The Australian (Media insert) - August 19th 1999
by Andrew Dodd
Two of Australia's newspapers are at loggerheads with the industry-appointed adjudicator, writes Andrew Dodd, and the timing could not be worse.
There's trouble at the Press Council. A stoush has broken out between the print media watchdog and The Australian newspaper. The stand-off is becoming increasingly nasty, with the editor-in-chief, David Armstrong, describing the council as an "institutionalised bureaucracy only concerned with its own self-preservation" and as a body with "no idea how to conduct business fairly". The Australian is boycotting the council, refusing to co-operate until it agrees to major reforms.
At the same time The Age's
representative senior journalist, Pamela Bone, has resigned from the 21-member
body in disgust because the Press Council won't accept The Age's contention
that the continued presence of another member creates a conflict of interest.
She has accused the council of being flawed and behaving like a self-interested
club.
Image right: Australian Press Council chairman Dennis Pearce with Queensland Premier Peter Beattie (right) at the recent World Association of Press Council's conference held in Brisbane (1999).
The timing is appalling. Right now the council desperately wants to look like its both competent and united because federal politicians are at the door threatening to modify the body's role - there are even threats of a much-feared government regulator stepping in and taking over.
The council is no stranger to criticism (it has long been branded a "toothless tiger") but this round of criticism goes much deeper and questions the very ability of the Press Council to regulate the newspaper industry.
Bone - who has represented The Age's publisher, David Syme, a subsidiary of the Fairfax group, on the council for more than three years - sent her letter of resignation to Pearce last week.
"I resigned on a matter of principle," says Bone, "because Peter Costigan continues to sit on the Press Council".
Costigan is a freelance journalist whose work is published in the Sunday Herald Sun, Adelaide's Sunday Mail, The Gold Coast Bulletin, and The Hobart Mercury, as well as several motoring magazines and the Qantas in-flight magazine. He also happens to be Lord Mayor of Melbourne.
He has refused to resign from the Press Council in spite of public urging from The Age for him to do so. Says Bone, "He's sitting on a body which judges people writing about him.
"I've spoken to media ethicists and they agree that it is a clear conflict of interest. If the Press Council can't see that this is a conflict of interest then I wonder what conflict they would see."
The issue has been simmering since Costigan's election as Lord Mayor in March. The Age ran an editorial criticising Costigan's refusal to stand aside and The Age's editor, Michael Gawenda, wrote to Press Council chairman Dennis Pearce to convey his "serious concerns" about Costigan acting as a "gatekeeper now that he is also a major player".
"This is a clear conflict of interest that it could be likened to the Premier of Victoria, Mr Jeff Kennett, holding a Press Council seat," Gawenda added.
Costigan's decision to remain on the council - he has been a member for 16 years - was endorsed by a vote of 15 to 2 after Costigan assured the council he would not judge any matter involving himself or the city council.
Bone's alternate on the Press Council, The Age's opinion page editor, Paul Austin, has resigned in support of her position.
Meanwhile, there's another, even darker cloud looming - namely The Australian's decision to boycott the council and its refusal to publish a ruling made against the newspaper, following the council upholding a complaint against The Australian magazine, published with The Weekend Australian, by a Polish community leader.
The complaint concerned three words in an article that appeared in the magazine last November. The story dealt with the Vatican's attitude to sainthood and referred to the death in 1941 of a Catholic priest, Maximillian Kolbe, in a "Polish concentration camp".
The matter was pursued by Irek Karaskiewicz, of the Federal Council of Polish Associations, who accused The Australian of waging a campaign of slander against Polish-Australians and demanded a front-page apology and retraction. (The article, written by John Cornwall and reprinted from Britain's Sunday Times Magazine, assumed the knowledge on the part of the reader that the "concentration camp" referred to was in Nazi-occupied Poland).
Karaskiewicz took the issue to the Press Council which ruled that the words were ambiguous and offensive to Polish-Australians and that the paper had erred by not redressing the "hurtful mistake". Editor-in-chief Armstrong rejected the adjudication and has steadfastly refused to publish the council's ruling, as it is obliged to do under the terms of newspaper membership of the council.
This has led to an exchange of letters between Armstrong and the council in which Armstrong has accused the council of "adjudication by ambush" and "moving the goalposts in the complainant's favour". He called the ruling "fatally flawed" and tainted by the council's own unfairness.
Armstrong told Media The Australian treats apologies and corrections very seriously, but the problem with the council is it "makes up the rules as it goes along".
He says the problem stems from the council's dual role of mediator and adjudicator. "You can't do both at the same time," he says.
The dual role led the council to initially accept a complaint against The Australian of publishing false information, but then allowed the complainant, during the mediation process, to change the complaint to publishing ambiguous information. Armstrong contends the council allowed Karaskiewicz to introduce new evidence without giving The Australian sufficient time to respond.
"Please note," Armstrong wrote to the council, "that we are not prepared to have The Australian devote valuable, senior-level resources to Press Council matters only to risk being sandbagged in this way in the future."
He announced that the paper was ceasing all co-operation and correspondence with the council until it withdraws the adjudication, apologises to The Australian and agrees to reform its procedures.
Dennis Pearce, defended the handling of the complaint in a letter of his own. He said he was "puzzled" by Armstrong's reaction to the adjudication.
He said the council had given ample opportunity to The Australian to refute Karaskiewicz's claims and would have probably suspended the ruling if the newspaper had offered at the hearing to print a letter of clarification. He told Media that if The Australian accepts The "Polish concentration camp" reference was ambiguous, it would make amends by publishing the adjudication.
In his letter Pearce, invoked another, more interesting reason why The Australian should cop the ruling. It had very little to do with the merits of the case and everything to do with outside political interference - namely an implied threat by the federal government to establish a new statutory body to regulate newspapers in Australia.
The Press Council's "existence has stood in the way of a government-appointed body being established to adjudicate upon complaints against newspapers", Pearce wrote. "It would require very little to induce a government which is not happy with the council to appoint such a body."
Pearce went on, "I am aware of more than one senior minister who regards the council as an ineffectual body.
"If it becomes apparent that leading newspapers do not see themselves as subject to the council's jurisdiction, the case for not establishing a governmental body will be markedly weakened."
There are many competing agendas at play in these disputes. The Australian is angry with what it sees as an unfair ruling and wants the council reformed.
For its part, the Press Council is defensive of its own procedures. Pamela Bone sees the council as out of touch and too self-interested. Peter Costigan wants to protect his own membership. But everyone involved is united by one thing - the fear of government control.
This has been a resounding theme throughout the council's 23 year history. The council was founded by newspaper owners in 1976 "to avoid the creation of a statutory body" after the Whitlam government had proposed the establishment of a government press regulator.
The owners have been doing their best to avoid outside regulation ever since.
Perhaps a line in one of Pearce's letters to The Australian points to the reason why the industry is so anxious to maintain control. He wrote that if a government body was set up to hear complaints against newspapers, "it would undoubtedly be given much wider powers to order action to be taken by a newspaper than the mere publication of its rulings".
It is interesting that the chairman of the Press Council is seemingly so dismissive of the highest sanction the council can impose on a newspaper.
Says Bone, "The goal of self-regulation is a worthy one but the threat of government interference doesn't mean we have to put up with a flawed Press Council."
She's critical of the cosy nature of the council, which she describes as a club. "Any organisation which allows people to be members for 15 or 20 years must become a club and will start looking after its own interests, rather than doing the task it's designated to do," she says. Bone cites the example of one member, David McNicoll, who was on the council for 23 years, the last 12 as Kerry Packer's Australian Consolidated Press representative, until ill-health forced him to resign earlier this year.
Says Pearce, "I don't think its too clubby."
However, he does remember thinking when he joined the council, in November 1997, that there were too many old people and too many men.
At the next week's meeting, Pearce will submit a paper calling for half the council's membership - the slots for an editor, two journalists and seven representatives of the general public - to compete for their positions after six years on the council. But under his plan the 10 industry-appointed members won't be subject to competition.
Another of Bone's concerns is the nature of complaints dealt with by the council. She believes they are often "trivial and vexatious" - the last resort of marginalised groups such as the gun lobby, anti-environment and anti-immunisation groups, as well as pit bull terrier owners and strident men's rights organisations.
Although many of the 400-450 complaints received by the council each year are mediated or dismissed, she suggests that if the council "didn't take on all the vexatious complaints it might not have any work to do".
One interested observer is NSW Liberal Senator John Tierney, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Information Technologies, which is inquiring into the media codes of conduct and considering extending the powers of the Press Council.
Tierney wants to see the council have more clout and classes it as one of the least effective of any of the bodies that regulate the communications industry. The select committee is due to table a report next month.
In June, Tierney wrote to The Australian's letters page detailing "dissatisfaction among some members of the (committee) about the powers of the Press Council or lack thereof. Public perception even among media practitioners tags this body as a toothless tiger".
The Productivity Commission is also investigating the media and has given signals it has considered the idea of a merger of the print and electronic media watchdog roles into one government appointed regulator.
Pearce opposes a statutory regulator because of the risk of the lawyers getting involved and the process becoming too costly for ordinary readers to access.
The timing of the dispute with The Australian is "most unfortunate", says Pearce, "The Council relies on the acceptance of the adjudication by newspapers.
"They might not like what we say but we are only an independent umpire, and if they object to this independent umpire, then they are likely to get a much tougher independent umpire."