[vacri]

"reality has a left-wing bias"

The ABC (Australian version) gets comments that it's heavily left-wing, yet they have their own internal metrics that watch for evenness of opinion, and these have to match up with an external auditor.

Of course no-one can be neutral about a subjective topic, but it's interesting that those news organisations with strong reputations for quality general-news reporting are always seen as 'left-wing rags'.

[bbbhn]

I don't know anything about ABC, but generally speaking, I imagine that the likelihood of a media company's internal team declaring that their own company's reporting is biased is about as likely as BP creating an internal team that reports offshore drilling creates uncontainable environmental risks.

I don't think it's surprising that the majority of established media companies lean in a certain political direction. People on one side of the political spectrum may be more attracted to journalism than the other side, which would naturally lead to media companies producing journalism more sympathetic to the political arguments that their employees are sympathetic to.

[vacri]

No-one can be unbiased about the news because it's inherently subjective. I agree, an internal-only team can't help but be biased, which is why they try to balance it against an external team.

[sien]

Like The Economist?

Are the ABC's internal metric's available? What about the audits?

Their selection of journalists on current affairs shows is interesting though. Chris Uhlman's wife is an ALP MP, Barrie Cassidy was a Hawke staffer, Maxine McKew became an ALP member, Kerry O'Brien was a Whitlam staffer. It's almost like there is a pattern....

[vacri]

True, I was probably a bit hasty in 'always', but think that 'usually' fits.

My knowledge came from a friend of mine who had some reason to be at an ABC office at one point and witnessed a meeting between the ABC staffers and the external agency, and they were concerned that their week's tallies didn't match up, as they were out 2 minutes. I imagine that the ABC's numbers would be public info somewhere, and I have no idea about the external agency.

As for the list of journos, it doesn't really say much about the content itself, if the content is monitored. I mean, if you want to do quality current affairs on TV in Australia, there's ABC, and there's SBS, the latter of which doesn't do much domestic stuff (as it's not their bailiwick).

[sien]

It depends on the monitoring. If you cook that you're golden regardless of what you do.

Actually determining bias is difficult.

There is also Meet the Press on the commercial stations and Sky News is actually well worth watching if you have it. Richo's show and Peter Van Onselen's are really good.

But reading news is far better at any rate.