… well, as right as possible!
At the very least, Nine Entertainment Co. chair Peter Costello would have been very proud of the subediting standards displayed at The Sun-Herald in Sydney on Saturday night.
That’s the view, at the very least, of The Bug’s Media Glass House bitter and twisted sad-sack old hack compilers after they tried to make sense of that paper’s splash on Sunday (above).
We refer to David Crowe’s piece on the findings from the Resolve Political Monitor compilation poll, conducted exclusively for The Sun-Herald and based on responses from 4587 voters from April to June.
The basic take out of the quarterly poll – one that any casual reader of the paper would have totally missed (or been misled) by the main headline – is that Labor increased its primary vote to 41 per cent nationwide over the three months to June, up from 40 per cent in the three months to December last year.
As Crowe, the paper’s chief political correspondent, observed, that 41 per cent is “significantly higher than the election result of 32.6 per cent last May” with a primary vote “strong enough to cement Labor in power, with gains in more than a dozen seats if the vote was replicated at the next election”.
So what did our subeditor concentrate on; a focus, to be fair, driven by the slant Crowe possibly gave his piece? That Queensland voters’ support for Labor has fallen from 37 per cent to 34 per cent “since the government soared to record highs in the polls late last year, tightening the race with the Coalition ahead of the July 15 byelection for the Gold Coast seat of Fadden”.
So, would a Sydney-centric paper normally give a flying fuck about the Queensland results in a national compilation by the paper’s pollster? Would the national result have been far more interesting to the paper had the LNP’s overall fortunes improved.
Would the Queensland angle have been anywhere near as interesting if the Labor vote had not slipped? The chances of this heading ever appearing? LNP’s HOLD ON FADDEN AT RISK!
Silly rhetorical questions, we know.
The MGH needs to point out it’s assuming that Crowe’s opening paragraphs are more or less as he wrote them and have not been fiddled with by a sub out to impress by doing the Right thing. And if so, Crowe could argue he’s concentrated on the Queensland angle because of that looming Fadden by-election on July 15.
But the MGH still calls bullshit on that. The big story surely was that Labor had not just retained a strong national lead but extended it – extended might have been the word you were looking for, David, instead of retained? – despite a strong Opposition campaign for many weeks pushed by the mainstream mediocre highlighting cost of living pain for many Australians.
Indeed, ignore the jockey line about Queensland and the splash looks very much a general dig at Labor nationally. Hint: living cost rises are very much a national thing. Hence our suspicion of Costello’s pleasure. He likes to see things going well for the LNP.
If Crowe’s original opening paragraphs were what readers saw over their breakfast cereal, we would simply make the point that if he was in any way keen to expand on the possible ramifications for the main parties on July 15, he would have wanted to bring closer to the front of his yarn the crucial detail that the 34 per cent Labor vote in Queensland in the Resolve compilation was still seven points above the 27 per cent at the May 2022 election. He could also have brought up to the top the Resolve finding that the LNP’s vote in the Sunshine State is now at 33 per cent compared with 40 per cent at the 2022 poll.
Were Labor to do seven per cent better in primary votes in Fadden in 11 days time (or indeed if the LNP do seven per cent worse) that will indeed be big news and very, very damaging for Peter Dutton and the LNP. Possibly fatal for Dutton if a fresh independent candidate does well and if the 110,000 or so Fadden voters wanted to really express their feelings about their former member Stuart Robert. Especially since the Robodebt commission findings are about to lob. Gee willikers, Crowe might have even want to mention a recent by-election result that turned historic federal by-election results on their head.
They are all fair observations a politics writer of Crowe’s standing could have made, had he wished to concentrate on the Queensland angle in a fair and measured manner and not with just cheap, basic shots that threw in The Voice for good measure.
The MGH will stick with its overall view that the treatment of the Sun-Herald’s splash – its clear downplaying of both Labor’s chances mid-month and the main take from the yarn – reeked of a pro-LNP bias that the Herald mastheads have sadly been exhibiting as they drift inexorably to the right under the leadership of arguably one of the world’s finest-ever former Treasurers.
Want to be alerted immediately a new blog hits Australia’s longest running and most offensive satire site? Simply click on the Follow sign or the link below to be emailed new yarns the moment they are uploaded! The very second we go far too far – and trust us we will – you can then quickly unfollow via the three dots!
The Bug Online 