Vic Voters Dump Labor! Really?

The Murdoch press is reporting a slip in the approval rating for Victoria’s Labor Premier Daniel Andrews based on the results of an opinion poll commissioned by the Herald Sun. Their breakdown of the statistics purports to prove that voters have lost faith in the Labor Government because it is not tough enough on youth crime.

This kind of scare mongering by the tabloid press has to be one of the oldest tricks in the book. The recently deceased former editor of the Chicago Tribune, Jack Fuller, gives a fascinating account of a scare campaign that his paper ran when he joined as a reporter in the 1970s. Circulation for the Tribune was in decline and so the editor sent a couple of young reporters out to investigate muggings on the subway. In Chicago someone gets mugged on the subway every day. Always have, probably always will, so it wasn’t hard for the young crime team to report the details of at least one mugging a day for six months straight. What the editors did was splash it on the front page and label it a crime wave. Circulation shot up of course and outraged citizens campaigned hard for City Hall to lock up the culprits and throw away the key.

The politicians had to talk tough and be seen to throw more resources at law and order but only from the punitive end. Certainly nothing about crime prevention was required or advocated by the newspaper. This is a scenario that repeats itself in jurisdictions all over the world whenever newspaper editors get bored or want to turn up the heat on their least favoured politicians.

Its standard practice for papers like Melbourne’s Herald-Sun or the Sydney Tele to engage in this kind of manipulation, but when broadsheets like the Age and the Guardian get on the band wagon and re-report this muck, it serves only to legitimise unethical use of the media and can have serious repercussions for individuals and for our society as a whole.