Författare: Denis Muller Senior Research Fellow Centre for Advancing Jou

For decades it seemed Alan Jones was unassailable.

A finding against him of professional misconduct by the Australian Broadcasting Authority (2000); a finding that he incited hatred, serious contempt and severe ridicule of Lebanese Muslims (2009); propositions of violence against two women prime ministers (2011 and 2019); verdicts against him and his employer amounting to millions of dollars in defamation actions (most notably one for $3.75 million in 2018): none of these ended his career.

Quite the reverse. Only weeks after the Australian Broadcasting Authority found in its “cash for comments” inquiry that Jones and others had misled their listeners by presenting paid endorsements as editorial opinion, he was hosting an event for then prime minister John Howard.

Howard was to become a fixture on the Jones program throughout the 11 years of his prime ministership.

The day after the Australian Communications and Media Authority found Jones was likely to have encouraged violence and vilification of Australians of Lebanese and Middle Eastern background, Howard described him as “an outstanding broadcaster”. “I don’t think he’s a person who encourages prejudice in the Australian community, not for one moment, but he is a person who articulates what a lot of people think.”

By 2001, Jones had become a kind of on-air policy-maker for the New South Wales government. In November that year, he dined with the then Labor premier, Bob Carr. They discussed a range of government policies, particularly policing. At that time, Jones was a relentless critic of the NSW police.

The following week, Carr dispatched his police minister-designate, Michael Costa, to Jones’s home to discuss policing policy.

In 2011 he said Julia Gillard, then Australia’s prime minister, should be taken out to sea and dumped in a chaff bag. In August 2019 he said Scott Morrison, who was then Australia’s prime minister, should “shove a sock” down the throat of his New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern.

He was an outspoken climate-change denier, and these grotesqueries were part of his campaign against political recognition of this reality.

Jones’s power, which made him so apparently untouchable, came from his weaponising of the microphone for conservative political ends in ways that resonated with his vast and rusted-on audience of largely working-class older people across Sydney’s sprawling western suburbs.

These suburbs contain many marginal state and federal electorates where the fates of governments can be decided. Their populations provide fertile ground for seeding by right-wing radio shock jocks, of whom Jones and his rival John Laws were pre-eminent examples.

In Australia, this is a peculiarly Sydney phenomenon. It is not seen to the same degree in any other capital city, even though they too have large areas of socioeconomic disadvantage like western Sydney.

Why that should be so is a complex question, but there are aspects of Sydney life that mark it out as different. It is really two cities. One is the largely prosperous and scenically dazzling east and north. The other, much larger, consists of dreary tracts of increasingly crowded housing stretching for many kilometres to the west and southwest.

In Sydney argot, the inhabitants of these respective worlds are called “silvertails” and “fibros”, the latter referring to the cladding of the homes that proliferated in western Sydney between and after the two world wars.

This two-cities effect makes the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” highly visible in a way that has no parallel in other Australian capitals. It engenders deep-seated grievance and cynicism, which the likes of Jones, who lives in a multimillion-dollar apartment on Circular Quay, have relentlessly exploited.

Jones coined the term “Struggle Street” to encapsulate the hardships of his listeners’ lives.

To these powerless people, Jones and Laws gave a voice, and as their audiences grew, prime ministers and premiers courted and feared them.

In the end, Jones’s impregnability was breached by not the power elite turning on one of their own, but by the journalism of a redoubtably tenacious Sydney Morning Herald investigative reporter, Kate McClymont.

In December 2023, she claimed Jones had used his position of power, first as a teacher and later as the country’s top-rating radio broadcaster, to allegedly prey on a number of young men.

In response to McClymont’s work, the NSW police set up Strike Force Bonnefin, run by the State Crime Command’s Child Abuse Squad, to conduct an investigation into Jones.

On November 18 2024, Jones was arrested at his Circular Quay home and charged initially with 24 sexual offences against eight males. The following day, two additional charges were laid involving a ninth male.

Through his lawyers, Jones has denied the charges and was bailed to appear in Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court on December 18. He was ordered to surrender his passport and not to contact or harass the alleged victims.

The charges relate to offences alleged to have been committed by Jones between 2001 and 2019, the youngest alleged victim being 17 at the time.

Those dates coincide almost exactly with Jones’s most influential years, from 2002 to 2020.

McClymont has spoken about the reluctance of some of her interviewees to speak, for fear of what Jones might do:

People were too afraid to take on Alan Jones. Once a couple of people came forward, and some people were happy to be publicly named, that gave confidence for other people to come forward. Läs mer…

Media coverage in Australia of the US presidential election and of the Voice referendum in October 2023 offer some pointers to what we might expect during next year’s federal election campaign.

They also suggest some ways in which the professional mass media might better respond to the challenges thrown up by the combination of disinformation, harmful speech and hyper-partisanship that disfigured those two campaigns.

The ideological contours of the Australian professional media, in particular its newspapers, have become delineated with increasing clarity over the past 15 years. In part this is a response to the polarising effects of social media, and in part it is a reflection of the increased stridency of political debate.

The right is dominated by News Corporation, with commercial radio shock jocks playing a supporting role. The left is more diffuse and less given to propagandising. It includes the old Fairfax papers, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, now owned by the Nine Entertainment Company, and Guardian Australia.

These contours are unlikely to change much, if at all, between now and the 2025 election.

Impartiality versus ‘bothsidesism’

Under these conditions, how might Australian journalism practice be adapted to better serve democracy under the pressures of an election campaign? The objective would be to contribute to the creation of a political culture in which people can argue constructively, disagree respectfully and work towards consensus.

In pursuing that objective, a central issue is whether and how the media are committed to the principle of impartiality in news reports. This principle is under sustained pressure, as was seen in both the presidential election and the Voice referendum.

We know from the words of its own editorial code of conduct that News Corp Australia does not accept the principle of impartiality in news reports. Paragraph 1.3 of that code states:

Publications should ensure factual material in news reports is distinguishable from other material such as commentary and opinion. Comment, conjecture and opinion are acceptable as part of coverage to provide perspective on an issue, or explain the significance of an issue, or to allow readers to recognise what the publication’s or author’s standpoint is on a matter.

This policy authorises journalists to write their news reports in ways that promote the newspaper’s or the journalist’s own views. This runs directly counter to the conventional separation of news from opinion accepted by most major media companies. This is exemplified by the policy of The Guardian, including Guardian Australia:

While free to editorialise and campaign, a publication must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.

Appended to The Guardian’s code is the essay written in 1921 by C. P. Scott, first the editor and then the owner-editor of the Manchester Guardian, to mark the newspaper’s centenary. It includes these words: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred”. Referring to a newspaper’s public duty, he added: “Propaganda […] is hateful.”

In the present overheated atmosphere of public debate, impartiality has come to be confused with a discredited type of journalism known as “bothsidesism”.

“Bothsidesism” presents “both sides” of an issue without any regard for their relative evidentiary merits. It allows for the ventilation of lies, hate speech and conspiracy theories on the spurious ground that these represent another, equally valid, side of the story.

Read more:
’Suicide for democracy.’ What is ’bothsidesism’ – and how is it different from journalistic objectivity?

Impartiality is emphatically not “bothsidesism”. What particularly distinguishes impartiality is that it follows the weight of evidence. However, a recurring problem in the current environment is that the fair and sober presentation of evidence can be obliterated by the force of political rhetoric. As a result, impartiality can fall victim to its own detached passivity.

Yet impartiality does not have to be passive: it can be proactive.

During the presidential campaign, in the face of Trump’s egregious lying, some media organisations took this proactive approach.

When Trump claimed during his televised debate with Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio, the host broadcaster, the American Broadcasting Company, fact-checked him in real time. It found, during the broadcast, that there was no evidence to support his claim.

And for four years before that, The Washington Post chronicled Trump’s lies while in office, arriving at a total of 30,573.

Challenging misinformation

During the Voice referendum, many lies were told about what the Voice to Parliament would be empowered to do: advise on the date of Anzac Day, change the flag, set interest rates, and introduce a race-based element into the Constitution, advantaging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people over others.

These were rebutted by the relevant authorities but by then the lies had been swept up in the daily tide of mis- or disinformation that was a feature of the campaign. At that point, rebuttals merely oxygenate the original falsehoods.

More damaging still to the democratic process was the baseless allegation by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton that the Australian Electoral Commission had “rigged” the vote by accepting a tick as indicating “yes” but not accepting a cross as indicating “no”.

Opposition Senate leader, Simon Birmingham, also said allowing ticks but not crosses undermined the integrity of the process.

The electoral commissioner, Tom Rogers, was reported as repudiating these claims, but by then these lies had acquired currency and momentum.

A proactive approach to impartiality requires establishing the truthful position before or at the time of initial publication, then calling out falsehoods for what they are and providing supporting evidence. Neither the principle of impartiality nor any other ethical principle in journalism requires journalists to publish lies as if they might be true.

It would not have been a failure of impartiality to say in a news report that Dutton’s claims about a rigged referendum were baseless, with the supporting evidence.

That evidence, set out in an excellent example of proactive impartiality by the ABC’s election analyst Antony Green at the time, was that the ticks and crosses rule had been in place since 1988.

‘Proactive impartiality’ is the key to reporting the 2025 election

The question is, do Australia’s main media organisations as a whole have the resources and the will to invest in real-time fact-checking? The record is not encouraging.

In March 2024, the ABC dissolved its fact-checking arrangement with RMIT University, replacing it with an in-house fact-checking unit called ABC News Verify.

In 2023, a team led by Andrea Carson of La Trobe University published a study tracking the fate of fact-checking operations in Australia. Its findings were summarised by her in The Conversation.

Read more:
Is Australia’s golden age of third-party fact checking over?

In the absence of a fact-checking capability, it is hard to see how journalists can perform the kind of proactive impartiality that current circumstances demand.

On top of that, the shift from advertising-based mass media to subscription-based niche media is creating its own logic, which is antithetical to impartiality.

Mass-directed advertising was generally aimed at as broad an audience as possible. It encouraged impartiality in the accompanying editorial content as part of an appeal to the broad middle of society.

Since a lot of this advertising has gone online, the media have begun to rely increasingly on subscriptions. In a hyper-partisan world, ideological branding, or alternatively freedom from ideological branding, has become part of the sales pitch.

Where subscribers do expect to find ideological comfort, readership and ratings are at put risk when their expectations are disappointed.

Rupert Murdoch learned this when his Fox News channel in the US called the 2020 election for Joe Biden, driving down ratings and causing him to reverse that position in order to claw back the losses.

These are unpalatable developments for those who believe that fair, accurate news reporting untainted by the ideological preferences of proprietors or journalists is a vital ingredient in making a healthy democracy work. But that is the world we live in as we approach the federal election of 2025. Läs mer…

In February 2017, as Donald Trump took office, The Washington Post adopted the first slogan in its 140-year history: Democracy Dies in Darkness.

How ironic, then, that it should now be helping to extinguish the flame of American democracy by refusing to endorse a candidate for the forthcoming presidential election.

This decision, and a similar one by the second of America’s big three newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, disgraces journalism, disgraces the papers’ own heritage and represents an abandonment of civic responsibility at a moment when United States faces its most consequential presidential election since the Civil War.

At stake is whether the United States remains a functioning democracy or descends into a corrupt plutocracy led by a convicted criminal who has already incited violence to overturn a presidential election and has shown contempt for the conventions on which democracy rests.

Why did they do it?

Why would two of the Western world’s finest newspapers take such a recklessly irresponsible decision?

It cannot be on the basis of any rational assessment of the respective fitness for office of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

It also cannot be on the basis of their own reporting and analysis of the candidates, where the lies and threats issued by Trump have been fearlessly recorded. In this context, the decision to not endorse a candidate is a betrayal of their own editorial staff. The Post’s editor-at-large, Robert Kagan, resigned in protest at the paper’s decision not to endorse Harris.

This leaves, in my view, a combination of cowardice and greed as the only feasible explanation. Both newspapers are owned by billionaire American businessmen: The Post by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, and the LA Times by Patrick Soon-Shiong, who made his billions through biotechnology.

Bezos bought the Post in 2013 through his private investment company Nash Holdings, and Soon-Shiong bought the Times in 2018 through his investment firm Nant Capital. Both run the personal risk of suffering financially should a Trump presidency turn out to be hostile towards them.

During the election campaign, Trump has made many threats of retaliation against those in the media who oppose him. He has indicated that if he regains the White House, he will exact vengeance on news outlets that anger him, toss reporters in jail and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage he doesn’t like.

Logic would suggest that in the face of these threats, the media would do all in their power to oppose a Trump presidency, if not out of respect for democracy and free speech then at least in the interests of self-preservation. But fear and greed are among the most powerful of human impulses.

The purchase of these two giants of the American press by wealthy businessmen is a consequence of the financial pressures exerted on the professional mass media by the internet and social media.

Bezos was welcomed with open arms by the Graham family, which had owned the Post for four generations. But the paper faced unsustainable financial losses arising from the loss of advertising to the internet.

At first he was seen not just by the Grahams but by the executive editor, Marty Baron, as a saviour. He injected large sums of money into the paper, enabling it to regain much of the prestige and journalistic capacity it had lost.

Baron, in his book Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post, was full of praise for Bezos’s financial commitment to the paper, and for his courage in the face of Trumpian hostility. During Trump’s presidency, the paper kept a log of his lies, tallying them up at 30,573 over the four years.

Against this history, the paper’s abdication of its responsibilities now is explicable only by reference to a loss of heart by Bezos.

At the LA Times, the ownership of the Otis-Chandler families also spanned four generations, but the impact of the internet took a savage toll there as well. Between 2000 and 2018 its ownership passed through three hands, ending up with Soon-Shiong.

Both newspapers reached the zenith of their journalistic accomplishments during the last three decades of the 20th century, winning Pulitzer Prices and, in the case of the Post, becoming globally famous for its coverage of the Watergate scandal.

This, in the days when American democracy was functioning according to convention, led to the resignation of Richard Nixon as president.

The two reporters responsible for this coverage, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, issued a statement about the decision to not endorse a candidate:

Marty Baron, who was a ferociously tough editor, posted on X: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”

Now, of the big three, only The New York Times is prepared to endorse a candidate for next month’s election. It has endorsed Harris, saying of Trump: “It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States.”

Why does it matter?

It matters because in democracies the media are the means by which voters learn not just about facts but about the informed opinion of those who, by virtue of access and close acquaintance, are well placed to make assessments of candidates between whom those voters are to choose. It is a core function of the media in democratic societies.

Their failure is symptomatic of the malaise into which American democracy has sunk.

In 2018, two professors of government at Harvard, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, published a book, How Democracies Die. It was both reflective and prophetic. Noting that the United States was now more polarised than at any time since the Civil War, they wrote:

America is no longer a democratic model. A country whose president attacks the press, threatens to lock up his rival, and declares he might not accept the election results cannot credibly defend democracy. Both potential and existing autocrats are likely to be emboldened with Trump in the White House.

Symbolically, that The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times should have gone dark at this moment is reminiscent of the remark made in 1914 by Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey:

The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. Läs mer…