In recent blogs on this site, especially regarding the phrase `war on terror’ and the political mud slinging of recent weeks, I have frequently seen the hope expressed that the media should be free of bias and just report the truth. A praisworthy sentiment. Can you however really handle the truth? Would you recognise it if you see it? Would you watch a news show if it really gave you the full truth about what it knows and what it doesnt? Do not presume the answer is `yes’ too easily. To illustrate how virtually everything you get fed in the news is a fabrication, I took the liberty of dissecting a couple of stories of the news of the last two days. I only concentrated on stories you could find on SBS world news or ABC news so that the overly obvious bias from certain quarters was already filtered out. Lets take some stories in random order to give you a sense of how you are being spoonfed, though I wish to stress at the outset that probably very little of the fabrication is politically motivated:

1. The financial news. The ABC headline: ‘Interest rate concerns push Aussie shares down’. Really? On an average day, there are millions of share transactions made for a whole swathe of reasons. The reasons to sell include people who need the money embedded in their shares. The reasons to buy include having money to invest. They include hopes and fear on thousands of items including the overseas economies, and the whole of the domestic economy. Given all this, how could a journalist possibly know that it was interest rate concerns that pushed the shares down? Could the journalists have talked to all the thousands of people who dealt in shares yesterday, or the millions of people on who’s behalf shares were traded? There’s no way the journalist could have done that. Where then does this story come from? Presumably from the journos talking to a couple of their mates close to the market who feed them this line. In a strict sense though, this headline and nearly every other headline containing an explanation of movements on financial markets is a fabrication. Indeed, nearly all the news regarding explanations for what goes on in the economy pretends to know the unknowable and each of us laps it up every day. We’ll let the tricky issue as to what constitutes an Aussie share lie.

2. The weather forecast. Actual weather modellers come up with many different scenarios and essentially are only able to say what the weather will be within confidence bands, subject to the assumptions of their models and data availability. Hence the `weather outlook’ you are spoonfed is simply one particular scenario, neither representing the average forecast or anything approaching an undoubted forecast. Nevertheless, words are used like ‘tomorrow it will be X degrees in Melbourne’. Pure fabrication. It gets worse. Recall seing those pressure charts on virtually every weather channel and in the paper? These things dont just ignore the uncertainty in the forecasts, but they are actually literally made up. There’s no such thing as a line going through the continent where on one side the pressure is below some number and on the other side it is above some number: pressure varies immensely locally for all kinds of reasons (spot winds; clouds, hills, buildings, etc.). Drawing a pressure line on a map is a bit like drawing a line through Australia and saying ‘the rich people live to the left of this line and the poor people live to the right of this line’: vaguely right at best. Pressure maps are strictly speaking pure fabrications, but you would not see this mentioned in the media.

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From a recent Michael Kirby speech [pdf]:

For example, our Constitution is too rigid. It is one of the most difficult in the world to amend. This feature of Australian legal arrangements can sometimes protect us from the risk of mistakes, as in the Communism referendum of 1951. But the rigidity also helps produce a national constitutional lethargy that despairs of needed alterations and of fresh thinking about our basic governance.

This doesn’t survive empirical scrutiny. Continue reading →