NSW Auditor-General highlights false greyhound racing coverage

Last week the NSW Auditor-General published a scathing report into the ill-fated advertising campaign to ban greyhound racing.

In the criticisms of the campaign, the auditor-general highlighted that the campaign contained inaccurate statements, including the specific claim that the average lifespan of a greyhound was 1.5 years.

“The department, using a method that refers to various sections of the Commissioner report, calculated the average lifespan as 0.74 years. We found a mistake in the department’s calculation. Correcting this mistake shows an average lifespan of 3.7 years,” the Auditor-General said.

If you follow the articles here on The Roar, you would have been aware of this, as I wrote about it more than a year ago.

“The average lifespan is simply an average of those numbers, and it is most certainly not 0.74 years, nor is it 1.5,” I wrote.

“Think about it, how the hell can the average of a set of numbers be lower than the lowest number in the sequence? It can’t. The average of these numbers is 3.7, a maths puzzle I expect high school students to get right.”

My article had both the same broad criticisms as the NSW Auditor-General and, more importantly, precisely the same specific criticism of the accuracy of the advertisements.

However, if you were following other media organisations you may well have seen the advertisements but never realised that the information contained in them was flat out wrong.

And that’s really the interesting question. Here at The Roar, contributors write articles with their opinions on sports.

Surely it is ridiculous that the NSW Auditor-General is vindicating the articles written by random members of the public, when it should be vindicating the work of journalists instead?

(Rainer Hungershausen / Flickr)

It’s not like there wasn’t the public interest, either. The issue was a very hot topic at the time, and the public hate being lectured by governments, and hate it even more when they make things up.

In this case we should also be somewhat critical of parts of our mainstream media. Well-informed sources that had complained about the administration of Greyhound Racing NSW for years were suddenly given the cold shoulder when they had the temerity to tell the same journalists that the state government was lying.

They cared not whether the information was true or false, only whether it aligned with their world view. They created a loop of ignorance where the state government and journalists kept agreeing with whatever nonsensical claim was being made by the other.

After all, advertising gurus will tell you that people find numbers persuasive, so when you have a barrow to push who cares if those numbers are true or false?

It was this atmosphere that created the conditions for the debacle that was the advertising campaign.

And that’s when websites like this are at their best, when people get so fed up with the press for failing to properly inform people that they actively find ways to get accurate information to the public sphere.

So perhaps when you read articles from contributors, you might find the information they contain to be far less inferior to that in the mainstream press than you would normally presume.