A new report from the ANU has come out claiming that the ABC is more biased towards the right of politics. I checked the ANU website and it is not a drama school comedy production. This comes after Peter Costello and John Howard both criticised the ABC for bias – so the report is suspiciously well timed. The report is here. It appears the authors of the report failed to run a sanity check over their results, because according to a media report:
…the surprising categorisation of public figures Gerard Henderson and Les Murray as pro-Labor and Hugh Mackay as pro-Coalition.
I noticed the same. The categorisation of intellectuals as either right or left is determined by how many times they are mentioned by either an ALP or Coalition politician in Hansard. While there are other aspects to the model, the breakdown of intellectuals in this way forms the basis of the whole report. A basic mention in Hansard does not seem like the basis for saying much about media bias. The authors also have no fear in using one data point for determining the political standing of an intellectual. Pretty weak stuff. The whole report seems like a rush job – using Stats 101 – designed to discredit Howard and Costello and protect the author’s fellow government employees in the ABC.
Now that I’ve played the ball, it is time to play the man. The author of the report Andrew Leigh, teaches labour economics and political economy at the ANU and started his academic career with a BA from the University of Sydney. So we know from the get go that he is a pinko commie sympathiser in bed with Big Government, Big Education and Big Media. He also has fascination with ‘top incomes’ or rich people, and seems to have rehashed the same article over and over again about the topic to get his publication details up. So that gives a fairly quick indication as to his political bias and the quality of work produced.