On the Voice, ‘both sides’ journalism risks giving racism a platform

Peter Dutton is attempting to shut Australian media out of the feel-good bipartisan acceptance of the Uluru Statement from the Heart by locking the opposition into rejecting the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. And in trying to make it party-political, he’s trapping the media to “both-sides” the debate along the fissures of the traditional Labor-Liberal divide.

It’s time, says US journalist Wesley Lowery in a key essay in Columbia Journalism Review, to abandon “performative neutrality, paint-by-the-numbers balance, and thoughtless deference to government officials”.

The opposition leader’s strategy insists the media cover the Voice as politics as usual, rather than recognise it as a moment to affirm a critical national project that meets the demands of a multicultural — indeed, multiracial — democracy.

In an interview with Nine’s Peter FitzSimons on the weekend, ABC Radio National morning presenter Patricia Karvelas — a long-time reporter on the Uluru statement — rose to the bait, saying: “Since Peter Dutton broke what was historically an attempt at bipartisanship, I think this Voice debate now is very partisan, and so I am being a stickler for not taking a position.” It came with a caveat: “I really think my job this year is to call out the lies and say, when appropriate, ‘No, that’s not the case.'”

But the narrow party-political frame of Canberra politics can never be an adequate way of understanding and explaining the offering in the Uluru statement.

Nine columnist Niki Savva put the dilemma bluntly: “While it is not true to say that every Australian who votes No in the Voice referendum is a racist, you can bet your bottom dollar that every racist will vote No.”

The result? Racist memes and tropes becoming centred in the No argument, particularly on social media, with “both sides” reporting of the referendum amplifying and normalising that racism.

In the midst of 2020’s Black Lives Matters protests, Lowery (who had won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 2015 protests) shook up the industry with his call for journalism of “moral clarity”.

In this latest essay, he calls out the trap — like Dutton’s muddying the clarity of the Voice — of an “obsessive focus on the minutiae of national politics”. He draws from James Fallows’ famous 1996 essay “Why Americans Hate the Media” to explain how this focus presents “every public issue as if its ‘real’ meaning were political in the meanest and narrowest sense of that term — the attempt by parties and candidates to gain an advantage over their rivals”.

He repeats the call for clarity over moral issues, to resist the coward’s qualifiers like “racially tinged” or “racially charged”. “Justified as “objectivity,” Lowery writes, “they are in fact its distortion.”

Despite what critics (including Lowery’s former editor Martin Baron) have said, he’s not repudiating the journalistic imperative of a truth built on footings of fact. He’s damning journalistic “inoffensiveness” dressed up as objectivity, “necessitated by an advertiser- and audience-based business model”.

The US press, Lowery says, too often continues to see itself as a white product, created by white journalists, based on the sensibilities of white readers and for the benefit of white communities.”

Australia’s 20th-century media (identified in Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” as the “print capitalism” central to the rise of nationalism) built the 20th-century settler nationalism project that former prime minister John Howard so successfully co-opted. Now, new Australia — young, diverse, more educated — has moved on from challenging Australia’s traditional settler media to adapt to the post-settler country we’ve stumbled into.

“The mainstream press,” says Lowery, “has been incapable of providing the journalism necessary to best serve and defend multiracial democracy because the mainstream American press has never, in practice, believed in multiracial democracy.”

Too harsh for Australia. Since the 1980s, the Australian media has been a critical — if halting — part of the country’s cultural and social journey. Both Nine and the ABC have been ready to engage with the Voice as the moment when the country’s politics catch up. Even parts of News Corp demonstrate a yearning to get on the right side of history.

Moving forward requires reaching back to journalism’s best values.

Lowery’s advice? “Diversity must be the cornerstone of our profession … We must value truth, democracy, and the equal and fair treatment of all people. We should stand up for the vulnerable — who are not voiceless; rather they are unheard by a society and institutions that refuse to listen — while taking heed that we do no harm.“

Does the Australian media need to change how it covers the Voice debate? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.