National discourse requires return to truthful reporting

Declining media quality is having a bad influence on the standard of ­national politics.

Declining media quality as a direct result of revenue falls driven by digital disruption is having a bad influence on the standard of ­national politics.

Young journalists, a larger ­cohort in newsrooms as older staff are given redundancy to save wages, are easily captured by ­advocacy groups who they believe are “sources”. They are not; they are barrow pushers.

Disabilities groups, refugee ­advocates, the teacher unions, hi-tech rentseekers and dozens of ­environmental lobbies pepper young journalists with press releases and phone calls. Many reporters have already been told at university that their role is to change the world and “speak truth to power”, rather than report the facts in a fair and truthful way.

This creates as environment in which politicians such as US President Donald Trump can easily undermine media credibility. After all, readers and viewers are already suspicious of us in the media.

In Australia, an already thin media market is finding it increasingly difficult to apply tough, adult scrutiny to government policies and is often relying on advocacy groups to provide its political analysis.

Who provides the media ­support for good policy apart from this paper, The Australian Financial ­Review and those few national business leaders prepared to speak out?

Think about the lack of rigour in reporting of the Rudd and Gillard governments’ pink batts scandal or the Building the Education Revolution (apart from in this paper and on talkback radio station 2GB). More recently most newspapers and current affairs broadcast programs have missed the problems with schemes the Coalition inherited from Labor, such as the National Broadband Network, the National Disability Insurance Scheme or the Gonski education reforms (1.0 and 2.0).

The ABC’s Four Corners did a great job last Monday uncovering rorting, theft and waste in the $13 billion Murray-Darling Basin Irrigation Scheme reforms first mooted by John Howard and ­finally ticked off by the Gillard government in November 2012.

To my mind, much of the media lacks an obvious vantage point from which to scrutinise such ­policies. For the ABC, conservation concerns informed Monday’s terrific work by Linton Besser.

At The Australian, a paper unashamedly devoted to advancing national prosperity, judging such issues is alway simple: does a particular scheme work and is it in the national interest? But in the state-based media, which have been more seriously affected by several rounds of journalistic redundancies, even the old “states rights, anti-Canberra mentality” that used to be harnessed by premiers against prime ministers is fading as a journalists’ yardstick.

Only South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill seems still to be able to argue a states’ rights case against all the evidence. How else to explain the indulgence he receives, particularly on local ABC, for arguing black is white in matters of electricity generation?

Replacing old journalistic yardsticks almost by stealth — aided by the rise of “curation’’ and diminution of the role of the editor — is the plethora of lobby groups that have their hands up many journalists’ backs. These groups are generous with their flattery of reporters when they get one of their hobby horse yarns up in mainstream media. Many now run annual awards for journalism they consider helps their cause: various human rights and environmental journalism prizes, medical and banking reporting prizes.

The real question young reporters should be asking in the wake of a decade of failed schemes that have wasted probably $100bn is this: why the hell is the federal government, which has shown zero sign of being good at service delivery, taking on roles formerly the domain of state and local ­government or business?

Think of the NDIS. Disability services since federation have largely been provided by state health departments. The federal government provided services only for military veterans, and many would argue it did so badly.

Ditto Gonski. Most young journalists swallow the line from teacher unions that the public education system is being rorted by private schools. Never mind state schools are mostly funded by the states rather than Canberra and the states pay nothing to private schools. Never mind parents who choose private education already pay for public education through their taxes and are most likely to be the biggest taxpayers. Never mind that the state system would collapse without the private ­system or that total government funding by the states and the ­federal government per private student is about half what it is per public student.

School education and school building (BER), hospitals and ­disability support (NDIS), roads building and public transport, home insulation codes (batts) and welfare housing (Rudd’s rorted National Rental Affordability Scheme) are all the traditional ­preserves of state and local governments. To my mind the record of the feds in these areas since Rudd told us he would “end the blame game” back in 2007 makes it crystal clear the media should be demanding to know when the feds are going to get out of state government service delivery areas rather than constantly asking about increased federal funding

Instead we see endless lobby group spokespeople being given airtime and column inches to whine about the need for more money from the federal government.

Think of complaints about NBN speeds recently. Most stories have been informed by the individual journalist’s view that the original fibre-to-the-home scheme proposed by Rudd and Stephen Conroy would have been better. As if money were no object.

But despite the unchallenged and false claim by Conroy on the Bolt Report on Tuesday night that his scheme would have been cheaper, common sense should tell every journalist in the country that rolling out fibre to the node at the end of the street across a whole continent will cost a fraction of what it would have cost to roll out that fibre to every home in the street.

As columnist Terry McCrann noted in the Herald Sun on Thursday morning, the rollout that is now half finished probably would be only 15 per cent done under the Labor “Rolls Royce” NBN. But why is the government even mandating such technology and why were the industry and the market not left to provide effective solutions?

That is the real question reporters should be asking. Just as pernicious as advocacy groups for its effect on journalistic thinking is the manufactured consent driven by social media. Check what opinion makers are saying on Twitter and Facebook about the NDIS, Gonski and the NBN if you want to see where much journalistic thinking is coming from.

And how else to understand the worldwide outrage at President Trump’s decision to ban transsexuals from the US military and his statement the government should not be paying for gender reassignment surgery for military personnel. On The Drum on Thursday night there was opprobrium for Trump’s tweets and agreement from the panel with Disability Commissioner and Deaf Society president Alastair McEwin who agreed with host John Barron via sign language that gender reassignment surgery was a universal human right and so was fighting for one’s country.

I doubt those two propositions would find wide support in most pubs in Australia or bars in the US, but there was no dissent from the panel on the ABC. Indeed, the idea that the military’s central role was to defend the nation and kill its ­enemies did not rate a mention. It’s as if the military only exists today as a laboratory for tolerance of identity politics. No wonder so many ­people buy Trump’s “false news” narrative.

Improved political outcomes in this country will need a different kind of media scrutiny from the debased reporting we are seeing.