One of France’s leading media analysts wrapped up his year-long election coverage with a report that was, journalistically speaking, shocking: he owned up to all his mistakes.
“I’m replaying this whole presidential election and it’s going to hurt,” Olivier Bost told listeners to French talk radio station RTL. “It’s time for the mea culpa … I was wrong on political analyses. I didn’t see, didn’t understand, what was happening.”
It wasn’t bad reporting. His regular commentary was deeply sourced. As he told Brazilian journalist Daniela Pinheiro in a recent interview: ”Whenever I write, I call at least five, seven sources to hear different points of view. I’m not the type to do purely theoretical and intellectual exercises.”
Bost’s admission is about more than French self-criticism. It’s the global story of how the media has come to write about politics — and why it’s getting it so wrong, so often.
It matters here in Australia, where political coverage is coming off two big rounds of getting it wrong: in the lead-up to the 2019 election, Scott Morrison was, in political reporting, assumed certain to lose — until he won. In 2022, he was thought sure to win — until he didn’t.
Let’s take a micro-moment: remember when Albanese’s cash-rate gaffe back in April was predicted to be the end of his campaign?
Blame Trump: brutal bad-faith “fake news” attacks have made journalists justifiably defensive and reluctant to admit error.
Blame the internet: these days, mistakes that once ended up as fish-and-chips wrapping now endure where anyone can find them.
Blame social media: its immediacy is severing “journalism” from “news” and has lured journalistic analysis into the minefield of hot takes. It’s put political journalism exactly where it doesn’t want to be: on the wrong side of the line dividing analysis from prediction.
The media’s most august political analysts have found themselves modern-day Roman augurs, trawling through the entrails of daily politics to let us know what happens next. Look at the coverage of the stage three tax cuts, with column after column predicting the inevitability of disaster for the Albanese government, whatever it does.
Political analysts are in a fix. The tools they’ve been trained to use to read the future are now unfit for purpose.
‘There is no pattern’
In his interview with Pinheiro, Bost said: “Because we think we know political life very well, we tend to have a lot of certainties, and we are tempted to analyse political events based on examples from the past which are familiar to us. Like: ‘This is Macron’s tactic’, ‘So and so’s game is that’.”
The trouble is, says Bost, “it limits a lot. Especially because, analysing politics in France in the last 15 years, it’s all new. There is no pattern.”
The polls are no reality check
For decades, polls of voting intention were, more or less, right — or right enough as a reality check for journalists. Then, suddenly, they weren’t — not just in Australia, but in much of the world (most recently in Brazil).
It’s all a game
In reporting, too much of politics is treated as all game all the time, where self-interest and electoral calculus are all that matters. It’s not always wrong and it may even provide a way through: economists have been using game theory to tame unpredictable behaviourist inputs into their models for half a century. Political reporters not so much.
New media, social media
It’s a shock to Canberra insiders, but much of politics now happens in broad daylight — on social media and in emerging digital media. (Sure, Twitter isn’t real life. But the Canberra press gallery isn’t either.)
Snootily dismissed as “sewer rats” and “drips” in Canberra, sophisticated “open source” readings of social media have been bringing insights that broaden understanding since the blogging explosion more than a decade ago. Right now, “open source intelligence” pioneered by groups like Bellingcat is providing much of what we know about what’s happening in Ukraine.
Hunting as a pack
Australia’s gallery has long had a reputation for reporting — and predicting — as a pack. It’s not unique to Canberra. As Bost said: “We live in bubbles, we are always talking to those who think like us. This includes deputies, ministers, who also live in their own bubbles.”
Complexity
Maybe Australian politics is just one spinning wheel in a complex global machine. Or maybe, as Niels Bohr (or maybe Yogi Berra or Sam Goldwyn) may have said: predictions are hard, particularly about the future.
Do you wish journalists were better at admitting their mistakes? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
