Alice Springs shows why the media struggles to fact-check moral panic

As the breathless amplification of Dutton’s unsubstantiated claims in Alice Springs last week showed, Australian news media still has a long way to go in breaking its reliance on “if it bleeds it leads” news.

It just can’t resist a good moral panic about the public danger of surging crime. Nor can it resist the bullying demand from political leaders to put them on air with extravagant claims, regardless of whether what they say is true or not.

Confronting its first big Trump-style challenge — an evidence-free claim tossed out with a chin-jutting dare to ignore it — Australia’s media defaulted to a clickbait test of “news-worthiness” with only the lightest fact-checking.

The ABC seems to have the most to learn, trapped as it is by its eagerness to “both sides” any issue whenever it fears party politics are involved. Insiders yesterday showed how easy it can be to wave through the repetition — and expansion — of “people say” claims while nitpicking and gotcha-ing over the details of what sort of “Voice” conservatives would — maybe, perhaps — agree to.

Yet, the information they — we — needed was sitting in front of them, with guest panellist and Age columnist Jack Latimore. While News Corp media have been urging on the panic, the Nine mastheads have been cautiously avoiding the trap. Latimore had written a major takedown of Dutton’s Alice Springs stance just the day before.

Around the world, ginning up panic about attacks on children and women is the go-to misinformation play of the populist right, having weaponised its power to target outsider groups — from QAnon’s pizzagate conspiracy to India’s “love jihad” claims. There’s recent history in Australia, too, of the right using crime to whip up hostility against groups such as supposed African gangs in Melbourne, or asylum seekers on Nauru purportedly “trying it on” — as Dutton declared in 2019 — with claims of rape to seek abortions in Australia.

In Alice Springs, the panic has morphed through popular right-wing talking points, starting with the violence of an alcohol-fuelled youth crime wave before moving on to a child abuse conspiracy of institutional inaction — with the media continually ramping up such allegations.

Situating the panic in Alice Springs suits the conservative narrative, too. A Town Like Alice has always had a special place in Australia’s settler imagination in a “last frontier” sort of way (although Bruce Chatwin’s opening description in The Songlines is more damning: “a grid of scorching streets where men in long white socks were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers”).

This saga comes as journalists are — or should be — asking why the media covers crime (and the type of crimes) the way they do. Why is there so much focus on individual personal tragedy, and so little on trends, explainers and accountability?

When pressed, most journalists mumble their way to some comfortable landing spot about “public safety”. The more we know about the risk of crime or accidents, journalists tell one another, the safer we’ll be.

But most crime and accident reporting either lacks any real context (like the annual story on Easter traffic accidents) or is wedged into a panic narrative (such as this Darwin police wrap-up by the ABC on the weekend).

Reporting is determined not by supply but by media demand. Although personal crime has long been declining and annual traffic deaths have been largely flat for a decade, media latch on to whatever they can to fill a politics-free gap in Australian media. 

There are a few things this past week that should warn Australia’s media. When it comes to a frenzy over crime, bad-faith actors are going to act in bad faith. More, you can’t fact-check your way out of the moral panic that’s blown up thanks to the oxygen of amplification you gave it in the first place.