A question of balance
‘Where’s the balance?’ I raged as I listened to ABC Radio National
this morning. In yet another example of a run-of-the-mill interview
that you might hear on any news media platform or channel across this
country, James Carleton was interviewing a business owner about the Carbon Tax.
This interview may as well have been produced and gift-wrapped by the
fishing industry’s PR firm, it so reeked of one-sided bias. But that’s
the thing about balance that the mainstream media just don’t get. Or
just don’t care about. Or both. Balance isn’t the ability to find
someone who wants to speak in favour of the Carbon Tax (if these people
have been interviewed in the mainstream media over the last few years, I
must have missed it) and then to balance the argument, interview
someone staunchly against the Carbon Tax, like Carleton’s guest this
morning. That’s kindergarten simple thinking on what balance might be,
and they can’t even get this right. No, an intelligent producer and
interviewer would aim to find balance in the very questions they ask, so
to provide an insight into the two sides of an argument within the one
segment of news that they’ve given over to a particular topic for a
limited amount of time.
So let’s look at how Carleton might learn from this sloppy,
unbalanced interview. First of all, it’s important that the audience
know who is being interviewed in order to properly frame their ‘well you
would say that wouldn’t you’ opinion. Carleton introduced his
interviewee Gary Heilmann as apparently a ‘small business’ owner, the
managing director of De Brett Seafood at Mooloolaba on Queensland’s
Sunshine Coast. Carleton explained that Heilmann’s business includes a
tuna fishing boat, a fish processing plant and a fish and chip shop.
Fine. But it’s often what is left out of such an introduction which is
so lazy on the part of the interviewer and also most telling. Because a
quick Google of Heilmann makes it very clear that he isn’t just some
random small business owner who the ABC happened to come across to
provide his views on the repeal of the Carbon Tax. Here he is quoted in the Sunshine Coast Daily, posted on Liberal Mal Brough’s website, bemoaning the Carbon Tax back in March 2013. Here he is on the ABC’s website in 2011,
apparently representing his own business and other fishing operators in
lobbying the government to provide $76 million in compensation because
of the proposed introduction of a marine park. In this article on the same topic
from 2011, the author writes that ‘Fishing operators such as Heilmann
say drastic measures are needed because Australia’s waters are
over-fished’ and makes the point that since many operators have gone out
of business, licenses have been cut back to 115 and Heilmann has
slashed his fleet from 10 boats to only 2. This time he’s talking about the Coles fish price-war (aren’t free markets fun?). Here he’s complaining about the Sunshine Coast Regional Council building a roundabout
that makes it hard for his fishing trucks to get away from the port of
Mooloolaba (how dare the council try to improve traffic conditions for
people visiting the beach when Heilmann’s trying to move stock!). And
finally, here is Heilmann defending against claims that fishers were raiding Gold Coast recreational fishing areas,
in, you guessed it, his role as Managing Director of his company, and a
member of a tuna fishing industry advisory committee. Wouldn’t this
background as a fishing industry media spokesman have been helpful to
the balance of Heilmann’s Carbon Tax interview?
So what questions might Carleton has asked so to at least challenge
Heilmann’s pre-prepared-press-release-like rant about why the Carbon Tax
is bad for his business and must-be repealed? What could Carleton have
done to provide some balance, rather than offering nothing more than the
perfect Dorothy-Dixer-like combination of questions which came off
sounding like they had been written by Heilmann himself to keep his flow
of ‘I’m
anti-Carbon-Tax-and-my-opinion-is-important-because-I’m-a-business-owner’
script perfectly intact? How could Carleton have avoided the
same-old-lame-overused-statement that was so perfectly rehearsed it
sounded like Abbott himself had planted it in Heilmann’s head, when he
said ‘governments… have simply managed to drive the cost up to the point
where it’s just not worth being in business anymore because you can’t
generate a return on the assets’. I know what you’re thinking. I know
you’re thinking it’s not Carleton’s fault that Heilmann so perfectly
slotted into the Abbott anti-Carbon-Tax narrative which brought us to
this point tonight where the Carbon Tax is, devastatingly for the
environment, about to be repealed. But it is Carleton’s fault and it’s
every journalist’s fault who has given exactly this sort of interview
all the airtime it ever wanted, without once asking a question that
challenged the very basis of the argument about pricing carbon. What if
he’d tried even one of these questions, just to throw an alternative
argument into the mix and to provide some balance for the audience:
‘Being a fisherman, and clearly concerned about over-fishing, you
must be concerned with the sustainability of not just your business, but
also your family’s safety in the environment you live and work in. Do
you worry that climate change will have a detrimental effect on the
sustainability of your livelihood and the sustainability of the planet
we live on?’
‘Do you think it’s appropriate for a government to put the concerns
about business profit for a handful of business owners ahead of their
concerns for the safety of our planet in an unstable climate?’
‘What policy would you prefer the government introduce to encourage
large polluters to cut down on their carbon emissions instead of the
Carbon Price, to change their business practices to ensure we limit the
catastrophic effects of climate change? Or do you not believe climate
change is real?’
‘Have you considered renewable solutions such as solar energy to cut
down on your high electricity costs, in order to improve your margins
and to make your business more sustainable as fossil fuels continue to
deplete and grow in cost?’
‘If you can’t make a profit running your business in a sustainable
way, is it time to think about doing something else and to stop blaming
the government for every challenge your business faces? If you can’t run
your business without producing unsustainable amounts of carbon
emissions, isn’t it better for the community if you do try something different?’
If people like Heilmann don’t want to answer such questions, they can
choose not to be interviewed on a national radio station. Someone else
can be interviewed instead. How about me? I would be happy to answer
balanced questions about a particular topic. But I would never be
invited because I’m not a business owner or an industry spokesperson. I
guess that’s the thing that’s most disappointing about Carleton’s
interview in the first place. Journalists like Carleton never interview a
nobody like me who has to actually live in the community where climate
change is happening. The Carbon Price was not just some economic burden
on large polluters. It was designed to try to save our planet. How about
interviewing a member of the community on this topic, rather than a
whinging-he-would-say-that-wouldn’t-he-self-interested-axe-the-tax-business-owner.
Just for a change.
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