There is no left-wing conspiracy at Aunty, just a liberal groupthink

Wednesday, 14th April 2010

I was driving to work on the Tuesday morning after Easter, listening, as usual, to ABC’s news radio.

I was driving to work on the Tuesday morning after Easter, listening, as usual, to ABC’s news radio. On came a piece about how it was very likely that the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, would soon be going to the Queen to request that she dissolve Parliament and call an election. The ABC report went on to mention that Brown’s Labour party was just 4 per cent behind the Tories in a recent poll, the closest the two parties have been in many months.

Now, that didn’t seem quite right to me, so on arriving at work I decided to check the polls. And there it was: in a recent ICM poll Labour was only 4 per cent behind the Conservatives.

That wasn’t the full story, however. In a YouGov poll, conducted the night before (on Easter Monday), Labour was behind the Tories by 11 per cent. And in the Express poll, also just out, Labour was down by 10 per cent. And in the poll of polls the Tories were up by 9 per cent.

So there was no outright falsehood on ABC radio. What they reported was strictly true. But, boy, was it misleading! So misleading that it got me thinking...

Of course, no one believes they sit around at the ABC saying, ‘Gee, I wonder how we can put an incredibly one-sided spin on this particular news story.’ Or, ‘Hey guys, which stories do you think we ought to bury and which to emphasise, so that we give the news the most pro-left-wing gloss we can?’

Still, when you listen to stories like the one about the polls in the UK, you just have to wonder what sort of unspoken biases are being given scope to paint a picture quite distinct from the one that would emerge were there a few more Coalition voters working at the ABC.

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