By RICHARD WALSH
Saturday 18 March 2000
HERE IS the news. Kind of. According to most broadcast and press reports, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras a fortnight ago attracted crowds of about 600,000 people; according to the front-page lead in The Sydney Morning Herald of 11 September last year, Dili police station was piled high with thousands of corpses; according to a prominent story in The Australian 10 days ago, a federal MP had singled out Rupert Murdoch as ``perhaps the greatest Australian of the 20th century and the nation needed more entrepreneurs like him''.
In truth the mardi gras probably attracted a crowd of about 100,000 (according to an utterly convincing computation by a Sydney Morning Herald letter-writer on the following Tuesday); the number of lives lost in East Timor was nothing remotely like that reported initially by the Australian media last year, and The Sydney Morning Herald has subsequently never attempted to maintain that its claim about the Dili police station was correct (but nor has it apologised for its inaccuracy); New South Wales Liberal Ross Cameron actually said that both Murdoch and Howard Florey were at the top of his short-list of great Australians and merely made this point preparatory to raising serious issues about the risks to Australian democracy of Murdoch's dominant newspaper proprietorship (which The Australian failed to mention).
As with most egregious errors that occur in journalism today, these episodes reveal the pressure on journalists to pander to the prejudices of their readers and their proprietors, and the absence of appropriate safeguards. These in turn reflect great changes in the practice of journalism that have engulfed the profession in modern times.
When I was a young man filled with dreams of journalism (as a student newspaper editor on a Rupert Murdoch scholarship!) there were no communications courses. Instead we filled our heads with stories about our larrikin heroes - the two founding editors of The Bulletin being jailed for their report on the Clontarf picnic grounds, Cyril Pearl's account of the Sydney Truth's flamboyant John Norton in Wild Men of Sydney, Frank Hardy taking on the might of the Wren family, and so on. But it wasn't all ancient history. Within our own experience there were South Australian Premier Tom Playford's attempts to jail Rohan Rivett over the Adelaide News' campaign to save Rupert Max Stuart from the gallows, Frank Browne being jailed by Menzies, Max Newton's public spat with Billy McMahon, and Adrian Deamer's dismissal by Murdoch from the editorship of The Australian. From this inspiring mishmash we absorbed, like mother's milk, the idea that to be a journalist was to be a kind of subversive, fighting for truth and justice against the might of proprietors and politicians (including Labor politicians, of course: old-timers could vividly remember Arthur Calwell's stint as Minister for Information during the war).
LIFE APPEARED to be simpler then. The birth of The Australian in the mid-'60s empowered newspaper journalists as they had never been empowered before. Previously working journalists had never had bylines, and therefore could not achieve a personal following. All papers were politically conservative and the proprietor was supreme. Suddenly there was a new kind of journalism in the air and more competition for the best talents. Simultaneously The Age, under Ranald Macdonald and Graham Perkin, was revitalised, and there was the prospect of The Canberra Times being converted into a national paper. The arrival in the early '70s of the two weeklies, Nation Review and The National Times, added a new dimension.
But coinciding with this new and invigorating era for print journalism there came another important change: broadcasting discovered the popularity of current affairs. Since its inception in 1956, Australian TV had for a decade virtually ignored politics, but the growing popularity of This Day Tonight in the pre-Whitlam era was a revelation and soon the commercial networks wanted to go down this path. Mike Willesee left the ABC at the end of 1971 to found A Current Affair, which was an instant success. Radio, under pressure from TV, was also reinventing itself - AM had begun in the same year as TDT (1967); PM began two years later.
The broadcast media's involvement in public debate has had a rather insidious effect in some ways - it has led to confusion about what journalism is, who are its practitioners, and what is its role. For example, TCN Sydney's news is promoted as ``Brian Henderson's News'', as though the former compere of Bandstand plays some significant role in creating the words and images he so disarmingly fronts.
Radio and TV journalism is at times in the hands of people with fine voices and good looks, but often no journalistic training. It's hardly surprising that John Laws states categorically that he is not bound by the ethics of journalism - he does not see himself as a journalist, even though he is as much a public affairs commentator as is Max Walsh, and arguably more influential.
Where once the media were run by very private family companies, today such proprietors are large public enterprises. Employees feel secure and upbeat when their share price is prospering. Customarily, particularly in the press, senior journalists own shares and options in their companies, which clearly compromises their objectivity. For example, when, on 15 December last year, Pacific Power lost a significant court case, which might ultimately cost NSW taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, neither of Fairfax's Sydney-based papers could bring themselves to mention that their current CEO, Fred Hilmer, is the former chairman of that ill-starred electricity company. Journalists probably were not requested, let alone instructed, to omit this important detail from their stories. However, did the senior journalists involved sense instinctively that this revelation would not be good for a business in which they have an emotional and, in some cases, financial investment?
Most people understand that Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer are the strongest-willed media proprietors in the country. However, the two men operate in very different circumstances. Kerry Packer has a well-earned reputation for being a shrewd businessman who has converted his father's small fortune into a mega-colossus. PBL is a public company open to public scrutiny, so he would not willingly foist on his television stations or magazines an editorial policy that was unpopular with their audience. His father, by contrast, ran a private, secretive company and did not care if the readership of Sydney's Telegraph did not share his militant conservatism. (Rupert, when he acquired it, made it more critical of the then conservative federal and NSW state governments, which helped boost its sales.)
KERRY PACKER'S political allegiances are unpredictable and, from my experience, his intrusions into his television and magazine interests are sporadic and unsystematic and of minor political significance. He was not comfortable with David Dale's editorship of The Bulletin, and ultimately sacked him, because the magazine pilloried some of his friends rather than because of its political orientation. During my 14 years of leadership at ACP, I was never asked to support any particular candidate or party and indeed had no clear idea of where Packer's preferences lay.
On one memorable occasion Packer complained that we were not running enough articles in The Bulletin in favor of protectionism (one of his hobby horses); we accommodated this request without eliminating any journalism in favor of free trade.
There is little doubt that Packer made it known to the Nine Network in 1995 that he wanted to be interviewed on A Current Affair, which resulted in the famous Ray Martin interview in which he ``endorsed'' John Howard's aspirations and sent Keating spare, but at that time any rival program would have fallen over itself to have had him as its guest.
Rupert is more ideologically driven and enjoys quasi-monopolies in some cities; his Australian papers are so insignificant in his global portfolio that he is free to run them as personal fiefdoms. Rupert hides from nobody his immense displeasure at the datacasting regime unveiled by the Communications Minister, Senator Richard Alston, just before Christmas. John Howard firmly believes that this is the root cause of the hypercritical attitude to his government adopted by Murdoch papers this year; there is a tonne of circumstantial evidence to support the PM's analysis. The gushingly uncritical way in which these papers deal with Murdoch's financial interests creates a sycophantic miasma over all of News Ltd's financial reporting and undermines its credibility. The Australian's Finola Burke shares Murdoch's views on how the digital spectrum should be deployed for the greater good of everybody; she is given generous space in which to expatiate endlessly on this matter and is backed up by regular editorials developing the same themes. The nomadic Murdochian Terry McCrann is so attuned to the thoughts of Rupert and Lachlan that when he argues, as he did recently, that the Liberal Party should turn to Peter Costello for revitalised leadership, it is difficult not to assume that McCrann is reflecting the hopes of his proprietorial family.
IN NO OTHER media group in Australia does a single individual seek to exert so much power. On the other hand, as the recent ABA inquiry has revealed, 2UE may be the only significant media outlet where the employees are more powerful than the putative boss.
Elsewhere, while there will inevitably be some sense among ambitious media executives at the top of the hierarchy as to what the proprietor or the board wants, the subtlest influence on the two major groups that still contribute most to forming opinion among the powerful elites - Fairfax and the ABC - is peer pressure.
Demographically journalists are fairly homogeneous. They are well educated, reasonably well paid and famously sociable. Most share the same life goals and are not immune to flattery.
The culture of the ABC and Fairfax was once called ``small-l liberal''; today their journalists would probably describe themselves as ``social progressives''; their detractors would see them as ``left liberals'' or worse. These are not organisations notably tolerant of militant conservatives or reactionaries in their ranks.
Collegiality means that senior journalists often have access to letters to the editor that are critical of them before they are published, and can successfully exert pressure on the lower-ranking executives who control this outlet for the voices of readers.
Papers obsessively correct absurdly trivial errors, to give the impression that they have a meticulous eye for self-criticism, but often fail to correct major mistakes, except under threat of litigation. In this collegial world, journalists who are admired by other journalists are given Walkley awards.
During the late '90s there has been a significant decline in the circulation and readership of newspapers; even television news and current affairs has suffered a decline in the size of their audience. This has made individual journalists feel more vulnerable, with unpredictable results on the quality of their work. A particular news or comment item may be written to curry favor with some future employer - a competing media group, a government minister with a staff vacancy, or a company recruiting executives.
With revenue uncertain, there is pressure on costs. Fred Hilmer initiated Project Hercules at Fairfax to rein in costs; Kerry Stokes has created a similar exercise at Seven. Cost reductions lead to less investigative journalism, which is labor-intensive, and a greater reliance on agency material. In newspapers, the foreign pages may be devoid of any Australian perspective; in television, we get endless footage of the US presidential primaries.
Print journalism was once synonymous with reporting, but a great deal of bread-and-butter reporting is now in the hands of lowly paid anonymous practitioners in agencies such as AAP.
There is less checking of facts all round. The American Al Dunlap, as chief executive at PBL, was for a time one of the most high-profile businessmen in this country. The story he spun to journalists, including to those who worked at PBL, of his humble beginnings was pure fiction, but no one took the trouble to check his story out until his return to the United States, where a Business Week reporter of the old school exposed him as a fraud.
There's more dependency on PR guff. Press releases can provide a cheap source of copy, and companies can helpfully eliminate the time and cost of research. PR companies provide free travel to exotic locations for their friends in the media. Admirably, Fairfax has recently adopted a code by which such assistance should be openly avowed by their journalists. However, the code, in regard to gifts of travel and accommodation, seems to be applied inconsistently. News Ltd has no such code.
Struggling to maintain their revenues, newspapers can at times become more preoccupied with concocting new liftouts and obsessively redesigning their pages than with solid journalism. Good sub-editing is perceived to be so unimportant that it is often confused with pedantry. Over-reliance on computerised spell checks does not help. When The Sydney Morning Herald can offer ``Bid to reign in payouts to victims of crime'' as the lead headline on one of its news pages, as it did last August, you can take it that attention to detail is a major problem throughout the newspaper industry.
Desperate for circulation, even the best papers succumb to a kind of creeping tabloidism. For example, newspaper editors almost certainly hoped for a lift in sales during last year's crisis in Timor. If the reporting is dramatic, if there is widespread belief that hundreds of thousands of people are being massacred, this compounds the effect. History will show that the Australian media grossly exaggerated the mayhem in Timor (which is not to deny that there was widespread property destruction and appalling loss of life). It should be noted that Lindsay Murdoch, who wrote the story about Dili police station being piled high with bodies in The Sydney Morning Herald last September, was also contributing stories to The Age, which sensibly did not give this story prominence.
In the '70s, many large advertisers were adverse to using The Australian or the two new weeklies. Australian commerce was very unenterprising then and its leadership was undynamic. Because advertising was perceived more as something you were supposed to do, a kind of civic duty, selection of media had more to do with the personal tastes of the managing director than any critical media analysis.
Advertisers today cannot afford to choose media as a form of political patronage. Business is too competitive for that and over time a better educated and more sophisticated business leadership has emerged. Big advertisers have to include TV in their schedule. If they want to reach a mass audience it is difficult for them to boycott Nine. During most of the '90s if they wanted to target women, they needed Seven on their schedule; if they wanted a younger demographic, they needed Ten. But the exact way in which they allocated their media spend between these three commercial networks was fluid and the large sums of money involved gave them significant leverage. The competition now presented to the networks by SBS, pay TV and cyberspace strengthens the hands of advertisers further.
While a significant television spend is seen by many advertisers as an essential ingredient in their media schedule, radio and magazines are seen as optional media with wider choices available because of their fragmentation. Here the potential for advertiser pressure is even greater. Display advertising in newspapers can often also be seen as optional rather than obligatory. A notorious case was when the then Queensland Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, refused to allow the Queensland Government to advertise in The Courier-Mail when that paper had bravely embarked on a crusade to expose the corruption prevalent at that time. As the recent ABA inquiry showed, some radio stations - and their employees - are so desperate for revenue that they are prepared to solicit advertisers by indicating their willingness to pervert journalistic values.
To boost their revenue in a world of declining circulation and overweening advertisers, the media look avidly for supplementary sources of income. Traditionally this took a variety of forms and led to that well-known enemy of good journalism, the cross promotion. To coincide with the publication date of the Fairfax Good Food Guides, for example, the papers involved suddenly discover a preternatural interest in matters alimentary that defies real news values.
But Murdoch's papers are the most relentless cross-promoters in Australian publishing and sometimes, as with commercial radio, it is difficult to know where their news ends and their puff pieces begin. What is not so widely known is that ABC Enterprises has become so powerful, because of its revenue-generating potential, that its views can hold sway in some creative areas - for example, it may push for a particular composer to create the score for a proposed new program because of the stronger potential for a bestselling audio spin-off.
THE DECLINE in profitability of traditional media, with all its adverse effects already noted, has led to a significant investment by the main companies in new media. The World Wide Web is a mad millennial bazaar of commercial and publishing enterprises, of inspired amateurs and paranoid graffitists.
The prestige portals wish to raise themselves above this dubious milieu by carrying authoritative and continuous news and sports updates; the irony is that most Australian companies cannot provide such material as they themselves acquire this from press agencies rather than generate it themselves. The ABC, which does have the resources to provide continuous news feeds, is hawking its services but most of its journalists have no serious experience of print (the Net's nearest neighbor in the old media); its transcripts contain often hilarious mistakes and the service it provides is not at a professional level of which it could be proud.
So this is the way the news, as we once knew it, ends. In traditional media, journalism has evolved from a mystical craft of unbylined subversives to a profession dominated by a well-rewarded elite protecting their share prices. In the new media, the information gatherers are almost as anonymous as they were half a century ago, but certainly not as reliable. As a piece of mischief, you can request from a reputable search engine references about an intentional misspelling, like ``Dennis Lilee'', and discover to your amazement that there are plenty of entries for this not-so-famous fast bowler. If, as it seems, there are not enough discerning readers/viewers out there to reward quality and to cause unprofessionalism to wither, we may well be experiencing the slow death of the journalism for which I, as a young man, held such absurdly grandiose dreams.
Richard Walsh co-founded Oz magazine in 1963 and was the founding editor of the weekly newspaper Nation Review in the early 1970s. He was managing DIrector of Angus and Robertson Publishers until 1986, when he became head of Kerry Packer's magazine company, ACP. With David Salter, he was co-editor of Zeitgeist Gazette, a daily online newsletter that ceased publication last week.
Media Watch presenter Paul Barry, federal Communications Minister Senator Richard Alston, Australian Financial Review editor Colleen Ryan and Seven Network chief Kerry Stokes will be the keynote speakers at The Age's first Vision 21 event of 2000. The symposium will be held at the Melbourne Convention Centre on Tuesday, 28 March.