Main Stream Media

How the left-leaning media hurt Labor, Tony Abbott is half right ("The other election losers", on this page on Tuesday) when he says the media in Australia lean to the left. But what he doesn't say is that this left-leaning media bias is hurting the Labor Party. And this fact disguises a harsher truth: media bias is irrelevant to electoral outcomes. Look at the presidential election in the United States. The media were massively anti-George Bush, but he won comfortably. Eighty per cent of US counties are now Republican. The way Bush campaigned explains what happened. Bush didn't try to influence journalists. They were for John Kerry. Instead, he went to rallies, looked into the camera, and spoke directly to voters.