Politics Down Under

Media bias—a favourite claim of politicians throughout the world—is a hot topic in Australia. So hot, in fact, that the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) in Melbourne, Australia, has established a Media Monitoring Unit modelled after The Fraser Institute’s National Media Archive (NMA).

The Archive’s Kate Morrison travelled to Melbourne to assist with the new unit and its first project—an analysis of the Australian federal election. Using content analysis techniques developed by the NMA, the IPA’s Media Unit assessed how four TV news programs covered the policies of Australia’s three main political parties—Liberal, Labor, and National.

The IPA’s findings received widespread publicity in newspaper and on radio, with an editorial in the national newspaper, The Australian, suggesting that the study may have been responsible for making Australia’s public broadcaster’s coverage more balanced during the second half of the campaign.

In Australia, charges of media bias— particularly concerning the ABC (Australia’s counterpart to the CBC)—are frequent. Last May, Communications Minister Richard Alston charged that the ABC was biased in its reporting of a bitter and, at times, violent dispute between dock workers, represented by the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), their employer, Patrick Stevedore Pty Ltd., and the Australian government.

In response, the ABC commissioned an independent report from Professor Philip Bell, Foundation Chair of the Department of Media Communications at the University of New South Wales. The subsequent Bell Report found that the public broadcaster’s TV news and top public affairs programme was “balanced over an extended period.”

Predictably, Bell’s findings were not the final word on ABC bias. During the recent Australian federal election, the ABC’s alternative rock radio station came under fire for promoting an anti-government music festival. A week later, an ABC radio interviewer asked the prime minister if a goods and services tax (GST) would lead to an increase in the price of heroin. The GST was the main election issue, accounting for almost a half of all policy debate on the four main TV news programs, and Prime Minister Howard was absolutely outraged at the question.

During that week, the IPA’s Media Unit released its first results, highlighting two findings: one, that TV news reporting of policies was highly negative; and two, that the ABC favoured the Labor Party by a factor of over 2 to 1.

The Australian newspaper reported on September 18, 1998 that, “[Prime Minister] Howard said this week’s report by the conservative think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, saying that ABC-TV’s election coverage was biased against the Coalition [Liberal Party plus rural-based National Party] was ‘right on the money.’”

However, over the duration of the election campaign, ABC’s coverage was no more biased than that of its main competitor—Kerry Packer’s Channel Nine—and was less biased than the other commercial networks, Channel Seven and Channel Ten. During the first two weeks of the campaign, of the four programs, ABC-TV news was the most hostile towards the Howard government, but during the final week of the election campaign, ABC news was the most balanced. The sudden shift in ABC-TV news coverage was likely due, in part, to the IPA’s monitoring project.

Unlike other media studies conducted in Australia, the IPA’s Media Unit assessed each and every comment about the Coalition (Liberal plus National) or Labor Party policies. The measure of balance was based on the ratio of pro-Labor-plus-anti-Coalition comments to pro-Coalition-plus-anti-Labor comments. This methodology does not measure subtle differences, but does provide an excellent overall gauge of the stations’ reporting practices. (Results are available on the IPA’s web site at http:\\www.ipa.org.au.)

In the previously mentioned Bell Report, the principal measure of balance was the number of “sound bites” allocated to the principal agents—Patricks, the union, and the government. Bell concluded that the ABC programs “acted professionally and fairly insofar as balance and accuracy can be judged.”

However, Bell’s study excluded journalists’ commentaries. How did reporters characterize events, describe the main players and assign motive or blame? What arguments for and against the principal agents’ positions were most often asserted? The Institute of Public Affairs’s Media Unit is planning, as its second project, to conduct a full content analysis study of the ABC and Channel Nine television news coverage of the waterfront dispute, with results to be released in February, 1999.

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Last Modified: Wednesday, October 20, 1999.