Speculation falls short of facts

When I tuned into the ABC’s ‘Insiders’ programme on Sunday morning, I’m quite sure I could have been watching a replay of virtually any edition from last year. The dominant topic of conversation for the nation’s political journalists is leadership — specifically, the leadership of the governing Labor party. Report after report after report has told us that Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s position is terminal; that members of her party are agitating for a change of leaders; and that her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, is set to back a stunning comeback. 

It would be nice if there were even a skerrick of evidence that any of this is true.

But as Ben Eltham writes, while there are myriad articles and commentaries on the topic, no one has gone on the record to say that leadership change is imminent. True, you can’t take a politician at their word at the best of times — by the time they publicly admit that a change of leader is being considered, the said leader is already lying on the floor in a pool of blood. However, after nearly a year of speculation about Gillard’s prospects from unnamed sources, Eltham argues that there’s surely a point at which journalists should question the merit of continuing to publish the same stories without any proof of their validity. Fiction can often be more interesting than facts — but that’s no grounds for the media to substitute the former for the latter.