Monitoring detects bias

Letter to the Editor:

Tony Reeves's attempt (Letters 6 July) to decide that people or institutions are not fit to comment on important matters, such as the performance of the ABC, because of his characterisation of their politics as "far Right" is, unfortunately, a style of argument far too common in Australia:  playing the man, not the ball.

The issue is the performance of an important national institution funded to the tune of $600 million taxpayers' dollars a year.  If bias is merely "in the eye of the beholder" as Mr Reeves claims, then the ABC must end up being completely unaccountable, as there will be no widely-accepted way of judging the quality of its performance.

Fortunately, it is possible to ascertain bias by careful study of media reporting to see if it is systematically selective in ways which favour particular individuals or organisations.

This is what I did in its recent study of the ABC's TV News coverage of the 1998 waterfront dispute.

That Mr Reeves thinks a thoughtful conservative commentator like Michael Duffy is "far Right" says quite a lot about Mr Reeves, but not much about Michael Duffy.