Out with the quackery, in with principled, honest and independent media

Lindsay Tanner was the first person I heard argue that Australian democracy was on a downhill slide and the media was largely to blame. As he wrote in Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy:

After spending much of my life dedicated to the serious craft of politics, I have to admit that I am distressed by what it is becoming. Under siege from commercial pressures and technological innovation, the media … has little tolerance for complex social and economic issues … [and is undermining] the quality of our democracy … from within. 

This thesis was — and remains — an easy sell to most Australians. If you don’t work in or near government, the media is your sole portal to what’s being done in your name. No wonder when things get ugly or messy, the messenger gets the blame.

But while I have long argued that Australia’s democracy was unravelling long before the media fell apart, there is no question that there is a problem — a serious problem — in parts of the media, and that without an independent and properly functioning press, democracy cannot survive. 

The founders of American democracy understood that, which is why journalism is the only profession the bill of rights explicitly mentions and protects. Even Australia’s notoriously taciturn constitution has been found by the High Court to imply a freedom of political communication that ensures those who speak about politics in ways MPs don’t like can’t be censored or jailed.

The bottom line is that in a democracy voters have to know how those they’ve elected are doing and can’t be expected to rely on those same politicians to tell them. 

In other words, if we didn’t have an independent press already we’d have to invent one. 

So the press is essential and must be independent from government. But for democracy to thrive, what are the essential characteristics of the information we need it to provide? 

Let’s start with shared facts.

The most disturbing aspect of the declining standards of some mainstream media outlets is not just their willingness to broadcast unverified information as fact, but to share what they know — or should know — to be lies. More chillingly, such outlets endorse the Putinesque view that “nothing is true, and everything is possible” — that facts don’t exist, or they might as well not, given we have no trusted means to verify them as real and unbiased. 

But of course, facts do exist. Indeed their persistence in the face of being ignored is how we know they are facts. Back in the heyday of mainstream media — before Fox and the internet — the existence of facts and their foundational role in media reporting and as the basis of expert commentary was unquestioned. While we had plenty of viewpoint difference — including by the close of the 20^th century from people who weren’t white men — we all shared the same facts. 

This meant confusing disagreements about whether a war was actually taking place somewhere, or who won an election in the absence of demonstrable reasons for doubt, just didn’t happen. Sure someone like Roger Stone might have had a crack at confusing things, but he and his ilk couldn’t find each other on Facebook, and back at the news desk editors and fact-checkers did their jobs and filtered the rubbish out. 

When this changed at the start of the new millennium, I was among the first to notice. An abortion rights activist at the time, I was appalled at how a pro-life activist schooled in US tactics began selling her ideas under the banner of feminism. How did she do it? By falsely claiming to be a bioethicist to journalists used to scrutinising content for inaccuracies but not credentials and leaving her long pro-life history out.

As she understood then, and we know for certain now, credentials are among the most critical information news consumers use to decide who and what to trust. 

While this was the first direct shot at media conventions — conventions that had evolved over more than a century to achieve the interconnected goals of informing the public and maintaining public trust — it wouldn’t be the last. The manipulation of the balance requirement came next, with fringe academics claiming the same amount of real estate in the papers and on radio and TV as scientists representing the overwhelming academic consensus that climate change is dangerous, caused by humans and happening now. 

Shared facts, honest credentials and zero-tolerance for quackery. That’s what our democracy was short of before the internet came to town and wrecked what remained of journalistic conventions designed to foster the marketplace of ideas. 

Next week we’ll look at what’s happened, where we are now, and what needs to happen restore an information eco-system conducive to democracy.