Guest Post: Is the Media Biased Against the Right of Politics?

A guest post from a reader:

This question has been debated a lot and on the Right the answer is invariably, yes.

Having followed the media carefully since the election it is my view that it is extremely hard to deny that assertion.  Let me share some insight as to how this has occurred.

I am not going to discuss Winston Peters and how his comments are reported.  This is newsworthy and would be so irrespective of the political backdrop in my view.  Although as always the blending of news and opinion is irritating.  There is a world of difference between a politician actually having lost control and a journalistic assertion that he has.  If the PM has agreements in place about what his colleagues can and cannot say then by definition he has not lost control when they are followed.  Actually journalists I do not give a shot for your deduced conclusions when you have interviewed only your keyboard to reach them.

TV ONE Policy Reporting

For the past month TV One has on a regular basis run stories that follow the same trite formula:

1. Pick a new government policy.

2. Find a perceived loser under the policy.

3. Get them to moan or do it for them.

The bias in this simplistic nonsense is the level of analysis which occurs.  The Right believes in prudence.  By definition it likes to save and spend carefully rather than borrow and spray.

What journalism does is that it treats the funding of anything as neutral or irrelevant and discusses only the impacts arising from that spending.  This inherently favours the Left of politics.

Let me express it this way.  Have you ever seen an item which takes a proposal from say a government like the last one which involves copious amounts of borrowed spending and analyses it in terms of the impact of future borrowing, the crimping of the private sector, the impact on tax rates, inflation and so on?

Similarly, have you ever seen reporting on proposals from the new government which sets them in the context of running balanced books, paying down debt and avoiding some of the problems mentioned above?

You just won’t see it.  All that will be reported is that some group or another is advantaged or not by the end result of what is spent. 

Katie Bradford why not actually use your talents to get under the hood?

Journalists Don’t Do Logic

In a similar way journalists appear  incapable of placing any proposal in the context of wider philosophical principles or values, and have no grasp of logic.

Look at the proposal to remove the smoking ban which doesn’t exist yet.

The Right generally places greater emphasis on individual choice and responsibility.  That is not nothing.  It matters.  

It is self-evident that a right-of-centre government will draw the line between paternalistic prohibition of society’s evils and freedom to make mistakes in a different place than a left-of-centre government.  That is a perfectly reasonable and debateable set of values.

Have you heard anything in the media that implicitly or explicitly acknowledges the right to differ in that way?

Rather in the same way that TV One can’t get below the trite and superficial in policy matters the whole sector lacks the wit to see or acknowledge that different perspectives result in different policies and different boundaries.  It once again focuses on the immediate, calls it harm and uses it to bludgeon the government.

The clincher here though is the utter unwillingness to see this reversal against the larger backdrop of every policy choice around harm that a government can make.

My point is best explained thus:

1. Government could ban cars and save many lives.

2. Government could shut down the internet and stop scammers and hate-crime and improve mental health.

3. Government could require all buildings to survive a force 9.5 earthquake and save lives.

4. Government could put centre barriers on every road in the country and save lives.

When one thinks about that one realises the choice of the new government is but one of an infinite range of choices it could make of fundamentally the same type which reflect its values and philosophies.

As such the journalistic outrage is banal, infantile and I suspect deliberate.

Special mention to Lisa Owen here who in interviewing Dr Shane Reti adopted such a vile tone she should in my view have been invited to express her questions more civilly before he answered.  

Hyperbole is Only Wrong if Coming from the Right

I leave you with one last thought.

Imagine the journalistic hysteria if a member of the current government asserted that teaching young people about homosexuality represents the systemic rape and perversion of our children.

Set that alongside the total non-response to Debbie Ngarew-Packer accusing the current government of deliberate systemic genocide of Maori.