From Fair Debate to Click Bait

Perhaps, given previous experience, I should have known better than to write a letter to the Noosa News editor and expect it to be published.

Throughout my term of office as councillor, Noosa News had a track record of offering me no right of reply after publishing offensive, misleading and at times misogynous letters about me, often under fake names.

But, having ceased to be a councillor and ever the optimist, write a letter I did.

It was on a topical issue at the time – being the amount candidates spend on campaigning for election to Noosa Council.

Noosa News didn’t publish my letter, instead giving it to journalist Peter Gardiner to convert into a news story; a news story that completely distorted what I had written.

And I was further dismayed that it was published on the newspaper’s website under a misleading and – let me be candid – dishonest headline.

My letter had been titled briefly and accurately, ‘Incumbency is the big advantage in election campaigns’.

Noosa News rendered this as, ‘You pay peanuts ($70,000 worth) and you get elected mayor’.

I had written the letter in response to two Noosa News articles that said Clare Stewart had spent $71,000 on her election campaign which drew a reaction from several letter writers decrying such expenditure.

(I have since viewed the Electoral Commission website and find that Clare’s disclosure statement shows a total expenditure of $55,361.68, so it’s not clear where the Noosa News figure came from.)

The point I made in my letter was that incumbent candidates have a great advantage in election campaigning after getting four years of media coverage, council public relations support and simply being in the job.

In contrast new candidates are at a great disadvantage and have to spend a lot more money to gain recognition of their names and policies to level the playing field and so give voters the ability to make a reasoned choice.

I wrote in my letter that, compared to that great advantage of incumbency, Clare Stewart’s campaign spending was peanuts.

In the Noosa News headline and lead paragraph, Gardiner claimed I had said Clare Stewart’s $70,000 campaign spend was mere ‘peanuts’ and that I considered ‘paltry’ the $25,000 I spent out of my own pocket on my 2016 campaign.

Neither of his assertions was correct. They were distorted, they were untrue and it seemed to me they were malicious.

I had never said $70,000 was ‘peanuts’, or that $25,000 of my own money in my 2016 campaign was ‘paltry’.

Indeed, they were both significant sums and spent to get known across the Shire, a benefit incumbent candidates get for free.

But Gardiner decided to go for shock and awe, skewing my words to make it look like I considered the $70,000 spent by Clare Stewart as ‘peanuts’ or my own $25,000 ‘paltry’ – this rendering carrying the strong implication that I lacked sensitivity to the scale of those amounts money. Totally untrue. Both represent sacrifices.

Upon reading the news story, I immediately emailed Gardiner to express my dismay and request he retract those inaccurate sections of the article and apologise.

The same afternoon he replied by email and phone with an offer to amend the headline and the lead paragraph to correctly reflect what I had written.

With my agreement, he made those changes, with the website headline changed to “Ex-councillor: Countering incumbency comes at a cost in elections”.

I accepted his explanation and correction but remain dismayed that my letter to the editor should have been distorted, misrepresented and used as the basis for a cheap shot.

And search as I might, in nothing Gardiner wrote did I find that simple word ‘sorry’.

I reflected that, since the News Corp buy-out, the Noosa News website has become ‘subscriber only’ and features click bait headlines and sexed up stories that aim to get readers to pay the $300 a year the news organisation think they’re worth.

Anyway, Noosa News never published my letter in its newspaper, so readers never got to read the case I made in response to its misleading article and letters.

So, for the record, here’s the text of the letter I wrote that was converted into a distorted and dishonest article by a journalist and a newspaper which well understand the effects of such falsification and the lack of ethics it implies.

INCUMBENCY IS THE BIG ADVANTAGE IN ELECTION CAMPAIGNS

Unlike incumbents, new candidates for Noosa Council have to spend real money to become known to our shire’s 40,724 enrolled voters.

Incumbent councillors, unless they totally disgrace themselves, can run successful campaigns on the smell of an oily rag.

My experience is that, once elected, they are told early on that if they stick together and don’t make waves, they will be re-elected.

One important reason is that councillors get four years of publicity funded by the council and supported by the council’s PR team.

These salaried spin doctors churn out videos, media releases, photo opportunities and Facebook posts constantly featuring the mayor and councillors. This continues almost right through to election day.

Then there’s the pork barrelling of strategically located coastal and hinterland projects, often announced in the run up to an election. The true value of all this not just a few pennies.

During election campaigns, the newspapers suppress true debate and mostly ignore candidates’ contributions on important issues, leaving voters wondering who’s who and what they stand for.

So, if new candidates are to compete on something like equal turf, they generally need to spend a significant amount of money.

When I ran for council in 2016, I had been on management committees of several community groups, but was not known by everyone.

I connected with as many people as I could and in addition I spent $25,000 of my own money to inform voters about my policies and what I stood for.

I won and as a councillor tried to do as much as I could for the people of Noosa. You can make up your own mind about whether I gave value for money.

Our new mayor Clare Stewart has disclosed that it cost her $70,000 to run a competitive mayoral campaign.

But this is still peanuts compared to the cost of the free publicity received over four years by incumbents. In Noosa, that seems to be the real price of democracy.