On the list of suspects for how the world got into its current predicament, many people would give the media a prominent place. They would point to their propensity for sensationalism, for pandering to the lowest common denominator, for refusing to adjudicate on basic issues of truth and falsity (known as “he-said-she-said” journalism) and for inflaming national and ethnic hatreds.
There’s a lot of truth in all of that. But quite aside from the big things, the media also do harm at the level of detail. This, for an example, is from the BBC’s report this week on the swearing in of Rob Jetten, the new prime minister of the Netherlands.
The 38-year-old claimed victory in October’s election with his Democrats 66 party (D66) narrowly beating anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders in a nail-biting election.
. . .
It is a minority cabinet, meaning every major reform in the coalition deal … will have to be negotiated vote by vote in the Netherlands’ two parliamentary houses.
The casual reader, who doesn’t recall anything much of the background from last October, will most probably take away two things from this. Firstly, that if a small number of votes had gone the other way, Wilders would have been prime minister instead of Jetten; and secondly, that the new government will be at peril of defeat in parliament by the far-right Wilders and his allies. Both those things are completely wrong.
It’s true that D66 finished only narrowly ahead of Wilders’s Party for Freedom (PVV), 16.9% to 16.7%. But if those positions had been reversed, or even if Wilders had been a few points ahead, it would not have made a fundamental difference to the result. The reason there was an early election in the first place was that the other parties had discovered it was impossible to work with the PVV, so a Wilders-led government was just never on the cards.
The three parties making up Jetten’s new government (left-liberal, right-liberal and centre-right) won 43.0% of the vote between them, as compared to 29.8% for the four far-right parties.* The joint Greens/centre-left ticket had 12.8%, and the rest splintered among a host of minor parties. Being a proportional system, the seat totals came out much the same way: 66 for the new government, 46 far right, 20 Greens/centre-left and 18 others (mostly centre and left).
So Wilders was nowhere near forcing his way into office, mainstream parties will have a large majority, and the government will only be in danger if it antagonises the parties to its left. But that’s totally different to the impression you would get from the BBC report. And it’s by means of dozens of little inaccuracies like this that voters across the democratic world have been convinced that the far right is a much more powerful and popular force than it really is.
Recall the numerous media outlets, many of them generally unsympathetic to Trumpism, that referred (and keep referring) to Donald Trump’s 2024 victory – the narrowest popular vote margin this century – as “sweeping”, “decisive”, “triumphant” and the like. Even the word “landslide” was sometimes allowed to feature. If they had been more scrupulous in these small things, perhaps they would not enjoy such low levels of public trust.
Nor is the lesson devoid of relevance to Australia, with a recent spate of polls showing a surge in support for One Nation. It would be nice if our media balanced these reports with some basic psephological information, such as its history of polling bubbles and its dependence on Coalition preferences to win seats.
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* Four far-right parties contested the election, but in the new parliament there will be five, after several anti-Wilders MPs split off from the PVV to form a new group.
The World is Not Enough 