Public ideas
The media’s duty in an age of misinformation
Fran Kelly brackets the 2024 Andrew Olle Media Lecture with references to her dog Buster. In themselves these references say a great deal about how some people see the ABC, and about her dedication as a professional journalist to principles of truth and respect for all.
But it’s about more than those two important points. It’s about the way professional journalism struggles to be heard in a world that has become “an echo chamber of conflicting perceived truths”.
She illustrates the problem with reference to the Voice campaign. She calls out those responsible for using Trumpian tactics, spreading lies and misinformation in order to foment mistrust and division – white supremacists, Peter Dutton, conspiracy theorists, foreign governments. It’s a refreshing break from the depressingly common journalistic practice of using passive-voice statements to avoid revealing who is engaging in assaults on democracy, fearing that revelation of responsibility may lead to an accusation of “bias”. (Is not a practice of failing to call out those responsible for such practices in itself a bias against exposing the truth?)
It’s also refreshing to hear an ABC journalist who does not feel obliged to give equal weight to lies and the truth: Kelly specifically criticises the way some media resort to moral equivalence – the balanced treatment of unbalanced phenomena – as a protection against criticism.
She has advice for journalists struggling in this postmodern world of alternative facts, lies, misinformation and disinformation. They have to stick to their search for the truth, to reporting on facts. But that alone is not enough:
Unless we also convince Australians that as journalists we are reporting the facts, and not bending them to fit our agendas.
Unless we can convince people we are committed to holding the powerful to account rather than just being a mouthpiece for their claims.
And unless we can find a way to make our news gathering accessible, relatable and available where people gather online in communities they trust, it doesn’t matter how good we are with facts, those stoking fear and mistrust through emotional manipulation…weaponizing the fault lines … will win.
On colonialism, economics and democracy
Colonization was nasty, but some instances of colonization were nastier than others.
Differing patterns of colonization provided three economists – Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson – with a natural experiment to reveal how they affected the colonised countries’ post-colonial development.
They identified two patterns of colonization. One was about plundering the colonized countries’ resources; the other was about developing Lebensraum for emigrants from the colonizing power.
In the first group of countries the colonisers established extractive institutions; in the latter they established inclusive institutions. Countries in the first category tended to stagnate or even go backwards, while countries in the second category generally went on to develop as prosperous democracies.
That’s a rough summary of their book Why nations fail: the origins of power, prosperity and poverty, and of the work that earned them the Nobel Prize in Economics this year.
On Radio National’s Saturday Extra, James Robinson gave a short outline of their work. (12 minutes). Their methodology, including their use of mortality rates as an explanatory variable, is in an American Economic Review article: The colonial origins of comparative development: an empirical investigation.
A critique of their work is in a Conversation contribution by Jostein Hauge of Cambridge University: This year’s Nobel Prize exposes economics’ problem with colonialism. Their main criticism is that China’s extraordinary development does not align with the model developed by Acemoglu et al: Robinson deals with this apparent anomaly in the Saturday Extra interview, with some interesting observations on China’s economy. The other criticism is that in noting the current-day success of some previously-colonized countries, they ignored the brutality of colonization. This is in line with the general criticism of mainstream economics in that it ignores normative issues.
In the context of the current debates about our own colonial history, we could speculate about how much different our history might have been had the Portuguese or the Belgians been our colonial masters.
More generally, although Acemoglu et al see Australia as a country as one with inclusive institutions, we fall out of their pattern somewhat because of the way we, rather than our colonial master, have shaped our institutions, particularly our taxation system, to privilege our extractive mining industries, and committed the crimes against indigenous people that they attribute to the colonising powers.
Liberal pluralism for our times
“I don’t think Western liberals are yet intellectually prepared for a reality in which the central world-historical and moral event of the twentieth century is no longer remembered as the Holocaust but rather as decolonization.”
That’s a quote from the essay Political ideas in the 21st century by Charles King, Professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University.
He traces the environment within which the idea of liberal pluralism has competed for attention over recent history. Initially in the “postwar” years, with Nazism defeated, and Soviet Communism contained, the idea of liberal pluralism managed to hold its place in a western world unburdened by ideological struggles.
That comfortable era is behind us, he writes. “Today, ideological politics has come roaring back. At no point since the 1940s have the contrasting ideas at stake in political debate been so starkly evident”. He goes on to state:
Pluralism seems once again threatened by new forms of self-satisfied certainty, and these challenges allegedly come as much from the progressive left as the radical right, as anyone schooled in the competing phrasebooks of mobilized theory can confirm: Christian nationalism, postliberalism, settler colonialism, intersectionality, white privilege, antiracism, the Great Replacement, identity politics, CRT [Critical Race Theory], DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion], and on and on.
These inflexible dogmas must be met with a clear liberal vision:
When confronted with a clear set of counterclaims about history, politics, economics, and human nature, most powerfully from the extreme right, from MAGA Republicans to the Alternative for Germany, pluralists need a more robust account of what it is they actually believe. We need a clearer idea of what pluralism is, what alternatives are on offer, and how to energize a specifically liberal pluralist worldview for our own time.
He summarizes that idea of liberal pluralism. “It simply requires that government be rooted in individual dignity, choice, and voice.” That shouldn’t be a hard message to get across, but having enjoyed a comparatively easy run in the postwar era, liberals have become complacent, assuming that the case for liberalism is self-evident.
Such a re-assertion of liberalism should draw on the work of John Stuart Mill, and his wife Harriet Taylor (whose contribution to Mill’s ideas is often unrecognized). That’s a lead in to what King sees as a fundamental principle of liberalism, gender equality:
Opposition to real equality between the sexes is the glinting thread that connects the authoritarianism of Putin with the cultural revanchism of Orbán, the Nazi-adjacent nostalgia of the Alternative for Germany with the “manoverse” of Trumpist social media, the “common-good conservatism” of the Catholic right with the Christian nationalism of Protestant evangelicals.