Tapu Misa: Bias in the media perhaps, but there's no conspiracy

Its always a good sign when politicians get grumpy with the media. I don't know any politician who isn't aggrieved at one time or another by their portrayal in the media. Which is as it should be. The moment politicians are happy is the moment we should be taking a hard look at ourselves.

Which is why Winston Peters' speech to the Commonwealth Press Union in Sydney last week sounded so familiar. It put me in mind of a neglected lover complaining, petulantly, that he doesn't get enough attention from the object of his affections.

Peters averred that the media and politicians feed off each other, need each other.

Unfortunately, or so the lament goes, the media are biased. The media don't understand politicians or their policies. The media fail to appreciate their finer points. The media don't call often enough and when they do, they are apt to get it wrong. The media are faithless whores too easily won over by all the other politicians.

It's not that we in the media should be quick to dismiss criticism. But when Peters complains that journalists are no longer reporting just what politicians say, as they did in the good old days, but now have the temerity to decide for themselves what is valid in a politician's message and make their own judgment on its content (which is their job), he looks just a tad self-interested.

I can just imagine how thrilled editors and readers would be to receive uncritical and faithful renditions of his and his colleagues' every utterance.

Peters is not the first to complain about the bias that goes into making news judgments, although I'm not sure why this comes as a surprise to him. After all, journalists are as much products of their religious, cultural, ethnic and economic backgrounds as politicians.

It's possible we might be more liberal as a group, but to call the widely divergent and often diametrically opposed views a media conspiracy is getting just a tad feverish.

To be fair to Mr Peters, perhaps he was looking in the direction of the United States, where media credibility has had a particularly bad run of late. As if last year's humiliating mea culpas by the New York Times and the Washington Post weren't enough to make us less complacent, this year's series of embarrassing revelations over commentators and reporters who have been pocketing some of that US$250 million spent by the Bush Administration to promote its policies is a reminder that we should all be a lot warier of the information we're being fed.

Among the hired hacks was the high-profile conservative print, radio and TV pundit, Armstrong Williams, who was paid a cool $240,000 to extol the virtues of Bush's No Child Left Behind programme in his op-ed pieces. One of two other syndicated columnists to be found out, Maggie Gallagher (who once wrote that Bush was a genius at playing daddy to the nation), declared in her column that she would have mentioned the $21,500 she was paid if it hadn't slipped her mind.

Then there were the two reporters whose bogus news reports on the Administration's Medicare prescription-drug plan made their way into more than 50 broadcasts, including CNN's and were later deemed by an official watchdog to be illegal, covert propaganda.

Some commentators have suggested that this is the real reason Bush got his second term. Laurie Spivak, writing on AlterNet, posits that the conservative movement's well-oiled marketing machine has been shaping American public opinion for more than a quarter of a century, through a host of media outlets (notably Fox News, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Clear Channel), conservative think-tanks and paid commentators, reporters and consultants.

Take, for example, the success the conservative movement and industry interests have had in undermining the mainstream scientific consensus on global warming.

In his books The Heat is On and Boiling Point, journalist Ross Gelbspan documents the way in which the coal and oil companies provided financing to a small group of contrarian scientists who made themselves available for media interviews around the world as so-called sceptics on the subject of global warming.

The Union of Concerned Scientists and other critics have complained that this fringe scientific view, which hasn't been subjected to the same rigorous scientific review, has been given disproportionate prominence by the industry-friendly Bush Administration. And, of course, by the media, who are accused of aiding and abetting this climate of misinformation - though not through conspiracy and corruption, but the more usual incompetence.

Chris Mooney, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review last November, blames the dearth of scientific expertise among journalists and the journalists' obligation (and, I think, natural tendency) to provide balance, leading many to give voice to even the most fringe elements.

'While some scientific uncertainty remains in the climate field, the most rigorous peer-reviewed assessments ... have cemented a consensus view that human greenhouse gas emissions are probably (that is, the conclusion has a fairly high degree of scientific certainty) helping to fuel the greenhouse effect and explain the observed planetary warming of the past 50 years."