Spotlight On ... Public Right To Know

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday August 23, 2004

Ben Cubby

Are journalists doing their jobs properly?

Sometimes not, a conference in Sydney was told at the weekend. The annual Public Right to Know conference held at the University of Technology brought reporters, editors and academics together to ask if the media were doing enough to keep people informed. Speakers claimed that many journalists had been caught in a web of obfuscation spun by public relations companies and governments.

But allegations of media bias, such as those aimed at the ABC by the former communications minister, Richard Alston, could soon disappear if Dr Annabelle Lukin's methods of analysis gain widespread currency. The Macquarie University linguist uses functional grammar models to test newspaper articles about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, making checking for bias a more scientific, less opinionated process.

"Mapping bias is multi-dimensional," Dr Lukin said. "You can theoretically and empirically go past the point we are at now, which is one person saying one thing and one person saying another. There's a sense that the public want to know about bias and are entitled to accurate answers."

The free flow of ideas to the public was also in danger of being choked by the prohibitively high cost of requesting information from governments, said Jack Herman, executive secretary of the Australian Press Council. Last year, he said, a journalist requesting some documents under freedom of information laws was billed for 141 hours of "decision-making" time by departmental staff.

These difficulties may help explain why circulation for most city newspapers is gradually falling. But Dr Susan Forde, journalism lecturer at Queensland's Griffith University, said small community papers have become much more popular in the past decade.

Broadcasting graphic images of war on television is often seen as having turned public opinion against the Vietnam conflict, but it seems it can also condition people to support war.

Ilan Pappe, a political scientist at Israel's University of Haifa, told the conference that regular images of barbarity and destruction shown on Israeli television appeared to have made people afraid to question their government. He said viewers had been numbed to the point where a light-hearted reality TV show last year live from the smouldering ruins of Jenin refugee camp provoked no complaints at all.