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August 24, 2006
The Australia and New Zealand School of Government recently held a media conference. The talks are not online. So we have to rely on the fragments that are published by the old media. The Australian has published an extract of the talk by Tony Abbott, the federal Health Minister, which explores the relationship between politicians and the media. He says:
These days, many of the most important and difficult debates don't occur in parliament but in lengthy live media interviews where politicians are expected to have instant answers to every question and a single mistake can be disastrous.
Aren't these instant answers in live media interviews just parts of an ongoing public conversation within our political insitutions and in civil society?
Tony Abbott has been an active participant in the deabtes about biopolitics and in the debate about reproductive cloning-- or "cloning-to-produce-children"-- and therapeutic cloning--or cloning-for-biomedical-research. He has positioned himself as a conviction politician who sticks to his guns and the leading conservative voice against therapeutic cloning.
This is much broader debate than a few quips made by politicians during a live media interview as it is about the biotechnology and public policy that involves the regulation of biomedical technologies. The debate is much wider than the current narrow preoccupation with the "life issues" of embryo destruction, or the concerns over therapeutic cloning in the current public policy debate.
Abbott's central concern in this talk is the political bias in the media, by which he means the left-liberal bias of the mainstream media and its partisan stance towards conservative politicians. He says that:
It's true that there are now effective conservative voices in the Australian media, such as Piers Akerman, Andrew Bolt, Christopher Pearson, Janet Albrechtsen and Miranda Devine, with people such as Alan Jones on radio. That hasn't altered the dynamic of the newsroom and, if anything, has intensified the "give no quarter" attitude of the Left-liberal media mainstream. A media staple since the 2004 election has been the rise of the so-called religious Right. This motif testifies to the historical amnesia and cultural impoverishment of most younger journalists, in whose minds views that would have been orthodox a generation ago now seem odd or evidence of religious brainwashing.
This is onesided account. The conservative voices in the media are opinionated, politically partisan and is grounded in their prejudices. This right wing media, which has given rise to Fox News, has rejected the old liberal distinctions between fact and opinion, dumped truth and objectivity, and repudiated the ethos of the media as a fourth estate acting as a watchdog for democracy.
Secondly, the historical amnesia and cultural impoverishment of most younger journalists, is partly due to the failures of Australian conservatism to go beyond partisan journalism of ''the (academic) elites entrenched and conspiring against the best interests of the Australian people' and foster a more vibrant and diverse intellectual culture. You cannot blame the journalism schools for the intellectual poverty of the conservative culture in Australia.
An example of this poverty is Abbott's claim that the Lockheart review proposed the potential creation of human-animal hybrids---even though this scary monster claim is a misrepresentation of what the report is proposing to do, and the regulatory regime opposed to the creation of hybrids. It is an appeal to fear not reason.
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Something very apparent about the Right is that they believe in total victory.
Not until every article, editorial or commentary is couched in their terms will they admit that this bias is a figment of their imagination.
Even the last bastion of left wing commentary, the ABC, has been totally neutered.