Few professions have as disproportionate a sense of self-regard as journalism. Despite being regularly ranked as one of the least-trusted professions in Australia, Britain and America, journalists nurse the abiding conceit that they are bastions of truth and integrity.
Worse, they continually puff their chests and strut their little stages in the borrowed plumage of “expertise”, even though they so regularly get things completely wrong. They not only completely failed to foresee the possibility of a Trump victory in 2016, journalists collectively, flatly, declared that it was impossible. Anyone, like Ann Coulter, who dared suggest otherwise immediately suffocated under a blanket of smug laughter.
They got Brexit wrong. They got Johnson wrong. They got the 2019 Australian election completely, utterly wrong.
[Australian editor-at-large Paul Kelly:] “This has got to be the most serious collective failure on the part of the media that I’ve seen in my time in politics[…]most of the media got the politics wrong, they got the policies wrong and they got the mood of the country wrong”.
Not that being so embarrassingly wrong bothers the legacy media. With the ruthless efficiency of The Party of 1984, inconvenient facts like that are summarily shoved into the Memory Hole. When the taxpayer-funded ABC hosted a post-election panel, two of the panel had to pull a quick switcheroo of the books they had ready to go to publication. Nikki Savva’s Highway to Hell: The Coup that Destroyed Malcolm Turnbull and Left the Liberals in Ruins and David Crowe’s Venom: The Vendettas and Betrayals that Broke a Party both underwent urgent title revisions.
Nothing to see here.
As Thomas Sowell says, politicians, business people, even sports coaches are held accountable for their failures. Journalists, though, exempt themselves from such paltry concerns as accountability and scrutiny. At least used car salesmen, real estate agents and lawyers know that everyone hates them.
Kelly went on to say […]“when you make mistakes of that magnitude you would normally expect that, after the election, there would be a process of revision and reassessment on the part of the media, which would be demanded by its leaders”. He said he was not aware of any such introspection.
According to Kelly, it is an example of “extraordinary double standards” that journalists hold politicians to account for even relatively modest mistakes and “urge a rethink on the part of the politician”. But journalists do not hold themselves to account for their own mistakes.
They’re quick to point fingers at other professions, though.
On the post-election Insiders program, the executive producer showed footage of ABC TV personalities criticising opinion pollsters. Andrew Probyn declared “this is a shambles when it comes to opinion polling”. And Annabel Crabb asked: “Should anyone trust an opinion poll again?”
A reasonable question — but no more reasonable than to ask whether Australians should trust political commentators, such as Crabb, who had taken part in their own particular shambles.
In any event, the opinion polling companies recognised their errors of last year and have set about improving their survey techniques for the future.
Not so, journalists. Especially not journalists locked inside the taxpayer-funded leftist echo-chamber at the ABC. They’ll just go on, patting themselves on the backs for being ever so clever and wiser than we mere plebs who can’t afford to live inside the quinoa-proof fence of inner Melbourne and harbourside Sydney.
After all, they just know they’re better than us. They never make mistakes: just ask them.
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