Democracy is under threat — and the media's 'neutrality' won't save us

From Donald Trump to Pauline Hanson, mainstream media is normalising dangerous anti-democratic politics

The United States is no longer considered a liberal democracy.

According to the Varieties of Democracy Institute at Gothenburg University, which keeps track of these things, the US is now considered an ‘electoral democracy’ — which means it still has elections, but the individual civil protections we take for granted in Australia are no longer a tenet of US democracy.

Not only is the US democratic project crumbling, it is also rushing headlong into becoming an autocracy faster than Turkey and Hungary. And it only took Trump a year.

“The speed with which American democracy is currently [being] dismantled is unprecedented in modern history,” concluded the authors of this year’s report on the health of the world’s democracies.

In Australia, we have largely ignored this. The US is an ally and that is the acceptable, ‘neutral’ view. We report on US foreign policy as if nothing has changed, even as everything does.

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Just 7% of the world lives in a liberal democracy now and in 44 of the 87 democracies, freedom of expression is under threat. The UK has seen a massive drop in how democratic it is, driven by “a substantial decline in freedom of expression and the media”.

Australia has retained its 12th spot, and is still considered a liberal democracy. Not that we defend it. Democracy lives and dies on high expectations and we have become so conditioned to low expectations from our government and institutions, we largely expect them to let us down.

The media has helped create this environment of low expectations and disappointment, and the South Australian election result is a prime example.

You would be excused for thinking that South Australia had suddenly experienced a very conservative swing. The focus has been on who finished second and the groundwork is being laid for another culture war ahead of the next federal election — this time, on preferential voting.

This has been led by a media that loves the drama of the Hanson resurgence. This last happened ahead of the 2016 election, when Hanson returned to the Senate with great fanfare. That was off the back of regular breakfast TV slots and cushy puff pieces about her being flown around Australia by a staffer. Hanson doesn’t exist without Australia’s media and the media love her content. The drama is the point.

So Hanson and One Nation are treated largely with kid gloves — puff pieces and fauxrage pieces about what she has said, with minimum prosecution of her ‘policies’. Hanson is largely treated sympathetically by Australia’s mainstream media, which has decided her appeal makes up one part of ‘neutrality’. After all, it’s just offering up one side of the debate, right? And isn’t that the media’s job?

But as the focus on One Nation since the South Australian election has shown, that ‘neutrality’ is not the same as ‘objectivity’. Neutrality is a political act — you are pre-determining the conditions of the issue or debate before it happens, deciding what is and isn’t to be included. This gives rise to false equivalence and, by extension, lends credibility to the non-credible — Hanson and her ilk are immediately elevated as being equally serious on matters of policy debate, which gives disillusioned voters the permission to flirt with her party as a serious contender. When Hanson does well, she is presented as an unstoppable force. If support starts to dissipate, she is just parked until the next economic crisis, when she is re-inflated by the media, well versed in how the cycle works.

Because the story of the South Australian election is not the 20% or so of the primary vote that Hanson cannibalised from the Coalition. That’s just a reframing of conservative politics in Australia. It’s that most voters rejected conservative candidates. 48% of South Australian voters put Labor or the Greens first, compared to just 41% who went with the Liberals or One Nation. The just under 11% covered by ‘other’ are a mixed bag, but having looked at some of the independents, they fit the ‘not a conservative’ trend as well. While votes are still being counted, it is already clear that most South Australian voters rejected conservative candidates.

Not that you would know. ‘Neutrality’, when the story is decided, doesn’t allow for such facts.

It’s rare in Australia for second-term governments to improve their positions. And yet, at the federal election, we saw that too. Voters set the foundation for higher expectations — but the media has mostly focused on One Nation, rather than why voters are turning to a populist party and what could be done to address their concerns.

Instead we get a self-serving echo chamber. And you can already see the seeds being planted to start challenging preferential voting in Australia, which the media is doing very little to take seriously, or push back against.

Because the antidote to institutional false neutrality is facts, which means taking a position. A factual one. It’s a fact that the world is backsliding when it comes to democracy. It’s a fact that freedom of expression is under threat. It’s a fact that democratic protest is rapidly being criminalised, in Australia and elsewhere. It’s a fact that the US is one of the greatest threats to global stability and peace. It’s a fact that the world order is remapping.

Yet the way these facts are framed says everything about how we got here. One Nation is not an unstoppable force and voters seem desperate to reframe the narrative.

That, though, isn’t ‘neutral’, and therefore is dismissed. Even as it means that voters who are trying to hold our democracy, and governments, to higher standards get dismissed right along with it.