Damned Lies and Journalism

Oz polls show nothing can save this miserable govt. Election can not come soon enough.People decided and tuned out months ago.
— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) May 19, 2013

'The nation is drowning in debt. The federal government has lost control of public finances. The NBN is a disaster. Business is struggling because union thugs are destroying productivity growth. We are being overwhelmed with illegal boat arrivals. Refugees are living on welfare and bleeding us dry.'

If your main sources of news are the mass market Murdoch tabloids and the commercial radio shock jocks, it is a fair bet that the above statements might significantly reflect your view of the world. And it is fair bet that those beliefs will play a major role in how you vote in the federal election in September.

That's a pity, because those statements, which are ritually presented as "news" (not  opinion) by the likes of the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun, are not true. They are misrepresentations, they are distortions and, in some cases, they are outright lies manufactured by a media magnate seeking to deliver an election outcome which suits his commercial and ideological imperatives.

The sheer volume of this muck prompts one to ask where journalists stand. For instance, we constantly see  deceitful scare stories about public debt, devoid of context. In the case of this boogeyman, the News Ltd scribblers conveniently leave out that to ensure a liquid bond market, gross debt will rise if government  issuance is kept at a set ratio to the economy (as requested by  APRA, the RBA and other key institutions). They ignore that our net debt is among the lowest in the OECD, and they will ritually overlook that, in the eyes of bodies like the IMF, our debt is of no concern at all. These are facts. They are not 'left-wing' facts. They are facts.

The Murdoch press runs hysterical campaigns that this country is heavily taxed, that public spending is out of control or that the current government has increased the impost on consumers and business, when the truth is the Howard and Costello government was the highest taxing and spending in Australian history. But don't take Ross Gittins' word for it, ask the IMF.

On the national broadband network, the biggest public infrastructure project in Australia since the Snowy Mountains irrigation scheme, it is right and quite proper for the media to exercise scrutiny of any mismanagement or cost over-runs. That's their job. But anyone reading the daily beat-ups in the Murdoch press campaigning against  the NBN could be forgiven for concluding that News Corp has a vested commercial interest in seeing it fail.  On that score, the fact that Abbott and Turnbull chose Murdoch's Foxtel studio as the venue to unveil their alternative broadband scheme tells you everything you need to know about why the nation's most powerful media group is running such a hard line on this story.

The business press, meanwhile, manufactures "exclusives" which parrot CEOs warning of a productivity "crisis" in the economy, despite hard evidence that productivity has actually been improving in recent quarters. As the one or two sane voices remaining in the mainstream press have pointed out, these sort of pesky facts don't suit the preferred narrative of ruin and incompetence under Labor.

Debt and economy scaremongering one can live with. But it is the slanted and mischievous  coverage of boat arrivals, more than any other issue, that condemns  the state of mainstream tabloid journalism in this country. If you hadn't already noticed, no opportunity to push the buttons of fear and prejudice is wasted. If a fact can be bent sufficiently out of shape to stoke fears of an alien invasion, it will be done.

The irony is the facts about boat arrivals are freely available. As the prominent barrister, QC and human rights advocate Julian Burnside points out, it is NOT  illegal to seek asylum here. There is no queue for them to join. The number of refugees is  extremely small (1 for every 1000 Australians), most arrivals are by plane and asylum seeker numbers here are a fraction of those in other developed economies. We have about 4 million authorised arrivals a year. Boat people make up 0.2% of that. Yet we don't hear this. Why?

We don't hear this because a big chunk of the mainstream media has decided its job is to pander to ignorance, to push people's buttons, to recycle myths so as to generate emotional reactions and manufacture outrage that generates page impressions so the public looks at their paid ads.

But that's the media's problem. The media is not journalism. The media's business model is busted and it's searching for a way to bring back eyeballs to keep its declining advertising base happy. That has nothing to do with the professional obligations of journalists, which have not changed at all.

For those unfamiliar with quaint notions of professional standards, journalists are obliged by their code of ethics to "report and interpret honestly" and to strive "for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts".  They must not suppress relevant facts or give distorting emphasis and they must do their utmost to give a fair opportunity for reply.

So ask yourself: When did journalism become defined by an ability to just make stuff up so long as it attracts sufficient eyeballs? When did success in journalism become defined as a capacity for creating click-bait that panders to prejudice, ignorance and the ambitions of flaky political carpetbaggers?

When did business journalism become about supplying unpaid PR spin for rent-seeking lobbies seeking to pass off their own commercial interests as the public interest? At what point did economic journalists decide that the facts were just too inconvenient to fit a prevailing political narrative?

Finally, when did we sit back in Australia and decide to let a US citizen who presides over an organisation that hacks phones, promotes illegal wars and trashes corporate governance to promote regime change and run our democracy by remote?

And, ladies and gentlemen, Mr Murdoch does all of this in the name of freedom .

The God Complex

Once upon a time in politics - not that long ago, at least in human years - the mainstream media audience sat respectfully in the grandstands watching the game. Journalists, on the  other hand, were on first name terms with players and coaches and had a cosy, inside view of the action.

Now, as is increasingly evident, the audience is invading the pitch. The old insiders' game is breaking up. And the former participants and stenographers are clearly ruing the loss of clubby exclusivity. On Twitter, they can be seen pompously blowing their whistles and citing rules that no longer apply.

There are a handful of these former mainstream media referees in social media, cutely patronising everyone with an opinion as "partisan" and arrogantly casting themselves as Mr and Mrs Reasonable. Worse, they seem incapable of seeing the pathology of their own supposed "non-partisanship".

The concepts of 'the view from nowhere' and 'false equivalence' are well documented by US academic Jay Rosen. But many Australian MSM journalists seem to be having difficulties getting their heads around the concepts, preferring instead to hide behind the shield of fake objectivity.

For those who aren't familiar with these terms, the 'view from nowhere' is the reflexive position taken by journalists in which they place themselves at the comfortable and non-controversial centre between polarised extremes. Because they are neither "that" nor "this", they get to call themselves “impartial.”  As Rosen describes it, the view from nowhere particularly suits a two-party system because it posits there are only two views about any issue; this leaves them comfortably inside a beige demilitarized zone in the middle where Truth as Defined by Public Polling reigns.

"(The view from nowhere) is an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. Journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance."

False equivalence is part of the same strand of thinking that announces itself as fair and even-handed but that is really about escaping the responsibility of judgement. It's the "on the one hand, on the other" school of reporting that grants equivalence to cranks against established and well researched fact. Think of the mealy mouthed news stories that talk about the "vaccination debate" (whose side are you on?) or climate change. It frankly suits the media to turn every issue into a bipolar circus even if "the other side" is occupied exclusively by nutjobs, cranks and conspiracy theorists.

In this world, journalists act as boundary riders, policing what is and isn't admissable in any debate and establishing the terms of our discourse. They proudly project themselves as virtual ciphers interested only in the Truth, while declaring that everybody else is playing grubby politics or crude partisanship. It's a neat trick and serves to control the rules of the game in a way that suits journalists and their corporate masters.

But as Rosen has described it, the view from nowhere really only dates from about the mid-20th century when the media sought out mass audiences and found it commercially useful to position its editorials as a kind of "Voice of God", an omniscient referee in the sky with no stake in the game. Prior to this, however, the press was nakedly partisan and would frequently publish outright falsehoods to push the case of the political or business class its publications represented. Rightly or wrongly, we now seem to be returning to that world, which is why individual journalists who cling to the romantic notion of themselves as above it all are having such a hard time adjusting.

If journalists are to succeed in a dis-intermediated world, they are going to have to stop seeing themselves as boundary riders, referees and disembodied voices of a superior being and get in amongst it with everyone else. That doesn't mean, by the way, that they can't be fair and balanced and accurate. But the notion of absolute objectivity or the journalist as outsider needs to be retired.

After all, there is nothing unique about their views. For the most part, they have no information that is not available to everyone else. Much as they might imagine otherwise, they do not dictate the terms of the debate. They are not 'in charge' and above it all. And even in their most studied 'objectivity', they can be as partisan as anyone.

Of Human Bondage

An increasingly unhinged Australian mainstream media, with a few honourable exceptions, has been revving up the scary-o-meter in recent days about this country facing a future of debt, deficits and public penury for as far as the eye can see.
 

“A decade of deficits spells a bleak future for Australians,” was the headline on the increasingly tabloid ABC television news, warning of a crisis bigger than the one where Bates went to jail in Downton Abbey.  I spluttered over my warmed up risotto (my lovely wife was out at the movies) and quickly checked my Bloomberg terminal.

Nope. No crisis. In fact, the bond market had rallied on the day of the announcement of a $12 billion worsening in the budget bottom line.  Yields had fallen. In bond market speak, that means prices had risen. In other words, more people wanted to buy our government bonds.  No fears, then, of a supply glut.

For those not familiar with public financing, the government meets the gap between revenues and spending by issuing bonds, a sort of publicly traded IOU. As Australia is one of only eight nations in the world rated the rolled gold ‘AAA’ by all three major ratings agencies, this makes our bonds highly sought after.

In other words, the big funds in London and New York look at Australia and see a virtual South Seas Switzerland – strong public finances, solid growth, low unemployment, low inflation, good yields and politically stable.

Clearly, then, these poor deluded souls wasting their billions are not listening to the ABC News or reading the front pages of The AFR (‘Budget Hole Hits $12bln). Perhaps, they were looking instead at Rupert’s US financial daily, that lefty rag The Wall Street Journal, which last year described the Australia Government’s ‘AAA’ debt one of the few safe haven investments left in the developed world.

You see, this is what happens when you let political journalists loose on an economics story.  For these people, bonds have something to do with the money they will forfeit for spilling red wine on the carpet of their 80s rented apartments in Belconnen. Economic literacy is not the gallery’s strong point. Easier just to reheat the talking points supplied them by the political short-order chefs.

Which is why the routine with budget stories is to wheel out Chris Richardson of Deloitte Access Economics, position him Moses-like on a grassy knoll overlooking federal parliament, and get him to dip into his bulging knapsack of mangled metaphors about various dire states of in-hockedness.

Some perspective, then. The shortfall in the budget is about 1% of GDP. What does that mean? Imagine you’re a two-income household earning about $200,000 a year. You’ve done the household budget. It’s not good. You forgot to include Jasmine’s school trip, which is going to cost $2,000. That’s 1% of your household GDP. Well, that’s the position Australia is in. Cue the violin sonatas.

And what about THE DEBT?  Another analogy: Your household income is $200,000. Your mortgage is $20,000. Yes, $20,000. You are no worse off than Australia the economy. Are you worried?

Now some more perspective. Australia has an unemployment rate of 5.4%.  In the US, the economy leading the world out of recession, unemployment is 7.7%, in our commodity cousin Canada 7.0%, in the European Union about 11%, in Spain 27%. You can see these numbers on the OECD’s website here.

Another fact: Before the GFC, Spain was an exemplar of fiscal rectitude. It was so parsimonious it would have had Chris Richardson writhing in think tank ecstasy. In 2007, Spain posted a budget surplus, the second largest in the Eurozone. Clearly, then, we can’t blame budget recklessness for Spain’s position now.

Since the financial crisis, Australia has gone from 15^th to 12^th largest economy in the world. In that time, 900,000 new jobs have been created. This is a period when in much of the developed world, millions of jobs have been lost and millions of lives destroyed.

Now think about what would have happened to our budget position if the government here had taken the austerity route – that is had worn the hair shirt recommended by the mean-eyed tailors of the media. Tens of thousands of people would have been thrown out of work. More unemployed means more social spending. Fewer employed means lower consumer spending.

What do you think happens to the budget in that scenario? A hint: Take today’s “black hole” and dig much, much deeper. Then throw into that hole the bodies and dreams of the lives destroyed by unemployment, failed businesses, faltering health and education forgone.

So forget the cute, faked up, political narratives. These are the facts. If there is a budget black hole that we should be scared about, the financial markets are not telling us so. In fact, they are sending the opposite message. In any case, the hole is not significant in the scheme of things. And finally, the damage – not just fiscal, but human – would have been far, far greater if we had listened to the punishers and straighteners now lecturing us from their privileged positions.

None of this is intended to deny we have budget challenges. But don't believe those who say it is due to "out-of-control" spending. As a proportion of our overall growing economy, our public spending has remained relatively constant. What's happened is we got a big, temporary pay rise in the early 2000s via the commodity boom and then we made permanent changes to the budget (largely via tax cuts and middle class welfare) that mean when revenues fall, as we are seeing now, it has a bigger effect on the bottom line.

Be aware, also, that the high-flying Australian dollar - which is defying the usual sell signals of falling commodity prices and narrowing interest rate margins - is acting on a brake on much of the trade-exposed parts of the economy. And that's affecting tax revenues as well.  As we saw, the Australian dollar is so high partly because we are such a model of fiscal virtue and good governance. People overseas want to lend to us. And that means the government is borrowing at an extremely competitive rate. It's a good credit risk.

The important point for the average person is a budget surplus is not an end in itself. If you buy the austerity doctrine, you end up like the poor souls in Spain. You can't eat budget surpluses. Good economic policy is about ensuring we grow our common wealth in a sustainable way. And that means keeping people in work, creating the conditions for business to flourish and ensuring a level of equity and justice.

You won’t read this in the newspapers, because it doesn’t suit the story they want to sell you. It requires an understanding of economics and how financial markets work. Most of all, it requires a sense of perspective, which is in short supply in much of our political journalism these days. Shame.

• For accurate MSM reporting on the budget, see:
• Tim Colebatch in The Age
• Ross Gittins in the SMH
• Outside the mainstream media, I recommend:
• Ben Eltham in New Matilda
• Stephen Koukoulas in Market Economics

Reinventing Journalism

It is a painful time for many journalists. Cast aside from the failing industry that used to provide them with a secure living, they are confused, frustrated and in some cases downright angry that society no longer seems to put a dollar value on the skills they worked so hard to perfect.

That the wounds of mass redundancies are still raw was rammed home to me last week when I took part in a panel at an inner Sydney hotel organised by the Public Interest Journalism Foundation (PJIF) to "share ideas and experiences around innovation in journalism".

"These ideas about new media are all very fine, but we need to know how we're going to earn a living," was  a common refrain from some of those attending. Others expressed concern that no New Media enterprise would have the commercial heft to protect investigative reporters against lawsuits aimed at suppressing accountability journalism.

Suffice to say it became clear fairly early in the piece that these journalists didn't see digital media as likely to provide them with a reliable living.

Also on the panel were journalist and publisher Anne Summers, former Sydney Morning Herald social affairs writer and now blogger Adele Horin and freelance journalist and new media trainer Lesley Parker. The panel was moderated by Melissa Sweet, public health writer, coordinator of the health blog Croakey and president of the PIJF.

Each of us described how we have practised our craft outside the mainstream media environment. Of course, in my case, I no longer make a living as a journalist. I have a day job in the financial services industry. The fact is this blog is a labour of love and was never intended as a commercial enterprise. So the question inevitably came: How can you, with your funds management gig, offer anything to unemployed journalists about making a living in a post-industrial media world?

It was a reasonable question and one for which there's no pat answer. But just because I no longer work in the mainstream media doesn't mean I no longer care about journalism and the important role it plays in society. In many ways, I feel I have done some of my most public-spirited work as a writer since leaving the media  - in my paying job helping to educate people about sound investment principles and through this blog on media and journalism.

I sympathise with the plight of journalists who've lost their jobs. It is a tough adjustment when an industry that's provided a reliable income for decades implodes. But the fact is the days of Big Media have gone.  The business model is broken. While digital experiments may yield marginal revenues, newsrooms inevitably will be smaller and involve much more multi-tasking. Even if they were offered jobs back in that environment, I doubt many of the older journalists would enjoy the new environment very much.

While they don't have to be "tech heads", journalists who want to reinvent themselves are going to have to learn how some of the new digital tools work. And those who make sniffy denunciations of social media, as if they are above it all, are also going to have to change.

The danger is that a lot of journalists will unnecessarily limit their post-industrial-media options by clinging to a narrow definition of journalism and undervaluing their skills in other environments as organisations like universities bring journalism in-house. Those skills, rare in the world outside the media, include:

• communicating clearly
  
• helping experts talk directly to the public
• moderating and facilitating debate
• building online communities 
• aggregating reliable sources around public issues
• providing relevant context and background
• synthesising multiple strands of information into coherent narratives
• finding relevant information quickly and efficiently

Those skills can be employed commercially. But they also can serve the public interest. To make it work in a way that generates a living will require a lot more cross-discipline collaboration than journalists are used to  - with technology experts, with marketers, with academics and with business.

Providing a practical insight at the PIJF event was health academic Professor Simon Chapman who spoke of his experience with Choice magazine more than a decade ago in developing online communities in which readers were active participants in the editorial process. Former Age editor Andrew Jaspan's successful experiment with The Conversation is an example of journalists helping academics sharing their expertise in areas of public interest more widely. Melissa Sweet told of her own work for conference organisers providing accurate and non-sensationalist reports direct to  audiences, particularly in remote and regional areas and without the need for mainstream media coverage. In the US, philanthropic efforts like ProPublica are gaining traction.

OK, none of these initiatives look like The New York Times.  But the cosy cultural cocoon of the newsroom has gone. And the defiant tribalism of journalism - of being perpetual outsiders - won't work in this post-industrial context. They're going to have to invite people inside the tent and develop a more collaborative, open form of journalism - one that involves less distance from the public and greater immersion in the conversation that we are all having.

Ultimately, public interest journalism has a value irrespective of price. But somehow we need to bridge the practical challenge of ensuring that those who serve the public through their journalism are rewarded for it so it can be sustained. Change will be difficult. And there will be lots of false starts and blind alleys. But I'm sure that the best way forward involves collaboration, patience and a readiness to reinvent journalism by rediscovering journalism.

(For an outsider's view of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation forum, see this account from political blogger Andrew Elder).

See also: New definition of Citizen journalism  - The Australian

Media Stockholm Syndrome

'Twenty Ways to Bulk Up Your Cash'. That was the breathless headline in The Australian Financial Review on September, 27, 2005

 "It's shop till you drop for ordinary people with money to park," the article gushed. "And the range of investment options is so vast, it's very nearly an embarrassment of riches."

The most interesting trend, we were told, were nifty new high-yielding fixed income products called 'collateralised debt obligations' that had previously been exclusive to the big end of town but which were now available to retirees seeking higher yields to supplement their pensions.

But wait, there was more. Retirees worried about losing their dosh could buy capital protection by sinking their life savings into Asian hedge funds. Hubba Hubba!

Well, we know how that story ended. Those funky little securities - dubbed by Warren Buffet as weapons of mass wealth destruction - wormed their way into the global credit system and nearly blew it up, taking the savings of tens of millions of retirees and hard-working people with them.

Now, the causes of the GFC are complex and blame can safely be spread around reckless bankers, incompetent regulators, ratings agencies, rocket scientists and economists. But the financial press, supposedly a watchdog of the public interest against the shonks, deserves some scrutiny as well.

Is the financial media supposed to be a cheerleader for capital? Is its role primarily to act as a defacto marketing arm for the financial services industry to plug product to the "mums and dads"? Does it exist firstly to promote uncritically the agenda of business lobbies as synonymous with the public interest? It's worth asking those questions.

Indeed, the role of the financial media has been topical lately after a much read column by Fairfax journalist Paddy Manning who, at the cost of his job, blew the whistle on the erosion of editorial independence at the AFR, the rise of 'advertorials' (advertising dressed up as news) and a trend toward faked-up front page 'exclusives' that are essentially free PR for business lobbies and investment banks.

"The AFR’s business journalism is built on a fundamental contract between company and reporter: high-level access in exchange for soft coverage," Manning wrote. "Too often,  even for many of its own hard-pressed reporters’ liking, the result is PR-driven 'churnalism' which shows up as ‘drops’ ...'herograms’ for business leaders, unreadable roundtables and conference-linked spreads featuring plenty of happy snaps of business leaders with a glass of champagne or mineral water in hand.”

Manning is not alone in this criticism. And it is not coming from only one side of politics. Professor Sinclair Davidson, a conservative libertarian and senior fellow at free market think tank the IPA, has condemned creeping PR dressed up as business news and argues the AFR does itself no favours by being an uncritical cheer squad for one group or another.

"It  worries me – as an avid consumer of news and opinion – that the media should see its role as selling PR to its readership as opposed to providing a platform for advertising while providing news content," Davidson wrote in The Conversation. "Consumers should be as well-informed about business and economics as they are about politics. It is here that I think the Australian business media doesn’t serve its customers as well as it could or as well as it should."

To an extent, the financial press has always erred on the side of being too cosy with business. It's a professional hazard for journalists generally.  Long-term police reporters can end up identifying with policemen to the extent they write like one ('the offender decamped in a northerly direction'). Political journalists, stuck watching Canberra too long, can start to see the world through the lens of a party tactician and report politics as an end in itself.  And financial journalists can start to fancy themselves as investment bankers, economic gurus and business titans, despite having salaries a fraction of those they report on. (Christopher Skase took it a step further and actually became one).

This media version of Stockholm Syndrome results in journalists starting to see their roles (usually without being conscious of it) as unpaid spokespeople for the sections of society they report on. They come to imagine themselves as representatives of the milieu in which they move, their role being to advance uncritically the sacred cow concerns of business lobbies - productivity 'reform', lower and lower tax rates, deregulation and privatisation - regardless of whether or not it is good public policy. They mistake 'pro-business' for 'pro-market'.

This isn't to say that these calls by business should not be reported and that these arguments should not be made through the media. But it seems increasingly clear that many business and financial journalists see no wider public role in their reporting. They are there to advance the cause of business or to help investment banks ramp IPOs or to provide 'investors' (speculators) with stock tips or to move the market or simply to sell newspapers.  Some aspire to being an Alan Kohler or a Robert Gottliebsen, a guru perceived as having privileged information about the market.

But just as in other branches of journalism, the sense of a Fourth Estate responsibility - of holding the powerful to account and representing the interests of people as citizens (not merely as consumers or investors or shareholders) - is fading or non-existent, at least at an institutional level. This has little to do with individual journalists getting worse, in my view. But it's more a reflection of the economic pressures on the industry, the real-time nature of financial news that mistakes noise for signal (just as in politics), the growing complexity of finance, the competition from blogs and online tipsheets and the dwindling resources for thorough, fact-filled journalism.

Just after the 2008 financial crisis, London School of Economics professor Damien Tambini published a paper entitled 'What is Financial Journalism For? Ethics and Responsibility at a time of Crisis and Change' (PDF), Tambini argued that with the boundary between news, PR, spin and paid advertorial growing ever fainter, it was becoming even more imperative that journalists were consciously aware of and adhered to the supposed ethical responsibilities of their profession.

"Ultimately, do journalists have a broader professional duty to ensure that corporate malpractice comes to light, or is their role merely to provide whatever their readers want?" Tambini asked. "And are those readers basically to be addressed as real or potential investors or as citizens with a variety of views?"

 Clearly, the AFR has decided to tailor the newspaper to a single view of the world. That may win them a few friends at the big end of town. But as a former financial journalist who now works in the financial markets, I've encountered a breadth of opinions about the economy, tax, industrial relations and climate change that belies the assumed Cycloptic worldview of the Fin's front page. Long term, that can't be a good business strategy.

Catering to a single class with a single ideology also ignores the millions of Australians who have a stake in the financial system through their superannuation, their jobs, their mortgages, their taxes, their business and credit card loans and all the risks piled ever higher onto their shoulders by a capitalist structure that so often patronises them as dumb consumers, passive 'mums and dads' and suckers to be sold another dud.

Who looks after these people? Who argues their corner, if not financial journalists?

Freedom for Whom?

Freedom! Is there any word more abused than this in the debate about politics and media standards? From Rupert Murdoch, his editors and commentators and the ubiquitous IPA, the rhetoric of 'freedom' is now ritually used to forestall any examination of media power.

This American style hand-on-heart eulogising of freedom reached a crescendo recently with the failure of the Gillard government's media reforms. Having gone as far as sending its own representative to make a submission at the Senate hearing into the legislation, the IPA predictably released a statement  welcoming the ditching of the reforms as a "victory for freedom of speech in Australia".

As always, though, freedom is never clearly defined by the conservative forces mouthing it as a principle. Instead, it serves for them as a useful "feel good" term that no-one in their right mind would ever consider circumscribing. Indeed, it helps the commercial interests of the shady forces they represent to conflate every attempt to improve media standards and public accountability with a threat to freedom.

So what is achieved is a confusion in the public's mind about freedom of speech, freedom of thought and expression, traditional press freedom and the neo-liberal concept of freedom of the market. It's deliberately woolly rhetoric and it results in people rallying around somebody else's flag. Which is why it helps to define terms first.

 In the report of Lord Justice Leveson, the man who conducted the UK media inquiry, freedom of the press and freedom of speech are defined as two quite different concepts:

"Freedom for commercial mass media businesses (‘corporate speech’) is a very different proposition from the freedom of individual self-expression (‘personal speech’). The latter....has its roots in a very personal conception of what it is to be human...This argument has no direct relevance to press freedom because, put simply, press organisations are not human beings with a personal need to be able to self-express. In any event, an argument for free speech for the powerless will not make a case for free speech for a powerful organisation."

So if the principle of defending media freedom does not equate to freedom of speech, what are we defending here? The most common arguments are that the media has a special role in holding the powerful to account, in representing a diverse range of opinions and, at its most essential level, in providing the public with accurate information so it can make fully informed decisions in a democracy.

Yet it is notable that in all their carefully engineered hysteria, the Freedom Squad have steered clear of any examination over whether those important and valid roles of the media are being performed  adequately.  It is easier to stand on a soapbox, print photoshopped caricatures and chant about threats to freedom than to examine whether the mainstream media is doing its job properly - publishing accurate information, providing a diversity of views and holding power to account, including the power of the media itself.

Woefully unreported in all the recent tennis match coverage of the aborted media reforms ('how will it play in the opinion polls?') was the thoughtful testimony of Press Council chair, Professor Julian Disney, to the Senate hearing on the legislation. Disney made the point that press freedom does not exist in isolation and is about much more than "we can say whatever we like". For freedom to exist, Disney says, people must be given accurate information, a point he reinforced by noting that Australian newspapers could not even be trusted to report his council's adjudications accurately.

"If people are to have freedom of expression, they need access to reliable information. If they are fed false information, then the views that they form and they might want to express will not be the views that they would form and express if they were well informed. Access to unreliable, distorted information is an attack on freedom of expression."

In this way, poor media standards - as we have seen in the continuing distorted, deceitful and manipulated coverage of the media reforms in the Murdoch press - are a bigger threat to this society's freedoms than anything we have seen from the Gillard government.

Meanwhile, real threats to journalistic freedom - as we are seeing now with five Australian journalists facing court action to reveal their confidential sources by Gina Rinehart and others - receive only fleeting coverage in the same newspapers, if at all.

So it seems clear that the fist-pumping editorialising of our media about their service to democracy is really a self-interested device to mask their own untrammeled power, and their role as players pushing the ideological and commercial interests of their proprietors. The 'freedom' they espouse is really the freedom of the market, not a civic concept, but one purely related to capitalism.

Nowhere is it countenanced that a highly concentrated media - as we have in Australia - can just as easily be a malevolent influence on democracy by deliberately misinforming its readers to further its own agenda , by using its power to slur and silence its critics and by thwarting attempts to improve accountability.

Ultimately, freedom cannot exist on its own. It requires truth and justice also to prevail. But you won't see the Murdoch press and the IPA championing those ideals.

Sanity Break

As the Dream of the Ruddstoration fades, we can begin to imagine other ways of reporting the perpetual political circus of Canberra. This police reporter's newscast from Ireland's RTE has the tone about right, I think: