When you’re stuck in a political ideology, reality looks like a competing ideology.

I just watched the Bolt Report and found myself raging at an interview with Tim Blair (32min in) about the ‘bias’ of the ABC. Apparently all of the main reporters on the ABC are lefties, and there are no conservatives.

This is the problem with ideologues – they don’t see the middle. They don’t see reality. The only see “My position” and “everything left/right of my position” which is clearly biased (because it doesn’t agree with me).

The line which made me lose it was this one:

…on global warming, well you know that’s a fantastically long record of bias. You will remember a few years ago when the ABC actually ran a British global warming skeptic documentary and afterwards Tony Jones had to run a sort of a television counseling session for traumatised ABC viewers. It was hilarious.

Here’s the deal – reporting the scientific consensus is NOT a political ideology. If the ABC reported the GM crops were dangerous, and that wifi causes cancer, or that alternative medicine was just as valuable as real medicine, then you would have a case for claiming that the ABC had a left wing bias (ie: reporting things believed by many left wing extremists, that are otherwise not based in reality), but they don’t. The ABC is designed to report reality, and when your ideological view is so far out of alignment with reality, then that reporting might appear biased to you, but that is because of your own bias.

Playing the non-scientific documentary about climate change skepticism WAS prsenting a bias. A right wing bias, which has no connection to reality.  You can’t assert your right wing ideology as a basis for changing the reporting of scientific facts. End of story.

Bolt followed up the line above with:

the assumption seems to be… that conservative journalists can’t be impartial, but the left can

highlighting my point, which is that if your bias is so far to the right (or left) that you think that objective reporting is biased, then there is nothing anyone can do to help you. Genuinely objective journalists, genuinely reporting the news as objectively as possible look ‘left’ to you, because they are left of your position. This doesn’t make them actually lefties, it is just how the appear to the right.

And similarly, if you ask the socialist groups out there who want capitalism torn down completely, they will tell you that the entire media is right wing. Maybe the ABC needs to get more socialist reporters on it, you know, to balance out all of that right wing bias it has by defending vaccines and denying the efficiency of homeopathy….or whatever it is that pisses the far left off.

You can’t force an objective organisation to start saying that vaccines kill, that GMOs are harmful or that global warming isn’t happening! Doing so is to move it from objective fair reporting towards your ideological bias, and while, obviously, that is the real goal here, I am pretty sure most people would agree that leaving the ABC as an objective source is far more desirable than bringing in a few conservative reporters…which is what Bolt seems determined to do… ‘in order to balance’ the network out.

Because obviously 10 people in the middle of a see saw is always balanced out by one person far out on the tip of ONE side.

 

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 10.0/10 (1 vote cast)
When you're stuck in a political ideology, reality looks like a competing ideology., 10.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.