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February 18, 2010
Can we now prove Tony Jones' bias?
I stumbled across an article today by James Madden at The Australian website and thought that it might be of interest to our readers here at Menzies House.
We all know Tony Jones has his favourites but never before had we thought of finding a way of measuring his bias. But things have changed! Blogger Gavin Atkins thinks he has a system to measure this bias which sounds pretty reasonable to me.
I can't vouch for the authenticity of the stats and don't want to be called up by Media Watch next week if the data is wrong, but it sounds like a pretty accurate representation of a standard off-the-shelf Jones interview to me. Have a look at the excerpt below and let me know what you think by commenting at the bottom of the page.
I can't vouch for the authenticity of the stats and don't want to be called up by Media Watch next week if the data is wrong, but it sounds like a pretty accurate representation of a standard off-the-shelf Jones interview to me. Have a look at the excerpt below and let me know what you think by commenting at the bottom of the page.
Chris Browne is Editor-in-Chief of Menzies House.POLITICAL bias is not always an easy thing to measure. But blogger Gavin Atkins, who writes for the Asian Correspondent website, has taken a novel approach in an attempt to discover whether the perceived left-wing slant of the ABC's Lateline program actually exists or whether the claims of bias are just paranoid ramblings from the conservative side of the political divide.
Atkins compared two recent interviews the show's host Tony Jones conducted with opposition treasury spokesman Joe Hockey and Treasurer Wayne Swan, and recorded how many times the silver-haired journo interrupted the pollies and how much of the respective interviews were filled by Jones-speak. Now, as Strewth is physically and mentally incapable of any bias, we will simply reproduce Atkins's findings in their raw form. "As indicated by the ellipsis punctuation (. . .) appearing at the end of an unfinished sentence, Hockey was interrupted 20 times. As indicated by ellipsis punctuation (. . .) appearing at the end of an unfinished sentence, Swan was interrupted 0 times. From a 3482-word segment, 2027 words were spoken by Hockey and 1455 words by Jones, thus Jones took up 42 per cent of the words used in the Hockey interview. Out of a 2960-word segment, Swan spoke 2190 words, 870 words by Jones, thus Jones took up 29 per cent of the words in the Swan interview." To put that in some perspective, independent observers have noted that roughly 93 per cent of the average Strewth column is utter nonsense.
Below is an excerpt from ABC’s editorial code of practice:
Internal ABC investigations have repeatedly shown that the ABC leans towards the Liberal party anyway (if you can really accurately measure these things, which I'm not convinced you can).
News Ltd is running an open campaign against the ABC and this is just part of that.