I have linked to this post on my blog but I have nit picked those points…

Sometimes the Left are Right: The Right-Wing 5 Headed Monster

Whilst I could nit-pick one or two points I won’t.

Good call.

AK: Well, it’s impossible by definition to nail down all the meaning in a cultural system, because meaning is a function of audience – different things mean different things to different people, if that’s a banal enough way to put it. I agree it’s the vibe – but I question the assumption that The Herald (to take your example) is creating that feeling or reflecting. It’s a feedback loop – you can’t assign all the agency to the media outlet and its Tory-voting primaries, which is what the `media has a right-wing bias’ argument does. A great deal of the media’s function is in agenda-setting – telling people what to think about, rather than explicitly what to think – but by the same token a media outlet generally needs to tell its audience what they want to hear in order to be successful. It’s a devilishly hard bit of business to tease out whether the media’s main role is in reinforcing peoples’ prejudices or in forming them in the first place, and I’m always deeply suspicious of people who claim to have done so (unless I can see their working).

L

I swear, Key is trying to be centrist but he had no idea how much blood is going to fly once all those heads start attacking one another. He has such a desire to please everyone – that sort of attitude is idealistic but will make for a huge mess once people’s expectations are shattered.

Still it’s an interesting proposition/observation and I’ll keep it in mind for the future.

Iprent – something strange seemed to happen when I wrote that problem post, that seemed to be more than just an edit problem. As I recall I hadn’t finished typing when I must have hit some key or the mouse by mistake & the comments posted (I may not have added anti-spam the code words(?)), with the last paragraph incomplete. As you can see it ends mid sentence, and didn’t include the last sentence or two that I wrote. I was using a PC and Firefox. There was an edit link visible, but no timer counting down, and clicking on the edit link produced an error message.

ak, some good points. I too worry about the possible untoward influence of such dominant productions as the Herald. I think it would help if our main news outlets were less commercially oriented, raised the quality of their reporting, encouraged more diversity of perspectives in front page/headline stories, and encouraged more people to critically engage with the media. A big ask I know in our infotainment, consumerist environment. But IMO the problem is not so much that there is bias in the MSM, but that a large number of people consume the stories without being aware of and/or critical of the biases.

Too true Carol: nor deliberate omissions or under-reporting, nor the justification for reporting at all, nor timing of reports, nor placement or duration…nor….etc

Lew: There are ways of bringing the nuance and level of detail……. But it’s a hell of a lot of work, and it’s very, very hard to do…

Impossible I reckon Lew. Sorry, I know it’s your job an’ all (and I had high hopes that someone like yourself might be able to quantify it), but it’s a bit like trying to pre-judge or analyse the effectiveness of advertising: persuasion is an art form and the only real proof is in the pudding.

One pudding we have is the high male/Auckland tory vote, and the stand-out ingredient is the “Lenin/Clark” Herald. Geographical coincidence?

To quote my favourite fillum (The Castle), “it’s the vibe”. Death by a million “unbiased” repetitions of, e.g., “Her critics accuse her of…… nanny state-corrupt-Helengrad-anti-smacking-digging dirt-third-termitis-desperate-tied at the hip-social agenda-lightbulb banning-short showers……etc etc ad nauseam coupled with a studied nonchalance towards the greatest political flip-flop and blooper show in history.

Unmeasurable? Sure. So is the assumption that those who hire the sole informants of our swing voters’ opinions vote tory. So’s love. But not pudding.

One of the major reasons the right (such as it is) takes such a dim view of the humanities and of academics in general is because they take for granted a lot of postmodernist, poststructuralist, Marxist/Gramscian, relativist, etc. theory and perceive it to be a sort of orthodoxy. I adhere to a lot of that theory, but I don’t believe it is an orthodoxy anywhere outside the academy. In the (and I hate this propaganda term) `real’ world, other theoretical bases – realism, nationalism, etc. hold much more sway, Much of the problem I find with media academics is that they tend to presume that orthodoxy and apply it in a normative sense to the media and political action – essentially they judge the world as it is against a yardstick of how they think it ought to be in light of a whole lot of somewhat alien theory. They say reality has a liberal bias – but I don’t think it’s quite as liberal as a lot of academics think.

Lynn: Yeah, I’ve been hatin’ on this new ajax edit. Bring back the old one, I say!

L

[lprent: I'm coming to think that I should just write my own (usual time pressures apply). Unfortunately the old one was having problems with newer browsers and didn't work with the latest version of wordpress.]

Interestingly it mostly confirms my thoughts and suspicions about the MSM but really good to see it written down and elaborated so well.

Many thanks to you all

With respect to our MSM, I think the Herald in recent years tends to be blatantly pro-National, though it can present some leftish views in some articles – usually buried away from the main pages. TV One tends to lean more to the right, but it could be the result of a variety of interacting facors rather than a conscious position – stories available, pressure for ratings, individual reporters (Espiner leans more to the right than some of the other journos), and maybe just having absorbed some of the right wing philosophy that is inscribed into the aims of a commercialised TV channel

eg It always irritates me that, come budget time, TV One promotes their item on it by asking “Will there be something in it for you?” Rather than a more leftish question, which would be “Is it fair to all sections of ociety? Or a simplified version of,”What affect will this have on the different sections of society?”

I have been surprised by the conservatism of some political studies academisc I have come across

Yes, I can tell you know what you’re talking about. I also favour qualitative research, the more qualitative the better – I prefer discourse analysis for this reason (though currently most of my time is spent doing content analysis).

And I think there’s a few media academics I know who would disagree with you on the lack of (left) bias in our mainstream media.

Yeah, I accept it isn’t an open-and-shut case. I have a few problems with the bald statement `the media are biased to the right’, though. I’m a political scientist working with the media as an expression of politics, and I find there’s a tendency among media academics without a background in politics to overstate or oversimplify ideological matters. As far as systemic ideological media bias goes, I’m certainly not arguing there’s none – just that bias typically takes the form of distortion rather than a distinct skew either way.

I think there’s some merit to the argument that heavy focus on polls influenced the final election result, though – strong consisitent polling for one `side’ will tend to embolden that side and demoralise the other side. It’s about manipublating projected regret in voters.

L

You’ll also be aware of push-polling – (viz pushing a pov). To the extent that persistent and regular polling is conducted with – as was the case E08 – that pov could have gotten to be accepted as result = foregone conclusion. So why bother etc.. Push-polling, as used elsewhere and understood is partisan, Poll-push-polling (my wee suggestion) is something else.. not least of which would be the best intentions gone awry on democracy..