Dishonest Journalism And The NBN

There’s journalistic bias, which is an undesirable, but unavoidable part of the media landscape … and then there’s outright dishonesty.

Compare the reporting by The Australian and The Guardian of cost blowouts in the Coalition and Labor’s NBN schemes.

The Australian’s right wing bias is well known. It is evident here in its choice of headline:

Labor's NBN Bill Was Set To Hit $73bn

The main point of the article is Labor’s mismanagement and waste, costing taxpayers an extra $29B in excess of the originally budgeted $44B, plus the fact they had either made substantial efforts to hide the massive cost blowout from the public who are paying for it, or worse, were unaware of its size.

The article’s subsidiary (and justified) anti-Labor point was a description of the predictable overstaffing and public service like arse covering culture at NBNCo:

“The culture and leadership of the organisation was widely viewed as a major problem. … a fear among staff of being blamed for mistakes that generated a lack of willingness to accept responsibility in some functional groups.”

“A committed, motivated, generally capable group of people who want to do important, meaningful work … there were also fears of contradicting senior staff and mistrust in the motives of some leaders. People were reluctant to document decisions for fear of the potential consequences.”

Such organisational dysfunction is not uncommon in the corporate world, however it seems to be more prevalent in government projects and in this case, an entirely foreseeable consequence of Kevin Rudd and modern Labor’s bureaucratic management style.

The Australian’s article does discuss substantial delays and cost overruns in the Coalition’s NBN plan, beginning in paragraph 4, sufficiently close to the beginning for the reader to get the picture that there are problems with both NBN plans.

At least the information required for comparison is presented early in the article:

·         Labor’s cost blowout is 65%, the Coalition’s is 40%.

·         Labor’s plan says it will deliver fibre to 100% of homes, but will cost $32B more and be completed several years after the Coalition’s.

·         The Coalition’s plan will employ a mix of delivery mechanisms, resulting in faster, cheaper deliver of a lower bandwidth service to the majority of users. However, the 30% of customers having their internet service delivered by pay TV cable should find the speed more than adequate. So, it’s really less than half of users who will not get the functionality promised by Labor.

The Guardian’s left wing bias is greater in magnitude than the Australian’s right wing tendency and even more overt. Worse, its brand of lefty politics is the hypocritical, sanctimonious cant of middle class, dilettante lefties: the ones who espouse socialism while living in expensive houses and sending their children to private schools.

So, it’s little surprise that the Guardian’s take on the NBN troubles led with:

Coalition’s NBN to cost $12bn more and take four years longer

Strategic review blames cost blowouts and poor management as government breaks promise to deliver NBN by 2016

The Australian and Guardian are both privately owned, so it’s not unreasonable they would each skew their reporting to the politics of their owners. Readers just need to be aware of what to expect.

The problem with the Guardian’s reporting is its blatant misrepresentation, starting with the subheading. It links “cost blowouts and poor management” with “government breaks promise”. Most readers would naturally infer cause and effect ie. poor management by the government has led to a broken electoral promise. I think the Guardian editors are well aware of this and I suggest that was their intention.

In fact, the cost blowouts and poor management were due to the previous government: this one has only been in power three months.

There is a ranking of seriousness of misdeeds in journalism. There’s bias in the selection of the headline and the order of reporting of the facts. That’s largely unavoidable and at least educated readers can see through this.

Then there is selective omission of facts and information which do not support the editorial agenda. That is worse than the bias of order choice because it is directly misleading.

In a similar vein, linking partial descriptions of facts to convey a false impression is worse than mere bias: it is dishonesty. It renders the article propaganda.

Even if the reader senses the article has been selective in its reporting of facts, it's often difficult and sometimes practically impossible to discover the full context.

The first half of the Guardian’s coverage is devoted almost entirely to the time and cost overruns in the Coalition’s plan. It is not until well into its second half that we find out Labor’s 100% optical fibre plan was not scheduled to be completed until 2024. That’s clear bias, but at least the fact is there.

But when do we discover how much Labor’s plan actually cost? You can find the figure $73B in small print type, in the last row of a table, at the end of the article … with no mention of the fact Labor’s original budget was $44B.

That’s the difference between The Australian and The Guardian’s reportage: the former is predictably biased, whereas the latter is predictably dishonest. And these are the people with whom our government broadcaster wants a closer working relationship.