<
https://theconversation.com/journalists-reporting-on-the-voice-to-parliament-do-voters-a-disservice-with-he-said-she-said-approach-204361>
"For much of the past two decades, polarisation and hyper-partisanship have
weakened Western democracies, most notably in the United States and Britain.
Australia has not escaped, although the consequences here have been nothing as
compared with Brexit or the insurrection in Washington on January 6, 2021.
Social media has been the primary agent of this democratic dysfunction, but
parts of the professional mass media have also contributed.
Impartial news reporting is an antidote to polarisation. The Voice referendum,
with its impassioned arguments on both sides, presents the Australian media
with an opportunity to show their capacity for truth-telling and impartiality.
While the overall performance so far is patchy, there does seem to be a
lessening in the polarisation that was such a significant feature of federal
political reporting between the overthrow of Kevin Rudd by Julia Gillard in
2010 and the defeat of the Morrison government in 2021.
A straw in the wind was a column by Chris Mitchell, the former editor-in-chief
of
The Australian, in a recent commentary on coverage of the referendum.
While supportive of the referendum’s critics, he made an appeal to both sides
to respect the other.
It was an important point. As the Harvard political scholars Steven Levitsky
and Daniel Ziblatt have argued in their book
How Democracies Die, it is lack
of respect for the opposing side that has been so corrosive of democracy,
especially in the US, over the past two decades.
There are other signs the Australian media are approaching the task of covering
the referendum in a way that serves the public interest. Many platforms, for
example the
Canberra Times and the ABC, have published factual and
straightforward “explainers” setting out the basics of the referendum."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
