This interpretation comes from Lisa Pryor in the SMH today:
As a former property reporter, I know a bit about this tax. I have written news stories about the injustice of it, because that is what reporters do; they write news stories from a range of perspectives, including those they disagree with. But with my reporting hat off, I want to explain what I really think: land tax is a fabulous tax, especially in this era when we suffer from a shortage of residential properties.
Well, no. Reporters try to be as objective as possible and clearly distinguish between fact and opinion.
Unfortunately, however, we live in an era of ‘churnalism’ in which our news reports are:
spoon fed by government and PR agencies, and incorporates wire copy into stories without the most cursory fact checking.
I can only guess that this spoon-feeding is the source of Pryor’s ‘range of perspectives’ or does she interpret ‘fair and balanced’ reporting as a kind of stream of stuff written from various viewpoints so that she writes a negative piece on something one day and another piece on the same subject from a different perspective the next day, which sounds weird to me.
As soon as something has a ‘perspective’ it is an opinion and opinion has no place in reporting.
4 Comments
I agree with your point, but I’m not sure this is the fairest example to make it with.
At least on the online link you provide, it is clearly labelled as an opinion piece. And I do think reporters are entitled to express opinions when they are clear that is what they are doing.
Half of them problem is that yes, too many straight news pieces, expecially in the tabloids, veer into opinion. But in print, both News Ltd and Fairfax have a design problem as well. Too often they have an opinion piece appear on news pages with insufficient signposting – the piece often follows the same column widths, typefaces and justified text as the straight news pieces they share the page with.
An opinion label is usually there, but the casual reader is halfway through the piece before they realise and look for the signposting.
it’s a classic case of a page template being designed to look clean, without working hard enough to give clues to the reader.
Tim I have no problem with the opinion piece which as you say is well sign-posted and I think quite entertaining what raised my hackles is that line about all those news reports written from a range of perspectives – they shouldn’t be they should be as objective as possible (that’s the brand of journalism without it is indistinguishable from ‘mere blogging’).
I agree with your point about layout and design but I also think there is just too much opinion in newspapers and too much by journalists really its their capacity to do great journalism that is valuable not their opinions.
I wrote the article off as another of the silly-for-the-sake-of-provocative pieces now flooding both Fairfax and News Limited. The mainstream media is either not taking issues and readership seriously or hasn’t the talent to produce expert communication fodder. A prime example is the spin placed on changing social trends linked to our economic decline. We’ve had women returned to a fifties-lifesyle and even an online survey asking where do women belong!! Lisa’s land tax prejudices would wear very thin with my 94-year-old friend living in a miner’s cottage beach-side at Newcastle. Born in the tin and fibro shanty and now on a DVA pension the church has committed to seeing her stay there. It’s a story with better attitude really than Lisa’s!
Okay, I am breaking a personal rule here by responding to a blog discussion about a story I’ve written, but I have found this discussion quite thought provoking and I think it is worth breaking a rule to make a point about journalism.
Of course journalists “try to be as objective as possible and clearly distinguish between fact and opinion” but this does not mean that some objective facts and legitimate news stories aid some perspectives, and other objective facts and legitimate news stories aid others. I’ll give you some examples from my days as a property reporter, on the topic of property taxes:
Firstly, a story showing that property tax bills have jumped massively for property owners in a particular geographical area, due to revised property valuations. This is absolutely a legitimate news story, especially when the revised valuations are out of sync with revised valuations in other areas. The story would be balanced by comments from the government saying the new valuations reflected the market price of property in the area, perhaps confirmed by evidence of recent sales. For all the balance and objectivity, the very act of publishing such a story rather than ignoring it aids the perspective of anti-tax activists.
Secondly, a story about a university study calculating the billions of dollars of revenue lost as a result of tax concessions on homes. Again, this might be balanced by comments pointing out that capital gains tax concessions introduced in the late nineties also apply to shares as well as property, as well as statistics showing how NSW property owners face higher taxes than in other states, but again, the very act of publishing the results of such a study suggest that the argument has a level of legitimacy.
I believe it is the job of an objective news reporter to write both these types of stories, regardless of personal ideology. Far from being the result of spoon feeding, stories such as the two examples given above generally came from, in the case of the first example, bugging the Office of State Revenue week after week to release valuation statistics they were reluctant to release and, in the case of the second example, trawling through journal articles and abstracts for conference presentations.
As for the opinion piece I wrote about land tax, yes it was deliberately provocative and, I hope, entertaining. Trust me, I could have written the same piece in a dead serious and faux objective way, but I don’t think that would have improved it any.
As for Christine’s comment that my land tax prejudice would wear thin with her 94 year old friend living in a miner’s cottage beachside at Newcastle, land tax does not apply to a person’s principal place of residence, only additional properties they own but do not live in, as I explained in the column. If the 94-year-old rents rather than owns the property, appreciation of the value of waterfront land across Australia in recent decades would play a much bigger role in the increase in rent than the expense of land tax.
Thanks for hearing me out!
Cheers,
Lisa