Fourth Estate failure replaces democracy with propaganda warlordism.
What is a democracy? Do we live in one?
The first question is easy enough to answer: democracy is literally the rule of the people. An electoral democracy is a system of government run by representatives who have been granted the informed consent of the voting public.
The word ‘informed’ ought to leap off the screen to anyone concerned about the state of contemporary politics. It certainly does for me. I’ve always had my doubts, but years of watching the CFA dispute from the front row has sealed the deal: voters are most certainly not adequately informed about the issues upon which they base their vote. In fact, frequently they are deliberately misinformed. As a result, our reality falls far short of our aspirations to democratic government.
The CFA dispute intersected dramatically with the national interest when the Coalition decided to exploit it for their 2016 federal election campaign. Without any serious challenge from competing parties or the media, the Liberal Party led an extraordinarily successful campaign of deception. The campaign framed Labor and the United Firefighters Union as marauding villains who threatened to conquer the CFA and sully its virtue.
In support of this narrative, the Liberals set up an astroturfing platform — Hands Off the CFA! — that doubled as a Liberal Party fundraising vehicle, and set about propagating numerous lies as supposed evidence of how an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement recommended by the Fair Work Commission effected a ‘hostile union takeover’ of the CFA. Two lies gained particular prominence. The first claimed the union would take over absolute decision-making power through so-called ‘veto’ provisions. The second claimed union members would take over on the ground, too, prohibiting volunteers from putting out fires until seven union members were present to supervise them. Both claims were demonstrably false at the time they were deployed. That is, they were lies. Nevertheless, they were repeated again and again, to the point where even Guardian and the ABC were stating them as fact. Only after the election did The Age and Guardian, prompted by Adam Bandt, note that the seven-firefighter claim was a lie.
The CFA campaign paid off handsomely for the Coalition. According to Herald Sun editor Damon Johnson, strategists from both the Liberal and Labor parties credit the campaign with winning two or three seats, in an election the Coalition won by four seats. (There is an element of boastfulness in Johnson’s comment: the Herald Sun supported the Coalition campaign with dozens of front-page stories packed with hyperbole and fabrication.)
A significant fraction of the Coalition’s winning margin was contributed by voters who based their decision upon disinformation. Is it accurate to say those voters gave their informed consent? That is, is it accurate to say this government was democratically elected? No, I don’t think so.
They all do it: so goes the standard shut-down when people like me get on their high horse about political lies. I hear this often from friends and acquaintances who are politically disengaged. It is an expression of their justified cynicism. But I also hear it from seasoned political insiders, including journalists. The implication is we should just stop worrying about lies, because they’re an unavoidable part of our political landscape.
I can’t stop worrying. Here’s why: if we accept political lies, we accept that we don’t live in a democracy, and never will.
I don’t want to believe that, and I don’t think journalists do, either. In fact, many journalists are keen on the idea that their profession comprises a kind of guardian class for democracy. As Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance chief executive Paul Murphy told an appreciative audience at the 2017 Walkleys, ‘No one in this room needs convincing of the importance of public interest journalism to a functioning democracy.’
Journalists see themselves as the guardians of democracy, because they believe just what I have articulated above: an informed public is essential. Without it, we can’t have a democracy.
Despite whatever psychological value it might appear to offer as a coping mechanism, it’s an exercise in cognitive dissonance for anyone who believes in democracy to resign themselves to accepting rampant lies as a natural feature of politics.
Political lying must be seen for what it is: the grossest kind of integrity violation, and grounds for the most serious repercussions. Why? Because it strikes at the very foundations of democracy. A political lie is a corruption of democractic process of a higher order than those that already attract grand censure, such as expenses rorts, and every instance of political lying should yield significantly more intense criticism.
It’s not only elections that are corrupted by lies. Rampant lying makes a mockery of political ‘debate’ between elections, too. Parliamentarians are elected to arrive at decisions on matters of public interest, by rational argument, as informed by evidence. The democratic value of parliament is lost when lies reduce debate to power games designed to build a propaganda base for the next election.
What will we end up with if our society follows the lead of many political insiders, and abandons truthfulness as misty-eyed idealism? The result — and we’re already part-way there — might be termed propaganda warlordism. Think of the medieval period, or Game of Thrones. Power was pursued and held by force of violence, in most cases by competing parties pursuing self-interest with no regard for ethics or the public interest. Our system of government by free election means we are no longer ruled by violence, or the threat thereof. There is no room for explicit coercion, but there is room for persuasion. As persuasion gives way to manipulation, and manipulation gives way to deception, our system shifts from democracy to propaganda warlordism. That is, a kind of warlordism where physical violence is replaced by the rhetorical violence of lies.
(Think this is far-fetched? Watch Insiders, if you can bear it. The discussion consistently frames politics as a propaganda war. Actions are appreciated purely for their capacity to sway voters, with little to no reference to truth or the public interest. The entertainment the panel members find in Australian politics looks very much the same as the entertainment people find in the depraved power battles of Game of Thrones — a fictional story with fictional victims.)
We can protect our democracy from being degraded to propaganda warlordism, to a degree, by standing up to the most obvious propaganda: lies. Political lies must be de-normalised and disincentivised. They must result in political pain, not political gain. We must all become, as The Economist argues, card-carrying ‘pro-truthers’.
That could be achieved by a grassroots movement, or it could be achieved by political thought-leaders: politicians and journalists. For journalists, that ought to be a pretty simple request. Just do the job you already claim to be doing. MEAA should take the lead in making that happen.
If they need inspiration, journalists should look to how their colleagues in the United States responded to the election of Donald Trump. The US media, perhaps shocked into their senses by the extreme dangers of the Trump presidency, have realised this is not a game. Real people suffer when dangerous men lie their way into power. Can you see the Australian media censuring political lies the way the US media now does, with headlines like ‘Trump’s Lies, the Definitive List’, or ‘President Trump has made more than 2,000 false or misleading claims over 355 days’?
It’s hard to imagine, but we must.
I originally prepared this article with publication by Guardian Australia in mind. It was written as a plea to journalists and commentators to denormalise political lies. My premise was that some journalists, deep down, were committed to the democratic duty of journalism to inform the public.
The events of March 6th forced me to reject that premise, so I withdrew the article, which was under consideration by the Guardian opinion editor at the time.
The reason I could no longer accept that Australian journalists have any moral conscience or sense of democratic duty to which to appeal is this: on March 6th, nearly the entire mainstream media — including the ABC and Guardian (via AAP) — served as an uncritical echo chamber for fake news put out by the Herald Sun, in direct collaboration with the Victorian Liberals.
No-one who who takes journalistic ethics seriously would parrot a claim of the Herald Sun and represent it as fact, without attribution or fact check. To refuse to take the story offline, to issue a retraction, or to apologise, now for nineteen days and counting, to me is proof that the Australian media are beyond redemption. There is no point imploring them to lift their game. They won’t.
Nevertheless, I think my article did a reasonable job of explaining why a truthful media is essential to democracy, and what we are left with without an effective media. For that reason, I’ve put it up here.
