• Rodney Tiffen

29 March 2010Most coverage of the home insulation controversy ignored history and avoided simple mathematics, writes Rodney Tiffen in Inside Story

AFTER daylight saving was introduced in the United States in the early 1970s the television coverage of early morning traffic accidents intensified, leaving viewers with a strong impression that there was a link between the two phenomena. Missing from the TV news was the fact that there had been no change in the rate of accidents – the media attention had increased simply because early morning accidents were judged to be more newsworthy in the midst of controversy over daylight saving.

A similar case occurred in New South Wales in the early 1980s, when the Wran government’s head of corrective services, Tony Vinson, sought to introduce urgently needed prison reforms. The new policy was portrayed in some sections of the media as a “softening” of the system, and from that point on every escape was treated as if it were a test of the reforms. Vinson’s policies had made escapes more newsworthy, and little attention was paid to longer-term rates of escape.

In both instances, the news coverage carried an imputation of causality – implicitly, in the pattern of attention, and explicitly, through editorial comment and in the reporting the views of critics. Preoccupied with the present and neglectful of the past, concentrating on individual events and ignoring longer-term patterns of events, the news media conveyed a false causality.

These two cases (and there are many other similar examples) make a useful backdrop to the controversy over the Rudd government’s home insulation scheme and the largely unexamined assumptions about cause and effect that permeated the media coverage...

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Photo: Rachel Cobcroft/ Flickr