Left-wing Twitter twits as biased as those they slam on the right

According to Twitter warriors, bias means anything not of the political Left.

To a Twitter warrior, bias means anything not of the political Left. Picture: AFP

Media bias is in the eye of the beholder — but if the beholder is a Twitter warrior, bias means anything not of the political Left. Too bad about the 50 per cent of the population who vote conservative.

Three tweets by journalists last Wednesday make the point.

Chip Le Grand tweeted out the front pages of that morning’s Daily Telegraph in Sydney and Herald Sun in Melbourne. The Tele’s splash with a picture of Labor’s Bill Shorten said in caps: “The great divider”. The Melbourne daily led with a court story about local cancer diet fake Belle Gibson: “Belle cries poor”. Chip, a terrific writer and reporter, was once this paper’s Victorian editor. His tweet showing the two front pages asked, “Did someone miss the orders from Rupert or could it be that different Newscorp editors make independent judgements about what goes in their papers?”

Tim Dunlop, once a left-wing blogger for this company’s News.com.au, wrote: “Or could it be that this is a single random example that proves nothing?”

No one who actually understands newspapers could fail to see the differences between News’s Sydney and Melbourne tabloids.

The Tele, as most of its former editors have said many times, is as brash as Sydney; the Hun much less so, like its more reserved home town of Melbourne. And the aforementioned News.com.au, the biggest and most successful news website in the country, is also owned by News Corp and positioned way to the left of the newspapers. So what? It’s a diverse market.

Also responding to Chip was the US correspondent of the left-wing The Monthly, Richard Cooke, who without any apparent self-awareness tweeted of Chip, “Imagine tweeting this out to try and show that your company *lacks* bias.” This is breathtaking from a journalist working for mega-rich Melbourne left-wing publisher Morry Schwartz, who also owns The Saturday Paper, Quarterly Essay and publisher Black Inc. Schwartz Media wages non-stop war on anything conservative, giving the Melbourne property developer cover for his high-rise development business.

Cooke leveraged off The New York Times’ 20,000-word investigation last month of the Murdoch family to produce yet another boring Schwartz hatchet job on News Corp for the cover of the latest Monthly. It’s a company fixated on the Murdochs and News, but only for commercial reasons.

Former Monthly editor Ben Naparstek once told me the reason for Schwartz’s Murdoch obsession, saying the 2011 issue that featured yours truly on the cover was his biggest selling. Schwartz knows lefties will pay to read about what they hate.

Neither Dunlop nor Cooke, or the Schwartz empire, see their own biases. Yet from where half the population stands and votes, the ABC, Guardian Australian, the Conversation, Crikey and many of Nine’s former Fairfax papers seem every bit as biased as they claim News to be.

The outcry over The Daily Telegraph’s “Mother of Invention” splash, published on May 8, was the catalyst for Chip’s tweet and yet another round of News Corp bias accusations. Many in the media accepted Shorten’s heartfelt anger at the piece and his view it was a hatchet job on his mum.

It was not and no one in the long list of critics of the story can have actually read it. Nowhere in the story or editorial was Ann Shorten criticised.

The Tele raised the issue of her career because the previous Monday night on the ABC’s Q&A Shorten himself, unprompted, spoke at length about his mum’s lack of opportunity. She had wanted to be a lawyer but became a teacher. Q&A host Tony Jones failed to intervene to explain to his audience that Ann Shorten had gone on to study law later in life and to become a barrister.

Shorten turned the Telegraph story to his advantage. Good luck to him. But why did so many Twitter twits proclaim the Tele had failed in its mission by inadvertently helping Shorten? Its mission, like that of all good media, was only to scrutinise a politician’s claims.

Labor’s subsequent attempted delegitimising of News Corp was the same tactic used by Labor prime minister Julia Gillard when she threatened to regulate the media because this newspaper’s Hedley Thomas was following the Australian Workers Union slush fund story subsequently proven correct at the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption. At the time Paul Whittaker, then editor of The Daily Telegraph and now chief executive of Sky News, produced a 2013 front page of former communications minister Stephen Conroy as Joseph Stalin for his plans to regulate the press. Conroy now works for Whittaker at Sky News.

The Ann Shorten story was unremarkable by comparison. News simply has been doing the job the other media shirked to earn Twitter acclaim.

Labor was offering the biggest tax policy prescription since John Hewson’s Fightback in 1993. This column mid-campaign criticised the media for not picking up on Labor’s promise to subsidise the wages of childcare workers. But there was much more.

Neither side offered meaningful short-term reform of personal or corporate taxes to increase incentives and boost growth. Few reporters challenged Labor on wages or mentioned low wages growth was happening at a time of historically low inflation and record low interest rates. Nor has either side had a story about productivity improvements in the labour market that could justify wage rises.

Too little scrutiny was applied to Labor’s sly plans to reregulate the labour market and revitalise a trade union membership that includes only 9 per cent of private sector workers.

Most media allowed Labor to claim Fair Work Australia’s Sunday penalty rates windback was the work of the Coalition when they knew FWA was Labor’s own independent wages arbiter. Why no defence of FWA from the former Fairfax papers and the ABC, which for decades have supported a centralised independent wages arbiter against this paper’s support of more deregulation?

At a time of slowing growth across the economy, falling house prices and threats on the international economic horizon, why did so many in the media welcome Labor’s rolling back of negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount? Had Labor won, journalists would have looked stupid when this had the inevitable adverse effect on prices that it was actually designed to achieve.

Why did the media let Clive Palmer have another shot at becoming an Australian version of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi with virtually no scrutiny? Why did the ABC, Guardian Australia and Nine’s papers act as campaign boosters for progressive independents? They know the rise of independents is destroying our system of federal government. Why did so few journalists challenge Labor for walking both sides of the fence on the Adani coal project depending on whether it was talking to Victorians or Queenslanders?

Worst of all, how were so many journalists prepared to let Labor claim it was stupid to ask for costings on its plan to almost double renewables and reduce emissions by 45 per cent by 2030? The Tele on Friday reported polling showing 60 per cent of voters reject the no costings argument. The day before in an election editorial that could have been written by a child, Guardian Australia made no mention that across Europe the roll-out of renewables is slowing dramatically. As a London-based company it must know that.