Uncovering election coverage

Media coverage in Australia of the US presidential election and of the Voice referendum in October 2023 offer some pointers to what we might expect during next year’s federal election campaign.

They also suggest some ways in which the professional mass media might better respond to the challenges thrown up by the combination of disinformation, harmful speech and hyper-partisanship that disfigured those two campaigns.

The ideological contours of the Australian professional media, in particular its newspapers, have become delineated with increasing clarity over the past 15 years. In part this is a response to the polarising effects of social media, and in part it is a reflection of the increased stridency of political debate.

The right is dominated by News Corporation, with commercial radio shock jocks playing a supporting role. The left is more diffuse and less given to propagandising. It includes the old Fairfax papers, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, now owned by the Nine Entertainment Company, and Guardian Australia.

These contours are unlikely to change much, if at all, between now and the 2025 election.

Impartiality versus ‘bothsidesism’

Under these conditions, how might Australian journalism practice be adapted to better serve democracy under the pressures of an election campaign? The objective would be to contribute to the creation of a political culture in which people can argue constructively, disagree respectfully and work towards consensus.

In pursuing that objective, a central issue is whether and how the media are committed to the principle of impartiality in news reports. This principle is under sustained pressure, as was seen in both the presidential election and the Voice referendum.

We know from the words of its own editorial code of conduct that News Corp Australia does not accept the principle of impartiality in news reports. Paragraph 1.3 of that code states:

“Publications should ensure factual material in news reports is distinguishable from other material such as commentary and opinion. Comment, conjecture and opinion are acceptable as part of coverage to provide perspective on an issue, or explain the significance of an issue, or to allow readers to recognise what the publication’s or author’s standpoint is on a matter.”

This policy authorises journalists to write their news reports in ways that promote the newspaper’s or the journalist’s own views. This runs directly counter to the conventional separation of news from opinion accepted by most major media companies. This is exemplified by the policy of The Guardian, including Guardian Australia:

“While free to editorialise and campaign, a publication must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.”

Appended to The Guardian’s code is the essay written in 1921 by C. P. Scott, first the editor and then the owner-editor of the Manchester Guardian, to mark the newspaper’s centenary. It includes these words: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred”. Referring to a newspaper’s public duty, he added: “Propaganda […] is hateful.”

In the present overheated atmosphere of public debate, impartiality has come to be confused with a discredited type of journalism known as “bothsidesism”.

“Bothsidesism” presents “both sides” of an issue without any regard for their relative evidentiary merits. It allows for the ventilation of lies, hate speech and conspiracy theories on the spurious ground that these represent another, equally valid, side of the story.

Impartiality is emphatically not “bothsidesism”. What particularly distinguishes impartiality is that it follows the weight of evidence. However, a recurring problem in the current environment is that the fair and sober presentation of evidence can be obliterated by the force of political rhetoric. As a result, impartiality can fall victim to its own detached passivity.

Yet impartiality does not have to be passive: it can be proactive.

During the presidential campaign, in the face of Trump’s egregious lying, some media organisations took this proactive approach.

When Trump claimed during his televised debate with Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio, the host broadcaster, the American Broadcasting Company, fact-checked him in real time. It found, during the broadcast, that there was no evidence to support his claim.

And for four years before that, The Washington Post chronicled Trump’s lies while in office, arriving at a total of 30,573.

Challenging misinformation

During the Voice referendum, many lies were told about what the Voice to Parliament would be empowered to do: advise on the date of Anzac Day, change the flag, set interest rates, and introduce a race-based element into the Constitution, advantaging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people over others.

These were rebutted by the relevant authorities but by then the lies had been swept up in the daily tide of mis- or disinformation that was a feature of the campaign. At that point, rebuttals merely oxygenate the original falsehoods.

More damaging still to the democratic process was the baseless allegation by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton that the Australian Electoral Commission had “rigged” the vote by accepting a tick as indicating “yes” but not accepting a cross as indicating “no”.

Opposition Senate leader, Simon Birmingham, also said allowing ticks but not crosses undermined the integrity of the process.

The electoral commissioner, Tom Rogers, was reported as repudiating these claims, but by then these lies had acquired currency and momentum.

A proactive approach to impartiality requires establishing the truthful position before or at the time of initial publication, then calling out falsehoods for what they are and providing supporting evidence. Neither the principle of impartiality nor any other ethical principle in journalism requires journalists to publish lies as if they might be true.

It would not have been a failure of impartiality to say in a news report that Dutton’s claims about a rigged referendum were baseless, with the supporting evidence.

That evidence, set out in an excellent example of proactive impartiality by the ABC’s election analyst Antony Green at the time, was that the ticks and crosses rule had been in place since 1988.

‘Proactive impartiality’

The question is, do Australia’s main media organisations as a whole have the resources and the will to invest in real-time fact-checking? The record is not encouraging.

In March 2024, the ABC dissolved its fact-checking arrangement with RMIT University, replacing it with an in-house fact-checking unit called ABC News Verify.

In 2023, a team led by Andrea Carson of La Trobe University published a study tracking the fate of fact-checking operations in Australia. Its findings were summarised by her in The Conversation.

In the absence of a fact-checking capability, it is hard to see how journalists can perform the kind of proactive impartiality that current circumstances demand.

On top of that, the shift from advertising-based mass media to subscription-based niche media is creating its own logic, which is antithetical to impartiality.

Mass-directed advertising was generally aimed at as broad an audience as possible. It encouraged impartiality in the accompanying editorial content as part of an appeal to the broad middle of society.

Since a lot of this advertising has gone online, the media have begun to rely increasingly on subscriptions. In a hyper-partisan world, ideological branding, or alternatively freedom from ideological branding, has become part of the sales pitch.

Where subscribers do expect to find ideological comfort, readership and ratings are at put risk when their expectations are disappointed.

Rupert Murdoch learned this when his Fox News channel in the US called the 2020 election for Joe Biden, driving down ratings and causing him to reverse that position in order to claw back the losses.

These are unpalatable developments for those who believe that fair, accurate news reporting untainted by the ideological preferences of proprietors or journalists is a vital ingredient in making a healthy democracy work. But that is the world we live in as we approach the federal election of 2025.

This article was published by The Conversation.