The politics of partisan media
How a partisan press suppresses the truth and weakens democracy
Imagine rounding up 15 000 viewers of Sky News and with adequate incentives, getting them to become nightly listeners to Phillip Adams Late Night Live, as an experiment to try to understand the workings of far-right partisan media.
That’s essentially what David Brookman of the University of California and Joshua Kalla of Yale University did, with a sample of Fox News watchers who were incentivized to watch CNN instead for a month: The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers. This is an academic pre-print brought to our attention by Joseph Walker of The Jolly Swagman .
The conventional and convenient theory about politically-biased media is that those on the “right” choose right-wing media, while those on the “left” choose media that fits their political inclination. The media have no political influence of their own.
Brookman and Kalla dismiss this simple all-explaining theory. They find among their subjects that their short exposure to CNN wrought changes in what they came to see as important issues (e.g. concern about the disruption resulting from “black lives matter” gave way to concern about Covid-19). For some issues, such as Trump’s behaviour, the experimental subjects developed new perspectives.
The experimenters describe three ways partisan media works. The first, and most commonly understood, is agenda-setting. For example we can expect our right-wing media to put a great deal of emphasis on China’s military power in the election period. The second is in terms of how events are framed. Right-wing media will report on the marvellous thing the Morrison government is doing to bring down gasoline prices, while more objective media will describe and analyse movements in all prices.
The third mechanism is what they call “partisan coverage filtering”, leading viewers “to learn more information favourable to the network’s partisan side”, leading in turn to changes in viewers’ “attitudes and political evaluations”. In relation to economic policy right-wing media may emphasize variables favourable to the Coalition – new jobs supposedly created by the Coalition’s policies, new funds for aged care, new infrastructure committed, while more objective media will emphasize employment insecurity, under-staffing in aged care, road and rail projects promised but never delivered.
They conclude that the results of their experiment “indicate challenges that partisan media may pose for democratic accountability. Our findings suggest that partisan media may affect voters’ choices at least in part because it hides information about aligned incumbents’ failures and distorts perceptions of political rivals.”
The lazy journalism of gotchas
“The cash interest rate at present is seven – I'm just trying to think. Was it 7.25? I'll have to go and check that one.”
That was Shadow Treasurer Julie Bishop’s response to a gotcha question in September 2008. Treasurer Wayne Swan was quick to make political capital of her fumbling, and it was probably one factor contributing to her replacement by Joe Hockey a few months later – someone who was to have his own muddled and glaringly inaccurate responses when he became Treasurer.
As Greg Jericho wrote in 2015, commenting on Hockey’s and others’ gaffes, “the sad truth is that when journalists ask simplistic questions about the economy and tax system such as ‘what is the interest rate’ it generally betrays the fact that they have a simplistic understanding of the economy or tax system”.
To John Howard, Albanese’s memory lapse on Monday was a “so what?” issue. (His “correction” the following day has all the sincerity of a Soviet Union show trial.) The ABC’s David Taylor looked a little further into the question, and found that the stock answer to a stock question about the RBA’s cash rate – 0.10 percent – is wrong. That’s the RBA’s target: the actual cash rate, a figure set daily by the markets, is 0.06 percent.
Do journalists who ask questions about specific numbers really think that the ideal prime minister or treasurer is a savant who can churn out numbers with accuracy and confidence, like Raymond in the movie Rain Man , or a nerd who knows the fine definitional differences in the RBA’s terminology?
Or are they just smartarses who want to show off in front of their colleagues?
Surely we want our prime minister and ministers to know about how the economy works – why there is more to economic management than simply managing the fiscal figures, how and why certain functions are in the market and other functions are best done by government, how fiscal and monetary policies interact, why wages are slow to respond to skill shortages and so on. (Quick quiz: do you know your car’s kerb weight? do you know how to drive it?)
We also want politicians to have at least a primary school understanding of mathematics, to be assured that they know the difference between real and nominal prices and interest rates, and, particularly relevant in the case of a pandemic, that they understand the basics of compound growth: politicians’ failure to understand this has cost thousands of lives worldwide as they have failed to respond to small but rapidly-growing Covid-19 numbers.
If our journalists had enough economic nous they would be putting hard economic questions to all politicians. Most importantly they would be asking the Coalition why our productivity has fallen to such low levels over their time in office: is it because they lack the political courage to deal with structural change?
But perhaps the problem is old-fashioned partisanship, from journalists whose bosses pay them well to stop Labor from being elected. As Michael West points out, the media cards are stacked against Labor. Our commercial media are mainly owned or directed by Coalition supporters. Even those that claim to be more independent are conscious of their revenue from government advertising, and the ABC tamely lets commercial media set the political agenda – an agenda that carefully avoids public policy and keeps politics at centre-stage. In an election campaign Morrison is in his element – announcing and spinning (he doesn’t even have to pretend to do anything).