian has been targeting them with a succession of negative articles”.
The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, sent a detailed response to Media Watch’s questions but Barry aired only one sentence.
One criticism from Greens leader Bob Brown is that The Australian has run more than 20 articles critical of the party since August 15, just days before the election.
Mitchell had noted that since August 15, the paper “would have run several hundred political stories”.
“Twenty negatives on the Greens seems very few,” he told Media Watch.
“We would have run many more negative stories about Labor and the Coalition in that period.” He added the Greens’ “views on the economy, death taxes, the shutting down of the coal industry, etc, need to be widely reported”.