There is a bias built into every journalist, regardless of political leanings or their employer.
That bias is to favour whatever interpretation of facts that makes the best, most arresting story.
The more unexpected something is, the greater its news value. The story, journalists learn, lies in the gap between how things are meant to be and what they really are.
So it is not news to say “parents love their children” or “hospitals care for patients” or “government works competently”. That is what we expect.
The result of all this is a media default setting towards the negative. This bias, if not checked, leads us to over-interpret and hyper-ventilate. A mistake becomes proof of incompetence. A problem becomes a crisis.
Now, for the first time in most of our lives, we are in the middle of a real worldwide crisis – one that reaches into every aspect of our private and public lives. Coronavirus tests us as a society and as individuals.
Research by the Public Interest Journalism Initiative suggests that at times like these, people greatly value trusted sources of news and information.
A survey done in April this year – at the beginning of the pandemic and after the bushfires – found that 86 per cent of Australians use news media daily, and the vast majority (81 percent) described public interest journalism as important. That rose to 86 per cent for such journalism during natural disasters and public health crises.
What we don’t know – and PIJI plans to do more research on this – is what people regard as deserving of the tag “public interest journalism”.
Yet despite these survey results, ask anyone whether the media has helped or hindered them through the last few months and you are likely to get, at best, a mixed response.
For decades the whole edifice of commercial media has been in a crisis of public trust, and most media companies – and potentially even the public broadcasters - are actively engaged in further “mining” the dwindling reservoirs of that trust.
Added to this is the explicit and toxic partisanship of some outlets – yes, I am talking mainly but not only about News Corporation. We simply can’t afford to put up with this dysfunction anymore. We have to either disengage from it or find some way of changing it.
Coronavirus is like black ink on white china. It shows up all the cracks – including in the media. And I think the last few months suggest journalists are not as useful as we are going to need them to be.
Particularly in Victoria there has been real trauma. And while it now looks as though Australia is doing well in world terms, the pandemic is still with us.
Added to that is the climate change emergency, with the likelihood of more frequent natural disasters, economic strain and social dislocation.
Meanwhile the international situation is more unstable than at any time since the second world war.
Hard times are with us now, and more lie ahead.
I think this suggests that journalism needs to re-examine its default settings and inbuilt biases – as well as recognising its inherent strengths.
I am emphatically not arguing for censorship.
During the Second World War, the Australian media was strictly censored. Many news organisations willingly cooperated. They believed censorship was necessary to prevent valuable information falling into enemy hands and to maintain high morale at home.
For example, when Darwin was bombed by the Japanese in 1942 the official death toll was given as 17. In fact, it was closer to 250. Decades later, the true story of that attack came out.
That kind of censorship is repugnant, but we shouldn’t assume Australian governments wouldn’t try it again. There have been too many attacks on media freedom in Australia in recent decades to allow for complacency.
The Vietnam War was not censored and the images and stories from the front line played a part in making an unjust war unpopular (and ultimately unsustainable) for the democracies involved.
Social media makes censorship harder – though not impossible, as the Chinese Government has demonstrated.
If Darwin was bombed today the story would be out – with pictures, video and comments – before anyone could act to suppress it, and before any journalists got to the front line.
For all the faults of social media, it is surely a good thing that it can act as a counter to the suppression of information by the powerful.
So what would the media’s role be if the Darwin bombing happened in 2020?
First thing - straight facts, not spun or obscured. A lack of clear reliable information fosters panic and confusion. There is nothing more guaranteed to cause social disruption than a noticeable gap between what the government tells you is happening, and your lived experience.
Then, surely, an embrace of the concerns of the community, which would include holding government to account for the relief effort, but also enabling a civic conversation and response.
There is good research to suggest that while people may experience journalism as being corrosive – always pointing out problems and rarely offering solutions – the cumulative effect is far from destructive.
Mass media keeps us connected. We’re thinking about the same things, even if we disagree on the issues. As journalism historian Mitchell Stephens has observed, sharing news keeps us broadly oriented in the same direction. The long term effect is cohesive. It is what makes us into a community.
I think journalists and their audiences should be thinking about that role. I am not suggesting for a moment that the media should minimise problems, cease holding governments and the powerful to account or stop investigating and reporting on misconduct and the many injustices in our society.
But we should remember the other part of their mission – social cohesion.
In my early days as a journalist, I was taught to reflect before putting finger to keyboard.
The question my mentors made me ask was “is there an innocent interpretation of these facts? Is there another way of looking at things?” And, of course, there nearly always is. I think journalists need to recommit to that discipline.
We need to tell the story on the evidence and check ourselves before we turn problems into disasters.
Meanwhile, it has never been easier to hold a civic conversation. The mission is not only to identify problems in society, but also be part of the attempt to find solutions.
Journalists need to own, and live up to, their civic role, and become explicitly civic-minded.
That, I suspect, will bring audiences back to news media. Free information and misinformation is everywhere, but the future of news media relies on what people are prepared to support. We should reflect on that.
Information first, as comprehensive as possible, with no gloss or spin. Then conversation.
In finding the facts, journalists will and should continue to be pains in the arse. Finding things out is far more difficult and complicated than most understand. It involves persistence and troubling questions.
But while scepticism is a necessary qualification for a journalist, cynicism is not.
In fact in times like these, cynicism is best seen as a moral and professional failing. We need grounds for hope.
If there is no civic society, there will be no journalism and no democracy worth having.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of many books and numerous articles and essays. She is also a journalism academic and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. She has won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism, a Foreign Press Association Award and a number of Quill Awards, including for her reporting from the Philippines with photojournalist Dave Tacon.
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