The tears of Scott Morrison had barely dried after the election when the bad takes started flowing from the mainstream media. It’s a not unknown phenomenon. Overall, there’s such a demand for content that people who don’t have that many ideas have to pump something out. Added to that is the News Corp imperative to spin for the right, a factor now a part of Nine newspapers’ calculations.
But the contenders for the Bad-Take Brownlow this time round may have been a little crazier than usual. Both Terry McCrann and Gerard “Gollum” Henderson went with innumerate and logic-chopped arguments that what matters in a preferential system is first-preference votes, and Jacqueline Maley faithfully reproduced the opposition’s pitch about The New Peter Dutton: that we don’t yet know him. (To paraphrase Jason Clare on Tim Wilson on election night, that we don’t like him is not because we don’t know him, it’s because we do.) And on the ABC, Stan Grant, bless, said teal supporters were just like Trump supporters, in that both were angry. Very Hegelian, Stan.
But of course, the winner on points and on the red carpet has to be Peter Hartcher, who is not only a wonky vote counter and a poor analyst, but is happy to do such twice in two weeks. Readers of the Age/SMH were gobsmacked to see their senior political opinionista, in a piece denying the significance of the teal and Greens result, completely undercount their first preferences by comparing the 2022 running totals on the AEC website with the completed count from 2019.
Did he not understand the difference between a first count and a declared count, one wondered? He soon did. Twelve hours or so after Hartcher’s initial assessment that the Greens’ primary vote had only increased by 4000 votes, (“Those are the official AEC figures,” he had noted), Nine newspapers had to run this embarrassing postscript:
Some readers have argued that this article puts too much emphasis on the primary vote count in explaining some voting trends. This is a valid point because I’ve used the unfinished primary vote count for last week’s election and compared it to the finished count for the 2019 election. So it’s not a comparison of like with like.
Ya think? But wait, it didn’t matter:
Another way of analysing the results would be to use the parties’ percentage shares of the vote counted so far … If you use this approach, it leads to the same conclusion — Labor’s share of the vote is down a fraction, the Greens’ is up a little …
A little? The Greens’ primary vote was up by 1.9%, which is the whole of Labor’s two-party-preferred majority, and a 20% increase on the Greens’ 2019 primary vote. But to put it in the way it most matters, that is an increase of 300,000 votes. Not 4000. Hartcher was out by a multiplier of 75.
Why didn’t they simply correct Hartcher’s article, rather than offer a “postscript”? Because they can’t. To insert the true figures — that the Greens’ vote increased by a “mere” 300,000 votes — would have made a mockery of the whole piece. The article is wrong at its core, and the postscript simply doubles down on the error. The whole thing should be removed from the website on grounds of basic factual error.
Would this make you circumspect in future? Not if last Saturday’s column is any sign. In making his contribution to the new press gallery imperative — big up Peter Dutton, to keep in-party contacts and restore the political duopoly — Hartcher has reproduced without interrogation or investigation one of Dutton’s utterly bogus claims, to wit:
The Coalition lost votes not only to its left but also to its right. On his preliminary count, some 200,000 voters deserted the Liberals to vote for the teals. At the same time, 700,000 left the Coalition to vote for the smaller parties to the right of the Coalition such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Clive Palmer’s United Australia, says Dutton, citing internal Liberal estimates. The Libs fragmented support on both sides.
There’s 1.6-1.7 million hard-right minor party voters. The 700,000 figure is… what? Those votes that return to the Coalition? No, because those votes are not lost. Those votes that preference Labor? Well, not all of them, because some of them would have been Labor votes. You can see this in some outer-Melbourne seats — with minor right party candidates on offer, Labor’s primary fell. But its two-party-preferred vote was largely unaffected.
The only votes these can be are “diverted preference” votes of a specific kind, where you somehow manage to lose votes to a party to the right, that then preference Labor out of… protest, or sheer orneriness, or what? If Dutton or Hartcher can find 700,000 of those votes, and in even vaguely winnable seats, I’d love to see them.
But wait, it’s even better, because the figures are in error in an entirely different fashion. This election, the three “main” hard-right parties — One Nation, UAP and Liberal Democrats — ran in all 151 seats and won in none of them. The 1.6 million votes are from that exercise (and the 700,000 from somewhere within that). The 200,000 votes attributed to the teals are taken solely from the eight victorious teals, at about 30,000 votes apiece.
But community independents of various shades ran in about 40-50 seats. The total vote for independents was 760,000. I would suggest that about 500,000 of those votes (which include the victorious teals) were for community independents — i.e. sane progressives with pretty similar programmes to the teals, with some suburban and rural variation. So a mystery 700,000 “lost” Liberal votes compared to 500,000. Except that 700,000 is probably more like 100,000. Heck of a job!
Dutton’s a politician, and can say anything he needs to get an effect (he may also be as genuinely stupid as Mark McGowan suggests he is, and not understand the maths). But what is Hartcher’s excuse for running Liberal talking points without scrutiny?
And what are the Nine newspapers’ and the Age/SMH’s editors’ excuses for running these error-strewn pieces as flagship articles? Do they no longer care what goes in, or what scrutiny it fails to withstand? It is desperately sad to see.
Still, Peter Hartcher, respect! You managed to be wrong two different ways in one article, and wave through two different types of error in one opposition-provided figure in the other. No one comes close. The 2022 Bad-Take Brownlow is yours! Unless there’s been a mistake in the count…
Staggering the huge turn-around in the Fairfax papers since they went to Costello et al.
Pity, as there are now no major printed dailies that are balanced .
What hasn’t changed much is the orientation of the readers of Fairfax publications, going by the comments, which are usually strongly anti-coalition and pro-progressive.
Is the disconnect between readership and editorial sustainable?
If not, how will it resolve over time?
As an indication, after 40 years of subscribing to the SMH, I finally got jack of it……….
…….and switched my subscription to Crikey.
The demise of Fairfax is an ongoing tragedy.
I still subscribe to Fairfax so I don’t just get my own views echoed back.
It is actually hard to consume news at all still without it unfortunately. The Guardian just don’t have enough journos.
To paraphrase Brecht’s Die Lösung, “the readership has lost the trust & confidence of the editorial suite and must work hard to rectify their error – until then Fauxfuks will print RWNJ garbage until they return.”
Like Thucydides I had been a rusted on SMH reader for over 30 years. But the very day Greg Heywood took his $8m payout to sell out FairFacts, I cancelled my online subscription, fearing the worst. By then I was already a Crikey subscriber of some years, and I have been pleased to see some of the old SMH columnists I most respected turn up in The New Daily, Guardian and, gosh, I think even Crikey.
As to fearing the worst about the future of SMH/Nine Entertainment. Completely justified.
A vocal minority perhaps? Some days it sees a concerted right wing propaganda push. I stopped subscribing, I had had enough. But like the rusted ons, didn’t want to accept the demise of a once great masthead and commented frequently. Luckily there are others to read, so I gave up. Chip Le Grand’s right puff pieces did it. Given the electoral result, to make it fiscally viable, Costello’s 9fairfax will try like MuckRake to sway the next one. 9s already spruiking Matthew Guy. But since the younger up and coming voters will soon ratio out the right, they will probably eventually go broke. Good.
You’re right. I’m seriously thinking of cancelling my subscription to The Age.
The speed with which they were trying to promote Liberal leader Dutton as now someone completely different to the old Dutton was astonishing.
Won’t get fooled again.
Yes it’s a tragedy that we no longer have a balanced mainstream media in this country.?
Thanks for reading the entertaining Nine newspapers for me, Guy. I gave up my subscription some years ago and see no reason to resume it.
For much the same reason, I’ve also given up on 7.30, The Drum, Q&A and Insiders. None of them offers much meaningful analysis any more. I do listen to Laura Tingle on Late Night Live where she’s more forthright than on 7.30.
Sarah Ferguson will be a welcome replacement for the hopeless Sales on 7:30 who should never have been appointed. Ex News Ltd Patricia Karvellis on RN Breakfast is so hostile to Labor it looks like the Liberal Party writes the questions.
Losing the ABC as a source of unbiased reporting and analysis (apart from the odd exception) is devastating. As someone said last week, it’s the other way to bring the ABC down – drive away supporters.
Tony, IMHO Patricia Karvellis is one of the more balanced reporters. Her pieces convey a depth of common sense and balance, that the baying hounds of the MSM lynch mob are incapable of producing.
Ozstralian, we’re obviously listening to different presenters. I let out an audible laugh when I read your comment In my humble opinion, when former News Corp apparatchiks venture onward into the outside world, they carry with them a certain mindset that I for one pickup on immediately. “Common sense and balance” is, I would suggest, open for debate in this instance. After all, what self respecting journalist, wanting to adhere to their Code of Ethics would ever work for Murdoch? Join this evil organisation and you are tarred for life.
Well Paul, an “audible” laugh. Impressive. I’d be reluctant to agree that a previous News Corp employee is mentally deranged for life, as a result of the NC experience. Presumably most of us need a job, and the decline of newspapers would suggest journalists work where they can, as would you. You drive a petrol driven vehicle, by necessity, and the downside in terms of climate is well known to you. We all have to compromise at times.
Mike Seccombe, Malcolm Farr, et al. There is quite a list of OK journalists who used to work for MM but now work for Schwartz media, the Guardian and Crikey. There are also disturbing cases of current MM journalists who say reasonable things on the Drum, alongside wild right wingers like Greg Sheridan.
That is nonsense. Whilst the worst of the Murdoch empire is very bad indeed, most of it is simply reporting. Many fine journalists have worked at one time or another for a Murdoch media outlet. Indeed, in Australia if you want to stay in media, you often have no choice. It is really boring reading this soft cock left take on journalism.
Come the revolution! How long to wait for the media diversity Royal Commission? Labor please, don’t delay because you are in, remember Rudd’s petition achieved over half a million signatures, so get at it. I watch sky news UK and it is a revelation since it was stripped from Murdoch. Finally I live in Queensland- help!
Agreed.
They probably do. I agree she just pumps out their talking points. An example of the tragedy that has befallen the ABC.
Karvelas just blows with the wind.
At uni a radical lesbian leftie, at NewCorpse joined the Bolt pile-on against Aboriginal people deemed insufficiently black and at RN somewhat balanced, but always with the Murdoch agenda in the back pocket.
‘Murdoch agenda in the back pocket’, that really nails the whole ABC these days; sometimes the front pockets too, with the AFR adding its bit. PK blahblah-ing with mumbling Phil Coorey sums it up.
…not if you read her Wikipedia entry… I like the way the edits contextualise who her employer was… she has a strong conservative bent…
What has being lesbian got to do with anything?
It contextualises how different her (presented) persona was from the one it is now and others its been in-between.
She was out, proud, radical and rebellious. She was a well-known figure in Melbourne student left politics, who went on to NewsCorpse and became someone completely different. Makes the transformation of her rough contemporary in student politics, Paul Howes, look glacial in comparison!
I believe she still has a same sex partner. And in any case, so what? there are plenty of conservative out lesbians. Irrelevant.
Yeah, the turn of the millennium student lesbian radical scene wasn’t exactly ‘conservative out lesbian’ – it was a conscious, brave choice in a society somewhat accepting, but fundamentally more hostile than now.
But also a relatively obvious place to fit in if you were queer … which goes to the chameleon, amoral nature of Karvelas, a person for every season.
Was there acknowledged queer in those days? There were not a lot of out options.
You could be onto something but I watched Karvelas’ reaction to the Labor victory on the Sunday morning ABC and she seemed pretty chuffed and excited to the point where it seemed her preference was obvious. But you might say that just proves your point with Labor now in power.
Personally I don’t think so. I think she has matured/developed her views. By all accounts she had a pretty challenging start in life, not necessarily politically aware or savvy.
Was there acknowledged queer 20 years ago?!? Enough for the NUS to have a dedicated Queer Officer and many unis to have Queer Spaces.
For me the late ’90s / early 200s was its heyday.
A good description of the student queer left at that time (that Karvelas was a part of) is this:
“Mark Pendleton, the NUS queer officer in 2001, describes the politics of queer student activists at the time: “The new anti-capitalist queer groups base their action on an explicitly anti-capitalist and implicitly Marxist analysis of queer oppression. Their core belief is that homophobia is perpetuated by the economic system of capitalism. That being said, there are certainly remnants of an identity politics within the anti-capitalist queer movements”.”
This article, whatever you think of the politics of the author, gives a good history of the last few decades of queer student activism – https://redflag.org.au/article/whatever-happened-campus-queer-politics
Oh, dear. “Their core belief is that homophobia is perpetuated by the economic system of capitalism.” The most rawly, uncompromisingly, anti-trade Union advanced capitalist country on earth has recently made same-sex marriage a right, despite hosting the most active “new age” and medieval religious groups, which mostly foster homophobia. The evidence is that capitalism has not perpetuated homophobia, at least since the nineteen sixties, when women came to be increasingly less often viewed as properly the property of men, although the tragedies caused by men who cling to that view are still too many even today. It is worrying that so often people, who rightly want to rid our culture of oppressive homophobic ideologies, don’t understand their social origins and sound off with a currently fashionable view of what that is.
As Karl Marx argued, capitalism is the social origin of unemployment and underemployment, homelessness and poverty, oppressive conditions at work for unskilled workers and a tendency to shift upwards the share of profits in national income. The Coalition-the party of big business and not “the forgotten people”-did very well at helping capitalism. Karl Marx did not comment much, if at all, on homosexuality or homophobia but, given that he recognised that any society would not be purely one economic system or another, he would have allowed that the culture of homophobia was not perpetuated by capitalism. When speculating about the future, at which Marx was much less able to get what he said spot on, he did say in the “Communist Manifesto” that capitalism would tend to discard all relics of past superstitions in favour of naked cash calculation. Perhaps he would not have been surprised that same sex marriage could become a right, although he would have been surprised that same sex marriage could be a right in a country that simultaneously promoted the superstitions of the Christian religion more than any other on earth.
This was posted to give a (20+ year old) view, but to illustrate the milieu in which Karvelas moved – the point being, she blows with the wind and has very little integrity (as in qualities integral to herself).
That’s OK, as I realised what you were doing. My comment was a criticism of those who don’t look for the real social origin of some feature of society but lazily drum up some currently fashionable theory. I agree that Marx was fashionable in the NUS at that time, so you could claim an NUS medal by invoking capitalism as the the social force perpetuating homophobia.
Right-o, seems like we are in furious agreement then! 🙂
By golly Paul did alright for himself, didn’t he?
and her Wikipedia entry describes some of these anti Labor perspectives…
Are you serious? The same alleged journalist who ‘softball’ interviewed white nationalist grifter Steve Bannon, informing him that he was not racist, then took a selfie with him?
Hardly makes the ABC centre right let alone centrist, or is this a new Oz compass?
I think Ferguson was conned by her subject and just made an embarrassing error of judgment in that interview. Hard to forget though.
Possible, but difficult to believe that a journalist, producer and/or researchers were not aware of Bannon and unable to do a basic web search and/or research; says a lot about avoiding research and expertise in preference to opinions and beliefs…..
It is hard to fathom, because she’s done so much stellar stuff.
Has she ever reflected on that massive misjudgement?
She might have to explain herself now.
The explanation might be simple: an interviewer has to ingratiate him/herself with Bannon to get him to open up.
Indeed; she immediately lost me while standing smiling next to him and declaring “this is ok”.
I could only assume she referred to “being white”.
Thanks from me too GR. I gave up buying the Nine news when Fairfax sold the titles. But I am grateful that others keep an eye on the rubbish that is written and call it out. We have been very ill-served by our msm since at least mid-2013 – maybe much earlier but I was out of Australia from 2007 until 2016 so not fully across the detail.
Earlier than mid 2013, as the Murdochs and co got Abbott in.
The “fairness” for which the ABC says/implies it strives nowadaze seems to include regurgitating the BS spewed from Murdoch’s minds – not being called out, or queried, or the record of the “source” brought up (going to relevance and bias for a start?).
“Question the rest of the media?” re motivation and recorded “accurate” history. Perish that thought.
Where’s the “fairness” in that – sort of “corporate think” – for the broader, voting Australian public?
Yes they’d be better served getting stuff from Crikey or TND and other online publications
You go, Guy, cos you’re correct. Great swathes of MSM coverage and commentary pre and post election has been pathetic, embarrassing, dishonest, snivelling, just plain wrong and/or just plain stupid. If those pumping this rubbish out were capable of just a jot of reflection they might be able to understand just how damaging their garbage is – how it all adds up to being very bad for democracy as all their mis and disinformation swirls around and is taken at face value by people still deluded enough to think that journalism is a profession peopled by fairly intelligent types who value the role of the fourth estate and are guided by the Code of Ethics.
Couldn’t agree more, yet all we hear from the MSM (and beyond) is moronic stuff about how “social media” is to blame for all our ills.
Guy, you could be more considerate of the massive dose of relevance deprivation being experienced by Hartcher, Speers and Co. They have to believe that government is simply one tightly contested three year election campaign, else why would you read them?
They were incredibly lucky to finally have a government that believed the same thing. Unfortunately reality has intruded in the utter demolition of that government everywhere but Queensland. The Press Corps is still in the early – disbelief, denial – stage of mourning, poor dears. It could get even sadder from here on.
I haven’t paid a penny to Murdoch since 1975. I continue to subscribe to SMH because if they go under, we know who will fill the gap? There are also some good people working within the Nine/Fairfax Group. They may yet respond to the disconnection. The ABC could have been annihilated by the conservatives. It will recover.
Funding for the ABC and SBS should be out of reach of politicians, especially the Murdoch party. The coalition really are pathetic with their attacks on the neutered ABC while being ritually co- joined to the Murdoch machine. Watch Sky News in the Uk, now it has been stripped from Him, the difference is startling.
Australia’s media landscape is downright dangerous. Purchased opinion rather than facts. The Liberals and hayseeds have never been able to take defeat on the chin.
Listening to them now you would think they were still in government instead of having their collective arses handed to them on a plate. Its the fault of the media for allowing so much exposure.
Yeah, you’d think Potato Pete was the new PM, and his band of crony ministers indeed ‘incredibly talented’, according to the media, quoting him! Taylor, Robert, Cash, Ley, Joyce etc??? No one’s talking in the MSM about how most of them have been disgraced at some point, and proved incompetent at others, and Pete’s ludicrous words are just repeated at face value. Has a collection of Labor shadow ministerial selections ever been given this much headline coverage?
And worse still Dutton is now ranting on how Labor should have (in 2 weeks) fixed all the things the LNP didn’t do for 9 years, or worse, made go bad. I suppose he thinks it makes him look like a “tough” oppo leader. But in my mind the opposite – just a weak blathering fool with no intellectual capacity at all.
He’s pretty certainly a bit thick.