Rupert was right to worry

“We understand Newspoll because we own it.” Has there ever been a clearer statement of proprietorial arrogance from the mainstream media than this?

The statement was published a few weeks ago as part of a big dummy-spit editorial in Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspaper. This was one episode in a dust-up between the mainstream media and the blogosphere, and it tells us quite a lot about what is possible for “stand alone” operatives and bloggers in the new media world.

Some background. The blogosphere in Australia has yet to gain the political clout of the best US sites, for reasons that have been discussed by leading blogger Mark Bahnisch in On Line Opinion. This year’s federal election will be the first in which mainstream newspapers have lost their near monopoly on analysis and comment.

It would be a mistake to overestimate the impact of bloggers and independent online media. I am not suggesting it can yet sway election results. Nevertheless, it is being felt.

Recently another professional public opinion pollster, Denis Muller, wrote for Crikey that the best bloggers provided more in depth comment and analysis than the mainstream media. According to Muller:

Though small in number, (the bloggers) exert new accountability on the media and pollsters alike, providing a concrete example of how the Net is democratising the media, if in a small and limited way. Mumble, Poll Bludger, Possums Pollytics and Oz Politics are four examples. Here the poll tragic can lose himself in a maze of analysis, much of it far more insightful and daring than anything you find in the mainstream media. They live off the data supplied by the media pollsters - Newspoll, Nielsen, Morgan, Galaxy - but burrow down into the data, compare one poll with another, show trends, and feed in related data such as current betting odds.

In other words, the mainstream media may own the polls, but they don’t necessarily understand them as well as sections of the audience.

The fuss that led to The Australian’s “we own it” dummy spit had been brewing for some time. The Australian has been dubbed the “Government Gazette” in sections of the blogosphere because of its perceived pro-Howard bias. This isn’t entirely fair. The paper has broken many stories embarrassing to Howard - most notably award-winning reports of the Australian Wheat Board’s shameful role in bribing Saddam Hussein in the lead-up to the Iraq war. But as well The Australian has been strongly identified with the government’s intellectual agenda, providing both turf and ammunition in the continuing “culture wars” in which Howard and his supporters have demonised the left and sought to re-cast Australia’s understanding of its history.

For some time bloggers have observed that The Australian‘s political editor, Dennis Shanahan, seems over-willing to emphasise anything in public opinion polls that can be seen as positive for the government. Shanahan protests that his record is its own defence. He got it right last federal election, for example, when many pundits were predicting a Labor victory. But the criticism has clearly stung. The tensions all came to a head after this piece by Shanahan provoked a flurry of online criticism. Shanahan and his headline writer seemed to be straining to pull a positive for the Government out of poll results that really hadn’t shifted, and showed that defeat for Howard was highly likely. Shanahan responded to his blogosphere critics defensively, and got another bollocking from his readers in the comments section as a result.

All good healthy debate so far, but then it got nasty. Peter Brent, who runs the leading psephological blog Mumble, reported that Australian editor Chris Mitchell had rung to say the paper would “go” him for criticising Shanahan. This was followed by an Australian editorial that did indeed “go” Brent, other bloggers, and commentators on Crikey (which I write for, and which is Australia’s first e-mail based news service). The Australian editorial - more than 1,000 words - is worth reading in total, but here are some choice paragraphs.

The measure of good journalism is objectivity and a fearless regard for truth. Bias, nonetheless, is in the eye of the beholder and some people will always see conspiracy when the facts don’t suit their view of the world. This is the affliction that has gripped, to a large measure, Australia’s online news commentariat that has found passing endless comment on other people’s work preferable to breaking real stories and adding to society’s pool of knowledge.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the fortnightly fury that accompanies The Australian’s presentation of Newspoll, the nation’s most authoritative snapshot of the political landscape.

[Online commentators] claim to understand the mainstream but in reality represent a clique that believes what it considers to be the evils of the Howard Government position on Iraq, climate change, and Work Choices to be self-evident truths. They despair that Mr Howard has not suffered the same collapse in public support as US President George W Bush and Newspoll makes it clear Mr Howard still enjoys very strong support in the electorate. Such commentators clearly have a market because there are a lot of people who want to have their own prejudices endlessly confirmed. But they should not kid themselves they are engaged in proper journalism and real reporting.

On almost every issue it is difficult not to conclude that most of the electronic offerings that feed off the work of The Australian to create their own content are a waste of time. They contribute only defamatory comments and politically coloured analysis. Unlike Crikey, we understand Newspoll because we own it. Martin O’Shannessy understands Newspoll because he runs it and Sol Lebovic understands Newspoll because he started it. The results of our analysis speak for themselves over 20 years.

The blogosphere erupted, mainly in delight at being taken notice of, but also in laughter. The Australian branch of News Limited, it seems, saw itself as uniquely qualified to detect bias, and uniquely free from “political colour”. This, bloggers commented, would be laughable were it not so obviously the product of tunnel vision.

It could also be remarked that public opinion polls are surely partly owned by the many members of the public whose opinions are picked up and strained through the mesh. What News Limited owns is a methodology, a brand name and the means of publication. They do not own the opinions, nor the proper interpretation of those opinions.

To make matters worse, News Limited then appeared to censor one of its own bloggers, Tim Dunlop. Dunlop had written this post commenting on the editorial. He wrote:

If bias is in the eye of the beholder, then there are a lot of “beholders” out there who think The Australian is biased, particularly in its coverage of polling data. The evidence for this is not just [to] found in the blogosphere but on their own pages where their columns and articles often fill up with criticism from their own readers accusing them of spinning information in favour of the Howard Government. In attacking the “online commentariat” they are also attacking a sizeable sampling of their own readership.

But Dunlop’s post was pulled within the hour by News Limited management, against Dunlop’s will. Fortunately, other bloggers had already cached it, and it was soon posted on half a dozen independent blogs - proof, if any were needed, that editing newspapers doesn’t work like it used to. It’s a fair bet that Dunlop’s pulled post has now been read by many more people than would otherwise have encountered it.

The censoring of Dunlop is significant, because he was the first Australian blogger hired by the mainstream media “from the wild”, and at the time there was a lot of speculation about whether or not it could work. Dunlop, an Adelaide based academic and former small business owner whose doctoral thesis was about public debate, came to prominence as author of the cheekily named Road to Surfdom, which was one of the first political blogs in Australia and remains among the most popular. When he signed with News Limited last year he assured his readers that he would remain an independent voice. He has indeed had a free hand, regularly criticising his colleagues on News Limited newspapers and offering a decidedly more liberal view than his hard copy journalistic colleagues - but it seems he has now discovered the limits of News Limited’s tolerance.

Dunlop told me the week after his post was pulled that he was having “talks” with management about editorial independence and expected to be able to blog on the result of his talks soon. He still hasn’t done so, but is continuing to blog feistily on other matters. My understanding is that Dunlop has, after much soul-searching, decided to give News Limited one more chance.

Quite apart from highlighting the tensions between blogging and proprietorial expectations of control, this affair highlights the gap between the larger international News Corporation - a modern interactive empire - and its Australian incarnation. These days Australia is rather like the home planet for the intergalactic corporation. It is fondly remembered, but rarely visited. The Australian News Limited is still predominately a newspaper company, controlling more than 60 per cent of the country’s total newspaper circulation. It is run by sharp but old fashioned conservative newspaper men. For powerful and intelligent people they have, in this affair, made themselves look fragile and silly. It is rather sad.

Contrast the behaviour of News Limited with some words of wisdom from a well-known newspaper man a couple of years ago.

What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel … They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle … We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.

That’s right: these words are from the landmark speech by Rupert Murdoch in which he signalled his conversion to the digital world. Murdoch worried about whether his editors were capable of making the cultural change. He said that too many saw their readers as stupid and less able than they to discuss the news. “In any business” he said, “such an attitude toward one’s customers would not be healthy. But in the newspaper business, where we rely on people to come back to us each day, it will be disastrous if not addressed.”

It seems Rupert was right to worry.

The irony in this whole matter is that if The Australian had simply shut up and let the blogosphere commentariat be, nobody would be talking about them now. As it is The Australian seems to have confirmed and increased the impact of political blogging, even in the act of dismissing it as the work of self-appointed amateurs.