Newspaper bias in Melbourne

Newspaper bias of the cultural elite

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The bias of the Melbourne newspaper, The Age, in favour of a liberal secular humanist attack on Christian belief and practice has become increasingly evident in recent years. The hostility of this influential paper to the Roman Catholic Church has been obvious and regrettable to other Christians as was as Catholics. Had the bias against Christians and Catholics in particular been directed against some other religion or minority, say Moslems or Aborigines, there would have been an outcry against it.

Although it remains in many respects an excellent journal, The Age has shifted emphasis from the open tolerant liberal treatment of news, in which it was known for objectivity and reporting as a matter of record, towards the deliberate shaping of attitudes which conform with a narrowly based elite cultural orthodoxy. When liberalism so transformed becomes compulsory it is no longer liberal. Documents expressing some of my concerns in that regard have been posted here.

The ideological bias of The Age in their promotion of liberal attitudes to divorce is challenged in two faxes I sent to that Melbourne newspaper in November 1996 when it was promoting fashionable attitudes to divorce, wrongly claiming divorce had little or no adverse affects on children, in the way it reported research which was misleading and contrary to an overview of the most reliable research results which had just then been published in The Australian Psychologist.

Interestingly, on 25 May 1998 The Age published an article by Robert Manne Why Australia's cultural orthodoxy must be resisted defending Betinna Arndt against similarly distorted reporting and an attack on her by the ABC's Media Watch program for her use of research on the effects of divorce in the US.

The page on Issues in the Uniting Church on this site lists some of the consequences of similar conformity to a cultural orthodoxy in the Church.

It is fairly typical of the secular humanist 'progressive' orientation of the Australia intellectual and artistic media elite that they should also support voluntary euthanasia. I wrote a letter to Kevin Andrews expressing support for his action at the time when he introduced the bill to overturn the Northern Territory legislation which had provided a legal basis for euthanasia. A sermon on the topic "The value of human life" a year or so earlier sets out some my thinking on this matter and deals specifically with editorial contributions of The Age to the campaign for the introduction of a similar law in Victoria.

The position taken by The Age on the Serrano exhibition with the photographic work "Piss Christ" is a further illustration of the same set of humanist anti-Christian attitudes and bias. It was notable that in the midst of this controversy that The Age actually claimed in an editorial that Christians were not entitled to the same protection that the adherents of other religions could rightly expect in our multicultural society. Although it is a popular attitude amongst our cultural elite that anything goes as long as it is not Christian, the paper actually lost a good deal through the narrow and aggressive stance it took on the Piss Christ controversy in a peculiar reverse type of worserism. [Relevant documents will be posted later.]

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