As reporters increasingly judge themselves on the approval of social media, the costs of being wrong and alienating the wider public are being ignored at many media operations.
Prime examples this week were the pile-on against the National Party’s election of Barnaby Joyce as leader and Deputy Prime Minister and the left media’s apparent support for consideration by UNESCO of a move to place the Great Barrier Reef on the world heritage endangered list.
At the ABC, in the Nine newspapers and on most free-to-air television news broadcasts, reporters repeated as fact the idea Joyce has a woman problem and his return as leader will damage the Coalition’s chances at the next election. Nick Cater, columnist at this newspaper, has researched how most Australian journalists live in the inner-city postcodes of our capital cities, and thus their world views are often different from those of the wider public.
A couple of good judges at The Australian know Joyce has political cut-through, even if many here and across the political commentariat bought the “woman problem” line. Former Labor senator and numbers man Graham Richardson wrote on Wednesday: “For years I regarded Barnaby Joyce as the best retail politician in the country.” National editor Dennis Shanahan wrote on Monday: “The argument that ‘women won’t vote’ for the Coalition with the new (Nats) leader has to be set against the number of people – men and women – who will support the ‘great communicator’ Joyce in the regions.”
As a journalist who spends half his time in regional Australia I have to report people outside the capitals love Joyce, even if some Tesla-driving, Zali Steggall-voting neighbours in Manly tut-tut. Yet journalists went to extraordinary lengths last week to quote the rural lobby group, Australian Women in Agriculture, and former West Australian National Catherine Marriott, who had lodged an unproven sexual harassment claim against Joyce, to suggest he would be a political liability.
AWIA founder Alana Johnson told Guardian Australia: “The astounding thing is the National Party is obviously not listening, otherwise they would never have chosen Barnaby to be their leader again.”
On the contrary, a poll reported by Shanahan in The Australian on Friday suggested most Nationals voters were happy with Joyce’s return. My friends and family in Joyce’s electorate – while not a statistically valid sample – were gleefully predicting his return at a family celebration this month.
Joyce’s success in New England in 2019 suggests regional Australians may place less emphasis on sexual politics than Canberra journalists.
Peter van Onselen in The Australian on Thursday resorted to facts over feelings, pointing out correctly that, in 2016, Joyce’s performance as Nats leader had saved Malcolm Turnbull from fluffing the unlosable election, and consigning the Abbott-Turnbull Coalition government to a single term.
Perhaps more news organisations should have travelled to the Hunter and the central Queensland coal seats the Coalition plans to target at the next election, to ask voters what they think? This goes to the heart of the media’s alienation from mainstream Australians in the regions and outer suburbs of our capitals.
These are the voters who delivered government to Scott Morrison in 2019, often because they saw through Labor’s position on coal. Labor told inner-city Melburnians that coal is out while telling voters in the NSW Hunter Valley and in central Queensland that Labor is the friend of the miner. Even the miners’ union, the Queensland branch of the CFMMEU, criticised Labor’s two-faced policy.
Yet this remains the position of Labor leader Anthony Albanese.
Former frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon in the seat of Hunter and ALP spokeswoman on resources Madeleine King (Brand, WA) both say the party needs to commit to a future for coal mining. Just as voters reacted badly to former Greens leader Bob Brown’s 2019 convoy from Melbourne to the central Queensland coal seats, Joyce will be well placed to wedge Labor on the issue.
Yet at the ABC it’s as if presenters such as Fran Kelly have forgotten the falls of Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull (twice) and Bill Shorten over climate policy. A key Joyce backer, Senator Matt Canavan, got the better of Kelly on Thursday morning.
Canavan asked what the point would be in committing to net zero if China did not take meaningful action, since China is still driving increased global carbon dioxide emissions. Wouldn’t Australia be destroying its own industries to help China boost those same industries on its soil at no net benefit to the planet? He’s right, but it’s a point many climate activist journalists will never concede.
Nor will such reporters acknowledge the perverse role of China in the reef decision – both as chair of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee and as the main driver of global CO2 emissions. The meeting to decide the GBR’s fate is in China next month.
In Kelly’s first interview following the UNESCO news, she did not ask Josh Thomas, chief executive of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, how with only 1.3 per cent of global emissions Australia could save the reef with a domestic climate policy. Thomas did say action needed to be global and suggested all reefs should be on the endangered list if the GBR is. Kelly ignored the prompt.
Last week, neither the climate correspondent for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald Mike Foley, nor Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg in the same newspapers, acknowledged Australia can’t change global ocean temperatures. It was worse at Guardian Australia. Imogen Zethoven and Graham Readfearn on Tuesday actively supported changing the reef’s status and thought it was up to Australia to come up with a plan. However they did observe that China is the world’s largest emitter and is not committed to a 2050 target.
You would be forgiven for thinking this was just self-serving media politics designed to pressure Australia to commit to net zero by 2050. Yet most Australians understand we are one of the few countries likely to meet our 2030 Paris climate commitments and many of the poseurs who have signed their nations on to 2050 will not even meet their 2030 targets.
If activist journalists could not see the flaws in UNESCO’s proposed GBR downgrade, 11 countries, including France, Britain, Canada, Thailand and Spain, could. They all co-signed a letter from federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley denouncing UNESCO’s consultation process.
It won’t be easy for Australia to win this one. As Adeshola Ore reported here on Friday, the majority of World Heritage Committee members have signed up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Nothing to see here for media activists rewarded on social media for damaging Australia’s national interest and being incurious about the facts.
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