Following the Dismissal on 11 November 1975, the editors of the major newspapers understood the national mood was volatile.

Australian society was resolutely divided about the Dismissal, as to whether the governor-general should have sacked the prime minister, whether the sacking was unconstitutional, or whether the government should have been left to run its course and gone to an election in the normal way. Public polls showed 49% agreed with the Dismissal and 48% disagreed. Only 3% were undecided.

The editors declared publicly, they would be even-handed and give equal space to both sides in the election campaign. They said, “We will take out the ruler. We will measure. We will give equal space to each side."

It was a crude way to approach or judge even-handed reporting, for space is only one measure; you can have space that’s all negative or a space that’s all positive. The change in emphasis of a story, or placement on the front page or in the back pages are obvious ways to highlight or suppress content. Editorialising on the front page can show clear bias. It can be that space is not available or even that there was a legitimate stuff up. Such things can happen.

All news is managed by sub-editors, by available space, by quantity of advertising. But the La Trobe research team did the task and measured space given to all political coverage, including letters to the editor, editorials, commentary, by-lined and non-by-lined news. The team also assessed the election coverage in the four papers for whether the stories were positive to the ALP, to the Liberal Party or neutral. The results were revealing.

On the basic, crude measure of space, The Age stood out as most even-handed. The Sun, which focused on entertainment rather than information, was even-handed in the number of stories reported, but when we examined the emphasis given, for both The Age and The Sun, what the headline was, where the story was placed in the paper, and the disappearance of some commentators, a different story emerged. The Australian stood out in terms of its clear bias in coverage both for the Liberal Party and against the ALP. The Age took a less straightforward approach to bias.

The La Trobe research group issued a press release on the content analysis of election coverage a few days prior to voting day which supported the charge of bias in reporting. A detailed content analysis of four Melbourne newspapers supported this claim.

The results for The Australian were stark. Most of its reporting showed no by-line. Coverage of the constitutional issue and debate about democracy, which was the main issue Whitlam ran on in the campaign, disappeared from copy in a few days. No article which supported the ALP appeared in the paper. The coverage of Fraser’s claims about economic carnage and Labor mismanagement of the economy predominated, although there was no journalist from any paper who could get Fraser to describe any economic policy details for his vision.

The editors of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald published their instructions to journalists to “play it straight, not to write comment, not to write adjectival descriptive pieces”. But as one journalist told me, “We could not play our role as journalists… Damaging stories guys wrote never saw the light of day. It seemed to me cockeyed. It was just a very demoralising campaign from the get-go."

The level of morale of News Limited journalists was lowest. Three members of the Australian Journalists Association wrote to Rupert Murdoch objecting to the way their guidelines were applied and alleged their professional integrity had been impinged. Given no response, a further letter was sent from 75 journalists.

Murdoch replied but did little to stem the growing tension. On 8 December, the journalists voted to go on strike. On 10 December, the Arbitration Commission directed journalists to return to work as Murdoch agreed to a communique that News Ltd executives would act in accordance with the AJA Code of Ethics. But nothing changed.

Later, on A Current Affair in the 1977 election, Murdoch claimed, “Journalists were showing bias, and we cut the bias out of their stories which is a different thing.” But Greg Taylor, then editor of The Age, told me, “I believe they were slanting news [in 1975] and they were doing it so obviously… it was ridiculous, and it became widely known that journalists were being pushed in certain directions.”

The Press Gallery members who were interviewed described their editors’ handling of their copy as they reported the election. Many were angry, traumatised, despairing and depressed, and told their stories graphically. It was a unique period in Australia’s media history and is chronicled in Part 3.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.