Gerard Henderson, Andrew Leigh, Joshua Gans, slant in the media and howling at the full moon while wearing steel capped boots

(Above: setting the level and tone for the incisive academic debate to follow).

Could any study of the media convince Gerard Henderson that the ABC isn't a den for craven commie pinko pervert socialists, a dark bat cave full of crazy lefties?

Unlikely. When Professors Andrew Leigh and Joshua Gans recenty published research suggesting Australians journalists tended to be centrist, and that ABC television news had a significant slant towards the coalition during the period 1999-2007, people went on believing what they always believed.

No reason to let a couple of academic wingnuts get in the way of the eternal and correct view of reality.

Professor Gans said that in reaching the results, the researchers had used three methods.

“Our first approach focused on public intellectuals,” said Professor Gans. “Coding up Hansard mentions, we were able to place over 100 public intellectuals on a Labor/Coalition spectrum. Using media mentions of the same individuals, we then tested whether particular media outlets were more likely to quote left-wing and right-wing public intellectuals.

“The second approach analysed journalistic content. We asked five raters to code nearly 300 election stories as pro-Coalition, pro-Labor, or centrist. The third strategy focused on editorial decisions. We had the raters code up newspaper headlines (without seeing the accompanying stories). We also coded up editorial election endorsements,” said Professor Gans. (here).

Clearly they'd got it right in relation to The Age, a notoriously festering cess pit of left wing ideology, so unrelated to reality that it's hard to find a decent loon to write about on a daily basis, but the finding in relation to ABC News was so preposterous, it clearly flung the whole research strategy in to doubt (the full report is available here at the top of page).

What's worse, the findings that most media were largely centrist, that television tended to be the most right-wing medium, and newspapers the most left-wing, were disturbing, but what was truly alarming as that the newspaper rulers (editors and such) were strongly biased, with only 8 of 44 election endorsements over the period 1996-2007 being for Labor.

Well when confronted with these kinds of findings, what to do, how to react? Who better to turn to than Gerard Henderson, whose favorite past time - when not mentioning and burnishing his iconic image of John Howard - is to be a fervent repeater of the news that the ABC is a den of iniquity. Now you might call that a canard but we French lovers known it's a duck. When it quacks like a socialist, walks like a socialist, eats snails like a socialist, it surely is a canard. Vendre un canard à moitié!!!

And how does Henderson respond in his Media Watch Dog, issue no. 26? (here)

Well first he spends a good deal of time reviewing ABC programs for the night of Monday 31st August 2009, thereby showing an unhealthy fixation, almost a compulsion to devour ABC shows which almost matches the bizarre behavior of people anxious to read the work of loons.

So The 7.30 Report is held to produce viewers asleep on their couches, only to awaken to watch Australian Story, which receives this report card:

8 pm. Australian Story takes a full 30 minutes to tell the story of a middle class young man. It’s called “Fly With Me”. He makes paper planes. Wow. It was believed that he had a malignant brain tumour. Sad. He didn’t have cancer and he’s still with us. Hooray. He still makes paper-planes.

At which point you might think 'just switch off the telly' because brain damage, if not brain death, seems the likely outcome - especially if that's the best you can do to send up and traduce a show determinedly aimed, via soft, people-loving human interest stories, at conservative cardigan wearers and librarians.

But no, it's on with Four Corners producing more yawns about an alleged conspiracy in relation to the 7/7 London bombings, involving the recycling of a BBC progam, and a chance to slag off Media Watch because it slagged off the Geelong Advertiser for printing hairsuit instead of hirsute.

Which goes to show that one show's trivial pursuit is certainly the meat and potatoes of the Media Watch Dog scribbler. (But no need to mention the more substantive matters in Media Watch that night because that's just the usual critique of non-stories).

This is followed by a critique of Phillip Adams on Late Night Live, with a long anecdote by Adams reprinted at length, followed by the question does anybody really care? To which the answer is surely no, in which case the full to overflowing intertubes has swollen just tad with more useless trivia thanks to the scribbler's fetishistic recycling of Adams. What is this fixation on men in black, some kind of Tommy Lee Jones or bdsm dungeon thing?

After what's apparently the usual critique of non-stories by the scribbler - Linda Javin's decency in getting whipped when visiting the Hellfire Club in 1993 for Rolling Stone - the scribbler announces a brave decision to award a five paws gong for excellence and a zip paws for trash on the ABC.

Naturally, after handing Emma Alberici a five paws award for a report mentioning the Hitler-Stalin pact (apparently this notorious and well known major historical event is rarely mentioned in the Australian media), a zip paws award is handed out to the ABC Radio news report which called the corruption of the Oil-For-Food program a "Wheat for Weapons" scandal, thereby becoming stooges of Labor spin. Sure that bit of funny business might have helped the tyrant Saddam Hussein, but surely not as much as when we shipped off 107,000 tons of scrap iron to Japan during the period 1939-1941, not to mention plenty of wool and wheat (see here).

Getting a whiff of obsessive compulsive behavior, and way too much attention paid to the ABC?

Well all that is just by way of a hors d'oeuvre for the scribbler's take on the academic study of "media slant", under the extremely objective, non-partisan header The Square-Root of Media Bias, A Full Moon, Some Academics and So On.

Why not start with a cheap shot at the methodology employed by the academics, in the manner of a hairsuit skinhead roaming the streets of Geelong?

Now for a full disclosure. MWD read the Gans/Leigh paper when there was a full moon - or close to a full moon. This may explain MWD’s inability to follow some of the insights of those two insightful academics. Take this insight, at Page 9, for example:

To estimate the political position of each media outlet, we simply estimate a weighted OLS regression, in which the dependent variable P is the share of Coalition mentions by a given public intellectual i in media outlet j in time period t, and the independent variable is a vector of indicator variables for each media outlet:



So that’s pretty clear, then.

[Not really. Are taxpayers paying good money for this sludge or is this all a fake? Ed]

Well that's pretty clever. A joke about the full moon, a joke about an equation, a mention of fake sludge, and it's all done. No need for steel tipped boots, just meeting the academics on their level on a level playing field, and disposing of them with a razor sharp intelligent rebuttal - and did I mention the couple of mentions of how the taxpayers' money was paying for this tripe?

But perhaps you're feeling this is a bit underdone. Well how about this trumping of sordid statistics by valid personal impressions?

In the lead-up to the 2007 election, a majority of journalists - in Canberra and elsewhere - gave the impression that they were opposed to the Howard Government on a range of issues and that, as a result, their coverage was slanted to a leftist or left of centre position. The list includes such subjects as Australia’s’ commitment in Iraq, national security, climate change and the WorkChoices industrial relations changes etc. However, the ANU paper does not even cover these issues. Indeed, at times, the analysis is so vague as to be incomprehensible.

You see "gave the impression" to an individual observer of an objective kind is much more gold standard than the aberrant, incomprehensible mystical full moon gobbledegook of half baked ANU academics intent on statistical observation using mathematical devices so arcane that no man on his fourth beer in a public bar could understand. Which is how their absurd pretense at mathematical precision can be undone by a simple impression - the impression being that it's so vague as to be incomprehensible. To the average duck. And what the average duck doesn't understand surely doesn't matter.

Why bother with an arcane attempt at an overview when you can cherry pick to suit your prejudice? Sure it shows a complete ignorance of statistics and statistical method, but when's that ever prevented a decent impression by an impressionist from being much closer to the truth. Read a novel so you can get closer to the emotional truth. So much better than reading dull history, often written - so I feel - by academic lefties.

So what's the use of taxpayers' money then if it's wasted on aberrant studies when you can always whip up a quick impression?

Throw in a couple more equations to show the transparent absurdity of these absurdist academics - I mean what on earth can you make of muck like this? - and the job is done.

Hah. See. Blithering nonsense. What on earth do they mean? I don't know, so surely it goes without saying, they don't mean anything.

QED. As scientific a demolition job as could be imagined, a hatchet applied to the statistical methodology with unerring precision. So then it's time for a little gay coloring:

Go on. Unfortunately Messers Gans and Leigh did just this. And, unfortunately, The Australian thought that the results of this study - which commenced as an ANU seminar - were worth reporting. This, apparently, is what passes for scholarship in the groves of the ANU.

Yep, it's the standard response nerds get in the school yard when they begin their jibber jabber and end up building something like the intertubes. The scribbler could have just shouted 'bunch of wankers' and performed a wedgie, and he would have elevated the standard of discussion by at least being transparently a basher of academics and intellectuals.

But the funniest thing? While stridently refuting anything that didn't fit with the "impressions" of our scientific observer, it seems the bizarre academics and their perverse study did get it right about The Age.

In any event it was good to see that among the weighted OLS regressions, the variables (dependent and independent alike), the square roots and the not so square roots, The Age - sometimes known as “The Guardian on the Yarra” - held its own as the flyer of the Red Flag. To keep up with “The Guardian on the Yarra” leftist agenda, you merely have to follow the opinion/comment pages each week.

So here's my statistical analysis of that result: The Age: study is correctly proportional to personal impressions, five paws; the ABC: study is inversely incorrect because of square rootage variables, zip paws. And I didn't once crack a root joke. Nota bene.

So then it's off to take a look at The Age, which offers up the opportunity for a few personal impressions of the socialist lefty bias the Melbourne based rag that week, with a piece by Catherine Deveny about religion and God seeming to offer the most offense.

Which perhaps is revelatory, because the response of the scribbler to the statistical methodology deployed in the 'media slant' study is somewhat akin to a creationist confronted by a scientist blathering on in deeply mystical ways about the theory of evolution.

Don't bother me, it's the full moon, and I'm slightly batty, is the only scientific response to scientific gibberish, and the Media Watch Dog plays an adept game. Surely a five paws award, with citation: for maintaining the noble art of Australian anti-intellectualism, balanced by subjective impressions, and aided by a rigorous filter which can spot a leftie hiding under a fig leaf five hundred yard away. Not to mention a refusal by the media to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact at least once a week. Just as no one seems to mention Scrap Iron Bob. Perhaps that's because no one's that intent on reliving ideological wars that are now heading to seventy years old.

If only the scribbler had added a couple of bonus insights: can these academics do the hard yards, and take the ball up the middle, and can they bowl a bouncer, or even light a barbeque in the back yard for the snags and chops? Probably not, and there's your answer. QED.

I suppose you could always read the study yourself, but remember, never let it interfere with your personal prejudices and own solid bias and impressions. That way lies full moon barking mad craziness.

(Below: fearful you've nodded off to sleep, or got distracted, or - gasp - started to watch the leftie ABC or read the red raggers in The Age, how about a few more cartoons. You can catch more Nicholson here, and I know it's a repeat, but eternal vigilance in the matter of the ABC's pinkness is required).