Spike the groupthink and focus on what is true

Groupthink activist journalism is cowardly and reporters must write only what they are sure is correct.

Long before “post-truth” became the international buzzword of 2016 we at The Australian had our own phrase for progressive media that placed its world view ahead of the facts.

We called it the “false narrative” and usually got Chris Kenny to write Saturday Inquirer pieces outing Fairfax or the ABC for ­failing to come to terms with ­issues bedevilling the Rudd and Gillard governments: think the pinks batts scheme, the Building the Education Revolution or the almost weekly forecasts in the first half of 2013 in The Sydney Morning Herald that Julia Gillard was about to stage a miraculous recovery in the polls. She did not and was rolled by Kevin Rudd midyear, saving dozens of seats for Labor.

One of my favourite media false narratives was Gillard’s ­misogyny speech, given in the middle of a furore over her ­captain’s pick for Speaker, Peter Slipper, describing women’s anatomies as “like mussels”. Such a feminist image, no?

Even better was the Friday February 26, 2010, sacking by Rudd of his environment minister Peter Garrett over the green insulation scheme, the pink batts debacle that killed four installers, burned down hundreds of homes and saw organised crime gang the Carlton Crew enter the insulation business. While 2GB’s Ray Hadley, The Courier-Mail and The Australian led the way in reporting the scheme’s failings, the Fairfax and ABC newsrooms looked away because the plan was “good for the environment”.

As The Australian asked the following week, what on earth must SMH readers seeing the next day’s Saturday morning paper splashed with the Garrett sacking have made of the event? For all they knew the scheme had been a marvellous success.

These issues were really a matter of reporters and editors letting their prejudices blind them to the obvious facts. They supported big government spending programs and wanted a powerful feminist woman PM to succeed.

Even after the election of the Coalition in 2013 these news organisations were unable to come to terms with other Labor failures such as the National Rental Affordability Scheme, the supply of digital set-top boxes to pensioners or the rorting of the vocational education sector. These were left to The Australian to cover.

Similarly, the Trump election continues to confound much of the US media, but many of the problems reporters have found themselves in are more a matter of long-standing media biases and preconceptions about the rectitude of progressive positions than they are about deliberately false news.

Take the case of the Time magazine correspondent Zeke Miller who blew the whistle on the removal of a Martin Luther King statue from the White House. The story was untrue, the reporter had only one source and did not check if his lead was ­correct but went straight to social media to tweet out a yarn that was then included in his report.

The story fitted perfectly with preconceptions about Donald Trump. It just was not true.

We have seen more of such false narratives in the past couple of months in our media, sans Trump.

Just before Christmas, Fairfax’s city tabloids and national financial tabloid got into a lather about work commissioned by federal Treasury from Griffith University professor of economics Tony Makin outlining why Rudd’s GFC stimulus did not in fact save ­Australia from recession. The Fairfax and ABC view was that Treasury was wrong to pay the eminent economist for such ­heresy.

They seemed unaware Makin had written academic papers soon after the global financial crisis ­arguing exactly that case and had been published on this paper’s opinion pages making his point several times and as early as 2012.

In progressive media land, big government and public spending are unarguably good and deficit repair a right-wing obsession.

Another fabulous progressive false narrative was exposed last week when the Chinese company Yancoal offered $3.2 billion for Rio Tinto’s Hunter Valley coalmines. The progressive media has been arguing for years that China has been moving from coal to ­renewables.

This paper has been reporting the truth. China is still building coal-fired power stations and such emissions trading systems as it has are local, with low carbon prices of about a dollar a tonne.

Gillard introduced her carbon tax scheme in July 2012 at $23 a tonne. But in this false narrative all fossil fuels are bad and all renewables good. Never mind the benefits of modern electricity generation for the poor of India and China and never mind the costs of renewables boosting power bills to pensioners in ­Australia.

The sad resignation of former NSW premier Mike Baird is ­another example of the progressive media’s particular “spin” on truth, which turns out to be fairly subjective depending on one’s own political leanings.

For SMH state political editor Sean Nicholls the beginning of Baird’s troubles was his decision to backflip on his greyhound ­racing ban last October. Only a Fairfax or ABC journalist could see the greyhound ban in such terms, completely ignoring the rights of people in the industry to a fair living from their efforts.

The published polling shows Baird’s troubles hit midyear after the ban decision was announced on Facebook in early July. Newspoll in September showed Baird’s personal approval rating had slipped 22 points from 61 to 39 per cent and the Coalition’s primary support was down six points.

The SMH’s own polling in late August showed Baird slipping behind Opposition Leader Luke Foley as preferred premier but Nicholls blamed failures in the hospital system because the poll appeared to show 51 per cent ­support for the greyhound ban. Of course at that time the ­campaign against the ban had only just started. The key clue should have been the rise of Foley, a vocal critic of the greyhound ban.

Nicholls wrote a savage comment piece on October 13 slamming Baird for the greyhound backflip. But largely on the back of a rural and regional backlash against the ban the National Party in mid-November lost the safe seat of Orange to the Shooters and Fishers Party after a 21 per cent swing against the Nats.

In a prophetic piece first published on November 24 and republished on January 19 after Baird’s retirement Nicholls hinted Baird could consider stepping down and suggested new premier Gladys Berejiklian could be the “ultimate refresh”. He again saw the greyhound backflip as a prime cause of Baird’s problems.

Readers should accept Baird’s public explanation. His decision came in the wake of health problems faced by his sister, mother and father.

Media and political use of polling, as in the Baird case, can be the ultimate false narrative.

While many on the Right ­suggest Malcolm Turnbull is doomed because the Coalition is lagging in the polls, it is clear polling is not predictive in this way.

The Prime Minister is on thin ice because he used 30 negative Newspolls in a row by Tony ­Abbott as justification for his challenge, but every pollster will say polling is a snapshot of the electorate at a particular time and in no way indicates a likely ­election result years out.

Despite some crazy commentary to the contrary, this paper argued right up to the weekend before the Turnbull challenge on September 14, 2015, that Abbott as prime minister could easily defeat Labor on three issues: asylum-seekers, power prices and Labor’s unfunded 50 per cent renewable energy target and budget repair. Never mind Niki Savva’s weekly column. The position of the paper’s editorials, of Paul Kelly, Dennis Shanahan, Chris Kenny and me, as the texts quoted in my book make crystal clear, was that Abbott could win an election against Labor leader Bill Shorten.

And history shows why The Australian was not fazed by ­Abbott’s polling.

Paul Keating won the Fightback election of October 1993 after starting the year down 46.5 to 53.5 to John Hewson’s ­Coalition. And John Howard beat Kim Beazley in 1998 and 2001 after trailing by as much as 46-54. And he destroyed Mark Latham in 2004 despite again trailing 54-46 five months before the ­election.

In fact, in May 2001 conservative columnist Andrew Bolt ­declared Howard “God’s gift to his foes”, arguing he lacked vision, inspiration and understanding.

Of course, in all of the above cases Newspoll picked the result the day before the election. Pollsters are confident there is a high mathematical probability that polling from Tuesday to Thursday night in the last week of a campaign is a reasonably accurate measure of the Saturday’s voting intentions.

So what is the point of all this?

The progressive local media continues to repeat discredited material from the so-called Trump Dossier. The SMH only last Wednesday repeated the tale of Trump and the Russian prostitutes. There is no evidence the story is true and lots that it is wrong.

It just happens to fit the progressive view of Trump and the left-wing youth social media vibe about a man democratically elected the leader of the free world. He is only a week into his job.

Editors must clamp down on this sort of reporting and apply some rigour to what they publish, especially online. This kind of groupthink activist journalism is cowardly and reporters must be brave enough to write only what they are sure is correct.

Cheers and fan tweets for journalists from the graffiti “dunny door” of social media need to be ignored in the interest of brand credibility.