Bias or stupidity blocking the truth

It is either bias or stupidity on the part of the reporter and news ­consumers see through it.

The ABC’s Media Watch last Monday used a discussion of the US presidential election and the way Republican candidate ­Donald Trump has been reported for many years to take on an issue many in journalism believe the profession needs to think about.

Host Paul Barry highlighted Trump’s role in the “birther” movement, the mad conspiracy fired up by Trump claiming US President Barack Obama is not a US citizen. After five years of pushing the claims, Trump quietly dropped them last month and ­acknowledged that, yes of course, the President was a US citizen.

The question for journalism is how to deal with a wealthy businessman and alternative presidential candidate who is prepared to lie and say that black is white if he thinks there is political mileage in it for him.

Barry quoted journalism academics who believe the central point of journalism has to be to reveal the truth to readers and viewers and think that may necessitate the end of traditional “he said, she said” journalism. I have made similar points here and elsewhere in regard to the conduct of former prime minister Kevin Rudd. Rudd for at least 18 months claimed he had no interest in succeeding UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

We found out in late July that he had held discussions with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop about the possibility of the government supporting his candidature as far back as September last year. Journalism faced similar issues about truth versus traditional reporting practices in the last ­federal parliament with Queensland billionaire Clive Palmer. The Australian disputed Palmer was in fact a billionaire and then looked hard at his business interests and how he was using the 2013 electoral success of his Palmer United Party to further those interests.

Palmer was treated with great deference by the ABC at the time, largely because of his criticisms of the then conservative prime minister Tony Abbott and former conservative Queensland premier Campbell Newman. He was a regular guest on the ABC’s Lateline and never challenged about his bogus claims, at least until the weight of revelations became impossible to ignore. At one stage Palmer launched a long series of defamation suits against The­Australian’s Hedley Thomas and me, which included as many as a dozen claimed defamatory imputations. History has vindicated the paper’s reporting, but only after a series of media rivals allowed themselves to be used and abused by the self-interested former adviser to Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Many people at The Australian Financial Review were critical of what they claimed was a campaign by the paper. But this is precisely the point The New York Times, which last week blew the whistle on Trump’s tax arrangements, Media Watch and many journalism academics were ­making about Trump. In the conflicting balancing of rights, responsibilities and debates about truth, the central and prime concern of the journalist must always be to try to reveal the truth about his or her subject.

Other considerations must come second lest people with less strict moral compasses such as Trump, Rudd and Palmer be given free rein to lie to voters. Of course the problem with abandoning traditional forms of objectivity in news writing journalism is that it might only drive support to someone like Trump, whose supporters already believe mainstream media is conspiring against their preferred candidate. Much the same has been argued here about the mainstream media and One ­Nation leader Pauline Hanson.

In my view, this is where strong editors set directions for their papers and programs. Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser complained bitterly that this newspaper campaigned relentlessly and ruthlessly against the Rudd and Gillard governments’ Building the Education Revolution that wasted billions of dollars on unwanted school halls and covered learning areas. We did. It was the right campaign and I drove it. The New York Times is doing a similar thing with Trump and tax and Hedley Thomas was just as focused and unrelenting with Palmer and the Australian Workers’ Union slush fund affair.

I think the techniques of ­traditional journalism can be used as always but with the clear aim of taking the paper’s or program’s agenda forward rather than the agenda of a politician seeking to obscure the truth. That is, media can ignore the “he said, she said” paradigm and just not publish things it knows to be untrue, while applying those traditions of ­internal balance to tough campaigns seeking to shine a light in areas where a subject would prefer remain hidden.

None of this is easy in the age of Twitter where the good heart outguns the good fact. Look at what happened to the ABC’s best reporter, Chris Uhlmann, when he wrote the truth last week about the effects of renewable energy on the South Australian power blackout. Hundreds of Greens “belief-niks” demanded Uhlmann be silenced by the ABC and Media Watch bring him into line. I hope Media Watch has a closer a look at the technical and engineering issues involved in harmonising interstate power grids. He will find out Uhlmann used facts and balance to call out the truth, as much as silly tweeters might hate it.

But it is not just politicians who will say anything at all knowing it will be reported. Increasingly facts have become optional and challengeable for political purposes. This is the ultimate triumph of the postmodern Twittersphere over public interest journalism.

Why, for example, in an age where any politician in a cheap suit can demand a royal commission into the banks, do no journalists ever ask about the crucial role of fully franked bank dividends in maintaining pensions for superannuants who face real penury with low interest rates and sharemarket returns?

Why do so very many journalists continue to let the Opposition Leader Bill Shorten bag a same-sex marriage plebiscite he very publicly supported himself only three years ago?

Why do journalists let asylum-seeker advocates campaigning for the release of refugees from Manus and Nauru continue to make their claims without ever dealing with how they would avoid a repeat of the failures of the system between 2008 and 2013 and the drowning of 1200 people at sea? None of that is down to the methods of traditional journalism. It is either bias or stupidity on the part of the reporter and news ­consumers see through it.