Who Watches the Media?

Complaints about media bias -- notably the ABC and the Murdoch press -- have been a staple of Australian political comment for decades.  The problem has been that the evidence has been circumstantial and anecdotal -- so it has been easy for people to say that it is all just "in the eye of the beholder".

Professor Henningham of Queensland University has produced some interesting evidence from surveys of journalists and the general public in metropolitan Australia showing divergences in attitudes between the general public and journalists.  Where there were significant differences in attitudes between journalists and the public, the journalists' attitudes put them closer to positions typical of the ALP than the Coalition.

Prof. Henningham also asked journalists to rate major media outlets as pro-Labor or pro-Liberal.  Journalists rated the 7.30 Report, ABC News and Four Corners as the most pro-Labor of the major media outlets, followed by SBS News, The Age (rated the most pro-Labor of the private sector media), Channel Nine News and The Canberra Times.  Channel Seven, A Current Affair, Channel Ten and The Telegraph-Mirror were rated by journalists as middle of the road, but still to the pro-Labor side.

While these results are interesting and indicative -- the ABC may claim it is not biased, but that is apparently not the view of journalists themselves -- they are impressionistic, lacking any hard data to support them.  That journalists have views significantly divergent from the general public might not come out in their reporting, and impressions can be incorrect.

During the recent election campaign, I set up a Media Monitoring Unit in order to provide the hard data the debate over media bias had lacked.  With assistance from the Fraser Institute of Canada -- which has been engaged in media monitoring for the past 10 years -- the Unit monitored the prime-time TV News of the ABC and the three commercial free-to-air channels looking at coverage of policy issues.

Three reports were released during the campaign and a final report produced after the campaign.

If one divides the five-week campaign on the four major networks into 20 "station-weeks" and scores each station-week as a "win" to one side if the ratio of comment favoured it by 20% or more, the results for the campaign are as follows:

Overall, policy comment favoured the ALP by one-third.  The focus of comment was strongly on the Coalition -- it had 1.8 times more coverage than the ALP and almost twice as many critical comments.

The coverage was highly critical -- over half of all comments were negative, less than a quarter positive, only about a quarter were neutral.

The only two Coalition "wins" are interesting stories in themselves.  One, the ABC on week three (the week of the Coalition policy launch), was right after controversy about ABC media bias had reached fever pitch.  The other, Nine in week four (the week of the ALP policy launch), was after Kerry Packer had endorsed John Howard.

Overall, Nine had the most balanced coverage, followed by the ABC (which had the distinction of being the only network not to produce one week of balanced coverage) then Seven, with Ten being the most hostile to the Coalition.

It is important that such a powerful body as the media is subject to outside scrutiny and I am seeking to continue this contribution to the debate.  The results for the Federal election campaign suggest that the attitudes prevalent amongst journalists do affect media coverage -- that journalists do focus, and focus more critically, on the side of politics they are more ideologically distant from.