Almost as worrying for journalism as the proposed federal anti-disinformation legislation discussed here last week is the politicisation of expertise by media and governments.
Courts of law have always known different expert witnesses can offer vastly different testimony. Journalists have often relied on academic experts to bolster news stories, seldom worrying about obtaining balancing quotes from experts who disagree. Universities even provide media guides for news rooms to provide expert commentary on matters from economic policy to agriculture, the law and medical research.
Not balancing expert quotes was less of a problem before so much journalism became about contentious, highly politicised issues. Think the voice, renewable power, the pace of climate change or Covid-19 mandates. The potential politicisation of expertise is exacerbated as journalism schools increasingly reject traditional reporting techniques such as providing balancing quotes.
This started in environment journalism in Australia and ABC reporters led the charge. Following in the footsteps of The New York Times, they rejected reporting of dissenting scientific opinions on man-made climate change, citing a highly contentious study claiming 97 per cent of global scientists agree on anthropogenic global warming. Never mind those scientists, some among the most qualified on Earth, who have nuanced views about climate dangers.
Now left-wing journalists in a range of fields try to delegitimise reporting they dislike politically by claiming it is at odds with what the experts say. ABC Media Watch is full of this kind of censorious wowserism, especially about climate.
Serious academic research into the politicisation of expertise now abounds worldwide, supercharged by the pandemic. We saw much of this in Australia where ABC health editor Dr Norman Swan and the OzSAGE group of medical professionals – who got much more wrong than right – pushed for ever tighter lockdowns, only giving up on their Covid extremism recently.
OECD analysis shows how politicised in hindsight the expert public health advice was during the pandemic. Only Sweden stuck to its original public health road map set out before Covid hit. Remember the World Health Organisation actually opposed lockdowns at the start of the pandemic, as did many countries that nevertheless locked down hard in the wake of China’s 2020 lockdown.
Sweden, widely criticised in the first year of the pandemic for remaining open, has reported lower excess deaths since the start of the pandemic than most lockdown countries. The OECD says, taking account of Australia’s higher population growth, the excess death rate here over the first three years of Covid was 2.1 per cent. For Sweden it was minus 0.6 per cent, or no excess mortality at all.
Yet the ABC regarded itself and Dr Swan as a “single source of truth” on Covid. Dissenters were treated as intellectual lepers.
The silliest plea for respect for experts this column has seen was published by the Crikey website on June 27 by the populist former teacher, Bruce Pascoe.
Pascoe wrote about the proposed voice referendum: “One of the most insidious threats to democracy is the idea that learning and intelligence are the enemies of the people. These are the arguments of the huckster, the carpetbagger, the autocrat and the fascist.”
Pascoe believed Australians should simply listen to the expertise of the Aboriginal academics backing the Yes case.
The real national expert on Aboriginal anthropology is Professor Peter Sutton who, with archaeologist Keryn Walshe, comprehensively demolished Pascoe’s Dark Emu in the 2021 book, Farmers or Hunter Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate.
Sutton, author of the best book I have read on the Aboriginal experience here, The Politics of Suffering, in his latest volume exposes Pascoe’s misquotations of the journals of the early explorers and his lack of understanding of Aboriginal culture and spirituality, let alone anthropology.
Sutton lived with north Queensland’s Wik people in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
He is closely associated with the tribes of outback South Australia. Sutton is the pre-eminent expert in the field. Yet Pascoe in his 2021 book, Country – co-written with historian Bill Gammage – essentially dismisses Sutton’s critique.
This column in December 2019 noted how much of Dark Emu was borrowed from Rupert Gerritsen’s 2008 book, Australia and the Origins of Agriculture, and Gammage’s 2012 The Biggest Estate on Earth.
It also noted the influence on Pascoe of the 1970s work of Barbara York Main and WK Hancock, the 1980s writing of Eric Rolls and Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters in 1994.
Pascoe, rather than expert on race issues or anthropology, is a summariser of the work of his predecessors.
This paper in May 2019 reported Gerritsen’s brother, Rolf, a professor of Indigenous policy studies at Charles Darwin University, saying “90 per cent of Bruce’s book is taken from my brother’s work”.
Rupert, convicted of terrorism in Perth in 1972, died in 2013 without academic or financial success.
Now, as if preordained by the spirits, our ABC on July 18 will broadcast a special on Pascoe, The Dark Emu Story. In its promotional ad it even quotes Network Ten Indigenous journalist Narelda Jacobs scoffing at criticism of Pascoe’s claims for Aboriginality.
I know many Aboriginal people – some traditional elders expert in cultural matters – who believe Aboriginal heritage is about facts rather than feelings.
It is in electricity production that the politicisation of expertise has done the most damage in Australia. Led again by the ABC, journalists of the left roll out climate scientists who know nothing about the engineering problems of renewable energy to preach the gospel of clean and green power. As recently as last Tuesday, Energy Minister Chris Bowen was again telling ABC 7.30’s Sarah Ferguson renewable energy produces the cheapest electricity.
As this column has pointed out for several years that’s only if you ignore the need for another 20 Snowy Hydro 2.0s, 10,000km of new power lines, tens of millions of new solar panels, a trebling of rooftop solar, tens of thousands of new wind turbines, hundreds of giant battery storage facilities and new gas-firming power stations.
Energy regulators estimate this will cost $300bn. On present form you could safely treble that. That’s a lot of hospitals and schools.
Under the preferred Step Change plan released last July by the Australian Energy Market Operator, Australia needs to lift renewables from 27 per cent, including hydro power, today to 82 per cent by 2030.
It has taken 20 years of rooftop solar subsidies and the Renewable Energy Target to get to where we are now.
We need to treble that in the next seven.
Yet to the ABC, Guardian Australia and the Nine papers, journalists who point out the countries with higher penetrations of renewables are between 80 and 100 per cent reliant on hydro-electric power are engaging in “climate denial”. Check the numbers in Paraguay and a handful of small countries with tiny populations.
Nowhere is a continent doing better than Australia was already doing under the Morrison government.
This brings us back to the nature of journalism.
Reporters need to have an inquiring mind and a healthy sense of scepticism. Journalism should never be about enforcing childish, unrealistic pieties, even if so-called experts advocate them.
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