Thread by @Vic_Rollison

I agree @ItaButtrose that sometimes ABC reporters ‘unconsciously let their biases show through’ - but this isn’t left wing bias. According to my quantitative research it’s right wing bias framing news using capitalist class’s view of economy, capital versus labour. A thread👇🏻

Article for reference here, where Ita is laying groundwork to bring more conservative voices into the ABC. In other words - doing what Murdoch/Liberals have been lobbying for FOR YEARS:
smh.com.au/entertainment/…

I looked at reporting of an industrial dispute - CFA versus UFU in Vic 2016. These results are obvs just one case, but I also looked at five historical disputes and they are generalisable across normal industrial disputes between workers and employer.

Here is a breakdown of media reporting by percentage of narrative. Red matches union/Labor narrative, blue matches employer/Liberal narrative. Yes I counted them - this represents thousands of codes.

As you can see, ABC isn’t the most biased in aligning its narrative with the employer, but it is certainly not biased towards left. The right wing narrative which dominated media framed the union and firefighter members as unreasonable, thuggish, greedy and trying to grab power.

I found this employer/Liberal narrative was so close to the Herald Sun/Australian narrative that it was hard to tell where it was born - seamless in its similarity and consistent across both groups.

However, I also found this same narrative evident in ABC and Guardian reporting - not biased to the same extent, but it certainly dominated both these outlets and the union/Labor narrative was used far less often (given far less credibility).

The reason I used an industrial dispute as a case study is that it provides a generalisable case study to understand framing of political and economic news more broadly. The relationship between workers and capital is the basis of left wing versus right wing politics.

You can see similar bias that I found in ABC industrial dispute reporting across much ABC political coverage. It is likely unconscious as Ita so helpfully points out. But it’s there - and it does change the way Australia understands politics.

A great example is way ABC reporters mostly write/talk about tax through a negative frame. Framing expert George Lakoff describes the success neoliberal/conservative politicians have had in using the phrase ‘tax relief’ to frame tax as something you are afflicted by - a negative.

Here is an article from ABC doing exactly this - framing tax cuts as a ‘relief’ - this is a right wing idea. Yes, this has become a dominant frame, but that nevertheless has a right wing bias. The capital class sees tax as a bad thing, and fight tooth and nail against paying it.

If ABC really did have left wing bias as Ita suggests, tax would be framed as a positive thing. Tax is redistributive. Tax creates government services and spending to benefit the whole society. This is a left wing idea - that tax is positive. Framing it as negative is right wing.

So successful have the neoliberals been at framing policies they don’t like as bad for the economy, and perpetuating a myth that left wing governments can’t manage money, these ideas have become rules of thumb, otherwise known as right wing biases.

The biases towards the interests of the capital class are subtle, yet important. For instance, interviewing someone losing from franking credits changes, without also interviewing someone gaining from a policy funded by this change is not a balanced report.

I have found there is a structural bias across all media - sometimes subtle, sometimes overt - which benefits the views and interests of the capital class over the rest of society. The ABC exhibits such right wing bias. Not all the time. Not every report. But it’s there. End.

@threadreaderapp unroll please