The bias of Australian journalists. (Media).

I have rarely attended elections in any country, certainly not a democratic one, where the newspapers have displayed more shameless bias.

--W.F. Deedes

WHEN I GAVE a paper on "How the News is Made in Australia" at the beginning of May, containing some observations which I was at pains to stress were my own, I knew what would follow. Not so much that the first journalist who asked a question would be shaking with rage; what I knew was that I would be yet again in a tumbril driven by that latterday Robespierre, Stuart Littlemore, with David Salter leading the knitting in the front row. But Stuart Littlemore's demolition job of me on the night of Monday 14th May only proved my point, which is that the power of the media has largely devolved down to the journalists.

It was classic Littlemore. Film and text carefully edited--with voice-over--to caricature the victim so as to minimise Stuart's Jacobin line. And of course, never an unedited live interview. Stuart doesn't like them. His last live interview was with the king of American media-watchers, Steve Brill. When Stuart tried his usual tirade against the media, Brill summed him up in an instant: rather than the solution, Littlemore was part of the problem. "I think you are more arrogant than the most arrogant journalist I have met anywhere in the world."

That produced the longest sulk ever broadcast on Australian television. Like Lot's wife, Stuart became a veritable pillar of salt, dissolving before our eyes. Then to Jennifer Byrne's surprise, he even suggested he was not paid by the ABC! No, Stuart won't have a bar of the live interview on his televised opinion column. The victim might answer back--or worse--present a cogent argument which undermines Stuart's line.

On this occasion I must thank him, profusely. He has strengthened my case.

It is the journalists who decide what is newsworthy, how that news will be presented, and what spin to put on it. And as Professor John Henningham found in 1996, your average political journalist is not your average Australian. There is undoubtedly a greater degree of homogeneity in the social, cultural and political values a ad opinions of Australia's journalists than in comparable countries. Unleashed from the anonymity of a craft patiently learned as apprentices, and thus from close control and supervision, the journalist corps has achieved stardom and reigns almost supreme. Littlemore is a classic example. No one would seriously suggest that he is the mouthpiece of the ABC Board, or its Chairman Donald McDonald, or of Jonathan Shier. If Littlemore is a captive, it is only of his own tired political correctness. Which of course he is entitled to be--as he was entitled to advance reasons why I should resign. But under any of the ethical codes, including those which Littlemore may care to espouse, I was entitled to give my side.