Shoddy Reporting from The Australian

Have you seen the front page of “The Australian” today?

It is well known that “The Australian” is a conservative publication – but the sheer editorialising of the day’s news, as well as the questionable placement of media gossip on the front page makes me wonder if the Australian’s typesetters accidentally received the agenda for the “Daily Telegraph”.

It is bad enough that the decision was made to relegate the coverage of the biggest ever shareholder revolt against executive remuneration to the business section. 

It is even worse that above-the-fold placement was given to Karl Stefanovic. You might as well be reading a gossip rag like “New Idea” (which produced much better political reporting this week than the Australian by breaking the Andrew Broad story).

But I digress. As pathetic as the Stefanovic story is, you can’t deny that it is news of general interest. My main concern is the second above-fold-story.

In short, the story highlights sections of an audit of the Renewable Energy Target that reveals that roughly a quarter of residential solar panel installations are sub-standard, with about 5 per cent of that quarter representing installations with a “severe risk” of causing harm. Genuine news story? Yes. Front page worthy? Maybe. Taking the liberty to compare government subsidies of solar panel-installations to the fatal “pink bats” scheme? 

Please. Also note that the incredibly inflammatory headline confirms the unsaid: no one has yet died due to the dodgy solar panels. Additionally, the story claims that “one-quarter of all rooftop units inspected posed a severe or high risk”, the language in the report uses neither of those words. The bottom-two safety ratings are “unsafe” and “sub-standard”. Although an average of roughly 23 per cent of installations were deemed “sub-standard”, out of 24,371 inspections undertaken since 2011, only an average 4.2 per cent of panel installations were deemed unsafe by the auditor. 

Again, I assert that this is a genuine news story. However, to either change the language contained in the report or to independently assert that the meaning of “sub-standard” is “high risk”, and to strongly suggest that solar panels cause death in the headline is nothing more than irresponsible journalism.

In fact, I wonder if the story’s author even read the report. References to the report seem to come from a letter the Federal energy minister wrote to his state counterparts about this issue. Although it certainly is within the duties of the minister to draw attention to a potential risk within his portfolio and their regulatory jurisdiction – I suspect that this was an act of political posturing supported by our national newspaper on a day when even the NSW state liberal government is distancing itself from federal energy policy (or lack thereof).

Poor effort from “The Australian” today. I suspect we will see more of it. In October, Chris Dore, editor of the Daily Telegraph was made editor-in-chief of The Australian. Although it is not uncommon for news limited editors to jump between titles, this one appointment might bring our national paper further to the right and further downmarket. But what can we expect from a man who lunches with two notoriously conservative political activists?