What do you do when you’ve spent the past year gathering signatures for a petition, only to decide the message you actually want to deliver is the opposite of what your petition calls for?
Victorian Nationals Deputy Leader Steph Ryan MLA has come up with a pretty neat trick. Don’t lie about what the petition actually asked people to sign their name to. Instead, get the media to tell the lie for you, by baiting them with a skillfully deceptive media release.
Here’s the lie Steph Ryan managed to trick the McIvor Times into telling:
In fact, Ryan’s petition says nothing at all about “keeping” volunteers or opposing some fictional plot to replace them with career firefighters! (An absurd suggestion, especially in Ryan’s seat of Euroa, which contains not a single fire station deemed busy enough by CFA to warrant career firefighter response at present.)
Here’s what Ryan’s petition actually says:
The wording reported in Hansard is similar:
The proposition people are being asked to oppose here is the supposed take-over of the CFA by the UFU. That’s the polar opposite of what would be on the table under the rumoured restructure: complete withdrawal of career firefighters (UFU members) from the CFA!
The petition is part of the long-running anti-EBA “Hands Off CFA” campaign, which pre-dates by many months any speculation about restructuring the fire services. The McIvor Times is incorrect to state that the petition relates to the rumoured restructure or alteration of the CFA/MFB boundary.
Did reporters at the McIvor Times just make this lie up on their own? I doubt it. I think they were tricked into inferring it from a deceptive media release from Steph Ryan, which jumbles together statements about the petition (blue) with comments about the rumoured restructure (pink).
To the letter of what was written, Ryan never claimed the petition is about the potential restructure. But it’s a pretty good bet that a time-poor, over-worked reporter will reach the conclusion that it is, and won’t take the time to fact-check that conclusion. Clearly this is what happened at The McIvor Times.
Ryan’s actions here are clearly unethical. Thousands of people who signed a petition supporting “Hands off CFA” were never asked their opinion about a potential restructure, but Ryan has led the media to believe that those who signed the petition support her stance opposing the restructure. This is a particularly devious ploy because a restructure could see the UFU take their hands off the CFA completely! For this reason, many supporters of Hands Off CFA would surely look positively at a restructure, but Ryan is using their names to oppose it.
Are other Coalition MPs running the same deceptive propaganda campaign? How many other local newspapers have fallen for the same trick? It’s very hard to say. Most local newspapers don’t come up in my news searches, McIvor Times being one of the few exceptions. But I’d back it in that Ryan sent her media release to dozens of outlets, and quite a few would have run it. For local papers, any media release is free content: hard to resist.
(Update, 22nd April 2017: an identical story appears on the website of the Kyabram Free Press. Like The McIvor Times, the Kyabram Free Press is part of McPherson Media’s stable of 14 local newspapers distributed across north-central and north-eastern Victoria. Their websites are collectively paywalled, so I am unable to ascertain whether the article has been run in all of these papers. McPherson Media claims a combined print readership of 116,100 for its newspapers. Executive Director Ross McPherson has a history of using his media power to manipulate election outcomes, but is no rusted on Nats supporter: his efforts in 2014 helped independent candidate Suzanna Sheed oust The Nationals from the seat of Shepparton, which borders Steph Ryan’s seat of Euroa .)
A Previous Attempt
This is not the first time the Coalition have used local papers to spread deception about the CFA dispute. They have done it continually. One particular campaign is worth noting here.
Fairfax local paper The Warrnambool Standard reported on 1st February 2017 that Opposition emergency services spokesman Brad Battin was claiming there had been a decline in CFA volunteer numbers during the term of the Andrews government.
However, to their credit, the Standard followed up in the very same article with a statement from the CFA refuting Battin’s claims. According to the CFA, the figures Battin was using were corrupted by a change in data collection procedures. Comparing figures from before and after the change was “comparing oranges with apples”.
That conclusion is supported by a quick graph I made using data from CFA’s web site:
Nevertheless, despite the fact that Battin’s claim had been debunked by the Standard on February 1st, the Coaliton continued to try to use it for political mileage.
Here’s Kim Wells, boasting three weeks later on Facebook about having misled Parliament the day before:
And, you guessed it, here’s Steph Ryan peddling the same lie on the 7th of February, in local paper The North Central Review:
Again, this is just one news story that I stumbled upon haphazardly. How many other Coalition MPs spun the same lie, in how many other local newspapers, despite the fact that it had already been debunked?
