COMMENTARY: By Victoria Fielding

I once heard someone say that when the Left and the Right became polarised — when they divorced from each other — the Left got all the institutions of truth including science, education, justice and democratic government.

The Right got the institution of manipulation: the media. This statement hit me for six at the time because it seemed so clearly true.

What was also immediately clear is that there was an obvious reason why the Left sided with the institutions of truth and the Right resorted to manipulation. It is because truth does not suit right-wing arguments.

The existence of climate change does not suit fossil fuel billionaires. Evidence that wealth does not trickle down does not suit the capitalist class. The idea that diversity, equity and inclusion (yes, I put those words in that order on purpose) is better for everyone, rather than a discriminatory, hateful, destructive, divided unequal world is dangerous for the Right to admit.

The Right’s embrace of the media institution also makes sense when you consider that the institutions of truth are difficult to buy, whereas billionaires can easily own manipulative media.

Just ask Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and turned it into a political manipulation machine. Just ask Rupert Murdoch, who is currently engaged in a bitter family war to stop three of his children opposing him and his son Lachlan from using their “news” organisations as a form of political manipulation for right-wing interests.

Right-wingers also know that truthful institutions only have one way of communicating their truths to the public: via the media. Once the media environment is manipulated, we enter a post-truth world.

Experts derided as untrustworthy ‘elitists’
This is the world where billionaire fossil fuel interests undermine climate action. It is where scientists create vaccines to save lives but the manipulated public refuses to take them. Where experts are derided as untrustworthy “elitists”.

And it is where the whole idea of democratic government in the US has been overthrown to install an autocratic billionaire-enriching oligarchy led by an incompetent fool who calls himself the King.

Once you recognise this manipulated media environment, you also understand that there is not — and never has been — such as thing as a rational public debate. Those engaged in the institutions of the Left — in science, education, justice and democratic government — seem mostly unwilling to accept this fact.

Instead, they continue to believe if they just keep telling people the truth and communicating what they see as entirely rational arguments, the public will accept what they have to say.

I think part of the reason that the Left refuses to accept that public debate is not rational and rather, is a manipulated bin fire of misleading information, including mis/disinformation and propaganda, is because they are not equipped to compete in this reality. What do those on the Left do with “post-truth”?

They seem to just want to ignore it and hope it goes away.

A perfect example of this misunderstanding of the post-truth world and the manipulated media environment’s impact on the public is this paper, by political science professors at the Australian National University Ian McAllister and Nicholas Biddle.

Stunningly absolutist claim
Their research sought to understand why polling at the start of the 2023 Indigenous Voice to Parliament Referendum showed widespread public support for the Voice but over the course of the campaign, this support dropped to the point where the Voice was defeated with 60 per cent voting “No” and 40 per cent, “Yes”.

In presenting their study’s findings, the authors make the stunningly absolutist claim that:

‘…the public’s exposure to all forms of mass media – as we have measured it here – had no impact on the result’.

A note is then attached to this finding with the caveat:

‘As noted earlier, given the data at hand we are unable to test the possibility that the content of the media being consumed resulted in a reinforcement of existing beliefs and partisanship rather than a conversion.’

This caveat leaves a gaping hole in the finding by failing to account for how media reinforcing existing beliefs is an important media effect – as argued by Neil Gavin here. Since it was not measured, how can they possibly say there was no effect?

Furthermore, the very premise of the author’s sweeping statement that media exposure had no impact on the result of the Referendum is based on two naive assumptions:

• that voters were rational in their deliberations over the Referendum question; and
• that the information environment voters were presented with was rational.

Dual assumption of rationality
This dual assumption of rationality – one that the authors interestingly admit is an assumption – is evidenced in their hypothesis which states:

‘Voters who did not follow the campaign in the mass media were more likely to move from a yes to a no vote compared to voters who did follow the campaign in the mass media.’

This hypothesis, the authors explain, is premised on the assumption ‘that those with less information are more likely to opt for the status quo and cast a no vote’, and therefore that less exposure to media would change a vote from “Yes” to “No”. What this hypothesis assumes is that if a voter received more rational information in the media about the Referendum, that information would rationally drive their vote in the “Yes” direction. When their data disproved this hypothesis, the authors used this finding to claim that the media had no effect.

To understand the reality of what happened in the Referendum debate, the word “rational” needs to be taken out of the equation and the word “manipulated” put in.

We know, of course, that the Referendum was awash with manipulative information, which all supported the “No” campaign. For example, my study of News Corp’s Voice coverage — Australia’s largest and most influential news organisation — found that News Corp actively campaigned for the “No” proposition in concert with the “No” campaign, presenting content more like a political campaign than traditional journalism and commentary.

A study by Queensland University of Technology’s Tim Graham analysed how the Voice Referendum was discussed on social media platform, X. Far from a rational debate, Graham identified that the “No” campaign and its supporters engaged in a participatory disinformation propaganda campaign, which became a “truth market” about the Voice.

The ‘truth market’
This “truth market” was described as drawing “Yes” campaigners into a debate about the truth of the Voice, sidetracking them from promoting their own cause.

What such studies showed was that, far from McAllister and Biddle’s assumed rational information environment, the Voice Referendum public debate was awash with manipulation, propaganda, disinformation and fear-mongering.

The “No” campaign that delivered this manipulation perfectly demonstrates how the Right uses media to undermine institutions of truth, to undermine facts and to undermine the rationality of democratic debates.

The completely unfounded assumption that the more information a voter received about the Voice, the more likely they would vote “Yes”, reveals a misunderstanding of the reality of a manipulated public debate environment present across all types of media, from mainstream news to social media.

It also wrongly treats voters like rational deliberative computers by assuming that the more information that goes in, the more they accept that information. This is far from the reality of how mediated communication affects the public.

The reason the influence of media on individuals and collectives is, in reality, so difficult to measure and should never be bluntly described as having total effect or no effect, is that people are not rational when they consume media, and every individual processes information in their own unique and unconscious ways.

One person can watch a manipulated piece of communication and accept it wholeheartedly, others can accept part of it and others reject it outright.

Manipulation unknown
No one piece of information determines how people vote and not every piece of information people consume does either. That’s the point of a manipulated media environment. People who are being manipulated do not know they are being manipulated.

Importantly, when you ask individuals how their media consumption impacted on them, they of course do not know. The decisions people make based on the information they have ephemerally consumed — whether from the media, conversations, or a wide range of other information sources, are incredibly complex and irrational.

Surely the re-election of Donald Trump for a second time, despite all the rational arguments against him, is proof that the manipulated media environment is an incredibly powerful weapon — a weapon the Right, globally, is clearly proficient at wielding.

It is time those on the Left caught up and at least understood the reality they are working in.

Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. This article was first published by the Independent Australia and is republished with the author’s permission.

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