While not mentioned by Schudson, nothing spoke to the rise of “objective journalism” more clearly than the rise of “scientific” polling: the attempt to document “the voice of the people” based on interviews that, in principle, gave every citizen an equal chance of being heard, of saying what they had to say, via questions free of bias, that bane of objectivity.

George Gallup, a figure central to the spread of polling, presented poll-takers, in his polling manifesto The Pulse of Democracy (1940), as people “moving freely about all sorts and conditions of men and noting how they are affected by the news or arguments brought from day to day to their knowledge.” Gallup took this model from James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth (1888), but his own polling, with its set questions and predetermined response categories, was far removed from the kind of observation Bryce favoured

In reality, Gallup followed a news-making model — the model exemplified by press conferences and media releases, where news is made for the press without being controlled by the press. Gallup not only created news, controlling what was asked, how it was asked and when; he also syndicated his results to a broad range of newspapers. Having his polls published by papers whose politics ranged widely shored up his claims to objectivity.

A parallel existed with the Associated Press, America’s first wire service. Since it “gathered news for publication in a variety of papers with widely different political allegiances,” Schudson notes, “it could only succeed by making its reporting “objective” enough to be acceptable to all its members and clients.”

While servicing a diverse range of outlets was central to Gallup in America, this is not what happened in Australia. When Keith Murdoch introduced the Gallup Poll here in 1941 he made sure that the company he set up to run it was controlled by his own Herald and Weekly Times and its associates in various states. Although Australian Public Opinion Polls (“The Gallup Method”) was notionally independent, executives from the Herald and Weekly Times, including Murdoch, could (and did) influence the questions Roy Morgan, APOP’s managing director, asked, including whether they should be repeated from poll to poll.

Whereas the American Gallup boasted subscribing newspapers that were Republican (as Gallup himself may have been), Democrat and independent, none of the newspapers that subscribed to the Australian Gallup Poll are likely to have ever editorialised in favour of federal Labor; for many years, Morgan himself was an anti-Labor member of the Melbourne City Council.

Much of the polling done in America and later in Australia, however, fits a third model: things that the press creates either directly (in-house polling; for example, of a newspaper’s own readers) or indirectly (by commissioning an independent market research firm to ask questions on the newspaper’s behalf). Media products that fit this category range from Clyde Packer’s creation of the Miss Australia contest in the 1920s (also copied from America) and the Australian Financial Review’s endless business “summits” in the 2020s, to the media’s ubiquitous sit-down interviews with politicians and celebrities. This is now the dominant model.

Creating news is the surest route to having an “exclusive” and creating “product differentiation.” If the “exclusive” is produced often enough, is highly valued, and prominently flagged — polling is now featured on the front page — it becomes a way of building “brand loyalty.” Newspapers that regularly commission polls from the same source, or that have a regular but non-financial relationship with a pollster, hope for all of this. Media that don’t commission their own polls — television and radio, especially — are often happy to recycle polls published in the press.

Brand loyalty is a way of building a readership. When it comes to polling, it generally means not citing polls generated by competing brands — especially polls that could raise doubts about one’s own polls. Where different polls produce different — even conflicting — results, this usually means that the rules of objectivity that require journalists to confirm their stories using more than one source are readily abandoned. While some newspapers are more brand-focused than others, journalists consulting their own polls and not others has become standard practice.

In polling, the strength of any brand — the reputation of the poll — depends on the prestige of the news outlet that publishes it. It also depends on the poll’s record, and that record is assessed against the few objective measures that exist: election results and referendums.

Polls that score well on these measures are more likely to be trusted on things other than the vote. That, at least, is the hope of the companies that poll for the press or have their polls publicised by the press. Companies involved in the prediction business try to ensure that their polls come as close as possible to predicting the actual vote — closer, certainly, than any of their rivals.

What pollsters hope to be trusted on, as a result of the accuracy on these measures, is everything else they do for the press — notably, reporting on the popularity of party leaders and taking “the pulse” (as Gallup liked to say) on issues of public policy. More than that, they are after a spillover or halo effect for their market research businesses more generally; financially, this is the point of involving themselves in the not particularly lucrative business of predicting votes. Trust is important because what companies report on matters other than the vote typically cannot be checked directly against any external measure.

Absent any objective check, there is always a risk of polling that panders, consciously or otherwise, to the client’s agenda or the pollster’s preferences. Against this happening, the guardrails erected by industry bodies like the relatively new Australian Polling Council or the old (Market) Research Society are either weak or non-existent — the APC mostly concerned that pollsters explain their methods and post their questionnaires online, a very welcome development but one that stops well short of setting wide-ranging standards in relation to the questions members ask; the Research Society mostly concerned to reassure respondents about the way polling companies protect their privacy.

Newspoll — and other polls

Enter Newspoll, a brand owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Established for a high-end newspaper, the Australian — whose news and views are seen by some as exerting an out-size influence on conservative politics — Newspoll can claim a record of predicting national elections second to none.

In the course of conducting its most recent poll — a fortnightly event that usually grabs the headlines for what it has to say about national voting intentions, leadership satisfaction and preferred prime minister — Newspoll raised the issue of nuclear power. “There is a proposal to build several small modular nuclear reactors around Australia to produce zero-emissions energy on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired,” Newspoll told respondents (emphasis in the original). It then asked: “Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?” Respondents were invited to select one answer: “Strongly approve” (22 per cent); “Somewhat approve” (33 per cent); “Somewhat disapprove” (14 per cent); “Strongly disapprove” (17 per cent); “Don’t know” (14 per cent). In short: 55 per cent in favour; 31 per cent against; 14 per cent not prepared to say either way.

As Newspoll might have anticipated on an issue as contentious as this, its question generated controversy. Unimpressed, the economist John Quiggin proposed — tongue-in-cheek — a quite different way the question might have been worded: “There is a proposal to keep coal-fired power stations operating until the development of small nuclear reactors which might, in the future, supply zero-emissions energy. Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?”

A question on nuclear power could have been asked in any number of ways: by putting the arguments for and against nuclear power; by taking the timeline for getting nuclear power up and running and comparing it to the timeline for wind + solar + hydro; by asking who should pay (governments, consumers, industry, etc.) for different forms of energy with zero emissions, and how much they should pay; by qualifying the “zero-emissions” solution with some reference to the waste disposal problem; by omitting the words “small, modular” — not just descriptors but, potentially at least, words of reassurance; and so on.

Different questions might still have produced a majority in favour of nuclear energy. A question asked for the Institute of Public Affairs by Dynata, in April 2022, on whether Australia should build nuclear power plants to supply electricity and reduce carbon emissions,” found a majority (53 per cent agreeing), and an even lower level of opposition (23 per cent).

As with Newspoll, the IPA poll raised considerations that invited an affirmative response: “small modular,” “zero-emissions energy,” “on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired” (Newspoll); “to supply electricity,” “reduce carbon omissions” (IPA). Not a single consideration in either poll might have prompted a negative response.

The high proportion in the IPA survey neither agreeing nor disagreeing (24 per cent) — an option Newspoll didn’t offer — allowed respondents who actually had an opinion to conceal it, Swedish research on attitudes to nuclear power suggests. So, while the level of opposition recorded by the IPA might have been higher without the “easy out,” the level of support might have been higher too.

Other questions about nuclear power failed to attract majority support. Asked in September by Freshwater “if Australia needs nuclear power” (the precise question was not published), and presented with a set of response options similar to those offered by the IPA, 37 per cent of respondents supported nuclear power and 36 per cent opposed it, 18 per cent saying they were “neutral” and 12 per cent “unsure.” Apart from coal (supported by 33 per cent), every other energy source received wider support: hydrogen (47 per cent), natural gas (56 per cent), offshore wind (58 per cent), onshore wind (61 per cent) and solar (84 per cent).

Asked in the same poll whether “Australia should remove the ban on nuclear power development,” 44 per cent agreed. But asked whether they agreed or disagreed that “Australia does not need to generate any energy from nuclear power,” 36 per cent disagreed. Similarly, no more than 35 per agreed that “the federal government must consider small nuclear modular reactors as part of the future energy mix” — a much lower figure than Newspoll’s, even if the question isn’t necessarily better.

Freshwater also asked respondents to choose between two trade-offs: “Australia builds nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are replaced earlier” (44 per cent chose this one) and “Australia does not build nuclear power plants meaning some coal power plants are extended” (38 per cent); 18 per cent were “unsure.” Respondents opposed to both coal and nuclear power were left with only one place to go — “unsure.” But on the poll’s own evidence — 33 per cent supporting coal, 36 per cent supporting nuclear — the figure of 18 per cent appears to underestimate this group considerably.

Another question on nuclear power, this time asked by RedBridge, is said to have shown a 35–32 split over “the idea of using nuclear to provide for Australia’s energy need.” As yet, however, neither the question nor any figures have been posted on its website.

Yet another question, asked in February by Resolve for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, also failed to show majority support for nuclear power. Told that “there has been some debate about the use of nuclear power in Australia recently” and asked for their “own view,” respondents split four ways: “I support the use of nuclear power in Australia” (36 per cent); “I do not have a strong view and am open to the government investigating its use” (27 per cent); “I oppose the use of nuclear power in Australia” (25 per cent); and “Undecided” (15 per cent).

In reporting this “exclusive survey,” David Crowe, chief political correspondent for the two papers, made no reference to the Newspoll published the previous day. This, notwithstanding that in reporting the Resolve poll Crowe gave pride of place to “mining billionaire” Andrew Forrest’s attack on the Coalition’s nuclear policy — a policy the Australian suggested had received a “boost” from the Newspoll. Nor did Crowe refer to any other poll.

On one reading, most respondents (61 per cent in the Resolve poll compared to 39 per cent in Newspoll) had “a strong view” (the respondents who declined to say “I do not have a strong view…”), those without “a strong view” either being “open to the government investigating” the use of nuclear power or “undecided.” More likely, the question didn’t measure how strong any of the views were — some of those without strong views being “open to the government investigating its use,” others joining those who harboured strong views (respondents Resolve didn’t directly identify) to indicate either their support or their opposition to nuclear power.

Effectively, the Resolve poll rolled three questions into one — one, about support or opposition to nuclear power; another about the strength of these opinions; and another about “the government investigating” the “use” of nuclear power. But since responses to one of these questions would not necessarily have determined responses to any other, Resolve’s shortcut obscures more about public opinion than it illuminates; a respondent with a strong view, for example, might still have been “open to the government investigating its use.”

In October 2023, Resolve asked another question — this one reportedly commissioned by the consulting firm Society Advisory, and run “exclusively” by Sky News. The result suggested a degree of openness to nuclear power that was even higher than that indicated by Resolve’s poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald. Asked if “Australia should rethink its moratorium (ban) on nuclear power to give more flexibility in the future,” half (49 per cent) of the respondents were in favour, less than half that number (18 per cent) were against, opposition to “flexibility” requiring some strength, with an extraordinary 33 per cent “unsure” — a sign that this question too was a poor one.

Not only do answers depend on the question, they also depend on the response options. In an extensive survey — not just a one- or two-item poll — conducted in October–November 2023, the British firm Savanta asked respondents “to what extent, if at all,” they supported or opposed using nuclear energy “to generate electricity” in Australia? While 40 per cent said “strongly support” or “tend to support,” 36 per cent said “strongly oppose” or “tend to oppose,” 7 per cent said “Don’t know,” and 17 per cent said they “neither support nor oppose.”

As with the Resolve poll for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Savanta’s response options — which included “neither support nor oppose” — reduced the chance that its question, however worded, would yield a majority either in favour of nuclear energy or against it; almost as many opposed nuclear energy as supported it, a quarter (24 per cent) choosing to sit on the fence. In the Newspoll, where 55 per cent approved and 31 per cent disapproved, there was no box marked “neither approve nor disapprove.” If there had been, then almost certainly Newspoll would not have found majority support either.

The Savanta survey also shows what happens to support for a single option — here, nuclear power — when respondents are given a range of options. Asked to think about how their “country might shift its current energy generation mix” and given a list of five alternatives, only 23 per cent nominated “nuclear energy”; 41 per cent, almost twice as many, nominated “large-scale solar farms.” Of the rest, 15 per cent nominated “onshore wind farms,” 6 per cent “gas carbon and storage (CCS),” and 4 per cent “biomass from trees.”

Newspoll made no attempt to ascertain whether the public had heard of “small modular nuclear reactors” much less what the public knew about such things. In the Guardian, the proposal was described as “an uncosted Coalition thought-bubble”; in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, former deputy Reserve Bank governor Stephen Grenville noted that there were “just two operational SMRs, both research reactors” and that work on what “was expected to be the first operational commercial SMR” had “been halted as the revised cost per kWH is uneconomic for the distributors who had signed up.” Elsewhere, an academic specialising in electricity generation described SMRs as “not, by any stretch of the imagination, what most people would consider small.”

On what the public knows — or, more accurately, on how much it thinks it knows — the Savanta survey is again useful. When asked what they had heard of nuclear energy, few (8 per cent) said “I have not heard about this energy option” or “don’t know.” But just 18 per cent said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a lot about how it works.” Most said “I have heard about this energy option, and know a little about how it works” (41 per cent) or “I have heard about this energy option, but don’t know how it works (33 per cent).

In a poll conducted by Pure Profile, reported in May 2022, 70 per cent said they didn’t understand “the difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion.”

… and the Australian

Keen to publicise the result of its Newspoll — a result the paper openly welcomed — the Australian’s reporting of the poll and its commentary around it was tendentious.

The distinction between respondents’ having a view and their having a “strong” view was one it mostly ignored or fudged. The paper’s political editor Simon Benson, reported in Crikey to be “responsible” for the poll, ignored it. He repeatedly represented “majority” support as “strong” support. The fact that pollsters themselves regularly make this mistake shouldn’t make it any more acceptable. If support is a metre wide, it isn’t necessarily a metre deep.

The headline in the print edition — “Powerful Majority Supports Nuclear Option for Energy Security” — fudged the distinction. In itself, 55 per cent is not an overwhelming majority; in 2017, same-sex marriage was supported in the nationwide “survey” by 62 per cent. In itself,  55 per cent is hardly a “powerful” number — one that politicians ignore at their peril; in the lead-up to the same-sex marriage decision, both John Howard and Tony Abbott made it clear that they wouldn’t consider anything less than 60 per cent in favour to be a number that the parliament would have to heed. Had 55 per cent (not 36 per cent) “strongly” approved nuclear reactors, the Australian would have had a defensible case. But even in polls that offer a binary choice, “strong” majorities are rare.

Rather than representing a “powerful majority” in favour of the “nuclear option,” Newspoll’s figures might equally be said to show that most respondents (61 per cent) did not feel strongly one way or the other — a majority that the Australian would not have wanted to call “powerful.”

A highlight, Benson argued, was the fact that respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four — “the demographic most concerned about climate change” — was the demographic most likely to support nuclear power, 65–32. “There is no fear of the technology for most people under 40,” he concluded. This line was one that impressed shadow climate change and energy minister, Ted O’Brien, when he discussed the poll on Sky News.

It also resonated with opposition leader Peter Dutton. Attacking the prime minister for being out of touch with public opinion, which he was reported to have said was “warming to nuclear power,” Dutton noted that nuclear power was “supported by a lot of younger people because they are well-read and they know that it’s zero emissions, and it can firm up renewables in the system.”

The news that “NewsPoll [sic] showed a majority of young Australians supporting small-scale nuclear power generation,” even prompted a discussion of the pros and cons of nuclear power — not the pros and cons of the polling — on the ABC.

But eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds as the age group most favourably disposed to nuclear power is not what Essential shows, not what Savanta shows, and not what RedBridge shows. In October’s Essential poll, no more than 46 per cent of respondents aged eighteen to thirty-four supported “nuclear power plants” — the same proportion as those aged thirty-six to fifty-four but a smaller proportion than those aged fifty-five-plus (56 per cent); the proportion of “strong” supporters was actually lower among those aged eighteen to thirty-four than in either of the other age-groups.

In the Savanta survey, those aged eighteen to thirty-four were the least likely to favour nuclear energy; only about 36 per cent were in favour, strongly or otherwise, not much more than half the number that Newspoll reported.

And according to a report of the polling conducted in February by RedBridge, sourced to Tony Barry, a partner and former deputy state director of the Victorian Liberal Party, “[w]here there is support” for nuclear power. “it is among only those who already vote Liberal or who are older than 65.”

In the Australian, the leader writer observed that “public support for considering nuclear power in Australia is rising as the cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge becomes more real.” But Newspoll had never sought to establish what respondents think are the “cost and implications of meeting the decarbonisation challenge” so it could hardly have shown whether these thoughts have changed.

Benson’s remark, on the Australian’s front page, that the poll showed “growing community support” for nuclear power was also without warrant; “growing community support” is something that the poll does not show and that Benson made no attempt to document. Since the question posed by Newspoll had never been asked before, and since polled opinion is sensitive to the way questions are asked, “growing community support” is one thing the poll could not show.

Subsequently, Benson cited Liberal Party polling conducted “immediately after the [May] 2022 election loss” which “had support at 31 per cent.” The question? Benson doesn’t say. Is it really likely, as Benson believes, that in a “short space of time,” as he describes it — less than two years — support for nuclear power could have jumped from 31 per cent to 55 per cent? The considerable shift in polled opinion on same-sex marriage that Wikipedia suggests happened sometime between 2004 and 2007 is hardly likely to have happened since 2022 in relation to nuclear energy.

Peta Credlin, Australian columnist and Sky News presenter, argued the growing-support line by stringing together: a poll conducted in 2015 (by Essential, though she didn’t identify it as an Essential poll), which had support at 40 per cent; the IPA poll (which it was safe to name) from 2022, which had support at 53 per cent; and the Newspoll, which had it at 55 per cent. Not only was each of these conducted by a different pollster, hence subject to different “house effects”; each had posed their own question.

Had the Australian wanted to see whether support really was growing it might have considered re-running one of the questions it had asked years before — or, preferably, re-run more than one. But perhaps the point of the polling was not to show that support was growing but to create the impression that it was growing — that it had a momentum that might leave Labor, “in its fanatical opposition to nuclear power,” as Benson wrote, stranded on “the wrong side of history.”

This was not the first time the Australian has interpreted the results of a Newspoll as heralding a turning point on this issue. In 2007, shortly before prime minister John Howard announced that the Coalition would set up a nuclear regulatory regime and remove any unreasonable impediments to the building of nuclear power plants in Australia, the Australian told its readers that there had been a “dramatic shift” in support for nuclear power. The basis of its claim: questions asked by Newspoll — two in 2006, one in 2007. (In those days Newspoll was a market research company, not a polling brand whose field work had been outsourced first to YouGov and more recently to Pyxis.)

The questions asked in 2006 were not the same as the question asked in 2007. In May and December 2006, Newspoll told respondents: “Currently, while there is a nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney used for medical and scientific purposes, there are no nuclear power stations being built in Australia.” It then asked: “Are you personally in favour or against nuclear power stations in Australia?” The majority was against: 38–51, in May; 35–50, in December.

In March 2007, Newspoll changed the question, and framed it quite differently: “Thinking now about reducing gas emissions to help address climate change,” it asked, “are you personally in favour or against the development of a nuclear power industry in Australia, as one of a range of energy solutions to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions?” On this, opinion was fairly evenly split: 45–40. The majority were not against; in fact, there was a plurality in favour. The Australian’s interpretation: in just four months, Dennis Shanahan and Sid Marris concluded, the attitude of Australians to nuclear energy had “dramatically reversed.”

Not so. After commissioning Newspoll to ask the 2006 question again, in April 2007, the Australia Institute found that the level of support for “nuclear power stations being built in Australia” was 36 per cent (35 per cent in December 2006), the level of opposition was now 46 per cent (previously, 50 per cent), and the “don’t knows” were now 18 per cent (previously 15 per cent). In short, whereas opposition had exceeded support by fifteen percentage points, 50­–35, it now exceeded support by ten points, 46–36 — a decline of five points, but no reversal, dramatic or otherwise.

This time around, both the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald have asked questions similar to the one Newspoll asked in February, but in polls of their readers not in a public opinion poll. Asked, in July 2023, whether Australia should “consider small nuclear reactors as one solution to moving away from fossil fuels?,” the Financial Review’s readers favoured “consider[ing]” the idea, 58–30. Asked, in July 2023, whether “small nuclear power reactors should be part of Australia’s energy mix,” the Herald’s readers opposed the idea, 32–55. Even if these questions had been included in national polls, the Australian might have baulked at citing the results of either, since it would have given oxygen to another brand.

There is evidence of a growth in support for nuclear power between June 2019 and March 2022, but there is no convincing evidence that points to “growing support” in the two years since. When the Lowy Poll asked respondents, in March 2022, whether they supported or opposed “removing the existing ban on nuclear power,” 52 per cent said they supported it, an increase on the level of support in March 2021 (47 per cent). And in September 2021, when Essential asked respondents whether they supported or opposed “Australia developing nuclear power plants for the generation of electricity,” 50 per cent said they supported nuclear power, a sharp increase on the level of support (39 per cent) it reported in June 2019. However, when Essential asked the question again, in October 2023, the level of support hadn’t moved.

The only evidence for a recent shift comes from Resolve. In October 2023, when Resolve first asked the question it asked in February 2024, 33 per cent (compared with 36 per cent in February) supported “the use of nuclear power” and 24 per cent (23 per cent in February) opposed it. (Nine Entertainment appears not to have previously published Resolve’s result for October.) Its February poll represents an increase of four percentage points in the gap between the level of support and the level of opposition, from nine points to thirteen.

But a shift of four points is well within the range one might expect given the vagaries of sampling — the “margin of error” that pollsters regularly parade but just as regularly ignore. Non-sampling error — a much bigger problem than pollsters acknowledge — also might have played a part, especially given a question as complex and confused as the one Resolve asked. Errors of both kinds are compounded by the widespread use by pollsters of opt-in rather than probability-based panels.

Jim Reed, who runs Resolve, is reported as saying that voters “were increasingly open to the potential of nuclear power now the Coalition was advocating for existing technology in large-scale plants.” According to Reed, support has “swung towards at least openness to nuclear power.” But Nine did not reveal what change, if any, Resolve had detected since October in the number without “a strong view” and “open to the government investigating its use (27 per cent in February).” Support, Reed added, was “weak… at the moment simply because people aren’t being asked to approve an actual site.” Even if he had measured strength, which it appears he hadn’t, one could equally imagine support becoming weaker, not stronger, once voters were asked to “asked to approve an actual site.”

What sort of voters did he think were now supportive or at least “open’? “We’ve got a new generation of younger people who are quite positive towards nuclear power,” Reed said. Was this “new generation” evident in October or did it only become evident in February? If it was evident in October, was it responsible for February’s four-point shift? Nothing in what Nine published allows us to say.

While Reed restricted himself, largely, to interpreting the actual data, in the Australian the commentary strayed much further. It wrote, for example, of “the costs and risks of renewable energy” having “become clearer.” But it offered no evidence that those costs and risks had become clearer to the public — not surprisingly, since these too were things about which Newspoll had not asked.

Leveraging the Newspoll result to predict that “most Australians would back a move to small scale nuclear power,” the headline in the online edition of the Australian ignored another distinction — not between strong and weak opinion but between polls that showed un-mobilised opinion and polls that showed mobilised opinion; so, too did Sky News. Any “move to small-scale nuclear power” would be politically contested, and once contested opinion might shift.

Subsequently, Benson ventured a more sober assessment of the Coalition’s prospects of carrying the day. “For Dutton to win the argument,” an argument that would take “courage” to mount, “any Coalition energy policy must be framed in a cost-of-living context that can demonstrate how nuclear power will deliver cheaper and more reliable power into the future,” he wrote. For Dutton to position nuclear power as “a central component” of his energy policy, Benson declared, was “as big and brave as it gets.”

Others went further. In a rare note of dissent within News Corp, James Campbell, national weekend political editor for Saturday and Sunday News Corp newspapers and websites across Australia, called the idea of Dutton “going to the next federal election with plans to introduce nuclear power” as “stark raving mad.” One thing the Coalition should have learnt from the Voice referendum was that “support for anything radical in Australia shrinks the moment it hits any sort of concerted opposition.” And, he added, “there’s the unity problem. Do you really think Liberal candidates in ‘tealy’ places are going to face the front on this?”

Benson, meanwhile, had back-tracked. Pointing again to the distribution of opinion among eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds, he advanced a quite different assessment: “the onus is now on Labor to convince Australians why we shouldn’t have nuclear power.” Chris Kenny, the Australian’s associate editor, thought “the nuclear argument could play well in the teal seats where there is an eagerness for climate change and a high degree of economic realism.”

If Benson was right the first time, however, and the Coalition needs to take care over how it frames the debate, then the Savanta data suggest that it may face a few challenges. Asked what impact nuclear energy would have on their “energy bills,” about a third (35 per cent) of its respondents said it would make their bills “much cheaper” or “slightly cheaper,” less than a third (28 per cent) thought it would make them “much more expensive” or “slightly more expensive,” but more than a third (38 per cent) said they either didn’t know or thought it would make “no difference.”

In the Essential poll, conducted around the same time, respondents saw little difference in “total cost including infrastructure and household price” between three energy sources: “renewable energy, such as wind and solar” (38 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 35 per cent, the “least expensive”), nuclear power (34 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 34 per cent, the “least expensive”), and “fossil fuels, such as coal and gas” (28 per cent considering it the “most expensive” option; 31 per cent, the “least expensive”).

Supporters of nuclear energy may also have to address some of the concerns Benson didn’t mention. In the Savanta study, 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (45 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (32 per cent) about “waste management”; 77 per cent were either “very concerned” (47 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (30 per cent) about “health & safety (ie. nuclear meltdowns, impact on people living nearby)”; and 56 per cent were either “very concerned” (23 per cent) or “fairly concerned” (33 per cent) about the “time it takes to build.”

In another poll, this one conducted by Pure Profile in the first half of 2022, respondents were asked how they would feel if a new nuclear power station were built in their city. Around 50 per cent said they would feel “uncomfortable,” more than a quarter “extremely uncomfortable”; just 7 per cent would have felt “extremely at ease.”

It would be reassuring to think that any newspaper that wanted its polling taken seriously would need to commission better polling than the polling the Australian was so keen to promote. But the Newspoll results were taken seriously by a rival masthead. “The Newspoll published in the Australian,” the political editor of the Australian Financial Review, Phillip Coorey wrote, “found there was now majority support for the power source.”

A week after its poll was published, and its results — with a nod to the Coalition — described as “powerful,” the Australian’s front page led with another “exclusive,” this time courtesy of the Coalition: its “signature energy policy” to be announced “before the May federal budget” would include “a plan identifying potential sites for small nuclear reactors as future net zero sources.” The following day, Benson wrote that Newspoll had “demonstrated strong support for the proposal that Dutton is working on announcing soon.” But the policy Dutton was working on, apparently, was not the policy Newspoll had tested. “The Coalition energy plan,” Benson revealed the same day in another front-page “exclusive,” was “likely to include next-generation large-scale nuclear reactors — not just the small-modular reactors.”

A newspaper that has a position on nuclear power and thinks of polls as an objective measure of public opinion should make sure that the questions it gets (or allows) pollsters to ask, and the results it gets journalists to write up, look fair and reasonable to those on different sides of the debate. In effect, this was the discipline George Gallup placed on himself when he signed up newspapers with divergent views.

Even if a newspaper wanted to use its polling to gee-up its preferred party, it might also think about using its polling to identify some of the risks of pursuing a policy it backed — risks that no party wanting to win an election could sensibly ignore — not just the opportunities to pursue that policy.

Whether Michael Schudson left polling out of his account of objectivity because it didn’t fit with his argument about objectivity as an ideology, or because he didn’t think it a part of journalism — neither journalism nor market research being a profession in the sense that law or medicine are professions — or simply because of an oversight, is unclear.

Better, more comprehensive, polling wouldn’t end the political debate or the debate about the objectivity of the polls. Nor should it. Nonetheless, it might be a good place from which to progress these debates.

Of course, for those who don’t want to foster a debate about the policy or about the polls, any plea for do better is entirely beside the point. •

The post Nuclear power, Newspoll and the nuances of polled opinion appeared first on Inside Story.

January’s rejigged Stage 3 tax cuts announcement — warmly received in voterland, it seems, and made an ostentatious meal of by the opposition — has turned a new page. Now the political class has all but unanimously declared the return of the prime minister’s mojo. Albanese is in control again, looking and acting confident. But the Dunkley by-election on 2 March could change all that, of course, potentially dramatically.

So what’s the point of these incessant, whiplash-inducing analyses of how the parties and leaders are “travelling”? At core they must be about the next election; they can have no purpose otherwise. But once we’ve voted, this term of government will be viewed through the lens of the 2025 result and all today’s twists and turns will be forgotten. The caravan will move on to how the next election is shaping up.

One popular school of thought sees the media’s incessant horse-race adjudications as self-fulfilling. It is in a party’s interests to be described as being on track for electoral victory because the happy vibes will help it get there. With apologies to Sting, I don’t subscribe to this point of view. The narrative certainly influences reality, even around the edges of opinion poll results, but its effects on elections are usually minor and unpredictable.

The idea matters a lot to politicians and their staffers, though, partly because many of their jobs are dedicated to generating good reviews and partly because those reviews can ultimately affect their professional survival.

Peter Dutton, who was always facing a battle to remain Liberal leader for the full term, went into the summer break looking rather happy, but now he’s biting his nails about Dunkley. Albanese, who as prime minister enjoys more institutional fortification, would be harder to shift in the event of a bad result, but government MPs and staffers still imbibe the commentary. No leader enjoys forlorn troops and nervous backbenchers.

Judgements about how the participants are travelling are largely driven by opinion polls — and most of all, far ahead of the others, by Newspoll in the Australian. The tendency reached a nadir of sorts back in 2015 when Malcolm Turnbull talked about Tony Abbott “losing” all those Newspolls. (Albanese borrowed that formulation on the ABC’s 7.30 this month to point out his government has never “lost” one.)

The first Newspoll of 2024, in early February, found 62 per cent believed the government “did the right thing” by rejigging the tax cuts, with just 29 per cent saying they “should have kept their promise and implemented the tax cuts without changing them.”

Voting intentions and personal ratings were virtually identical to Newspoll’s final 2023 survey, which is widely seen as evidence the government didn’t “take a hit” for breaking that election promise. Along with the problems the decision caused (and will continue to cause) for the opposition right through to the next election, and along with the fact that the government was taking control of its destiny, the figures were enough to make it a “win.”

Just between us, though, Labor was a bit lucky with Newspoll’s phrasing. The fact that the changed policy represented the breaking of an ironclad, repeated promise was hidden in one of the responses, the one very few people nominated.

When another pollster, Redbridge, conducted a big survey at about the same time, it posed several questions about those Stage 3 tax cuts. The first (on page 21) simply asked if the government should stick to its repeated promise not to change them; it received a slight plurality in support of sticking with the cuts designed by the Coalition. The second (page 26) described the reported changes and asked about approval; this time the rejigged policy received large support, rather like that found by Newspoll.

All these pollsters’ questions are valid; the point here is that different wording can produce different headlines. A Newspoll question that resembled Redbridge’s first one would have generated very different perceptions about how the changed policy had been received by punters.

Redbridge also found a decrease in the government’s two-party-preferred support from 52.8 per cent in December to 51.2 per cent in February. Yet despite this “swing” the survey was reported very positively for the government in News Corp tabloids. Perhaps it can be difficult to break from the press gallery consensus.

Note that the prime minister is a bare relic of the figure, a year ago, who could do no wrong. How might voters have reacted if he’d announced these changes back then? He might well have taken that “hit” from those sky-high poll numbers. We’ll never know.

Broken election promises are as old as politics itself. From electors’ point of view Albanese is now just another politician; perhaps he had already become one last year. All prime ministers end up like that. “My word is my bond” is henceforth a punchline, like “Honest John” Howard in a previous era.

Like his predecessors, the prime minister is relying on the allure of incumbency: yes, I’m less than honest at times but I get the job done; I make the hard calls for the nation, and that’s what matters.

He even trotted out, also on 7.30, the sense of “trust” reclaimed by both Howard (in 2004) and Gillard (2012). “Australians,” he told Sarah Ferguson, “can trust me to be prepared to have the strength to take the right decisions that are needed.”

It was an overly long sentence, with spits, starts, lulls and twists, but he got there eventually. Rather like the government’s path to Stage 3 Mark II. •

The post How’s he travelling? appeared first on Inside Story.

We need to focus on the institution, not the individual priest. Practice and policy. Show me the church manipulated the systems so that these guys wouldn’t have to face charges. Show me they put those same priests back into parishes time and time again. Show me that it was systemic, that it came from the top down. We’re going after the system. I think that’s the bigger story.

The team, led by Walter Robinson, kept digging and eventually revealed not only the shocking extent of the abuse but the lengths to which the church hierarchy went to protect the abusers. The team’s 600-plus stories during 2002 eventually led to the resignation of Boston’s archbishop, Bernard Law.

The dramatisation of these events, Spotlight, was released in 2015 and won the Academy Award for best picture. Perhaps even more than All the President’s Men, it is a film that makes journalists feel proud of what their work can achieve.

Less than a decade later, though, Spotlight feels like a relic from a bygone era. Since 2015 the size and influence of the legacy news media have diminished markedly within a media ecosystem in which the majority of people in the United States and Australia get their news from social media.

As Brian Stelter documents in his books Hoax (2020) and Network of Lies (2023), news from established outlets like the New York Times sloshes around the internet alongside the toxic swill from Fox News and elsewhere. This tsunami of news and opinion is further polluted by torrents of misinformation and disinformation on social media, whether it’s about vaccines, the 2020 US presidential election or the Voice referendum.

Into this changed, and changing, environment comes Collision of Power, Baron’s memoir of a forty-five-year career in journalism that took him from the Miami Herald via the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times to eleven years editing the Boston Globe and eight years as executive editor of the Washington Post. He stepped down from that last posting, aged sixty-seven, in February 2021.

Baron has spent his entire career in newspapers and is resolutely old school in his belief in the continuing value of public interest journalism and orthodox notions of journalistic objectivity. Collision of Power reads as something of a collision between the world he grew up in, inspired by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s 1970s reporting on Watergate for the newspaper he eventually edited, and a world in which countless journalistic disclosures about Donald Trump’s manifest unfitness for office made not a jot of difference to his supporter base.

Does this mean Baron’s memoir should be consigned to the dustbin of history along with the dinosaurs of print? Well, unlike many journalists’ memoirs, this one is not marinated in tales of derring-do and all-night drinking marathons. Baron spent most of his career as an editor rather than on-the-road journalist and his book is all about the work.

I only know that Baron rarely drinks because he said so after winning the 2016 Christopher Hitchens prize, and then only to compare himself with the famously lubricated Hitchens and make a larger point — that they might have approached life differently but they shared the same journalistic values. But he does wryly acknowledge the accuracy of Schreiber’s portrayal of him in Spotlight as “humourless, laconic, and yet resolute.”

The three main threads running throughout Collision of Power are flagged in its subtitle: “Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post.” Baron was appointed executive editor of that newspaper in 2013, a time when Donald Trump’s name was still good for a laugh, courtesy of Barack Obama, at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. He stepped down the month after Trump left office still proclaiming he had won the previous November’s election.

Baron reflects that the Post, like the rest of the mainstream news media, had underestimated Trump’s appeal to many Americans. After the 2016 election he resolved to devote more resources to getting reporters out across the country to tap into ordinary people’s experiences and concerns. He also concedes that the Post put too much weight on Hillary Clinton’s slipshod secrecy about her emails during her presidential campaign.

Before the election, Baron and his journalists had learnt how Trump dealt with the media — how he alternated between feeding them stories and gossip, as he had done for years as a New York property developer, and threatening to cut off access or, worse, if he became president, change the libel laws to make it easier for public figures to sue journalists. As Trump railed about “the fake news media” and levelled personal insults at individual journalists, Baron stressed that “We’re not at war with the administration. We’re at work.”

The “work” was published continuously, including in a multi-authored book, Trump Revealed, that covered many aspects of the candidate’s life, from real estate to allegations of sexual harassment, and from his business ventures to his television career. The newspaper’s fact-checking unit tracked Trump’s runaway capacity for exaggeration and deceit, finding that during his presidency he told 30,573 lies.

When the Post’s David Fahrenthold decided to test Trump’s self-seeded reputation as a philanthropist, for instance, he found fallow ground. The Trump Foundation had received US$5.5 million but claimed to have pledged US$8.5 million to various causes. Notoriously, one donation made by Trump was for a portrait of himself that Fahrenthold’s citizen sleuths on social media found in his Florida golf resort. Fahrenthold also broke the story of the notorious Access Hollywood tapes.

Throughout the Trump presidency, the Washington Post and the New York Times competed hard to break stories that would hold Trump and his staff to account. The sheer number of important disclosures they made is easy to forget, partly because there seemed no end of chaos in the Trump administration and partly because no matter what Trump did he was exonerated because the Republicans had the numbers in the Senate. Almost without exception, they refused to examine issues on their merits and voted out of blind, fearful loyalty to Trump.

Baron’s careful recounting of the many scandals of the Trump administration is both a salutary and a dispiriting experience for the reader. Salutary because we may have forgotten how damaging Trump’s presidency was to so many (remember the one million–plus US deaths from Covid-19?) and dispiriting because he continues to evade responsibility for his actions.

As Trump heads towards the Republican nomination for the 2024 election, the various court cases brought against him are mired in process, delays and appeals. Baron’s memoir reminds us that it was the Post’s reporter Amy Gardner who broke the story that led to one of the most serious post–2020 election cases: how Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, received a phone call from Trump urging him to “find” enough votes to reverse Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the southern state.

According to the recording Gardner obtained, Trump said to Raffensperger: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” Trump faces thirteen criminal charges for trying to undo the Georgia result.

Baron’s acute awareness of the threat posed by a second Trump presidency explains why he feels compelled to go over events in such detail. What he doesn’t reflect on is how and why Trump has been able to recover from the ignominy surrounding his 2020 loss. It is a commonplace of commentary to say that Trump’s rise is a symptom of disease in the Republican Party. But has there ever been a symptom so potent and deep-seated, given that the Republican Party is now the Trump Party in all but name?

The media’s role in aiding and abetting Trump’s rise from the ashes of 2020 is something Baron could also have reflected on. Trump is an attention magnet, and the news media has been unable to resist the pull of a figure who sees politics in the hyperventilating, hypermasculine style of pro wrestling. Unable but also, perhaps, unwilling: Les Moonves, the chairman of the CBS television company, infamously said in 2016 that Trump’s rise “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

The evidence is in on the “may not be good for America” part, so it is truly galling to see the news media rushing to cover Trump’s every recent move in classic horserace style. Left behind at the starter’s gate is context, history or a strong enough sense of the grave risk to democracy.

As New York journalism professor Jay Rosen says, the organising principle for the news media as it covers the 2024 presidential election should be “not the odds, but the stakes.” That is, “not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy, given what’s possible in this election.” He points to a 2023 piece by Brynn Tannehill in the New Republic as an example of “stakes commentary” whose analysis is both plausible and terrifying. It’s well worth reading.

Collision of Power’s second thread is Jeff Bezos’s surprise purchase in 2013 of the Washington Post from the Graham family, which had owned it since 1933. Like many other media outlets, the Post was struggling to adapt its business model to survive commercially in the digital media age.

One of the world’s richest men (he was worth US$25 billion at the time), Bezos bought the paper out of his own pocket for US$250 million rather than through the company he founded, Amazon. According to Baron, he did so out of a commitment to sustaining public interest journalism.

Bezos’s motivation and plans for the paper attracted a lot of scepticism at the time. Why would a leader of one of the global tech behemoths that had laid waste to the print media’s business model want to buy one of these financially ailing newspapers? Would he allow the Washington Post to report without fear or favour on Amazon, especially given the company’s long history of stonewalling journalists probing its hostility to labour unions, to take one example among many? Would he be an interventionist proprietor?

Soon after buying the paper, Bezos met staff in the “windowless, cavernous and thoroughly charmless ‘community room’” next to the newspaper’s auditorium and fielded questions, including one from famed veteran investigative reporter, Bob Woodward: “How and why did you decide to buy the Post?” (“Hardball,” cracked another journalist.) Bezos answered that he had asked himself three questions before making the decision. Was the newspaper an important institution? Yes, of course. Did it have a future? Yes, in the right circumstances. Did he have anything to contribute, especially as he lived on the opposite coast, in Seattle? Yes, he could provide “runway”; that is, long-term investment that would allow time for experiments to succeed or fail.

And on the question of the newspaper’s coverage of him and his company? “Feel free to cover Amazon any way you want. Feel free to cover Jeff Bezos any way you want.” According to Baron, the newspaper did just that. Its resolve was tested in 2019 when the National Enquirer revealed Bezos had been conducting an affair with a media personality, Lauren Sánchez, including sending her “dick pics.” Baron says the Post covered the issue professionally but acknowledges it could not quite nail down whether the National Enquirer’s story was a political hit job.

The Enquirer, known to be close to Donald Trump, is a supermarket tabloid that engages in “catch and kill”: using a legally enforceable non-disclosure agreement, it buys exclusive rights to “catch” the damaging story from an individual before “killing” it for the benefit of a third party. Trump had been pursuing a vendetta against Bezos and what he called “the Amazon Post.”

On the question of proprietorial interference, though, Baron is adamant: “Bezos never interfered in the Post’s journalism during my seven years plus under his ownership, even if coverage of Amazon put the company in an unfavourable light. For all the speculation that Bezos would use the Post to exercise influence, I never saw any evidence he had or would. I got the sense Bezos relished the challenge of turning around the Post.”

Not that Bezos initially understood exactly how journalism is produced. Like Fred Hilmer, the management consultant who was Fairfax Media’s CEO between 1998 and 2005, Bezos was, and is, obsessed by metrics. He wanted the newspaper’s online website to devote more of its resources to “aggregating” other outlets’ stories into shorter pieces with clickbait headlines, and he wanted each story done in fifteen minutes.

Baron could see the idea’s commercial savvy — it was a “bargain-basement way to profit off the work of others” — but found it intensely annoying that the readers he wanted to consume the newspaper’s original reporting would be drawn in by these “digital gillnets.”

Bezos separated journalists into two categories: those whose work had a “direct impact on the product” (reporters) and those who had an indirect impact (editors). Hire more of the former and fewer of the latter, Baron was told, but he resisted. He believed good editors were essential to “directing and coordinating coverage and ensuring that it meets our quality standards.”

Baron tussled with Bezos on these issues throughout his tenure. He came to appreciate Bezos’s genuine insights into improving the company’s efficiency, and he welcomed Bezos’s commitment to deepening and broadening coverage by hiring more journalists. The number of political journalists at the paper doubled during Baron’s time there, and before the 2016 election an eight-person “rapid-response investigative team” was established. In time, improvements in how the paper’s stories were packaged and delivered to readers reaped rewards in both reach and subscription numbers.

Bezos also came to appreciate the particular role newspapers play in society and the particular culture a newsroom needs if its staff are going to publish stories that anger and upset powerful people, including presidents. When Ben Bradlee, a legendary predecessor of Baron who oversaw the paper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, died in 2014, Bezos was not planning to attend the funeral until he received an email from Bob Woodward reminding him not only of Bradlee’s importance in the paper’s history but also that he was “the soul of the institution that’s now yours.” Bezos attended, and afterwards described it as an “awakening” for him.

The new owner imbibed the example of Katharine Graham, publisher between 1963 and 1991, whose steadfast support of the paper during Watergate earned her the ire of the Nixon administration, which planned payback by encouraging its allies to challenge the licences of the Graham family’s television stations.

Trump initially tried charming Bezos before asking him to use his position to secure favourable coverage. When Bezos rebuffed his demands, Trump launched a ferocious campaign against Amazon. He claimed the company should pay higher postal rates for its goods and more tax — a bit rich coming from someone who had boasted about not paying much tax.

Partly because of Amazon’s public unpopularity, many underplayed what Trump was doing. Baron, however, cites a 2019 article by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine: “The story here is almost certainly a massive scandal, probably more significant than the Ukraine scandal that spurred impeachment proceedings. Trump improperly used government policy to punish the owner of an independent newspaper as retribution for critical coverage.”

Running alongside commercially oriented discussions are sharpening challenges to Baron’s sense of journalistic ethics. In the third thread in Collision of Power he discusses his stewardship of an important newspaper during what has been, and continues to be, a difficult period for the news media. He illustrates the challenges with detailed accounts of the cases of Wes Lowery and Felicia Sonmez.

Lowery won a Pulitzer for his reporting on police shootings in 2015; Sonmez was a breaking news reporter. Both fell foul of the newspaper’s social media policy by tweeting their views on various controversies, including Trump’s racist comments about four progressive congresswomen of colour (Lowery) and sexual assault allegations against high-profile sports stars and other journalists (Sonmez).

Lowery left the newspaper and began speaking out about what he saw as the bankrupt nature of objectivity in journalism. Last year he wrote a thought-provoking essay, “A Test of the News,” for the Columbia Journalism Review in which he highlighted how journalists from diverse backgrounds are feeling increasingly frustrated and disenchanted by how news stories are chosen and framed from what Lowery sees as a predominantly upper-class, white, male perspective.

The lack of diversity in American (and for that matter Australian) newsrooms has been a problem for many years. In 1971, according to the American Journalist Project, just 3.9 per cent of those working in newsrooms were Black. By 2013 the percentage figure had still only nudged up to 4.1.

Journalistic objectivity has also been the subject of controversy for many years. Historically, journalists and editors liked to think their decisions about news selection were arrived at dispassionately. At best they were discounting, and at worst they were oblivious to, the values — personal, cultural and ideological — underpinning their decisions. Even the language of the newsroom, with its talk of “a nose for news” or, more formally, “news values,” gives the game away. Whose nose, what values?

Behind the cloak of objectivity are hidden all sorts of journalistic shibboleths. The horserace coverage of electoral contests, for instance, has been analysed in the academic literature since at least 1980, but the news media seems unable or unwilling to recognise the problems of reporting politics as if it were a sporting event.

Another example: people in positions of power and authority, especially presidents and prime ministers, are accorded at least 50 per cent of space in news items simply because of their status. When an allegation is made against them, they must be asked for a response. When president George W. Bush built the case — spurious as it turned out — to invade Iraq in 2003, he was able to game the journalistic requirement for balance. Donald Trump, of course, has pushed that game several moves down the board.

Objectivity in a scientific sense is unattainable. Journalists are human beings. The news media industry’s relentless pushing of the idea that news reporting can be objective has simply sent an open invitation to everyone to play spot the bias.

What journalists can and should pursue is an objective method of verification, as is cogently outlined in Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s essential guide, The Elements of Journalism. At its simplest, this means seeking out all perspectives on an issue, especially a contentious issue, and reporting viewpoints dispassionately. Drawing on a range of views blunts a journalist’s tendency to serve up their biases or simply opine.

That doesn’t mean accepting any and every view. As the quote variously attributed to Jonathan Foster and Hubert Mewhinney has it: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.”

First published in 2001, Kovach and Rosenstiel’s book has been revised three times to keep up to date with trends and debates, including on newsroom diversity. They cite a Black business executive, Peter Bell, who says arguments for greater diversity in newsrooms presuppose that all Black people or all women think alike. “What is the Black position on any given issue? The answer, of course, is that there isn’t one.”

Conversely, a Black journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, says the rage she feels about racial injustice drives her reporting. Rather than the word objectivity, she talks about meticulous research, evidence and transparency as guiding principles that strengthen her storytelling.

For Kovach and Rosenstiel, “Independence from faction suggests there is a way to produce journalism without either denying the influence of personal experience or being hostage to it.” As much as greater diversity along racial, gender or gender-identity lines is needed, they argue that newsrooms also need intellectual and ideological diversity.

In 1971, 26 per cent of American journalists identified themselves as Republicans, 36 per cent as Democrats and 33 per cent as independents. By 2013, the number of Republicans had dropped to 7 per cent while the number of Democrats had fallen slightly to 28 per cent and the number of independents had risen to 50 per cent.

In practice, according to Kovach and Rosenstiel, this means “on the crush of deadline, journalists often expect everyone in the newsroom to think the same way rather than embracing debate inspired by personal background… It has been safer to default to a vision of journalistic consciousness that pretends politics doesn’t enter into it.”

Baron, for his part, supports the need for greater newsroom diversity and has seen the benefit of journalists using social media for their work. But he is also a socially conservative person for whom the story is what matters, not him or his opinions. As much as anything, that was what he disapproved of when Lowery (whose work he greatly admired) took to Twitter.

This is a valuable book by a self-effacing but outstanding editor. It is no small irony that, having been inspired by the newspaper’s Watergate reporting, Baron seems blind to the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were the first newspaper journalists to become celebrities. It was their book, All the President’s Men, and the film adaptation starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (with Jason Robards as Bradlee) that created the Watergate legend.

The horse known as the unheralded journalist has long since bolted. The doors of the stable containing the social media horse were also flung open several years ago. The question now is whether media outlets and their journalists can find the balance between opinion and reporting and between free speech and company loyalty. •

Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post
By Martin Baron | Flatiron Books | $74.99 | 548 pages

The post We’re not at war. We’re at work appeared first on Inside Story.

There was no fraud. The postmasters’ lives were destroyed because of faults in the Post Office’s Horizon computer network. But much like Australia’s robodebt system, Horizon was regarded as infallible. Attempts to raise the alarm were ignored; people who sought help were hounded for non-existent debts. As in Australia, those whose lives were turned upside down struggled to gain the attention of established media outlets; it was individual journalists and smaller publications that kept digging and probing, and refused to accept Post Office spin.

It wasn’t until January this year that prime minister Rishi Sunak conceded it was one of Britain’s greatest-ever miscarriages of justice. He has committed his government to a “blanket exoneration” of hundreds of wrongfully convicted individuals and promised them “at least £600,000 in compensation to rebuild their lives.”

Three compensation schemes have already been set up and around one hundred convictions overturned by appeal courts. A public inquiry led by a retired High Court judge began hearings in February 2021 and is likely to continue at least until September this year. In the meantime, many former postmasters remain destitute or seriously out of pocket. They are waiting not only for redress but also for the full truth about what went wrong in the executive ranks of the Post Office.

While details continue to dribble out, so far no senior managers have been held to account, though former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells has offered to hand back the CBE she was awarded in 2019.

Vennells said she was “truly sorry for the devastation caused to the subpostmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted.” Whether or not Vennells loses her gong is up to King Charles. The union representing Post Office employees reckons if she were truly remorseful then she’d offer to repay her performance bonuses as well.

Solicitor Neil Hudgell told a January hearing before the parliament’s business and trade committee that the Post Office spent £100 million “defending the indefensible” through the courts yet he has clients who are still waiting on reimbursements of a few hundred pounds. He said the contest between postmasters and Post Office was characterised from the start by an inequality of arms. “You are facing this big beast in the Post Office, with all the machinery that sits behind it,” he added. “You have some poor person who is being accused of doing something hideous who does not have that.”

On top of the financial losses comes the psychological toll. Hudgell says his firm has more than a hundred psychiatric reports for clients diagnosed with depressive illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoia. At least four former postmasters are thought to have committed suicide, and more than thirty have passed away while awaiting justice in their cases.

The saga goes back to 1999, when the Post Office began rolling out a new computerised accounting system to its thousands of branches and sub-branches, many of which operate as franchises run by subpostmasters. Essentially, the subpostmasters are independent contractors delivering services under an agreement with the Post Office. Many also operate a shop, cafe or other small business on the side.

As in Australia, people go to their local post office for much more than stamps and parcels. Branches offer banking and bill payment services, and handle applications for passports and other critical official documents. Subpostmasters play a central role in villages and small towns. They are often trusted as advisers and confidants, especially for older, less digitally connected citizens. To be accused of putting their hands in the till was a mortifying experience.

The new Horizon computer system, developed by Fujitsu, was meant to make it easier for postmasters to balance their books. But problems were evident from the start. In 1998, Alan Bates invested around £60,000 to buy a shop with a post counter in the town of Llandudno, in north Wales. After Horizon was introduced, discrepancies quickly appeared in his accounts, and Bates found himself £6000 short.

“I managed to track that down after a huge amount of effort through a whole batch of duplicated transactions,” he recalled. Meticulous record keeping enabled Bates to show that the problem lay with the computer system and was not the result of carelessness or fraud. Still, in 2003, the Post Office terminated his contract, saying £1200 was unaccounted for.

Unlike other postmasters, Bates was not prosecuted or forced into bankruptcy, but the injustice and the lost investment cut deep. Post Office investigators insisted that he was the only subpostmaster reporting glitches with the computer system, but Bates was certain that there must be others. He was right. RAF veteran Lee Castleton challenged the Post Office in court after it suspended him over an alleged debt of almost £23,000. In the first instance, the Post Office failed to show up at court and he won. Months later, the Post Office raised the case to the High Court. Castleton represented himself, lost, had costs awarded against him and was rendered bankrupt.

Castleton managed to convince a young journalist at the trade publication Computer Weekly to investigate. Rebecca Thomson found six other examples of people who’d been accused of stealing from the Post Office, including Alan Bates, who had tried a few years earlier to interest the same magazine in his case.

National newspapers and broadcasters failed to pick up Thomson’s 2009 story. “It really did go out to a clanging silence,” Thomson told the Sunday Times in 2022. “I was super-ambitious, and I was disappointed and a bit confused about the fact that there had been so little reaction to the story, because I still continue to feel like it was incredibly strong.”

What Thomson achieved, though, was to confirm Alan Bates’s hunch that he was not alone. Bates reached out to other subpostmasters in Thomson’s story and discovered they’d been told the same thing as him: no one else has had a problem with Horizon, you’re the only one. This Post Office mantra was a bare-faced lie.

Bates and his newfound allies founded the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance with the aim of “exposing the failures of Post Office, its Board, its management and its Horizon computer system.” Their campaign for truth and justice is the subject of the four-part television drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, starring Toby Jones as Alan Bates, that aired on British TV in January.

The series put the scandal and the ongoing public inquiry firmly back in the headlines (Rishi Sunak’s belated response to years of revelations came a few days later) but it would not have been possible without fourteen years of dogged, dedicated journalism. Since Thomson broke the story in 2009, Computer Weekly has published about 350 follow-up articles on the issue. Separately, freelance journalist Nick Wallis has pursued the story since 2010, at times relying on crowdfunding to finance his work.

In 2010, Wallis was working at a local BBC radio station when a flippant response to a tweet put him in contact with Davinder Misra, the owner of a local cab company, who told him his pregnant wife had been sent to prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Seema Misra had been convicted of theft and false accounting and sentenced to fifteen months jail. The Post Office claimed she had misappropriated almost £75,000 from her branch in West Byfleet in Surrey.

With roots stretching back to 1660 and the reign of Charles II, the Post Office is in many respects a law unto itself. It doesn’t have to jump through the hurdles of police investigations or case reviews by a public prosecutor to launch prosecutions. It has huge resources to employ top silks to represent it. Against its might, people like Seema Misra didn’t stand a chance.

Unaware at the time of Thomson’s article in Computer World, Wallis decided to investigate. He has been writing and broadcasting about the Post Office scandal ever since. He has been a producer, presenter or consultant on three episodes of Panorama, the BBC’s equivalent of the ABC’s Four Corners, he has written a book, The Great Post Office Scandal, he made a podcast series, and he maintains a website dedicated to continuing coverage of the story.

Wallis also acted as a consultant on Mr Bates vs the Post Office. He told the Press Gazette he was “blown away” by the program and what it had achieved. Yet he stressed that it is Bates and the other postmasters who should take the credit for getting the scandal into the open and convictions overturned.

Seven screens Mr Bates vs the Post Office in Australia this week. If you can put up with the ad breaks, the series is well worth watching. It’s an engaging, heartwarming story of decent, ordinary folk standing up against the powerful and the entitled and eventually winning against the odds. If you want to understand the story more fully, though, and to hear directly from those most affected — people like Alan Bates, Seema Misra and Lee Castleton — then I’d recommend The Great Post Office Trial, Nick Wallis’s podcast for BBC Radio 4. It’s a compelling tale that shows what good journalism can achieve. •

The post Lost in the post appeared first on Inside Story.

Here’s how the press conferences would work. The summit would break in the early hours of the morning and hundreds of journalists would rush to their home country’s briefing room to receive their quotable quotes. Interpreters would scramble; the basement’s unflappable audiovisual team would swoop into action. As twenty-eight heads of government or state took to their podiums, the biggest show in Brussels would reach its climax amid a frenzy of mostly upbeat activity.

Twenty-seven press conferences would follow a similar script. The leader would tell journalists that, yes, negotiations had been tough but middle ground had been found (the passive voice was perfect for EU leaders not wanting to lay blame or take responsibility). If a deal had ultimately been struck it had been in the name of European solidarity. The message was reliably similar: you don’t always get what you want, but it was worth the compromise.

The British press conferences were very different. It was as though Cameron had attended a meeting in a parallel universe. The unelected bureaucrats had tried to put one over on Great Britain, the prime minister would tell us. But fear not — the ever-vigilant British government had seen through the ruse and stepped in to stop another case of continental thieving. And before you had time to take it in, Cameron would move on to domestic affairs, making a point of only taking questions from British journalists and speaking straight down the camera into the houses of the British public. Then he’d skedaddle — no conciliatory statement, no acknowledgement that this political union had brought years of peace, prosperity and a sense of democratic purpose that would have been unthinkable in the Europe of the early postwar era.

As an Australian in Brussels, I didn’t have a horse in this race. You could be objective about the European Union’s achievements without believing that Britain needed to be part of the project. But you could be under no misapprehension that the over-the-top Euroscepticism of British politicians was inflicting real damage. The repeated assertion that the EU was inherently undemocratic — ignoring its directly elected parliament and a European Council made up of twenty-eight democratically elected heads of state or government — was simply untrue. Why would he say that? Britain could have argued that it didn’t agree with the political direction of the EU without suggesting that it was unrepresentative and illegitimate.

Cameron’s decision to take a baseball bat to the EU at every opportunity may have made good political sense and no doubt played well with the popular press that brought the narrative of thieving continentals to the masses. But when it came time to back-pedal and tell voters that, all things considered, Britain was better off as part of the EU, Cameron lacked the credibility to pull it off. The narrative he had built couldn’t be demolished overnight.

I may not have had a stake in this fight, but I was intrigued to observe the Cameron narrative as it weaved its way into Australian reporting on this issue. It wasn’t so much the Euroscepticism that was percolating into the writing of Australia’s London-based European correspondents, but a broader misunderstanding of where to place the EU on the political spectrum.

The British conservatives’ political spin was that the EU was supported by urban, progressive, not-quite-British types — what Theresa May later referred to contemptuously as “citizens of nowhere.” It was a political narrative that put the EU on the left and, by implication, all opposition to the EU on the right in the political firmament. This was a preposterous reimagining of the political reality of continental Europe and one that any observer on the Brussels side of the English Channel would have seen through. Yet conservatives in Australia appeared to lap it up. The fake narrative was there for all to see in the recent Spectator article by Tony Abbott, in which the former prime minister supported not just Brexit, but a no-deal Brexit.

Of all the misunderstandings our European correspondents could have assimilated from their London vantage point, the notion that the EU is something “of the left” is possibly the most pernicious. On the continent, where most of the bloc’s 512 million people lived, the political atmospherics were quite different.

Both European liberals and conservatives — in fact, any centre-right party outside the populist or neo-fascist mould — tend to be pro-European. On the mainland, big business loves a single market, while free marketeers applaud the EU’s largely successful attempt to break down the anticompetitive residues of an old Europe dominated by guilds and vested interests. The EU itself, through its consistently pro-market executive, has pushed member states towards free-trade agreements, including a deal with Canada, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and a range of regional groupings — not to mention the now almost-abandoned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the United States. When France’s gilets jaunes protesters take to the streets they are fighting president Emmanuel Macron’s pro-European liberalism, in the sense of classical liberalism.

In fact, strands of the European left have often expressed ambivalence about the liberalism that underpins the European project. The EU hostility expressed by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, which harkens back to before the 1980s, is arguably more recognisable to a continental European. The school of thought that suggests the EU is merely a construct of the forces of global capital — a view popular among supporters of Italy’s Five Star Movement, say, or Greece’s Syriza — doesn’t take long to bubble up to the surface.

Europe’s competition commissioner, the Danish liberal Margrethe Vestager, may be applauded when she takes on American tech giants, but she’s viewed with disdain by many for her role in fighting national governments as they pick industry winners, meddle with the economy and attempt to violate the EU’s tough rules banning state aid. Northern European states — in particular the Netherlands and Britain — are reliably blamed for promoting economic liberalism within the bloc, and old-school European lefties either despise the EU outright or regard it with extreme scepticism. Europe’s left was Eurosceptic from way back, before Cameron was born.

So, how did we fall for it? Why would Abbott and others on the right of Australian politics take sides against the pro-market, liberal EU?

Australian journalists need to take some responsibility for this state of affairs. Covering European news from London by repurposing Reuters copy without spending time in Frankfurt, Strasburg, Brussels or Paris was never a good look. But now, with Britain heading for the door, covering European affairs from London is even harder to justify. With the French–German relationship central to the power play at the heart of the bloc, eastern European EU members and Baltic states at the centre of geopolitical struggle with Russia, the Nordics providing increasingly attractive models of governance, and Italy and Spain still reeling from the implications of corruption scandals, you can’t afford to get your news through the filter of the London press.

A post-Brexit world requires a better, more nuanced understanding of EU affairs. It’s time for Australian journalists to go continental. •

The post The enemy within appeared first on Inside Story.

In 2008, Michael Wolff published a book called The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch. Wolff had benefited from far greater access to Murdoch and his family than any of the magnate’s earlier biographers. He taped more than fifty hours of interviews with Rupert himself, spoke to all immediate family members, and put questions to senior company executives.

In an article in GQ three years later, Wolff revealed that he received this level of cooperation because Murdoch and others close to him didn’t want Murdoch’s legacy “forever yoked” to Fox News and its powerful head, Roger Ailes. The biography would be a weapon in the “increasing war” against Ailes. Wolff acknowledged that he had made “a devil’s bargain not to talk to Ailes.”

It is plausible that Murdoch’s inner circle was disillusioned with Fox News and Ailes. Rupert’s main focus during 2007, dwarfing everything else, was his long-cherished dream of owning the Wall Street Journal, and he was keen to ease fears among the paper’s board members that he would dumb it down.

Moreover, Fox was on the losing side of the election that swept Barack Obama to victory. Even before his inauguration, the network was abandoning professional standards, becoming more propagandistic and, as the election had shown, increasingly out of touch with majority opinion. Fox went on to nurture and support the extreme-right Republican faction, the Tea Party, even helping it appeal for funds. It aired the groundless “birther” theories that Obama wasn’t born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president.

Yet the only member of the family to publicly express any criticism during this period was Murdoch’s son-in-law, Matthew Freud, husband of Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, who said in 2010, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corp, its founder and every other global business aspires to.”

Those comments were immediately and forcefully disowned by Rupert, and he subsequently gave Ailes a large bonus and a pay rise. Any lingering internal disillusion with Fox News was snuffed out by the results of the 2010 midterm elections, in which the Republicans gained an extra sixty-three seats in the House of Representatives, the biggest success of its kind since 1948. Fox News hosted a televised victory party with many Republican candidates and officials. Never again during Ailes’s tenure were there internal rumblings of any significance.

While Murdoch’s defence of Ailes at the time may have been a commercial necessity, he never in subsequent years showed any inclination to distance himself. In 2016, following Ailes’s resignation in disgrace after allegations of sexual harassment, Murdoch had the chance to change the network’s approach, as his son James was reportedly urging him to do. Instead, he kept change to the minimum. “We’re not changing direction,” he said a few months later. “That would be business suicide.”

But if Murdoch’s aim was to enhance his own legacy, then selecting Wolff as authorised biographer was wrong-headed in every respect. Wolff — once described in the New York Times as “a prime piranha in the Manhattan media pond” and by high-profile magazine editor Tina Brown as “the sour savant of American media” — had demonstrated much greater skill at tearing down reputations than at building them up.

Wolff’s main attempt to distance Murdoch from Fox News comes in the last few pages of the book when he suddenly asserts that the Murdoch children, his wife Wendi Deng Murdoch and even Murdoch himself were all “liberals,” a term he conspicuously fails to define. The claim is made without elaboration or any evidence (except that some of them supported Obama). It is a lame and unconvincing note to end on.

Rupert was widely reported to dislike the book. Ailes, on the other hand, had no reason to be disappointed. Wolff notes several times that the one person in his employment whom Murdoch never interferes with is Ailes. He even says Ailes is “possibly the one man of whom Murdoch is afraid.” Going further, he claims that Murdoch had “a crush on Ailes. For a very long time, having dinner with Ailes is the most galvanising thing in Murdoch’s life — it makes him feel in the game, it’s pure pleasure.” There’s more: “Murdoch backs [Ailes] all the way” because of Fox News’s success.

Whoever suggested Wolff could write a book distancing Murdoch from Ailes must have been unaware of just how strong the relationship between Ailes and Wolff already was. Wolff describes how he got to know Ailes in 2001:

I’d written something about him that he didn’t like, but then he invited me to lunch. At that first lunch I thought, Oh my God, this is gold. First thing, he’s incredibly knowledgeable about the media business, insightful about everybody, couldn’t stop talking. The gossip flowed in a non-stop way, and I took every opportunity in the subsequent years to sit down with him. So we became friends.

Wolff had another blockbuster success in 2018; again his degree of access was marvelled at, and again Ailes played a central part. Fire and Fury was probably the biggest-selling book on the early years of the Trump presidency. At the book’s centre is an individual who is intellectually, emotionally and morally unfit to be president. Wolff’s access to Trump’s staff and his revelation of their intensely negative view of the president are the book’s core.

Even before it was published, Fire and Fury created a furore. When Trump threatened to sue Wolff for defamation and invasion of privacy, the publisher simply brought forward the release date. High sales were guaranteed.

Graydon Carter, ex-editor of Vanity Fair, summed it up: “The mystery is why the White House let him in the door.” Once again Ailes figures prominently. According to Wolff, Steve Bannon and Ailes were guests at Wolff’s home for dinner in January 2017, and Wolff suspected that Ailes told Bannon that Wolff was someone he could trust. Up until his death Ailes was a “terrific source” for Wolff, who also had many conversations with Bannon. His closeness to the two men opened other doors.

Now Wolff has published The Fall: The End of Fox News — and the hero of this book is, yes, Roger Ailes. Ailes is an absentee hero: forced to resign from Fox News in 2016, his departure sweetened by a US$40 million payout, he died after a fall in 2017. But not only is he the most quoted figure in the book, he sets the standard by which others are judged and inevitably found wanting.

For Wolff, Ailes was the key to the success of Fox News: his “bravura leadership” created “brilliantly marketed and packaged news for the better part of twenty years.” Moreover, “the ousting of Roger Ailes in July 2016 presaged the end of Fox and conservative media’s industry dominance.” Ailes was “a sui generis talent [and] without him the playing field was suddenly level.”

This last claim proved inaccurate. For the four years of the Trump presidency — the years following Ailes’s departure — Fox had bigger audiences and more influence than at any other time. The direct line into the White House gave the network a centrality in the news mix that it had never enjoyed before.

Since Trump’s defeat, the network has hit much rougher times, and a lack of leadership, vision and strategy has become more obvious. The certainties of the Ailes era are being recalled nostalgically. But it is far from clear how Ailes would have responded. Would he have peddled election fraud to please the audience’s prejudices? Would he have responded differently to the Dominion Voting Machines lawsuit, which produced the biggest corporate defamation payout in American history?

Or are the network’s problems simply the result of his successors’ lack of ability? Ailes’s widow Beth is in no doubt. Wishing her husband a happy heavenly birthday last May, she said, “It took you twenty years to build Fox News into the powerhouse that it was and only six years for the Murdochs to wreak havoc. Rupert thought he could do your job. What a joke. He has the chequebook but could never come close to your genius.” The Murdochs “weren’t born here and don’t have the same pedigree” as Roger.

Wolff is also dismissive of the Murdochs. Rupert is too old, is often disengaged for long periods, and isn’t capable of sustained leadership. Lachlan and James — Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, according to Ailes — are even worse. Lachlan “is so absentee, fundamentally, living in Australia and running an American company,” more interested in spearfishing than running the company, incapable of making decisions. James, who left the company in early 2018, is aggressive and arrogant, and becomes furious when anyone contradicts him; his empty rhetoric about making Fox a force for good has no business sense or strategy behind it. The other key managers, both of the business and its journalists, lack vision, courage and ability.

Wolff was approached a decade and a half ago to write a book that would distance Murdoch from Ailes. In the latest book he has come full circle, a spear carrier for the Ailes legacy, and part of that involves demeaning the Murdochs. •

The post Manhattan’s media piranha appeared first on Inside Story.

Michael Wolff, prolific chronicler of American media mega-trends, wrote a book about it, Autumn of the Moguls. Network TV was a mess, he said. The music business was a mess. Jayson Blair’s saga of journalistic fraud at the New York Times had left Arthur Sulzberger Jr “not at all a sun god, but merely a mogul manqué.” A “countdown” was under way for ageing Rupert Murdoch at News Corporation, Sumner Redstone at Viacom, Michael Eisner at Disney. Barry Diller was giving the media industry “the finger,” leaving behind his “old mogul life” in charge of a Hollywood studio and TV network to concentrate on a company that owned Expedia, Ticketmaster and other digital businesses.

The idea resonated strongly in Australia. Rupert Murdoch had started out there a long time ago and now dominated the commercial media scene with another elder, the third-generation Packer mogul, Kerry. When Kerry died in 2005 and son James sold the family’s cherished television business, the forecast for moguls looked on target, though not especially astute given the older Packer’s heart had stopped once before.

Moguls generally, though, were hanging on. “Self-made” media boss Kerry Stokes was now being described as a mogul, having taken control of the Seven Network in the 1990s and then added newspapers when cross-media ownership rules were relaxed in the 2000s.

In America, the autumn proved long. There is still enough life in Murdoch moguldom for Michael Wolff to have published another book about its impending death, The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire, just the other day. While Redstone did finally die, Eisner’s successor at Disney, Bob Iger, stayed and stayed, buying and buying. He stepped down, only to be called back as CEO last year. Tech titans Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos added “media” to their realms, Jobs through his own investment in Pixar and Apple’s pioneering plays in digital music, movies and television; Bezos by acquiring the Washington Post and founding Amazon Studios and Prime Video.

Then, a year ago, the CEO of another Silicon Valley giant decided to buy one of the town squares of online speech. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter might be going as poorly as AOL/Time Warner, the fin-de-siècle merger that Wolff thought marked “the beginning of the end” and the start of “a new phase, a whole new era, of resistance and revision.” But it happened, Twitter continues to exist, though with a new name and direction, and Musk is still in charge, behaving much like those mercurial, autocratic moguls of old. Obituaries are being written for the company and the deal, but so too is a new book about Musk. It devotes a lot of pages to the Twitter/X saga and its content-moderation challenges, and it is written by no less than the biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger: Walter Isaacson.

Media moguls don’t endure merely because particular men live long: they all die in the end. Nor do they survive because the specific media technologies they happen to control turn out to be attractive to users, although that helps: some moguls have been good at parlaying control of one medium into dominance of another, from radio and newspapers into television; from movies to programming for TV, video cassettes and DVDs; from free-to-air broadcast television to multi-channel cable and satellite subscription services. Not even the propensity for some with fortunes from other fields to crave power over a society’s messages can fully explain the dogged durability of media moguls.

Moguls endure because their ranks are constantly replenished by a culture that craves them and because storytellers find subjects to satisfy the hunger. Exactly which of society’s messages constitute “media” has proved malleable. Of newspapers, news and information, Wolff wrote in Autumn, “If you knew anything about anything, you understood them to be not just equivocal businesses but plastic concepts. They were in transition and if you weren’t ready to be part of that transformation you and your business would die.”

More broadly, he thought a mogul was “an adventurer, a soldier, a conqueror, even a crusader, and, yes, a saviour, willing to march off and take territory and subdue populations and embrace the unknown and do whatever was necessary to do to make the future possible ― no matter what the future was.”

That is the kind of person Walter Isaacson saw in Elon Musk — pioneer of Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla — and it was why he wanted to write about him. He had seen the type before. Steve Jobs, too, was a man with huge ambition and capacity to direct the building of new products and experiences, to transform the lives of the people who used them and the industries that created them. Jobs is referred to several times in Elon Musk, and it is clear that Isaacson sees the two in a similar frame. They are heroes standing in the way of American Decline, outsized personalities who think big and take risks while controlling every detail. They stamp themselves on their enterprises and outputs. Their personal quests, he thinks, shift the nation and the world.

Musk agreed to let Isaacson “shadow” him for two years, and Isaacson tells us what he saw and heard. With Musk’s encouragement, he interviewed “friends, colleagues, family members, adversaries, and ex-wives” as well, and he tells us what they told him. This method makes it a book in two parts.

In the first part, the biographer is assembling evidence about things that have already happened. A lot of this is familiar from other works about Musk, especially the amateur psycho-sleuthing about a brutal upbringing and possible Asperger’s producing a ruthless guy who struggles with empathy but dreams big, drives people hard, sometimes sleeps in his own factories, and achieves the impossible over and over again. Ashlee Vance and Tim Higgins have covered this and it is not clear that Isaacson adds much to their excellent work beyond the constant presence of Musk’s own voice.

Once Isaacson is there himself from 2021, in the thick of the unfolding events, the second part of the book becomes a different exercise. The biographer is now a witness to the roiling present, not an inquisitor about history. How reliable a witness is for the reader to judge, but we are there for the thrilling ride. Isaacson becomes part of Musk’s family, a trusted confidante. He is in Musk’s house, his car. He receives messages from him at crazy hours about really weird stuff. He offers advice, judges Musk’s moves.

While he is doing all this, he gets lucky. Musk, already a mogul, decides to buy Twitter. Is this “media”? If so, Michael Wolff’s autumn is over. Elon Musk is going to become a media mogul in front of Walter Isaacson’s eyes.

Or is it the other way around? Is it Musk who has got lucky? With his road-tested storyteller in the passenger seat, his every word, every angle, every image, will be recorded, stored, shaped. A book, half-written already. What better time for “an adventurer, a soldier, a conqueror, even a crusader, and, yes, a saviour” to march off and take media? •

Elon Musk
By Walter Isaacson | Simon & Schuster | $59.99 | 670 pages

The post Making media moguls appeared first on Inside Story.

Early in that decade the first-born of the children who made up the postwar baby boom began to challenge their parents with slogans like “Never trust anyone over thirty.” Those parents — retrospectively labelled “the greatest generation” for having endured the 1930s depression and the second world war — had come to regard their kids as lazy and spoilt.

As the children born in the 1940s became thirtysomethings and the youth revolts of the 1960s faded away, the generation gap was mostly forgotten. Its revival in the 1990s came in a quite different context. By then, the lazy equation of “boomer” and “young person” was clearly obsolete.

The members of the post-boom cohort, who became known as generation X, were seeking to make their way in the world but found their way blocked by the much larger generation above them, who occupied all the desirable cultural niches and weren’t planning to move on any time soon. Mark Davis’s Ganglands: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism was one of the earliest expressions of this frustration.

Davis’s work was well received in Australia. But the terms of the debate were set in the United States by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their bestselling book, Generations. As well as making the now-standard claims about the characteristics of the boomers, Strauss and Howe theorised that major events caused generations to cycle through four different types: idealist, reactive, civic and adaptive.

Strauss and Howe’s model was initially accepted uncritically. This mode of classification was a boon to marketers and lazy journalists, functioning largely as a more respectable form of astrology. Rather than engaging in tedious discussions of economic and foreign policy, for example, presidential campaigns could be discussed in terms of the generations to which the contenders belonged.

Pushback came soon enough, not least from me. (Disclosure: the fact that my cohort, generation Jones, 1954–63, isn’t recognised in standard generational classification predisposes me to dislike the entire generational punditry genre.) In a piece written in 2000, I made a number of not entirely original observations:

• Claims about generations are often restatements of longstanding clichés about the laziness and irresponsibility of the young or the rigidity and hypocrisy of the old. Demographers distinguish these “age effects” (as well as “time effects,” the influences that affect all age groups) from the “cohort effects” specific to those growing up during a depression, for example, or a long postwar boom.

• Differences associated with race, class and gender are mostly more significant than those associated with birth cohort. Donald Trump might share a birthday with a Black woman paid the minimum wage to clean one of his hotels, but that doesn’t mean they have any significant experiences in common.

• The boomer generation is particularly problematic because the demographic event after which it is named doesn’t match the cultural events with which it is associated. At one end, many of the leading figures in boomer culture were actually born during the war years — in other words, before the boom. At the other end, those born after 1954 were too young to experience either the full employment of the postwar economic boom or defining cultural events like the Woodstock rock festival or the fights over conscription and the Vietnam war. Barack Obama (born 1961) is classed as a boomer, but his political awareness was shaped by the presidency of Ronald Reagan (whom he saw as a role model) rather than that of Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon.

• More generally, the typical gap of fifteen to twenty years between their oldest and youngest members means that generations are too big for any real commonality of experience.

As criticisms of this kind multiplied, generational analysts lost credibility, though very slowly. It was only in May this year that the Pew Research Center, widely seen as an authoritative source of survey findings, conceded most of the points made above and announced that its audiences “should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens.”

Nevertheless, the generational bandwagon rolls on. A new arrival is Jean Twenge’s book Generations, whose title recycles Strauss and Howe’s though she rejects a good deal of their analysis. Twenge adopts a narrative format to apply the generational frame to Americans born in the last one hundred years, beginning with the silent generation (born 1925–45) and ending with polars, her own term for children born since 2013.

Twenge avoids some of the pitfalls discussed above. Most importantly, she pays attention to the distinction between age effects, time effects and cohort effects. She compares the experience of different generations at the same age, and tries to take account of long-run trends like the rise of computers. She uses long-running data sets such as the Panel Study on Income Dynamics to assure consistent comparisons of different cohorts at the same age.

This approach yields some interesting insights. For example, the silent generation married and had children earlier than any previous or subsequent generation, and had more children per family. One interesting implication of early childbearing is that most of the later boomers were the children of parents from the immediately preceding generation, the silents, unlike the more common gap of two generations between parents and children.

Another, not particularly startling, observation is that boomers have been bigger consumers of alcohol and recreational drugs than any other cohort. That phenomenon has continued from the upsurge in youthful drug use in the 1960s to the present day. Younger generations like the millennials and gen Z are more abstemious, perhaps as a result of a lifetime of exposure to messaging about the dangers of substance (ab)use.

More fundamentally, Twenge makes the point that technological change has different impacts on different age cohorts. One claimed effect is increased individualism, though this ignores how the once widely held admiration for “rugged individualism” is now rarely heard in the United States.

Twenge is on stronger ground when she discusses the slower life trajectory created by two things: the need for young people to spend more time in education in a technologically complex society, and the longer life spans enabled by improvements in health. These changes inevitably alter the timing of the processes that define generations: leaving the parental home and forming new households, entering and leaving employment, old age and death. While they don’t really follow generational boundaries, they provide a useful narrative device.

Twenge concedes a related point. “It’s also true that generations are sometimes too broad: those born ten years apart but within the same generation have experienced a different culture,” she writes. “Still, too many micro-generations would be confusing and would make it harder to discern broad generational trends.”

Familiar analytical problems remain. Like nearly all generational analysts, Twenge consistently downplays the importance of class. This passage is truly striking:

The charming novel Nine Ladies, by Heather Moll, imagines the aristocratic Mr Darcy from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice time-travelling from 1812, when race, gender, and class were destiny, to 2012. He’s of course amazed by smartphones, airplanes, and restaurants, but the advice the born-in-1987 version of Elizabeth Bennet gives him the most often is, “Remember, treat everyone equally.” Equality is one of the unifying themes of cultural change over the last one hundred years, making it one of the unifying themes of generational change.

This claim would have been unremarkable if it had been made in the 1950s, when America was a proudly middle-class society. But the rise in inequality and the decline in social mobility have been central to the disasters that have befallen the US polity in the last few decades, culminating in the emergence of Trumpism.

Turning more specifically to generational analysis, there is the problem that the demographic baby boom from 1946 to the early 1960s does not match cultural and economic history, which shows a sharp break at the end of the postwar economic boom in the early 1970s. Economically and culturally, as I pointed out back in 2000, the Vietnam generation has a lot more in common with the “baby busters” (the last of the silents, born during and just before the second world war) than with baby boomers:

[M]ost of the cultural icons of the Vietnam generation were actually born before 1945. Obvious examples are the Beatles and Rolling Stones, not to mention James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Throughout the 1960s, rock music was made by the children of the baby bust, who were in the fortunate position of having the largest audience in history. Other members of the baby bust cohort took the chance to establish themselves as the social and political voice of youth, a position which they then sought to maintain well into middle age.

Twenge implicitly concedes most of this, noting that the last of the silents were anything but silent.

A more coherent generational analysis could be achieved by having the boomer generation born between the late 1930s and the mid 1950s, too young to have real memories of depression and war but young enough to come of age during the seemingly endless prosperity of the postwar boom.

Then, following the suggestion of cultural commentator Jonathan Pontell, the rest of the (demographic) baby boom could be assigned to my cohort, generation Jones. The most appealing etymology for generation Jones is the slang term “jonesing,” referring to withdrawal after a drug-induced high. As summarised by Wikipedia: “Jonesers inherited an optimistic outlook as children in the 1960s, but were then confronted with a different reality as they entered the workforce during… a long period of mass unemployment.”

On this division, the remaining boomers would be a shrinking minority in their seventies and eighties, soon to pass from the scene altogether. And without the boomers, the journalistic generation game would cease to be of much interest.

Even in the toned-down version offered by Twenge and the Pew Research Center, generational analysis misleads more than it enlightens. For serious scholarly work, five-year birth cohorts, categorised by race, gender and class background, are much more useful. For entertainment purposes, astrology is just as good and less divisive. •

Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future
By Jean M. Twenge | Atria Books | $32.50 |  560 pages

The post Can generational analysis be saved? appeared first on Inside Story.

Like others, I often wonder why the ABC I have so enjoyed and relied on can be irritating and sometimes infuriating. If it was on the edge of a cliff, there are days I’d have given it a push. Often that’s when the ABC seems to have no idea what it’s doing or no idea why people use it.

I look at ABC websites that sometimes have PR blurbs presented as news content. I watch Insiders who insist on framing every issue with their personal opinion, the first-person pronoun in heavy employ. News programs give me convoluted versions of a policy or event’s implications, but nothing of the actual policy or event itself. Above all, streams of programming have themes but not surprises. Lots of answers. Too few questions.

Ms Doogue raised the possibility (I think) of the ABC’s irrelevance. It’s the question that all media have had to face since the distribution of content was inverted. What used to be a limited, controlled flow of information and entertainment is now a dispersed, popular network that is both ubiquitous and constant. Technology allows people almost anywhere to view, read or hear almost anything: from live news like the Georgia grand jury’s indictment of Donald Trump to the video replay of all twenty minutes of the Matildas’ World Cup penalty shootout with France. Commercial aggregators like Apple and Netflix offer seemingly unlimited choices. Very soon algorithms will interpret your question, search the digital universe and present you with a composed briefing (which may be what News Corp sees as the future for “news”).

Former BBC director-general Mark Thompson, who was hired by the New York Times when it was mired in poor performance (and fixed it) and has now been picked to repair the ailing CNN, made a useful point recently. American television, he said, seemed to be stuck in the 1980s. With endless sources of opinion, what people really want is accurate and relevant news. Who’d have thought it?

Since the moment consumers began to find serious value in digital channels, the traditional media have been struggling — most often with their financial sustainability, but almost always with their direction and purpose. When the media most needed to revisit fundamentals, many leading players did the opposite — they chose the values that suited them.

Audience numbers are the traditional measure of media strength. Commercial media generally pursued large audiences to justify their advertising rates. The newspapers or broadcasters that captured the largest consistent audiences generally made the most money.

Digital media fractured that concept in two ways. Aggregators of audiences (Google, Meta) offered advertisers far bigger audiences than any incumbent — and did so at a fraction of the cost. Other digital arrivals (Netflix, YouTube) catered extremely well to particular interests and were able to commercialise that offering at a global level; driven by consumers, they turned media measurement on its head.

But much of the established media stuck with tradition and used raw, aggregate numbers to measure their performance. This is why a lot of news media gave away valuable content online, at least in the early years of the internet. More importantly, the measurement of digital traffic encouraged a trend towards crude preferences: by favouring content that drives traffic it promotes popularity over value. Commercial media that didn’t pursue inherent value struggled to get enough people to pay.

The logical endpoint for a content business chasing pure numbers is fairly obvious. Pornography, or its intellectual equivalent, gets eyeballs and doesn’t cost much. People like Tucker Carlson and Alan Jones — not to mention Rupert Murdoch — discovered this formula ages ago.

The ABC has a different problem. The people who pay for the ABC are taxpayers and the people who decide how much they pay are politicians. Why pay? Because Australians want and value a service that isn’t sustained by commercial means. That is, they want something that commercial providers don’t provide. So the ABC should have been better placed than commercial media to respond to a media environment driven more by value than by mass. Yet it seems to have fallen for the same error that its commercial counterparts did.

While ABC aggregate audiences are holding up, its own measures of value, still strong, are declining. But these data don’t tell the full story.

Digital media aggregated audiences but also disaggregated content creation. People who have common preferences and prejudices can stay in the lane they prefer. For a person interested in news, it’s bit like walking down a busy street and asking each person for an opinion. Or, for those who don’t like discordant views, like choosing only the news offered by one’s priest or football coach.

I would have expected the ABC to start dealing with the new environment by asking some very blunt questions. Like: why are we different? What is value for our constituents? How do we impose discipline on our work to deliver value to the people who pay for it?

Jeff Bezos was, I think, one of the first to align a media strategy closely with value. One of the interesting results, to my eyes, is that his Washington Post is much more about news — facts that inform — than its competitors are. Bezos measures everything, but his metrics are about value and how the people who pay judge value.

The ABC does a lot of things well, but it doesn’t do them consistently. I suspect the reason for that is the absence of discipline guided by a clarity about what its paying customers (taxpayers) value. A strong emphasis on news and facts, clearly presented, would overcome the natural tendency of traditional media towards celebrity thinking. (Seriously, do all those TV and radio folk really think people want their opinion on what the Reserve Bank does?)

The ABC could be more obviously bringing Australia into our homes. It could be more obviously filling gaps in the media. It could be asking really interesting questions — not gotcha questions — and providing really helpful information.

I fear the ABC will fail to win sustained support and resources because it didn’t ask the right questions about the new media environment. The main one being: what is value for Australian taxpayers? •

The post Asking the right questions about the ABC appeared first on Inside Story.

If Armstrong is ever to pursue such a possibility he could do a lot worse than take out options on two new books that tell the story of the original succession, when Rupert Murdoch inherited the keys to his media kingdom from his father Keith. Together, they not only provide a Succession-worthy dose of power plays and court intrigue; they also offer a profound insight into where Rupert Murdoch came from, what he would become and how he has shaped our world.

Walter Marsh’s Young Rupert provides a richly detailed and intricately interwoven close-up view of the young Murdoch on the make in 1950s Adelaide, building the business he inherited from his father. Media Monsters, the second volume of Sally Young’s exhaustively researched and endlessly fascinating history of the Australian media, tells that story in more condensed form but takes it further, as Murdoch extends his operations to the east coast, creates the Australian and throws all his weight behind the election of the Whitlam-led Labor Party in 1972.

The first succession, it turns out, involved at least as much Machiavellian intrigue, internecine struggle and human frailty as the present one; its consequences, it need hardly be said, are still being felt today.

The story begins, inevitably enough, with a very powerful man who, despite age and ailment, can’t bring himself to relinquish control. In 1949, Keith Murdoch was chairman of the board and managing director of Australia’s largest newspaper company, the Herald and Weekly Times, or HWT. There he had grown accustomed to unrivalled influence, claiming credit for the rise and fall of governments and prime ministers.

“I put him there and I’ll put him out,” Murdoch contemptuously said of prime minister Joseph Lyons in the 1930s. When Bob Menzies became prime minister for the second time he immediately sent Murdoch a note thanking him for using his newspapers to energetically campaign on his behalf. There was nothing self-effacing in Murdoch’s reply, which noted that the swing to Menzies was largest where his papers held sway.

But ill-health was catching up with Murdoch, forcing him to spend long periods away from the office. And so he announced a kind-of-retirement. While he would remain on as chairman, he was stepping down as managing director, charging one of his “bright young men,” Jack Williams, with responsibility for day-to-day affairs.

Except Murdoch couldn’t let go. He surrounded Williams with rivals, bad-mouthed him behind his back and sometimes to his face, and constantly interfered in day-to-day management. Williams had his faults, not least a serious drinking problem; one night he was arrested for urinating in Melbourne’s Alfred Place. But friends believed it was Murdoch who was driving Williams to drink.

The simmering tension between the chairman and his erstwhile protégé came to a head in late 1952 when Murdoch gathered together his fellow board members and persuaded them that Williams had to go. Having reclaimed undiluted control, Murdoch travelled out to his property on the Mornington Peninsula to spend the weekend.

And there he died. Within hours of the news, Williams had returned to the HWT offices where he ordered an engineer to blast open the now deceased chairman’s private safe. Armed with the revelations contained therein, he managed to persuade the remaining board members to reconsider their decision to terminate his own employment. At a hastily convened meeting he was reinstated — and the minutes of the previous meeting were expunged from the record.

For all that Keith Murdoch had refused, in the last years of his life, to let power slip from his hands at the Herald and Weekly Times, much of his energy had been focused elsewhere. As a minor HWT shareholder, he knew he would never be in a position to pass on the reins to his young son, Rupert. Thus he had devoted himself to building a media business of his own, one to which the laws of primogeniture would apply.

To set up his son’s inheritance, Murdoch had taken on substantial debt and a shady business partner, refusing to let his fiduciary duties to HWT shareholders stand in the way of securing the succession he cared about most. Or, as Young puts the matter bluntly, Murdoch “conned News Limited off [the HWT] for his son.”

Three years before his death Murdoch had told the HWT board that their position in Adelaide, where the company had effective control of both the city’s daily newspapers, was no longer tenable. In the wake of a royal commission into the press in Britain, monopoly power was under intense scrutiny. It would be prudent, he suggested, to pre-empt government intervention and offload one of their papers.

But Murdoch was less than candid about how such a move might benefit him personally. “When Murdoch told the annual meeting of shareholders in December 1949 that the HWT’s shares in News Limited had been sold,” writes Marsh, “he did not disclose that he was the purchaser.”

Murdoch’s extracurricular activities, as Marsh aptly describes them, were no secret by the time of his death. But his private papers revealed the full extent of these operations and the tremendous conflicts of interest they entailed. Like the secret negotiations Murdoch was conducting to defect from the HWT and merge his company with the owner of one of its main Melbourne rivals, the Argus. Or the fact that Murdoch’s partner in Queensland Newspapers, owner of the Courier-Mail, was none other than the underworld figure made famous by Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory, John Wren.

Jack Williams was back in charge, and one of his first tasks was to produce a glowing obituary for his mentor-turned-nemesis; he would also serve as a pallbearer at Murdoch’s funeral some days later. As Marsh wryly observes, “It’s hard to imagine any circumstances in which Sir Keith would have approved of this chain of events, but as Williams helped carry him from the church, he was in no position to object.”

Nor could Murdoch object as his old colleagues at the HWT sought to reacquire the company he had prized from it, News Limited. Barely had Keith been buried before his young widow, Elisabeth, was approached. The HWT, she was informed, was about to begin a Sunday edition of the Advertiser that would in all likelihood kill off News Limited’s Sunday Mail. Wouldn’t she prefer to sell first, they asked. Indeed, wouldn’t life be easier without the burdens of owning and running her late husband’s entire newspaper business?

Elisabeth didn’t take the bait. But — determined to clear the significant debt her late husband had racked up — she sold them the Courier-Mail. The young Rupert, who had hurried back from Oxford to claim his inheritance, was bitterly disappointed. “Cunning old bastards,” he called his dad’s former colleagues, but he must have recognised that his father was the most cunning of them all, and he was the prime beneficiary of the bastardry.

Thus Marsh and Young tell a story that revolves around not one succession but two — the fates of the very large business Keith Murdoch managed and the much smaller one he owned — and the conflict between the two. The resulting inheritance might have been smaller than both Keith and Rupert had hoped but, as Sally Young emphasises, it was nothing to complain about: three newspapers (the daily News and the Sunday Mail in Adelaide, and the Barrier Miner in Broken Hill) as well as a significant stake in the weekly women’s magazine New Idea, and a number of radio stations.

But young Rupert inherited more than assets with the potential to generate substantial revenue. He entered an elite club that exercised enormous control over Australia’s political and economic life. A large part of Sally Young’s achievement in Media Monsters is to lay bare the true extent of that power; in so doing she offers a profound insight into what Keith Murdoch really bequeathed his son.

As familiar as the troubling relationship between politicians and newspaper proprietors is, the effect of Young’s meticulous research is to surface details that still retain their power to shock (as well as containing remarkable contemporary resonances).

Witness the remarkable role of the press barons in the founding of the Liberal Party. In late 1944, Menzies was invited to dinner at the Melbourne home of a senior mining executive. In attendance were all the country’s leading media figures, including Keith Murdoch, Frank Packer and Rupert Henderson, manager of the Sydney Morning Herald. By the end of the evening, all those present had agreed to do everything in their power — which was considerable — to bring the Liberal Party into existence. “None of this secret compact was disclosed in the attendees’ respective newspapers,” Young sharply observes, “and nor is the remarkable dinner mentioned in official accounts of the Liberal Party’s history.”

The press proprietors collectively backed the party to the hilt over subsequent decades. Measured in terms of editorial support during federal elections, Australia’s daily newspapers supported the Liberals 90 per cent of the time during the fifties and sixties. But it’s the details of this cosy collaboration that are truly revealing. After the half-Senate election in 1953, Menzies sent a message to the editor of the Courier-Mail, Colin Bednall. “My dear Colin,” Menzies wrote, “I cannot go abroad without writing to let you know how much we have all appreciated the attitude of the Courier-Mail during the Senate campaign. No government could have asked for its case to be better or more enthusiastically presented.”

Menzies received an equally sympathetic hearing on radio. He requested, and received, extraordinary, unfettered access to the listening public through weekly ten-minute Man to Man broadcasts on forty stations across the country. The media barons hoped the opposition leader, H.V. Evatt, “would not complain or demand equal time,” Young explains. “He did both, but was ignored.”

The Liberal leader made sure these favours didn’t go unrequited, making a series of decisions that shaped the new medium of television in the interests of his powerful media allies. When he announced a royal commission into the introduction of television, the first commissioner chosen was the aforementioned Courier-Mail editor, Colin Bednall. Suitably stacked, the commission delivered predictably congenial recommendations, and Menzies did the rest to ensure the newspaper proprietors who already had a licence to print money would be well positioned to make even more.

The television market established by the Menzies government was at once highly concentrated and poorly regulated, lacking the pluralism and diversity of American television on the one hand, or the public service character of the British model on the other.

The UHF band already in operation in the United States could carry hundreds of television stations, including channels reserved for community groups and educational purposes; Australia opted for the much more restricted VHF band. In Britain commercial broadcasting took place under a public service model with similar obligations and programming standards to the BBC’s. In Australia, such regulation and oversight was successfully resisted, and private ownership of television transmitters made it practically impossible to revoke commercial television licences, and therefore to rigorously enforce any standards.

If blatant partisanship, the parlaying of political support into commercial benefit and the concomitant degradation of the public sphere would, in time, come to epitomise Rupert Murdoch’s way of doing business, what is remarkable in both Young’s and Marsh’s accounts is the extent to which he initially resisted playing this game. To be sure, he took to the role of publisher with gusto, fending off the HWT’s assault on his lucrative Sunday paper in Adelaide, acquiring Perth’s Sunday Times in 1954 (where he first exhibited his talent for tabloid sensationalism) and securing the license for the NWS-9 station when television came to Adelaide in 1958.

Marsh comprehensively establishes that Murdoch was always ruthlessly ambitious and that intellectual consistency was never really his thing (he believed in the benefits of competition as long as he was the beneficiary). But, for all that, the young magnate forms a striking contrast to his father, his contemporaries and, above all, his older self.

It may just be a historical curiosity that the young Rupert was an ardent socialist known as Comrade Murdoch at Geelong Grammar; that he installed a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford; or that he engaged in an admiring correspondence with Ben Chifley. But even after he had taken over the family business his politics retained a decidedly leftist hue. In Adelaide he hobnobbed with future Whitlam minister Clyde Cameron, and flirted with the Fabian Society. “He was much further left than me,” Cameron recalled in his memoir.

Even if Cameron exaggerated for effect, his recollection clearly contains a strong kernel of truth. Sally Young describes the Adelaide News in the 1950s as “the most liberal daily paper in the country, one with a social conscience that published very different views to the establishment Advertiser.” Similarly, in its early years the Australian was exceptional in its willingness to question conservative governments. It was the sole morning newspaper to editorialise against Australia’s commitment of troops to Vietnam. Then, of course, there was Murdoch’s energetic and enthusiastic campaigning for Labor in 1972, prior to his rejection of Whitlam and his long march to the right.

The most revealing insight into Murdoch’s politics in this period is found in Marsh’s rich account of the case of Arrernte man and itinerant carnival worker Rupert Max Stuart, sentenced to death in 1959 for the gruesome rape and murder of a young girl. In the wake of Stuart’s trial, Murdoch’s News ran a series of reports that brought the veracity and justice of the conviction into serious question. First, it was revealed that Stuart had neither translator nor legal representation on hand when he made a confession; then that it had been beaten out of him; and finally that he appeared to have an alibi. With financial support from the News, a concerned clergyman had tracked down Stuart’s former employer, now interstate, who testified that the convicted man was with him at the time the crime occurred. PRIEST: STUART HAS PERFECT ALIBI, ran the headline in the News, DELAY THIS HANGING.

South Australian premier Tom Playford announced a royal commission and a one-month reprieve for Stuart, and one British newspaper described Murdoch’s editor, Rohan Rivett, as the “Zola of South Australia.” But Murdoch’s convictions were about to be tested further, when the royal commission the News had done so much to establish ended in acrimony, with Stuart’s counsel, Jack Shand, walking out. COMMISSION BREAKS UP — SHAND BLASTS NAPIER, read one News headline; SHAND QUITS — “YOU WON’T GIVE STUART FAIR GO” blared another.

If, with the passing of half a century, these statements seem like a pretty reasonable rendering of what had transpired, that was not how they were received at the time. The News was deemed to have impugned the integrity of the court, and Rivett and Murdoch found themselves facing a series of libel and seditious libel charges. They stuck it out and, ultimately, the charges were dropped but only after a long, expensive and intimidating legal action. Meanwhile, Max Stuart’s conviction stood, and he served out a lengthy jail sentence (the question of his guilt remains murky). But his life was spared.

It’s impossible to absorb these events, also comprehensively covered in Media Monsters, without reflecting on the story of a similar — and similarly horrifying case — that occurred three decades earlier. On the last day of 1922 a twelve-year-old girl was found raped and murdered in an alley off Melbourne’s Little Collins Street. Soon a local publican, Colin Ross, was in the police’s crosshairs. The editor of the Melbourne Herald, Keith Murdoch, was thrilled: he had learned firsthand from his British mentor, Lord Northcliffe, what a good murder could do for circulation.

Under Keith’s direction, the sensational allegations against Ross were flogged for all they were worth, sales nearly doubled, and Ross — who was exonerated by DNA evidence seventy-five years later — was convicted and hanged. So notorious was the Herald’s commercialisation of the case that its new headquarters on Flinders Street, built in the years following Ross’s hanging, were long known as the Colin Ross Memorial. The Colin Ross Memorial was where the teenaged Rupert Murdoch would get his first taste of the newspaper business. It is difficult to believe the case was far from his mind as he campaigned against the execution of Max Stuart throughout 1958 and 1959.

For all that the Stuart case exhibited Murdoch’s long-lost idealism, it also taught the young proprietor a critical lesson about the newspaper business and the consequences of offending the advertisers who were his main source of revenue. With the case still in full swing Murdoch told Clyde Cameron, “I’m in a spot Clyde. Myers have phoned to say that unless we drop our campaign in favour of Stuart, they are going to withdraw all of their advertising from the News and that means a lot to us…”

In the short term, Murdoch withstood the pressure, but only weeks after the conclusion of legal action against the News, he sacked Rohan Rivett. Keith Murdoch had confidently predicted, a year before his death, that his then socialist son would “eventually travel the same course of his father.” This sacking was one of the first signs that Keith would in time be proved completely correct (with interest on top); it also indicated that Rupert had fully registered the true commercial consequences of his editor’s campaigns.

Around the same time, Murdoch learned an even more important lesson about surviving and thriving in a business in which the majority of revenue came from selling advertising, when he witnessed the spectacular failure of the Melbourne Argus. In 1949, the Argus’s editorial line had taken a sharp turn to the left, a marked departure from the arch-conservatism that had characterised the paper for most of the preceding century.

The shift from right to left was effected at dizzying speed and in the process the paper’s new British owners made a number of serious missteps. But, as Sally Young explains, when the Argus was shuttered in 1957 its audience had actually grown. The problem was that “advertisers had shunned the bolshy, down-market, more left-wing paper. That was the deathblow, rather than a loss of readers,” writes Young. “When the paper closed in 1957, it had 170,000 readers, and that was 42,000 more than the Age, and a higher circulation than five other capital city dailies had at that time.” The Argus failed because its moderate leftwards tendency attracted less pecunious readers who were less sought after by advertisers.

The case of the Argus is crucial to understanding the nature of the Australian press in Rupert Murdoch’s formative years. The ideological commitments of proprietors provides one explanation for the overwhelming conservatism of Australia’s newspapers, but not the only one. After all, the proprietors had to win a readership and this meant selling their papers to a nation that was roughly equally politically divided. Even at its high watermark in 1966, the Coalition’s two-party-preferred vote was only 57 per cent — evidence of a far more politically divided nation than its daily newspapers suggested.

What the Argus experiment clearly indicated was that the preferences of readers were of secondary financial importance to the preferences of advertisers for the attention of a particular type of reader — one with high disposable income. Left-wing working-class newspapers faced a structural obstacle: a lesson not lost on Rupert Murdoch who, Young notes, “would use the Argus as a cautionary tale. He said a lack of advertiser support killed it and only 5 per cent more advertising would have made a big difference to its future.”

In their seminal history of the British press, Power Without Responsibility, James Curran and Jean Seaton attribute a decisive role to advertising in determining the commercial viability of newspapers since the nineteenth century. And they also tell a story of central importance in the career of Rupert Murdoch: the strange death of a newspaper called the Daily Herald and its rebirth under a new name, the Sun.

The demise of the Daily Herald was similar in nature to that of the Argus, only amplified in scale and consequence. When it was shut down in 1964 its circulation was 1.26 million, greater than that of the Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian combined. Surveys indicated that its readers took in more of their paper than the readers of other major dailies — and felt more attached to it. Its problem? It ultimately couldn’t compete financially with rivals who enjoyed the favour of advertisers. The Daily Herald readership might have been very large but it was overwhelmingly working-class, with minimal disposable income, reflective of the paper’s radical politics, and thus relatively unattractive to advertisers. Despite obtaining 8.1 per cent of national daily circulation in its final years, the Herald received only 3.5 per cent of net advertising revenue.

A decade before its downfall, the Daily Herald’s owners had recognised that they faced a choice. Either they could go really mass-market and cater to the advertisers who were more interested in quantity than “quality.” To do this, the paper would have to shed its political identity, and associated coverage of union matters, and ratchet up the human-interest stories, cartoons and horoscopes. Or they could go for quality by focusing on attracting the young, affluent audience that advertisers were willing to pay top dollar for.

The rebranding of the paper as the Sun was a belated attempt to pursue this latter strategy, but its half-hearted execution lacked strong internal support. And so, in 1969, the floundering paper was offloaded to Rupert Murdoch. Unlike the previous owners, Murdoch decided to take the Sun down-market and brought an unabashed and unqualified commitment to doing so. “I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it,” was the edict delivered to the Sun’s new editor. Circulation doubled within twelve months.

Rupert Murdoch is, of course, far from the first person to cast aside youthful ideals in pursuit of profit and power, or to tread the path from rebellion to reaction, a journey abetted in his case by the coincidence of middle age with the global turn to neoliberalism. But if a person is ultimately an opportunist it pays to attend to the opportunities the world affords them. The young media mogul on the make was consistently confronted with a powerful set of commercial incentives that decisively shaped his course: avoid offending advertisers and maximise the audiences that advertisers are willing to pay for.

When Murdoch made his next big move, to the United States, he entered a media landscape that had been powerfully shaped by the same forces he had encountered in Australia and the United Kingdom. In the 2019 book No Longer Newsworthy the American media scholar Christopher R. Martin describes how postwar American newspapers became increasingly defined by the pursuit of high socioeconomic status readers, the kind advertisers desired. Editorially, that meant a declining coverage of industrial relations, and strikes in particular. And when strikes were reported, the framing shifted from open-minded engagement with workers’ demands to an increasingly dominant focus on inconvenienced consumers.

As reporters were taken off industrial relations beats, financial self-help columns and coverage of the stock market increased. And as the mainstream media stopped telling working-class stories, right-wing cultural warriors were only too willing to fill the vacuum, with figures like televangelist Pat Robertson and ultraconservative shock jock Rush Limbaugh stepping into the void — as, eventually, did Murdoch’s Fox News. But, says Martin, America’s “right-wing media complex got its start with Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the New York Post in 1976.” •

Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire
By Walter Marsh | Scribe | $35.00 | 352 pages
Media Monsters: The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires
By Sally Young | UNSW Press | $49.99 | 576 pages

The post The first succession… and its consequences appeared first on Inside Story.

Apart from its election record, which for the last thirty years has been the gold standard, Newspoll’s status derives from its longevity (Roy Morgan Research is the only polling brand that has been around for longer), where it is published (an upmarket newspaper read by most federal politicians, with an online presence featuring excellent graphics) and its frequency (unmatched). Poll addicts crave nothing more than a known quantity, easily accessible trend data and a regular fix.

It’s not just the percentages Newspoll generates that matter; it is also the way the Australian interprets the figures. How much the figures themselves matter, and how much the Australian’s interpretation matters, is difficult to say. Both are recycled by politicians and journalists, among others, without much thought being given to whether they make sense.

In the latest poll, conducted 12–15 July, Labor’s primary vote was down (from 38 per cent, 16–24 June, to 36 per cent), as was the Coalition’s (35 per cent to 34 per cent), but Labor’s two-party lead grew from 54–46 to 55–45 — rounded, as are all Newspoll figures, to the nearest integer. As Adrian Beaumont noted in the Conversation, Labor “may have been unlucky” in the rounding of the two previous Newspolls but it “was probably lucky” this time.

At the Australian, the judgement of long-time political editor Simon Benson was unequivocal. Focusing on the fall in Labor’s first-preference support rather than the rise in its two-party share, he declared: “Labor’s honeymoon is officially over.” “Officially”? It was as if Newspoll should be recognised as having the same sort of status as the Australian Bureau of Statistics, say, or the Australian Electoral Commission. If, as Phillip Coorey observed, “the latest Newspoll” was merely “the latest to declare the government’s honeymoon over” (it was the Australian not Newspoll that declared it) then it was uniquely the Australian that made it “official.”

Benson took it for granted that Labor’s “honeymoon” came to an end once its first-preference support declined to a post-election “low” by an amount Benson judged to be significant. No matter that this support for Labor was still well above the 32.6 per cent (primary) or 52.1 per cent (two-party) vote recorded at the May 2022 election. The “honeymoon” had ended, and that was now “official.”

An electoral honeymoon, unlike the real thing, can end it seems — or begin to end — at whatever moment a poll-watcher chooses. Last September, when Labor’s two-party support in Newspoll reached 57 per cent — just two points higher than its current level — and its primary support stood at 37 per cent (one point ahead of where it currently sits), Benson judged that “the electoral honeymoon for Anthony Albanese continues”; in the preferred prime minister stakes, Albanese (61 per cent) was well ahead of Dutton (22 per cent), figures virtually unchanged from July.

This year, at the beginning of March, when Labor’s two-party support was at 54 per cent (three points lower than it had been in September) but its primary support still on 37 per cent, Benson took it as “a sure sign that the romance of the honeymoon phase is coming to an end for the government.” At 54–28, the Albanese–Dutton head-to-head had changed as well, but not dramatically. By mid May, however, when Newspoll estimated Labor’s two-party support at 55 per cent (its current standing) and its primary support at 38 per cent (higher than its current 36 per cent), he wondered whether it was “now the beginning of the end of the government’s honeymoon”; head-to-head, Albanese was still ahead of Dutton 56–29.

The day after the Australian published Newspoll’s figures for July, Nine’s metropolitan dailies published the latest figures from their July poll, the Resolve Political Monitor. Resolve’s percentages read as if Labor’s honeymoon was still in full-swing: Labor on 39 per cent, not 36 (the Newspoll figure); the Coalition on 30 per cent, not 34 (the Newspoll figure).

Political polling is nothing if not competitive. Making its own call about the end of Labor’s honeymoon, Resolve was not to be outdone. In March, after his poll had produced exactly the same figures (39–30) it would produce in July, Resolve’s director Jim Reed took Labor’s fall from 40 per cent in his previous poll as “another confirmation that the honeymoon highs have come to an end.” In June, Resolve had Labor back on 40 per cent. What had previously been a “honeymoon high” was now a sign of something quite different; in May, after all, Labor’s support had been 42 per cent, two points higher. Resolve, the Sun-Herald reported, “had started noting declines in Albanese and Labor’s honeymoon ratings early this year.”

Clearly, the only rule these commentators seem to follow in declaring an electoral honeymoon to have ended is that the level of support for the government in the latest poll is lower than the level recorded in the immediately preceding poll. Neither absolute levels of support nor the longer-term record count. If subsequent support for the government rises and falls — even if it is to a level higher than the previous high — one can declare an end to the honeymoon all over again. Neither the rise nor fall need be outside the poll’s margin of error — a figure the Australian and the Nine newspapers parade endlessly but their commentary studiously ignores.

Poll-watchers who have insisted for years that the Australian interprets its Newspoll data to cheer up or cheer on the Coalition may have noticed that its reading of the latest Newspoll backed up the interpretation of the Fadden by-election offered by the Liberal National Party candidate in Fadden, Cameron Caldwell. The Australian gave Caldwell’s interpretation the hortatory headline, “Fadden result ‘shows the honeymoon is over for Labor.’”

As well as spelling the end of the honeymoon, the result in Fadden showed “concern over the Indigenous voice” to be “high,” Caldwell argued. Columnist Joe Hildebrand — a vocal Yes supporter — recycled and generalised Caldwell’s line in the Daily Telegraph: “It could not be clearer,” he wrote, “that voters are rewarding the Prime Minister for his moderate and centrist direction and punishing him for the one aspect of his government” — the Voice — “that has been cast by his critics as radical or woke.”

Perhaps voters in Fadden were concerned about the Voice. “Using Fadden as a trial run,” Coorey had written on the eve of the by-election, “Dutton is attempting to turn the Voice into a lightning rod for broader discontent with the government.” After the by-election, however, another senior journalist, Paul Bongiorno, was equally adamant that “Dutton didn’t push his opposition to the referendum in the campaign”; having “raised it in a doorstop a few weeks ago, he dropped it as the poll neared.”

How anyone could conclude that Dutton had succeeded in making the Voice an issue based on nothing more than the result in Fadden, neither the Australian nor Hildebrand explained. One needs survey data, not a set of electoral returns, to determine whether Caldwell’s claim has merit. Bongiorno reports Caldwell saying that “people raised the Voice with him quietly because they didn’t want to be accused of racism or prejudice if they raised it publicly” — raised with him, he might have added, because they assumed Caldwell would not have thought such concerns racist or prejudiced. But Coorey, citing another LNP source, discounts the idea that views about the Voice affected the result: “the Voice had little impact either way,” he reports.

Even if the Voice was not shifting voters against Labor, were voters shifting against the Voice? As luck would have it, Newspoll’s latest poll also included a question on “whether to alter the Australian Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice.” For the Yes side, the topline numbers brought no more cheer than Caldwell: Yes, 41 per cent; No, 48 per cent; Don’t Know, 11 per cent. The corresponding figures after the same question was asked three weeks earlier: 43–47–10.

The changes between June and July may have been small but they played to the dominant media narrative about the Voice: that support is declining; that No has now overtaken Yes; that the referendum, if not doomed to failure, is not on a path to success. In June, Benson had cautioned that it would be “foolhardy” to “make a call… four months out from polling day” (expected mid October), and that it was “not over yet for the voice.” Now, just three weeks later, with the margin between Yes and No growing from four points to seven — well within what the Australian describes as Newspoll’s “theoretical margin of error” — Benson concluded that “the voice referendum [was] in serious trouble,” support “gradually collapsing” with “confusion over the detail, the scope and the function of the voice… killing any goodwill many undecided voters may have had.”

More striking than the topline figures was a startling shift in the differences between women’s responses and men’s. The new poll reported a seven-point rise in support for Yes among men and a ten-point fall in support among women. Suddenly, from being more likely to vote Yes than to vote No (a six-point gap), women were more likely to vote No than to vote Yes (a gap of eleven points) — a turnaround of seventeen percentage points. And from being more likely to vote No than to vote Yes (a fourteen-point gap), suddenly men were almost as likely to vote Yes — a twelve-point change.

By any measure, these were remarkable changes. The movement of one-in-five women from the Yes column (48 per cent down to 38 per cent) to either the No column (42 per cent up to 49 per cent) or the Don’t Know column (10 per cent up to 13 per cent) in such a short time — and before the start of the formal campaign — is difficult to credit. The movement of one-in-ten men from the No column (52 per cent down to 47 per cent) or the Don’t Know column (10 per cent up to 8 per cent), while only half as big, also stretches credulity.

Since the shifts were in opposite directions, they largely cancelled each other out. Had the shift among either group been less dramatic, the topline results might have looked quite different. For example, if support among women had declined by no more than half as much as Newspoll reports, support for the Voice would have stood at 43 or 44 per cent and opposition at 45 or 46 per cent. This would have represented an improved result, not a worse result, for the Yes camp than Newspoll’s figures of three weeks before. What might the headline have been then?

When Newspoll asks about the Voice, Benson writes, “female voters have until now been significantly overrepresented among the undecideds.” Now, when Newspoll asks those respondents who initially say they “don’t know” whether they “approve” of the alteration to the Constitution, “which way they would lean if forced to profess a view,” things are different: “women voters are now significantly more likely to say No.”

Neither Newspoll nor the Australian is keen to disclose the patterns of response to the initial question — before respondents were leant on to choose Yes or No — in the last three polls. Benson failed to reply to a request that the Australian do so; YouGov, the British-owned firm that conducts Newspoll, said it “can’t really comment.” As a consequence, Benson’s account can’t be confirmed independently. Yet the rules of the Australian Polling Council, of which YouGov is a founding member, say that if “voting intention figures are published with the undecided participants excluded, the proportion who were thus excluded should be published.”

Why might women have moved from Yes to No? Benson attributes the shift to the “targeted campaign by the No camp.” Crucial to this was the fact that the government, “in its contortions over the voice,” had “vacated the field of talking to voters’ primary concern — the cost of living.” Noting that “any pollster… will tell you female voters are more highly attuned to cost-of-living pressures than male voters” — though “cost of living is by far the issue of most concern to a majority of all voters” — Benson insists this gave the No camp a “strategic edge.” The No campaign had also “spent significant funds directly targeting women.” This, in his view, “appear[ed] to have paid off.”

To have “paid off” to anything like the extent Benson implies, the No campaign would have needed not only to have targeted female voters but also to have done so across most of the social media platforms on which the No campaign’s advertising, coordinated by Advance Australia, has largely been conducted. But targeting of this kind is not what the evidence shows. An analysis of the three Facebook pages — Fair Australia, Not Enough, and Referendum News — that Advance Australia has been populating concludes that only one (Not Enough) was targeting voters in the two largest states.

If the other two pages were “essentially ignoring New South Wales and Victoria” — the two states where the majority of women (and men) reside — the No campaign can hardly have been reaching the majority of female voters. Moreover, while the ads on Referendum News skewed “towards a female audience,” the ads on the other pages skewed to different demographics.

Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that the No campaign did enjoy the kind of success Benson attributes to it, are we to conclude that as well as shifting women in extraordinarily large numbers to the No side, the No campaign — in a terrible own goal — also shifted a large number of men across to the Yes side? If not, what did shift these men? This is not a question Benson attempts to answer; everything he has to say goes to explaining why support for the Voice should be falling rather than why, among men, it might have risen.

The explanation for the “rise” in support among men may lie in nothing more profound than the vagaries of polling. Newspoll has asked its Voice question with its current response architecture three times (the first is here). If one looks at all three polls — not just, as Benson does, the last two — among men the Yes–No split is 45–46, 38–48, 45–47: it’s the second (June) poll, not the third (July), that is the odd one out. If the second poll underestimated support among men, the most recent poll may simply be correcting that.

Before the latest Newspoll, only one poll had ever reported finding more men than women in favour of a constitutionally inscribed Voice. Conducted in December 2022 by Freshwater Strategic, it showed only the narrowest of differences in support between men (51 per cent) and women (50 per cent); but even in this poll, more men (30 per cent) than women (22 per cent) were opposed. The most recent poll to use the same response architecture as Newspoll — a poll conducted by Essential Media (5–9 July), a week ahead of Newspoll — shows women (49 per cent) more likely than men (44 per cent) to support Yes, and men (47 per cent) more likely than women (40 per cent) to say No.

None of this appears to have registered at the Australian. For Benson, the referendum had “suffered a collapse in support among women voters,” with women “for the first time… now more likely than men to vote no, a central change to core support.” The precipitous fall in support among women was noted by the paper’s national editor, Dennis Shanahan. The story about a new gender divide got a run in an editorial on the day it broke, and another run the next day. Other outlets, too — seemingly less concerned with objectivity, which requires critical evaluation, than with neutrality, which requires no more than reporting what is newsworthy — reproduced the figures.

Could such a shift have happened? Bongiorno — another strong supporter of a Yes vote — thought it not only could have happened but had happened, even as he took out the standard insurance against being held personally responsible for his report. “If you can believe the opinion polls,” he reported, “regional Australia has gone very cold on the idea of a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament.”

Perhaps Bongiorno also had in mind a poll published a couple of weeks earlier by the Canberra Times, not referenced by the Australian. The poll was conducted online by Chi Squared (the research arm of the Canberra Times’s owner, Australian Community Media) among readers of fourteen daily newspapers “serving Canberra and key regional population centres such as Newcastle, Wollongong, Tamworth, Orange, Albury and Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Ballarat, Bendigo and Warrnambool in Victoria, and Launceston and Burnie in northern Tasmania,” to which 10,131 readers had responded.

Chi Squared purported to show that “in the regions” the level of support for establishing the Voice (the question was not disclosed) stood at just 35 per cent. While this figure was not very different from Newspoll’s estimate, the “poll” was conducted from 16 to 26 June — at a time when Newspoll, using sampling techniques better suited to the task, not simply self-selection, was reporting a 40–51 split in the regions rather than Chi Squared’s 35–57. If regional opinion had shifted between June and July in the way Newspoll suggests, why might it have shifted? Benson doesn’t venture an answer; nor does Bongiorno.

“The bottom line,” says Benson, “is that the trend towards a No vote is increasing and it is expanding in the wrong demographics for the yes camp.” What the “right demographics” might be, he doesn’t say. The Yes camp needs a majority of the national vote and would be happy, one assumes, to accept contributions from all demographics. No demographic — certainly not women rather than men, or regional rather than metro voters — is “right” or “wrong”; if support is slipping, it is slipping largely across the board. To win, Yes also needs majorities in the majority of states; any four will do, though a victory in one or more of the bigger states will do more to secure a national majority vote than a victory in one or more of the smaller states.

To see whether the latest Newspoll has got things horribly wrong on the Voice — or whether, on the contrary, it should be recognised for being the first to detect an extraordinary change in the gender gap and a substantial expansion of the metro–regional divide — we will need to wait for the next polls, whether from Newspoll itself or from Resolve, Freshwater or Morgan.

Finally, a word about an unreported upheaval at YouGov. Between the June poll and the one conducted in July, virtually all of those working in the public affairs and polling unit at YouGov left; the departures included the head of the unit (and chair of the Australian Polling Council), Campbell White.

Did the number and quality of the personnel heading out the door have an impact on the analysis of the more recent poll? If the changes at YouGov have affected data quality or the quality of the analysis, and aren’t corrected, then — much like support for Labor or support for the Voice — Newspoll’s status in Canberra might slide as well. •

The post The “end” of Labor’s honeymoon and the “collapse” of women’s support for the Voice appeared first on Inside Story.

Ben Roberts-Smith was already the most famous and celebrated soldier of his generation. During multiple operational tours in Afghanistan, he had won the Victoria Cross, the Medal for Gallantry and the Commendation for Distinguished Service — making him the most highly decorated Australian serviceman since the second world war.

After retiring from the army in 2013, Roberts-Smith had done an MBA and traded his $120,000-a-year soldier’s pay packet for a $700,000 package as Queensland manager of the Seven Network. Venerated as an exemplary role model in war and peace, he was named Australian Father of the Year in 2013 and served as chair of the National Australia Day Council from 2014 to 2017.

During his research in Afghanistan and Australia, Masters had heard claims that Roberts-Smith was not quite the paragon of virtue that political leaders, powerful business figures and the Australian public had come to embrace. There were mutterings that he was a headstrong bully, that the circumstances in which he had won his medals were dubious and that he had been involved in multiple battlefield abuses. But there was nothing concrete.

The meeting in the privacy of the Hyatt Hotel rose garden had been arranged as an opportunity for the former soldier to rebut various criticisms being levelled by his old comrades, rather than as an inquisition. “While I was obliged to ask difficult questions, which is the job of a journalist, I was in a mood to mediate,” Masters, an admirer of Australia’s special forces and supporter of their engagement in Afghanistan, would write. But while Roberts-Smith had begun by revealing himself to be “articulate, measured and persuasive,” the conversation soon degenerated into anger and vitriol.

The war hero went to war on his accusers. He blasted some of the soldiers who had served with him as cowardly, incompetent and toxic. He said his critics were driven by jealousy and were smearing him with lies. He was “vicious” in his angry rebuttal of their accusations. As Masters later watched the two-metre-tall figure in the tailored business suit depart, he would reflect: “My overwhelming impression… was that Ben Roberts-Smith VC, MG was not behaving like a man with nothing to hide.”

A few days later, Masters received a late-night call on his mobile phone from an anonymous source on an encrypted line, who said: “He kicked this bloke off a cliff. As his face spun down, it smashed against the wall and his teeth sprayed out. The bloke who saw it can’t get the image out of his mind. He said he had to get away from Ben Roberts-Smith. It was not the first time he said this stuff happened. RS is a bloody psychopath.” After Masters pursued further details from sources, “the outline of a shocking story emerged, cruel to the point of abomination.”

He realised he was on the cusp of perhaps his biggest story since the 1980s, when he had exposed the French government’s involvement in the sinking of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior and revealed the police corruption in Queensland, helping to trigger the Fitzgerald royal commission. But the former Four Corners star was now a freelance journalist and writer with limited resources. “I needed an ally,” he would concede.

And so began one of the most formidable partnerships in the history of Australian investigative journalism — Chris Masters and the Age’s Nick McKenzie. Despite being thirty-three years younger than Masters, McKenzie had a CV to rival if not surpass that of the man who had once mentored him as a cadet journalist. After two decades of spectacular investigative journalism, McKenzie had won an unprecedented fourteen national Walkley awards for journalism and twice been named Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year.

Their six-year collaboration delivered a series of shocking revelations about the conduct of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan and a marathon defamation trial that ended last month with a finding by Justice Anthony Besanko in the NSW Supreme Court that Ben Roberts-Smith was a liar, a serial bully and a war criminal. Besanko found it was “substantially true” that the VC winner had been involved in the murder of four unarmed Afghan prisoners and civilians, had intimidated and threatened court witnesses to hide the truth, and had lied repeatedly in his sworn evidence.

Despite Roberts-Smith’s decision on Tuesday to lodge an appeal in the Federal Court challenging Besanko’s findings, the dramatic conclusion of the case has starkly framed the prospect of years of sensational war crimes prosecutions that are likely to shred the reputation of our armed forces at home and abroad and scar the Anzac mythology that has been a cornerstone of our national identity for more than a century. The failure of Roberts-Smith to hide what Besanko found to be true must give new impetus to the work of the Australian Federal Police and the Special Investigator appointed in the wake of the internal defence department inquiry into war crimes in Afghanistan headed by NSW judge and army reservist Major General Paul Brereton.

Brereton reported in 2020 that there was credible evidence that thirty-nine Afghan non-combatants had been unlawfully killed by or at the direction of Australian special forces, “which may constitute the war crime of murder.” His report identified twenty-five current or former Australian soldiers who were “alleged perpetrators — either as principals or accessories.” Brereton described one of the unspecified incidents he investigated as “the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history.”

Had Besanko found in favour of Roberts-Smith, it would likely have dampened if not derailed the cumbersome process of bringing appropriate criminal charges against those identified by the Brereton inquiry. It would have re-energised the many powerful voices who continue to argue that whatever happened in Afghanistan should be left behind in Afghanistan. And it would certainly have discouraged the media from further interrogating matters that might risk ruinous defamation costs.

Instead, the chief of the defence force, General Angus Campbell, this week declared that thoroughly investigating those Australian soldiers accused of war crimes in Afghanistan was “utterly critical” to Australia regaining moral authority at home and with its allies. Campbell, who deserves great credit for initiating the Brereton process in 2016 in the face of strong military and political opposition, told the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s journal the Strategist that it was also imperative to deal more broadly with “the breadth of the cultural professional issues” that had been highlighted by the inquiry.

“Our operational capability is in large part about our capacity to win the friends and partners who will stand with us in conflict,” he said. “We need to be a force that people want to serve in, but also to join with in partnership across nations. We have never fought alone. We never want to fight alone. What a tragedy if because of real or perceived lapses in our military conduct we found ourselves alone.”

While the tenacious partnership between Masters and McKenzie secured victory in what became the biggest and, with costs now estimated to be as high as $35 million, the most expensive defamation case in Australian history, it would not survive the final reckoning. Their plans to jointly write a book about the saga unravelled. According to Masters, he and McKenzie “worked well together as investigators, but regrettably could not coordinate the writing” of a joint book.

That apparently amicable literary separation has now delivered two compelling accounts of the partnership that complement and illuminate each other — Nick McKenzie’s Crossing the Line and Chris Masters’s Flawed Hero. Both are powerful, passionate and often moving narratives infused with the personal impacts of fighting the most protracted and enervating journalistic battle each of them had ever experienced. Had they lost, it would have been a serious setback late in the illustrious career of seventy-four-year-old Masters. For Nick McKenzie, it would have been the end. He writes that he could not have coped professionally with the failure and, aged forty-one, would have quit journalism.

The two journalists reveal how perilously close they thought they came to losing. While they were sure of the accuracy of their reporting and the details of the atrocities they had helped to uncover, they concede that they faced an uphill battle proving it to the standard required for a defence of truth in a civil defamation case.

To succeed, it was essential to persuade soldiers who witnessed the abuses to agree to give evidence or, if they were compelled to appear, to tell the truth about what they had seen. When the case began, they were pessimistic about the prospects of persuading even those soldiers who were appalled by what they had seen and supported their reporting to willingly give evidence. They were sure Roberts-Smith had the upper hand at the start of the hearings and held it until close to the end.

Had the hearings not been delayed many months by the intervention of Covid, they felt it unlikely they would have had enough time to persuade reluctant witnesses to cooperate. But in the end, the defendants called twenty-one serving and former soldiers, and it was the compelling testimony of a number of them that ultimately defeated Roberts-Smith’s claims.

For both journalists it was, before the final victory, a deeply disillusioning experience. For Masters, who had spent decades working closely with special forces and growing to admire their dedication and professionalism, this was especially so. Beyond the shocking evidence of the multiple murders of unarmed prisoners and civilians, there was what Liberal MP and former SAS captain Andrew Hastie would describe as a pervasive “pagan warrior culture”: rookie soldiers “blooded” by being ordered to kill Afghan captives, “throw downs” in which radios or weapons were planted on the bodies of unarmed victims to pretend they were legitimate battlefield casualties, and “kill boards” kept by SAS units with targets of Afghans to be killed. “It amounted to a descent into the depravity we fight against,” writes Masters.

For McKenzie, seeking justice for the most famous of the victims became a driving force. Ali Jan was the innocent farmer and father of six who was visiting the village of Darwan in Oruzgan province to buy flour and a pair of shoes for his young daughter on 11 September 2012 — the eleventh anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks in New York — when Australian soldiers swooped on the village. Justice Besanko would accept the evidence of multiple witnesses that after he was handcuffed and questioned, Ali Jan was taken to the edge of a nearby cliff and kicked off by Ben Roberts-Smith, who later ordered the execution of the helpless and badly injured farmer.

In 2019 McKenzie travelled to Afghanistan to meet Ali Jan’s widow, Bibi Dhorko, who was desperately struggling to support her young family after the loss of her husband. “One of the soldiers who’d been at Darwan the day Ali Jan died told me something just before I made the trip to Kabul,” he writes. “I’d thought about it ever since. Ali had lived a relatively meagre existence confined to a few villages, a cluster of kin and a daily struggle to survive. Once the story of his death was exposed in our newspapers, it had viscerally exposed the barbarity of those few Australian soldiers who had gone rogue… In death, Ali had reinforced to my war-bitten source the sanctity of human life, even in conflict. This was why the laws of war mattered. Maybe that was Ali’s ultimate legacy.”

As much as the Roberts-Smith saga showed the best of Australian journalism through the determined work of our finest investigative reporters, it also showed the worst of Australian journalism in the outrageously partisan conduct of rival media organisations. They not only failed in their professional duty to help expose the scandal but also worked hard to undermine the credibility of the fine work done by McKenzie and Masters, gormlessly joining the Roberts-Smith cheer squad.

“I can’t say I handle well being beaten up by fellow reporters,” Masters writes. “My view is that there is a shared responsibility. We work first for the public, so there should be some shared values and purpose.” He derides in particular the reporting of the Murdoch press: “The Australian’s reporting on the war crimes now under scrutiny, and especially on Ben Roberts-Smith, was flimsy and partisan. Probably because they had not done the work, because they were incapable of catching up and had an ingrained oppositional stance to Fairfax, and because they could not resist the spoils of a drip-feeding by Roberts-Smith’s lawyers.”

The magnitude of Roberts-Smith’s fall from grace has been amplified by the heights to which he was elevated in popular perception, in large part a product of jingoistic and uncritical coverage in the popular media. Chris Masters dubbed him the Anzac Avatar — the superman soldier whose fame and legendary battlefield exploits made him the embodiment of Australia’s self-perception as a nation of rugged, fearless and independent individuals.

“Craving identity,” Masters writes, “Ben Roberts-Smith found the shape of who he wanted to be in the persona of the killing machine. The special forces operative, amped in popular media to superhero veneration, became a poster boy. We could not help ourselves. The seven-foot-tall and bulletproof Anzac avatar assumed that pedestal.” This, says Masters, is where it went “monstrously wrong.”

Ben Roberts-Smith was one of four Australians to win the Victoria Cross in Afghanistan. Why was he the household name when most Australians would be unaware of the three other Australian soldiers who also won the highest award for gallantry, let alone know their names? How many know the story of Trooper Mark Donaldson who rescued a wounded Afghan interpreter under heavy fire, or Corporal Daniel Keighran who drew enemy fire away from a wounded colleague, or Corporal Cameron Baird who was killed in action storming an enemy-controlled building?

While it was central to Roberts-Smith’s case to portray himself as the victim of a reckless media smear campaign, Masters points out that the complaints about the soldier “originated not from the pampered, irresponsible media but from battle-hardened colleagues.”

Both McKenzie and Masters argue persuasively that Australians rightly dismayed by the scandalous misconduct within the ranks of our elite forces in Afghanistan should be heartened by the fact that the truth would probably never have been revealed without the courageous stand of many decent and professional soldiers appalled by the actions of their comrades.

Says McKenzie: “It was the good men and the moral soldiers of the SAS who stood up and told the truth in court.” Masters writes: “There are soldiers in Australia’s Special Air Services Regiment who have moral as well as physical courage. While those who spoke endured condemnation from many of their brothers, it is hoped that some glancing consideration might be given to the probability that they saved their regiment. Had these revelations erupted as a scandal that was unforeseen and not self-reported, the SASR would have been lucky to escape disbandment.”

As Australia braces for years of traumatic testimony with the twenty-five potential war criminals identified by the Brereton inquiry facing prosecution, we might hope that the courage and decency of those who called out the renegades and forced the reckoning will be the narrative that begins to salvage the tarnished honour of our armed forces. •

Crossing the Line: The Inside Story of Murder, Lies and a Fallen Hero
By Nick McKenzie | Hachette | $34.95 | 488 pages

Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes
By Chris Masters | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 592 pages

The post Unfriendly fire appeared first on Inside Story.

At the beginning of April, when Newspoll last reported on support for putting a Voice into the Constitution, it estimated the level of approval at 53 per cent and opposition at 39 per cent; 8 per cent said “Don’t know.” Two months later, the corresponding figures are rather different: 46–43–11.

On the face of it, this looks like support has declined by seven points, the opposition has risen by four points, and the “Don’t knows” have gone up by three. And it looks like that’s the result of a couple of months in which the No side has campaigned hard and the Yes side has been on the back foot, with some of its erstwhile supporters either switching to No or putting off a firm decision and “parking” their vote, as Newspoll’s former boss Sol Lebovic used to say, under “Don’t know.”

Thus, Dennis Shanahan, in a comment for the Australian: “The latest Newspoll figures… suggest there is an across-the-board movement against the voice and a surge in uncertainty.”

Not so fast. There are two reasons for caution when comparing the June results with the April results: a change in Newspoll’s question and a change in what we might call, borrowing a phrase from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge, its “choice architecture.”

The question: The Australian notes that the question asked in its latest poll is not the same as the question asked in its previous polls. The obvious implication is that its figures need to be interpreted with care.

In April, Newspoll explained that “There is a proposal to alter the Australian constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament.” It then asked: “Are you personally in favour or against this proposal?”

In its latest poll, Newspoll used a slightly different preamble: “Later this year, Australians will decide at a referendum whether to alter the Australian Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice”(with those italicised words underlined in the questionnaire). It then asked: “Do you approve this proposed alteration?” This made it “the first Newspoll survey to present voters with the precise question they will be asked at the ballot box when the referendum is held later this year.”

If the differences in the wording of the two questions explains, at least in part, the differences in the two sets of responses, it is not clear how it does. Did the reference to “recognition” deflate support? That seems unlikely: since “recognition” has wide public support, its inclusion is more likely to have boosted support than deflated it. Did the prospect of having to vote at a referendum boost opposition? Again, that seems unlikely, though at a time when voters may have more pressing things to worry about, it’s probably the better bet. Perhaps the heavy black underlining of the proposal caused concern.

According to a quote in the Daily Telegraph, another News Corp masthead, polling analyst Kevin Bonham believes Newspoll is “likely more accurate” than many other polls because it has been the first to use the exact wording of the referendum proposal. However commendable that might have been, we cannot assume that the wording necessarily makes a difference to respondents.

A polling purist might baulk at Newspoll’s switch from: (a) asking respondents whether they are “in favour or against” (balanced alternatives) a proposal to alter the Constitution to establish a Voice; to (b) asking respondents whether they “approve” this proposed alteration, with no balancing alternative (“disapprove”). It might also have been better practice to ask respondents how they intended to act (that is, vote) rather than how they felt (“in favour or against”; “approve”).

The choice architecture: What the Australian overlooks — and what Newspoll itself fails to note — may be something more important than the change in the question: the change in the poll’s choice architecture. In April, Newspoll not just posed a different question; it also offered a different array of response options: “Strongly in favour,” “Partly in favour,” “Partly against,” “Strongly against,” “Don’t know.” In its most recent poll, by contrast, the options offered to respondents were simply: “Yes,” “No,” “Don’t know” — a set of responses, it should be acknowledged, better suited to a referendum than the set Newspoll previously offered.

How might this change have affected the results? With a wider number of response options, the proportion that chose “Don’t know” was relatively small; in April’s Newspoll, it was 8 per cent, with the numbers in February (7 per cent) and in March (9 per cent) having been almost the same. Polls by other companies in February, March or April that offered the same sort of choices as Newspoll offered in its latest poll reported higher figures for “Don’t know,” just as Newspoll now does.

The assumption that we can compare polls that use different architectures (Yes/No/Don’t know as against Strongly in favour/Partly in favour/Partly against/Strongly against/Don’t know) simply by collapsing categories (Yes = Strongly in favour + Partly in favour) is mistaken.

It is difficult to say how much the change in the Yes and No responses can be explained as an effect of the change in the choice architecture. But this doesn’t leave us without any bearings. As we would expect, the “Don’t know” number in June (11 per cent) is higher than it was in April (8 per cent); the “surge in uncertainty” is therefore almost certainly an illusion — an effect of changes in the response categories.

If the “Don’t know” number is higher, then the Yes and/or No vote has to be lower. In this Newspoll, the Yes vote is lower but it is also lower than we might have expected on the basis of a switch in choice options alone. And the No vote, far from being lower, is higher.

Allowing for changes in the choice architecture, this suggests that, over the two months since Newspoll’s last survey, the Yes side has lost support and the No side has gained support.

This is hardly news: a tightening of the contest is what almost all the polling has shown for some time. The intriguing question is how much of a tightening would Newspoll have shown — with or without its new question — had it not changed its response options.

Nor is it news that fewer than half of those polled intend to vote Yes. Since March, none of the polls that use the standard architecture (Yes/No/Don’t know) — Freshwater, Morgan, Resolve — have reported Yes majorities. The only way of conjuring Yes majorities from these polls has been by assuming either that the “Don’t knows” won’t vote or that enough of them will vote — and vote Yes — to get the proposal over the line.

According to Simon Benson, who wrote the Australian’s main story, the Newspoll results “suggest the debate is now shaping up as one being led by elites on one side and everybody else on the other.” What this means is unclear. There are “elites” in both camps. But even if the “elites” were only on the Yes side, the polls don’t show “everybody else” on the other. Benson has reprised a dichotomy, pushed by some on the No side, without thinking it through. The poll results, he says, “stand as a warning sign for advocate business leaders that their customer base and employees may not necessarily be signed up to the inevitability of the referendum’s assumed success.”

Is the Australian’s clearest contribution to the debate its headline? In February, the website run by Fair Australia, the name under which senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s Advance is campaigning against the Voice, advertised its plans to “build an army of Aussies” to “defend our nation.” Now, told by the Australian that most “Aussies” don’t intend to vote Yes, the undecided may draw some reassurance that it’s okay to vote No. •

The post Losing ground? appeared first on Inside Story.

Why Hungary, and why now? A tagline revealed that Sheridan, the Australian’s foreign editor, is just back from a week as a visiting fellow at Budapest’s Danube Institute. What the newspaper didn’t tell readers is that this evocatively named organisation is funded by the Hungarian government (via its Batthyány Lajos Foundation) as part of its breathtakingly generous bankrolling — to the tune of billions of dollars in funds, buildings and other assets, according to Foreign Policy magazine’s Ana Luiza Albuquerque — of conservative institutes based in Budapest.

The job of these institutes is to host visiting fellows like Sheridan, often for months at a time, and run seminars, publish reports and periodicals, and generally promote what Orbán calls “illiberal liberalism.” (Orbán has also described Hungary as “the last Christian conservative bastion of the Western world.”) The Danube Institute alone publishes three journals, the European Conservative, the Hungarian Review and the Hungarian Conservative. Other Budapest-based institutes with government links include the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs.

Orbán’s largesse is no doubt part of the reason for the sharp rise in his stocks in recent years among English-speaking conservatives of a more hardline bent. But it is his record of four consecutive election wins since 2010 — however tainted by bribes, crackdowns and electoral tampering — that has become a talisman for those American conservatives who worry that real democracy will never guarantee them the power they want.

Prominent among Orbán’s beneficiaries is the American conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher, who crops up repeatedly in media coverage of Hungary’s cross-Atlantic appeal and has benefited from Danube Institute hospitality. Dreher is the thread running through Foreign Policy’s account of Orbán’s spending on the institutes, and he’s also the larger-than-life centrepiece of a New Yorker article investigating the appeal of Hungary’s authoritarianism for figures on the Republican right.

For Dreher, Orbán’s example is “so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it’s serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness.” He was especially struck when Orbán told a group of visiting conservatives, “We hope you will think of Budapest as your intellectual home.”

Where Sheridan ignores Fidesz’s excesses, Dreher believes “we expect too much of these post-Communist countries if we judge them by Western standards of clean government.” He takes the credit for having persuaded Fox News’s then-presenter Tucker Carlson to broadcast a week’s worth of programs — even less critical of Orbán than Greg Sheridan’s piece — from Budapest in 2021.

But another figure also keeps appearing in the New Yorker piece. One moment he’s lunching in a bistro in Budapest wearing “a pin-striped suit and a tie from Liberty, the London clothier once favoured by Oscar Wilde.” Then he’s in his nearby office, assuring the magazine’s Andrew Marantz that his long wait for permission to attend the Budapest-hosted Conservative Political Action Conference is “merely an oversight.” (It wasn’t; Marantz’s request was eventually refused.) Here he is — with an “Ah, good, you made it!” — when Marantz slips into the conference reception at the five-star Párisi Udvar hotel. And here he is, when a friend of Dreher lends Marantz a spare pass, giving the reporter a friendly slap on the back.

This genial scamp is the eighty-year-old British journalist John O’Sullivan, who has been president of the Danube Institute since its inception in 2013. O’Sullivan has impeccable conservative credentials: he wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s and later helped draft her memoirs; he took over from William F. Buckley as editor of the New York–based National Review in 1990; he was editor-in-chief of United Press International and then executive editor of Radio Free Europe in the early 2000s.

But one job is missing from the New Yorker’s summary. During 2015 and 2016 O’Sullivan was editor of Quadrant — yes, Australia’s Quadrant — and since then he has been the magazine’s international editor. More than that, he appears to have stayed on as president of the Danube Institute throughout his editorship.

It’s strange thought: that decades-old tribune of the Australian right, Quadrant, being edited by an Englishman who also held the most senior position in a Budapest-based think tank funded by the Hungarian government. Did he continue to be paid by the institute? Did he spend much time in the Quadrant office in Sydney?

Quadrant hasn’t been entirely candid about O’Sullivan’s relations with the government of Hungary. When the magazine announced his appointment as editor in February 2015, his work at the Danube Institute was mentioned only in the past tense. I can’t find any instance where the dual role was made clear to readers during his editorship.

Even after he moved to the international editor’s job, his relationship with the institute barely rated a mention — even at the foot of a piece he wrote in September 2021 about Tucker Carlson’s “polite questioning” of Orbán (a good thing, in O’Sullivan’s view) — although he did fleetingly mention his work at the institute in a piece a couple of months later. This year the institute has cropped up a couple of times in O’Sullivan’s articles on general topics, but without any reference to its generous backer.

Other Quadrant contributors admire Hungary too (though not all contributors to O’Sullivan’s old magazine, National Review, do). Former Liberal frontbenchers Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer have all accepted invitations to speak at Danube Institute, and former diplomat (and Abbott adviser) Mark Higgie took up a fellowship there.

Unlike O’Sullivan, Sheridan is worried by one characteristic of Orbán’s Hungary: its hardline enforcement of immigration controls. But for the Australian’s foreign editor, “freedom” (whatever that means in a country fast slipping down the democracy rankings) trumps everything. Freedom, above all, from “coercive and ideological contemporary left-liberalism.”

Surely Australian conservatives haven’t caught the Hungarian disease from the more intemperate of their American counterparts? Maybe not all of them, but there are signs that Greg Sheridan has. Should he have mentioned to readers that the think tank that hosted his visit is funded by foreign minister Németh and his colleagues? I’d say so, but perhaps he sees the battle with left-liberals as so vital, and so unequal, that such niceties must be sacrificed. •

The post Dazzled on the Danube appeared first on Inside Story.

But Besanko’s incendiary finding early yesterday afternoon that Ben Roberts-Smith, the most highly decorated and revered Australian soldier since the Vietnam war, was “a murderer, a war criminal and a bully” — as the headline in the Age instantly trumpeted its victory — is a watershed moment for the future of investigative journalism and, more profoundly, for the future of our military forces, upon whose reputation much of our national self-esteem has been cultivated for more than a century.

Besanko ruled that Roberts-Smith murdered or was complicit in the murder of multiple unarmed civilians while serving in Afghanistan. He found, on the balance of probabilities, that Roberts-Smith kicked a handcuffed prisoner off a cliff in 2012 before ordering another soldier to shoot him dead. He further found that in 2009, the SAS corporal ordered the killing of an elderly man found hiding in a tunnel in a bombed-out compound and, during the same operation, murdered with a machine gun a disabled man with a prosthetic.

The decision was not a criminal conviction but a civil judicial determination of truth on the “balance of probabilities.” But the reputation of Victoria Cross and Medal for Gallantry winner Roberts-Smith lies in tatters, along with that of the Special Air Service Regiment, with which he served, and the troubled Australian deployment in Afghanistan for which he was once a poster boy. And an air of grim foreboding hangs over the coming Afghanistan war crimes prosecutions in which Roberts-Smith is front and centre among many soldiers accused of grave abuses.

Roberts-Smith’s decision to sue for defamation must go down as one of the biggest own goals in history. As Age reporter Nick McKenzie pointed out after the verdict, the journalists had not wanted to go to court and neither had the SAS soldiers forced to give evidence against their former comrade. Roberts-Smith gambled that by taking defamation action he would intimidate and silence his media accusers. Instead, he simply amplified massively the damaging publicity in a case that dragged out over five years, thanks to Covid, and ended by vindicating his accusers.

Had Roberts-Smith simply professed his innocence and rejected the allegations in the Age reports, however damning they were, the media coverage would likely have subsided until the findings of the Brereton inquiry evolved into war crimes prosecutions, a process that clearly still has a way to run. At that point, if charged, he would have been judged alongside others accused of equally heinous crimes, with perhaps a better opportunity to introduce mitigating evidence and supportive witnesses — instead of flying solo into the sun in the civil courts.

Nine Entertainment, dating back to when it was known as Fairfax Media, has been rightly applauded for backing its journalists in this case. Had it lost, it would likely have been up for the bulk of the costs of the two legal teams — estimated at as much as $25 million — aside from any award of damages. (Another $10 million is estimated to have been spent by the Commonwealth on its representation in the case.) Even with an expected costs order in its favour, Nine is likely to finish out of pocket to the tune of several million dollars. But given the gravity of the matters at the heart of the stories, the company really had no choice but to stand and fight, for the sake of its own reputation as much as that of its star journalists.

The modern history of media defamation cases in Australia, including at Fairfax, has been mostly about negotiating early settlements and quick payouts to avoid the potentially crippling costs of going to trial and losing — a fact that often has only emboldened litigants whose misconduct was a proper target of journalistic investigation but who have plenty of money to stare down the media and muddy the waters with writs.

Had Nine lost to Roberts-Smith, the fallout would likely have been very serious for the future of investigative journalism in Australia. The huge financial toll would have made all publishers and broadcasters even more wary about tackling big stories challenging high-profile, well-resourced entities, more likely to fold than fight when their journalism was challenged legally, and probably less enthusiastic about investing the big bucks needed to employ and deploy good investigative journalists.

The decision in the defamation case has no formal bearing on the war crimes proceedings, which is why defence minister Richard Marles was able to escape yesterday with a brusque “no comment” on the civil matter when his office will undoubtedly be consumed with analysis of the fallout from the case. But the intense publicity surrounding the trial and its shocking conclusion will sharpen expectations of a timely and thorough interrogation of the conduct of Australian forces in Afghanistan, which is now a full-blown national scandal and an international embarrassment.

On the steps of the court after the verdict, Nick McKenzie — whose formidable career and reputation also hung in the balance with the trial’s outcome — rightly pointed out that the decision involved one soldier not his entire regiment, many of whose members had bravely spoken out about his conduct. “I’d like Ben Roberts-Smith to reflect on the pain that he’s brought on lots of men in the SAS who stood up and told the truth about his conduct,” McKenzie said. “They were mocked and ridiculed in court. They were bullied. They were intimidated.”

But with many other SAS soldiers under active investigation for murder and other very serious war crimes, and with the brutal and ugly culture of the unit drawn in graphic detail during the defamation hearings, the future of the SAS Regiment is in serious question if not untenable. It is painfully evident that much of the behaviour that led to the alleged atrocities thrived under an elitist and secretive code. Some SAS members were clearly emboldened to believe they could act with impunity and in defiance of international law.

The indications that multiple offences occurred over many years in Afghanistan calls into serious question not only the failure of the SAS commanders to maintain discipline but also the lack of supervision by the entire command structure of the Australian Defence Force.

Just as the misconduct of a minority has tarnished the reputation of the entire SAS and all those who fought with courage and dedication in Afghanistan, so too has that misconduct cast a shadow over the reputation of the entire ADF, its proud legacy in two world wars and multiple other conflicts, and its claim to be the repository of the hallowed Anzac spirit and a standard-bearer of the Australian character.

The problem has been compounded by sections of our defence establishment who have resolutely defended Ben Roberts-Smith and denounced the work of those journalists who dared to challenge his record, not least within the previous leadership of the Australian War Memorial. Most egregious among them was former AWM director and later chairman Brendan Nelson who, after the first reports appeared in the Age, accused the journalists of running a scurrilous and unfounded campaign against the SAS and Roberts-Smith in particular.

“Australians need to understand that we have amongst us a small number of real heroes and Ben Roberts-Smith is one of them,” Nelson declared. “I say to the average Aussie, if you see Ben Roberts-Smith, wave and give him a thumbs up.” When he appeared as a witness in the Federal Court two years ago, Nelson said he had been cautioned by a senior member of government about his effusive support for the soldier, and went on to say that he had rung Roberts-Smith after reading the story about him: “I told him I’d read the story, I knew it was about him. I told him that I believed in him. I was very sorry that such an article should be published about him.”

The $25 million question is how Ben Roberts-Smith will foot the bill for his and Nine’s costs in the likely event that the court orders him to pay. It has been reported that his boss and principal backer, Seven Network magnate Kerry Stokes, lent him $2 million to pursue the action against Nine. Stokes, who was chairing the AWM board when the case was launched, yesterday expressed disappointment with the decision and appeared to try to dismiss it as a disagreement between soldiers.

“The judgement does not accord with the man I know,” Stokes said. “I know this will be particularly hard for Ben, who has always maintained his innocence. That his fellow soldiers have disagreed with each other, this outcome will be the source of additional grief.”

It has been reported that the Stokes loan to Roberts-Smith was secured with his Victoria Cross medal. If so, this could well prove one of the worst commercial decisions in the shrewd businessman’s career.

As I have written previously, it would be politically and morally untenable for a soldier found to have committed murder to be allowed to keep a Victoria Cross — and an insult to the memory of all other VC winners. If Roberts-Smith’s right to wear the VC is revoked for dishonourable conduct, the medal will have little value beyond that of a historical curiosity, and certainly won’t be worth the $1 million-plus that Kerry Stokes has generously paid to acquire other Australian VCs for the AWM.

The court victory is another feather in the illustrious cap of veteran journalist Chris Masters but it cements McKenzie’s place as the pre-eminent Australian investigative journalist of his generation, if not all generations. Over two decades he has exposed a succession of scandals in Australian public, corporate and criminal life, but none more serious or consequential than the rot at the core of Australia’s armed forces. •

The post Murder he wrote appeared first on Inside Story.

Those words are a measure of how quickly the media landscape in Australia has changed. Today, such a thud would puzzle most of the target audience. For the remainder it would have a slightly embarrassing whiff of nostalgia.

Web-based news media has become the norm. The death of print has been predicted so often it has almost become a joke, but nobody doubts that hard-copy newspapers will end the second they stop turning a profit. That day grows closer as the generation that understood the significance of the thud on the veranda dies out.

Crikey, meanwhile, is in modest good health. It drew international attention late last year after Lachlan Murdoch sued over an opinion piece that described the Murdochs as “unindicted co-conspirators” in Washington’s Capitol riots. Murdoch abruptly dropped that action last month after News Corp’s depositions in Dominion’s case against Fox News attracted adverse publicity. Crikey claimed it as a win — not only for it, but for free speech.

Just three weeks earlier, Crikey had gone back to the future, appointing Sophie Black as editor-in-chief. Black is among the first journalists to have had a journalistic career entirely in online media — and mostly with Crikey. She worked there for ten years between 2004 and 2015, first as deputy editor, then as editor and editor-in-chief.

This time she replaces former Sydney Morning Herald editor Peter Fray, who exited the Crikey job after, somewhat worse for wear, he heckled ABC award winners at the Walkleys, suggesting that Crikey had broken their story first. He followed that up with a tweet describing the ABC as a fraud, but later apologised for his conduct.

It was a striking display of a characteristic that Black acknowledges is “baked in” to the Crikey personality — its self-image as a perpetual larrikin outsider, of the media yet outside the media.

And yet, despite the successive waves of change that have devastated many newsrooms, and despite the flat spots, missteps and not-infrequent self-indulgence, Crikey is still with us — the idiosyncratic survivor of the new media age.

Why? And what happens next under its new editor-in-chief?

Mayne, a former media adviser to the colourful Victorian Liberal premier Jeff Kennett, founded Crikey in late 1999. The weekday newsletter had already become part of the undertow of public life when Beecher took over, serving a niche audience of politicians, investors, journalists and news junkies with a mix of insider gossip, comment, analysis and speculation.

Although most media outlets were making their content available online for free, viewing the web as little more than a promotional opportunity, Mayne had charged a subscription from the very beginning. Today that looks like a stroke of genius.

Beecher’s Private Media Partners paid just $1 million for the business: a small amount but a significant milestone, for this was the first time an internet-based news service had changed hands for real money. Google had only just established itself as the world’s dominant search engine. Nobody had heard of social media. Facebook and Twitter only became accessible to the public the following year.

This was the time of the brave little blog-based startups, many of them not-for-profits run on a wing and a prayer and the enthusiasm of their founders. There was On Line Opinion, New Matilda, Tim Dunlop’s Road to Surfdom and group blogs including Club Troppo and Catallaxy.

A rhetorical battle of “bloggers v. journalists” was raging, with some suggesting that web-based citizen journalism would make professionals redundant. Few foresaw that the live blog would instead be taken over by mainstream media and become a staple, reinforcing the place of established mastheads at the centre of public dialogue. Independent bloggers mostly faded away, were recruited by the mainstream or switched to Twitter. Crikey lived on.

So what has changed since Black last worked for Crikey in 2015? “Less than you’d think,” she tells me. Some contributors — Guy Rundle and Bernard Keane among them — have been at Crikey for all of that time. Their combined output would, if grouped together, make several thick books.

As for the Lachlan Murdoch imbroglio, both Keane’s column that provoked the writ, and the way the publication handled it were “emblematic of what Crikey is about,” says Black. “A great cracking story for us is one that reveals the way power works in this country, and this was a story we were at the centre of.”

Murdoch accused Crikey of using the case to get publicity and subscribers. Private Media’s chief executive, Will Hayward, puts a different slant on it. “I thought the worst thing that could ever happen was that he sued us, we lose and no one cares.” Once the company decided to stand up to Murdoch and refuse to take the column down, he thought it was essential to “go big.”

Crikey took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times urging Lachlan to follow through on his threats and issue a writ. The battle immediately became international news, and the Australian media — which prefers to ignore Crikey — had to report it too.

Black acknowledges a “Lachlan bump” in subscriptions but says they had already been growing over the previous three years. That’s the amazing thing: Crikey is actually doing quite well, in a niche kind of way. It has been doing quite well for some time.

When Black left in 2015, subscriptions seemed to have hit a ceiling of around 12,000. Nothing the team did resulted in any further growth. Today, though, around 26,000 people pay $199 a year (with some getting discounts on that) to access the email newsletter and website.

Hayward won’t disclose profit figures but agrees that a back-of-the-envelope calculation of around $5 million annual revenue is in the ballpark. “A bit less than that because some subscriptions are discounted.”

But the dream of selling advertising on the basis of a small but influential audience has receded. Today, more than 95 per cent of Crikey’s revenue comes from subscriptions. Advertising is almost non-existent.

And the “Lachlan bump”? Around 5000 more people have subscribed since Murdoch sued. On top of that, a GoFundMe appeal to help cover legal costs raised $588,735 from 6700 donations. The court is now deciding whether that amount should be deducted from Crikey’s costs before Lachlan has to pay its bill. Crikey would prefer the money go to the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, and for Lachlan to pay full tote odds.

Financially, in other words, the bump was substantial but not game-changing. More important, perhaps, was the reinforcement the case gave to what Crikey likes to think of as its unique cultural position.

As a result of the growing subscriber numbers, says Black, Crikey is better resourced than it was when she was last editor. She reckons she has at least two more staff reporters to work with, bringing the editorial staff — including Black and Gina Rushton, who edits day to day — to seventeen. There is also a healthy budget for freelance contributors, though Black won’t say exactly what they pay. (Apparently not everyone gets the same rate.)

Since 2015 the wider world has changed too — as has social media. Staff reporter Cam Wilson “can write almost full-time on the phenomenon of fringe groups and conspiracy theories online,” says Black. “That has really struck me in terms of a marker of time and how much things have accelerated and changed.”

Day to day, the Crikey content is still divided between analysis, news reporting and obstreperous — and often long-winded — opinion. There is certainly more original content these days. Investigations editor David Hardaker has broken stories about Scott Morrison’s QAnon mate — before Four Corners covered the same ground — and Hillsong’s finances.

This week, climate editor Emma Elsworthy has explained the extent to which environment minister Tanya Plibersek is constrained by legislation in approving coalmines. In previous weeks, reporter Maeve McGregor has given a very different slant to reporting on the inquiry into the prosecution of Bruce Lehrmann.

Last year, Guy Rundle’s take on the death of Labor senator Kimberley Kitching was not only a tour de force of lyrical reporting but also the media’s only attempt to thoroughly explain the factional background to allegations she had been bullied.

All this is content you wouldn’t read anywhere else. And yes, there has also been gratuitous and overly long pontificating and over-hyped stories. But those are hardly unique faults.

And yet Crikey could so easily have failed. Before Black left in 2015, she was editor-in-chief not only of Crikey but also of a raft of small, online-only specialist publications started by Beecher in what Black today describes as a “fail fast, throw it up and see what works model.” There was a property newsletter, a daily arts review, a women’s issues newsletter and more. Most of them comprehensively failed.

The only survivors are Crikey itself, the Mandarin, which specialises in public service news, and SmartCompany, which targets entrepreneurs. According to Hayward, the three titles each account for about a third of Private Media’s profit/loss result, but Crikey is by far the biggest employer of journalists.

Perhaps the highest cost of the failed ventures was in opportunity. When they launched, Crikey had online-only news publishing to itself, and a subscription model the mainstream outlets were only just coming to terms with. The Guardian soon arrived in Australia, as did the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, the Daily Mail and youth-oriented Vice Media, which licensed its Australian web operation to Nine and a television channel to SBS.

If Beecher had invested in Crikey at that time rather than diverted energy into short-lived niche publications, it might have mounted more serious competition to the newcomers. Instead, for a long period, Crikey languished while the Guardian established itself and went from strength to strength. “I think that folding some of [the niche outlets] was an acknowledgement that Private Media needed to be more focused on the things that worked,” says Black. “I think it was stretched too thin.”

And yet BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post are now gone from the Australian scene. Vice Media filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States earlier this month, having made almost all of its Australian staff redundant in 2020. And Crikey is still with us.

These days, Private Media Partners is owned by a spider’s web of small shareholdings, including former employees, the publishing company Allen & Unwin, and the family of Beecher’s co-founder in Private Media, the late Di Gribble. The biggest investors include John B. Fairfax, once the proprietor of the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, and Cameron O’Reilly, son of media magnate Tony O’Reilly. Beecher is the largest shareholder with about 40 per cent, owned directly and through family companies.

Beecher is, in Black’s words, “very much chairman of the board” and not a visible presence in the newsroom most days. Stephen Mayne, best known these days as a shareholder activist, is no more than an occasional contributor.

On the day Murdoch dropped the case against Crikey, says Black, the most powerful feeling in the newsroom was relief. “It had been a lot for the reporters and those involved to carry.” Now she wants to capitalise on the experience. She sees “a real opportunity coming off the back of what’s happened with Murdoch to crystallise a sense of independence.”

She won’t be drawn on differences in style between her and her predecessor, Peter Fray — nor on the circumstances of his departure. But others observe that she lacks the braggadocio of old-school editors. “She is born of new media,” says one. “And that’s a very different vibe. It’s a more democratic vibe.”

She conceives Crikey as “almost like an old-fashioned campaigning newspaper, sitting outside media and observing it. I think that’s a pretty invaluable space that we’ve carved out over twenty years. It has been there since Mayne started it, and it means you kind of get to have your cake and eat it too.”

Years ago, Crikey was refused permission to go into the budget lock-up because it was not “real media.” It was there this year, but still treated very much as a poor relation. Crikey doesn’t get the “drops” of news stories and documents from the powerful, says Black.

“But I don’t think that’s a bad thing for the most part. It means we do things like the Murdoch campaign, like the fantastic campaign that Crikey ran on Scott Morrison’s lies. There’s an edge there. There’s a freedom where we are unimpeded in so many ways. And I think that lies at the heart of what makes Crikey unique and invaluable and what makes it so much fun.”

So what lies ahead? “We’ve got a subscription base who are invested, literally, in our independence and in supporting stances like the Murdoch case,” says Black, “and we want to feed that interest by continuing to cover issues around the public interest, free speech, freedom of information, and the way defamation law is weaponised in this country consistently and rigorously.” •

The post New media’s idiosyncratic survivor appeared first on Inside Story.

Politico’s Jack Shafer suggested it was Murdoch rather than the Dominion Voting System company that had somehow emerged the winner, despite the size of the payout. This is what News Corp does to make messes disappear, he wrote. “A hundred million here, a hundred million there, might crimp your finances, but in the Murdoch universe, paying such settlements is just the cost of doing business Murdoch-style.”

The company’s history does suggest settlements are part of the Murdoch modus operandi. As Shafer noted, News paid $US50 million to women who suffered sexual harassment at Fox, another $US15 million to an employee who complained of wage discrimination and $US500 million to a competitor in three separate actions over allegations of anticompetitive behaviour. Of the numerous other payouts, many are subject to non-disclosure agreements. And then there’s the invasion of privacy and other unethical conduct exposed by the hacking scandal in Britain, which the company tidied away by settling with legions of people.

But the Dominion case is different. The quantum of the payout — $US787.5 million, or half the company’s annual profit — is off the scale. It dwarfs the total amount paid during the hacking scandal and is generally seen as the largest defamation payout ever, by anyone, anywhere.

And this could be just the beginning. Another voting company, Smartmatic, is suing Fox for $US2.7 billion and has made allegations similar to Dominion’s. If it also settles for half, then Fox can kiss goodbye to the rest of the year’s profits and much of next year’s as well.

Then there’s a derivative case in which some of the “60 per cent of shareholders who aren’t Murdochs” are suing because they claim Fox board members and managers left them exposed to financial loss. The shareholders will allege that Fox decision-makers failed, despite numerous warnings, in their fiduciary duty to stop the on-air lies. Several cases are likely, all with eye watering amounts at stake. There’s also speculation the company will struggle to find insurance cover in future, or that its premiums will become prohibitively expensive.

The settlement has been a huge news story across the nation’s rival, and often tribal, TV networks. If the coverage I’ve seen is any guide, Murdoch isn’t having a great time in the court of public opinion either. On the relatively progressive MSNBC network, presenters were lining up all day to kick Fox and its on-air presenters, but especially Rupert Murdoch.

The most scathing attack was meted out by one of the network’s hosts, Lawrence O’Donnell, who delighted in pointing out that Murdoch “surrendered today like you have never seen him surrender before.” he claimed that in any other company the boss would be kicked out for the “stupidity” Murdoch had displayed.

O’Donnell argued that Murdoch had failed to provide the most basic oversight, such as insisting hosts issue the magic words “if that’s true” when discussing contested claims on air. He also accused Murdoch of mismanaging the Dominion law suit. If the company was always going to settle, he asked, why didn’t it do so before the chief executive and the most controversial on-air hosts were forced to go on oath and hand over their phones.

On this point, other commentators expressed gratitude to Dominion for pursuing the case long enough to force Fox to disclose all those internal emails and memos. Some even argued this was central to Dominion’s strategy; that it was a kind of gift to the nation and proof that Fox’s behaviour had undermined democracy itself.

The pre-trial documents remain on the public record and will continue to provide fodder for Murdoch-watchers for years to come. They’ve already revealed dozens of embarrassing details, such as high-profile Fox presenter Tucker Carlson’s passionate hatred of Trump despite his on-air adoration. They reveal the cynical culture and radically populist agenda inside an organisation that’s often captive to its own audience’s prejudices.

Over at Fox there’s been barely an on-air mention of the settlement. It was given perfunctory treatment when the network’s media reporter read a corporate statement that ended with the claim that the settlement “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.” The statement also said, “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

Back on MSNBC, contributors were quick to point out that an acknowledgement is not the same as an admission. In fact, the statement was little more than an allusion to the fact that judge Eric Davis had already ruled that Fox’s coverage was full of falsehoods. Davis was so convinced that he also ruled this conclusion couldn’t be disputed in the trial.

Observers noted that an acknowledgement also falls a long way shy of an apology, and it quickly became apparent that Fox wouldn’t be issuing one. An intriguing question is how much extra cash News handed over to Dominion to avoid having to say sorry. One suspects quite a lot: when you think about it, an appropriate apology would be quite a mouthful. To do justice to the matter it would have to say something like “Sorry for lying, systematically and knowingly, while trashing the Dominion business and amplifying the conspiracy theories of a president trying to overturn a democratic election and incite insurrection.” I suspect News would pay a lot of money to avoid saying that out loud.

Despite the cost, there appears to be little hope that Fox will change its ways anytime soon. On the day after the ruling, Tucker Carlson was hammering on about the same old issues — the spread of trans culture, the failures of the Biden administration, perceived security threats, the culture wars. As usual, no progressive voices were on hand to temper the fear-mongering. So perhaps Shafer is right? The business may have been bruised, but the business model is still intact.

Since I started writing this article we’ve discovered what the case means for Crikey and the lawsuit brought by Lachlan Murdoch against the Private Media masthead. You may remember that Lachlan’s case centres on Crikey’s decision to publish, and then re-publish, an article that claimed the Murdochs were the “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 6 January uprising in the Washington.

The Dominion case exposed the weakness of Murdoch’s argument. Fox chose not to defend the claim that it knowingly and repeatedly published false information and conspiracy theories that favoured the side advocating an uprising. To be clear, the United States is one of the toughest jurisdictions in which to bring a case against the media. It wasn’t enough that Fox was consistently wrong, Dominion had to prove actual malice by demonstrating a wilful motivation to damage Dominion through its falsehoods. The discovery process revealed that even with that protection Fox would be hard-pressed to defend itself.

The resulting trove of internal Fox documents was a boon for Crikey’s lawyers, who had to make the much stronger case under Australian defamation law that Fox made a concerted effort to undermine public confidence in the election result, contributing to the uprising. We’ve all seen what’s in the memos, and so has Lachlan Murdoch. This morning he bowed to the inevitable. •

The post Bruised but not yet beaten appeared first on Inside Story.

Petty in the Australian, 25 March 1967. Flinders University Museum of Art

In a cross made of newsprint, the words on the upright are Ho Chi Minh’s and those on the crosspiece are Lyndon Johnson’s. You can imagine the indigestion at the breakfast tables of a still very white Australia when politicians’ words burdened a shockingly Vietnamese Christ on a modern via dolorosa. It isn’t pretty or funny, but it is morally and intellectually arresting. It has historical and symbolic depth as well as contemporary bite.

If you’re looking for ground zero of the idea that cartoonists are “of the left” in Australia, Petty’s stint at the Australian during its first decade is it. He sided with the little guy, then asked how the system worked to keep him little and the usual suspects (captains of industry, financiers, the military industrial complex) big. His cartoons can be busy because he thinks in systems and mechanisms and wants to make them operate more fairly and generously.

Petty was always inclined to treat politicians more as lackeys of vested interests and playthings of historical processes than as proper villains in their own right. This, I think, made him deeper than most other cartoonists or, indeed, most other satirists. I put no statute of limitations on this view. Juvenal looks like a grumpy whinger with a brilliant turn of phrase by comparison. Bill Leak could play the man superbly in his caricatures and punchlines, but the shafts of lightning didn’t shed consistent light on Australia as it is, and as it could be.

Petty’s cartoons did just that. The critique changed with the times, as the times demanded, but the golden thread of wanting a better, fairer, more intelligent and independent nation never disappeared into the fabric of daily affairs. On my first visit to interview him in the late nineties, he pointed me to a cupboard where there were “a few pictures of mine.” It was less than a dozen — Petty visited the past often to learn lessons, but never to dwell there. He lived for tomorrow’s paper, and the current art project.

He came a long way from a fruit farm in Doncaster as a child of the Depression, but he never lost the practical attitude to problems and sense of guiding purpose. Every cartoon asks something like “How do you fix this bloody thing, and get it to do what we want?” More or less sequentially, his satire had four great themes.

I have already illustrated the first — the horror and stupidity of war, particularly the Vietnam war. He had been to London and witnessed the collapse of Empire made explicit in decolonisation and the Suez Crisis of 1956. He returned to Australia via Southeast Asia in time to be cartooning during the death of Kennedy, the resignation of Menzies and, most importantly, the incremental decision to join the United States in Vietnam.

Rupert Murdoch’s adventure in national influence, the Australian, was in its initial (wildly) progressive phase, and Petty was its standard-bearer. He was half a generation older than baby boomers threatened with conscription and increasingly inclined to flood the street with moratoria. He also blew up the pomposity of Anzac Day in 1969 with a dismembered soldier’s corpse from the actual war diverting a pious procession of “lest we forget.”

Meanwhile, the Coalition governments were deteriorating comically, and Petty especially “owned” the image of Billy McMahon as a hapless, vainglorious fool with very big ears:

Broadsheet, November 1972. National Gallery of Victoria

It’s funny, in a bitter kind of way, how often people have had recourse to the “worst PM since McMahon” trope in recent years. I wonder if Morrison has reset the clock on that one.

In a series of cartoon books as well as at the Australian, he sought to shape the rebirth of interest in national character and destiny in the dawning post-British age. In the heroic age of this project, the hero — and the exemplar of Petty’s second theme — was Gough Whitlam:

The Australian, 14 November 1972.

The fulfilment of the dream of an open, egalitarian and cosmopolitan Australia under Whitlam was messy and exciting — Petty even donated a logo to the 1974 election campaign. The big hump in his career was when the dream collided with the first of several stages of reaction to the dismissal at the end of 1975. Malcolm Fraser wrongly assumed that normal postwar boom conditions would return with sensible chaps back in the big white cars, a trick Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison tried in recent years with even less success.

Petty spent the second half of his life exploring his third and fourth themes, a long, intelligent dissent from this “Lucky Country” mentality and from the Reaganite confidence in market forces that came in its train. He never tired of showing how and why the economy should serve human needs and desires rather than its own geometry of indices. And he was farmer’s son enough to recognise that you have to protect long-term interests from human rapacity. Two cartoons, from 1977 and 2015 respectively, show that you can be right a long time as a satirist and not necessarily be attended to:

The Age, 30 April 1977.

The Age, 17 August 2015.

When the Age suggested that he stop cartooning in 2016, at the ridiculously premature age of eighty-six, he was annoyed and disappointed. He lived for the work, and kept drawing anyway, right up to the last months. He understood ideas and the weight of the past, but it was the next paper, the next crop, the next generation that always mattered most. His optimism was informed by clear-eyed experience but was also incredibly robust.

What would he say to the nation today? With his genius for being stern yet quizzical, I don’t think he’d mind having this cartoon thrown back into the current debate over what it is to be a proper nation, one true to its past, present and future:

The Age, 20 April 2015.

Though he is gone now, it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to look again into the satirical mirror he held up to us for so many decades. We might see something we could fix. •

The post Petty’s golden thread appeared first on Inside Story.

Although the Murdochs strongly supported Trump during his presidency, and although the audience for their American media tended to be pro-Republican, they were ready to face facts after the election-night count. Fox News’s chief political correspondent, Bret Baier, saw “no evidence of fraud. None.” Murdoch’s New York Post urged Trump to accept the result. His “baseless” stolen-election rhetoric “undermines faith in democracy and faith in the nation,” said the paper.

Along with the Associated Press, the network had made an early call for Biden in the crucial state of Arizona on election night. It proved to be the right call, but it infuriated the Trump camp as premature, if not wilfully wrong.

As we now know from internal documents obtained by Dominion Voting Systems as part of its legal action against Fox News, key Fox figures were already railing against what they saw as an audience-alienating decision on election night. “We worked really hard to build what we have,” high-profile anchor Tucker Carlson wrote on 5 November. “Those fuckers” — senior editor Bill Sammon and reporter Chris Stirewalt, who had decided to call Arizona for Biden — “are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”

“The audience feels like we crapped on [them],” wrote Scott, “and we have damaged their trust and belief in us… We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.” Sammon and Stirewalt were soon forced out of Fox, not for making a professional error but for their “arrogance” and for damaging the “brand.”

The clashes continued. On the night of 12 November, Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted that “top election infrastructure officials” had found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” An indignant Tucker Carlson wrote to his colleagues: “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck? … It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Again, Scott took the same line. Heinrich “has serious nerve doing this,” she wrote, “and if this gets picked up viewers are going to be further disgusted.” By morning Heinrich had deleted the tweet. (The New York Times later reported: “While she removed a tweet in which Mr. Trump had tagged her colleagues Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, she posted the same fact check in response to a different tweet from Mr Trump that made the same false claim but did not tag her colleagues.”)

Fox’s White House correspondent Kristin Fisher got similarly short shrift when she fact-checked fraud claims by lawyer Sidney Powell and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. She was immediately told by phone that higher-ups were unhappy and she needed to do a better job of “respecting our audience.”

Respect was suddenly Fox’s word of the moment, Fox’s prime-time anchor Sean Hannity was arguing that “respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical. Fox has spent the last month spitting at them.” For outsiders, though, nurturing the audience’s delusions and punishing staff who behave professionally might seem a strange sort of respect.

In the early days after the election, when Fox seemed ready to accept the result, the network’s rating began declining. It was “getting creamed by CNN!” wrote Murdoch, but much more troubling was the number of viewers who were switching — with Trump’s encouragement — to upstart rivals on their right, Newsmax and One America News.

On 9 November Trump retweeted a series of stories from Newsmax claiming election fraud. Three days later his attacks on Fox escalated in a flurry of tweets encouraging viewers to switch to other networks. By the end of that day, Fox stocks were down 6 per cent; by mid November the network’s daytime audience had fallen from a pre-election 2.4 million to just 1.6 million, and its prime-time audience from 5.3 million to 3.5 million. Newsmax’s viewer numbers increased sixfold, from 57,000 to 329,000.

Fox News had become prisoner of the monster it had created. An audience fed on fantasies couldn’t face the new reality. “To be honest,” one producer said, “our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition.” A network executive conceded that “conspiratorial reporting might be exactly what the disgruntled viewer is looking for.” Commercial profitability and professional integrity were pulling in opposite directions.

This was the moment when management announced its dramatic pivot. Scott called 9 November, six days after the election, “Day One” and committed the network to pushing “narratives that would entice their audience back.” She was, she said, “trying to get everyone to comprehend we are on a war footing.” Two themes figured prominently in subsequent Fox News internal communications: “brand” and “respecting the audience.” Both would override accuracy and other professional scruples.

The on-air results of Scott’s directive were dramatic: by the end of the second week after Fox News had called the election for Biden, it had “questioned the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it at least 774 times,” according to Media Matters for America. Off-air, Fox News’s chief financial officer reported on 8 December that Fox’s “ratings momentum has been extraordinary [and] it is feeding absolutely into advertising strength.” Scott was rewarded with a multi-year extension to her contract.

Newly focused on promoting claims of electoral fraud, the network’s primary targets were Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, the two companies that provided electronic voting equipment for the election. Powell and Giuliani were the Trump associates most vigorously accusing the companies of having conspired to alter the election results.

Powell asserted that Trump had won not just by hundreds of thousands but by millions of votes shifted in Biden’s favour by Dominion’s software. “It’s really the most massive and historical egregious fraud the world has ever seen,” she said. Her dramatic claims had audience appeal. When research showed that viewers were switching to Newsmax specifically to watch her as a guest, Hannity brought Powell onto his program.

Giuliani was equally emphatic: Dominion’s machine “was developed to steal elections.” Dominion was “an organised criminal enterprise… started in Venezuela with Cuban money.” The intemperance of his language was no barrier to repeated appearances on Fox.

Of the several Fox presenters who took up the theme, the most extreme was Lou Dobbs. “Read all about Dominion and Smartmatic voting companies and you’ll soon understand how pervasive this Democrat electoral fraud is,” he tweeted, “and there’s no way in the world the 2020 presidential election was either free or fair.” It was “an electoral 9/11 against the United States, with the cooperation and collusion of the media and the Democrat Party and China.” “It is a cyber Pearl Harbor,” he added. “We have technical presentations that prove there is an embedded controller in every Dominion machine.”

Even the Trump campaign distanced itself from the seemingly unhinged Powell and Giuliani. Trump ally Chris Christie called Powell a “national embarrassment” and Trump’s legal team thought Giuliani was “deranged.” Although the Trump campaign disavowed Powell on 22 November, she and Giuliani continued to appear on Fox for several more weeks.

Even after the 6 January attacks on the Capitol, Fox continued to host guests who claimed the election was stolen. On 26 January Carlson interviewed My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell after he was banned from Twitter for promoting lies about Dominion and the election. Lindell repeated those lies without any challenge from Carlson. Not coincidentally, Lindell is one of Fox News’s biggest sponsors. According to Murdoch’s deposition in the Dominion case, Lindell “pays us a lot of money.” “It is not red or blue, it is green” — it is about money rather than politics — he agreed when questioned by Dominion’s lawyers.

Given the frequency and severity of the attacks on Dominion, the company’s decision to sue Fox News came as no surprise. Dominion also sued Newsmax and its three most prominent accusers, Powell, Giuliani and Lindell. (The other voting machine company, Smartmatic, has also sued Fox News.) The fallout has already been spectacular. Dominion has gained access to thousands of internal Fox News documents revealing extraordinary cynicism and hypocrisy among executives and producers.

A media organisation can’t successfully be sued for defamation by a public figure in America unless malice can be shown, and any effort to do that usually relies on inferences and indirect evidence. Not in this case: “I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”

The contrast between what the Fox News personnel were saying to each other and what they were saying on air was stark. Disparaging descriptions of Powell, Giuliani and other fraud-pushers — “mind-blowingly nuts,” “totally off the rails,” “crazy,” “absurd” and “shockingly reckless” — figure frequently in their internal communications, but didn’t stop “really crazy stuff” (in Murdoch’s words) being put to air. Commenting on one program, Fox president Jay Wallace observed that “the North Koreans do a more nuanced show.”

Not a single Fox witness testified that they believed the allegations about the voting-machine company to be true, according to Dominion’s account of the deposition evidence. Fox’s internal fact-checking department, the Brainroom, also said the claims against Dominion were wrong.

“Sidney Powell is lying; she is a complete nut,” Carlson told his fellow prime-time anchor Laura Ingraham. “No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.” “Nut” seems close to the mark: in an email to Maria Bartiromo, whose show she had appeared on several times, Powell said her source of information on Dominion was a person who described herself as “internally decapitated,” capable of “time travel in a semi-conscious state” and able to speak to “the Wind” as “a ghost.” Apparently this raised no red flags at Fox.

These internal communications provide excellent ammunition for Dominion, and there are further reasons why the company is likely to receive extremely high damages. Most defamation cases involve a single article or a short series by a small number of individual journalists, whereas this one involves a blizzard of segments over several months.

Dominion’s suit focuses on twenty statements across six Fox programs. It argues that “literally dozens of people with editorial responsibility — from the top of the organisation to the producers of specific shows to the hosts themselves — acted with actual malice.”

Likely to add to the damages is the fact that Dominion communicated 3600 times with Fox during the broadcasting of the contentious segments in order to correct facts. Most importantly, it sent an email titled “Setting the Record Straight,” and a series of updates, to more than ninety of Fox’s reporters, producers and anchors.

Nineteen of the twenty statements were made after Dominion alerted Fox that they were lies and pointed the network to the correct information. But Fox kept defaming Dominion and failed to respond to demands for retractions. “To this day,” says the company, “Fox has never retracted the false statements it broadcast about Dominion.”

While most defamation cases focus on damage to the plaintiff’s general reputation, Fox’s claims went further, undermining Dominion’s very existence as a commercial entity. The company’s business relies on a bipartisan acceptance of its integrity and reliability. Since the Fox News onslaught, several of its contracts have been challenged by Trump Republicans. All Fox’s claims about its audience size and influence are now being used as evidence of the damage done to Dominion.

“As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved,” says Dominion, pointing to threats to its employees and the extra security it has been forced to employ.

Fox also showed a corresponding lack of interest in reporting developments counter to the narrative pushed by Trump and his allies. Unmentioned went the fact that Dominion machines are used in twenty-eight states — including battleground states Florida and Ohio, which Biden lost. On 11 November, for instance, Sean Hannity told his audience that the hand recount in Georgia would help resolve questions about Dominion. When the count was completed later that month and the governor of Georgia declared the voting machines had been accurate, Hannity was silent.

The Dominion lawsuit has also ushered in a new phase in the Donald Trump–Rupert Murdoch relationship. The mutually convenient bromance of 2016–20 is long gone. Murdoch’s American newspapers have consistently editorialised against Trump’s claims of a rigged election. The Wall Street Journal declared the charges against Dominion baseless. After the midterm Congressional elections, in which the candidates Trump most closely embraced performed poorly, the Journal called him an electoral liability. The New York Post was much cheekier, with a front-page caricature of Trump as Humpty Dumpty under the headline “Trumpty Dumpty.”

The initial cache of documents released by Dominion late last month showed that Murdoch thought Trump’s claims of fraud were baseless and that he strongly disapproved of them. Ironically, of course, it was one of his organisations, Fox News, that did most to give those baseless claims political currency. In mid December Fox reported a poll saying 70 per cent of Republicans thought the election was rigged because of voter fraud. Without Fox’s intense coverage, we can only guess how much lower that percentage might have been.

The revelation that Murdoch disapproved of Fox’s coverage in principle but encouraged it in practice shows him to be a hypocrite. But the stark contrast between on-air and off-air views also raises crucial questions about how other Fox personnel saw their responsibility. At one stage, Carlson texted Ingraham: “It’s unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” It is as if Carlson thought he had to be a passive cipher for Powell and Giuliani’s views, however mistaken. When Maria Bartiromo’s producer was asked “If someone says something untrue on one of your shows, do you think that it’s important to correct it?” she simply replied “No.”

As a result of Murdoch’s deposition in the Dominion case, Trump discovered that after the 6 January Capitol riot Fox News’s owner aimed to make Trump a “non-person.” His response was characteristic:

If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged and Stollen, then he and his group of MAGA Hating Globalist RINOS [Republicans in name only] should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding and abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS.

Much more will emerge when the court case begins in Delaware on 17 April. Apart from the huge sums of money involved, the case raises fundamental issues about the health of American democracy and the responsibilities of the media. “These lies did not simply harm Dominion,” the voting-technology company argues. “They harmed democracy. They harmed the idea of credible elections. They harmed a once-unshakeable faith in democratic transfers of power.”

Fox News was a crucial ally of Trump in his attempt to reject the election outcome, and many of the radicals who stormed the Capitol on 6 January would have viewed the claims of electoral fraud broadcast repeatedly on the network. It is this association that Crikey’s Bernard Keane probably had in mind when he attributed to the Murdochs part of the blame for the riots, an assertion that prompted Lachlan Murdoch to sue under Australian defamation laws.

Never has a court case in Delaware been more keenly watched in two Sydney law chambers than Dominion’s will be. •

The post Damaging the brand appeared first on Inside Story.

The two fifty-five-minute programs that make up India: The Modi Question contain almost nothing that has not been known in India for years. But the BBC’s involvement brought the stories to a global audience.

Part one unfavourably portrays Narendra Modi’s role as chief minister in the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat state in 2002. It includes awkward and embarrassing videoclips of Modi’s speeches and interviews at the time. Part two focuses on the unenviable human rights record of Modi’s national government, and especially its treatment of India’s Muslim minority of close to 200 million people, or around 14 per cent of the population. The Indian government has banned the showing of the first but not the second part.

The documentary was immediately denounced by the Indian external affairs ministry for “the bias, the lack of objectivity, and frankly a continuing colonial mindset.” The documentary, the ministry’s Arindam Bagchi added, “is a reflection on the agency and individuals that are peddling this narrative again.”

Not surprisingly, the ban on part one led to curiosity in India about what it contained. Illegal showings were organised, and zealous police clashed with student groups screening the documentary in universities.

A month later, on 14 February, the national government’s income tax authorities began what became a three-day “survey” of BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai. It was not a “raid,” officials emphasised; “raids” happen after dark.

The survey, said the authorities, was the culmination of a longstanding investigation into the BBC’s alleged “deliberate non-compliance with Indian laws including transfer pricing rules and diversion of profits illegally.” Four days after the survey, authorities let it be known that “the income/profits shown by various group entities was not commensurate with scale of operations in India.” The BBC was reported to be waiting for an official notification of the charges.

For people whose memories extend back to 1975 a sense of déjà vu kicked in. The BBC was expelled from India in the first month after prime minister Indira Gandhi proclaimed an “emergency,” arrested political opponents and introduced censorship of the press. “Indira is India and India is Indira,” her supporters chanted, as she and her younger son attempted to build a personality cult around the prime minister. In India today, it is hard to look, listen or read without encountering prime minister Narendra Modi’s image.

The notion of a conspiracy against India had gained momentum earlier in February when the US financial firm Hindenburg, which specialises in short-selling, released a damaging report on the vast corporate structure of Gautam Adani, one of the richest men in the world. Adani and prime minister Modi are both Gujaratis, and their rise to international prominence in the past twenty years has coincided.

This epic has a long way to go, but listed shares in Adani companies have lost a lot of value, and Gautam Adani’s close connections with the prime minister have given the opposition in India’s parliament the first opportunity in years to challenge the government convincingly. Portions of speeches in parliament attacking the prime minister were ordered expunged from the record by the speaker.

The Adani group issued a 400-page rebuttal claiming the Hindenburg report was “a calculated attack on India, the independence, integrity and quality of Indian institutions, and the growth story and ambition of India.” Its rhetoric projected the Adani business empire as a symbol of India.

The most recent feather-ruffling came on 16 February when billionaire George Soros said, in the course of a long address, that the troubles of the Adani group and its links to the prime minister and his government might “significantly weaken Modi’s stranglehold on India’s federal government and open the door to push for much-needed institutional reforms.”

Soros’s remarks, declared an Indian magazine that supports Modi’s government, “largely validate the existence of a larger conspiracy to derail the Modi government.” Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar, visiting Australia, described Soros as “old, rich, opinionated” and “dangerous,” and pointed out that India’s years under colonial rule had alerted it to the dangers of “outside interference.”

When Indira Gandhi was directing her “emergency” fifty years ago, the bitter experience of colonialism and the dangers of the “foreign hand” were frequent themes.

The flutter over the recent affronts to prime minister Modi and to India have been interpreted in two very different ways. At one pole, a respected and reflective columnist saw the possibility that “the first cracks” were appearing “in the hegemonic empire Modi and his BJP have built.” An activist who is also a serious electoral analyst had already calculated that a BJP victory in next year’s national elections could be difficult given the strength of local parties in many of India’s twenty-eight states.

At the other interpretive pole, the recent incidents are seen as opportunities for India to show its muscle and strut its stuff. According to pro-Modi figures, the “Western democracies” need a growing India more than India needs them — for economic and strategic reasons. Underlining India’s ability to wield economic and strategic influence, they point out that two Indian airlines have ordered almost a thousand passenger jets from Boeing and Airbus, and India is seen as a key element in making the Quad — an alignment of the United States, Japan, Australia and India — a significant entity.

The way to deal with the BBC, a BJP supporter noted, was not with clumsy denunciations and tax surveys. Rather, “the Indian diaspora” in Britain should be encouraged to join the movement to defund the broadcaster “unless the BBC gets out of bed with… left-liberals and Islamists of various hues.” A vast, influential diaspora with Indian roots was something Indira Gandhi didn’t have. Rishi Sunak and others should be expecting calls. •

The post Ruffled feathers or straws in the wind? appeared first on Inside Story.

We all know that polls taken years before an election are poor predictors of voting intentions. Unforeseen events will occur, of course, but it’s also unrealistic to expect all voters to know what they’d do under the suddenly posed hypothetical: “If an election were held today…”

As the actual vote approaches, polls get better, especially when the question becomes “How will you vote on Saturday the Xth?” (These days the question is tweaked to take account of what is increasingly a weeks-long voting period.)

Things are trickier when a referendum is being discussed. Nearly everyone knows what an election is. But what proportion could immediately describe what a referendum actually is? What about words like “enshrined,” “Indigenous Voice” and the “Constitution” itself?

Way back in 1987, a Newspoll found that only 54 per cent of respondents “knew that Australia has a written Constitution.” In 1992 a Saulwick poll put the figure at 67 per cent. More recently, in 2021, the Constitutional Values Survey found a much higher 83 per cent answering affirmative to the easier statement, “had heard of the Australian Constitution.” And the proportion who could describe how the document is amended? We have no idea.

Americans are more likely to know about their founding document, and it’s possible Australians are more aware of America’s too. Its clauses (particularly its amendments) feature regularly in international news, commentary and popular culture. (America’s, unlike ours, is amended by majorities of federal and state legislatures.)

Until this year the Voice to Parliament was largely a preoccupation of the political/academic/media class. A little over half the respondents to this 2021 survey, for example, had never heard of it.

Given all these uncertainties, springing a benignly described question on an unsuspecting citizen isn’t going to produce a reliable indicator of people’s eventual voting decision. So it’s little wonder early polls on referendums have a history of being wildly wrong — much more wrong than voting intentions ones. But they too become better predictors as the day approaches.

(The 2017 marriage equality survey would also have suffered from the evolution of the question’s meaning, but to a much lesser extent. It was not intended to change the Constitution, and the “vote” was just another survey, labelled as such, voluntary, filled in at home — and by three-quarters of respondents, it turned out, during the first week of the official campaign. Like the 1999 republic referendum, it dealt with a familiar, long-discussed topic, but without the earlier one’s constitutionally ordained, and fatal, requirement that a specific model be approved.)

The last time a Labor government held a referendum — a midterm set of four questions — was in September 1988. Shadow cabinet voted to support two and oppose two, but the party rooms overturned them and the Liberal and National parties campaigned energetically against all four.

Triumphantly as it turned out; what the Hawke government saw as a set of proposals so inoffensive it would slip through unharmed became the worst-performing in referendum history. The cause was not helped by a High Court finding that some of the government’s info-ads had broken the law.

In the final six months of that campaign, polled support halved, from the high 60s and low 70s to the 30s. Party-support surveys have been known to shift by several points over similar periods, but nothing approaching 30 per cent. The actual survey questions have disappeared into the ether, and they would have changed over the months, but the early ones (to take one of the four proposals) might have been along the lines of “Do you support recognising local government in the Constitution?” To which a reasonable answer might have been “Sure, why not, it makes sense.”

By referendum day, after an all-singing, all-dancing campaign, the act of voting had become more complicated for the one-in-three voters who ended up “changing their mind.” From their point of view, the question might have become “Exactly why does this government want to change the Constitution?”

From there, the questions would have multiplied: “We’ve survived this long without this change, why do it now? This important document should not be tinkered with lightly; I read somewhere it will create a lawyers’ picnic. And the taxpayer dollars to do all this” — $30 million–plus was bandied about then; for the Voice the popular estimate is $200 million — “would have been much better spent elsewhere. And it wouldn’t hurt to remind this rather arrogant and complacent government who’s in charge.”

During 2022 and 2023 the main Voice polls have measured expressed opinions about “support/in favour” rather than voting intentions for a referendum held either “today” or later in the year. The wording will change later in the year, but these are the reported questions for recently released surveys.

Essential asks: “As you may be aware, there will be a referendum held later this year on whether a Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be enshrined in the Constitution. Do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

Newspoll, in the Australian: “There is a proposal to alter the Australian Constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament. Are you personally in favour or against this proposal?”

Resolve, in Nine papers: “The new federal government has committed to a referendum — a national vote — on whether to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Constitution. You will be asked to vote on this change to the Constitution in the next year or two, and voting is compulsory. Given this, do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

Resolve’s reported “next year or two” and “new federal government” look like gremlin-induced remnants of 2022 polls. Apart from that, its wording seems best because, while rather long and laborious, it doesn’t assume people know that the Constitution can only be amended by popular vote, or what a “referendum” is. But still, like the others, it’s different from a standard political poll because it doesn’t ask about voting intention.

So there’s variety in pollsters’ questions, much more than is found, again, in party-support polls. Referendum polling seems an even less exact science than general election polling. Despite that, though, the polls are all recording similar levels at the moment: around 60 per cent support once you exclude undecideds and/or push them to choose.

(That Resolve survey was taken in two portions. The first in December found 62 per cent net support, while the second in late January, after opposition leader Peter Dutton had launched his quasi-No “confusion” campaign and the topic started featuring heavily in the news, had it lower, at 58 per cent.)

Obviously the surveys taken in the final week of the campaign will more resemble each other and be very different from those above. They’ll ask people how they voted if they’ve done so already, or how they intend to vote. They’ll all be pretty close to the final result. (Even a 2019-sized poll fail will appear respectable unless the “error” happens to account for the difference between success and failure.)

Afterwards, accounts of the Voice referendum will describe a trajectory of surveyed “support,” but in reality the question respondents answer, from January to referendum day, will gradually have changed.

How meaningful are opinion polls purporting to measure support for inserting an Indigenous Voice to Parliament into the Australian Constitution? At the moment, barely meaningful at all. •

The post Just remind me, what is the Constitution? appeared first on Inside Story.

We find ourselves in the former group. We were deeply moved by the Netflix series, directed by the critically acclaimed American documentary film-maker Liz Garbus, and were absorbed by the book. It isn’t simply the human drama that gripped us, or our sympathy for Harry and Meghan. We also see significant implications for Australia in the way the debate over their actions has played out.

Any account of these recent events must begin with Princess Diana, for it is increasingly apparent that her rebelliousness lives on strongly in Prince Harry and is evident in Meghan’s attitudes and behaviour. When Diana was alive, many people saw her as the best thing going for a stodgy and rapidly fading royal family. What’s often forgotten is that before her death in August 1997 she had become a prominent social activist.

We were particularly struck by footage in the BBC documentary, Heart of the Matter, showing her walking in protective clothing through a recently cleared minefield in Angola earlier in 1997. “I’d read the statistics that Angola has the highest percentage of amputees anywhere in the world,” she explained to the camera. “That one person in every 333 had lost a limb, most of them through landmine explosions. But that hadn’t prepared me for the reality.”

We were also struck by another TV image: Diana sitting by the bedside of an HIV/AIDS sufferer in a hospital. During a visit to Cape Town to see her brother, Earl Spencer, in 1997 Diana had met with Nelson Mandela, who praised her dedication to helping those infected with HIV/AIDS. “We saw her sitting on the beds of AIDS patients and shaking hands with them, and that changed perceptions dramatically with regards to AIDS,” Mandela recalled. He also expressed his appreciation for Diana’s visit to children in Angola crippled by landmines, observing that she had helped inspire the campaign to destroy South African landmines.

An important feature of Diana’s social activism was its internationalism. As well as AIDS awareness and prevention, she supported charities and organisations committed to battling poverty and homelessness, visited charities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Nepal, India and other countries fighting leprosy, and opposed the stigma surrounding mental illness.

In the last year of her life, Diana began dating Dodi Fayed, an Egyptian producer whose well-known films included Chariots of Fire. Perhaps her attraction to an Egyptian man partly reflected a desire to extend her consciousness beyond England with an act of love that was also a rebellious act. After all, Egypt had been the scene of perfidies and infamies characteristic of the British Empire, especially the crushing (with the help of Australian soldiers) of the gathering movement for Egyptian independence in 1919.

The open grief of the British public after Diana’s death led us to believe that the tabloids had learned their lesson and would no longer harass, intrude on and exploit the royal family. We are astonished by our naivety.

Despite his decade-long career in the British army, Harry undoubtedly carries on his mother’s tradition of rebelliousness and internationalism. He is patron of a leading landmine-clearance charity, the Halo Trust, and has called for the world to become free of those weapons by 2025. Twenty-two years after Diana, he retraced his mother’s footsteps in Angola.

After walking along the suburban street that was once filled with explosives, he said it was “quite emotional” to retrace Diana’s steps “and to see the transformation that has taken place, from an unsafe and desolate place into a vibrant community of local businesses and colleges… I’m incredibly proud of what she’s been able to do and meet these kids here who were born on this street.”

A news agency photo shows Harry sitting beneath the Diana Tree, which marks the spot where Diana was pictured in the minefield. “Landmines,” he said, “are an unhealed scar of war.” In 2014 he had established the Invictus Games to support soldiers permanently injured in combat.

Harry and Meghan have also taken a leading role in drawing attention to the needs of people with mental illness. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, Harry revealed his own difficulties with mental distress while Meghan discussed her depression, experience of a suicidal state and the shocking refusal of the Palace to offer mental health support when she asked for it during her time in England. Under royal protocol, Meghan was compelled to give up her keys, passport and driver’s licence and only got them back when she returned to the United States.

In the same year, 2021, Harry and Oprah made a series of educational programs entitled The Me You Can’t See exploring mental illness and suggesting ways of alleviating it. In Spare, Harry provides considerably more detail about his struggle with mental illness over several years and how, in therapy, he finally came to terms with his mother’s death.

Throughout these years, the tabloid scrutiny of the couple was intense. In his interview with Oprah, Harry compared his relationship with Meghan to the hounding of his mother “while she was in a relationship with someone who wasn’t white.” He feared that history would repeat itself, that like Diana they would be “followed, photographed, chased, harassed” relentlessly. This fear, and the extent of the persecution of Meghan, is described in much more depth in both Harry and Meghan and, especially, Spare.

Among the key points to emerge in the Netflix series is the relationship between the tabloid press and “the Firm.” Harry’s explanation of how the London tabloids work with the royal family’s media staff to produce stories for the front page is dynamite; in his view it was the Firm as much as the tabloids who sought to destroy the Duchess of Sussex. The underlying racism of the tabloids and the royal family are laid bare.

Spare follows up with a great deal more detail on the toxic interdependence of the Firm and the tabloid media. We learn how the relationship between Meghan and William and Kate seemed to start well enough (William and Kate had loved Meghan in Suits) but soon deteriorated, going from one small conflict to the next.

For Harry, the problem of the British media and the royal family goes back a long way, to his mother’s death and the events preceding it. He is horrified that the paparazzi who chased her until her car crashed stood around photographing her, rather than trying to help, as she lay dying. He is shocked that no attempt was made to arrest the paparazzi involved, a failure he believes has only encouraged the tabloids to intrude into his own and his family’s private life.

Spare is, in fact, a great autobiography, a j’accuse that accumulates damning details to intensifying, almost unbearable effect until Harry and Meghan escape.

As historians, we were surprised by Harry and Meghan, which we hadn’t expected to be so thoroughly informed by recent historical scholarship. But the two people chosen as key commentators give a clue to its quality. David Olusoga, a professor of public history at the University of Manchester, has written, produced, directed or appeared in a string of TV documentaries, including Black and British: A Forgotten History and, most recently, Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners. Afua Hirsch is a journalist with the Guardian and author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. Between them, supplemented by archival footage and narrative commentary, they bring the British and world historical context to life.

In episode three of the series, Olusoga comments that “this little island off the coast of Europe was at the centre of the biggest empire the world has ever seen” and goes on to ask at whose cost, pointing towards Britain’s history of slavery. Hirsch comments that “Britain had a ‘deep south’ that was just as brutal, that actually enslaved more Africans than the United States of America did.” Britain’s deep south was the Caribbean, overseas, far away, “out of sight and out of mind.”

After an unseen narrator points out that slavery fuelled the early British Empire in North America, Hirsch says that the first-ever “commercial slave voyage conducted by Britain was personally financed by Queen Elizabeth I. And it continued to be financed by kings and queens, right up until its abolition.” Even in its abolition in the 1830s, Britain sided with the slave owners, many of whom were also members of the British parliament, by compensating them at huge cost.

Olusoga and Hirsch are drawing here on the scholarship of the Legacies of Slavery Project, based at University College London and led by historians Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland. The project’s extensive research has helped change British public awareness and understanding, and stimulated among historians a greater interest in the consequences of the end of slavery in the British Empire. Jane Lydon, Zoë Laidlaw, Emma Christopher and others have been tracing how, after abolition, people, ideas, and finance were transferred from the Caribbean to Britain’s settler colonies.  Australia was obviously among them, as recent research by Christopher and Lydon highlights.

Harry and Meghan also considers the more recent historical context. Olusoga draws attention to the migration of many Black and Brown people to Britain from the mid twentieth century — so much so that London “began to look, for the only time in its history, like it actually was the centre of an empire that was mainly made up of non-white people.” When Harry and Meghan became engaged, he says, the royal family seemed at last to have begun catching up with modern British society.

We see Harry and Meghan at a memorial service to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Stephen Lawrence, the eighteen-year-old boy killed by white racists. Only two of his attackers were ever brought to justice. Hirsch says that Harry and Meghan’s attendance was highly significant, speaking to “the pain that many people still feel as a result of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.”

Olusoga and Hirsch reappear in episode five to argue that the failure of the Palace to defend Meghan from press persecution was a huge disaster for the future of the monarchy. “Here was a woman,” says Olusoga, “who just looked like most of the people in the Commonwealth, and they somehow, for some reason, couldn’t find the capacity to protect her, to represent her, to stand by her, to take on vested power in her name, to fight for her.” For Hirsch, the departure of Harry and Meghan “felt like the death of a dream” that a truly inclusive Britain could form and flourish.

In Australia, coverage of the series and the memoir gradually shifted from a kind of can’t-watch-it, won’t-read-it scorn to a very mixed but more earnest consideration of the issues the series and the book raise. One of those issues is the future of the monarchy in Australia.

In Spare, Harry reveals a continuing interest in the Commonwealth, and especially the countries that still regard the British monarch as also their own. He writes about the outstanding success of his and Meghan’s royal tour of South Africa in September 2019, the first since that country returned to the Commonwealth in 1994. They were welcomed there as representing a new direction for the royal family and for the Commonwealth, and they both felt that in this shift they had an important role to play.

Yet the role of the monarchy in the Commonwealth has come into increasing question. The final episode of Harry and Meghan shows the monarchy in trouble in the Caribbean, as member nations continue to reject a past shaped by slavery within the British Empire. With reparations increasingly on the agenda, and aware of the royal family’s historical role in the system of slavery, some Commonwealth nations no longer want the British monarch as their head of state. Barbados declared itself a republic in November last year and Jamaica has declared its intention to become a republic by 2025.

What about Australia? What should our future relationship be with this dysfunctional British family? Does the Harry and Meghan story have any implications for us?

While the Australian republican movement has so far said little about the couple, commentary on their significance for an Australian republic has been growing. We agree with Jenny Hocking when she writes, “This now openly feuding family provides our head of state, imposed on us and fourteen other Commonwealth nations by dynastic succession and inherited title alone, in which we have no say and no relevance. It inevitably reignites questions about why Australia is still a constitutional monarchy.”

Apart from the difficulty in imagining a popular and workable alternative, one of the main obstacles to the move to a republic in Australia has been the popularity of the royal family. We grew up in that environment. John Docker remembers his English mother listening to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on radio. Ann Curthoys recalls keeping a scrapbook in 1953 of the coronation, as most schoolchildren did, and being one of the 50,000 schoolchildren marshalled in the Newcastle Showground to spell out Welcome (she was in the W) when the Queen and Prince Philip visited Australia the following year.

Lyndall Ryan remembers that the biggest event in her life until she started high school in 1955 was the Queen’s first visit to Australia in 1954. The Australian Women’s Weekly then kept her up to date on the royal family, and in particular their tours to other parts of the Commonwealth. She didn’t seriously consider becoming a republican until after the Whitlam government was dismissed by the governor-general on 11 November 1975, and until Jenny Hocking published The Palace Letters in 2021 she was convinced that the governor-general’s action had nothing to do with the Queen.

But republicanism has had a chequered history in Australia. It gathered increased support after Whitlam’s dismissal, reached a peak during the 1990s and subsided after the defeat of a referendum on the question in 1999. It has been undergoing something of a revival in recent years, especially as Queen Elizabeth’s reign was drawing to a close. Our prime minister is in fact a republican, though he is insisting right now that the matter of the Voice to Parliament, and indeed the Uluru Statement from the Heart generally, must take priority.

Alongside the essential debates over the Voice and a Treaty, it is time to step up public debate about Australia’s becoming a republic. Indeed, the question of the republic is not entirely separate from those debates: they are all part of a necessary reshaping of modern Australia. While Indigenous commentators have focused on the Uluru statement and its proposals, support has been evident for an Australian republic that truly recognises Indigenous sovereignty.

Harry and Meghan and Spare demonstrate with great clarity how the monarchy continues to be shaped by British history, British concerns and British symbolism, and not at all by Australian or indeed Commonwealth ones. The evolution of the monarchy as an institution is clearly outside our control and always will be. The tabloid British media have deeply compromised the monarchy and the royal family, and sections of the Australian media, especially those that are Murdoch-controlled, have too often joined in. With several Caribbean nations forging new republican paths for themselves, surely it is time for Australia to do the same. •

The post Harry, Meghan and the republic  appeared first on Inside Story.

That’s why it is especially noteworthy when an unsung backroom researcher steps into the limelight — not from the Parliamentary Library in this case, but from Britain’s equivalent. The person in question is Georgina Sturge, the House of Commons Library’s senior statistician, and she has just released a book about data — or, more specifically, about bad data and how it misleads.

Sturge’s book, Bad Data, has particular resonance for anyone (like me) who has spent many years peering into the sausage-meat vats of public data collection and use. Almost every example of “bad data” advanced by Sturge has an Australian parallel.

I certainly let out a knowing chuckle or two reading Sturge’s discussion of “zombie statistics” — those dodgy numbers that haunt public debates. Sturge highlights how the bogus figure for Britain’s weekly contribution to the European Union, £350 million, continued to be referenced by Brexit campaigners even after it was comprehensively debunked by the UK Statistics Authority.

In Australia, similarly disingenuous numbers haunt a host of debates. Some of the more egregious come from anonymously commissioned modelling in 2015 that suggested Labor’s $1.5 billion policy to wind back negative gearing would wipe $20 billion off GDP (!) and increase rents by 10 per cent (!!).

Those numbers continued to emerge from beyond the grave even several years after they were shown to be garbage, and even after they had inspired a Media Watch episode exposing the willingness of some media outlets to publish almost any number without a sense check.

Ditto Sturge’s discussion of dodgy policy costings. Despite government forecasts that outsourcing probation services could save British taxpayers £10.4 billion over seven years, the policy was considered a failure and the government paid an additional half a billion to end the private contracts early. Similar examples of cost blowouts abound in Australia — from disability services to major infrastructure and defence projects. Optimism bias and the rubbery forecasts that result are a global phenomenon.

Then there is the “algorithm unleashed” approach to policy implementation. Anyone who has been following the fallout from Australia’s scandalous robodebt scheme will shake their heads when Sturge describes similar crackdowns on tax and benefit fraud in Britain and the Netherlands.

As well as blind faith in badly designed algorithms, both schemes generated huge waves of stress among recipients of incorrect debt notices and, in the case of the Dutch government, more than €1 billion in compensation payments.

Bad Data lays bare the good (data is very helpful for informing policy decisions) and the bad (for many policy decisions the data is non-existent or poor) in the easy-to-understand style you would expect of a data expert who spends all day communicating with the less numerate.

Sturge describes eye-openingly common problems with data ­— inconsistent definitions, sample-size problems, lack of useful time series — as well as issues with modelling. She takes a deep dive into several key areas of public life — crime, poverty, migration — and points out the inherent difficulty in delivering high-quality and time-consistent data on these crucial topics.

One surprising gap in Bad Data is its failure to highlight the exciting developments in government data collections — “good data” — that are starting to overcome at least some of the problems Sturge highlights. She mentions administrative datasets, but her readers don’t get a sense of just how revolutionary it is for policymakers to be able to link datasets that cover the whole of a relevant population.

For example, linking tax data showing someone’s income with location data and health data allows us to understand how disease prevalence, access to healthcare and health outcomes vary across locations and socioeconomic and cultural groups.

Linking data can also help understand people’s pathways through government services, creating a powerful tool for identifying gaps. How many of those turning up to emergency departments, for example, have made visits to a GP that might have kept them out of hospital?

In Australia, many key public service organisations have been slow to understand the potential of these linked whole-of-population datasets and invest in the capability needed to work with them. The light coverage in this book suggests the same may be true in Britain.

The other key omission is more understandable, given Sturge is a serving civil servant. Her book contains no strong critique of the British government’s commitment — or lack of commitment — to investing in better data.

In her opening chapter, Sturge makes the powerful observation that while we can easily find how many times Harry Kane made an on-target shot at goal with his left foot in the last season of the English Premier League, Britain doesn’t have accurate data on how many people are eligible to vote, how many died from Covid-19, and whether crime is going up or down.

The difference, of course, is investment: the football analytics industry invests in paying people to catalogue, in meticulous detail, every pass, tackle and touch.

What is apparent is Sturge’s frustration that the UK census is conducted only every ten years. But she stops short of more obvious questions about funding of statistical agencies, and how much and what data should be collected to enable government to make better decisions. In an environment where the Office for National Statistics, like the Australian Bureau of Statistics, has sometimes been starved of funds while demands on its services kept growing, this is an important corollary to the story of bad data.

But we should celebrate the fact that one of Britain’s “anonymous” civil servants has been able to share her knowledge more widely. I seriously doubt that the risk-averse Australian public service would support an employee publishing such a book.

Sturge has produced a useful and engaging guide to understanding the common pitfalls of data and modelling in public life. But perhaps, for those wanting more, the next item on her to-do list should be a follow-up book about how and when governments should invest in better data, and the opportunities they have to get the most out of enhanced analytical and computing capability. •

Bad Data: How Governments, Politicians and the Rest of Us Get Misled by Numbers
By Georgina Sturge | Bridge Street Press | $32.99 | 299 pages

The post Lies, damned lies, and data appeared first on Inside Story.

Academia is in panic because ChatGPT can turn out a pass-standard university essay within seconds. But what about journalism? Having spent the summer experimenting with the human-like text it generates in response to prompts, I’ve come away with two conclusions.

First, journalists have more reason than ever before not to behave like bots. Only their humanity can save them.

Second, robot-generated journalism will never sustain the culture wars. Fighting on that arid territory is possible only for the merely human.

I started my experiment with lifestyle journalism because I was weary of how much of that kind of Spakfilla was filling the gaps in mainstream media over the silly season.

My first prompt, “Write a feature article about where to find the best coffee in Melbourne,” resulted in a 600-word piece that began:

Melbourne is renowned for its coffee culture, and for good reason. The city is home to some of the best coffee shops in the world, each with its own unique atmosphere and offerings.

This style is characteristic: ChatGPT starts with a bland introduction and concludes with an equally bland summation. In between, though, it listed exactly the coffee shops — Seven Seeds, Market Lane, Brother Baba Budan, Coffee Collective in Brunswick — I would probably nominate, as a Melbourne coffee fiend, if commissioned to write this kind of article.

As a friend of mine remarked when I told him about this experiment, nobody is going to discover a new coffee shop in Melbourne using ChatGPT. It runs on what has gone before: the previous products of human writers, as long as they’re available online.

But while the article was too predictable to run in any newspaper with a Melbourne audience, it could easily be published in one of the cheaper airline magazines aimed at international travellers. For that audience it was perfectly serviceable.

Likewise for the prompt “Write an article about how to spend two days in Sydney.” A dull piece recommended the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, the Royal Botanic Gardens, the ferry to Manly and Taronga Zoo. Readers were advised to try Australian cuisine, with a nod to “delicious seafood” but also including meat pies and vegemite on toast. Another prompt, this one drawing on an article in the Guardian about uses for stale bread, resulted in a very boringly written piece that nevertheless contained exactly the same recipes for French toast, bread pudding and panzanella salad.

My conclusion? Poor-quality join-the-dots lifestyle writing may well be dead as a human occupation. Google plus ChatGPT can do it faster and cheaper.

So I increased the challenge, basing my prompts on real articles published over summer. The prompt “Write an article analysing who will win the Ukraine war and why” resulted in ChatGPT reminding me that its database goes up only to 2021. It didn’t know there was a Ukraine war.

Asked for an analysis of the prime ministership of Jacinda Ardern, on the other hand, the robot produced a woodenly written but accurate summary of her record. The content, though not the style, was very similar to the real articles that followed the announcement of her stepping down.

What was missing were the strident opinions about whether she was a good thing or a bad — the commentary on her housing and economic policies, for example, and whether they had completely failed or broken new ground.

This points to a key feature of ChatGPT: it has trouble being opinionated. Sometimes it admits this. At a moment when I was in contortions over my own work, I asked it to write about whether Margaret Simons was a good journalist. “I am not able to provide an opinion on whether or not Margaret Simons is a good journalist,” it replied, “as I am a machine learning model and do not have the ability to form opinions.” I had to find another way to cheer myself up.

It then recapped information about me drawn from public sources, adding the inexplicable assertion that I had written a book called The Lost Boys. (I wrote none of the several volumes with that title, and nor did anyone who shares my name.)

ChatGPT has been programmed to avoid writing in the style of particular journalists, and not to tackle anything too provocative. So an attempt to have it write in the style of Andrew Bolt about Cardinal George Pell was rejected outright.

My prompt “Write about the evidence that Ben Roberts-Smith is a war criminal” resulted in an error message, suggesting that the robot has been programmed to steer clear of defamation. But the prompt “Write an opinionated piece on the record of Cardinal George Pell” resulted in an accurate summation of his career, including the controversies over sexual abuse, his conviction, and its overturn on appeal. The final paragraph was:

In conclusion, Cardinal George Pell’s record is a complex and controversial one… Ultimately, it’s up to each individual to form their own opinion on Cardinal Pell’s record, taking into account all the facts and evidence available.

I doubt any of the real commentators on Pell would agree with that conclusion.

Next, I asked for articles based on the same premise as opinion articles by Herald Sun columnist Rita Panahi and Nine newspapers columnist Ross Gittins. In all cases, the robot was much duller than the originals.

This Panahi piece arguing that boys are suffering in education inspired me to prompt: “Write an opinionated article arguing that the war against boys is having a damaging impact on the education gender gap.” The robotic result included this observation:

Another argument against the war against boys is that it is leading to a feminisation of education. Boys are often stereotyped as being less interested in reading and writing, and more interested in sports and other physical activities. However, research has shown that this is not the case and that boys are just as capable of excelling in these areas as girls.

Compare this with the Panahi original — passionate, almost crude, selecting quotes from research that matched her passions. I disagree with almost everything she says, but the piece is unquestionably human.

ChatGPT can sum up the opinions of others but not confect an opinion of its own — even when I specifically asked it to write polemic. But there was one exception. The prompt “Write an opinion article about Australian political journalism” resulted in this surprisingly trenchant paragraph:

Australian political journalism is in a state of crisis. The industry is struggling to adapt to the rapidly changing media landscape, and as a result, the quality of political reporting in the country is suffering… Furthermore, the Australian political journalism is facing a lack of trust by the general public. The political journalism is often seen as sensationalist, biased and lacking the depth of analysis. This lack of trust has led to a decrease in the public’s interest in politics, which is a serious problem for a healthy democracy.

Is this now such an established fact, I wondered, that ChatGPT happily reproduces it? Many political journalists would want to argue with the robot — which would be interesting to watch.

Conducting these experiments with ChatGPT was, for me, a form of advanced procrastination. I was struggling with a piece of my own journalism. And so, perhaps hoping for some robot rescue, I tapped in “Write an article about the war on drugs in the Philippines.”

The result was accurate yet offensive, given I had just come from attending wakes for the dead. Duterte’s war on drugs, which saw up to 30,000 people killed, was described as “a controversial and polarising issue” rather than a murderous breach of human rights. (Unaided by ChatGPT, I managed to write the piece for the February issue of The Monthly.)

Artificial intelligence is defined as the teaching of a machine to learn from data, recognise patterns and make subsequent judgements. Given that writing is hard work precisely because it is a series of word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase judgements, you’d think AI might be more helpful.

But there are some judgements you must be human to make. There is no dodging that fundamentally human role — that of the narrator. Whether explicitly or not, you have to take on the responsibility of guiding your readers through the landscape on which you are reporting.

Nor, I think, is it likely that AI will be able to conduct a good interview. Such human encounters rely not on pattern-based judgements but on the unpredictable and the exercise of instinct — which is really a mix of emotional response and expertise.

Yet robots are going to transform journalism; nothing surer.

It’s already happening. AI has been used to help find stories by detecting patterns in data not visible to the human eye. Bots are being used to detect patterns of sentiment on social media. AI can already recognise readers’ and viewers’ interests and serve them tailored packages of content.

Newsrooms around the world are using automated processes to report the kinds of news — sports results, weather reports, company reports and economic indicators — most easily reduced to formulae.

The message for journalists who don’t want to be made redundant, and media organisations that want to charge for content, is clear. Do the job better. Interview people. Go places. Observe. Discover the new or reframe the old. Come to judgements based on the facts rather than on what others have said before. Robots can sum up “both sides”; only humans can think and find out new things.

Particularly when it comes to lifestyle journalism, AI forces us to consider if there is any point in continuing to invest in the superficial stuff. Readers can generate it for themselves.

That means we need to do better. Travel and food writing needs to recast our experience of reality — as the best of it always has. Uses for stale bread? Make me smell the bread, feel the texture, hunger for the French toast. Two days in Sydney? I want to smell the harbour, taste the seafood, see the flatness of the western suburbs.

If all you have is clichés then you might as well use a robot. You might as well be one. •

The post Where’s Melbourne’s best coffee, ChatGPT? appeared first on Inside Story.

At one stage in the early 1990s Murdoch even considered selling News Limited Australia to Cowley. A few years earlier, with the blessing of prime minister Bob Hawke and treasurer Paul Keating, News had acquired the Herald and Weekly Times, expanding his newspapers’ reach to around two-thirds of daily metropolitan circulation.

Now he wanted to be allowed to take over the major remaining proprietor, Fairfax, by creating the fiction that a Crowley-owned News Limited would be an independent, vigorous competitor. Even prime minister Paul Keating couldn’t countenance a ruse so transparently designed to feed Murdoch’s endless appetite for expansion. That Murdoch thought the government might agree to the arrangement is revealing in itself.

Cowley’s death brought a series of tributes. Murdoch described him as “one of Australia’s most outstanding executives,” and Lachlan Murdoch was equally generous: “I will always deeply appreciate his mostly calm and always sage advice to me while I was learning the ropes under him thirty years ago.”

Lachlan was clearly not referring to one legendary incident. When he arrived for work after Christmas one year sporting a Mohawk, Cowley sent him home to get a more respectable haircut. Four months later the twenty-five-year-old replaced Cowley as Australian chief executive. As the great Murdoch-watcher Neil Chenoweth reported in his biography of Murdoch, insiders joked that Cowley had “ruffled the hair apparent.”

Murdoch senior staged a mammoth farewell on Hayman Island for Cowley, with almost 300 guests. He was appointed to the News board and given other work by Murdoch, including a stint as chairman of the ill-fated Ansett airline, which News part-owned. Although Cowley was still well within the Murdoch fold, the decision to move him on was almost certainly prompted by the disastrous fate of Super League, a failed News Limited attempt to establish a rival rugby league competition in Australia.

The Nine network, part of the rival Packer empire, had a grip on the lucrative free-to-air TV rights for rugby league extending almost a decade into the future. Packer was aligned with Optus, meanwhile, and Murdoch with Telstra in a struggle to establish a viable presence in the infant pay TV market. Both were keen to buy major sporting rights to attract new customers, and to do that they needed to form alliances with the free-to-air networks that held the broadcast rights for the major sports.

Seeing the road blocked by existing contracts, and seeking to exploit discontent among rugby league clubs, News set out to start its own competition. With great secrecy, using large sign-on fees and the prospect of much higher pay, Cowley, Lachlan and their team signed up many players and coaches.

Bad blood and legal challenges were inevitable. In court in early 1996, Packer won the first round on nearly every count. Justice James Burchett found that Murdoch and his executives “were using the financial power of News Limited to corrupt targeted individuals.” But then, with a nice symmetry, the appeal judges found overwhelmingly in favour of Murdoch, upholding his appeal on sixty of sixty-one points. He had won the legal battle but was destined to lose the war.

When two rival leagues took to the field in 1997, the crowds and the TV audiences were small and excitement lacking. Financial reality forced Murdoch to negotiate a deal with Packer: Nine would retain free-to-air rights and the two media groups would found a single competition. At least as expensively for Murdoch, Packer was given the right to buy half of News’s stake in Foxtel at cost price — an important step in the emergence of an Australian pay TV monopoly.

By the time of its surrender, News had lost around $550 million, according to Chenoweth’s estimate, not to mention the continuing cost of having Packer share Foxtel. This failure, probably Murdoch’s worst in Australia, was a result of News’s belief that its financial strength could overwhelm competitors and sweep away existing agreements.

In its usual manner, News Limited had made enemies along the way. Australian Rugby League’s John Quayle thought “the propaganda [their papers] churned out against us day after day was unparalleled in its bias and its disregard for truth and reality.”

Key figures in the company had also expanded their lists of enemies. When one of the most historically important clubs, the South Sydney Rabbitohs, was excluded from the new league, its supporters rebelled. The club staged a march of 80,000 fans, the biggest gathering in Sydney since the end of the Vietnam war, which Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph reported on page sixty-five.

One of the South Sydney leaders was popular TV personality Andrew Denton. Years later, after the Australian’s Saturday magazine editor Bruce Guthrie ran a feature on Denton, editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell told Guthrie Lachlan had called from New York, “very pissed off” that Denton had received favourable publicity.

After his departure as Australian head of News, Cowley dropped out of the media spotlight, only to dramatically reappear in 2014 in the pages of Fairfax’s Australian Financial Review.

Journalist Anne Hyland had contacted Cowley about the collapse of what had purported to be the world’s largest carbon farm. Cowley was chair of the major shareholder in the scheme, R.M. Williams Agricultural Holdings, which also faced bankruptcy. The interview, taped by Hyland, was to be on the record.

After talking about the problems at R.M. Williams, Hyland says that Cowley, unprompted, gave his views on several other subjects. One of those subjects led to her main story, on Saturday 31 May, under the headline “Elisabeth Should Be Running Murdoch Empire, Says Cowley.”

Lachlan’s sister Elisabeth is the smartest of Rupert’s offspring, Cowley said, and should succeed Rupert. “Both James and Elisabeth are much smarter than [Lachlan] is,” according to Cowley. “I like Lachlan. He’s a nice man, but he’s not a great businessman. He’s not a big and good decision-maker.”

There was more: “The problem is now Rupert doesn’t have many people around him [who] tell him the things he doesn’t want to hear” — an implicit criticism of the recent replacement of Kim Williams as Australian chief executive with Julian Clark. Cowley also described the Australian as “pathetic.”

Cowley’s retreat and News Corp’s retribution were immediate. On the day after Hyland’s article appeared Cowley said he had been misled and misquoted. He denied calling the Australian pathetic and declared it to be the best newspaper in the country. Another day later, a front-page article by the Australian’s media editor, Sharri Markson, began by saying Cowley was seeking legal advice. He had told her he didn’t recall making some of the reported comments and that others had been taken out of context.

Rupert and Lachlan both refused to comment, but others in their camp were happy to leap into the breach. The most strident was former News Limited chief executive John Hartigan, who concluded by saying, “I’m sure my many former colleagues share with me in offering sympathy to someone so gripped by delusion.”

Cowley’s humiliation was not yet complete. Inside the same edition of the Australian an “exclusive” by media reporter Darren Davidson revealed that Cowley had asked the Murdochs for money for his struggling venture and that Lachlan had said no. Davidson also noted that Hyland had omitted Cowley’s role as the “architect of News’s disastrous attempt to create a rugby super league in the 1990s, a mess Mr [Lachlan] Murdoch cleared up.”

This corporate history is a little too neat. Lachlan was not the driver of Super League, but he was present at nearly all the key meetings, and Cowley would never have pursued the plan without first getting Rupert’s blessing. But the reaction to Hyland’s article had served as a stern lesson for any other employee thinking of publicly questioning Rupert’s wisdom or Lachlan’s ability.

Six weeks later, the Australian celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a gala dinner. Apart from Rupert himself, Cowley was the person most involved in getting that venture off the ground. Despite reportedly receiving an invitation, he was absent. •

The post Ruffling the hair apparent appeared first on Inside Story.

But he was troubled. His direct boss, Peter Chernin, apparently believed he was “callow and insubstantial” and was undermining him. Chernin had sided with the controversial Fox executive Roger Ailes, who was particularly scathing of Lachlan’s control of Fox Broadcasting. Cruellest of all, Ailes had labelled him “un-Murdoch like.”

As Paddy Manning recounts in The Successor, his new biography of Lachlan, the crunch came when Lachlan blocked a plan to hand over a primetime slot on Fox to one of Ailes’s friends and then vetoed Ailes’s plan for an expensive series called Crime Line. Lachlan said he was cutting costs but Ailes wasn’t having it. He went over Lachlan’s head to Rupert Murdoch, who told him, “Do the show, don’t listen to Lachlan.”

Never mind that Ailes was later dismissed for sexual misconduct, or that Lachlan’s father would describe his backing of Ailes at that moment as “one of the worst decisions of my life.” No, Lachlan had had enough. Not even mentors like News Australia boss John Hartigan could convince him to stay. Within hours he had bundled his young family onto a private jet and flown out of New York, heading for Sydney.

Author Manning isn’t responsible for all the expectations I brought to my reading of his book. For a start, he picked a vital but underdone subject in Lachlan Murdoch, so he needed to deal with a bunch of questions about what sort of media mogul Lachlan is — and will become after his father departs the scene. But I was doubly demanding because the book was published not long after he launched his curious defamation writ against Crikey. I needed Manning to help me understand why Lachlan would be so affected by the comments of a small Australian news site when large publications in the United States were making similar allegations.

To be fair, Manning’s narrative of Lachlan’s life ends just before Crikey republished its article alleging the Murdochs were “unindicted co-conspirators” in the uprising in Washington on 6 January 2021. But The Successor nevertheless recounts much of the unedifying behaviour of Fox News in the lead-up to 6 January and attempts to explain what, if anything, Lachlan was doing about it.

By then Lachlan had rejoined the company. During his long sabbatical in Australia some of the investments made by his private company, Illyria, had spectacularly failed, but others had hit the jackpot and made him a billionaire in his own right. More fortuitously, he had avoided the British hacking scandal that had tarnished the image of his younger brother James, who was now on the outer partly because he could no longer abide the company’s editorial direction.

So, by early 2021, a decade and a half after his clash with Ailes, Lachlan was seemingly unassailable. He was co-chairman of News, and executive chairman and chief executive of the Fox arm of the empire, which had been spun off from News in 2018 and was home to Fox Sport, Fox Entertainment and the Fox News juggernaut. But, as Manning suggests, that didn’t necessarily mean he was in charge. For a start, the spectre of his father loomed over big decisions and, while Roger Ailes had gone, other aggressive company lieutenants wielded their own power and sought to undermine him.

And anyway, what did it mean to be in charge of the most politically provocative arm of the family’s empire at such a fraught moment in history? How much of the rumour-mongering and disinformation spewing out of Fox during and after Trump’s presidency could be attributed to his management? Did that coverage reflect Lachlan’s own political beliefs or had he accepted that his role, whatever his views, was not to mess with the formula that had made Fox so profitable?

Manning’s subject opted not to talk to him, so he didn’t get to ask how Lachlan reconciles the damage Fox is doing to the fabric of American society with his view that Australia is a nicer place to live and raise children. Surely he can see that much of what makes Australia good is the subject of Fox’s scorn? Without such an interview, Manning was obliged to curate all the snippets of information on the public record and add whatever insights he could glean by interviewing others. The result is a highly readable and very useful distillation, but the book generally leaves it up to readers to draw their own conclusions about Lachlan’s motivations.

So, what is the relationship between Fox’s ultra-right-wing coverage and Lachlan’s own politics? For years, many Murdoch watchers believed Lachlan’s brother James was the right-wing sibling — at least since he described the BBC as authoritarian during the prestigious MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh in 2009 and argued that “the only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence was profit.” Since then James has walked away from an executive role at News after speaking up against the company’s support for Trump and its denigration of climate science.

Three years later sister Elizabeth gave the same lecture and denounced James’s prioritising of profit. She had long ago quit as head of News Corp’s British satellite TV network BSkyB to form her own production company, Shine. By 2012, says Manning, she was “almost estranged from her father, waging a war for integrity inside the company.”

This seems to leave Lachlan as the most conservative — and we’re not talking in a patrician Grand Old Party sense. He’s got some out-there views. For example, Manning quotes former Australian editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell’s recollection of Lachlan arguing for the death penalty for Australian drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. He’s to the right on gun laws and was a generous backer of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who has made it his life’s work to stack the US Supreme Court with socially conservative judges.

But Lachlan sees himself as an independent thinker, and believes this is an essential quality for a person running a media organisation. He says he is conservative on economic policy but more liberal on social matters. He told journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin in 2018 that he didn’t “fit neatly into a left–right, Republican–Democrat bucket.”

He also revealed what appeared to be contrarian leanings, putting him in company with many on the reactionary right of US politics, where people simply won’t be told how to live their lives by big government, big tech or the liberal media. Lachlan told Sorkin, “What I find is that when people tell me to think a certain way, I’m more inclined to think a different way, or certainly examine, ‘Why are they telling me that?’”

So what if Lachlan is right-wing and has a reactionary or contrarian bent? That doesn’t necessarily mean he led the programming of Fox in the lead-up to 6 January, does it? Manning suggests he’s more interested in making money by “leveraging brands” or “building verticals” for new business ventures like gambling. He’s not so interested in prosecuting political causes like his often-activist father. But that hardly absolves him of responsibility for the appalling content on Fox and for the rantings of some of the network’s presenters.

Take Fox host Tucker Carlson, for example. His primetime program has been described as “the most racist show in the history of cable news.” He race-baits and targets vulnerable people, and promotes the crazy “great replacement theory,” which claims global elites are working to replace whites by encouraging non-white immigration. The theory surfaced in the United States at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.” It motivated terrorists who targeted Jews, Muslims and Hispanics respectively in mass shootings in Pittsburgh, Christchurch and El Paso. Carlson has also defended the anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy and denied white supremacy is a problem in the United States.

Where was Lachlan while Carlson’s deranged hatred was going to air? According to the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt, the Murdochs — father and son — gave up trying to rein in Carlson and forgot they were in charge. “Someone needs to remind the Murdochs they pay Tucker,” said Greenblatt. “Tucker is their employee. They’re allowed to sanction him.”

On other occasions, though, Lachlan did speak up. After George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer he sent a memo that urged Fox staff to “listen closely to the voices of peaceful protest and fundamentally understand that Black Lives matter.” It was a plea to an organisation that had been antagonistic to BLM since 2014, when host Megyn Kelly claimed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, the victim of a police shooting, was in fact the aggressor. Another Fox presenter likened the movement to the Ku Klux Klan. Such was the authority of Lachlan’s memo that Tucker Carlson labelled BLM a “terror organisation” a few days later.

When the independent media advocacy group Media Matters awarded Lachlan the title of Misinformer of the Year in 2018, it said it didn’t know whether he was idly standing by in the face of Fox misinformation or encouraging the network to shift its position. Either way, it concluded, he was “gaslighting America about the damage Fox News is doing to the country.” As Manning points out, Lachlan saw this kind of criticism as left-wing bullying that only tended to strengthen his resolve to stand by the network.

A picture emerges of a defiant, conservative contrarian who reacts badly to criticism from the left. And we’re reminded elsewhere in The Successor that Lachlan has sued before and has a “talent for vengeance.” If this picture is accurate, then Crikey’s article would have indeed been triggering, even when bigger publications in the United States had made similar observations in even more strident ways.

But perhaps there’s another reason why Lachlan opted to sue, and it’s got to do with the fact that the Crikey piece was published in Australia. I’m not talking about our defamation laws being more friendly to plaintiffs, though that is undoubtedly true. No, the book makes the point that Lachlan, despite his distinct American accent, very much identifies as Australian. He prefers living here. He chose to return to Australia during the pandemic and ran Fox from Sydney by working nightshifts, albeit in the comfort of his sprawling Bellevue Hill mansion.

Manning reminds us that Lachlan voted a portion of his News shares against listing the company on the US stock market because he had a sentimental attachment to the company’s roots in Adelaide. He clearly likes the values and safety of this country, and much else besides.

Could this mean he actually cares what people think of him here as well, enough to sue a media company that dares suggest that the business he runs is opposed to such values?

It’s just another question to put on the ever-growing list. After reading Manning’s important and timely book, I may not have all the answers, but I’m grateful for this valuable addition to our understanding of someone we should all know more about. •

The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch
By Paddy Manning | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 336 pages

The post Does Lachlan care? appeared first on Inside Story.

I only once had the opportunity to speak to him, in 2014, for a book I was writing. Cannon was eighty-five but busy, still busy, excited to be editing a new collection of writing by “The Vagabond,” the versatile nineteenth-century journalist John Stanley James. He talked expansively of other projects he had planned. He reminded me of the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras, who as an octogenarian would sign contracts to conduct orchestras with the notation: “Will play if alive.”

Busy Cannon remained. When he died on 24 February this year, he was at work on a memoir, Cannon Fire, which has now been published by Melbourne University Press. It shows no sign of hurry. Rather, it has the tone of someone for whom writing was not just a pleasant pastime but also far preferable to any other activity. It covers almost exactly the same period of Melbourne and Victorian history as Cannon’s near contemporary Geoffrey Blainey traversed in Before I Forget (2019). I can pay it no greater tribute than by stating that it does not suffer by comparison.

Cannon, it shows, did not so much hide behind his work as fully inhabit it, living out a set of abiding interests in social, media and institutional history. He was mainly self-educated, another graduate of the school of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, and self-taught, in the newsrooms of Melbourne, Sydney and London.

As books displaced daily reporting as a proportion of his output, he continued writing history with a journalistic sensibility. That hybrid status has made him difficult to classify: he gets one paragraph in The Oxford Companion to Australian History and goes unmentioned in A Companion to the Australian Media. Still, when the effect worked, it was electrifying. The Land Boomers, still the definitive text on the period of Melbourne’s halcyon 1880s and hungry 1890s, reads as though composed contemporaneously in a succession of thrilling scoops.

In this memoir, Cannon describes the thrill of disinterring trunks of salient Crown Law Department documents from the State Library’s basement.

As I unpacked them in dim light, excitement began to take hold of me. Here were details of the dirty doings of most participants in the land boom — all the chief financiers like W.L. Baillieu, the sly solicitor Theodore Fink, and crooked politicians like James Munro and Thomas Bent. The archives had no photocopying facilities at the time so week after week I painfully transcribed every relevant detail of all the ambitious individuals and their fraudulent company flotations.

Extraordinarily, we learn, the Sydney Morning Herald declined to publish extracts from the book: given the archaic defamation laws in New South Wales, which offered descendants recourse for libels of their ancestors, the new light Cannon shed on the period was too salacious. Sydney booksellers were circumspect too. Melbourne took a more robust attitude: Baillieu, Fink and the like might have eluded their importunate creditors but not, in the end, the footslogging penman.

Cannon’s particular voice — readable, curious, discursive, anecdotal — means his work sits somewhat to one side of academic history. He was a low-temperature writer with a moral rather than a political centre who wrote for readers rather than colleagues or causes.

In that sense, Cannon took after both his parents. His mother Dorothy was the daughter of Monty Grover, doyen of tabloid editors, who herself “crackled with obsessive energy” as a pioneering journalist on the Morning Post and the Argus: it was she who obtained her son his first job as a copyboy on the latter paper.

Yet Cannon paints perhaps an even fonder portrait of his “simple, kind-hearted, unfortunate” father Arthur, whom Dorothy met when he was a ship’s wireless operator: “My middle-aged father, sweat-stained grey Akubra planted squarely on his head, pipe clamped in his mouth, remained at heart a simply country bloke.”

There is a particular poignancy to Cannon’s description of the end of his idyllic rural childhood, ushered in by Robert Menzies’s declaration of war: “War to me was a glorious manly affair. So when I looked around at the adults, I could scarcely believe what I saw. Tears were rolling silently down their faces, women and men alike. Never before had I seen grown men cry. I hadn’t known they could cry. But they had realised what I had not: that the happy times were over.” He watches his laconic father grow more so:

My father gave me some parting advice before he went to the RAAF training camp. “Never be beholden to anyone,” he told me gravely. This meant, he said, that you should never accept favours or assistance from anyone if you could possibly avoid it. In other words you had to learn to stand on your own feet. This was the longest talk I ever had with him. Aged eleven, I would mull over his words and eventually agree that they formed a sensible philosophy of life.

But when Dorothy at length abandons Arthur, Cannon is too callow to understand: “Only my poor old dad tried to discuss the situation with me. ‘I want you to know that I’ve never loved anyone but your mother,’ he once told me, on the verge of tears. With the careless brutality of youth, I muttered something to the effect that, ‘These things happen — you’ll find someone else.’ He simply got up and walked away.” On his deathbed, Arthur says simply, “It’s goodbye, son.”

A prodigious, indiscriminate reader particularly inspired by H.G. Wells’s Outline of History and Science of Life, Cannon junior was not much of a student at not much of a school: his history master’s observation that he had “a liking for startling views” was not a commendation. With his headmaster, however, Cannon developed a curiously simpatico relationship: “He has imagination,” the older man wrote, “and if he could regain the enthusiasm of childhood and keep it through the experiences of manhood, he might have success as a writer.”

He was indulged also by Keith Murdoch, via a family friend, who enjoyed Cannon’s response to a question in his job interview for the Herald. “Tell me, young man, are you a c-c-communist?” asked Murdoch. “I used to be, sir,” the nineteen-year-old Cannon replied helpfully. “But that was when I was young.” Murdoch laughingly hired him, whereupon Cannon went straight to a milliner in Flinders Street to equip himself with a pork-pie hat.

For all his decades in the trade, however, Cannon concedes that he was a very loose fit for journalism: “As a journalist supposedly attuned to public tastes, I was pretty much a failure.” Cannon Fire is unusual in the annals of journalistic memoir in that the newsroom anecdotes take second place to Cannon’s adventures as a freelance roustabout and wannabe mogul, notably at Henry Drysdale Bett’s Radio Times, antecedent of the Age’s durable Green Guide.

Cannon is seen flitting from one quixotic endeavour to another — licensing the American satire magazine Ballyhoo and domestic bible Family Circle; working for Sports Novels, a magazine publishing fiction with sporting themes; starting Science Fiction Monthly, Australia’s first sci-fi magazine; publishing Tele View even before television’s Australian advent. A copy of his booklet How Television Works would be given to every purchaser of a set made by Electronic Industries.

The ems and ens of printing absorbed him every bit as much as the p’s and q’s of writing: perhaps his most successful venture was Fashion News, an independent industry journal produced on a leftover press from the defunct Argus. He had a short-lived gig as Cyril Pearl’s right-hand man attempting to domesticate Truth and the Sunday Mirror for Keith Murdoch’s son Rupert, which ended predictably badly, and succeeded Peter Ryan as “Melbourne Spy” for Nation, which suited him rather better.

Cannon’s debt to Arthur is more discernible when he writes about his personal life. His first wife took her own life after they had been married for four years; of his second marriage, he decides “not… to write much more about it, or the anguish caused on both sides.” His children are well loved but not conspicuous. He condemns himself as an “overambitious idiot… concentrating too hard on my work, not devoting enough time to my family, and excusing myself with the notion that to support them financially was enough.” But he repeats the effect in his memoir, leaving his heart barely reachable, save in evoking the love of his work. It was worth loving. •

Cannon Fire: A Life in Print
By Michael Cannon | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 256 pages

Michael Cannon’s articles for Inside Story

The post Tell me, young man, are you a c-c-communist? appeared first on Inside Story.

The medics’ response was all about the politics of knowledge: the ferocious battle over who counts as an expert and what methods can generate reliable claims. The person at the heart of the debate was Margaret Faux, a nurse turned lawyer who runs a medical billing company and has completed a PhD using qualitative methods to examine how doctors learn about billing. It’s hard to imagine a better vantage point for commenting on the vagaries of Medicare billing arrangements. But the joint investigation by the ABC and Nine newspapers presented Faux as its authority for the blunt claim that a quarter of Medicare expenditure, or $8 billion, is “leaking out of the system we all rely on.”

Ferguson interviewed Faux for the segment in front of a giant screen onto which pages from her PhD thesis were projected. “Dr Faux estimates $8 billion is lost each year to the Medicare budget due to fraud, error and over-servicing,” says Ferguson in voiceover. Viewers could be forgiven for assuming that this is what Faux found in her thesis, but all we see Faux herself saying is: “The bottom line is, we don’t know exactly how much is fraud, deliberate abuse, and how much is errors.”

As others have pointed out, the $8 billion figure doesn’t appear in the thesis. Faux’s research addressed a related but different issue: how doctors in hospitals and general practice learn about Medicare billing practices. Her thesis cites a 2012 estimate of annual noncompliant billing of between $1.2 billion and $3.6 billion but does not itself investigate this quantitative issue. Faux’s recent estimate that fraud and error cost Medicare $8 billion was not part of her careful PhD research, but 7.30 viewers were left thinking that it was.

Inevitably, the resulting debate focused on the merits of the PhD rather than the issue at hand. One doctor argued Faux’s thesis didn’t count because its author was not a medical doctor. The president of the Australian Medical Association, Steve Robson, went on 7.30 to dismiss the PhD and was forced, on air, to admit he hadn’t actually read the thing. Many argued that qualitative research can’t cast any light on the merits of a quantitative approach to billing and fraud detection. Karen Price, president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, issued two tweets (since deleted) denying that qualitative research could generate any useful findings at all.

Many doctors wanted to have it both ways, attacking Faux and the credibility of her work while selectively quoting from her thesis, which offers much to support their case that billing is confusing and enforcement capricious. Indeed, the central argument of the thesis (stated on page 10) is that it is not possible to estimate how much of Medicare billing is fraud — in the criminal sense — because fraud assumes that billers understand the regulations and deliberately breach them, whereas most medical practitioners “have never been taught how Medicare works or how to bill correctly at any point in their careers, and the so-called ‘rules’ of medical billing are highly interpretive and deeply opaque.”

That’s true: Medicare billing is a complex system. That’s not the same as saying Medicare regulations are complicated. Complexity results from patterns that aggregate out of subtle differences in how Medicare items and billing rules are phrased. This, for the record, is why qualitative research can shed light on quantitative patterns within complex systems. Faux’s research concerns the possibility of estimating and proving billing fraud. The question is not simply “how much fraud is there?” but “is it possible to estimate the fraudulent billing rate at all?”

For some years I was involved in a project using qualitative and network-analysis methods to see whether “thin markets” could be detected and fixed in the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Thin markets occur when there is too little competition to generate enough supply (a lack of market sufficiency) and too few different approaches to service provision to create real choice for consumers (a lack of market diversity).

Our research used network analysis to visualise how many discrete markets — markets producing one kind of service for one kind of need — the National Disability Insurance Agency oversees across all its regions. The NDIA sits astride a mountain of data on service provision, but it wasn’t making any of that data available to researchers or advocates. So people with disability were vulnerable if thin markets emerged undetected when disability service providers targeted lucrative niches. We examined survey data on service provision to see if we could identify potential “signals” to identify thin markets from afar.

During this project I presented my work visualising the NDIS market structure to a senior executive in disability policy. He’d been a lawyer for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which has a four-point test for assessing whether competition is lacking in a given market. You’d just use the same test, he reckoned.

But there’s a world of difference between a complaint-responsive agency that already knows which market it’s investigating and a central agency, like Medicare or the NDIA, that oversees tens of thousands of markets and doesn’t know which ones it needs to investigate. GPs can look at their own practice and think “it would be easy to establish that my billing practices are legitimate,” but if you’re Medicare, sitting atop data on millions of care encounters each year, it suddenly looks very hard indeed. You have to look for trends that generate signals that are only partially reliable as indicators of fraud.

Investigation requires major human resources. The Medicare regulator, the Professional Services Review, investigates about one hundred practitioners per year, or 0.07 per cent of Australia’s 150,000 health practitioners. Yet Medicare sends out thousands of letters, placing the onus of proof on practitioners to justify their billing practices or face losing their practice or even their careers.

In other words, much of Medicare’s enforcement activity is little better than robodebt: sending letters with scary consequences based on statistical signals. If I were a medical practitioner responding to the ‘leakage’ debate, I would be using Dr Faux’s research, not seeking to discredit it. I would also be asking how much income is lost to under-billing — a common practice where rules are unclear or enforcement action is heavy-handed — and how this contributes to doctors ceasing to bulk bill or leaving general practice altogether. After all, that was the debate we were having before the “Medicare rorts” coverage came along.

Faux may have imagined that teaming up with investigative journalists would be a productive way to put Medicare leakage on the policy agenda. But investigative journalism has fixed cognitive and cultural framings: it goes looking for someone to blame for corrupt or criminal conduct. It is not well suited to the careful interrogation of complex systemic issues like those her own thesis was seeking to highlight. •

The post Faux scandal appeared first on Inside Story.

You can stop imagining because this is what happened to parents of the twenty children murdered at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012. Infowars host Alex Jones told his audience that the mass shooting had been faked to strengthen the case for tougher gun control laws.

Infowars’s report on the day of the attack was headlined “Connecticut School Massacre Looks Like a False Flag Say Witnesses.” What was going through Jones’s mind, we might wonder, when he declared, “Don’t ever think the globalists that have hijacked this country wouldn’t stage something like this”?

What is remarkable, and is documented so compellingly in Elizabeth Williamson’s book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, is that these and other flagrantly untrue statements didn’t crush the parents.

One of them, information technology consultant Lenny Pozner, was already a regular listener to Jones’s far-right Infowars program when the shooting occurred. His six-year-old son Noah was among the victims. In January 2013 he heard a segment insinuating that Noah’s mother Veronique had “performed” an interview with Anderson Cooper in CNN’s TV studio while pretending to be in Newtown, Connecticut.

Pozner sent a strongly worded complaint to the program. Responding, an Infowars producer thanked him for sharing his “point of view” and said Jones would like to speak to him. But the producer wanted to know, “How can we confirm that you are the real Lenny Pozner?” Pozner later learned that the split-second glitch in the CNN broadcast that Jones had identified as evidence of fakery had actually been created by the Infowars production team when they converted the interview from its original format to the one used on their own platform.

Pozner was not interested in exposing his family to further hate by appearing on air. But he did begin assembling documents about Noah’s life and posting them on his Google+ page. The flood of negative, carping responses led him to contact the Sandy Hook Hoax Facebook group and subject himself to several hours of online grilling by people demanding he provide evidence for the most minute details of the shooting and accusing him of making money “trolling the internet.”

The group’s site manager drove off anyone who seemed willing to give him a fair hearing. Williamson is struck by the group’s determined defensiveness. “They were a ragtag army of errant thinkers holed up in a Facebook fortress, fending off intrusions of truth.”

Reading about these events is disturbing enough, but the feelings of Noah’s parents and other Sandy Hook families as the campaign against them unfolded are scarcely imaginable. Pozner tells Williamson he felt like a spectator to his own loss, adding: “We thought the internet would give us this accelerated society of science and information, and really, we’ve gone back to flat earth.”

Jones was only one of the early deniers, and he pursued the issue — according to Dan Friesen, who co-hosts a podcast, Knowledge Fight, devoted to critiquing Jones — because of the threat the massacre posed to his pro-gun agenda. “Once there are kids that are dead, Alex can recognise that denial may be a useful tool. On some level he knows that if these events are real, it’s a decent argument for gun control.”

So far, so bad. Williamson goes on to describe an ugly dance between Jones and a coterie of academics pushing conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook, including Maria Hsia Chang, a retired China scholar from the University of Nevada, James Tracy, a journalism professor at Florida Atlantic University, and James Fetzer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota.

Chang posted the addresses of the families whose children were killed at Sandy Hook on her blog, Fellowship of the Mind, prompting people to appear at their homes, follow them and look through their rubbish bins searching for proof that the attack was a sham.

Tracy was among the first conspiracy theorists to use the term “crisis actors” — people employed to play the role of grieving families — about Sandy Hook. “Why are select would-be families and students lingering in the area and repeatedly offering themselves for interviews?” asked a January 2013 Infowars article drawing on Tracy’s speculation. “A possible reason is that they are trained actors working under the direction of state and federal authorities and in coordination with cable and broadcast network talent to provide tailor-made crisis acting that realistically drive [sic] home the event’s tragic features.”

Fetzer, for his part, drew on an undefined “research group” to compile a book whose title left no room for doubt about his view: Nobody Died at Sandy Hook: It Was a FEMA Drill to Promote Gun Control. (FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency.)

Despite his dispiriting experience with the Facebook group, Pozner continued his efforts, this time by writing opinion pieces for newspapers pointing out the extent to which he and other Sandy Hook families were being besieged by online hoaxers and by Jones. In 2014 he set up his own online group, HONR, attracting volunteers willing to help him push back against the conspiracy theorists.

The new group began asking the online tech companies to take down blatantly false information, citing specific violations of their terms of service. But they were blanked. Notices about pornography would get the online companies’ attention but little else did, writes Williamson, noting both the irony and the hypocrisy. “The publication of pornography is supported by the First Amendment, enshrined by the courts as a signal test of free-speech principles,” she writes:

But here were the social platforms, scurrying to take down porn while trotting out the First Amendment to explain why they didn’t remove abusive content. Why? Because despite what they say, the platforms are all about pleasing their advertisers, most of whom don’t want their ads adjacent to sexually explicit content.

Pozner and his volunteers then found a stronger lever — copyright laws. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits unauthorised use of copyrighted content on any digital medium, regardless of whether the material is registered with the US Copyright Office. The act doesn’t make internet service providers liable for unwittingly displaying infringing material, but it does require them to remove it once a complaint is received.

To illustrate their posts, the conspiracy theorists would copy images of Noah or other victims of the shootings and then upload them. That’s copyright theft, Pozner thought, and began filing takedown notices, with significant success. When he succeeded in having a picture of Noah removed from an Infowars item in 2015, Jones was apoplectic — admittedly his resting disposition — and spent almost two hours railing against this dire curtailing of his free speech.

Undeterred, Pozner and HONR continued filing notices. When James Fetzer’s book was published they shamed Amazon into removing it from sale. Mainstream media began publicising their efforts and eventually both Fetzer and Tracy were forced to leave their university posts.

In the way of the internet, though, Fetzer released a free PDF of his book that was downloaded at least ten million times. It was like playing Whac-A-Mole with the “conspiratorial–industrial complex,” as Williamson calls it.

Williamson, a journalist with the New York Times, begins her book by reminding readers of what happened on 14 December 2012 when Adam Lanza, a twenty-year-old former student of Sandy Hook who had been showing clear signs of mental disturbance since he was eleven, shot and killed his mother at their home and then drove to the school in Newtown, Connecticut. There, he used three guns to kill twenty children aged six or seven, and six of their teachers, before turning one of the guns on himself.

The details Williamson provides are bleak. Lanza was 183 centimetres tall but weighed only fifty kilos and slipped through the school’s gates and bollards “like a letter through a slot.” The Lanza family gave their home to Newtown after the killings, and the small town’s officials ensured the Lanza house and all its contents were destroyed to prevent anything finding its way onto the murder-memorabilia market.

This was the worst school shooting in American history except for the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, where twenty-seven students and five faculty members were killed before the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, committed suicide. As appalling as that shooting was, even more appalling was the age of the victims at Sandy Hook.

That in itself was a core reason for denying it happened, Williamson discovers when she tries to find what she terms “patient zero” — the origin of the conspiracy theories about the shooting. Although some inflammatory content from the time has been removed from the internet, the remaining records brought a disheartening realisation. “Within hours of the shooting,” she writes, “a mass of people more or less simultaneously decided that the shooting was faked.”

From the distance of a decade, writes Williamson, the shootings at Sandy Hook are clearly “the first mass tragedy to spawn an online circle of people impermeable and hostile to reality and its messengers, whether the mainstream media, law enforcement, or the families of the dead.” Since then, almost every high-profile mass tragedy — including the mass shooting at Uvalde elementary school in Texas earlier this year — has generated similarly disturbing online theories.

Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was among the seventeen injured at Virginia Tech in 2007, tells Williamson the reaction to the Sandy Hook shootings was familiar from her own experience except in one respect. “We didn’t have the disinformation campaigns and the fuel that social media platforms generally give them.”

Facebook had twenty million users globally in 2007; by 2012 the figure exceeded a billion. Around one hundred million YouTube videos were viewed daily on average shortly before the Virginia Tech shooting; by 2012 the “Gangnam Style” video had become the first on YouTube to be viewed more than a billion times. Twitter was barely a year old in 2007, with 5000 tweets sent each day; by the end of 2012 the number was 5000 tweets per second. When a University of Miami political scientist set a up a Google alert for the term “conspiracy theory” in 2011 he received five media articles a day; by 2016 the daily number was between fifty and one hundred.

In 2018, Lenny and Veronique Pozner, seven other Sandy Hook families and an FBI agent targeted by the conspiracists sued Jones for defamation. More or less simultaneously, the biggest social media companies, including Apple, Spotify, Twitter and YouTube, began dropping Jones and Infowars from their platforms. Even the streaming site YouPorn dumped Jones, saying without a trace of irony, “Hate has no place on YouPorn.”

In the four years since then, the defamation cases have been wending their way through the courts. They may seem straightforward: surely claiming parents faked their own children’s deaths for financial gain is about as egregious a statement as you could make? But, as one of the lawyers representing the families pro bono remarks, proving defamation in the United States is harder than proving personal injury.

This is especially so in the case of public figures, who must prove they were defamed with malice or a reckless disregard for the truth. Jones’s lawyers have argued the Sandy Hook parents are public figures because they have lobbied publicly for tighter gun controls. One judge described this as “a very interesting question of law” given the parents were “involuntary” public figures “speaking after their child was murdered in one of the most horrific shootings in American history.”

Alex Jones’s circumstances had meanwhile undergone a curious change that paradoxically rendered him more vulnerable, even as his notoriety has soared. His relentless fanning of conspiracy theories had turbocharged the popularity of Infowars, as had his bromance with Donald Trump, doubling traffic to his site to fifty million views a month and boosting viewings of its YouTube videos to in excess of a billion. In 2013 Jones’s business was already bringing in US$20 million in revenue yearly.

“Jones got away with saying all this stuff before because he didn’t have an audience,” says Kyle Farrer, a lawyer representing Pozner. “Who cares what some guy yelling at clouds is saying? But now his megaphone is significantly bigger. He’s talking to this big audience and now he’s saying this crazy stuff that has a real effect on people. It’s like his rise is his downfall.”

For Farrer’s fellow lawyer on the case, Mark Bankston, the only threat Jones takes seriously is one that threatens his business. “If you make him understand that these kinds of ‘journalistic’ practices have a cost and an effect, and that he won’t be able to profit off of causing pain to a family, I think that’s a victory too.” Particularly if that message is heard by his acolytes and imitators.

Jones’s growing problem was that no matter how ridiculous we might find his unhinged ranting or his non-stop promotion and selling of products with names like Prosta Guard, Real Red Pill, Superblue Fluoride-free Toothpaste and Combat One Tactical Bath Wipes (“Baby wipes for middle-aged men who serve in a thrown-together militia out in the woods”), he was slowly, ineluctably being drawn into courtrooms where he had to abide by others’ rules.

This was unforgettably illustrated in one of the lawsuits playing out since Williamson’s book went to press. As a clip from the Law and Crime Network shows, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble found that she needed to talk to Jones as if he were a disobedient third-grader.

Judge: You must tell the truth. This is not your show. You’re already under oath. You’ve already violated that oath twice today. It seems absurd to instruct you to tell the truth again while you testify but here I am. You must tell the truth while you testify. This [pointing to the witness box] is not your show… Do you understand what I have said to you?

Jones: Yes, I believe what I said is true.

Judge (cutting him off): You believe everything you say is true. But it isn’t. Your beliefs do not make something true.

In the end, the answer to the question of what went through Jones’s mind as he began spouting his bile against the relatives of the Sandy Hook victims in 2012 is: who cares? The reason why he is “angry, mendacious and heedless of the wreckage he creates,” as his former wife, Kelly Nichols attests, is less important than the fact he is at long last being held to account for his words.

So far he has lost every one of the defamation cases launched against him, not least because he has refused to cooperate in the standard legal process of discovery and given judges little choice but to rule against him. Now that he has filed for bankruptcy the key question is: will he be able to sequester his wealth from awards for damages or will his business be ruined?

That he is in this predicament rather than continuing to rant with a voice that sounds, as Williamson puts it, like “twenty miles of rough road” is because of the determination of the Sandy Hook parents, along with all those who lent their expertise to the task. Asking what has been going through their minds, not just on 14 December 2012 but in the ten years since then, is the more pertinent question. It is also a much harder one to answer, particularly if you really do stop to imagine walking a mile in their shoes. •

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
By Elizabeth Williamson | Penguin Random House | $49.99 | 482 pages

The post Bearing the unbearable appeared first on Inside Story.

Stumm, who flew over Hiroshima with a group of correspondents, later wrote of the experience: “The usual journalists’ banter in the aircraft stopped as we neared the city, we were all so silent. I will never forget what it was like. I had expected rubble and the devastation, but nothing prepared me for the piles of bodies, clearly recognisable, and the bitter desolation of a once prosperous community. This [silence] continued even when we touched down. No one said a word.”

But it was Stumm’s interview with Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge as he lay in his hospital bed suffering from radiation poisoning that gave her readers the first real insight into what had taken place.

“Father Kleinsorge described walking barefoot through devastated Hiroshima for hours after the bombing,” Stumm filed. He had been reading at his presbytery, just 500 metres from ground zero, when he saw a flash. “I don’t remember hearing any explosion or how I came from the second floor to the ground floor, but when I did, I found that our house was the only one left standing as far as I could see,” Stumm quoted Kleinsorge as saying:

It was black as night. Six people, four brother priests, one student and one servant collected together, and we dug out the wife and daughter of the caretaker from under the wreckage. Fires had broken out all over Hiroshima. They raged at us from every direction. We had small splinter-like wounds all over our bodies. In the afternoon a whirlwind sprang up which made the sky pitch black and drove many people into the river, where they drowned. People were wandering about with their whole faces one large blister from the searing effect of the bomb. Only forty out of six hundred schoolgirls at the Methodist college survived; three hundred little girls at the government school were killed instantly. Thousands of young soldiers in training at barracks were slaughtered. I walked for two hours and only saw two hundred people alive.

“Two days after the bombing,” Stumm reported, “Japanese military forces entered Hiroshima and collected 200,000 bodies for cremation. In addition to those killed outright, many more died through lack of medical attention as every hospital had been destroyed.”

Ten years earlier, with a bachelor of arts, a diploma of journalism and some casual sports reporting experience at the Brisbane Telegraph under her belt, Stumm had followed her boyfriend, Harley, to London, where he was training to become an airforce pilot and she aimed to be a reporter.

But it was “harder to get into Fleet Street than to rob the bank of England,” as she would later write in her autobiography, I Saw Too Much. So, in 1936, she “crashed” into the night editor’s office at the Daily Mirror and plied him with a judicious mix of charm, truths and falsehoods.

“He asked me, can you do interviews? Never having done such a thing in my life, I promptly replied, yes.” To her amazement, he gave her a month’s trial, which would end up taking her across the world to cover the story of the century:

I was as green as grass for I’d never known what real work was like until I joined the Daily Mirror. However, it didn’t take long to realise that my job was one that demanded the qualifications of a Scotland Yard sleuth, combined with the acumen of an astute lawyer and the bright ideas of a crack advertising agency.

In the beginning I had no technical knowledge of how a newspaper operated. What I did have, I quickly discovered, was an instinctive news sense, something I believe you cannot learn: you either have it, or you don’t. In some instinctual way, I could scent, or feel my way into an important interview or recognise a good angle for a story.

And her angle was firmly tabloid. She covered crime, securing her first scoop by stalking a pathologist, charmed the leading tenor of the day into the bath to sing for a photo, interviewed movie stars like Robert Taylor and authors like George Bernard Shaw, and tailed Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret through the zoo at Regent’s Park.

When war broke out, Stumm followed Harley, now her husband, to Singapore and quickly found a job on the Malaya Tribune as a general reporter, bringing a “dash of Fleet Street” to Southeast Asia — so much so that her first story defamed the governor, almost getting her deported. Then, after the birth of her baby and the Japanese shelling of Singapore, she received a cable. It was her old editor at the Mirror. “Delighted to know you are safe. Can you become our accredited war correspondent and start filing stories immediately?”

Stumm became known as “that war correspondent with a baby.” Tiny Sheridan waited outside press conferences with her amah while her mother covered the refusal of authorities to believe that Singapore was vulnerable to Japanese attack. But Singapore did fall, and Stumm was forced back home to Brisbane, where she received another cable from the Daily Mirror: “All delighted you are safe. Can you represent us at General MacArthur’s HQ in Brisbane?”

The US general was the Supreme Allied Commander South-West Pacific Area, and Brisbane seethed with hundreds of thousands of serving US and Australian men and women. It was a city of sandbags, brown-outs and bomb shelters.

Stumm wore an Australian army officer’s uniform and the flat, broad brimmed Australian women’s army hat, all of which she felt was far from flattering. The American brass, complaining the hat made her look like a squashed tomato, gave her a US officers’ side cap, which she wore with flair. The quality of her reporting brought her to the notice of MacArthur, who included her in an otherwise all-male reporting pack sent to Port Moresby to cover the battle against Japanese forces.

“Here at this forward area, the atmosphere tinges with excitement and grim preparedness,” she filed. “Rugged Australian soldiers load trucks, dig roads, heave fence poles, their mahogany backs bent to the job, their Digger hats stained with the perspiration that pours off them in this humid land. Side by side with them work the Doughboys, more conventional in their fatigue suits with rolled-down sleeves, some even in khakis with ties neatly tucked in at the neck.”

She worked alongside George Johnston, who would cover the war in China and go on to become one of Australia’s most important novelists, and Ian Morrison, the war correspondent son of Australian George Morrison, who had covered the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China for the London Times. Like most of the men, she operated out of the local command post, covering stories that she couldn’t see first-hand, like the Battle of Kaiapit that saw Australian soldiers defeat a much larger force of Japanese with few losses and establish an airstrip to protect the northern coastal town of Lae.

“The country around Port Moresby was so bad it was a wonder to me that troops could fight in such difficult terrain,” she would write later:

The jeep track leading to the Kokoda Track was so rough it was a misery to ride along. But even here, Australian humour came to the fore. At the start of the Kokoda Track, a huge banner was stretched across the track which read: “Through these portals pass the best damn mosquito bait in the world.” On the other side to welcome the returning troops was written: “We told you so!”

Stumm covered the work of nurses, impressed with their courage and the hardships they faced. “Into Moresby by plane usually come the wounded from land and sea battles. Twenty-four hours a day the girls of Moresby, Australian and American, are on the job, taking care of them,” she filed. She would later interview a group of nurses freed from Japanese captivity, who, fearing pack rape, had kept vials of morphine, ready to kill themselves.

“Even though I’d been through air raids in Singapore, New Guinea was a shock,” she wrote later. “I remember walking down a dusty track, feeling dazed by the heat and the noise, when coming towards me was a war correspondent colleague, George Johnston. He asked me how it was all going. ‘It’s all a bit overwhelming, suddenly finding myself in the theatre of war.’ He nodded sympathetically. ‘I know. It’s a case of I saw too much.’”

As the war was ending, Stumm took a job on the Daily Telegraph in Sydney. But there was one last cable to come from the Daily Mirror, this time asking her to go to Tokyo to cover the Japanese surrender. In a story that would be repeated for women correspondents for decades to come, the editor of the Daily Telegraph only agreed to let her go if she made her own way there. With no civilian flights available, Stumm called on her air force connections, who helped her in memory of her husband, Wing Commander Harley Stumm, who had been killed in action.

After the war, MacArthur awarded Stumm the Asiatic Pacific Service Star for her services as a war correspondent in New Guinea. •

This is an edited extract from Through Her Eyes: Australia’s Women Correspondents from Hiroshima to Ukraine, edited by Melissa Roberts and Trevor Watson, published by Hardie Grant Books.

The post The correspondent who saw too much  appeared first on Inside Story.

On the internet, where most of what passes for public debate now takes place, the political temperature is permanently set to one hundred. Bad faith is the order of the day. The twenty-first-century public square is a suffocating, hyperpartisan, dopamine-fuelled dungheap of memes and nasty tweets. Every demographic group claims victimhood. Every issue provokes hysterical disagreement. Everyone is angry about everything all of the time.

For Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens, the authors of the new Quarterly Essay Uncivil Wars: How Contempt Is Corroding Democracy, both sides of politics share responsibility for this discursive rot. “Something’s amiss,” they suggest at the outset. Transgender activists and their gender-critical opponents are engaged in a battle to the death. Black Americans who speak of white supremacy deploy the same language of existential erasure as the increasing numbers of white Americans who invoke the spectre of anti-white discrimination. Families, apparently, are being torn apart by political polarisation.

What unites the loudest voices on both left and right, they argue, is an attitude of sneering contemptuousness for their political opponents. Both sides live in sealed-off, alternative realities: the left, beholden to a culture of prim censoriousness and moral absolutism, resides in some kind of imaginary university campus, prosecuting thought crimes and jumping at shadows; the right, meanwhile, occupies a Fox News–induced fantasy universe of fear and resentment, eternally besieged by the traitorous and freedom-hating metropolitan elites.

For Aly and Stephens, this contemptuous approach — or rather, non-approach — to public deliberation is both dangerous and new. It is, they think, substantively different from the kind of constructive disagreement that is meant to provide democratic politics with its flexibility, dynamism and responsiveness. To view someone with contempt, they argue, is to see them as an illegitimate political actor, to judge their ideas and interests as beneath consideration. The contemned’s place in the polity is questionable, their right to participate in a deliberative, mutually respectful debate refused. They are irredeemable, unworthy, deplorable.

Aly and Stephens’s story of how and why this happened is a familiar one. In recent years, they write, the perverse algorithmic incentives of the major social media platforms have encouraged a race to the bottom: the more base and prejudicial a news item or post, the more clicks, the more advertisers, the more dollars. For the authors, this “commodification of emotion” has soured the very “air” in which political debate takes place. It has closed off the possibilities for political cooperation and participation in a shared democratic project. Unless more attention is paid to “the conditions of our common life,” they warn, democracy as we know it may cease to exist.

This posture of high moral seriousness will be familiar to regular listeners of The Minefield, Aly and Stephens’s long-running discussion program on ABC Radio National. For the past seven years they have been taking prominent weekly news items and using them as prompts for stimulating and somewhat highfalutin discussions of “the ethical and moral dilemmas of modern life.” This year alone they have picked apart topics as diverse as hunger, ambivalence, housing affordability, the Ukraine conflict, the Religious Discrimination Bill and the television series Succession.

As a duo, they have an entertaining dynamic. Both are preternaturally articulate and argumentative. Stephens, who moonlights as the editor of the ABC’s Religion and Ethics section, is loquacious and widely read in political and moral philosophy. Aly, a media polymath with a high-profile side gig on Channel Ten’s The Project, has a more lawyerly manner, and is naturally inclined to take a sceptical or contrarian view. At times it seems as if he stands by with a sewing needle, waiting to deflate each new hot air balloon sent up by his excitable co-host.

By passing regular moral judgement on matters of public concern, both fit the definition of what we used to call public intellectuals. Both are consummate media performers, ready to offer their thoughts on almost any topic. Like all good public intellectuals, too, they tend to divide opinion. For some, their posture of good-natured intellectual detachment is refreshing, floating loftily above the catfights and mudslinging of the daily news cycle. For others, though, it all comes across as impossibly smug, a nationally syndicated graduate seminar run by two self-indulgent know-alls.

Either way, the impeccably courteous atmosphere of The Minefield provides a working model for the kind of respectful deliberation both would prefer to see in broader public discussion. Both delight in doubt and uncertainty, in moral ambiguities and ethical grey areas. As they often cheerfully admit, they are prone to finish each show even more confused than when they began. In this respect, Albert Camus’s epigraph to their Quarterly Essay reads almost like a motto: “We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right.”

In Uncivil Wars, Aly and Stephens take the Minefield formula and pursue it at essay length. The central problem they seek to pick apart — incivility in public debate — is presented as a matter of existential urgency. Their overall diagnosis — an excess of contempt — is defined in highly abstract terms. The arguments they provide are self-consciously polemical, their philosophising a provocation, their generalisations an invitation to further debate. And their discussion of how it all plays out is shot through with grand moral language: vengeance, shame, envy, anger, resentment, justice and forgiveness.

Despite Aly and Stephens’s posture of detachment, though, it is the left that seems to receive the brunt of their censure. The key illustrative examples they use to frame the essay are not the more overt Schmittian “friend and enemy” politics of the new populist right, but rather Hillary Clinton’s infamous characterisation of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and, closer to home, the Stop Adani anti-coal convoy that toured regional towns in the weeks leading up the 2019 federal election.

In the standard narrative that has formed around these two events, both have come to be seen as mistakes or turning points for the left, moments when establishment liberal elites inadvertently revealed their contempt for the forgotten people they were ostensibly trying to persuade. The result, per this interpretation, was that working people were driven to vote for right-wing politicians in protest. If only Clinton had not been so rude to Trump voters, they might yet have been persuaded not to vote for him; if only the Stop Adani protesters had invited the coalminers into their homes for tea and coffee, Labor might not have lost in Queensland.

This, to me, seems a rather naive reading of these events. Without a radical change in Labor’s policy, it is unlikely that much could have been said to people in rural Queensland to prevent them from voting in what they perceived to be their own interests. Clinton’s “deplorables” comment might have backfired as a political strategy, but it was nevertheless a pretty clear statement of her own political beliefs and those of her core constituency: the much-maligned urban white-collar professional managerial class.

Democratic politics is not always about consensus. It is also a way of working out the issues on which we disagree. That the interests of metropolitan voters did not align with those who were drawn to Trump is largely the point.

In a general sense, Aly and Stephens are right: something really is amiss. Since 2016, or perhaps 2008, many of the world’s major liberal democracies have looked much less robust than they once did. The number of simultaneous crises to be navigated is so overwhelming — climate change, geopolitical tensions, deglobalisation, war in Europe, inflation, pandemic, obscene wealth inequality and the resurgence of class politics — that some have taken to calling it a “polycrisis.” In this environment, established political parties and media institutions have faced continuing tests of their legitimacy. By any measure, these are genuinely concerning times.

The argument of Uncivil Wars, though, is that contempt and incivility are not merely symptoms of these concurrent crises: they are the cause. The teetering liberal democracies of the West will not survive the mounting threats to their existence, Aly and Stephens suggest, unless everyone can agree to put down their weapons and show a little kindness and respect. In the abstract, it is hard to disagree with such an argument: no popular, broad-based political movement was ever built without some element of mutual consideration, constructiveness and cooperation.

But we should not pretend that because public discourse has a contemptuous tone, a kind of equivalence exists between the political agendas of left and right, or between the quality of the solutions each proposes for the resolution of our social ills. For all the posturing and moral policing of the most annoying sections of the online liberal left, and for all the blind spots and unconscious biases of the “mainstream media,” there is still no liberal equivalent of Fox News, an organisation so flagrantly hostile to democratic norms that it is actively undermining the functioning of the American republic.

Aly and Stephens do not have any particular sympathy with the reactionary right wing of American politics. But when they suggest that the fascist inclinations and genuine illiberalism of the new American right has its mirror on the left, in the form of cancel culture and political correctness, they echo one of its most ridiculous talking points. Being mean to each other on the internet is not the same as denying someone’s political rights. As the authors’ own historical examples attest, hostile argument, straw manning of your opponents, exaggeration, partisanship — even incivility — have been features of democratic politics for much of modernity, regardless of the media environment.

Indeed, as Aly and Stephens concede, there are also circumstances where contempt is in fact justifiable and even politically productive, especially when it is directed “upward” towards those who wield power. In such circumstances, they write, appeals for civility in public debate — appeals for less contempt — function mostly as a means of stifling dissent. Contempt for a common enemy might instead be thought of as a way of building a political coalition. If the ends justify the means, it could even be considered a political virtue.

Aly and Stephens are correct to observe that the political “air quality” has become increasingly toxic, and that this sometimes undermines our ability to seek common ground. Stopping the rot in our democracies, though, requires more than simple policing of the way we talk to each other. If we have any hope of building political coalitions capable of seriously addressing the polycrisis, we will need to find more accurate and persuasive ways to make sense of the mess we are in.

Of course we shouldn’t pretend our answers to these questions are always absolutely right. But we shouldn’t be afraid to say when the other side is absolutely wrong. And if this means showing some “upward contempt” towards those whom our malfunctioning political system currently benefits, so be it. By pointing the finger at both sides, Uncivil Wars provides no real case for what should be changed and how we should change it. In the end, it comes across as mere moralising. •

The post Flame wars appeared first on Inside Story.

HEDLEY THOMAS: This is episode… of The Teacher’s Pet. Listeners are advised, this podcast contains coarse language and adult themes. This podcast series is brought to you by the Australian.

NEWS PRESENTER: Lynette Dawson was reported missing by her husband, former Newtown Jets Rugby League star, Chris Dawson.

JC: He said, I was going to get a hit man to kill Lyn, and he rang me and said, Lyn’s gone. She isn’t coming back.

JULIE ANDREW: I just want justice, and I’d love her little girls to know she didn’t leave them.

Streamed at length to tens of thousands of viewers last Tuesday via YouTube, Justice Ian Harrison twice dropped big hints about his answer to the mystery. At the eighteen-minute mark he declared himself satisfied that the high school teacher lied when he claimed that Lynette told him she had left him. At the seventy-four-minute mark he took the view that the little girls’ mother didn’t voluntarily leave them.

And yet the judge took nearly four more hours to get to his verdict, for the same reason that Hedley Thomas took an entire podcast series to hammer home his. He had to deal with the string of Dawson’s contemporaries who have come forward to denounce the ex-footballer as a violent creep who routinely abused his wife and was looking for criminals willing to do worse.

At the end of his podcast’s initial run, Thomas told 60 Minutes that he believed his informants’ account of the accused. Dawson “is a despicable person; I think he’s severely narcissistic,” he said. “I think that he’s dangerous.” Tuesday’s twist was that Harrison disagreed, finding that most of those belated testimonies were lies, embellishments or irrelevant, and instead holding — to audible gasps from the public gallery — that Dawson “is a person of prior good character.”

The judge specifically rejected multiple reports that the ex-footballer had struck or choked or threatened his wife, and dismissed the notion, proposed by the prosecution, that he had any tendencies, motivations or animosity towards her that were relevant to the murder trial.

Where does that leave Thomas’s podcast? Before I answer that, I should set out my own take on the journalist’s view that Dawson is a murderer, which I summed up in Inside Story four years ago:

Thomas’s view is widely shared by other journalists who have covered the case, as well as by a bevy of investigators, relatives and pundits and, now, by the millions of listeners to his podcast. While plausible, there is hardly any evidence to support it. Instead, The Teacher’s Pet is largely an attack on Dawson himself.

That “hardly any evidence” I mentioned? That’s exactly what Dawson’s judge relied on to reach his guilty verdict.

But what swayed Harrison wasn’t Chris Dawson’s character; rather, it was his wife Lyn’s. He firmly rejected as gendered and unfair any assumption that women never abandon their children. After all, everyone accepted that a Dawson in-law had done just that decades before Lyn vanished. But he did accept what nearly everyone said about Lyn Dawson: that it was absurd to think that someone with close family and friends who had little money of her own and couldn’t drive — someone who was trying to salvage her failing marriage — would suddenly and permanently “propel herself into a life of anonymity in a figurative state of nakedness.” It was still less likely that she’d keep only her unfaithful husband in the loop, and tersely, as he repeatedly claimed. Hence, Harrison’s findings that Lyn died and Chris lied.

That wasn’t enough to convict, though. The judge accepted that he needed to find a convincing reason why an otherwise non-abusive relationship would end with one spouse killing the other. The reason, of course, was the former schoolgirl, now in her fifties and referred to as JC, who told the court that Dawson had groomed her while teaching at her school, culminating in what Dawson later termed an “affair.”

But even that didn’t suffice to explain a murder, Harrison said, noting that affairs and failed marriages are commonplace. To the judge, it was clear that Dawson had plenty of better ways to leave his wife for JC and no good reason, financial or otherwise, to substitute a teenager for Lyn as his young children’s effective mother.

What killed Lyn, Harrison decided, was her husband’s jealousy. His obsession with the student eventually focused on her relationships with people her age, he said, especially when the teen left him for a beachside holiday a week before his wife disappeared. The upshot: “I am satisfied that the prospect that he would lose JC so distressed, frustrated and ultimately overwhelmed him that, tortured by her absence up north, Mr Dawson resolved to kill his wife.”

And so he did, Harrison found. Then, after faking a phone call to a local pool for cover, Dawson disposed of his wife’s body and phoned JC to tell her: “Lyn’s gone. She isn’t coming back. Come back to Sydney and help me look after the children and be with me.”

Whether an appeal court agrees with that theory remains to be seen. But Harrison’s take vindicates a central theme of Thomas’s podcast: that the former footballer’s day in court should have come decades earlier. Nearly all of the evidence the judge relied on was known to the police by the early nineties, when Dawson’s second marriage — to JC — ended. (In response to the defence’s claim that the story JC gave the police was invented to advance a custody dispute with Dawson, Harrison pointedly observed that JC herself was “only a child” when Lyn vanished.)

If Harrison’s reasoning is right, then so were the two coroners who recommended prosecution in the early 2000s. Seemingly in the wrong were lackadaisical cops during the eighties and nineties, former prosecutor Nicholas Cowdery (who repeatedly refused to bring the murder charge)… and me.

Does that mean the Walkley Foundation’s judges were right to call Hedley Thomas’s podcast “a masterclass in investigative journalism”? Several other judges have firmly said no. “I have listened to the podcast,” wrote the then chief justice of New South Wales, Tom Bathurst, a year ago, “and regard its object was to incite prejudice against [Chris Dawson] in a sensationalist fashion.” This was no idle review by Bathurst, who sat alongside two other judges. The septuagenarian Dawson spent the pandemic asking multiple courts to stop his murder prosecution in its tracks, citing the coldness of the case against him, the incompetence and bias of police who investigated him and, above all, the impact of the podcast.

Thomas was required to hand over most of his notes and interviews to Dawson and the court. This May (after a suppression order was lifted) we learnt how this particular sausage was made. Part of that story was Thomas’s approach, near the start of 2018, to a former solicitor, Rebecca Hazel, who had met JC by chance a decade earlier. In the years since, Hazel had developed a warm friendship with JC and was writing a book, The Schoolgirl, Her Teacher and His Wife. Thomas convinced Hazel that her book and his podcast — which he had started work on a few months earlier — should be published in unison.

Hazel later ruminated to the court that Thomas’s real interest was in her hard-won contacts. Her friendship with JC suffered after the now fifty-four-year-old eventually decided she wanted nothing to do with Thomas’s podcast. Until the deal collapsed, though, Hazel sat in with Thomas’s interviews. She told the courts that his journalistic style — which commenced by telling his interviewees that Dawson was a killer — left her uncomfortable.

It made the judges uncomfortable too, as did the revelation that those words of JC’s that opened each podcast episode — and gave the impression that Dawson told her that he’d hired a hitman who caused Lyn to disappear — were stitched together from two entirely separate remarks. Worse still was Thomas’s convincing of most of Hazel’s contacts — Lyn Dawson’s grieving family, some coronial inquest witnesses and, incredibly, Chris Dawson’s family lawyer and one of the coroners (both of whom were magistrates by then) — to endorse the podcast or even publicly condemn a murder suspect under active investigation.

And then there was the podcast’s attack on then director of public prosecutions Lloyd Babb, who attended Dawson’s school, even though Thomas was well aware that Babb would play no role in the charging decision. Elizabeth Fullerton, the judge who heard the whole pre-trial application, held that the journalist “deliberately raised the false spectre of impropriety” just to put more pressure on the prosecutor assigned to the case. After Thomas spent days on her witness stand, the judge observed that he “gave no indication that he had gained any insight into the damage he has done… and no obvious awakening of his ethical role as a journalist.”

Nor has he since. After Dawson was found guilty, Thomas publicly claimed (citing “senior lawyers” and “former and current police officers”) that his podcast was “a factor in the DPP’s decision to prosecute.” Thomas had said as much to Justice Fullerton, telling her he thought “public pressure” from his podcast and Lyn’s family “might cause the DPP to look at something properly,” a statement she labelled “breathtaking” and  something the prosecutors have always denied (including just last week).

Fullerton found that the brief of evidence the prosecution accepted was actually completed six months before Thomas started working on the podcast and sent to prosecutors a month before its launch. Notably, that brief already included Thomas’s supposedly biggest discovery, a 1982 missing person report supplied by Dawson. The cops had found that previously lost statement in 2015, three years before Thomas’s announcement on his podcast that he had been handed it by an “unlikely source.” (Weeks later, he said he got it from the ombudsman.)

To be sure, it’s all too easy to imagine the prosecutors buckling under the public pressure, and Dawson’s lawyers argued that any such perception was itself poisonous. After all, Thomas claimed throughout his podcast that he had “new evidence” for the police. (Justice Fullerton found that he actually had “little” that the investigators didn’t already have.)

Added to that, a Sydney radio personality had publicly convinced the then police commissioner to order his investigators to speak with Thomas. (Fullerton fretted that the commissioner himself was trying to influence the prosecutors, but opted for the kinder conclusion that he was just fooled by Thomas’s bluster.)

And, of course, the decision to charge Dawson came mere days after the podcast’s Gold Walkley. (It was also weeks after extensive digging at the former matrimonial home, at Thomas’s behest, uncovering nothing. A dirty cardigan previously found there was one of many pieces of evidence ballyhooed on the podcast that went unmentioned in the judge’s reasons.)

But, while it’s unlikely that The Teacher’s Pet prompted a murder trial, neither did it stop one. The courts rejected all of Dawson’s arguments that he couldn’t be properly tried, albeit by a whisker. Nevertheless, Hedley Thomas can clearly claim credit for some things.

For starters, he delayed Dawson’s trial by several years, with the courts ordering a pause until mid 2021 (in the hope that Sydney’s jurors would somehow forget Thomas’s podcast ever existed) and the High Court adding nine more months before it decided not to hear a further appeal from Dawson based on the lower courts’ criticisms of the podcast.

The podcast was also the main reason Dawson’s fate was put in the hands of a judge rather than a jury, after the Supreme Court ruled this would avoid the difficult and potentially impossible task of finding twelve jurors who were untouched by Thomas’s podcast. (Judge Harrison assured all that he had never partaken.)

Dawson’s prosecutors had wanted a jury trial regardless, perhaps worrying — rightly as it turns out — that a judge would dismiss most of the character evidence but also — wrongly as it turns out — that such a judge would then acquit. The result is that, instead of an inscrutable jury pronouncement, we now have detailed reasons — over 700 paragraphs of them — for why Dawson is now in jail.

One thing those reasons reveal (which a jury trial wouldn’t have) is the exact impact the podcast had on the verdict. Four years ago, I wrote, of the podcast’s revelations:

The new evidence about Lyn Dawson’s disappearance consists of decades-delayed revelations from family, neighbours, friends and acquaintances, each apologetic for not saying anything earlier about Chris Dawson’s allegedly odd behaviour or the bruises on his wife’s arm… [N]early all of this new evidence has a common flaw: it was generated not by Thomas’s gumshoeing but by the podcast itself. If [Dawson is] eventually prosecuted, [he] can compellingly argue that the new statements are distortions or fabrications prompted by Thomas’s own lurid claims.

And that’s what Dawson’s barrister, Pauline David, did. It was her only successful argument.

In the middle hours of his reasons, Harrison threw out virtually every witness Thomas uncovered or even spoke with at length — from the man who claimed Dawson asked him to find a hitman, to witnesses who claimed to have seen bruises on Lyn’s arms or throat, or heard her describe being choked or pushed in the mud — unless they had given the same account to the police well before they were interviewed for the podcast. He likewise threw out every defence witness who had seemingly only come forward because of all the publicity.

In short, The Teacher’s Pet stopped both sides from usefully investigating Lyn’s disappearance after the start of 2018. At his trial, Dawson’s lawyer argued that this hindrance, plus the police’s failure to gather key documents, since lost, or to speak with key witnesses, since deceased, and the delays that prevented Dawson doing the same, left him at an unfair disadvantage. Harrison disagreed, noting that his prosecutors were just as affected. Again, it remains to be seen whether Dawson’s appeal judges will agree.

Last May, a new Chris Dawson podcast launched:

JOURNALIST: Happy that finally it’s under way now?

CHRIS DAWSON: Yes, very happy.

HEDLEY THOMAS: My name is Hedley Thomas and I’m a journalist with a particular interest in podcast investigations into the alleged murders of women in Australia. This is the first episode of our new podcast series, The Teacher’s Trial.

This is Hedley Thomas’s fourth entry in the medium. His second and third podcasts followed the formula of his first. The Night Driver, which identified multiple possible suspects in the disappearance of Bathurst’s Janine Vaughan, failed to go viral. He had more success with Shandee’s Story, which reinvestigated a man acquitted of murdering his titular ex in Mackay and, like the ABC’s Trace, prompted an inquiry into the handling of DNA evidence.

His latest effort mimics a different one from Thomas’s newspaper. Yuendumu’s daily recaps of the trial of NT police officer Zachary Rolfe were a landmark in national court reporting, brilliantly letting interested people closely follow a case of enormous public interest, almost the way Americans routinely do. (The pandemic has seen many Australian courts live stream multiple proceedings of public interest, but no criminal trials to date.)

The NT Supreme Court itself took an especially open approach to the Rolfe case, eventually taking the unprecedented, but very welcome, step of publishing the whole trial transcript on its website. Its actions evinced a desire to be as open as possible and a trust in the media’s ability to report on such a sensitive case responsibly. In my view, the mutual trust was rewarded, and achieved a much higher public understanding of Rolfe’s acquittal among supporters and critics of the jury’s decision alike.

If Dawson had faced a jury, it’s doubtful that the NSW courts would have allowed anything similar. Justice Fullerton thundered that, had The Teacher’s Pet been published after the murder charge was laid, “a number of individuals and publishers would inevitably have been liable and likely convicted of a criminal contempt.” She was horrified that the podcast’s final episodes were published after the former teacher’s arrest, and noted that the prosecutors initially asked to vet The Night Driver in case Thomas somehow added to his errors. The Teacher’s Pet was eventually pulled from local sites and the media were banned from even mentioning the podcast’s name until this year.

But the ruling that gave Justice Harrison the jury’s role — itself prompted by The Teacher’s Pet — made The Teacher’s Trial possible. We’re better off for the coverage it provided. I’ve little doubt that reporters Matthew Condon, Claire Harvey and David Murray shared their co-host’s view about Dawson’s guilt, but it was refreshing to hear them refrain from stating it. Instead, their podcast gave detailed but fair summaries — sometimes even with counterarguments — of the prosecution’s evolving arguments and evidence, alongside balanced, expert reflections on the trial process, crime reporting and true crime fandom.

The different tone has any number of possible explanations. Attending every day in the courtroom, the journalists may have picked up the rhythms of a real trial, which — unlike Thomas’s parody — alternates between arguments and responses on each and every piece of evidence. And they would have been well aware that, much as Dawson and his family once recognised, their every word could end up being raised in court.

Dawson was also able to keep Thomas himself out of the courtroom for much of the trial by having prosecutors promise to call him to testify. (Thomas’s testimony turned out to be a very muted reprise of his testimony at the pre-trial hearing. The defence instead relied on a transcript of Thomas’s earlier testimony, and even a couple of podcast episodes, to convince Harrison of the journalist’s impact on the evidence.)

That meant Thomas was reduced to a background role on his own podcast. In an early episode, he responded to some of Justice Fullerton’s findings, expressing bafflement at her critique of how he edited JC’s words and defending the media’s role in exposing official failings. He played a greater role — albeit still somewhat muted — after he testified, and even issued a belated apology of sorts to JC days before Harrison’s verdict.

At Dawson’s murder trial, JC repeatedly objected to any reference to her “relationship” with Dawson — and even her later marriage to him — describing it instead as “grooming.” In response, Thomas said he no longer felt comfortable with having referred to JC as Dawson’s “teenage lover” in his earlier podcast. He invited advocate Nina Funnell onto The Teacher’s Trial to explain how Grace Tame had endured the use of the terms “affair” or “tryst” or (in court) “maintaining a sexual relationship” to describe her years of abuse by her teacher.

But no one — not Thomas, not his co-hosts, not Funnell — mentioned the elephant in the room. How do any of these people think Grace Tame would have felt if someone made a hit podcast about her case and called it The Teacher’s Pet? (Last week, the Australian proudly celebrated Dawson’s conviction by re-releasing all twenty episodes of the 2018 Gold Walkley winner.)

Like George Pell’s case before it, Chris Dawson’s is now on a path to an eventual finale in Australia’s High Court. Much may turn on Ian Harrison’s pre-trial rulings on the admissibility of evidence, which are yet to be published.

In the meantime, let me venture a different prediction: there’ll never be a podcast like The Teacher’s Pet again. This isn’t my hope speaking — though there is that — but rather the courts. Alongside his second Walkley, Thomas can now lay claim to Justice Fullerton’s prize for “the most egregious example of media interference with a criminal trial process which this Court has had to consider.”

When Elizabeth Fullerton spoke these words, she was well aware that they would fall on Thomas’s deaf ears, but she had a different audience in mind. She had pointedly asked the journalist what legal advice he had sought about the podcast, only to be interrupted by a News Ltd lawyer who claimed privilege. She later pondered what would be worse: Thomas choosing to go ahead despite his in-house advice, or because of it. She closed her judgement with advice to prosecutors: that they should be more proactive in seeking injunctions against true crime journalism before — perhaps even well before — relevant charges have been laid. She made it clear that she would now be more inclined to grant such requests.

That may be one last thing Thomas can duly claim credit for: the end of media investigations of cases under consideration by prosecutors in New South Wales, and perhaps other states too. But my hope is for something gentler: that Fullerton’s words are not aimed at all true crime journalism, but only the malign sort that Thomas peddles. There is still, in my view, room for podcasts that, like The Teacher’s Trial, offer a semblance of the justice that the courts afforded Dawson this year. •

Note: To correct an inaccuracy, the bolded words were added to the following sentence after publication: “She was horrified that the podcast’s final episodes were published after the former teacher’s arrest, and noted that the prosecutors initially asked to vet The Night Driver in case Thomas somehow added to his errors.”

The post The podcast’s trial appeared first on Inside Story.

Allowing for changes in the industry over time, the analyses made by these inquiries — whether they’ve been conducted by government departments, parliamentary committees, judges, bureaucrats or statutory authorities — have been remarkably similar, as have their proposed solutions. Yet there is precious little to show for all that activity.

The latest addition to the list is this year’s Senate inquiry into media diversity in Australia, whose report, released last week, frankly admits that much of what it has to say has been said many times before.

The good thing about all this inquiring is that if a future government ever works up the courage to break the mould of five decades and construct good, comprehensive media policy, the building blocks are lying around ready for use.

The latest inquiry does have a few important points of difference. It came in response to the petition launched by former prime minister Kevin Rudd and supported by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull that called for a royal commission into Australian media. The petition was signed by more than half a million Australians — a new record for parliamentary petitions — many of whom will have been watching and waiting to see what results from their efforts.

The petition and public participation through submissions brought the inquiry a moral authority that can’t be entirely dissipated by the surrounding politics, including the fact that the committee’s two Liberal members each issued a dissenting report, with senator Andrew Bragg describing the inquiry as a “stunt” and the recommendations “reckless.”

Although the inquiry was initiated by the Greens and chaired by Sarah Hanson-Young, all the committee’s Labor members supported the majority report. Yet almost immediately after its release shadow communications minister Michelle Rowland told Sky News that the report’s central recommendation — a royal commission — was “not a Labor Party policy.”

Rowland did acknowledge “deep concern in Australian society” about the health of democracy and the fourth estate and “broad agreement” that regulation needed to be reformed, and pledged that Labor would “take on board the recommendations made under successive inquiries.” But when she was predictably asked why Labor senators didn’t issue a dissenting report if the recommendations were inconsistent with party policy, she fell into incoherence.

“As you said, this was a Greens-chaired committee and it’s incumbent on the senators to choose whether they put their names to reports or whether they choose to issue dissenting reports,” she said. “The key thing here… is this is done in confidence. The Senate in confidence undertakes these — it’s not undertaken as part of a party policy process, the Senate performs its functions, as it has just done now. I can tell you clearly that this is not Labor Party policy. But we are very keen to ensure the health of our democracy is preserved by taking appropriate actions in the media space that has simply gone missing in action over the last eight years.”

What can she mean by “in confidence”? There is nothing more public than a parliamentary inquiry. And don’t start me on the mixed metaphors in that last sentence.

The most active Labor senator on the inquiry was Kim Carr, who turned up consistently, unlike other committee members, was well briefed and asked lots of questions. Carr has faced his own factional challenges in recent times, but here the other Labor senators seemed to follow his lead rather than reflecting Rowland’s views or, for that matter, those of Anthony Albanese.

Given the lack of dissenting recommendations from Labor senators, the report might well be seen as a collaboration between the Green and Labor senators. Rowland was keen to reject any assertion that it reflected what Labor might do if it is in Greens-supported minority government. Labor, she said, would not do “any backroom deals [with the Greens] on any area of policy, including in the communications portfolio.”

But let’s back up. What does the report actually say?

It makes two recommendations, with the second having multiple parts. The first deals with media regulation and adopts the Rudd petition’s call for a royal commission or judicial inquiry “to determine whether the existing system of media regulation is fit-for-purpose and to investigate the concentration of media ownership in Australia.” It wants the possibility of a single, independent media regulator to be explored in order to “harmonise news media standards and oversee an effective process for remedying complaints.”

The second, covering government funding for media outlets, calls for “sustainable and adequate” funding for the ABC and SBS, permanent funding for independent newswire Australian Associated Press (currently limping forward on philanthropy after News Corp tried to close it down), a trust to administer grants for emerging media ventures, and an upgraded National Broadband Network, kept in public hands, “to provide crucial communications infrastructure for as broad a range of new media ventures as possible, especially those engaging in public interest journalism.”

The majority report also recommended using the tax system to support journalism, both through tax incentives for investment, similar to those already used to encourage private sector research and development, and by making philanthropic donations to journalism ventures tax-deductible.*

The seven chapters justifying these recommendations serve as a decent primer for those — probably including some of the Rudd petition’s signatories — who have only just begun paying attention to the state of the news media and how it is regulated.

The senators agree with News Corp that the digital platforms, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, should be regulated, and approvingly cite the current government’s moves in this direction. But they turn this point back onto News Corp itself in the very next chapter, making it clear that such regulation and accountability should be uniform, and include equivalent levels of responsibility for traditional media. They twice quote the stunningly frank response of News Corp’s global head, Robert Thomson, when asked about aspects of media regulation and digital platforms: “Honestly, I have conflicting views on this. I would like it to be relaxed for us and intensified for them.”

What follows is the most strongly worded criticism of News Corp I have seen in any media inquiry report. The section headings give you the drift: “The Corrosive Effects of Monopoly on Democracy”; “An Unhealthy and Dangerous Influence on Politics” (which covers anti-Labor bias) and  “national security implications” which covers the spread of misinformation and the potential encouragement of political extremism, referencing the role of Fox News in the Capitol Building riot in Washington. Another section discusses “Public Health Misinformation,” and another examines the assertion that Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person to steward a global media company.”

The report includes case studies to demonstrate the failure of the current regulatory system, with all the examples drawn from the behaviour of News Corp, which the senators suggest is now impervious to the action of regulators. News Corp was invited to respond to the case studies but declined to do so.

The dissenting Liberal senators and News Corporation have cited this focus as evidence of bias. I disagree. Other media outlets are far from perfect, but when it comes to Nine, Seven West and the ABC the problems are usually the result of cock-ups, resourcing difficulties, errors of judgement or outbreaks of stupidity.

The News Corp behaviour detailed in the report is of a different order — intense, politically charged campaigns against institutions and individuals, sometimes with inadequate respect for the facts. This report makes clear it is time to stop pretending the reality is otherwise.

It also contains the most strongly worded critique so far of the current system of regulation. The senators excoriate both the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which regulates broadcasting, and the text-based industry’s self-regulation body, the Australian Press Council.

I have some sympathy for ACMA staff, who are saddled with weak legislation, limited resources and an absence of political courage from successive ministers. Nevertheless, the responses of ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin to the senators’ questions have to be read to be believed. Why, for instance did ACMA not act before YouTube decided to take down Sky News videos spreading Covid misinformation?

Sarah Hanson-Young: Let’s be very clear, Ms O’Loughlin. We’re not asking you about the number of complaints. We’ve heard that. What we’re asking is whether Sky News… is abiding by their obligations.

Nerida O’Loughlin: We do not see evidence before us, through the complaints process, that they are not.

Hanson-Young: You don’t look for it, do you?

O’Loughlin: We do not have a monitoring role.

The senators clearly thought YouTube’s action to combat misinformation was a good thing, but they also pointed to the dangerous  precedent — that a foreign-owned multinational accountable to nobody exercises greater power over the parameters of public debate in our country than the government regulator acting under Australian law.

When it came to the Press Council, the senators were scathing, noting that its performance was judged inadequate as far back as the 2012 report of the Convergence Review, and that this judgement had been echoed by just about every relevant inquiry since.

Two recent case studies refreshed the point. One concerned the United Firefighters Union (which is close to Senator Carr, it should be noted), which lodged a detailed complaint with the Press Council alleging egregious errors and vilification in a campaign by the Herald Sun. For the senators, the Press Council’s response — that it couldn’t deal with a complaint involving so many stories — “suggests not only that the Council does not have sufficient resources to investigate serious claims, but also that it could be perceived at times to be reluctant to investigate a publication that is the principal funder of its activities.”

The report notes that ten years ago, when the Finkelstein inquiry found the Press Council was not fit for purpose, News Limited (as it was then) was contributing 45 per cent of its funding. Today, the figure is 60 per cent.

The other case study concerned a campaign against Professor Michelle Telfer by the Australian. Telfer is a paediatrician and head of the Department of Adolescent Medicine at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. The Press Council found that the Australian’s coverage of her work with children experiencing gender dysphoria breached accuracy and fairness standards. Unbowed, the paper editorialised against the finding, saying it was “partisan and compromised by activists” and an example of “cancel culture tactics.”

Astonishingly, the Press Council suggested this combative editorial should be seen not as a sign of disrespect but rather as evidence that its adjudications matter to the industry. For the senators, it demonstrated “both the dubious ethical standards guiding the Australian’s editorial judgement, and the impotence of the Press Council.” Even the dissenting report by Senator Bragg describes the Press Council as a “toothless tiger” that can “only improve.” But he wants reform to be left to the industry.

Good luck with that. The Council and its industry members have been promising reform for more than ten years. If it were capable of serious reform, it would have done it by now.

Yet I share some of the Liberal senators’ concerns. The Labor and Green senators believe “it is the parliament’s responsibility to ensure that the nation’s news media are sufficiently diverse,” which places that obligation much more squarely in the laps of our political representatives than any other inquiry I can recall.

This needs careful teasing out. Media policy and regulation is the responsibility of government and parliament, but politicians should not  be trusted with any power over news media. In fact, as this report itself lays out, that is an argument for rather than against a royal commission — to take regulation reform  out of the hands of politicians.

When it comes to funding news media, one only has to look at the current government’s record of pork-barrelling and pressure on the ABC to be worried by the implications. A government-funded AAP, for instance, would be an extraordinary development — though not without precedent. The respected French newswire Agence France-Presse is state-owned and government-funded. But grants programs will always be vulnerable to political interference. The senators recommend an independent trust to oversee grants — but even so. Who appoints the trust? All routes lead to a minister’s office, and thence to cabinet.

Add to this that recent grant programs have seen money awarded to companies that nevertheless cut their editorial staff.

That’s a big reason why I think tax incentives for investment in public interest journalism is the best way of delivering government support at a time of collapsed media business models.*

Also helpful would be a longer cycle of funding for the ABC and SBS, with the amount tied to total government spending, or GDP, or another politically neutral indicator.

Most people now accept that government has a role in supporting news media; public interest journalism is a public good. We are left to determine the appropriate mechanisms. Despite so many inquiries, with so few results, these issues keep coming up, and the sheer number of Kevin Rudd’s signatories suggest it is now entering the mainstream of public concern. Surely the time for action that is more than piecemeal, that constitutes properly considered media policy, must be approaching. •

* Declaration: I have been involved in advancing these ideas through my work with the Public Interest Journalism Initiative, of which I was a board member until earlier this year. The PIJI made submissions to the Senate inquiry. The underpinning research reports can be read here.

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Diversity deferred, again? appeared first on Inside Story.

Not yet, as it transpired, and nor was the fall of the Republican Party, which continues to deny its real significance. Coincidentally or not, the fall that didn’t quite happen has been a central theme in several major American television series this year. Following major disruption to production schedules through the pandemic, The Morning Show (Apple Plus), Billions (Showtime) and Succession (HBO) all returned with new seasons about those who surf the high tides of wealth, power and celebrity.

The leading characters may not be likeable but their complex and often perverse personalities have disturbing resonances in the real world. Their fantasies, delusions, moods and impulses are consequential because wealth and celebrity mean power. Not the power of the presidency, though they sometimes come close to it, but power that is wide-ranging and even fundamental.

Billions continued its rollercoaster ride through the theme park of hedge fund capitalism, where the key players, always seemingly headed for a crash, take daredevil loops into the next escapade. This year’s season five eventually saw the departure of Damien Lewis from the lead role of maverick trader Bobby “Axe” Axelrod after a marathon combat with prosecutor Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giametti) and, for a while, it looked like a classic downfall.

Regular viewers, of course, knew better than to expect anything like that. Victories and losses in this arena are never final and, while billions are always at stake, that never seems to matter much. It’s all about the combat, which plays out in round after round of alpha male confrontation that is at times overtly primordial.

Episode one begins literally in the jungle, with Axe and his right-hand guy Mike Wagner (David Costabile) bellowing and beating their chests under the influence of the psychoactive brew ayahuasca. Afterwards they hare off on motorbikes, bearded and leather-clad, to get back to the city and be restyled in time for a contest with new challenger Mike Prince (Corey Stoll): not a shootout, but a photoshoot for GQ, vying for the cover profile.

Meanwhile, over at the headquarters of Axe Capital, the women are proving that they too can play hard. Performance coach Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff) has arranged a stunt with a friend who poses as a feral intruder looking for trouble. They throw each other across tables, do a few spins and backflips then embrace to the applause of the assembled company. “Now are we ready to do the fucking job for each other?” yells Wendy.

That’s Billions, subtle as a shower of brickbats. Purporting to offer an updated interpretation of game theory, a view of human nature developed by the Rand Corporation in the 1950s, the dramaturgy always revolves around competitive individualism, where collaboration is only another means of serving one’s own ends.

Axe’s departure, with its soundtrack of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” may signal the emergence of an instinct to escape the psychological straitjacket, but maybe not. “Why can’t we make our own?” was his response to Chuck’s challenge about the need to recognise wider laws in the universe. Prince arrives to take over Axe’s company, quoting Emerson and apparently offering a more expansive philosophy, until his concluding pronouncement: “What this is, is mine.” Ultimately, this gives us an Ayn Rand world — endlessly profitable but weary, stale and flat.

In its first season, The Morning Show offered a welcome antidote, working a blend of farce and pathos in its portrayal of a major television network descending into mayhem when leading anchor Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) is forced to leave following allegations of abuse. There was genuine sparkle in the performances of Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon as Alex Levy and Bradley Jackson, the presenters left with the challenge of holding the audience and restoring confidence.

Integrity, of the news and those communicating it, remains a central theme in season two, but the business of distinguishing between genuine integrity and its public enactment becomes increasingly tortuous. Kessler’s fall is terminal, but with other key personnel implicated in the scandal, the fall of the network is what counts; and there, the public face is all that matters.

The longer story arcs of The Morning Show follow each of the central characters as they confront the question of what it means to be a good or worthwhile person. Their explorations take them on divergent paths, which means the new season has been criticised for lack of dramatic cohesion. Aniston and Witherspoon don’t have enough good material to work with and risk settling into prototypes: Alex as the melancholic narcissist, unable to escape her own mannered persona, and Bradley as the queen of charm whose zipped-on smile vanishes as instantly as it appears.

But showrunners Jay Carson and Kerry Ehrin should be credited with some serious thematic commitment. With his capacity to escape every impasse by stretching the parameters of the situation, chief executive Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) emerges as the most dynamic figure, becoming a focus for larger questions about the corporate ethos he represents.

Stood down in the first phase of the crisis, he makes a defiant return as head of the news division and fronts the board with debonair contempt. Holland Taylor gives a crisp vignette performance as the board’s chair, Cybil Richards, getting nowhere in her attempts to exert authority over someone whose response to her demands is, “You really think that’s what this is all about, your little television network? This is a battle for the soul of the universe.”

Crudup portrays him as a lightning-witted improviser, always fully present in the moment, “exploiting the landscape of chaos.” Perceptive in interviews, Crudup speculates that if wealth and celebrity are the foundations of our value system, the implicit assumption is that individuals who personify those things must somehow be good.

The invitation to perform honesty, warmth and courage is always there, and some have the talent to do it with aplomb, but when the quest for goodness becomes introspective, as it does for each of the leading characters, and eventually for Cory himself, the corporate vehicle they are piloting may indeed go off the rails.

Succession has been compared to classical dramas of dynastic power and family conflict. Scripted with brutal wit and terse intelligence, and featuring a superb ensemble cast, it is widely acknowledged to be in a class of its own. Nevertheless, I have friends who won’t watch it, saying that the personalities it portrays are too toxic. And so they are, but the history of drama is filled with toxic characters. In ancient Greek tragedy, five generations of the house of Atreus engage in an unrelenting exchange of atrocities. Shakespeare gives us the murderous family pathologies of Hamlet and King Lear.

In these canonical models, the dramatic arc moves towards redemption through the downfall of the villains, and the termination of the regimes over which they have presided. But the rollout of the multi-season television drama allows the dramatic fall to be protracted, and perhaps ultimately averted, and therein lies the most troubling aspect of the contemporary picture.

The central strand of tension in Succession lies in an unresolved question: are we in a world that can no longer bring down a ruthless potentate and the twisted system of values over which s/he presides? Ageing media magnate Logan Roy (Brian Cox) is no mafia figure. He doesn’t dispatch people with physical violence; he destroys them by capsizing their economies and, if they are part of his inner circle, through humiliation and personal abuse. His four adult children are treated to the psychological equivalent of flaying.

This shouldn’t be fun to watch, but sadism in the realms of psychology has always been the stuff of comedy, where unfailing resilience is a source of entertainment. Connor (Alan Ruck), Roy’s eldest son, has an obtuseness that forms a natural defence: when he’s being got at, he usually just doesn’t get it. Roman (Kieran Culkin) and his sister Shiv (Sarah Snook), children of a second marriage, sharpen their wits on each other through pseudo-incestuous sparring that is exuberant and vicious by turns.

Some farcical secondary fallout comes from Shiv’s earnest spouse Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) who rolls with punches then takes it out through mock-bullying sessions with cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun). Only Kendall (Jeremy Strong) seems to have enough human sensitivity to be really vulnerable to the abuse, which, of course, makes him Logan’s prime target.

Spoiled, arrogant and petty, they are all ruined personalities, playing the game of corporate succession because it’s all they know how to do, though much of the comedy arises from their conviction that they can do pretty much anything. Shiv thinks she can dance, Kendall thinks he can sing, Roman fancies himself as a slick negotiator and Connor thinks he can be president.

How it will all turn out is unclear, and with a fourth season announced recently it is likely to remain so for some time, but don’t expect any catharsis. Chaos will always come again, and we live in an era when those who thrive in its landscapes are almost impossible to bring down. •

The post Landscape of chaos appeared first on Inside Story.

Considerable press coverage followed, partly the result of the merciless phrasing of Ryan’s criticisms but more substantially because the essay represented a significant about-face for its author. As director of Melbourne University Press, or MUP, from 1962 to 1989, Ryan had overseen publication of nearly the entire gargantuan endeavour that he now saw fit to cut down to size. Of all the things in his life that he looked back on with shame, Ryan wrote, the greatest was having been publisher of Clark’s History and having extended to Clark the support and encouragement that any author expects of their publisher.

Coming two years after Clark’s death, Ryan’s essay struck some readers as appropriate and well targeted, if also belated. For others, though, it was hypocritical, inappropriate and unnecessarily personal. The fracas raged for more than a year, with Ryan returning twice more to Quadrant to continue his poppy-felling and, seemingly, to salt the earth around it.

In this effort Ryan was joined by others, generally on the right of politics, who used Clark’s name in what would soon be termed “the history wars.” Prime minister Paul Keating had reignited those wars in 1992 when he accused the Coalition parties of being stuck in a golden age where the cultural cringe reigned and pride in Australian culture was non-existent. For Keating, Clark was a kindred spirit whose ideas echoed his own; when it came in 1993, Ryan’s attack was a “bitchy,” wretched betrayal.

For John Howard, then on the opposition benches, Clark’s vision in the History was gloomily ambivalent about the “heroic achievements” that also needed to be listed on Australia’s “balance sheet.” Over the decade that followed his becoming prime minister in 1996, he would try to dispel Clark’s vision and give more attention to those achievements, trumpeting (for example) the importance of Gallipoli.

In the years since then, Clark has attracted hatchets and haloes in near-equal measure. The subject of three lauded biographies and numerous critical studies, he has also been the target of scurrilous attack, perhaps most notably in 1996 in the Brisbane Courier-Mail, which falsely alleged that he was awarded the Order of Lenin by the Soviet Union for working as an “agent of influence.”

As the historian Stuart Macintyre wrote in 2003, Clark had endured “greater public obloquy than any other Australian historian.” Ryan’s Quadrant essay didn’t mark the start of that process, nor even its lowest point, but it made a deep notch in the public memory that is still evident three decades later.

Coming across Ryan’s initial attack six years after its publication, New Zealand historian Doug Munro became interested in the questions the controversy raised. Later, seeing Ryan fail to account for any of the contradictions in his case in the years before his death in 2015, Munro decided to embark on what he calls a “forensic re-evaluation” of the whole affair. In the background was his admiration for Ryan’s highly regarded second world war memoir, Fear Drive My Feet, which he has described as “the incomparable personal account of the New Guinea campaign.”

Munro fossicked through the archives and clippings, and spoke to all those still alive with something to say; and now, in History Wars: The Peter Ryan–Manning Clark Controversy, he tracks the origins of the affair, the circumstances that prompted it, the accuracy and significance of the claims that were made, and the broader context that they reflect. Drawing on a wide array of material that he musters with clarity and discusses with shrewd judgement, Munro might be said to revel a little too much in the detail.

But it is also where he finds the devil. In many respects, the opening line of Ryan’s essay might also have been uttered by Munro: his History Wars is an overdue axe laid to the dried-out stalk of a poppy, Ryan, who has been left to stand for much too long and in whose shadow too many untruths have been allowed to flourish.

When the Ryan–Clark controversy first broke out in 1993, Don Watson called Ryan’s essay an act of “double cannibalism”: “You live off him in life and when he’s dead you live off him again.” Ryan certainly returned to chew on Clark for years afterwards, but Munro shows that from the beginning Ryan was selective with his facts, concealing those that were inconvenient and distorting others. The distortion was so extensive that Munro has to be blunt: “Much of what Ryan says is inaccurate. He is not a trustworthy source of information.”

In distancing himself from Clark’s History, Ryan claimed that he had inherited — and thus been bound by — an open-ended commitment to publish the whole six volumes as Clark completed them. In fact, as Munro shows, it was Ryan who presented Clark with a written contract for the series, supplanting the informal offer made by Ryan’s predecessor before the first volume was published. It was Ryan who specified the number of volumes the series would include and when each manuscript would be delivered. It was also Ryan who made no provision for peer review, the process by which academic publishers usually ensure the accuracy of a manuscript.

Moreover, over the subsequent two decades in which he oversaw publication of the History, it was Ryan who allowed the terms of the contract to be varied, who encouraged Clark to continue writing when he talked of giving it up, and who repeatedly headed off any prospect of the series going to a different publisher. Far from being bound by the History, Ryan clung to it like a drowning man to a lifeline.

Munro also shows that Ryan refused to release his grip even as a beleaguered and heavily indebted MUP, in danger of going under when Ryan took over, recovered. Publication of the first volume of Clark’s work in 1962 was certainly well timed, providing the publisher with vital revenue and credibility. “It gave reassurance,” Ryan wrote in his memoirs, “to both booksellers and the public that ‘MUP is still definitely in business.’” By 1971, though, MUP had recovered its position, aided most of all by the sale of its printery and the building it occupied. By volume three, then, the lifeline that Clark’s work afforded was no longer necessary. In his original attack on Clark, and for years afterward, Ryan shuffled the pieces to hide this, but it does not escape Munro. As he puts it, acerbically, “Ryan, by his own account, sold his soul and continued to publish the History.”

Questions of integrity are rife in this book. As is well known, Clark poured his own, tortured feelings into his subjects, creating vivid portraits (perhaps even self-portraits) in the process, but at a cost to the credibility of his history. In old age, increasingly identified with the Labor Party, he put a sage’s hat atop his historian’s and made gnomic utterances purportedly drawn from his unique insight into the country’s soul. Did this make him a mountebank, as Ryan argued? Perhaps. But perhaps Ryan saw fraud because he was seeing it in himself.

Ryan had fought bravely during the second world war, had written that fine memoir of his experiences, was praised for his steady hand while director at MUP, and had been a well-regarded, if contrarian, columnist with a range of newspapers and magazines. But by the time he began drafting his essay on Clark in 1993, he had left MUP and lost his column in the Age, and was in Munro’s terms “a preacher without a pulpit.” Seeking a new pulpit — perhaps via a column in Quadrant — did he deceive himself into thinking that he had been shackled to Clark, that MUP had to publish the History? Did he realise that he was spinning his own fairy floss?

Writing thirteen months after his original essay on Clark was published, Ryan aimed another axe at the critics who had cried foul, and reiterated his criticisms of Clark and the History. In his original essay Ryan helpfully told the author of a single-volume abridgement then under way that he should simply stab the “thin verbal soup” of Clark’s work with a pin to allow the “gaseous verbal excess to hiss its way out,” leaving behind only what was important. Again, this phrase might also be used by Munro as a description of his efforts. His incisive study of Ryan’s criticism, and of the context in which the Ryan–Clark controversy played out, punctures the myths that have surrounded it and shows us what is important and what is left over: the wreckage of the history wars. •

History Wars: The Peter Ryan–Manning Clark Controversy
By Doug Munro | ANU Press | $55 (print), free online | 194 pages

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Tall-poppy lopping appeared first on Inside Story.

Among journalists, a slightly weary discussion is beginning about how the campaign should be reported. Few thoughtful journalists are entirely happy with the routines and rituals of political reporting in this country, yet the same tropes repeat themselves every time an election comes into view.

One thoughtful observer is Sean Kelly, whose new book about Scott Morrison is best understood, I think, as an essay on politics. It seems to be largely addressed to the journalists who have, on Kelly’s analysis, helped create the “flat character” of “ScoMo.”

The title of the book, The Game, sums up Kelly’s diagnosis — a political system and a country deprived of meaning and purposeful dialogue, making it unable to solve problems or harness opportunities. A country, in fact, that has become a “flat character.”

Political scientist Rod Tiffen highlighted the recurring problems with election reporting after the 2019 poll. Political parties were much better at learning from past poor performance than were the media, he said, which displayed “little learning… about how they might cover elections better.”

Research by the Shorenstein Center in the United States suggests that journalists’ emphasis on political tactics and strategy builds voter cynicism, thus increasing the appeal of “outsiders,” who can seem like a breath of fresh air. This kind of reporting helped to build Donald Trump’s support.

Cynical, clichéd reporting also makes people angry with the media, and fuels distrust. When journalists devalue the political process, they undermine their own effectiveness because most people care about their country, and their politics.

Adding to this, surely, is what Tiffen describes as journalistic “superiority signalling”: the practice of treating “the voters” as though they are wholly divorced from the audience for journalism. Too often “the voters” are assumed to be ill-informed or in some other way defective. Journalists hold themselves above the fray, describing the election contest as boring or devoid of content, rather than taking on their responsibility to make it interesting and relevant.

Now is as good a time as any to think about how it might be done better, not because the ideas are new, but because the need is urgent.

In their book Votes That Count and Voters Who Don’t: How Journalists Sideline Electoral Participation (Without Even Knowing It), Sharon E. Jarvis and Soo-Hye Han show how reporting that implicitly devalues the power of a vote depresses people’s participation and increases their anger with the media. What kind of reporting do they mean? They target reporting that is poll-driven, and reporting that concentrates on political strategy and tactics rather than issues.

In this country polls have dominated political reporting since at least the 1980s. This is partly because media outlets often commission the polls, and the results give them a neat exclusive. Historically, it is also because polls have been broadly accurate, therefore carrying the appeal of a glimpse into the crystal ball.

But poll-driven reporting paradoxically tends to devalue the power of a vote. It suggests the contest is already decided. And it takes away from a sense of active participation around issues that matter. It emphasises the game — the horserace in which all that matters is who is ahead.

Recent contests have cast doubt on whether the polls can still be trusted. During Australia’s 2019 campaign they were all manifestly wrong, and in similar ways. Yet political reporting has barely responded. Polls, some with a tweak or two, remain at the centre of coverage.

Tiffen suggested political reporting could be improved by concentrating more on frontbenchers than on leaders. If the media sponsored debates between ministers and shadow ministers, we could see Marise Payne facing off against Penny Wong on foreign affairs, Angus Taylor  and Chris Bowen on climate change, Josh Frydenberg and Jim Chalmers on the economy, Greg Hunt and Mark Butler on health, and Alan Tudge and Tanya Plibersek on education. We could better assess the talents of the teams, as well as their approach to the issues.

One of the most radical, but no longer new, ideas for improving political reporting came from the American journalism academic Jay Rosen, who led a movement in the early 1990s, “public journalism,” that attracted a passionate following among journalists and helped reshape some of the leading US newspapers. Rosen suggested that journalists had lost their connection with the public — that they were always gleefully cataloguing problems but not offering any solutions. The public retreated, and without that public, journalism “must die.”

The model Rosen proposed didn’t involve commentators preaching to the audience, but rather a conversation. The job of journalists, the movement suggested, was to help make democracy work. By the late 1990s hardly a news organisation in the United States hadn’t been influenced to some extent by the ideals of public journalism.

Media outlets involved typically held public forums to discuss matters of community concern and then tried to build collaborations to sort things out, letting community voices steer the reporting. Journalism was reconceived as a kind of “public square” or “town hall” in which people could meet to deal with their common business.

The Virginian-Pilot, for example, decided in 1995 to try a different method of covering elections for the state legislature. Its editors informed candidates that the paper would be basing its coverage on a citizens’ agenda: a list of priorities culled from interviews and roundtable discussions with residents, which would then be reported on in depth. Candidates would be asked for their views, whether or not those issues were on their preferred agendas. What the paper wouldn’t do, the editors said, was report personal attacks, stories about political strategy, and comments on who was ahead and who was not.

In other words, the paper would report politics as though it actually mattered. There would be no talk of how things might “play” in the electorate, and very little commentary based on backroom chats or the office gossip of politics. The assumption was that the audience had a stake in the news. The resolutions transformed both the newspaper and the conduct of the campaign.

Did the public journalism movement work? Philip Meyer, then professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, together with other researchers found that people in towns served by newspapers oriented towards public journalism had a better knowledge of candidates’ stands on issues, greater trust in the media, more social capital and more trust in government. But he also found the key element was the culture of the news organisation — its commitment to civic journalism values — rather than any specific intervention. The public journalism movement altered newsroom cultures — and that was powerful. Other research examining specific election interventions was more equivocal.

As with all ideological movements, the fervour didn’t last — partly because it was overtaken by the hard reality of the collapse of the media’s business models. Many of the local papers in the vanguard of the movement no longer exist. And the towns that have lost their local newspapers are also those where misinformation and conspiracy theories have the tightest grip.

Public journalism left Australia relatively untouched. Our concentrated media ownership favours the mining of market advantage over innovation.

The only conscious experiment I am aware of was the Sunday Age’s Climate Agenda, launched in 2011, which used online forums to gather ideas and questions to steer its climate change coverage. A senior investigative journalist was dedicated to seeking the answers to audience questions. (Declaration: I was marginally involved in this, as part of my academic research.)

Rosen was also influential at the ABC, with then managing director Mark Scott picking up on the “town square” rhetoric in framing the appropriate role of a public broadcaster. Scott was optimistic about using social media as part of this push. In our own time much of that optimism has faded, and in recent weeks journalists have taken to expressing contempt for users of social media and announcing their withdrawal as though it were a point of professional pride.

I worry about that move. It too easily becomes another form of superiority signalling. It assumes that the journalists and their audiences are a more knowing and elite group — somehow separate from the citizens who will soon vote, the majority of whom are social media users.

Social media has allowed a wider range of voices to be heard in political debate. That is both its curse and its blessing. If journalists leave the field, the bad actors have a free run. On the other hand, if journalists participate well and effectively, then both social media and political reporting could be better.

How else might political journalism be improved? I hear from Labor contacts that the strategy for the forthcoming election is twofold. “Don’t be hated” and “win the marginals.” Doubtless the Coalition has a similar strategy.

That means the day-to-day contest will take place out of sight for most of us. Do you think Albanese isn’t cutting through, or that Morrison is seen as a liar? Perhaps, but perhaps not — in the dozen or so electorates where their efforts are concentrated.

A combination of lockdowns, reduced media travel budgets, hollowed-out local reporting, highly targeted political messaging on Facebook, and a cleaving to Canberra by our most senior political journalists means that election journalism is not, or at least not yet, giving us a window into how people in the marginal electorates are thinking.

Imagine how that might change if there were reporters at the school gates, and in the hospital waiting rooms, and chatting to the dog walkers in the park.

Is it naive to hope for change?

Probably. Journalists, like everyone else, are weary after two years of pandemic. Some would welcome innovation and experiment, but resources are thin. Proprietors and managements are conservative and lacklustre.

But we can hope, and I think we should. The ideas for improvement have been around for decades. What we need is implementation and experiment, because business as usual is not really cutting it if the aim is a healthy democracy. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Here we go again appeared first on Inside Story.

The fourth generation’s James is unlikely to return to rags, but after last month’s damning findings about his management of Crown casinos, his business ambitions are in ruins. His future in Australian corporate life will now be severely circumscribed, and his political clout and public prestige much diminished. Gone is the kind of power and influence wielded by his great-grandfather Robert Clyde Packer (known as R.C.), his grandfather Frank or his father Kerry.

Like many dynasties, the Packer family owes its fortune as much to luck as to skill. The person who lifted R.C. Packer from the ranks of knockabout journalists was the wealthy Sydney identity and hotelier James Joynton Smith, who was launching a new — and later legendary — paper, Smith’s Weekly.

Having been ousted from his seat on the Sydney City Council, Smith established the weekly at the suggestion of journalist Claude McKay. He assigned its day-to-day running to McKay and R.C. Packer, who between them produced a lively and visually attractive paper.

In 1921, after Smith’s Weekly had become profitable, Smith generously gave Packer and McKay one-third each of the paper’s ownership. Two years later, with the company’s profits still rising, the pair added a new title to the stable, the Daily Guardian. Although it initially struggled against the established morning papers, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph, the new paper did well thanks to Packer’s marketing strategies, which included the first Miss Australia competition and free insurance for readers. But relations between Packer and McKay were stormy, and in 1927, after more conflict, McKay sold out to Packer and Smith.

By 1929 Smith’s interests had shifted. He began negotiations to sell the Daily Guardian to Hugh Denison, who owned the dominant afternoon newspaper, the Sun, as well as the Sunday Sun. Thanks largely to his other business activities, Denison was probably the richest newspaper proprietor in Australia at the time. He had made a fortune from his involvement in Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Ltd, better known as AWA, and British Tobacco. In both cases he prospered by buying and assimilating the competition — actions that would now be illegal under antitrust laws — to form a near-monopoly. But the success of his strategy in those industries led him to make serious miscalculations with his newspapers.

To entice Denison to buy the Daily Guardian, Smith and Packer announced they planned to start a Sunday Guardian to compete with Denison’s Sunday Sun. Denison bought them out of the two Guardians for the equivalent of around $12 million in today’s money, about a third in cash and two-thirds in shares in his Associated Newspapers. Smith promised not to start another newspaper for twenty-one years.

Packer’s share of the deal was a huge windfall, and accusations were later made that he kept more money than he should have. Encouraged by McKay, premier Jack Lang, with whom Packer shared a mutual hatred, unsuccessfully attempted to legislate retrospectively to force him to return much of it.

Although Packer was rich on paper, much of his fortune was tied up in Associated Newspapers shares, and as circumstances changed his stake in the company threatened to become worthless. Six capital city dailies had died in the years before 1930, and another three disappeared as the Depression continued.

Denison’s papers were performing badly, and he even owned competing titles in the same markets. Despite ill-health, Packer agreed to become managing editor. He closed some titles, fired many employees including Denison’s son, and caused huge ill-feeling, but he saved the company.

By this time, the person who was most like R.C., and was closest to him, was his son Frank, who had been born in 1906 and was now in his mid twenties.

Father and son had one more hugely profitable trick to play on Denison. The Australian Workers’ Union owned an afternoon paper, the World, which was losing huge amounts of money. In 1932 the union asked legendary Labor politician Edward “Red Ted” Theodore to sort out the mess. Theodore had been premier of Queensland before moving into federal politics; he became treasurer in the Scullin government in 1929 but was forced to stand down while a scandal was investigated. Having moved to New South Wales, his political career ended when he lost his seat in the 1931 anti-Labor landslide.

Theodore turned his considerable talents to making money. When he heard that Frank Packer was a potential buyer of the World, he suggested they team up. They made an offer for the paper, declaring they had plans to expand it greatly and undercut the price of the Sun. Incredibly, the person Denison sent to head off this challenge was Frank’s father, R.C. To stop Frank and Theodore’s bid for the World, which had lots of bluff and almost no money behind it, R.C. paid them over $7 million (in today’s money) not to proceed. When they heard, Denison and Associated Newspapers’ board members were furious, but they could not undo the deal.

The agreement included taking over the financial disaster that was the World, which Associated Newspapers immediately closed, dismissing its 280 employees. Frank Packer had been talking of great expansion plans right up until the deal was announced. The AWU had to meet the bill for the redundancies. The Packers were very unpopular but much, much richer.

R.C. Packer died in 1934. Thanks to Smith’s generosity, Denison’s gullibility and their profits from deals that most would judge as fraudulent, he had laid the foundations for the Packer empire.

FRANK’S EARLY TRIUMPHS

The deal with Denison prohibited Frank Packer and Theodore from starting a new newspaper for three years. Theodore went back to his goldmines in Fiji, in partnership with Packer and the controversial Melbourne business figure John Wren, among others.

After considerable indecision Packer started a new women’s periodical, whose driving force was one of his senior journalists, George Warnecke. The idea of a women’s newspaper was gaining traction, and some early starters had already appeared. But Packer’s Australian Women’s Weekly, edited by Warnecke and launched in 1933, was a much more professional and attractive publication. It quickly became the biggest-selling and most profitable magazine in the country.

With the three-year prohibition coming to an end, and cashed up with the success of the Women’s Weekly and the Fijian goldmines, Packer was keen to get back into newspapers.

Here, Hugh Denison re-enters the story. Associated Newspapers was still struggling financially. Denison regarded the afternoon Sun as the company’s major paper, and sometimes neglected the morning Daily Telegraph. After Packer and Theodore floated the idea of an afternoon paper, Denison invited them to buy the ailing Telegraph. Merging the paper with the Women’s Weekly, they formed a new corporate umbrella, Australian Consolidated Press.

When Packer, aged twenty-nine, took over the Telegraph in 1935, the Sydney Morning Herald’s circulation was almost two and a half times the Telegraph’s. Packer spent large sums of money on his new venture, employed some of the best journalists, subscribed to an international news agency and bought more modern printing equipment. Within a few years the two morning papers were level-pegging, and during the second world war the Telegraph overtook the Herald — a lead it has maintained ever since.

This period from the mid 1930s until the early 1950s was the golden age of the Daily Telegraph. As Packer became older, even more right-wing, more set in his ways, and stingier, the paper lost the verve of the first decade and a half of his reign.

He was not at all capable of embracing the changes and challenges of the 1960s. After one demonstration in America, the Telegraph editorialised, “If every time Negro revolutionaries decided to burn and kill, those maintaining the law killed 500 Negroes the Negroes might decide to stop burning and killing.”

By 1972, the Telegraph had a daily circulation of 316,000, less than half the 648,000 copies sold (in a smaller city) by its Melbourne equivalent, the Sun News Pictorial. While the Melbourne Sun sold around 440,000 more copies than its competitor, the Age, the Telegraph sold only 40,000 more than the Sydney Morning Herald.

But Packer maintained his reputation as a kingmaker. One of his best-known journalists, Alan Reid, once told me that Packer presided over a one-paper empire because it commanded the attention of the politically involved. Packer had a close relationship with prime minister Robert Menzies, and had been active in the formation of the Liberal Party in the mid 1940s. He was a keen player in Liberal politics for the rest of his life. Menzies wrote that Packer was the newspaper publisher he knew best. In a gushing foreword to a gushing biography, Menzies observed that all Packer’s faults were “masculine” faults.

Alan Reid may have thought it was a one-paper empire, but it was just one paper, and was unable to take advantage of all sorts of economies of scale. Moreover, the growing profits of the company’s magazines and, since 1956, TV stations meant the paper was becoming a steadily less financially important part of the empire. In 1972 Frank’s sons, Clyde and Kerry, persuaded him to sell the Telegraph to Rupert Murdoch.

While this was obviously wise in a business sense, Frank’s reputation and indeed his main satisfactions came from the Telegraph and the way he could play politics with it. He had been involved most recently in the machinations that saw John Gorton replaced as Liberal prime minister by Packer’s long-time friend, William McMahon. Now he had to watch all but helpless as Gough Whitlam and the Labor Party swept McMahon and his colleagues aside. His frustration during the election campaign had led to Channel Nine’s taking the unprecedented step of delivering an editorial, which alleged that Whitlam’s campaign speech “sounded like the marijuana dreams in a Utopian Disneyland.” It isn’t clear whether he changed any votes.

DOMINATING TELEVISION

While Frank’s stewardship of the Telegraph was mediocre in financial terms, it mattered less because the company had made the important corporate step into television. Packer succeeded in securing one of the two original commercial licences in Sydney, and his TCN-9 was the first station to go to air in 1956. His key success, however, was in securing Melbourne’s GTV-9 in 1960.

To understand the importance of this move we need to remember that no one company was allowed more than two TV stations, irrespective of the size of each station’s market. Sydney and Melbourne comprised 43 per cent of the national audience, and effective networking between them was the key to national success.

The GTV-9 licence had been awarded to a company headed by Sir Arthur Warner, a senior minister in Henry Bolte’s Liberal state government. Warner was also a major business figure, and his main company, Electronic Industries Ltd, manufactured Astor radios and televisions. Experiencing health problems, he decided to sell the business, but Electronic Industries’ new owner, British company Pye, could not legally hold an Australian TV licence.

Despite fierce competition, Packer won the licence — even though Warner also promised the station to Fairfax, which was offering the same amount of money.

GTV had been a much more successful station than TCN, but it was also a more expensive operation, and Packer’s main concern was to cut costs. He was also very hostile to its most successful star, Graham Kennedy, because he was gay.

Packer had gained the key advantage of the Sydney–Melbourne axis. The two Seven stations, by contrast, were split between Fairfax and the Herald and Weekly Times, in a fractious relationship. Nine could bid higher for popular American series and pay top dollar for local variety stars.

KING KERRY

Frank died in May 1974. His older son Clyde had so badly fallen out with him that he had emigrated to America and was leading a sort of right-wing hippie lifestyle supported by his business investments.

Kerry’s inheritance was an empire probably worth around $100 million. Just as importantly, it included almost unassailable strategic assets: the most successful commercial TV network and the biggest and most profitable magazine stable.

Kerry enhanced Nine’s dominance with sound managerial appointments and a greater willingness than his father to invest in programming. His most radical step was launching World Series Cricket in 1977, which lured leading players from Australia and other countries to play in a separate competition. After a couple of years of disruption, cricket unified again, and Nine dominated cricket broadcasting for the next four decades.

In the early 1980s Packer privatised the company, buying out the public and institutional shareholders at rock-bottom prices. A major attraction of full ownership was that he no longer had to account to anyone for his business decisions. But this resentment at ever having to explain himself would help to lead him into the major crisis of his career.

In an episode full of ironies, Packer’s magazine the Bulletin had exposed criminal elements in the Painters and Dockers Union. The royal commission into this rogue union, set up by the Fraser government and led by lawyer Frank Costigan, soon shifted its focus from petty crime to the union’s involvement in a large-scale tax avoidance industry, some of it legal, much illegal.

As part of its investigations, the commission interrogated businessmen Brian Ray and Ian Beames about their activities. It discovered that Ray, at the time a declared bankrupt, had given an interest-free loan of $225,000 in cash to Kerry Packer and had never received any repayment. In trying to probe this decidedly odd state of affairs, the commission uncovered very curious business dealings, aimed at tax avoidance and evasion.

Packer sought to obstruct the inquiries in every way he could — by flying documents from one country to another rather than surrender them, for example, and using delaying tactics in court. The Hawke Labor government, which had taken office by now, was impatient for the Costigan commission to finish, and imposed a deadline on its activities. Because it had not completed its investigations into Packer by that time, the commission prepared case summaries for its successor, the National Crime Authority.

Summary material relating to Packer was leaked to Fairfax’s National Times, which referred to him under the codename Goanna. The more spectacular of its assertions related to a murder passed off as a suicide and the allegation that Packer, or at least his cronies, had been involved in drug smuggling. When these claims were found to be baseless, Costigan’s whole case against Packer was discredited. Despite being fully vindicated, Packer lived under a cloud for almost four years. His obstructionism had worsened his position, but he was also clearly the victim of false accusations.

Packer was launched from the very rich to the mega-rich by two people, Paul Keating and Alan Bond. The first step came when the Hawke Labor government, led by Treasurer Keating, rewrote the media ownership laws in 1987–88. The new laws banned cross-media ownership between television and newspapers, and lifted the TV ownership limit from two stations to a percentage of national reach (60 per cent to begin with). The effect, and perhaps the intent, was to advantage Packer — who had no newspapers — and Murdoch — who had to sell out of television because he was no longer an Australian citizen. In contrast, two companies that Keating and many of his colleagues saw as enemies, Fairfax and the Herald and Weekly Times, owned both newspapers and television stations in ways that made it impossible for them to expand in the new environment.

Many people saw this as the last opportunity to buy into television, and within months all three commercial networks had changed hands. Murdoch sold his two Tens and Packer his two Nines. One stockbroker estimated that their combined price before the policy change would have been $800 million, but they now sold for $1.9 billion — a government-generated windfall of $1.1 billion for the two moguls.

Alan Bond bought Packer’s two Nines for just over a billion dollars. A few years later, Bond’s failing corporate empire couldn’t pay Packer the final $200 million, and Packer regained control at virtually no cost. He had been paid around $800 million, and in the end still had the TV network. “You only get one Alan Bond in your life,” he famously remarked.

During the media policy moves, Hawke was reported to have told ministers that if the new laws passed, Labor would win the next election. Keating told caucus that Packer was a “friend of Labor.” Whatever help Labor received from Packer, his quid was much more obvious than their quo.

Packer was now at the zenith of his power. The other two TV networks were deeply in debt, but he was all cashed up. From then until his death, Packer had many business opportunities but managed few business achievements.

At first he seemed to acquire assets almost randomly — to the extent that he eventually had to call in American Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap to rationalise them. He lost huge sums of money — with little or no public attention — on misplaced currency trading, in 1993 alone losing half a billion dollars.

His major policy win was in delaying the advent of pay TV. Although the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal had recommended in 1982 that pay TV be introduced “as soon as possible,” it didn’t begin until 1995, and wasn’t allowed to carry advertising until 1997. These delays were a major win for Packer.

Indeed, just before the 1993 election, a company led by former reporter Steve Cosser was threatening to launch a new service using microwave technology, which the government had previously endorsed. Keating dramatically intervened to reverse Labor policy in order to stop this challenge to Packer’s aims.

Packer’s bullying style became ever more pronounced. When the NSW government was deciding which company would be given the casino licence, James rang members of the government: “The old man told me to ring… This is the message: if we don’t win the casino, you guys are fucked.” Despite this eloquence in his calls to members of John Fahey’s Coalition NSW government, the Packers did not win the casino licence in 1994.

The state government was more impressed by the fact that the Packers’ main rivals, the construction company Leightons and the American casino operator Showboat, were offering $80 million more.

Nor did the Packers accept defeat graciously. Using information they supplied, Labor opposition leader Bob Carr raised a number of allegations in parliament, particularly about US police concerns that Showboat had links to organised crime.

Packer’s reliance on bullying probably cost him more opportunities than it secured. Not only did he fail to get the Sydney casino licence, he also failed in his efforts to get control of Fairfax and the West Australian newspaper, or to gain a strategic holding and role in Westpac. His pay TV venture with Optus was on course to fail until an expensive misstep by the Murdochs gave him a quarter of Foxtel and equal partnership in Fox Sports.

Eventually even Keating had had enough, privately calling Packer “a bottom feeder.” After Packer endorsed John Howard for prime minister, Keating publicly but ineffectually railed against the proprietor whom he had done so much to enrich.

Packer was increasingly a corporate dinosaur. His daughter wasn’t allowed to be involved in running the company, and he insisted that neither of his children attend university.

BETTING THE HOUSE

When Kerry died in 2005, he was said to be the richest man in Australia. According to the business magazine BRW, his son James inherited $6.5 billion. In contrast to Kerry’s inheritance, however, James received assets whose value had already peaked.

James was determined to move the empire out of media and into casinos. He saw that media stocks were overvalued and gaming stocks undervalued, and he saw chances to build internationally. Less than a year after his father’s death, on the very day — 18 October 2006 — the House of Representatives passed more permissive media ownership laws, he announced the sale of half of Publishing and Broadcasting Limited, as one of the family firms was now called, to private equity company CVC Asia Pacific for around $4.5 billion. By 2012 James had sold all his media assets, usually at a good price, and was cashed up.

Casinos suited James perfectly. Because they have very high initial costs, his ready access to capital was a big advantage. In most jurisdictions, they are limited in number, so competition is circumscribed and political connections crucial. And they tend to be guaranteed money-generators, requiring little management agility.

The high point of James’s success — and the peak of the political influence he had inherited — was winning permission to build a second Sydney casino. By this time he had interests in Crown casinos in Melbourne and Perth, and properties in Las Vegas and Macau. NSW premier Barry O’Farrell recommended he use the government’s “unsolicited proposals policy,” which allowed companies with a proposal attractive to government to gain an agreement to lock out all other competitors.

The policy enabled Packer to secure approval for his Barangaroo project without facing a tender process or an independent public review. His plan was for a very large, new “six star” hotel, some parkland and a casino at Barangaroo, on the northwestern edge of the Sydney CBD. The casino would target overseas “high rollers,” especially from Asia, particularly China.

Whatever the merits of the proposal, Packer’s lobbying for its approval was spectacularly successful. Not only did the state’s Coalition government support it, but so did the Labor opposition and even the Christian Democrats’ Fred Nile, as well as the self-anointed high priest of Sydney development, Paul Keating. This lobbying was no doubt helped by the parade of right-wing Labor apparatchiks — Peter Barron, Graham Richardson, Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar — who were now working in what Richardson described as the financially greener pastures of the Packer organisation.

But that was the peak of Packer’s lobbying power in Australia, never to be repeated.

His problems began in late 2016, when he was hit by overlapping crises. Investigators in Israel were looking at whether a series of very generous gifts Packer had given to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had broken Israeli laws. He was worried about the overall financial health of his empire. He experienced a much-publicised break-up with the singer Mariah Carey. And, most dramatically, nineteen Crown employees were arrested in China.

Crown had been operating in China’s “grey area.” Casinos are illegal there, and advertising them is also illegal, but promoting “resorts” is not, and China-based companies called “junkets” were arranging overseas trips whose sole purpose was to facilitate gambling for heavy gamblers. In theory Chinese were only allowed to take $3200 into Macau, but casinos there made lines of credit available to big gamblers. Crown seems to have blithely ignored warning signs that the Chinese government was becoming sick of this deliberate dancing around the law. In Los Angeles, Packer’s response to news of the arrests was to go on an alcoholic binge.

In August 2019, an investigation led by the Age’s Nick McKenzie, which had obtained tens of thousands of leaked documents and interviews with key informants, identified how Crown sought to attract high rollers from China, described Crown’s relationships with the junkets that arranged the trips, and revealed that some of the junkets had links with triad criminal gangs. McKenzie and his colleagues reported that Crown had turned a blind eye to money laundering; had provided sex workers and drugs for high rollers; and had connived in circumventing Chinese gambling laws. A former senior Australian public servant revealed that two government ministers had lobbied him to relax controls over private jets bringing Crown’s high rollers into Australia, where their distasteful behaviour included shooting wombats on rural properties.

Official action was slow to start, but eventually three states set up commissions of inquiry.

The year-long NSW inquiry, under Supreme Court judge Patricia Bergin, reported in February 2021. It found Crown had been indifferent to the threats to its employees in China, had facilitated money laundering by criminals, and had engaged with junkets that had links to organised crime. As a result of the findings, the company’s chief executive and some of its directors resigned.

Most fundamentally, Bergin found that Crown was unfit to run its Barangaroo casino, which meant the new casino would remain closed indefinitely. Moreover, the crackdown by both China and Australia on junkets, as well as more general trends in Australia–China relations, put Barangaroo’s business strategy into great doubt.

Once Bergin reported, the Victorian government set up a royal commission under former judge Ray Finkelstein, which reported last month. Very quickly, according to Finkelstein, the inquiry discovered conduct that was “variously illegal, dishonest, unethical, and exploitative.”

The commission found further evidence confirming Bergin’s findings that Crown had not taken adequate measures to protect its Chinese staff — or its staff in Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia and New Zealand — who were likely to be working illegally, and had used criminally associated junkets and facilitated money laundering. It found Crown had knowingly and deliberately underpaid tax due to the Victorian government. Crown has now paid $62 million owing, while another $200 million or so is still in dispute. Crown had deliberately exploited problem gamblers, the commission found, with some staying on poker machines for over twenty-four hours.

The commission also found widespread indifference to their responsibilities by the board and senior executives, and concluded that one of the key influences on this culture was Packer and his Consolidated Press Holdings, which put profit above all else.

Finkelstein recommended that instead of closing the casino — with its 12,000 employees (some working in the casino, some in other Crown operations including hotels and restaurants) — the government should place it under a state-appointed manager who would have ultimate control for the next two years. Crown’s fitness to continue would then be reassessed.

He also recommended that Packer be given three years to reduce his stake from 36 per cent to under 5 per cent. While some commentators thought this was generous, it should also be seen in the context that no one group would now be able to have more than 5 per cent of the shares, a stipulation that may deter many of the companies that normally invest in casinos. Such a requirement for dispersed ownership was present in the original casino legislation but was quickly waived, and has never since been enforced. It will be interesting to see if it endures.

Still ongoing is a royal commission into Crown’s conduct at its Burswood Casino in Perth, which quickly uncovered yet more cases of Crown ignoring warnings about money laundering. When he was interviewed, Packer repeatedly referred to breaches of the laws and regulations as “oversights,” but their sheer number suggests they were standard practice. Crown was determined not to know anything that might disrupt its business opportunities. Although he was Burswood’s chairman, Packer revealed that he didn’t attend any board meetings during the three years from 2013 to 2016.

In a sense, Packer’s downfall is the apotheosis of a corporate culture that has been building over four generations. R.C., Frank and Kerry would probably have made the same decisions as James in the same situations. They all thought that rules only applied to other people; that a law only matters if it can be enforced; and that connections and backroom deals matter more than rational public debate. And now it has all come crashing down. •

This article draws on books, articles and other research by Bridget Griffen-Foley, Paul Barry, Sally Young, Richard Cooke, Henry Mayer, Damon Kitney, Mark Westfield, R.S. Whitington, Sally Neighbour and Mark Maley.

The post The rise and fall of an Australian dynasty appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps the unkindest cut of all comes from ABC journalists with king-sized profiles and impressive CVs for whom you will never be sufficiently brave or bold, who will always want more from you. And when you are brave, according to Gaven Morris’s account of his time in the top job, you might not always tell them about it.

It’s just a month since Morris announced he was leaving both the job and the national broadcaster, after six years as the ABC’s director of news, analysis and investigations. His precise exit date, and his successor, have yet to be announced. His predecessor in the role, Kate Torney, also lasted six years, and Morris thinks that’s probably enough for anyone.

In an interview with Inside Story to mark his exit, he describes the job as relentless. “There are 1300 staff at ABC News. It’s a $200 million budget. The news cycle is twenty-four hours. You get really tired in a role like this.”

He is also, he says, not a “mind-the-shop kind of guy.” When he applied for the job he set out his ideas for change and asked not to be appointed if the board didn’t want to go in that direction. He wanted to prioritise digital transformation by bringing the ABC’s websites up to scratch as homes for the best journalism. He had already overseen the organisation’s shift towards continuous news, including the launch of the News 24 television channel, the pet project of the broadcaster’s managing director at the time, Mark Scott.

Although the road has been rocky, most would give Morris a tick on both those achievements. Much to the chagrin of Nine and News Corp, the ABC is now the number one news media website in the country, which is important to its continued claim on the taxpayer’s dollar. Website traffic is evenly spread across age groups, whereas the broadcast presence plays increasingly to children and retirees.

Morris’s internal critics concede this success. But they characterise him as more of a manager than a journalist’s journalist. They see change and platforms emphasised rather than content. But perhaps they don’t know the full story.

Six years is a long time — just how long is evident from all the controversies Morris has weathered. Shortly before he took up the top post, when he was still head of news content, there was the “burnt hands” controversy after the ABC aired asylum seekers’ claims that they had been mistreated by the navy. The ABC took five days to admit that its reporting could have been “more precise” and that it didn’t necessarily accept the asylum seekers’ claims.

Morris was only tangentially involved. The weight of the controversy fell on Torney and managing director Mark Scott. But he learned a lesson. “Taking too long” to resolve controversies has been a “recurring pattern,” he says. “Applying a little more triage to some of our dramas would have assisted us in not letting them get as big as they sometimes got.”

Then there was the filing cabinet full of cabinet documents sent to the ABC, only to be returned to the government after a few not particularly earth-shaking stories. There was the closing of the Drum opinion website, and the end of Lateline.

At times the organisation has seemed to be fighting internal battles as much as external ones. There was a bitter clash with former economics editor Emma Alberici, for example — something Morris says he is still not willing to discuss in detail.

More recently, during the controversies over successive Four Corners programs, some of the background briefing and leaking has come from inside the ABC, and against Morris. The delayed screening of a report on prime minister Scott Morrison’s QAnon-following friend, for example, was attributed to alleged political interference — something that Morris denies outright.

All news organisations experience battles between managers and strong-willed journalists, he says. “I think there’s something good about that creative tension… The difference with the ABC is almost every word of it plays out publicly in a way that would never happen at any of the commercial broadcasters or any of the newspaper organisations.”

He goes on: “I like being straight up and honest with people. But when that then gets played out immediately in a leak to a newspaper or a website, it makes you much more reticent than you might otherwise have been. That’s one of the real difficult parts of the ABC culture. I’ve always struggled with that.”

He never doubted the QAnon program would go to air, but the lesson from the burnt hands controversy, and others, is that if a story runs into trouble it is nearly always because it needed a bit more work and a bit more time. The QAnon story needed more of both, and then he approved it.

Then there’s the constant rumble surrounding Q&A, and more recently Four Corners’s “Inside the Canberra Bubble” report, followed by the rape allegations against then attorney-general Christian Porter, which Porter vigorously denies.

Morris has recruited leading political journalists David Speers and Laura Tingle and seasoned investigative journalist John Lyons, and overseen an increase in diversity in the newsroom. He says his team, and its capacity to reflect a broader spectrum of Australian experience, is the thing of which he is most proud.

Reflecting on the six years, Morris is clear about when the organisation was most at risk, and that was during the two and a half years from mid 2016 when Justin Milne was chairman and Michelle Guthrie the managing director.

Guthrie was sacked by the board in 2018, and Milne was forced to resign shortly afterwards after Guthrie revealed he had pressured her to sack journalists — specifically Alberici and political editor Andrew Probyn — because they were supposedly “hated” by the government. Milne was widely known to be a friend of then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Morris says the problems were deeper and of longer standing than the pressure concerning Alberici and Probyn. A “subtle” but implacable pressure was applied over many months.

“When Turnbull came out and said, ‘Well, I’ve never phoned Gaven Morris,’ he’s right about that. I didn’t get phone calls from Turnbull, but what I would notice is that other people would get phone calls that were very similar to the ones I was getting from other quarters… So the [Canberra] bureau would get a phone call from somebody. I would get a phone call from somebody else. Michelle [Guthrie] would get a phone call from somebody else.”

The message was clear, he says. “We’re all getting different phone calls, and the people involved would all be able to say that they never talked to so-and-so. But on a number of occasions, it was clear to me what was happening. It was quite a dangerous time in terms of the editorial independence of the ABC because of the different characters involved and the dynamic that was at hand.”

Morris resists my several attempts to get him to identify these callers. Board members, cabinet ministers or others? He apologises for “speaking in tongues.”

He also says that sometimes, when asked to do something he disagreed with during that time, he would “just put it in the bottom drawer and ignore it… Quite often someone would come back quite angry because I hadn’t done it. And I would say well, frankly, that’s my choice, and that’s what I’ve chosen to do.

“I thought, ‘I either leave or I’ve just got to put my shell on and sort of trudge on.’ I thought, ‘If my only job in doing this role at this time is to try to protect the people in the news division and hope that somehow this gets sorted out down the track, then I’ll hang on.’ If I left, I didn’t know what would happen behind me, even though at times in that period I really didn’t want to be here anymore.”

When the controversy over Milne’s behaviour broke, some reporters were “quite angry” with Morris for not having told them about the pressure. But he saw his role as “taking the arrows into my own body. They should not know. There should be no question of them changing a story because of that pressure, so I kept it from them and I have no regrets about that.”

He credits Guthrie with seeing through a necessary restructure of the organisation around genres rather than platforms. “She did that with great verve and great passion, and it needed to be done.” Her departure was “brutal,” he says.

Morris was brought back to the ABC from Al Jazeera to drive the move to continuous news and launch the News 24 channel, all on a tiny budget. He soon realised it would be the leanest and most underfunded news channel on the planet.

The problems were exacerbated when Julia Gillard called an early election in 2010 after overthrowing Kevin Rudd. Scott had promised the new channel would be launched in time to report the campaign, and the early date meant the channel was deprived of three months of practice and dry runs.

On day two of the campaign came the awkward and iconic encounter between Gillard and Rudd in which they were purported to have made up but could hardly look at each other. “We totally failed,” says Morris. “We couldn’t get camera to it. We couldn’t get a live signal out of it, and it was the picture of the day. And, you know, it was our first real major flop for the news channel, and it was fairly dispiriting.”

Other missteps followed. “I often went home feeling gutted and deflated because it wasn’t as good as it needed to be in the beginning, and we were getting pilloried everywhere. People were working so hard and I wanted it to improve. We had live trucks, but no live truck operators. We had technology that wasn’t built for doing live broadcasting… Everybody was learning on the hop.”

The new service was also a “pretty violent revolution” in the culture of the ABC, and plenty of “old salts” among the reporters were expecting it to fail. There were fears that quality would be undermined by the pressure for continuous content.

Nobody now doubts that it needed to be done, says Morris — and the 2019–20 bushfire coverage, bringing together all the parts of the ABC, was as good as any continuous news in the world. “It might have taken us ten years to reach Nirvana, but it was worth the investment.”

With most of Morris’s time in the top job dogged by successive cutbacks in funding after the relative plenty of the Scott years, unpopular decisions were inevitable. He didn’t grieve the Drum, which he felt was simply adding to the ubiquity of opinion. But the decision to axe Lateline, with its shrinking but rusted-on audience of political tragics, was emotionally difficult.

“The impossible task of the ABC is not starting new things but working out how to resource them when your funding is falling.” Audience research showed that Lateline watchers also watched 7.30: in other words, they were being served twice, while in Morris’s view the ABC was under-resourcing investigative journalism. The funding was reallocated to a dedicated investigative unit, producing cross-platform content.

As to current controversies, he rejects the rumble from the government and its fellow travellers in News Corp that the ABC, and Four Corners in particular, has become a haven for “activist” journalism. He signed off on the recent controversial programs and has no regrets.

He also continues to defend the ABC’s three-part documentary on the Luna Park fire, Exposed, despite its being criticised — as well as praised — by an independent review (which I discussed here). Exposed was “an extraordinary achievement,” he says; and while the review should be “reflected on” it is “not the law.”

ABC journalists’ use of social media — and particularly Four Corners reporter Louise Milligan’s tweets about MPs Andrew Laming and Christian Porter — has also been controversial. The ABC has had a code of conduct that governs social media use for some time, so why were reporters allowed to tweet away, sometimes in apparent breach?

Morris says what was needed were the “right mechanisms” — upgraded advice and guidelines now put in place by managing director David Anderson. While Mark Scott encouraged journalists to use the then-new platforms of Facebook and Twitter, Morris says that has changed, and that reporters “are not required to be on social media for their work… so don’t bother unless you want to personally, in which case it’s your own personal realm.”

He is deeply disillusioned with social media, which has carried claims that he is a Liberal Party stooge, including false theories that he is related to Grahame Morris, John Howard’s former chief of staff. “It doesn’t reflect any sort of rational or fair-minded or even intelligent conversation very much anymore… Unfortunately, it’s one of the innovations of the digital age that hasn’t aged well.”

If Morris has a clear plan after he finishes up, he isn’t detailing it, talking about possible consultancy work. What about regrets?

“I am not a regrets kind of guy,” he says, but he regards one issue as “still a work in progress.” It is the quest to overcome the worldview of most journalists and better reflect the views of the Australian population. This is not a matter of left–right bias, he says. That is not how most Australians think. The ABC should spend less time worrying about the “noise” that comes from the Australian and its News Corp stablemates.

Rather, he worries whether the ABC tunes in to the breadth of experience and views of the audience — working-class people, people living with a disability, people most journalists never meet. He worries, for example, about whether the organisation adequately reflected the views of the 30 per cent of Australians who voted “no” in the marriage equality referendum. “I’m not talking about religious zealots. I’m talking about genuine Australians who have a point of view that’s different to the 70 per cent. Are we at least making sure that is reflected? I don’t necessarily think we struck that right.”

Otherwise, he thinks he is leaving the organisation on a high. David Anderson has “restored order” after the Guthrie–Milne trauma. The ABC is once again “confident, certain of its mission. Morale is good. Resources are being managed well, good programs are being made. It didn’t have to turn out like that, but it has.” •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Taking the arrows appeared first on Inside Story.

Sims says Google has done more deals than Facebook. “Google has reached deals with the Conversation, SBS and other organisations that Facebook has not done deals with. Google is still negotiating and finalising deals with more news media companies and seems to be approaching this exercise in the right spirit. We are concerned that Facebook does not currently seem to take the same approach.”

Facebook’s dealings with the smaller independents will form part of a review of the code due to start in March next year, says Sims. The review “can examine closely the performance of all parties and whether the government’s expectations have been met.”

The campaign by the independents will highlight the murky mix of money, politics and strong-arm tactics that characterised the news media bargaining code’s first year of operation. The code, which came into force in March this year, is world-first legislation under competition law to force Google and Facebook to reach agreements with news media companies for featuring their content. It aims to protect the viability of public interest journalism and redress an imbalance in market power between the digital platforms and media companies.

At the last moment — and after Facebook made its displeasure clear by blocking Australians’ access to news content on its platform — the government changed the legislation. The tech giants would now be given a chance to strike their own deals with accredited news media organisations before the treasurer Josh Frydenberg considered compelling them to do so using the act’s “designation” provision. The treasurer also indicated that he was unlikely to use that power because Google and Facebook were already striking deals with media companies. That left the legislation technically inactive, with the threat of designation — a “nuclear option,” in the words of one government insider — acting as a big stick.

When the legislation passed, communications minister Paul Fletcher said that he expected deals to be struck with small publishers as well as large ones, but concern has persisted that the smaller players, who lack political as well as commercial power, will miss out.

Australian Property Journal editor Nelson Yap is one of the organisers of the new independent publishers’ campaign. He says that some small publishers have had their emails and phone calls ignored by Google and Facebook, and others have had their requests to negotiate rejected without reason. He believes that Google and Facebook are “doing just enough deals,” mostly with larger and politically influential publishers, to “take the issue off the front pages.”

The university-backed outlet the Conversation has petitioned parliament after successfully striking a deal with Google but being rejected by Facebook. “Without providing a reason,” editor and executive director Misha Ketchell wrote recently, “Facebook declined to negotiate with the Conversation and SBS, and many other quality media companies eligible under the Code.”

The growing coalition of small and independent publishers plans to seek ACCC permission to collectively bargain with Google and Facebook. They also plan to petition for both platforms to be designated. Designation would force them not only to bargain in good faith with any registered news media businesses wanting to negotiate, but also to share information about how content is carried on their platforms and give notice of changes to algorithms that determine how content is distributed.

The members of the emerging coalition have shared experience of getting the brush-off from Facebook, says Yap, often with communications being completely ignored. Google has cut some deals but rejected or failed to respond to other requests to negotiate.

Yap says he had early communications with Google — “They basically acknowledged my existence” — but since then he has heard nothing. Facebook’s response to approaches has been to urge him — and at least five other small publishers I’ve contacted — to drop any attempt to bargain and instead apply for a grant through the Facebook-funded Australian News Fund, which is administered by the prestigious Walkley Foundation.

But the independent publishers were dismayed to discover that one of the conditions of applying for the grant is that they “not have a content licensing agreement in place with Facebook.” They have understandably read that as meaning that by taking a grant they effectively end any chance of cutting a deal, at least for the life of the grant.

Facebook says that a publisher could receive a grant, and later cut a deal. It just couldn’t cut a deal before applying for a grant.

Yap criticises the Walkley Foundation for lending its name to such a scheme and says that in any case the chance to apply for a grant is no substitute for a commercial deal. “It’s a competitive grant scheme, so there is no guarantee you will get it.”

The chief executive of the Walkley Foundation, Louisa Graham, says that the foundation was not “privy to Facebook’s commercial negotiations” and agreed to manage the grants program “because it represents a substantive investment into the Australian media industry at a time when smaller, regional and public interest–focused news organisations and journalists are facing increasing financial strain.”

Applications, which opened this month, would be independently assessed in a competitive process, she says, and “the response has been enthusiastic.”

The publishers in the emerging coalition include Alt Media, which publishes the Sydney community newspaper City Hub and the LGBTI-focused Star Observer, Croakey Health Media, Naracoorte News, National Indigenous Times, Probono Australia, Hills to Hawkesbury Community News, Western Sydney Publishing Group, QNews, the Tasmanian Inquirer, Renew Economy, the Clarence Valley Independent and (full disclosure) Inside Story. Other publications, including several from the ethnic press, are considering joining.

Google said in a statement that it had reached agreements with more than one hundred Australian publishers, and provided me with boosterish endorsements from Independent Australia, Women’s Agenda, Australian Associated Press and SBS. Independent Australia — a trenchantly left-wing outlet — described Google as “an absolute pleasure to deal with.”

Facebook’s head of news partnerships for Australia and New Zealand, Andrew Hunter, says he strongly rejected any suggestion the company doesn’t “support or work with” smaller independent publishers. As well as “commercial arrangements with a diverse range of publishers,” Facebook provides grants and funded programs — including the Accelerator program, which funds innovation — directly aimed at small and regional publishers.

A recent deal with the 170-member Country Press Association was aimed at “the digital transformation of regional newsrooms.” Through the combination of these investments, says Hunter, “Facebook is supporting the newsrooms producing the vast majority of civic and public interest journalism across the nation.”

More broadly, Rod Sims says that the news media bargaining code has been “extremely successful,” leading to a “huge number of commercial deals with a wide range of media companies.”

There’s no doubt that is true. While nothing in the code ensures that money flowing from the digital platforms is spent on journalism rather than boosting profit, at least some of the money is clearly being used to hire journalists. The Guardian Australia, for example, has greatly expanded its staff in recent months, with more jobs advertised. Other big publishers have also been hiring, thanks to the flow of new money.

But others have criticised the code as a bad precedent — effectively bullying Google and Facebook into paying up, rather than reflecting any real calculation of commercial value. Media analyst Hal Crawford wrote recently in PressGazette that “by ‘playing dirty’ to squeeze out some income in the short term, the Australian government and media industry has stored up trouble in the long term.”

The deals done under the code are confidential, making it impossible to understand how news content is being valued. In Crawford’s words, “this is a game without rules being played out of sight.” A PressGazette investigation found that Australian publishers are getting a better deal from Google than overseas media are, almost certainly because of political pressure rather than a robust calculation of commercial value.

While they dance around saying it outright, Facebook’s argument is basically that it believes grants and other funded programs are a better way of supporting smaller players than commercial deals.

A commercial deal has obligations on both sides: performance benchmarks that a News Corp or a Nine Media might be able to fulfil, but an Independent Australia or an Inside Story might not. Such deals are said to be very complex, informed by metrics on reach, engagement and whether there is premium or paywalled content not otherwise available on Facebook. So Facebook prefers to make grants and fund programs for smaller players.

We might favourably interpret this as Facebook being an enlightened corporate citizen. Or, more cynically, we might see it as enlightened public relations. After all, surely it is possible to cut a simple, viable commercial deal if you really want to.

If Facebook gives a grant or funds a program, the power remains in Facebook’s hands. It is corporate charity. Whereas the idea of a bargain is that it is made between dignified equals — the whole rationale of the news media bargaining code being to even the playing field.

But it is all very complicated. Given the lack of data on how the market is valuing content on digital platforms, it is likely that if the campaign by the independents succeeds it will be more about politics than because of a robust commercial calculation.

The Conversation gives away its content for free to lift the profile of academic research. How, then, can it claim recompense from Google and Facebook, but not from the ABC or the Age or the other outlets that republish its articles?

Other members of the new independent coalition don’t always pay their contributors. How can they then seek to put a commercial value on its use by Google and Facebook? (At the very least, any flow of funds should go straight to the writers.)

Keep in mind that next March’s review of the news media bargaining code is likely to coincide with the federal election, and Facebook has the power to block Australians’ access to news content, as it did earlier this year. That would be a disaster. Or then again, in the light of recent revelations about Facebook’s conduct, perhaps a blessing.

Nobody thinks the current treasurer will take the “nuclear option” and designate the digital platforms with an election looming, and that raises the question of whether the publishers who do have deals with Google and Facebook will be able to cut good deals when the current ones expire. The answer may well depend on the treasurer of the day, and whether he or she has the stomach for a fight. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Cracking the code appeared first on Inside Story.

Surely satire had done its worst? That benchmark seemed to have been acknowledged by the Museum of London when it acquired the balloon as a permanent exhibit in early 2021. And yet, as Flinders University’s Robert Phiddian observes in his new book, Satire and the Public Emotions, Trump came out of it relatively unscathed.

Since the American president had at that point displayed a capacity to come out of just about anything unscathed, this may not in itself be especially remarkable. But, as Phiddian shows, satire has long been regarded as the most lethal weapon in the armoury of writers, artists and performers. If it proved ineffective at that critical juncture, is the pen no longer mightier than the sword?

The value of the Trump blimp, in Phiddian’s view, was no more than palliative: it was a cathartic release for the pent-up contempt, anger and disgust of protesters. Contempt, anger and disgust — the “CAD triad” — are the emotions associated with satire since classical antiquity, when it was epitomised in the works of fourth-century BCE dramatist Aristophanes.

To try to work out what satire actually does, as distinct from what satirists think it does, Phiddian focuses on the balance between cathartic gratification and strategic impact on the battlefield of politics. Satire, which purports to weaponise the CAD triad against a hated public figure to deliver a lethal (if virtual) assault, more often seems only to offer a placebo effect. It is thus “not exactly the opposable thumb of public discourse,” says Phiddian, though its appeal may depend on convincing an audience that it is.

If Trump’s term as president was the acid test of satire’s impact — a test it seemed to fail — then we have to ask why audiences returned night after night to Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, John Oliver, Samantha Bee and Seth Meyers for the latest excoriating tirade against him. Surely not just because it made them feel better. They must have been expecting some decisive moment to be reached, a turning point in public outrage.

But such a shift can occur only if the satirists win the contest of public opinion, and win it so decisively that the outrage translates into votes, or triggers a sweeping change in the zeitgeist. In the current environment, the only person who could really claim to have done that is Greta Thunberg. Thunberg cut through by speaking with the candour of a child, in stark contrast to the sophistries of a satirical tradition that harks back to the eighteenth century.

Robert Phiddian devotes much of his book to an account of key players in that tradition, the eighteenth-century satirists Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe and John Gay, who left us with some ringing phrases and indelible images. In his Satires (1738) Pope celebrated anger as a “sacred weapon” and gave vent to a moral wrath he claimed was driven only by “the strong antipathy of good to bad.” In The Beggar’s Opera (1728) Gay reversed the social world on stage to make heroes of “thieves and whores.” Defoe foreshadowed Orwell in The Shortest Way with Dissenters (1702), a pamphlet that disguised bitter mockery with animal parables.

Swift, going a step further than Pope, added the corrosive elements of anger and disgust to moral wrath and had the words saeva indignatio (savage indignation) engraved on his tomb. It is perhaps these emotions, more than anything expressed by his contemporaries, that are central to current political satire.

Contempt, anger and disgust converge in the savage indignation fuelling portrayals of Trump as a howling baby or Boris Johnson as a straw-haired buffoon mouthing gibberish from the stores of knowledge he acquired during his much-vaunted classical education. Scott Morrison joined the cartoonists’ company in Hawaiian shirt and flower crown, smiling like a loon as Australia burned in the black summer of 2019–20.

Financial Review cartoonist David Rowe pushes the boundaries of contempt and disgust, depicting Trump as a monstrous heap of pink blubber, a fusion of Jabba the Hutt and the emperor with no clothes. Other potentates drawn into Trump’s orbit take on the same guise of naked obesity, becoming figures of visceral hate.

With his focus primarily on the literary heritage of satire, Phiddian doesn’t comment at any length on visual manifestations. But it is here that some of his key questions are most graphically at issue. Rowe, in company with English cartoonists Gerald Scarfe and Martin Rowson, unleashes the savagery of indignation to a point where the boundary between satire and vilification dissolves.

There is always morality in their wrath. The repugnant personae they conjure on the page are a means of giving form to the offences against human value and dignity committed by the worst political leaders. But anger so highly charged with contempt and disgust becomes hatred, bearing its own moral hazards.

As Phiddian points out, “satirical disgust has no reliable moral compass.” He sees contempt as belonging to a “cooler” register, but rightly warns against its dangers. When expressed in caricatures foregrounding racial or gender characteristics, it is toxic. He discusses at some length philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s condemnation of the CAD triad as an emotional phenomenon vested in “a fruitless focus on magical ideas of payback.”

Such a view would ultimately put satire out of business as a moral enterprise, and Phiddian argues that greater licence is called for in the passion-infused politics of the twenty-first century. But hasn’t satire always claimed a greater licence? Isn’t that exactly what Swift did with his coinage of “savage indignation”?

Nussbaum’s views are an important check on the licence of satire, but as a moral philosopher she misses the entertainment factor. From Aristophanes onwards, satirists have been sought-after dramatists, poets, comedians, cartoonists, singers and impersonators.

Important as it is to deal with the theoretical aspects of satire as a tradition in entertainment, its effectiveness in moral crusades can’t be judged in the abstract. It’s all about the examples, and the media environment in which they are generated.

Take the case of Tina Fey’s impersonations of Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential election campaign, which Phiddian cites as one of the few instances in which satire can be said to have brought about a political downfall. Here, though, the idea of payback proved not merely magical. In his documentary The Undefeated (2011), Steve Bannon celebrated Palin as the harbinger of a new and revolutionary influence in American politics. The payback for her defeat was the rise of Donald Trump.

As for Trump’s own defeat in 2020, it remains to be seen whether the payback campaign over the “stolen election” will come to anything. But Trump is working on it, with a groundswell of supporters capable of returning any moral outrage directed at him with a vengeance of their own.

As the satirists’ treatment of Trump shows, the triad’s three components don’t appear in an equal mix: changing political climates bring one or another element to the fore. Contempt is riding high at the moment. Tinged with arrogance and associated with moral grandstanding, it is surely the most likely of the three to generate a backlash.

It also has the best entertainment value. With season three of Succession just commencing, we can expect a continuation of the carnival of interpersonal contempt that has made this one of the most popular and highly regarded series of recent years. Each member of tycoon Logan Roy’s gladiatorial family operates under an apparent conviction that contempt is the ultimate weapon of both attack and defence.

As they roll from one bruising debacle to another, though, lethal consequences elude them. It seems like an endorsement of Phiddian’s thesis: satire can’t deliver consequences. What’s funny is that we keep upping the ante, under the delusion that it will. •

Satire and the Public Emotions
By Robert Phiddian | Cambridge University Press | $31.95 | 84 pages

The post Is satire dead? appeared first on Inside Story.

Commonly described as an oligarch, Babiš is the Czech Republic’s second-richest citizen, with interests in agriculture, forestry and construction. He also owns the country’s two largest newspapers and its most popular radio station.

Tellingly, the citadel of Babiš’s empire, his conglomerate Agrofert, started life as a state-owned company called Petrimex, which Babiš privatised in the post-1989 era with the aid of some mysterious Swiss investors. Today his personal fortune is estimated at over US$4 billion. Not bad for a former member of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party.

Just two years after he bought his little piece of paradise in the south of France, Babiš decided to have a crack at democratic politics. In 2011 he established a political party called ANO, an acronym for Action of Dissatisfied Citizens, and the Czech word for Yes. Babiš says he founded ANO “to fight corruption and other ills in the country’s political system.”

Perspicacious readers may see where this is heading.

Mr Babiš is a politician in the mould of that other moneyed European statesman Silvio Berlusconi. In a controversial article published in 2015, Foreign Policy magazine christened him “Babišconi.” And, like the former leader of Italy, Babiš’s career in business and politics has been punctuated by scandals.

Despite being a strident critic of the European Union, for example, Babiš was charged with misappropriating millions in EU subsidies for his private use. (Parliamentary immunity saved him in that case.) And although he denied for many years that he was an agent of communist Czechoslovakia’s State Security Police, a Czech court ruled in January 2018 that he had in fact been an agent under the codename “Bureš.”

In 2017, despite this track record, Babiš parlayed his wealth, media influence and growing political power into becoming prime minister. It was a premiership of firsts. Babiš was the oldest and richest PM in the Czech Republic’s history. And he was the first holder of the post to have been charged with a crime.

Then, just a week ago, elections were held for the 200 seats of the Czech Republic’s lower house, and Babiš’s purchase of Chateau Bigaud came back to bite him on the bum.

Every few years the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists somehow manages to orchestrate a worldwide mega-leak of financial shenanigans the world’s rich would much rather remain secret. This year’s blockbuster, the Pandora Papers, is based on nearly twelve million leaked documents that expose how the rich and powerful use secret offshore companies to conceal their wealth.

Unfortunately for prime minister Babiš, his carefully camouflaged real estate deal in France had a starring role in Pandora’s revelations.

Up until this point in the campaign, his anti-migrant, anti-Europe rhetoric seemed to be doing the trick on the hustings. But then the Chateau story dropped and dominated the last five days of the election.

Babiš denied any wrongdoing, of course — but the political damage was done. “So, it’s here,” the outraged prime minister tweeted. “I had expected them to pull something out on me just before the elections in order to harm me and influence the Czech elections.”

What had looked like an assured victory for ANO turned into a humiliating — if narrow — defeat. A coalition of three liberal-conservative parties called (naturally enough) Together, or Spolu in Czech, scored 27.8 per cent of the vote, just pipping ANO’s 27.1 per cent.

Rubbing salt into the wounds, another coalition, this time of the centre-left, scored 15.6 per cent of the vote. This grouping is made up of the Pirate Party, a pro–civil liberties anti-corruption party, and STAN, a coalition of mayors and independents.

In the Czech system the party with the largest popular vote usually gets first crack at establishing a government. So, Together, with the Pirates and STAN, should trump Yes. (And if you can’t appreciate the wonders of democracy after reading a sentence like that, you’re not trying hard enough.)

As to the significance of the Chateau factor, there is some debate, but as the respected Czech political commentator Jiří Pehe has said, “If you look back, it’s one scandal after another with Mr Babiš and perhaps even his own voters might have thought, ‘this is enough.’”

A poll conducted by Czech television suggested as much. It found that 8 per cent of ANO voters had shifted to other candidates late in the day.

Babiš has one last chance to cling onto power: his friend and ally, the Republic’s president Miloš Zeman, has the say on who should get the first chance to try to form government. But Zeman is gravely ill and may not be capable of intervening; and anyway, Together’s leader, Petr Fiala, has already ruled out talking to Babiš, preferring to parley with the Pirates and STAN.

Are there any positive lessons in this parable? Let’s be optimistic and say ano. Right-wing populism works — until it doesn’t. Particularly if some key elements of civil society — campaigning journalists, independent judges and free elections — remain in place. •

The post Chateaued dream appeared first on Inside Story.

In fact, the time it has been allowed to brew is perhaps the most worrying thing about it. It suggests, if any more evidence were needed, that our system of media self-regulation is far from fit for purpose.

The matter has been brought to a head by an article published by Matthew Ricketson in the latest issue of Australian Journalism Review, in which he alleges that the Australian has exercised an effective veto over his serving on adjudication panels concerning its journalism. Ricketson sits on the Press Council as a representative of the journalists’ union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, or MEAA, a position that has been controversial.

Interviewed for this article, Ricketson makes his criticism in an even more pointed fashion. “I think it is outrageous that any publisher should be trying to dictate to the Press Council who should and who shouldn’t sit on an adjudication panel hearing a complaint about their journalism… It flies in the face of what genuine self-regulation of the news media is about.”

When I put a series of questions to the Australian, it responded with a short burst from editor-in-chief Christopher Dore. “Professor Ricketson’s new article only confirms our belief he has a genuine conflict of interest. It is an excellently articulated piece explaining why our concerns about his personal conflicts were thoroughly justified and remain so.”

In other words, there is no easy way out of this conflict.

The Press Council confirms that the matter will be discussed at its next meeting, on 19 November. Whichever way it goes, we can expect outrage, perhaps walkouts, and further doubts about the council’s ability to do its job.

The story begins ten years ago when Ricketson was appointed as a member of the Independent Inquiry into the Media and Media Regulation, created by the Labor government in the wake of Britain’s telephone hacking scandal and headed by Ray Finkelstein QC. The inquiry’s central recommendation was that there should be government-funded regulation of the news media because the Press Council and other existing mechanisms were not up to the job. The industry united in opposition to his report.

From this distance, it’s hard to recall the vehemence of the attacks on Finkelstein, his colleagues and Stephen Conroy, the minister who commissioned the report. Conroy was depicted as Stalin on the front page of the Daily Telegraph. As Ricketson recalls, “The next day, the newspaper apologised — to Stalin.”

In defending themselves from the threat of external regulation, the media organisations talked up how well the Press Council worked — even though all but one of its former and current chairs had told Finkelstein that the lack of independence from its major funders, the big media groups, was hobbling its ability to do its job. (For more on this history, see my piece from earlier this year.)

Finkelstein’s recommendations came to nothing, but Ricketson’s card was clearly marked.

Fast-forward to 2015, when the MEAA asked Ricketson to be its representative on the Press Council. This was odd, because the MEAA, like most of the industry, had opposed the Finkelstein recommendations, in which Ricketson had clearly had a role. Nevertheless, he accepted the post on the understanding, according to an MEAA statement, that he would represent the union’s policy positions.

“I was keen to see how I could contribute to effective self-regulation,” Ricketson writes in the Australian Journalism Review, “especially as the Press Council was now better resourced and the industry affirmed its commitment.”

Predictably, the usual Murdoch mascots fired up about his appointment and he became the latest in a long line of public figures to be subjected to one of the Australian’s campaigns of sustained vituperation. The tone of the five articles, two comment pieces, an editorial, a diary item and a cartoon can be judged from a piece by the paper’s excitable legal affairs correspondent, Chris Merritt, who wrote that “Matthew Ricketson deserves no blame for his appointment to the Press Council. To criticise him would be as senseless as blaming a rabid dog for having rabies. The blame rests with those who have overlooked his innate nature [sic].”

Eventually the campaign subsided, as these things do. But then, in 2017, Ricketson contributed to a series in Crikey about how the Australian targets its critics — referencing campaigns against Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Tim Flannery, Gillian Triggs and (I must declare) me.*

It was the Crikey series that spurred the Australian’s managing editor, Helen Trinca, to write to the Press Council arguing that Ricketson had an “inherent bias” against the publication and demanding he be excluded from any adjudication panels concerning it. The paper declared it would not take part in or accept any adjudication in which Ricketson was involved.

Trinca’s demand fell between two chairs, literally. Council chair David Weisbrot had left over a controversy about the appointment of Carla McGrath, deputy chair of GetUp!, as a public member. Many people — including me — considered that appointment inappropriate, but what horrified Weisbrot was how decisions of the council as a whole were being attributed to him by News Corp. The current chair, Neville Stevens, had not yet been appointed.

In other words, just in case the irony is not clear, a complaint about Ricketson pinging the Australian for vituperative personal attacks failed to be dealt with partly because the Press Council’s chair had resigned because of vituperative personal attacks by the Australian.

The council considered the Ricketson matter, but it was not resolved. Since then, says Ricketson, he has made himself available to sit on complaint adjudication panels but has been appointed to just four, none of them concerning the Australian.

He has raised the issue on several occasions, he says, “with increasing urgency. The council’s chair, Neville Stevens, told me at the council’s most recent meeting, on 13 May, that he would look into the issue of me sitting on panels. Perhaps he will, but I have heard nothing.”

In the intervening period, the MEAA has announced that it intends to leave the Press Council and is now serving out a notice period.

The council confirmed to me that the November meeting will “consider” the matter. It also said it had “comprehensive policies in place to deal with actual, perceived or potential conflicts of interest.” Comprehensive, perhaps. But clearly not speedy.

Reassuringly, in this context, the council recently issued a robust adjudication declaring that the Australian had breached fairness and accuracy guidelines in its coverage of gender-affirming healthcare. Ricketson obviously had nothing to do with that one, but the Australian nevertheless refused to accept it, using a combative editorial to argue that the decision was “wrongheaded” and “swayed unduly by a concerted campaign by activists.”

In further evidence that the newspaper has had an “irony-ectomy,” as Ricketson puts it, the Australian claimed to be a victim of “cancel culture.”

So what are we to make of the Ricketson matter? I was among those who thought it odd that he accepted the MEAA appointment in the first place, given the Finkelstein history. But ultimately that was a matter between him and those he was representing.

The Australian suggests in some of its communications that Ricketson has a conflict of interest. There is nothing in his conduct to suggest that’s the case.

Rather, the issue is perceived bias. But is he considered biased because he has criticised the Australian or because it has criticised him? And if critique does equal bias, a very long list of media academics and journalists would be disqualified from adjudicating complaints against various outlets. It is also, of course, part of a journalism academic’s job to critique. And Ricketson has repeatedly acknowledged that the Australian also does excellent journalism.

In other contexts, the Australian would surely assert that it is possible to critique public figures and institutions without being biased against them.

But the real shame is that this matter has been allowed to remain unresolved for so long. After nearly four years of inaction since the Australian’s complaint against Ricketson was first received, the matter can no longer be dodged. Could the council be about to lose another member — News Corp, its largest funder? Or will Ricketson walk — a largely symbolic move, given the MEAA is already going?

The Press Council’s travails don’t end there. The public hearings of the current Senate inquiry into media diversity — the inquiry spurred by Kevin Rudd’s petition to parliament calling for a royal commission into the Murdoch press — have revived memories of the Finkelstein finding that the council “suffers from serious structural constraints” and lacks “the necessary powers or the required funds to carry out its designated functions.”

On the other hand, the council recently welcomed a new chief executive, appointed after an extensive search. The woman in the hot seat is Yvette Lamont, previously group general counsel and company secretary of APN News and Media, now HT&E Limited.

I wonder if she realises what she is letting herself in for. •

* Further declarations could go on for a while, but those who are interested in my own history with the Australian will find an account in the Monthly back in 2012. Should I be tempted to seek appointment to the Australian Press Council, I suspect I too would be unacceptable to the Australian because of this history and other critiques. I disagreed with the central recommendation of the Finkelstein inquiry, but also thought aspects of the report were accurate and worthwhile. While we disagree on some of these matters, Ricketson and I have been friends and colleagues since starting together as cadets at the Age in 1982.

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The Australian versus the Press Council, again appeared first on Inside Story.

These were the antithesis of the voices of official media — polished, political and performative, suffused with what the Communist Party calls “positive energy.” They sounded like my friends on the mainland, people I’d met, and people I wanted to know.

The voices I’ve heard since then on StoryFM — which now attracts about 700,000 listeners per episode — are those of “ordinary” people and they continue to speak about things that bring them joy, sadness, moral confusion, anger or even transcendence. One man described growing up on a small houseboat that ferried goods along the Yangtze. Another told of being gay, closeted and secretly in love with his straight best friend.

I’ve listened to people talk about surviving sexual abuse; dealing with relatives in prison or addicted to drugs; working as a zookeeper, telehealth doctor or nanny; having a mother who was a sex worker; losing a young wife to cancer; being “fat-shamed”; being kidnapped in Syria. They’ve spoken of first kisses and first jobs, of being a teenage mother, of surviving floods, and in one hilarious and surprising episode, of living in the United States, catching a thief and, feeling sorry for him, making him something to eat. Episode 541, which dropped not long after the fall of Kabul in August, featured a woman whose mountain-climber father had been murdered by the Taliban in Pakistan in 2012.

When StoryFM started, the Chinese podcasting scene was still small, DIY and relatively free of commercial pressures and official attention. Like elsewhere, podcasting grew off the back of blogging, beginning around 2004 but not taking off until much later. In the West, it was 2014’s phenomenally popular Serial, produced by This American Life (itself an inspiration for StoryFM), that really kicked things off. Yet, as one Chinese podcaster told the tech-media platform KrASIA, podcasting in mainland China still had the feel of “pirate radio” as recently as 2019.

These days, there are around 16,000 Chinese-language podcasts, reflecting the variety of contemporary Chinese life. Some are short-lived by accident or design; others, like StoryFM, are long-running. They focus on topics as broad as pop culture, entrepreneurship and technology, or as specific as app design, museums and the care of pets. Some are passion projects: Wang Yuezhou, the human resources manager at a Shanghai tech firm, collects the stories of places and people threatened by urban renewal for Urbanlog.

Many, like the popular The Unemployables, which covers freelance life, are wide-ranging “chatcasts.” Listening to the best of them feels like dropping in on a party full of fun and interesting people. I’ve heard men talk about why they love to knit, and young women reacting frankly (and none too positively) to the party leadership’s idea that they should consider having three children. On one recent episode of The Unemployables, an astronomer revealed how he found happiness by quitting academia, with all its internal politics and bullying of junior staff, to become a home renovator.

As Fang Kecheng, who researches digital media in China, recently told the Shanghai publication Sixth Tone, “When you’re tired of all the hate and irrationality circulating online and want to listen to light-hearted and civilised discussion, you tune in to a podcast.” (In this, China is not so different from the rest of the world.)

According to a 2020 survey by PodFest China, almost 90 per cent of the eighty-five million–plus subscribers to China’s podcasts are under thirty-five. They are typically single and live in first- and second-tier cities, and 86 per cent of them have university degrees (versus 20 per cent of the general population). When the host of The Unemployables opened the episode featuring the astronomer-turned-renovator by playing a snippet of Peter, Paul and Mary’s “If I Had a Hammer,” he could assume enough listeners would get the joke.

Financial sustainability, as in the West, can be tricky. Chinese podcasts may look to sponsorship, investment, subscriptions, built-in micropayments, virtual gifts from listeners or advertising to survive. The first podcasts used Apple as a platform, and some still do, though listeners may need a VPN to access them.

Ximalaya, the first China-based platform, which was launched in 2012, was a game changer. With 250 million monthly active users, today it is the local market leader; it looks after hosting, distribution and RSS feeds for podcasters, offers audiobooks, and has plans to become an “online audio ecosystem.” Other major mainland platforms include Xiaoyuzhou, which comes with inbuilt social media so listeners can follow one another, and Lingzhi.

Yet even as these local options have boosted the profile of podcasting, with popularity have come new pressures. Previously, so long as hosts didn’t draw undue attention from the authorities by touching on Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet or other hypersensitive subjects, they could speak relatively freely, including about LGBTQI life and other topics heavily censored in mainstream mainland media. But the space for free speech in the world of podcasting is shrinking, with commercialisation playing a part: advertisers and investors want more mass appeal and less political risk.

Chinese censorship is not just about policing from above, or clear red lines: across the media and cultural industries, creators and publishers must often guess where the lines are in the first place — and that promotes caution and self-censorship. It’s hard to say why, for example, some podcasts dedicated to LGBTQI topics stopped production earlier this year. Apple, meanwhile, has made some Chinese podcasts, including one that mentioned the events of 4 June 1989, either unavailable in the China region or difficult to discover.

Podcasters’ strategies for not attracting official attention include anodyne episode titles and descriptions. Then there’s cabianqiu, “the ball that scrapes the edge,” a term taken from table tennis to indicate a play that, daringly, is just within bounds.

In 2019, The Unemployables published an episode in which a mainlander in Hong Kong, having witnessed the protests there, confessed he found the mass solidarity in the face of political injustice inspiring. The episode is still accessible, but it’s now two and a half minutes shorter than it was. Another podcast, Surplus Value, hosted by three irrepressible young feminists, suddenly disappeared from Ximalaya after a guest criticised both hyper-nationalism and the government response to Covid-19.

The women of Surplus Value now host Stochastic Volatility, on Apple. In a recent episode the trio talked about seeing a male passenger upskirt a flight attendant on a plane. Whipping into action, they documented the man’s behaviour with their own phones while alerting the crew.

This segment segued into a lively, informed discussion of the sexualisation of flight attendants globally and a survey of their depiction in Chinese popular culture, a look at the sexist media commentary on female athletes’ bodies at the Tokyo Olympics, and a quick history of synchronised swimming, before circling back to where it began, with another true story about a man on a plane. And so, at least for now, Chinese podcasts are flying high. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post First kisses and invisible red lines appeared first on Inside Story.

It has picked at sores that have been festering for almost forty years: sores created by the endemic corruption in New South Wales in the 1980s, the unresolved allegations in the so-called “Age tapes” and the record of Neville Wran’s Labor government. As for the present and the future, Exposed represents a small tragedy within the larger tragedy of the 1979 fire in the ghost train at Sydney’s Luna Park, in which six people died.

In my view, Exposed includes some of the best Australian television journalism of recent times. Yet it is being pilloried for faults in the final twenty minutes of its third episode, where the program details, and in places can be understood to be endorsing, an unsubstantiated allegation of corruption against Neville Wran.

The suggestion is that Wran interfered to help crime boss Abe Saffron gain control of the Luna Park site in the wake of arson. Spoiler alert here: I almost entirely agree with the report of the independent editorial review of the program ordered by the ABC board in response to complaints, which was conducted by peerless investigative journalist Chris Masters, a veteran of reporting on NSW corruption, and respected academic Rodney Tiffen.

Masters and Tiffen describe the program as an “outstanding achievement” that used deep, original and rigorous research to make a convincing case that the fire was probably arson, that the original investigation was perverted by corrupt police, and that Saffron may have been involved.

But when it comes to the allegation that Wran was friendly with Saffron and may have intervened on his behalf, Masters and Tiffen believe parts of the program are “misleading” and its references to political corruption “vague, anonymous, and unhelpful.” One of their terms of reference was to ask whether the program “demonstrated open-mindedness to alternative interpretations of events and issues,” and on this they clearly found it wanting.

Let’s talk about the old sores first. Prominent in public life today — and among the program’s most trenchant critics — are people who built their early careers during the decade, 1976–86, in which Neville Wran was premier of New South Wales. They are deeply invested in how history judges those times.

Journalists, too, put their careers on the line back then. Watergate was still a recent memory, and it was much easier to see journalism as an honourable, even heroic profession.

I was a junior journalist in the Age newsroom when Bob Bottom, a journalistic refugee from Sydney, arrived in 1984 in a cloud of glamour, righteousness and zealotry. He carried with him what became known as the Age tapes, which were alleged to contain evidence of corrupt activity by High Court judge Lionel Murphy. That the Age published this material — drawn from illegal phone intercepts by NSW police — was controversial at the time and remains so.

I remember the drunken post-mortems and the anguish when the parliamentary inquiry into allegations of misbehaviour by Murphy — which also involved allegations about Wran — was closed down because of Murphy’s terminal cancer. The records of the investigation were sealed for thirty years, and released in 2017.

It is hard, now, to convey the atmosphere of those times. A raft of royal commissions and corruption inquiries in six states in the 1980s and early 90s, many prompted by excellent journalism (much by Chris Masters) exposed corruption within state governments and aired allegations of federal significance. But among some of the journalists, the zeal was sometimes excessive, and the shades of grey too often depicted as black and white.

A fuller explanation of the times, and what can and can’t be said about the Wran government and corruption, is in an essay by Rodney Tiffen published by Inside Story earlier this week, given extra punch because of its author’s work on the ABC review.

Tiffen gives little comfort to Wran’s boosters and defenders, who have been among the program’s chief critics. While confirming that there is “no persuasive evidence” that Wran was corrupt in the sense of personal financial gain, he also lays out how corruption grew on Wran’s watch, and how he used government patronage for political advantage. In particular, Wran did favours for media barons — Rupert Murdoch chief among them. Tiffen sees Wran as a transitional figure between the rampant and established corruption of his predecessor, Robert Askin, and the reforms of the 1990s, including the creation of the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

The issues here — the slippery connections between the unscrupulous use of power for political advantage, the importance of ICAC, the enmeshment of media with government and power, and journalists’ roles on both sides of the corruption fight — could hardly be more relevant to our own times.

So much for the currents and the shadows. What of the program itself?

One of the chief critics of the ABC and Exposed has been Troy Bramston, a senior writer with the Australian. Bramston, in my view, makes some fair points but over-eggs his pudding. He has said the Luna Park fire was probably caused by accident rather than arson. How he can feel so secure in that conclusion after viewing episode two of Exposed is beyond me. Here, Bramston betrays biases and blind spots of his own.

Bramston and others have also suggested that the media — and the ABC in particular — should not report unsubstantiated allegations, including the allegations against Wran. I think that’s ridiculous. As the ABC editorial policies say, and surely all journalists would assert, publishing allegations “in the public interest is a core function of the media in a free society.” But of course it should be done after careful judgement, with context, clarity and balance.

The claim that the ABC should not have broadcast the allegation against Wran is particularly weird because it was already public. It can be found in the records of the parliamentary inquiry released in 2017, where it features as “Allegation 28.” It rested on police officers’ memories of what was contained in since-destroyed transcripts of the Age tapes. Exposed found one of those officers, Paul Egge, and interviewed him, and he stood by his recollection.

When the documents, including Allegation 28, were released in 2017, virtually all media outlets, including the Australian, reported them, despite the fact that they were untested allegations. Quite right too. This was of historical significance. It would have been wrong for Exposed not to deal with this material.

On Tuesday this week, the chief reporter on Exposed, Caro Meldrum-Hanna, tweeted screen shots of some of this coverage. “This morning,” she wrote, “I’m looking forward to an avalanche of complaints about all the previous coverage by all other media outlets who reported the exact same allegation & Paul Egge’s evidence (but without contemporary interviews with him or other relevant police and judicial witnesses).”

She has a point, but there is a difference between contemporaneous reportage of a document release and the way Exposed wove those same allegations into its narrative. The core problem with those last twenty minutes of Exposed, in my view, is not the material that was run but rather that more needed to be added. The allegation needed clearer signposting and contextualisation.

The suggested narrative has holes in it. It isn’t clear how Abe Saffron benefited from the Luna Park lease — if he did. There is no firm evidence that Wran intervened in the tender process, and some evidence that goes the other way. The allegation that Wran was “pally” with Saffron rests on the word of just one witness without corroboration. These things could and should have been clearly stated, perhaps in the conversations between the reporters that are used throughout Exposed as a narrative device.

A key graphic, screened twice in those final twenty minutes, depicts the substance of Allegation 28 as a hard red line linking Saffron and Wran. But even if the transcript Egge remembers still existed and the ABC had a copy, it would still amount to hearsay evidence — what others were saying about Wran — rather than direct evidence.

All these things should have been more clearly declared in the program. Other points of view could have been included — perhaps from some of the former ministers and staffers who have been among Exposed’s critics. Other material in the Age tapes that suggests Wran wasn’t corrupt could have been mentioned.

The ABC claims the program was not adopting the allegation against Wran, merely reporting it. And it is true that the crucial passage is littered with the word “allegation.” But other material pulls against this, including highly suggestive yet evidence-free comments from interview subjects, such as “there must have been something in it for Wran.”

As Tiffen and Masters conclude, “The series offers a penetrating and precise account of police corruption, judicial shortcomings and probes behind the façade of commercial interests. In contrast, its references to political corruption remain vague, anonymous, and unhelpful… The cumulative effect… left the reviewers with a strong impression the program concluded Wran was complicit… The program makers have not succeeded in framing a conclusion that plainly stated their position.”

The tragedy is that all these things could have been fixed with relatively small changes. Had that been done, Exposed would probably still have been attacked, but it would have been entirely defensible.

And so we come to another shadow on the present. I don’t blame the program makers for the muddiness and the overreach. Anyone who has worked for years on an investigation like this grows too close to the material, and then defensive of it. That is why the ABC has its rigorous processes of upward referral, and program review and sign-off.

In this case, in the case of those last twenty minutes, those processes failed. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course. But I nevertheless find it hard to believe that these issues were invisible to the executives who would have reviewed the content.

Add to this failure an unimpressive appearance before Senate estimates by ABC managing director David Anderson and editorial director Craig McMurtrie, in which McMurtrie suggested that the allegation against Wran didn’t need to be backed up more thoroughly because it was not the focus of the series.

And add to that the way the ABC dealt with the Masters and Tiffen report. First, the corporate communications team released ABC management’s response selectively: to the Nine newspapers and the Guardian, as I understand it, but not to the Australian, which had done most reporting on the affair. And then it only released the Masters–Tiffen report itself, quietly, about twenty hours later.

This was a classic spin manoeuvre by the ABC: getting your own version out there first to try to frame the coverage. We expect it of politicians but not of a publicly funded media organisation.

Having said all that, I suspect the legacy of Exposed will not be the controversy about its final minutes. The coroner has indicated a new inquest may be held as the result of evidence in the program. Exposed certainly makes a compelling case that one is needed. If that happens, this is what Exposed will be chiefly remembered for.

Other sores will continue to fester, though. The lesson here is that failing to combat allegations of corruption — both in the specific, criminal sense and in the broader political sense — is a flaw with generational longevity. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The premier, the crime boss and the ABC appeared first on Inside Story.

Wran towered over his contemporaries in intelligence and acumen, but his policy achievements, while not negligible, failed to match his electoral triumphs. “I didn’t set out to achieve much, actually,” he said when asked to nominate his main achievements. “My principal objective was to keep beating the Liberals, and I’ve had amazing success at doing that. That’s been my main triumph.”

The biggest cloud hanging over Wran’s legacy was his handling of a series of corruption allegations. As biographers Mike Steketee and Milton Cockburn conclude, “while Wran’s cynicism did him no harm in the early years of his premiership, it almost brought him undone over the corruption issue. Here the cynicism was deep-rooted and absolute: corruption was not an issue because it did not affect people’s lives, as did bread and butter issues.”

The leading historian of NSW politics, David Clune, agrees. “When confronted with evidence of widespread corruption, Wran made the serious error of trying to obfuscate and cover up,” he writes. “Rather than admitting that there was a real problem that needed to be urgently addressed, he over-confidently assumed his political and parliamentary skills would enable him to defuse the issue.”

Even future Labor premier Bob Carr took Wran’s handling of corruption as a negative exemplar: “I had seen Neville Wran’s premiership tainted and compromised on probity by three distinct errors. One, the elevation of a corrupt cop as assistant commissioner. Two, the extension of the term of a corrupt chief stipendiary magistrate, Murray Farquhar. Three, being too slow to shake out police corruption… Almost every week I was to watch him struggle to ward off allegations that his administration was tainted by a laxness towards corruption.”

Allegations of corruption in the Wran era have flared up intermittently in the decades since his retirement. Most recently, early this year, the ABC series Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire aired claims about Wran’s role in organised crime figure Abe Saffron’s successful bid to lease Luna Park after the 1979 fire that killed seven people. At around the same time, former chief magistrate Clarrie Briese published Corruption in High Places, a memoir drawing on his long and distinguished career in the NSW judiciary, and Wran is one of his main targets.

“Laxness towards corruption” is one thing, but the sheer number of controversies and allegations involving Wran has persuaded some people that he was corrupt. What does the evidence say?

The brand of corruption most commonly associated with politicians is the kickback — the bribe given in return for a favourable decision. Huge stakes often hang on how governments respond to development proposals or land rezoning applications, for instance, and a sympathetic politician on the inside can make a huge material difference.

Despite some gossip, neither during nor since Wran’s years as premier has any evidence emerged that he received bribes or sought other forms of personal enrichment. That’s not to say he was unaware of the patronage potential of government decisions — for political advantage, though, rather than personal gain. In particular, Wran treated media proprietors the way the Morrison government treats swinging electorates: as targets of inducements intended to attract support in return.

The most important example is his decision to grant the Lotto franchise to a consortium whose members included companies run by Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer. It was a highly controversial choice, and defied NSW Labor Party policy. Defenders of Wran have argued that the marketing skills of the Packer and Murdoch companies, by guaranteeing that Lotto was highly successful, ensured that more revenue flowed to the state than would otherwise have been the case. But it’s also true that the franchise gave those companies a reliable, government-guaranteed source of income.

Wran’s wish to maintain good relations with the major media companies led him to offer Fairfax the chance to participate in Lotto as well, but its board felt that entering into an enterprise with the government it professed to hold to account would not be proper. Packer and Murdoch didn’t feel so encumbered.

Wran also helped Packer in other ways. When the mogul was trying to establish World Series Cricket, Wran’s government overruled the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust to give him access to the ground, and helped finance the construction of the light towers that enabled play to take place in front of prime-time TV audiences. Without calling for competitive tenders, the government also extended his leases at the Smiggin Holes and Perisher Valley ski resorts until 2025.

These decisions have no hint of personal financial gain, but they do suggest that Wran was happy to use the government’s prerogatives to advance Labor’s interests, and that he wouldn’t be inhibited by procedural niceties.

Wran inherited a corrupt police force. During the eleven-year premiership of his predecessor, Robert Askin, writes organised crime expert Alfred McCoy, New South Wales “endured a period of political and police corruption unparalleled in its modern history.” Although figures on illicit activity can never be authoritative, McCoy estimated that the annual turnover from organised crime in Sydney totalled $2.2 billion in 1975, with income from various sources of gambling comprising the major share, and narcotics $59 million.

When Wran was elected in May 1976, the corrupt Fred Hanson was police commissioner and a member of the panel that would nominate Merv Wood as his successor. A majority of ministers preferred Brian Doyle, who had a reputation of fighting corruption, but Wran wanted Wood, and in the end his ministers complied.

Over the following few years, Wood proved himself less than enthusiastic in pursuing organised crime. In November 1977, when Wran responded to public clamour by ordering the shutting down of Sydney’s long-tolerated illegal casinos, Wood’s public response was that such an action would be “inhumane” because 300 employees would lose their jobs just before Christmas.

In parliament in April 1979, Liberal John Dowd asked Wran why a 1977 report on the organised crime figure George Freeman had not been acted on. Wran claimed he hadn’t seen any such report, and promised that if it existed, which he doubted, he would release it to the news media. To Wran’s intense embarrassment, Dowd then produced a copy of the report. Wood was not only failing to fight police corruption, but he had deeply embarrassed the government by not alerting Wran to its existence. Wran subsequently released part but not all of the report.

Soon after, Wran announced that an anonymous informant had compiled a dossier seeking to prove that an association existed between Wood and a major illegal casino operator. Wood resigned a week later, ostensibly on the grounds of avoiding embarrassment to the police service. Months later Wran announced that the investigation had found the allegations of corruption to be politically motivated, although he never released the report.

Wran’s support for Wood’s appointment as commissioner could simply be bad luck — a case of taking the easier course of following the committee’s recommendation — and didn’t necessarily indicate he was indifferent to police corruption. The government was riding high electorally at the time, and although Wood’s misdeeds intensified attention on corruption, they did little or no damage electorally.

What did eventually transform the politics of organised crime in New South Wales was the murder of Donald Mackay on 15 July 1977. Mackay, a pillar of the Griffith community, had been nominated as the Liberal candidate in the next state election. Griffith was at the centre of a large marijuana-growing industry directed by organised crime figure Robert Trimbole, and Mackay’s anti-drugs campaigning was seen as an increasing nuisance.

Three weeks after what was officially labelled Mackay’s “disappearance,” a royal commission into drug trafficking was set up under Justice Philip Woodward. A year later, Woodward revealed how farcically incompetent the police investigation had been. Abundant material evidence made clear that Mackay had not disappeared but had been the victim of a violent attack.

In his final report, Woodward concluded that Mackay had been killed by a mafia-style organisation that was growing marijuana in Griffith. Several of its key figures had mixed socially with local police; indeed, former police chief Hanson used to go duck shooting with Trimbole. On the night the report was released Trimbole threw a large party at his home and boasted that “the commission can’t touch me or charge me in any way.” The NSW police investigation into Mackay’s murder made no progress.

Some years later, though, a Victorian police investigation into other crimes revealed that Mackay had been killed by a hitman, hired on instructions from Trimbole, because of the problems he had been causing the criminals.

Mackay’s murder had occurred just over a year into the Wran government but re-emerged in its last year, 1986, after the hitman’s conviction in Victoria. After a group of Griffith citizens critical of the NSW police’s inept investigation pressed for an inquiry, a delegation from the town, including three of Mackay’s children, had a three-hour meeting with Wran. Afterwards, the leader of the group described the encounter as a calculated process of intimidation, including personal abuse by the premier.

Wran did announce a new inquiry. But he also said, “It’s about time people in this country stopped yap, yap, yap and went along and put up, and that applies to the people of Griffith.”

The inquiry, headed by Justice John Nagle, reported in December 1986. As well as directing scathing remarks at the police, Nagle also brought into clear public focus a letter written by a former minister in the Whitlam government, Riverina resident Al Grassby. In 1980, Grassby had tried to persuade some Labor MPs to read into Hansard a document he had written alleging that Mackay’s widow and son and their solicitor had conspired to murder Mackay. The letter was the basis of a front-page article in the Sydney Sun-Herald in August 1980.

Political insiders had long known of Grassby’s links to Griffith criminals. Astonishingly, Wran appointed him to a community relations position in February 1986. Gary Sturgess, an anti-corruption campaigner and chief of staff to opposition leader Nick Greiner, told the Sun-Herald he was “sickened” that “Wran would take on a man with such obvious links to the mafia.” During a strong attack in parliament Greiner argued for Grassby’s activities to be included within the scope of the Nagle inquiry, but the government made no response.

If Wran could plead bad luck in appointing the corrupt Merv Wood, his problems with another police officer, Bill Allen, were all of his own making. Apparently impressed by the way Allen cleaned up a tow-truck scandal, he twice promoted Allen over more senior officers and against opposition within the force. Thanks to this patronage, Allen became deputy commissioner in August 1981.

Allen’s brazen behaviour in the job suggested he felt untouchable. On numerous occasions he met with Abe Saffron at police headquarters. He and his family accepted free trips and hospitality in Macau and Las Vegas from illegal gambling interests. He tried to bribe a junior police officer with five payments amounting to $2500 in cash.

Allen’s career came to an abrupt end in 1982 after the release of a damning Police Tribunal report. Then, according to Steketee and Cockburn, the government made “what amounted to a deal with Allen.” In return for not contesting the charges, he was demoted to sergeant first class but allowed to retire and retain his pension. This, of course, meant that his conduct was never publicly explored.

The government had just secured a huge victory in the 1981 election, and was in a position of political strength. But the scandal produced the first instance of the extravagant, partisan invective that became more common in later years. When National Party Leader Leon Punch said that Allen was Wran’s bagman, Wran replied in spades: “Last week I called you a piece of slime. Now I call you a cur, a coward.” This unedifying spectacle covered the fact that no effort was being made to probe Allen’s actions and relationships.

Wran later complained that the Allen affair “was built up into a big issue,” and that Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser “went on a destruct and destroy course” against him, thus thwarting his hopes of moving into federal politics. This is baseless special pleading: a blatantly corrupt deputy commissioner would always have been a big issue, and it was commonplace for federal ministers to brief journalists about state developments.

When Clarrie Briese was appointed chief stipendiary magistrate in March 1979, his predecessor invited him to dinner. Briese later concluded that all four of his fellow diners — retiring chief magistrate Murray Farquhar, police commissioner Merv Wood, lawyer to organised crime Morgan Ryan, and High Court judge and former federal attorney-general Lionel Murphy — were corrupt.

Evidence of the corruption of Wood, Ryan and Farquhar manifested itself immediately. Farquhar’s last case involved drug charges against two men, Roy Cessna and Timothy Milner, represented by Ryan. Wood intervened by radically reducing the estimated value of the drugs seized by police, which allowed Farquhar to deal with the matter summarily — and more lightly — rather than referring it to a criminal trial. Before hearing the case Farquhar thoughtfully shifted to a courtroom with no sound-recording equipment — a move, writes Briese, that left the police prosecutor indignant and helpless.

Of all Farquhar’s suspect cases, this is the only one in which the corrupt motive seems to have been purely financial. Otherwise, his motive seems to have been primarily political or personal.

Farquhar’s judicial dexterity would first have impressed Wran while Labor was still in opposition. News Limited wanted to build a printery on land it owned in Botany, but the local council was planning to convert the area to residential use. Labor offered to intercede on behalf of News — rather zealously, it seems, for in 1975 charges were laid against the local state MP, Laurie Brereton, and Labor official Geoff Cahill for attempting to influence four Labor councillors. Brereton allegedly offered them money if they voted the right way and disendorsement if they didn’t.

Farquhar found the evidence against Cahill too weak and dismissed his charge. But while he found a prima facie case of bribery against Brereton, he deftly decided that the Local Government Act took precedence over the common law crime of bribery, and that under that act a charge had to be laid within six months, meaning it was now too late to proceed. Moves were made to revive the prosecution, but after Labor won the 1976 election the new attorney-general, Frank Walker, ruled on a technicality that the case could not proceed.

Brereton escaped a trial. It is a leap to then declare, as Wran’s former press secretary Brian Dale did, that the allegations were “tested and rejected in court.”

The magistrate’s next unorthodox intervention came after Wran had become premier. In a unique and vexatious private prosecution, Sydney solicitor Danny Sankey issued a summons against Gough Whitlam and his ministers Jim Cairns, Rex Connor and Lionel Murphy for conspiring to deceive the governor-general over the loans affair, which had created enormous controversy in the lead-up to Sir John Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam. The case opened in the Queanbeyan Court on the Monday before the 1975 federal election and continued — despite having little or no legal merit — until early 1979.

In 1977 the case was being heard by magistrate Darcy Leo. A Labor MP had attacked Sankey and Leo in parliament, and Leo had sued the Sydney Morning Herald for defamation for its report. Farquhar visited him in Queanbeyan and convinced him to withdraw from the case. Farquhar took over, but Sankey appealed against the change and Leo was reinstated. So Farquhar’s intervention didn’t materially change things, though there was speculation that his aim was to help the Labor defendants.

Wran’s devotion to Farquhar was tested in March 1978, when the National Times reported that George Freeman had been ordered out of Randwick racecourse as a disreputable character, having entered as a guest of Farquhar. Farquhar argued that he had bought the ticket at the request of a doctor, Nick Paltos, and didn’t know it was for Freeman. (Paltos was later convicted and imprisoned for drug offences.)

Justice minister Ron Mulock didn’t want Farquhar to return to the bench until he had given a satisfactory account of his relationship with Freeman. Farquhar initially declined on the grounds that he was suing the newspaper for defamation. Wran thought this was a valid reason; Mulock did not. Wran called Mulock to his office, where he was confronted by half a dozen senior ministers. Mulock stood his ground. As he left, Wran said, “Well, you’re on your own now and it won’t be forgotten.” Eventually Farquhar resumed his duties.

A year earlier Farquhar had made another decision that was to become a much bigger media focus than any other corruption issue during Wran’s premiership.

On 30 April 1983, the ABC’s Four Corners reported that a charge of embezzlement against rugby league chief executive Kevin Humphreys had been dismissed because Farquhar, professing to be acting on Wran’s instructions, had pressured a magistrate to drop the case.

Wran immediately sued the ABC for defamation and used the prospective court case as a reason for not answering any questions. A week later the magistrate who dismissed Humphreys’s case, Kevin Jones, made a statement that Farquhar had told him that “the premier has contacted me. He wants Kevin Humphreys discharged.”

This confirmed the central premise of the program: that Farquhar had told other magistrates that the premier was on the phone and he wanted Humphreys discharged. Clearly the most important sources for the program were the magistrates who heard Farquhar say this. Attorney-general Paul Landa demanded Wran step down and call a royal commission, which Wran did. Landa, and perhaps some other ministers, appear to have thought that Wran was probably guilty.

After two months of public hearings attracting saturation media coverage, chief justice Sir Laurence Street concluded that Wran was not involved, and he resumed the office of premier. One telling piece of evidence in Wran’s favour was that his diary showed that at the time Farquhar said he was on the phone the premier was in a meeting with Treasury officials and his economic advisers.

Street also ruled that Farquhar had tried to pervert the course of justice and should stand trial. Farquhar was subsequently convicted and served time in prison. Humphreys had to stand trial again, was convicted, and had to pay a fine.

The exoneration of Wran has often led his supporters to be dismissive of the whole Four Corners report. Former Wran staffer Graham Freudenberg, for instance, asserted in his memoirs that “the Four Corners ‘re-enactment’ was based on a fabrication… The ABC swallowed it hook, line and sinker.” The reporter, Chris Masters, maintains that “in all important respects the program was correct.” It accurately reported that there had been a perversion of justice, and that Farquhar had invoked Wran’s name.

On the day of his acquittal Wran held a media conference targeting the ABC and its “blot on the history of so-called investigative reporting.” On four or five occasions journalists asked Wran questions relating to Farquhar and the fact that the chief magistrate had invoked the premier’s name. Each time Wran redirected the question to the sins of the ABC.

Wran had sat through testimony by several magistrates that Farquhar had used his name. He also heard testimony about the close relationship between George Freeman and Farquhar, which showed the magistrate had a very profitable betting relationship with the crime figure. (This also showed that Farquhar had lied to Wran and Mulock about his relationship with Freeman a few years earlier.)

Yet Wran refused to utter a word of criticism of Farquhar, and neither he nor Street showed any curiosity about Farquhar’s motives for his corrupt behaviour. Nor did Wran show any interest in what Farquhar’s behaviour revealed about the administration of justice in New South Wales. As Masters commented, all who knew the case — including much of the NSW magistracy — believed the premier was involved. That belief “was a cancer that had been eating away at the NSW judiciary for six years.”

Many observers have said that the royal commission brought an enduring change in Wran’s attitudes, permanently reducing his enthusiasm for the role of premier. It also signalled an enduring rise in the prominence of corruption issues in NSW politics.

While Wran was still standing down, federal sources informed his deputy, Jack Ferguson, and police chief, Cec Abbott, of evidence that the state’s prisons minister, Rex Jackson, was accepting bribes connected with an early-release scheme he had introduced. Half-hearted internal investigations followed.

After Nick Greiner aired the allegations of bribery, Ferguson announced an inquiry. Then, in October 1983, federal opposition leader Andrew Peacock made much more specific allegations. Finally, the Fairfax weekly, the National Times, obtained incriminating information from Federal Police phone taps and on the morning of 26 October put detailed questions to the premier’s and the prison minister’s offices. That afternoon Wran, back as premier, demanded Jackson’s resignation.

The government’s stonewalling had certainly not disposed of the Jackson issue, and the fact that it was constantly on the back foot possibly increased the damage. Jackson eventually became the first prisons minister in Australian history to go to prison. Wran knew nothing about his minister’s corruption, but the resulting scandal further heightened the tension around corruption issues.

Allegations of corruption were becoming more frequent. When the National Times reported that secret police tapes revealed the identity of a Mr Fix-it for organised criminals, the Wran government’s initial reaction was to “feign disinterest,” which — according to Steketee and Cockburn — had become its favourite strategy.

At the same time, two other new allegations of corruption were made: investigative journalist Bob Bottom said that a NSW magistrate had conspired with a criminal figure to have a charge dismissed; and deputy federal National Party leader Ian Sinclair said that figures connected with the NSW government had said charges against him could be dropped if he paid $50,000.

Sensing that both claims were false, Wran moved immediately. He set up a commission of inquiry under Justice Ronald Cross to examine these two charges as well as the Jackson bribes. Cross disposed of Bottom and Sinclair quickly and absolutely. “The Spanish Inquisition would not have convicted the devil himself” on the kind of evidence Sinclair had given, he declared.

During the Cross commission, Bottom handed over a thick file on NSW police phone taps. The reaction was swift, Steketee and Cockburn write: “Three days later, the government announced through the Sunday newspapers new laws making it an offence to knowingly be in possession of a transcript or other records… of a private conversation illegally heard or recorded by a listening device.” Facing a penalty of up to five years’ jail, Bottom took the tapes to Melbourne, which is why this essentially New South Wales story was first published in the Age.

The last big corruption scandal of the Wran era came to be known as the Age tapes. It began dramatically on 2 February 1984 with a front-page story titled “Network of Influence,” based on tapes and transcripts gathered illegally by NSW police officers. No doubt sensitive to the possibilities of a defamation suit, the Age didn’t mention any names, focusing on audio recordings of Mr Fix-it and his dealings with a judge. Later, under parliamentary privilege, the crime figure was revealed to be Morgan Ryan and the judge Lionel Murphy.

Even before the names emerged, Wran was condemning the publication using two main lines of attack. The first was to say the tapes were phoney. The second — not necessarily consistent with the first — was to declare that those responsible for the taping should be jailed given that it was “the most illicit, illegal and despicable affair in Australian history.” Wran focused entirely on the illegality of the taping and, beyond calling them fakes, showed no interest in the tapes’ contents.

On the basis of Wran’s statements, the officers in the Crime Intelligence Unit who had made the recordings decided to deny all involvement. Much of the equipment was destroyed, as were many tapes and transcripts. Eventually a royal commission under Justice Donald Stewart offered the police officers immunity from prosecution, and later decided the tapes were genuine but the officers’ summaries were not sufficiently reliable to be used in criminal proceedings. Wran’s interventions had caused not only a long delay but also the destruction of much potentially valuable evidence.

The phone tapping was not the rogue operation that Wran’s comments suggested. Its origins went back to 1967, when police commissioner Norm Allan was looking for more effective ways to attack organised crime. NSW police were impressed by the FBI’s techniques for targeting and tracking such suspects, and a series of police commissioners handed the system down to their successors.

Justice Stewart concluded that some convictions would never have occurred if the unlawful interceptions had not helped in the gathering of evidence. Journalist Evan Whitton offered two cases: the first, the arrest in January 1978 of Wood’s old sculling partner, Murray Stewart Riley, and his conviction, with nine others, for attempting to import drugs; the second, the arrests in Bangkok of Warren Fellows, Paul Hayward and William Sinclair on heroin charges in October 1978 based on information gained by a phone tap on notorious crime figure “Neddy” Smith. As Justice Athol Moffitt, who led the first royal commission into organised crime in 1973, wrote later, “It seems clear the illegality of the tapes was not complained of for some years until politically damaging contents were published in the Age.”

With the fallout from the Age tapes threatening to run for months, and with the respite offered by Justice Cross’s findings on the false allegations, Wran seized the political initiative and called an early election for March. Labor won, but with a much reduced majority. Afterwards Wran made the double-edged boast that if he had had the material Greiner had, he would have won easily, and that the opposition dropped the ball by taking its eye off corruption issues.

Justice Murphy’s figuring in the phone taps began a series of political and judicial processes to explore his behaviour. A Senate committee was convened in late March 1984 and reported in August, split along party lines. A four-person second committee was formed in September and split three ways, with the chair, Labor’s Michael Tate, and Australian Democrat senator Don Chipp concluding that on the balance of probabilities Murphy was guilty of misbehaviour sufficiently serious to warrant removal from the bench.

On the basis of testimony given to the Senate committees by Briese and by Justice Paul Flannery, the federal director of public prosecutions, Ian Temby, decided to lay charges against Murphy. The first trial began in June 1985, and in July the jury found Murphy guilty of one charge but not the other. In a second trial in April 1986, Murphy was found not guilty, but controversially chose to make an unsworn statement — a procedure introduced to protect the illiterate — that allowed him to avoid cross-examination. Murphy wanted to return to his position on the High Court, but several of his fellow judges resisted. A parliamentary inquiry into allegations of misbehaviour was closed down when Murphy was diagnosed with cancer, and his death in October brought a huge outpouring of sympathy.

With the election behind him, and with his friend Murphy squarely in legal and political sights, Wran’s rhetoric became increasingly reckless. After Briese testified at the second Senate committee, Wran said, “His evidence raises grave questions about him, his conduct and his future. Obviously a very large question must now be hanging over him and his position as chief magistrate.” After Murphy was found not guilty at the second trial, Wran said of Briese, “He hasn’t enjoyed my confidence for a while but all the less because of this verdict.” He also suggested Briese was having secret dealings with the Liberal Party.

Wran’s statements moved several figures to come to Briese’s defence. Federal Labor attorney-general Lionel Bowen said Briese had his confidence, and Sir Laurence Street and five other Supreme Court judges wrote to Wran saying there was not the slightest justification for any action against Briese. Temby decided Wran should be charged with contempt of court.

Despite his outraged rhetoric, it should be remembered that Wran does not figure directly in the police tapes and transcripts at all. Ryan is heard talking to Farquhar, to Murphy and to Saffron. Wran figures only as a shadowy presence whom others talk about. Indeed at one point, Ryan tells a friend that Wran is straight.

The only claim against Wran himself in this controversy was made by Senior Sergeant Paul Egge, who said he had seen a transcript of Wran saying he would help Abe Saffron get the Luna Park lease. There is no trace of this transcript anywhere, and Egge said it was destroyed by his supervisor because it was “too hot.” This is the only such reference I have seen to a transcript being destroyed because it was “too hot.”

In sum, the Age tapes provided no evidence of Wran engaging in any corrupt behaviour. But his violent rhetorical responses were central to how the public controversy developed, and undermined any hope of a rational and informed debate.

Corruption became a running sore in the last years of Wran’s premiership. The simplest explanation for why this happened is that Wran himself was corrupt. Some closely involved people decided this was the case: Briese says that he, investigative reporter Bob Bottom, and state Labor minister Barrie Unsworth all “came to suspect that Wran himself was part of the problem of corruption in NSW, and for that reason was not interested in a conclusion.”

But Briese produces no evidence. He relates how, when he became chief magistrate, Farquhar asked whether he would handle sensitive cases for the premier, and said that such requests would come through Morgan Ryan, but Briese later writes that no such cases ever came.

When we are trying to decide whether a political leader or a government is corrupt, we are faced by two opposite but equally important obstacles. One is the secrecy surrounding corrupt behaviour. The other is that false accusations and groundless rumours aren’t unusual, especially about successful politicians.

Despite gossip to the contrary, no persuasive evidence exists to support the view that Wran was corrupt in the sense of seeking personal financial gain. Nor is there persuasive evidence that Wran directly or indirectly sought to advance any criminal interests, or had any direct or indirect relationships with such criminals.

What is offered as evidence of Wran’s corruption can sometimes be laughable. Herald Sun journalist and co-author of Underbelly, Andrew Rule, recounts that a businessman who knew Wran saw Saffron waiting in a brasserie presumably to have lunch with someone, then saw Wran walk in, look around and walk out again.

The greatest question mark hanging over Wran’s behaviour was his loyalty to Murray Farquhar. Wran never offered a word of criticism, even though staying silent flew in the face of clear evidence, defied colleagues and risked a political price. Perhaps this was because they had had corrupt transactions. If so, there were very few of them (although that would not excuse them) and they would amount to a very tiny tip of a much larger iceberg of controversy.

Wran’s ten-year premiership was a period of transition. Before it came the entrenched, unchallengeable corruption of the Askin era. A decade after Wran’s departure, important reforms had been enacted, creating a politically independent director of public prosecutions, an Independent Commission Against Corruption, the very thorough Wood royal commission into police corruption, and reforms to the police force.

Characteristically, Wran vociferously criticised the establishment of ICAC and predicted an incrimination free-for-all. “Each one will feed the crocodile in the hope that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last,” he said. “Under cover of fighting the evils of crime and corruption, we may discover we have forfeited the basic freedoms which distinguish the democratic system from a totalitarian state.” This is not only an inaccurate prediction of how ICAC developed, it also neatly overlooks that such bodies also protect citizens’ rights against the abuse of executive power.

Wran’s recalcitrance on corruption issues is best explained by his political strategies and inclinations. He played party politics harder than most. Justice Donald Stewart, in many ways an admirer, also thought “Wran was a good hater.” Wran played his politics so hard that he refused even to speak to Nick Greiner, except once at a public function in 1985 when he roundly abused him.

Wran’s political strategy was to control the public agenda. Corruption allegations were a threat to this aim, and so his first inclination was to contain their damage. But this meant that he consistently gave a higher priority to political expedience than to public accountability, and his responses more often hindered than helped any efforts to increase transparency and secure meaningful reforms.

Wran’s strategy was not simply an attempt at political pragmatism that failed. It resulted from a moral compass indifferent to the larger issues that corruption posed for the health of a democracy. •

The post Was Neville Wran corrupt? appeared first on Inside Story.

Global warming has caused the ice caps to melt, and the planet’s weather has gone berserk. Tornadoes “attack” Los Angeles and a huge wave engulfs New York City; then an ice age sets in. And all this mayhem seems to take place over the course of just a few days.

Though cliché-ridden and gloriously silly, The Day After Tomorrow did depend on the thinnest sliver of scientific fact. The plot of the movie is “inspired” — I wouldn’t put it any higher than that — by the real science of abrupt climate change.

That’s why, one morning in May 2004, I was sitting in the Sydney office of ABC TV’s Lateline anxiously trying to contact Wallace S. Broecker, Newberry professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. I was attempting to arrange an interview for Tony Jones about the film’s release, but because it was Lateline we were going to concentrate on something arcane called “ocean conveyor belts.”

I finally got through to Broecker at his home in New Jersey. “Professor Broecker,” I asked, “would you like to get up at six tomorrow morning and drive all the way into Manhattan to talk about the science that tangentially underpins this dumb movie?”

“Sure. And call me Wally — everyone else does.”

Wally Broecker was raised in an evangelical family but dropped his faith — “cold turkey,” he said — in his twenties. After gaining his doctorate at Columbia, he was a fixture at that university’s prestigious Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory for well over sixty years.

As early as 1975 he published an influential article in Science called “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” As he predicted, Earth’s temperatures started climbing the very next year.

Broecker was also the first scientist to identify and understand ocean conveyor belts, the ocean current networks that affect everything from temperature to rain patterns by shifting energy from one part of the globe to the other.

The famous Gulf Stream, for example, carries warm surface water to Western Europe, which is then sent back across the Atlantic as cold water at depth. Without the Gulf Stream bringing the warmth of the Caribbean across the chilly North Atlantic, Europe would suffer from a new ice age.

Broecker then developed the theory that would eventually inspire the makers of The Day After Tomorrow. These conveyor belts, he argued, could be switched on and off — perhaps over as little as a few decades. If global warming led to the melting of the ice caps, and a massive pulse of freshwater entered the oceans, these aquatic conveyor belts would grind to a halt — with catastrophic implications for the world’s climate patterns.

In a geological time frame, this would indeed bring about climate change in an abrupt manner.

That night on Lateline Broecker happily explained this terrifying scenario. I remember thinking, if the ocean conveyor belts did stop working it would be like turning off the planet’s life support system.

Broecker came into Manhattan early that morning to talk to a TV show on the other side of the world because he understood that he knew stuff that people needed to hear. As he once explained, “The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”

I hadn’t thought of Wally Broecker for years. All through the 2019 bushfires I didn’t think of him, nor while I was watching the terrible news of the floods in Western Europe. But then last week I saw this headline in the Guardian: “Climate Crisis: Scientists Spot Warning Signs of Gulf Stream Collapse.”

The source of that article, a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change, argues there’s been “a gradual weakening during the last decades” of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — basically, another name for Broecker’s ocean conveyor belt. In other words, here was up-to-date evidence of what he’d warned our audience about seventeen years ago.

Climate scientists have long said that pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will lead to increasingly frequent and severe bushfires, floods, heatwaves and cyclones. And they’ve been proven correct. Could Wally Broecker’s fears about the impact of climate change on the oceans also come true?

In a video statement recorded just a week before he died in February 2019 at the age of eighty-seven, Broecker said, “Get serious world. This is a very, very, very serious problem.” •

The post Get serious, world appeared first on Inside Story.

One of Tett’s colleagues once queried the relevance of her doctorate on marriage rituals in Soviet Tajikistan to her work at the FT. Using this as her starting point, she demonstrates how anthropology provided the training and intellectual framework she needed to scrutinise banking, business corporations, factories, international industrial collaboration and technological change.

It’s important to bear in mind that Tett is famous for being one of the few people to predict the global financial crisis — several years before it occurred, in fact, after she became alarmed by the peculiarities of capital markets, derivatives and securitisation. Following her instincts, she began exploring the culture of banking and finance using standard ethnographic methods.

First she learned the language. Banking jargon is replete with terminology that is almost impenetrable to outsiders. CDO (collateralised debt obligation) and CDS (credit default swap) mean little to a person taking out a mortgage, as does the fact that their debts might be “bundled” with others and “sold on” to investors. In her efforts to discern the patterns created by these exchanges of risk and debt, she discovered a clash between what these innovations were meant to achieve for banks — reduced debt — and what appeared to be happening — increased debt. The predicted “market correction” was simply not happening. “Risks,” she wrote, “were building inside this strange, shadowy world.”

Although she was accused of scaremongering and her characterisations of the financial world were heavily criticised, Tett was undeterred. Her methods required the ingenuity that is essential when studying powerful people and their institutions. She attended conferences, interviewed people, read a great deal, and generally immersed herself in the culture. All the while she was maintaining a critical eye, looking out for gaps in the narrative, for contradictions between what people said and how they behaved.

Describing her fieldwork in Anthro-Vision, Tett questions widely held assumptions about the “natural” functioning of market forces and exposes the fanciful reification of money and its exchange. She reveals how bankers and financiers can effect economic change in complex ways, and how and why impending financial disasters can sit comfortably in their blind spots.

To show another way of working within large organisations, Tett describes how Genevieve Bell, now the distinguished professor in ANU’s School of Cybernetics, broke new ground after she joined Intel’s research division in 1998. Bell began by launching a cross-cultural study of consumers in India, Australia and Malaysia, where her band of researchers discovered that people used their technological devices very differently from how their designers envisaged.

Other comparative research into facial recognition and artificial intelligence applications has found striking differences between attitudes, behaviour and use in the United States and China. Americans tend to see them as a form of invasive surveillance that threatens their privacy and personal freedom; Chinese people are generally more comfortable with scrutiny, viewing it as a form of state-endorsed security.

On the urgent topic of how best to manage contagious diseases, Tett argues for cultural sensitivity by telling the story of how Ebola was eventually contained in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. The early assumption was that people’s behaviour would change if they understood how Ebola is transmitted, and attended medical facilities immediately symptoms developed. Quite apart from the difficulty of getting treatment within an underdeveloped healthcare system, Ebola continued to spread because people could not abandon their customs surrounding death and burial. Family gatherings, at which the deceased’s body would be embraced, were a major factor that simple prohibition failed to stop.

Tett describes how Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist at Harvard who heads Partners in Health, had for decades advocated community-based treatment that respects local cultures and social context. The advice he and other anthropologists provided to hospitals and health centres had a dramatic impact on the spread of the disease.

To date, Tett observes, anthropologists have had little influence over how Covid-19 has been managed. Attitudes towards face masks, and ideas about family gatherings and religious rituals vary greatly, yet policies have generally been top-down, informed almost entirely by medical scientists. Technical solutions, such as contact-tracing applications for mobile phones, haven’t prevented people from transmitting infection (although the use of QR codes to track people’s movement, at least in Australia, provides the means for isolating contacts after the event).

Rational measures derived entirely from medical science might seem simple, but cultural understandings of certain practices are constructed within “webs of meaning” that privilege some human actions over others. Thus, kissing the corpse and sitting in a small room with other mourners are intrinsic to West African ideas of honouring the dead. Failure to do so invites opprobrium and disaster. Thus, too, British prime minister Boris Johnson initially refused to don a face mask, even while exhorting other citizens to do so, because masking has negative connotations and is “foreign,” and controlling what British people wear infringes their individual rights. In London or Sydney, refusing to wear a mask can be considered an act that demonstrates individual autonomy and freedom — cultural ideals that not only are seen as natural in a liberal democracy but are also more highly valued than responsibility to others.

Anthropological techniques are obviously useful in market research, and many of Tett’s examples illustrate the complex interweaving of cultural assumptions, social values and consumer choice. She shows how widely anthropological research is used in the United States and how different ethnography is from surveys that simply collect factual data and make correlations based on categories such as age, gender and political allegiance.

Anthropologists investigate why people make choices, and much of the complexity they identify derives from the fact that social values change. Tett offers the case of a childcare company that asked anthropologist Meg Kinney to find out why enrolments were so much lower than rates of website searches — what was deterring interested parents from enrolling? Conventional data showed how parents were using the website, but didn’t explain why they failed to pursue the matter. Using video ethnography, Kinney observed parents in their home discussing the services offered. She found that the people designing childcare programs, mostly born before 1975, placed far more emphasis on education and reassurance than did “millennial” parents, who wanted their children to be adaptive and resilient.

Tett also explores how environmental sustainability and the challenge of climate change have transformed corporate notions of moral responsibility. She discusses the strategies of ESG (environment, sustainability, governance) that BP and other corporations have embraced in response to criticism, but points out that the persistence of the profit motive means that many changes are made with an eye to the market advantage that derives from being “green.” This is hardly a novel anthropological interpretation —many activists have been alert to “greenwashing” for decades — but Tett moves the argument along by bringing in her earlier work on financial organisations, which prompts the insight that “the words around ESG are changing the money flow” in positive ways.

Anthro-vision is written for a general readership and aims to convince people in the worlds of business and industry of the value of anthropological research. Tett does acknowledge that the information and insights an anthropologist can offer are not always the ones hard-headed business figures might want to hear. Anthropological advice to mining companies can certainly fall on deaf ears in Australia, where disasters such as the destruction of the cave at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia testify to the fact that anthropological knowledge continues to be seen as either irrelevant or obstructive to modern business practice.

In a postscript to anthropologists, Tett concedes that many anthropologists would rather not engage in research that enhances business operations, perhaps enabling them to increase profits and power in a profoundly unequal world. But she also emphasises the advantages of influencing policies that can promote change based on the recognition of both common humanity and cultural diversity. At a time when the social sciences and humanities are in the firing line in universities across Australia, her conclusions about the value of anthropology are particularly germane. •

Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life
By Gillian Tett | Random House Business | $35 | 282 pages

The post First, learn the language appeared first on Inside Story.

I have been watching Sky News — a lot of it — recently, focusing particularly on its notorious “after dark” period, when the network’s mostly conventional live news service morphs into strident opinion from Alan Jones, Chris Kenny, Peta Credlin, Andrew Bolt and other News Corp mascots.

The ban has provoked a fresh round of hand-wringing among media commentators about Sky News and its influence. Underlying their comments is the assumption that the Murdoch organisation is succeeding in its attempt to establish an Australian equivalent of America’s Fox News, with all the fracturing of our body politic this would imply.

I wanted to see what was being put to air, and to assess whether we are watching the development of a fresh brand of media pathology. I certainly found a sea of spin and self-promotion, but my conclusion is: no need to panic — yet.

Establishing a local equivalent of Fox News was always going to be hard. Unlike in the United States, pay TV news has never been mainstream in Australia, and seems to be going backwards. Research by the Australian Communications and Media Authority in 2020 showed that Foxtel — the pay TV service that carries Sky News — was losing audience share in the subscription market to the streaming services Netflix and Stan. Just 23 per cent of Australians subscribed to Foxtel in 2020, compared with 27 per cent in 2018.

Television ratings have long shown that Sky News’s line-up of right-wingers attracts quite small television audiences, with the most popular programs gaining about 70,000 viewers. (The ABC’s Q&A, by comparison, regularly attracts more than 300,000.)

Since 2018, rural viewers have been able to access Sky News free-to-air on either WIN or now Southern Cross Austereo. This might raise the spectre of a US-style political division, with rural Australians treated to a very different set of “facts” and opinions. But there, too, the audiences are only modest. According to figures provided at my request, Sky News on WIN reaches an average of 136,000 unique prime-time viewers across all regional markets in Australia each weekday.

After two weeks of watching Sky News, I am not surprised by those figures. I wasn’t so much provoked as bored.

The Sky News after dark format consists of a series of half-hour slots hosted by Bolt, Credlin and the others, in which they speak direct to the camera. Often the hosts interview each other: Credlin interviews Alan Jones; Jones interviews Credlin. All of them draw regularly on the wider stable of News Corp journalists.

At other times, we see split-screen “interviews” — more like mutual bolstering — with “experts” and other invited guests. Jones, for example, says that all he does is present scientific evidence on Covid. But any scientific consensus is regarded with suspicion on Sky News — sometimes even taken as evidence of conspiracy. Jones likes the outliers.

Last week he interviewed Ramesh Thakur, introducing him, with a flourish, as emeritus professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. Thakur was talking about the stupidity of lockdowns — views he has also aired on other media outlets, including the ABC. But neither he nor Jones mentioned that Thakur is an expert, not in public health, epidemiology or even civil liberties, but in nuclear disarmament and international security.

Credlin spends a lot of time examining the entrails of conservative politics. Given her background, this can be sporadically interesting for political nerds like me, but it is hard to imagine it appealing to a wide audience.

In fact, Sky News demonstrates what happens when highly opinionated people are given access to a broadcasting platform without the usual discipline of producers and editors who have audience appeal uppermost in their minds. It is hard to imagine members of even its modest audience sitting glued to the set, as I did. Rather, I suspect Sky News is often background noise in homes and venues where the TV is always on.

That hasn’t stopped News Corp and its critics from encouraging a view that Sky News is taking the country by storm through its video replays on social media, and particularly Facebook and YouTube.

It is quite alarming how quickly this view has taken hold. Last year, Business Insider made the claim, widely quoted by others, that Sky News was becoming the biggest news brand on social media. Using the automated online analysis tool Social Blade, it suggested that Sky News videos were viewed sixty million times more than those from ABC News. I used Social Blade to do my own analysis, and couldn’t arrive at anything like that figure. Perhaps it’s me. Others should try.

Meanwhile, Sky News last month released audience research, conducted on its behalf by the Hoop Research Group, which made the heroic claim that a third of all Australians “engage with” Sky News every month “across more platforms than any other news provider.” According to Hoop’s report, as well as 3.2 million monthly viewers on Foxtel, 4.1 million Australians access Sky News on News Corp websites each month, with another 3.3 million on YouTube, 3.2 million on Facebook and 2.5 million on WIN. Twitter, Sky News podcasts, iHeart radio, the mobile app, and newsletters and emails made up the balance, for a total of 9.1 million unique viewers.

The founder and chief executive of Hoop, Liz Farquharson, tells me the figures used to make the “one-third of Australians” claim were the result of combining “inputs from official audience measurements services” with weighted data from an online survey of nearly 7000 Australians.

But while the Twitter figure equates broadly to Sky News followers on that platform, allowing for differences over time, the figures for the News Corp website — the largest portion of the claimed audience — are impossible to check, as are the figures for Facebook.

Farquharson says the survey was designed to overcome the shortcomings of the data sources and remove duplication. “We relied on currency data” — actual numbers of followers or subscribers — “where it provided the complete picture, like Twitter,  and survey data where it didn’t.”

Independent media analyst Steve Allen, director of strategy and research for Pearman Media, says Hoop’s methodology meant that every single interaction was counted — even if there was no real engagement. If the ABC or commercial television channels adopted the same approach, he says, they would probably be able to claim that more than 80 per cent of Australians access their content.

And for companies looking to advertise, the figures were meaningless, says Allen, because to reach an audience across so many platforms would be prohibitively expensive. Which might explain why, on Foxtel at least, the advertising on Sky News after dark is hardly prestige. Ad breaks are frequent but filled largely with plugs for other Foxtel content. Otherwise, promotions for subscriptions to Spectator magazine butt up against home-delivered pizzas and “ring now for a special deal” spruiking of heaters and massage chairs.

Which brings us to YouTube, which is touted as the great Sky News success story. The content that got Sky News banned by YouTube includes interviews “coordinated” by a Melbourne-based group of Covid-sceptic doctors. A September 2020 Kenny Report segment, for example, promoted ivermectin, and a November 2020 Outsiders segment plugged hydroxychloroquine, both of them highly controversial Covid-19 treatments.

Responding to the YouTube ban, Sky News rejected the idea that any of its hosts had “denied the existence of Covid-19.” This is probably true, but it is high-octane spin. As those two examples demonstrate, hosts have given a platform to people promoting ineffective treatments, encouraging them to attack the public health response and downplay the seriousness of the disease.

The Murdoch organisation is making a big play on YouTube with its Sky News content, but a check on the channel shows that this is not mainly about the Australian audience. Rather, Australia’s Sky News is providing a stream of content for the much larger US market.

The most popular videos, including but not only those featuring the after dark commentators, all deal with international issues — and largely with Donald Trump and Joe Biden — and the comments make it clear that those viewing them are not primarily in Australia. Some of the content doesn’t  even seem to have been screened on Australian television. At the time of writing, the most popular video on the Sky News YouTube channel, with eight million views, covered “China’s Deadly Coronavirus Cover-up” and was first screened a year ago. The second most popular — at 6.4 million views — was a two-year-old item about Trump visiting North Korea. Also popular was a Chris Kenny item from two years ago eviscerating the American writer Naomi Wolf.

Early this week, the most recently uploaded video covered Biden’s approval ratings, followed by coverage of the NSW lockdown. The videos dealing with Australian issues have viewing numbers in the low tens of thousands.

Thankfully, there’s an independent source of information about Sky News’s reach. It is the annual Digital News Report, published by the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre as part of an ongoing international survey of news consumers coordinated by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University.

The 2021 report revealed that the ABC was the most accessed news brand in Australia, both through its traditional broadcasts and online. “Offline” — on traditional TV, in other words — the ABC was followed by the three commercial networks and SBS. Sky News came well down the field in eighth position, with just 10 per cent of the audience, a drop of two percentage points from the previous year.

Online, the ABC led again, with news.com.au in second place. Sky News came in tenth, with 7 per cent of the audience, level-pegging with CNN and the Daily Telegraph, and behind progressive outlets such as the Guardian (11 per cent), BBC News Online (10 per cent) and the Nine newspapers (Sydney Morning Herald, 10 per cent; the Age, 8 per cent). Once again, Sky News’s audience was down two points on the previous year.

As for audience trust, the ABC led the field, with 70 per cent regarding it as trustworthy, up nine points on the previous year. Sky News ranked twelfth. While half regarded it as trustworthy, it was the media brand with the highest number of people — a quarter of all respondents — regarding it as not to be trusted.

Lastly and not surprisingly, the Sky News audience — online and television — was the most skewed to people who described themselves as right-wing.

I asked the lead author of the University of Canberra study, Sora Park, to comment on the Hoop research and the claim that Sky News was being accessed by a third of all Australians.

She said the Hoop study appeared to claim a level of news consumption among the Australian population that was too high, compared with other research. Park noted that the University of Canberra study looked at weekly reach, whereas the Hoop research quoted monthly figures. “Australians are very light news consumers, so people don’t regularly access news.” Therefore the Hoop research was probably capturing largely “sporadic news consumers” over a longer period.

And, as I can attest after a week of cross-platform Sky News, once they have you in their sights they keep hitting you up with texts and posts and prompts and ads laced with clickbait headlines. Which makes me wonder whether I will forever be counted in their audience figures.

So what are we to make of all this? Is Sky News growing in influence and reach, its after-dark presenters skewing public debate in the way their American counterparts have?

The evidence suggests that Sky News preaches mainly to the converted in its after dark commentary, and is not widely trusted.

The University of Canberra research suggests the ABC is Australia’s strongest news brand — which is doubtless one of the reasons it is so regularly attacked by News Corp.

Nevertheless, News Corp’s right-wing commentators form part of the background rumble to public and political life in Australia. On Sky News, they are at their most florid and least constrained by the traditions and disciplines of the conventional newsroom.

I don’t mean to suggest that Sky News is unimportant, but it is not, or not yet, anything close to Fox News in the United States in terms of its reach and influence. To think otherwise is to take it at its own estimation. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Is Sky News taking Australia by storm? appeared first on Inside Story.

And then there was an office in Crown Street, Surry Hills, directly above trendy Bill’s cafe. Once it was home to MCM Entertainment, for a time one of the biggest players in Australian radio syndication and a promising innovator in video-streaming technology. And for five brief months it would house a team of nearly fifty people secretly working out a plan to save two of Australia’s most important newspapers.

Those who cared about newspapers were becoming resigned to the fact that Australia was about to lose the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. The drumbeat that only the weekend editions would stay in print was getting louder. Yet there were no prominent examples of when a move by a newspaper to a digital product had been anything other than a last, failed throw of the dice. Beloved pets go to a farm, failing newspapers go digital-only. Tackily, bookmakers William Hill issued a press release in May 2016 headed “The Newspaper Death Sentence” offering odds on which Australian paper would close first. The Age was favourite at $2.60, while the Sydney Morning Herald wasn’t far behind on $3.20.

If journalism was to be saved, there were no playbooks to be found overseas. In the United States, many city newspapers had already closed. Two-paper towns had become one-paper towns, and one-paper towns were being left without a paper at all. In part that was newspaper economics, although it was also exacerbated by the fact that many US papers were owned by debt-laden companies. The only US papers that seemed to be healthy were the Washington Post, which was bought in 2013 by wealthy Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, News Corp’s Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, which was cementing its position as the global newspaper of record in digital subscriptions.

In Britain, the national market had been retreating. In 1995 News Corp’s Today newspaper had been the first national daily to drop out of the market in a generation. The Independent had kicked off the trend of switching from broadsheet to compact in 2003, but was now on its last legs, with the final printed edition soon to follow, prior to an afterlife as a clickbaity website. Fairfax would have to figure out the problem for itself.

The 2012 cuts had won the company a little more time. The purchase of Antony Catalano’s real estate offering, the Weekly Review, was helping Domain take on the News Corp–aligned REA Group. And there were early signs that the investment in Stan, which had launched in 2015, was working.

Greg Hywood took an approach that had never been attempted before. He recruited Chris Janz to lead what he labelled “the blue business.” Allen Williams, managing director of the Australian Publishing Media division, was in charge of “the white business.” The blue team was about the future. The white team needed to help the company survive long enough to get there.

Janz was ideally qualified. He was a former journalist who had worked across both newspapers and online, he had some coding skills and he’d run a business. He was also temperamentally suited — clever, likeable, and with a background that gave him credibility with both journalists and commercial people. He’d become interested in the web at high school, which led to him starting an IT and business degree before switching over to journalism at the University of Queensland. He’d worked on the “Australian IT,” a Tuesday section of the Australian in the dotcom boom times, when more than a hundred pages of job ads was not unusual. By 2002 he’d been one of the original editors of News Limited’s News.com.au.

After leaving News in 2006, he had been online manager of TV production company Southern Star. And in 2007 he had shown his entrepreneurial side, launching Allure Media, which was backed by tech investment company Netus. Allure had a relatively unusual franchise model for Australia — offering localised versions of big overseas pop culture sites including Defamer, Business Insider, Pop Sugar and Lifehacker. After Netus was bought by Fairfax, Janz had consulted for a year before becoming CEO of HuffPost Australia, the joint venture between Fairfax and Huffington Post’s US owner AOL.

Hywood’s brief to Janz was something few organisations had cracked: to come up with a workable business model that would allow quality journalism to survive. It was assumed that the project would focus on how to rapidly grow the company’s sluggish online subscriptions ahead of the death of print.

Janz slipped away from HuffPo without much of a ripple. Little was said about what he would get up to in his new role as Fairfax’s director of publishing innovation. Needing a more creative atmosphere, independent of the day-to-day distractions of the Pyrmont offices, he began to build the leadership of the blue team at the shadow Fairfax office on Crown Street.

Normally there would have been industry press releases to announce hires of the calibre of Janz’s growing team. Most of the people who would run the new Fairfax were new to the company. Jess Ross, who’d run subscription marketing for the British consumer organisation Which, came on board as chief product officer. Damian Cronan, who had just led the technical build of streaming service Stan and before then had led technology at NineMSN and real estate startup Myhome, came on board as chief technology officer. Matt Rowley, who’d launched the content marketing division of Australia’s biggest B2B (business-to-business) publisher Cirrus Media, was to be chief revenue officer. David Eisman, already working at Fairfax in a strategy role, became Janz’s right-hand man, and would later become director of subscriptions and growth.

This wasn’t just some sort of glorified strategic consultancy. It was a startup. The blue team would have to build the technology needed to replace the existing platforms, and execute the plan at breakneck speed.

When the blue business took charge, the newspaper websites would move across onto brand-new digital platforms better suited to driving online subscriptions. “It was a bit like trying to change engines on a plane in midair,” Hywood recalls. “It was incredibly stressful and difficult. We had to hold everyone’s morale together to make this work. It was important that there was no politics, and that everybody involved in the white business knew they would be looked after once the changes were made.” Janz puts it similarly: “You’re trying to keep the plane flying while you’re renovating it.”

As the weeks turned into months, the blue business eventually grew to nearly fifty people, all of whom knew that one day soon they would need to walk into Fairfax’s headquarters in Pyrmont and take control of the plane. The blue team was based in an open-plan office. There was a room for holding focus groups at one end. And there was a balcony where the staff would hold Friday afternoon barbecues after growing to the point where they could no longer fit in any of the local burger joints.

At a standing meeting at 9.15am every Monday, everybody talked about what they were working on. “We needed a completely open and transparent culture,” says Janz. “There were no meetings-before-the-meetings to agree the outcome, and very little happened behind closed doors.” And on Fridays at 3.30pm the teams would share with the group the progress they had been making.

In Pyrmont, Allen Williams was kept up to date about the work being done by the people who would replace him. “Allen’s part was to keep things going until we were ready,” says Janz. “He knew exactly what was going on, and we knew that we’d be taking over the business, and we had to be ready.”

Just a few months before the blue business started work in August 2016, Hywood had told the Macquarie investment conference that it was inevitable that weekday printing would soon end. Says Janz, “The original brief was to build a digital business. We were supposed to be out of print, Monday to Friday, in 2017.” The weekend papers, which sold better and attracted more ads, would survive longer.

But as the blue team worked through likely scenarios, something else became clear — it made more sense to keep the metro newspapers than to close them. Janz says the conclusion was gradual, rather than coming in a single lightbulb moment. Closing the papers might save a lot of money but it would also cost a lot of reader and advertiser revenue that wouldn’t come across to digital. There would also be a huge loss of relevance.

“It became evident very early on that the newspapers had such scale and influence that we needed to find a way to keep them,” says Janz. “Newspapers were still such a powerful piece of people’s lives. One of the keys to the rebirth was reminding the audience that this is the thing they value, and it has such a powerful role in how they start their day. It was about taking a step back and looking at the business with fresh eyes. The exit from print was not six months away — it was a decade or more away.”

Keeping the metro papers in print would only work if yet more costs could be taken out, and the blue team needed to plan for that.

If the existence of the blue team had leaked early, particularly the fact that there would be more job cuts, it would have been a disaster for the already demoralised company. In March 2016 staff had walked out in protest at a round of 120 job cuts. Somehow, in the leakiest of industries, no gossip escaped from the blue team. “I knew it wouldn’t,” says Janz. “I trusted everyone in the group. We shared a common purpose. They wanted to do this because they were proud of the journalism and they cared about the newspapers and they did not accept their demise as a given.”

By the end of 2016 it became clear that Fairfax’s revenues were crumbling even faster than expected. Revenues had dropped from $2.47 billion in the 2011 financial year to $2.3 billion in 2012, to $2.03 billion in 2013, to $1.87 billion in 2014, to $1.84 billion in 2015. There’d been a moment when the drop seemed to be easing, with revenues almost flattening to $1.83 billion in the 2016 financial year. But over the next six months the rate of fall got worse again. By December 2016 revenues at the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Australian Financial Review were down another 8.2 per cent.

What wasn’t helping was that the media agencies had heard so much about the end of print that they were turning their backs on the printed medium. Year-on-year, advertising spend on newspapers by media agencies had fallen by 25 per cent, monitoring service Standard Media Index revealed.

So the launch date was moved up to 14 February 2017, the day that the blue business would become the white business. On Valentine’s Day, the blue team walked into the offices at Pyrmont and took charge. Janz was announced as the managing director across Fairfax’s metro publishing division covering the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review.

Williams was given the new title of director of publishing transition. He’d be looking after the community papers. The community papers were not in Fairfax’s long-term future plan.

In a memo to staff, which was intentionally leaked to the outside world, Hywood wrote: “Chris has been overseeing the impressive product and technology development work that will be the centrepiece of Metro’s next generation publishing model. While we have considered many options, the model we have developed involves continuing to print our publications daily for some years yet.”

A week later Hywood went even further on the message that print extinction was cancelled. Not quite conceding it was a U-turn, he told investors: “We have looked at all options and while Monday to Friday can’t ever be off the table because it may well be the right thing for shareholders down the track, our view is that for some years yet, six- and seven-day publishing is the best commercial outcome for shareholders.”

Initially, the arrival of the blue team seemed like just another round of bad news to the staff. To make the plan viable, more jobs would need to go from the newsrooms to save another $30 million. Announcing the cuts on 5 April, Janz said, “With the proposed changes to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, Brisbane Times and WA Today newsrooms announced today, we will have completed the major structural editorial changes required to secure our metropolitan mastheads. The primary focus of Fairfax Media over recent years has been to lay the groundwork for the creation of a sustainable publishing model. We are now within reach of that goal.”

Unsurprisingly, when Janz talked to the newsroom, he was met with hostility. It looked like just one more round of cuts. “I told them that if nothing changes, we would be making redundancies every six months,” says Janz. “But what we were doing would be the last one that’s ever going to take place. I stood up and they were hurling abuse. The gut reaction was that they’d heard it all before.”

When the detail of the cuts — which would include another 125 job losses — was revealed at the beginning of May, most of the journalists in Sydney and Melbourne voted to go on strike for a week, wiping out most of the company’s coverage of the federal budget. By relying on wire copy and covering the news themselves, management still got the papers out.

During the strike, Hywood spoke again at the Macquarie investment conference, a year on from suggesting that weekday printing was coming to an end. “We respect our staff for the passion they have for independent, high-quality journalism,” said Hywood. “We share it — but we know what it takes to make our kind of journalism sustainable. Passion alone won’t cut it.” For the rest of the decade, Janz kept his promise. It was the last of the redundancy rounds. •

This is an edited extract from Media Unmade: Australian Media’s Most Disruptive Decade by Tim Burrowes, published by Hardie Grant ($34.99).

The post Fairfax’s blue team appeared first on Inside Story.

Many of the stories come from the “golden age” of Australian journalism, bathed in the sweet light of nostalgia but also revealing a dark side. Others describe what happened when the golden age ended with the collapse of the business model that supported most journalism.

Although the collapse is seared into journalists’ consciousnesses, it isn’t well understood in the community. Recent research by the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra found that two-thirds of Australians aren’t aware that commercial news organisations are less profitable than they were ten years ago. And yet this is the story that underlies almost every failure of today’s journalism.

The book being launched was Upheaval, edited by journalism academics Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson, which draws on interviews with fifty-seven journalists conducted in partnership with the National Library’s oral history program. Rich with anecdote and personal perspectives, it includes vivid accounts of the traumatic loss of a vocation.

There are prominent names here. Amanda Meade tells us about working for the Australian, and how she got into trouble for being seen speaking to the ABC’s Kerry O’Brien at a time when the Murdoch paper was attacking the public broadcaster. George Megalogenis confides his thoughts when he put his hand up for redundancy at what he correctly deduced was a tipping point for the industry — in 2012, when both Fairfax and News Corporation shed up to a fifth of their editorial staff. David Marr details the twists and turns of his career. Cartoonist John Spooner recalls realising that he was considered more disposable than the Age’s other flagship cartoonists, Michael Leunig and Ron Tandberg.

All of this raises a question. Were things better “back then” — by which I mean in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s, when newspapers earned rivers of gold from classified advertising, families gathered around a single screen to watch the evening news, and newsrooms were awash with resources and largely unquestioned power.

I am as prone to nostalgia as anyone. I started my career as a cadet at the Age in 1982. (Matthew Ricketson was part of the same intake.) In the years that followed, I succeeded in grumbling my way through and out the other side of what I now know was the golden age.

I remember newsrooms that, as Upheaval puts it, smelt “of stale sweat from the adrenaline and anxiety that drive daily journalism; of beer-soaked, never-quite-cleaned carpets and… cigarette smoke.” I remember the extraordinary resources we had: drivers to take us to stories; many, many subeditors to check our work; an army of “readers” who were employed to spot the mistakes that had still been missed.

As Marr recalls, newsrooms were unusual workplaces, “crazy universities” full of experts on the strangest of things. Newspaper men — and they were mostly men — were a breed apart. They were not the polished, tertiary-educated journalists who now dominate the newsrooms. They had a hard, twinkly-eyed charm, a knockabout empathy, a quick wit, and an intelligence that, if they had belonged to a different generation, would have sent them to university.

They dominated not only numerically but also because of their liveliness of mind. They were not in any sense intellectual — in fact, they were largely anti-intellectual. But they could grab a telephone and file a story in no time at all. They marshalled their thoughts quickly, put them forcefully and moved on. They were arrogant, of course. But that arrogance was masked by the real power that came with having access to the means of publication and broadcast.

Upheaval also documents some of the dark side. Jo Chandler talks about concealing her pregnancy at the Age in the knowledge that it could rob her of an expected promotion. Michelle Grattan recalls being denied the trades hall round because she might be exposed to “bad language.” Worse than this are the accounts of sexual harassment and assault, of women who could not bend down in the office without attracting offensive comments. Quite literally, it was hard for women to move, or even to exist, in these workplaces.

What brought this world to an end? It’s a complex story, but the dominant theme is the collapse of the business model, brought about by the internet.

The destruction came in two waves. First, the classifieds disappeared to dedicated online sites that better enabled people to search for jobs, cars and homes. At the same time came the beginning of the end of “appointment television,” with people able to view whenever they wished.

The industry was still struggling with that disruption when the second wave hit, starting around 2007. This was the rise of Google, Facebook and other social media platforms. They quickly grabbed most of the remaining advertising revenue.

Reliable estimates of job losses are hard to get. The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance estimates that 5000 journalists’ jobs have been lost over the last ten years. Data provided to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission by the main media companies show that the number of journalists in traditional print media businesses (including their websites) fell by 20 per cent between 2014 and 2018, at a time when Australia’s population and economy were growing strongly.

The easy conclusion, of course, is that things must have been better “back then.” More outlets, particularly local newspapers. More reporting of local courts, councils and public figures. More interstate and overseas correspondents. More specialist journalists with depth of expertise. In Canberra, more and deeper engagement with thinking at the highest levels of the public service.

But not everything is worse. In the golden age, newsrooms were overwhelmingly run by white men, and nobody saw that as a problem. We told ourselves that it was our job to reflect the community we served, but we were almost completely blind to the absurdity of that claim when women were sidelined and people of colour almost completely absent from the newsroom. Things are a bit better now, with a long way still to go.

The mainstream media has undoubtedly lost power, and with it some of its arrogance. Even the Murdoch press can no longer turn an election through sheer vote-swaying heft. Instead, it attempts to fix the parameters of public debate — though even that power is under challenge.

The ranks of professional journalists might have thinned, but many more people are actively engaged in the newsmaking process. Consider, for example, how data analysts, putting their work out on Twitter, have contributed to our understanding of the pandemic.

The professional media attempts to maintain its position at the centre by corralling the work of others, largely in the format of the “live blog” — a kind of aggregation of things that are happening “out there,” including on social media. There is plenty to celebrate in the rise of social media platforms: voices once excluded from public debate can now be heard. And there is also plenty to fear, for the same reason.

Above all, the thinning of journalistic ranks affects just about everything about the media. Surely one of the reasons the pandemic has been politicised is because it is being reported by political journalists. The specialists of old — the medical reporters, the science reporters — are largely gone. And the disruption is not over.

Plenty of experimentation with business models has taken place. For serious media, clickbait didn’t work. Now the name of the game is persuading people to pay to access news online.

What will people pay for? We are still finding out, but there are encouraging signs that good journalism is the answer. The world’s serious newspapers now earn more than half their revenue from subscriptions.

Countering that optimism, the University of Canberra’s research tells us that only 13 per cent of Australians are paying for online news, which is below the global average of 17 per cent. The vast majority of those who are currently not paying say it is unlikely that they will pay in the future.

I don’t think I am only being nostalgic when I say that it is more important than ever for society to pay attention to and care about its journalistic capacity, which these days is more an ecosystem than a monoculture. •

The post Bylines and bygones appeared first on Inside Story.

The commercial shows a panicked young woman gasping painfully for air in a hospital bed, decked with high-flow oxygen tubes. I found it hard to watch, and immediately messaged a friend, one of Sydney’s earliest cases of Covid-19, to warn her to avoid watching it.

So what’s the evidence about the effectiveness of such campaigns?

Experimental studies show that fear appeals can work, but systematic reviews indicate their effects are relatively modest. They find differences of between 10 and 30 per cent in self-reported attitudes, intentions and behaviours. But these are “laboratory” studies that measure short-term impacts. Evaluations of real-world campaigns have found smaller effects, and research by the University of Kentucky’s Seth Noar and colleagues found that’s true of health promotion campaigns across the board. Even the best-designed interventions average 9 per cent behavioural change per year.

So these campaigns work, but their potential benefits are small and may not outweigh their potential side effects and ethical concerns. As a public health practitioner and researcher my concern is more practical: what exactly did we want this campaign to do?

Social-marketing principles focus on defining our strategic objectives and identifying the precise behaviour we want audience members to adopt. On the latter criterion, the government’s ad is a mess, specifying three behaviours: “Stay home. Get tested. Book your vaccination.”

Complying with lockdown is not as simple as it seems. Here in Sydney, we hang on the daily 11am presser, listening for changes in restrictions and thinking about how to apply them in our daily lives. This detailed cognitive process isn’t helped along by fear or panic.

For many who don’t stay home, the issue is not complacency. It’s needing to work or care for family members — and, often, it’s not hearing the daily presser translated in their own language. Extraordinary rates of testing also make clear that we don’t lack motivation to care for the community: rather, what we lack is timely access to vaccination. The behavioural message there is “hurry up and wait.”

These failings aside, let’s consider the strategic objective of releasing a fear campaign at this point in the Australian epidemic.

Above all, it is designed to solve a political problem of our governments’ own making. Australia has used border control, both internal and international, as the centrepiece in a political theatre of epidemic control. This approach has encouraged the notion that we could just wait out the global pandemic until all Australians have been given their vaccine of choice.

Meanwhile, a vocal Covid commentariat has preached the gospel of Zero Covid — that nothing short of zero daily cases is acceptable. This argument fed a popular campaign against the AstraZeneca vaccine based on the claim that only Pfizer could offer herd immunity, that idyllic state in which Australians would never have to learn to live with the virus.

We are facing the epidemic consequences of that mistaken sense of invulnerability. Even ATAGI, the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation, bet on Australia managing to avoid further outbreaks, finding that the minuscule risk of blood clots was not outweighed by any protective benefit against illness or death from Covid-19.

As the daily presser reminds us, we now have individuals in their twenties and thirties battling the virus in intensive care. Imagine how different the outbreak would feel if we’d been vaccinating Australians at the projected rate of one million AstraZeneca doses per week.

This complacency runs deep in our epidemic response, and can’t be overcome with a single campaign, however hard-hitting it may be. Long-lasting change is necessary.

The historian Marianna Stylianou argues that we overestimate the effectiveness of the Grim Reaper campaign because it was just so memorable. Its success in this regard has cast other, more important responses to the AIDS crisis into the shade.

What people don’t remember is that the Hawke government convened a National Advisory Committee on AIDS that ran, in various forms, from 1984 to 2003. Known as NACAIDS, it was chaired by Ita Buttrose, a charismatic and effective communicator who was editor of the Daily Telegraph at the time of her appointment.

The commission ran a whole program of education and communication activities, not just mass media campaigns, that helped the Australian public understand that condoms — not fear — were the answer.

It is striking that our successful response to AIDS was not based on health advice alone. NACAIDS sat alongside a parallel committee of clinicians and scientists. Historian Paul Sendziuk interprets this as a pragmatic move that recognised the importance of considering practical perspectives drawn from everyday lived experience.

As the Covid-19 outbreak kicked off, the Morrison government appointed a bunch of its mates to coordinate business responses to the crisis. It is long past time to establish a National Covid-19 Commission with similar powers and functions as NACAIDS.

We need to stop looking for silver-screen bullets and ask what ongoing, well-funded program of activities can change how Australians understand the pandemic and our role in protecting ourselves and the community. •

The post Reaper redux? appeared first on Inside Story.

The APC, founded in the mid 1970s when the newspaper industry feared statutory regulation at the hands of the Whitlam government, remains the main forum to which readers can send complaints about the behaviour of newspapers and their associated websites. The APC simply expresses opinions; its member publications need only publish its adjudications.

The immediate reason for the breeze is that the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the main union covering journalists and media workers, has announced its intention to withdraw from the APC, where its representative sits alongside twenty-one other members, including industry nominees, independent journalists and members of the public. Under rules introduced a decade ago to protect the APC from tantrums by its funding members, the MEAA must provide four years’ notice before it can leave. This gives the APC the chance to persuade it to stay.

The immediate prelude to the MEAA’s action was a series of APC decisions about controversial cartoons in News Corp papers, but the union’s federal president, Marcus Strom, says they were not the cause. Rather, he says, the APC is no longer “fit for purpose” because it mainly covers mastheads with a history in print, though some online-only publications have joined in recent years.

Another spur for change is the departure of the APC’s executive director for the past seven years, John Pender. The headhunters looking for his replacement are being told that if quality candidates are to be attracted then the APC will have to convince them it is ready for change.

There are good reasons for cynicism. Ever since its birth, the APC has been trammelled by the interests and character of its dominant funders — the publisher members, and particularly the Murdoch organisation. According to the APC’s most recent annual report, covering the 2018–19 financial year, News Corp contributes up to 60 per cent of its $2.2 million in core funding.

Various attempts have been made to limit News Corp’s power, but money still talks. News’s relationship with the APC has been a marriage of convenience, paraded every time a government looks like considering statutory regulation of the media.

I am told that over the past decade News Corp executives on the council have effectively vetoed key appointments, both to the council itself and to employment within it. Behind-the-scenes talk says that the adjudication panels are being massaged to keep members likely to be critical away from the coalface. News Corp frequently attacks the council in its publications, and has published strong criticism of successive chairs.

A good way of summarising the APC’s history is to reflect on the record of the eight chairs who have attempted to lead it since its founding. The first, Sir Frank Kitto (1976–82), fell out with News Limited, as it then was, over its election coverage. News withdrew from the APC, kneecapping its funding. The second, Professor Geoffrey Sawer (1982–84), served only briefly, during the period when News was not a member, and thus avoided its ire. The third, Hal Wootten AC (1984–86), resigned immediately after the APC split fifty–fifty over his proposal to criticise Murdoch’s being allowed to take over the Herald and Weekly Times. The Australian Journalists Association (later part of the MEAA) also left at this time, together with many of the public members. It took decades for the APC to rebuild its credibility.

The fourth chair was Professor David Flint, a conservative lawyer, who was the only other chair not to have problems with News Corp. The fifth was Professor Dennis Pearce (1997–2000), who declined to serve a second term after News refused for several months to respond to APC communications about complaints. Pearce later told the Finkelstein media inquiry that the APC was overly influenced by fears it would lose its sponsors, which was one of the reasons Finkelstein recommended government regulation.

The sixth was Professor Ken McKinnon (2000–09) who wrote a blistering critique of News Corp in his final annual report. The publishers, led by News, had used funding cuts to end McKinnon’s publishing of regular reports about the state of the industry.

In the wake of all this, the APC’s public members flexed their muscles in 2009, leading to the appointment of Professor Julian Disney as chair — just as the phone-hacking scandal hit the headlines in Britain. The Murdoch organisation was on the back foot, particularly when the Gillard government appointed a local inquiry into media regulation led by Justice Ray Finkelstein.

Suddenly, News Corp saw Disney as its best friend. Daily Telegraph editor Paul Whittaker praised him in an open letter to readers arguing that the APC was doing the job very well and Finkelstein should be ignored. Disney was “fiercely independent,” wrote Whittaker. “The Press Council’s role has been strengthened significantly and this newspaper is committed to fully abiding by it.”

With the big stick of Finkelstein’s inquiry hovering over the industry, Disney managed to boost funding, introduce the four-year notice period on withdrawal, and steer through a new set of “general principles” against which complaints would be measured. He also began signing up new digital media players.

Finkelstein, unconvinced, recommended a statutory scheme of media regulation. But Labor communications minister Stephen Conroy instead introduced legislation that would effectively have made it compulsory for media to join self-regulation schemes that met government-mandated standards.

Cue outrage. Conroy featured on the front page of News Corp tabloids dressed as Stalin. The legislation failed — part of the sad history of the last days of the Gillard government. Soon Disney was under attack by News Corp, which was again threatening to withdraw from the APC, citing his “activism” and saying he had “gone too far” and was guilty of “mission creep.”

Disney was succeeded by Professor David Weisbrot (2015–17). After introducing some further reforms he became caught up in the controversy about the appointment of Carla McGrath, deputy chair of GetUp!, as a public member. Many people considered that appointment inappropriate, but what horrified Weisbrot was how decisions of the APC as a whole were misrepresented as his own. He resigned citing a campaign of “misinformation” by News Corp.

Which brings us to the current chair, Neville Stevens, a former senior public servant in the communications portfolio, who has been very quiet during the recent controversy. He declined an interview for this article, but the APC provided written answers to my questions.

Complaints to the APC are heard by an adjudication panel that includes community and media people, including some eminent names. Most complaints never get to formal adjudication; instead, one of the most useful things the APC does is resolve issues informally by contacting the publishers. Sometimes this results in a letter to the editor or a correction. In 2018, fifty-eight remedies were reached without adjudication, from a total of 736 complaints.

But when things do go to a formal process, justice is often delayed. One of the most recently published adjudications on the APC website, for example, concerns a December 2020 Herald Sun headline (and associated social media publicity) suggesting that six people had died as a result of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. In fact, as the text of the article made clear, it was unlikely that the vaccine had caused the deaths. Pretty simple, and the APC found against the newspaper — but not until May 2021, six months after the publication and well after the damage was done.

If the winds of change really are blowing, then three main factors might help swell the breeze. Technological change is forcing a rethink of broadcasting regulation. Radio and television currently operate within conditions written into their free-to-air licences. With most “broadcast” media soon to be streamed, though, governments will lose this lever they use to set standards. That might increase the pressure for the APC, or a similar body, to go industry-wide.

Meanwhile, things have moved on from the Finkelstein inquiry, where the big publishers vigorously opposed any government intervention. Now, all have enthusiastically signed up to government grant schemes and the news media bargaining code. All the relevant legislation makes the benefits conditional on a commitment to standards, including through membership of bodies such as the APC.

Finally, the APC now includes a wider range of members, including the Schwartz stable of publications (the Monthly and the Saturday Paper), Crikey and others. (On the other hand, the Guardian Australia has declined to join.) They don’t have the clout or capacity of News Corp or Nine, but they do have a voice. And News and Nine wouldn’t want them to leave because that would further undermine the APC’s credibility.

What shape would change take? Adjudications need to come faster. Perhaps an ombudsman-type person could write regular reports, speedily, on controversial matters in the press. And perhaps the APC could act on its own, rather than waiting for complaints, when a media outlet behaves egregiously.

But don’t hold your breath. Unless the new executive director has a tough hide, is unusually dedicated and goes into the job with eyes wide open, it’s hard to see the APC having the mettle to fight for the necessary changes. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The watchdog that sometimes barked appeared first on Inside Story.

This year’s Digital News Report: Australia 2021 reveals that the rapid increase in news consumption in Australia at the start of the pandemic has not been maintained, and nor has it translated into more people paying for news. In fact, the survey of 2034 Australians in January and February this year suggests that people’s interest in news has gradually declined over the preceding twelve months.

In April last year, a month into social isolation and restrictions on non-essential gatherings, the majority of respondents to a supplementary survey said that their news consumption had increased, and 70 per cent said they accessed news more than once a day. But that figure had dropped dramatically in this year’s main survey, and is now, at 51 per cent, even lower than before the pandemic.

This decrease is in keeping with the trend we have found over the years, with respondents’ interest in the news consistently declining. In 2016, 64 per cent of news consumers said they were interested in news. This figure fell to 52 per cent this year.

Even at the height of the pandemic when people were craving up-to-date news about the virus, more than two-thirds (71 per cent) of respondents admitted to avoiding news about Covid-19, mainly because they were tired of hearing about it and were overwhelmed.

In addition to this overall decrease in interest, we see a clear downward trend in the use of traditional platforms such as print and TV for news. The overwhelming majority of respondents (80 per cent) say they have not read a newspaper or magazine in the past week, and only 4 per cent say they primarily get news from print publications. Print consumption has halved since 2016. For regional residents, print consumption has dropped even more, to 42 per cent of its 2016 level, which is not surprising given that the majority of newsroom closures have occurred in the regions. TV as the main source of news has dropped back to pre-Covid levels of 40 per cent.

On the other hand, about a quarter (23 per cent) of respondents access news primarily via social media, which is a five percentage point rise over the past three years. The increase is particularly noticeable among older people. The proportion of people aged over seventy-five who get news mainly from social media has more than doubled in the past year (up six percentage points to 10 per cent).

The growth in social media news consumption has also ushered in different behaviour and commitment levels. The data show that most people who get news via social media do so incidentally while they are online doing other things, like chatting with friends. We know from previous surveys that people who seek news directly are much more likely to pay for it than those who run across it in the course of other activities.

Along with their declining interest in news, Australians also show little concern or awareness about the changing face of the news industry. Two-thirds of respondents are unaware that commercial news organisations are less profitable than they were ten years ago. Only one-third (34 per cent) express concern about the financial state of commercial news organisations, and even fewer (23 per cent) believe that the government should provide financial assistance.

Awareness of the financial state of news organisations seems to play a role in consumers’ decision to pay for news. Those who are aware of the current state are more likely to pay for news (17 per cent) than those who are not aware (11 per cent). And those who are concerned are more likely to support government intervention (39 per cent) compared with those who are not concerned (17 per cent).

Only 13 per cent of respondents pay for online news, and the number is not growing. Despite the importance of credible news and information during a global pandemic and a surge in consumption in the early days, we haven’t seen an increase in the percentage of respondents paying for it. More importantly, the vast majority of people (83 per cent) say it is unlikely they will pay for news in the next twelve months.

On the bright side, there are signs that Australians’ trust in news media may be increasing. During the global pandemic, trust in Covid-related news exceeded general trust levels, with a little over half of respondents saying they trusted most news (53 per cent) and news organisations (52 per cent) on this issue. Over the past twelve months, people have increasingly turned to public broadcasters for news, and trust in traditional news brands remains high. The improvement in trust is likely a reflection of the public’s greater reliance on news in a crisis, and the active dissemination of official health advice by news outlets during the pandemic. Further research by the News and Media Research Centre, to be released soon, shows that Australian news stories about the pandemic in 2020 were more likely to be informational than sensational.

But the peak in trust associated with news reporting about Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic in 2020 has not been sustained and accorded to news in general. The general trust in news is not as high (43 per cent) but is higher than last year (up five percentage points), which is in line with a global rise in trust in news.

There are clues in this year’s data about how the news media might maintain this increase in trust. Almost three-quarters of respondents say they want impartial news. And they trust the news brands they choose to consume more than they trust news in general, perhaps having been driven to specific brands after losing faith in the broader news environment.

Overall, the more that Australians see people like them fairly represented in the news, the more they trust it. Those who are satisfied with the amount of coverage of their political views are more likely to trust news (55 per cent) compared with those who say there is not enough coverage (27 per cent). The trust gap is even wider between those who think the coverage of their political views is fair (62 per cent) and those who think it is unfair (27 per cent).

Another factor is how connected people feel to their local community. Those who feel attached to their community are more likely to trust news than those who feel unattached. And we know that local news consumption, especially of newspapers, is associated with people’s sense of belonging.

If perceptions of trust are important to news outlets, then lessons can be learned from the Covid trust bump. Australians reward factual and relevant news that fairly reflects the diversity of the community. •

Digital News Report: Australia 2021 is produced by the News and Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra and is part of a global annual survey of digital news consumption in forty-six countries, commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. The survey was conducted by YouGov using an online questionnaire in January–February 2021. The sample is drawn from an online panel of 77,390 Australians and reflects the population that has access to the internet. The data were weighted to targets based on age, gender, region and education level to represent the total population based on Australian Bureau of Statistics census data.

Analysis of the data was carried out in collaboration with Caroline Fisher, Deputy Director of the News and Media Research Centre and Associate Professor of Journalism in the Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra; Kieran McGuinness, Digital News Report Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the News and Media Research Centre, University of Canberra; and Jee Young Lee, Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra.

The post Understanding the Covid trust bump appeared first on Inside Story.

The partisanship surrounding the program — ridiculous and nasty attacks from the Australian, social media defensiveness and boosterism from the Four Corners team — makes it hard to have a nuanced discussion about the allegations and the journalism. Nevertheless, here is an attempt.

The program bore an outsized weight of expectation, largely because ABC management delayed its airing (something I have written about elsewhere). In the event, it contained little information that hadn’t already been published by Crikey and the Guardian; but it was a great example of how a well-crafted piece of television — moderate and sombre in tone — can clarify and elevate the significance of a story, in this case through the power of the Stewart family’s testimony.

But let’s be clear about what it did not do. It did not prove that Scott Morrison buys into or subscribes to QAnon’s ugly and dangerous set of conspiracy theories. It provided circumstantial evidence to suggest that he might have been led by Stewart’s influence to insert a phrase in an important speech in October 2018, but it didn’t prove this. And nor did it offer evidence that Morrison has been otherwise influenced by QAnon.

The program included a one-paragraph response from the prime minister’s office declaring that Four Corners was engaged in a “personally motivated slur against the prime minister and his family” and was giving credence to “irrational Twitter conspiracy theorists.” As a result, the program was “raising the profile of what the prime minister clearly deems a discredited and dangerous fringe group.”

I think the prime minister is kidding himself if he thinks that this is an adequate response. But there are certainly murky Twitter and internet undercurrents in this story, and it is easy to see why the prime minister might choose to focus on this aspect in his defence.

The strongest evidence that Tim Stewart influenced Scott Morrison’s October 2018 apology to the survivors of sexual abuse is contained in a series of Signal messages allegedly received by Eliahi Priest, a self-styled “Australian activist and whistleblower.” All the journalists who have reported on the Stewart–Morrison friendship have used Priest as a source.

A superficial scan of his associations, history and social media activity reveals he is the kind of source journalists normally treat with great scepticism. He is an eccentric man, contemptuous of QAnon but pushing barrows of his own.

On Monday night he released a statement on Twitter, backed up by a statutory declaration, giving his own account of his interactions with Tim Stewart. He says that Stewart contacted him on Signal in September 2018 and the pair then collaborated on Priest’s attempt to bring prime ministerial attention to a theory he has about activities of the Nugan Hand Bank, which collapsed amid scandal in 1980. It had nothing to do with QAnon.

Notably, no journalists have so far picked up Priest’s Nugan Hand allegations, or many of his other claims, or even referred to this aspect of his activities. And you can see why.

Stewart and Priest subsequently fell out, and each of them effectively describes the other as a liar.

So why have journalists accepted the authenticity of the messages Priest says he got from Stewart about Scott Morrison’s speech? Could we have another Godwin Grech–style fabricator on our hands?

The Guardian, which was the first mainstream outlet to report the fact of the Stewart–Morrison friendship, clearly had reservations about Priest as a source, as can be seen from its 2019 story. While it reported Priest’s allegation that Stewart had claimed to be passing information to the prime minister, it also said “there is no evidence to substantiate Priest’s claims.”

Crikey and Four Corners concluded differently. Both basically accepted that Stewart’s messages to Priest were genuine — on the basis, as I understand it, of corroborating evidence on public Twitter streams and from other people who’d received similar material from Stewart. This matrix of evidence convinced them that the messages Priest provided were genuine.

Fair enough. But how did the messages become known to journalists? This intriguing aspect of the story was born on Twitter, when journalists Sandi Keane* and Ronni Salt — both of whom write for Michael West Media — obtained the message trail from Priest. Keane wrote on Twitter on Monday evening that “Priest kindly agreed to photograph all the critical Signal evidence over an 18 month period to Oct 2018 and send to me which I published on dozens of Tweets in Oct 2019 then sent to [Crikey journalist] Hardaker, [senator] Penny Wong, Shanks, ABC, etc. Took him a whole w/e. My job was to get it out!”

Keane also alleges that inserting the words “ritual sexual abuse” into the speech was suggested by Fiona Barnett, a woman whose claims of being the victim of an elite paedophile ring including former prime ministers were published in 2015 by most mainstream media outlets, only to be debunked by ABC’s Media Watch. Notably, Barnett is said by Keane to have been the source of allegations about paedophiles and sex crimes made by former Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan, also in 2015.

Murky stuff. But back to Stewart and his correspondence with Priest. Assuming the messages are genuine, what do they actually prove?

Only that Tim Stewart — as well as being a QAnon conspiracist — was a boaster and big-noter about his friendship with Morrison. And that is where it would rest if not for the unassailable fact that Scott Morrison did, strangely, include the phrase “ritual sexual abuse” in his speech.

A coincidence, perhaps? As evidence of QAnon influence, it’s thin. Nevertheless this alone makes the journalism worth doing, and the questions Scott Morrison has so far refused to answer worth asking.

The prime minister says he got the phrase from abuse survivors in the lead-up to his speech, including from members of a reference group associated with the royal commission into institutional child sexual abuse. Four Corners and other reporters have spoken to members of the reference group, and don’t regard Morrison’s claim as credible.

What we do know as a result of all this journalism is, first, that Tim Stewart and his wife are longstanding and close friends of the Morrison family and that Tim’s wife, Lynelle Stewart, was employed on the taxpayer dollar at Kirribilli House. Whether the friendship continues is not clear, but Four Corners showed photos of the Stewarts at Kirribilli House dating from January 2019.

There was a suggestion — short of an actual allegation — that Morrison’s controversial Hawaiian holiday in the black summer of 2019–20 would have been with the Stewarts had it not been cut short by the need for him to fly home to respond to the bushfire emergency. (News.com.au has reported that Morrison says he hadn’t planned to holiday with the Stewarts, despite both couples flying to Hawaii at about the same time.)

Second, Tim Stewart and his son are deep down the QAnon rabbit hole, and have become key figures in promoting the dangerous cult in Australia and worldwide.

Third, Stewart widely boasted about his friendship with the Morrisons and talked up his claimed influence over the prime minister.

On their own, these facts mean that journalists are right to report on this prime ministerial friendship, and to ask questions about it.

Finally, there is circumstantial evidence that Stewart might have succeeded in getting that key phrase into an important prime ministerial speech.

This final point is not proven, but the evidence is sufficient justification for the journalism, including by Four Corners.

Scott Morrison should answer the questions that arise from all this. If he doesn’t, we can only wonder why. We might speculate that the phrase was put into his head, without his realising its significance; after all, plenty of people hadn’t heard of QAnon in 2018. Or could it be that a full answer to the questions would put the spotlight on Jenny Morrison?

One final point. The Four Corners team, in my view, do themselves no favours with their social media activity. The story I have sketched above should demonstrate the importance of distinguishing between social media allegations by interested parties and professional journalism.

In that context, journalists on social media should behave with more than usual decorum. Instead, Four Corners team members take on critics, retweet supporters and implicitly congratulate themselves. Most of the time a dignified silence would be better, and even more so when the ABC is being accused of bias and is in a pitched battle with elements of the government.

Four Corners’s journalism was legitimate. It should speak for itself. And Scott Morrison should answer the questions. •

* Declaration: Sandi Keane studied for a Master of Journalism at the University of Melbourne when I was the coordinator of the course.

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post What Four Corners did and didn’t do appeared first on Inside Story.

The public doesn’t always like journalists behaving this way, and I can understand why. Too often over the past year, the self-conscious, self-righteous performance of journalism has trumped public service.

As the eminent American journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel write in their classic book, The Elements of Journalism, monitoring power is one of the fundamental roles of journalism. But “the watchdog principle is being threatened,” they warn, “by overuse and a faux watchdogism.” This kind of watchdoggery is more about entertainment and journalists’ egos than gaining useful information.

So what does “holding to account” mean? Let’s start with what it isn’t.

It isn’t a licence to be ignorant or poorly briefed, or to attempt to compensate with extra aggression. Indeed, it shouldn’t mean aggression for aggression’s sake.

Nor should it mean going for the gotcha story and ignoring, or not bothering to heed, the context. Most importantly, a reporter who fails to correct errors, of both fact and judgement, is part of the problem and should get out of the way.

During Victoria’s first lockdown the “daily Dan” — Victorian premier Dan Andrews’s marathon of media conferences — became essential viewing. Andrews made a point of continuing each conference until journalists had no more questions. Some of these media conferences went for two hours or more, and they were often hostile.

News Corp’s Herald Sun, in particular, was critical of the premier, tagging him “Dictator Dan” and critiquing both his management style and the government’s restrictions. Almost none of its commentary focused on the issues for which Andrews might properly be held to account — the systemic problems of public health resourcing and public service decision-making that were already clear and have been highlighted by subsequent inquiries.

Remarkably, the premier maintained a high level of support regardless. A poll taken in November 2020, at the end of the state’s longest lockdown, found that 71 per cent of Victorians approved of the way he was doing his job.

So: the impact of all that posturing journalism? Very small.

In fact, the journalists were props and prompts; Andrews spoke over their heads directly to the audience. I can’t remember a single question that placed him under serious pressure or a single occasion on which he said something he hadn’t planned to say. It was a display of political leadership unlikely ever to be analysed seriously by the media, given that doing so would reveal the impotence of performative watchdoggery.

So how would we rate the overall performance of the media over the course of the pandemic? I would say “mixed.”

Some of it has been excellent. Media reporting is largely to be thanked for exposing the problems with hotel quarantine, for instance — although mistakes were certainly made. The detailed reporting on the vaccine rollout and the nature of vaccinations has been a high point, as has the coverage of how the crisis is affecting individuals and institutions.

Talkback radio hosts, on both the ABC and commercial radio, have performed well, channelling questions from the public to those in power, and seeking and reporting useful information. Media pressure is probably also to be thanked for the fact that we now have more transparent data on outbreaks and responses.

But there have been huge missteps too.

No evidence has ever been found that security guards had sex with quarantine detainees, despite a claim by the Herald Sun that was repeated by journalists who should know better. The hotel quarantine inquiry made clear that it didn’t happen, but no media outlet has published a correction.

Too much reporting has been not so much inaccurate as distorted or devoid of context. Last month, for instance, many outlets reported that the Victorian government had wrongly blamed a man’s use of a nebuliser in hotel quarantine for the short lockdown in February. At least, that was supposedly the finding of what the Herald Sun described as a “bombshell” report.

But the confidential report said nothing of the kind. Rather, it found that a swabbing procedure involving an infected guest allowed the virus to leak into the corridor, where it travelled and infected the man with the nebuliser. His use of the nebuliser was indeed the main reason the virus then escaped from the hotel. Only readers who went well past the gotcha headlines would have found that context.

Then there was the time that chief health officer Brett Sutton was accused of trying to cover up evidence by “instructing” departmental solicitors not to reveal it to the hotel quarantine inquiry. That was comprehensively wrong — a misinterpretation of an admittedly ambiguously worded document. The idea that Sutton had covered something up was knocked on the head in the inquiry’s final report. Yet you had to dig deep to find corrections of the original, deeply damaging, front-page reports. Many outlets have never corrected those reports.

More recently, the Age took Sutton out of context to make it appear he had criticised the Victorian government’s response — though to its credit the paper corrected the report.

And we are still seeing senior reporters suggesting that somebody is covering up information about who made the decision to hire private security guards for hotel quarantine — even though the inquiry forensically established that no single person made the decision. Some of that reporting makes me think journalists haven’t bothered to read the report. Just because no guilty party has been blamed, they behave as if we know less than we do.

I have been speaking mainly about Victorian reporters, but journalists in Canberra and Sydney have also relayed falsehoods, some of them reflecting a simple misunderstanding of the southern city.

Most annoying to Melburnians is the lazy assumption — or perhaps acceptance of federal government behind-the-scenes briefings — that the current outbreak can be equated with the pre-Christmas breakout in New South Wales, and that therefore Victoria is wrongly locked down. Two things were different: the virus variant and the epidemiology.

Nor should we assume that the NSW approach was without risks. Reporters would be writing quite differently if that wave had got away, which most experts concede was possible.

So here we are again, with what social media has tagged the “daily non-Dan.” This time, while Andrews recovers from his back injury, acting premier James Merlino is presiding over the answer-all-questions encounters.

I am reluctant to criticise journalists for asking questions — even stupid ones. Sometimes you fly a kite, bark up the wrong tree or even make a simple mistake. That is all part of the process, as any journalist knows. A good reporter returns to the keyboard, winnows out the chaff and exercises judgement before filing a report.

But the unique experience of lockdown, with thousands watching in real time, means that for many members of the public the media conferences are the journalism. Many more are watching than will read or view the journalists’ reports. And they are largely disgusted by what they see.

They don’t necessarily understand the pressures the journalists are under, or the absurdities imposed by the tired tropes and media formats that newspapers and broadcasters haven’t shaken off. Sometimes a question will be asked many times to get the subject to answer succinctly enough for the six o’clock news. Sometimes reporters are getting text messages from the boss instructing them to press a certain line — and the boss is watching live, so there is no way to wriggle out. And we can all be wrong. We can all ask those stupid questions.

Even allowing for all this, some episodes in recent days have made me gasp.

Sutton arced up on Thursday when a journalist opened by asking him why the state was “getting contact tracing so wrong.” This, Sutton said, was “an absurd proposition” — and he was right. Certainly, contact tracing had its problems last year, and Sutton earned some displeasure from his political masters by being frank about that. This year, though, all the relevant experts have said that Victoria’s contact tracing is as good as it can be, and the effort to detect and trace so many contacts has been extraordinary.

So it was a stupid question. But instead of being eliminated from the reporting, it became central. It was reported that Sutton had engaged in a “rant” — that he had “been forced” to defend the contact tracers. A much better line of questioning, addressed to the minister or the acting premier, would have focused on Victoria’s long-term lack of investment in public health.

Or they might have asked whether the state had done anything to prevent another draconian lockdown of public housing, should infections emerge there. Or how it’s progressing with the implementation of the ombudsman’s recommendations in the wake of last year’s hard lockdown of tenants.

And just yesterday, questions were predicated on the incorrect idea that other states have a higher level of compliance with QR code check-ins. Time was spent on questions that seemed to misunderstand the different responsibilities and powers of state and federal government.

Have journalists forgotten that we ask questions in the hope of getting useful answers? That this is the main part of the job, and the main meaning of “holding to account”?

I am not arguing for reporters to go soft on the state government. But when citizens are being locked up, journalists owe it to their audiences to read the documents, understand the context, listen to the answers and think about them, and report on the structural issues — not to simply, or chiefly, focus on the “gotcha” moments. To report in a way that reflects reality rather than a fantasy world in which awful problems can be traced back to the actions of baddies.

My criticism here is predicated on a simple though perhaps naive idea. I think journalism matters. And it particularly matters at times like these. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post When bravado trumps reporting appeared first on Inside Story.

The fear was that the government would appoint ideologues with a brief to punish the organisation. Instead, two out of the three newcomers — former News Corp executive Peter Tonagh and former Channel 7 Perth managing director Mario D’Orazio — are unquestionably creditable appointments.

The question mark is over the third, IT specialist and serial board director Fiona Balfour. She is the “captain’s pick” of communications minister Paul Fletcher, and is said to be his long-term friend and ally. “She will be his eyes and ears on the board,” one ABC insider said this week. But this person admitted to having never met Balfour. She will be under scrutiny, and judged on her record.

So, why the cynicism and foreboding, and why the relatively benign reaction?

The foreboding reflected the fact that relations between the ABC and the government could hardly be worse, with the Christian Porter defamation case before the courts and the government still smarting over the Four Corners “Inside the Canberra Bubble” report, which revealed education minister Alan Tudge’s extramarital affair.

I understand that the ABC wasn’t told the appointments were imminent — or who was on the list — until a few hours before the public announcement. This seems like a calculated snub by Fletcher, particularly given that ABC chair Ita Buttrose protested only a couple of weeks ago about not being consulted.

The government’s lack of regard for the ABC is also evident in the fact that the appointments came months after the departure of the people they replace. The board has been seriously under-strength in the meantime.

As for the cynicism, that has a longer history.

For decades, both Labor and Coalition governments have stacked the ABC board with their political friends. Until the Howard government took office, though, these allies usually also had useful qualifications.

Under Howard, the board appointment process became nastier, more ideological and increasingly damaging. Board positions were handed out like purple hearts for perceived courage in the culture wars.

Thus, we had Ron Brunton, the anthropologist who had attacked the testimony of Aboriginal women protecting a sacred site during the Hindmarsh Island affair; Quadrant editor and frontier war sceptic Keith Windschuttle; Liberal powerbroker Michael Kroger; and News Corp columnist and ABC critic Janet Albrechtsen — with only the latter having any relevant experience.

The Rudd government tried to clean things up by introducing an arm’s-length process for ABC and SBS board appointments, under which an expert nomination panel assessed the applicants and delivered a list of recommended appointees to the minister. This worked moderately well under Labor, but when the Coalition again took office the process was progressively trashed.

First, the new government nobbled the four-member panel, appointing Albrechtsen and former Liberal minister Neil Brown. As the Australia Institute observed in a report on the process, both were “highly questionable appointments.”

Not satisfied with that, the communications minister at the time, Mitch Fifield, took to ignoring the panel, picking a succession of people it hadn’t recommended and in some cases who hadn’t even applied for the position. These “captain’s picks” included Vanessa Guthrie, Donny Walford and lawyer and investment banker Joseph Gersh, who is still on the board.

Guthrie was best known as chair of the Minerals Council of Australia and an outspoken advocate for the coal industry. Walford was a South Australian company director with no media experience, and hadn’t applied to be an ABC director. But the real cost of this abuse of process was the loss to the broadcaster of the better-qualified people who had been recommended by the nomination panel but passed over by the minister.

After a couple of rounds of this tomfoolery, good people became understandably reluctant to apply. Why would they subject themselves to a gruelling selection process when, even if they got to the top of the pile, it meant nothing?

Prime minister Scott Morrison continued this pattern by appointing Ita Buttrose as chair of the ABC even though she hadn’t applied for the job. The independent panel had recommended former Fairfax Media chief executive Greg Hywood, former News Corp chief executive Kim Williams and senior lawyer Ian Robertson, the national managing partner of Holding Redlich.

Morrison declared that he trusted Ita and Australians trusted Ita. (Nobody has asked him in recent times if he still feels that way.)

Many — including me — agreed that Buttrose was at least as good and probably a better pick than the shortlisted men. Her fierce defence of the ABC since her appointment proves she was not compromised by the manner of her appointment. But the lack of proper process still matters. Why, if Morrison wanted her, did he not encourage her to apply and go through the proper procedure?

By now the arm’s length process had become a bad joke. Yet,  quietly, the independent panel was being cleaned and smartened up. It now comprises three people, all of them suitable and none of them ideologues.

The chair is Sally Pitkin, who also chairs the Super Retail Group. Helen Williams, a former Australian Public Service commissioner, has been a member since 2017 and was recently reappointed. The newest member is journalist and Australian National University professor Mark Kenny, who joined in May 2019.

Which brings us to this week’s much-anticipated and better-than-expected appointments: Peter Tonagh, Mario D’Orazio and Fiona Balfour.

Some may be worried by Tonagh’s News Corp background, but this would be to misunderstand the politics of that most tribal of organisations. Tonagh was not a Murdoch man so much as a Kim Williams man — Williams being the chief executive who quickly ran afoul of News Corp’s old editors’ culture after Rupert appointed him to head the company. Tonagh survived but didn’t particularly prosper once Williams was forced out.

Since he left News Corp in 2018, Tonagh has led the consortium that revived Australian Associated Press, which News Corp tried to kill. He has also invested in media startups including the Squiz, a daily digital update of Australian politics, news and current affairs, and Inkl, which compiles news from different publishers across the world under one subscription plan.

In 2018 Tonagh also led the latest in the perennial efficiency reviews of the ABC. The result was an intelligent and nuanced report that rejected the idea that the ABC should save money by adopting a Sky News bargain-basement model of news reporting, with rip-and-read bulletins and a heavy reliance on televising stage-managed media events.

Tonagh argued that the ABC, with its curated shows, analysis and charter-mandated presentation of diverse points of view, needed proper and reliable funding to do its job well. He recommended that it and SBS refocus on charter activities, which would involve less lifestyle journalism at the ABC. He sensibly recommended that the ABC funding cycle be shifted from three years to ten, which would enable better planning and remove the broadcaster from the electoral cycle and the pressures generated by any controversies. (If only that recommendation had been adopted!) In other words, Tonagh is well qualified, well regarded and no Murdoch patsy, and understands the ABC, even if insiders don’t agree with all his conclusions.

D’Orazio, the other appointee recommended by the independent panel, has been a journalist, making him the only board member apart from Buttrose and staff-elected director Jane Connors with reporting experience. He was managing director of Channel 7 Perth for seven years until his retirement in 2019, and also has experience in public sector and cultural organisations. He chaired Western Australia’s contemporary dance company, Co3, was a director of WA Opera and has been on the board of the Australia Council.

D’Orazio is smiled on by the government. In 2019, Fletcher and then finance minister Mathias Cormann appointed him to the board of Australia Post, where he has recently been caught up in the controversy over the sacking of chief executive Christine Holgate. According to Holgate, he is a friend of Cormann’s and, with the rest of the board, was considering privatisation plans for parts of Australia Post, but aspects of Holgate’s account are disputed.

Finally, there is Fiona Balfour. She was not recommended by the independent panel and it is not known whether she applied for the job. She has no media or public sector experience, but she does have an impressive CV, with stints as chief information officer of both Qantas and Telstra and wide board experience.

Whom did we miss out on because of her appointment? We know that award-winning television producer, broadcast executive and journalist Anita Jacoby was in the mix. There would have been others as well. And which skills and experience are still missing from the board? What might Buttrose have asked for, had either the government or the independent panel consulted her?

For several years now, no one other than managing director David Anderson and staff-elected director Connors has had public broadcasting experience. The board is underweight in public and community sector experience more broadly. It remains light on journalistic experience, and overweight with conventional commercial corporate board experience. It lacks anyone with a practitioner’s understanding of the arts, science or academia.

In other words, a lot is still wrong with the ABC board. The legacy of previous politically motivated appointments has not yet washed out.

Nevertheless, there is nothing in the current crop that suggests deliberate government vandalism. And in the current context, that is a mercy for which we should be grateful. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Good news week appeared first on Inside Story.

Female journalists in Canberra are reporting on matters previously seen as private. They have been accused of advocacy — of abandoning the journalistic creed of objectivity. Twitter and Facebook exercise more power than any editor over what can be said, who can say it and the tone of public life.

The accepted practices of mainstream journalism are under profound challenge. Are the established disciplines and notions of objectivity our anchor in a world of lies? Or are they stale, white bulwarks of prejudice and inequality?

Consider the following story told by Osman Faruqi, editor of Schwartz Media’s daily news podcast 7am, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival earlier this month. After the Christchurch mosque shootings in August 2019, Faruqi said, he told different news organisations they were missing an opportunity by not having a Muslim journalist on the ground in New Zealand.

“You’re going to get a more empathetic and deeper story if people can speak in the language to the survivors,” he said, “and if they’ve been in a mosque before.” It would be wrong to send a Muslim journalist, one senior editor responded, because they would have too much “skin in the game.”

“I found that a very fascinating and revealing comment,” said Faruqi, “because it assumes that neutrality is the point of view of a middle-class white man, and everyone else is biased. My response was, ‘This is a white supremacist attack. You’re a white person who benefits from the structures and powers of white supremacy. You have skin in the game and so does every other white journalist reporting.’”

The session, sponsored by the Judith Neilson Institute and chaired by Schwartz Media’s editor-in-chief Erik Jensen, was set up as a contest between new sensibilities, represented by journalists like Faruqi, and the traditionalist defenders of objective reporting, represented by Alan Sunderland, who as the ABC’s former editorial director was responsible for setting journalistic tone and practice at the national broadcaster.

The two men were joined by former journalist Ariel Bogle, who researches online influence and disinformation campaigns for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Perhaps surprisingly, none of the panellists suggested that the journalistic ideal of objective reporting should be abandoned. As Bogle said, it was not really under attack. Where they disagreed, it was about the implications of the dawning realisation that journalism has blind spots. Those blind spots include previously unquestioned assumptions about which voices are “credible” and which should be ignored.

It is important to define the term “objectivity,” Sunderland argued, and recognise that it doesn’t necessarily mean balance. It resides not in the individual journalist or in the newsroom but in the professional discipline and judgement exercised by journalists and their managers. It means reporting in line with the evidence.

Good, objective reporters won’t give equal time and space to climate change deniers and climate change scientists, said Sunderland, and then regard their job as done. Rather, they will question their own preconceptions and do their best to set them aside, then gather the facts and exercise judgement. They will be led by the evidence.

In Sunderland’s words, this approach to objectivity is “fundamentally important and can work.” He sees his role as defending that idea against the legacy of “fairly sloppy practice and some fairly large blind spots.” So-called impartiality — or “balance” — is “at risk of imposing a very conservative, very predictable worldview, even as it’s pretending and claiming not to.”

The panellists agreed that sexism and sexual assault in Canberra would probably not have been recognised as a legitimate news story a few decades ago, when the gallery was male-dominated. Now, largely thanks to more senior female journalists, the paradigm had shifted. It wasn’t mentioned during the session, but the ABC’s 7.30 anchor, Leigh Sales, has said that she is reconsidering her “unspoken rule” that politicians’ private lives are out of bounds. “Have I been educated in, and almost brainwashed into, a system that has protected powerful men at the expense of women?”

Sunderland said that the ABC decided during his time in the job not to amplify those who disputed the established facts on climate change. But as for the debate about how to respond to those facts — how fast the world should move to zero emissions, the means of doing that, whether gas has a role in the transition — it was the job of the public broadcaster to reflect all views.

Most people would probably agree with that approach — yet the same principle can lead to dark places. During the marriage equality plebiscite, Sunderland said, there had been a “largely generational” internal debate between those who thought only one legitimate view existed — a Yes vote on human rights grounds — and those, like him, who thought all views should be presented.

“You don’t have to take the side of a particular fundamental religious perspective,” he said. “But there are legitimate views that need to be dealt with as objectively as possible and presented back into the community.”

But what, responded Faruqi, if it had been not marriage equality but interracial marriage, or a plebiscite about discrimination against Muslims? Would the national broadcaster still see its role as being to amplify all sides, including “ideas that are fundamentally heinous”?

Sunderland acknowledged that the ideal newsroom should be “as diverse as possible — socioeconomically, ethnically, gender, all of those things.” This was not so much to overturn the notion of objectivity, as to make it stronger. “I then want those in the newsroom to rub up against each other, to eliminate each other’s blind spots and to produce the kind of classic impartiality that I think powers the best [that journalism] can do.”

Faruqi responded that white male journalists didn’t just wake up one day and decide to let women and people of colour into the magic circle. “People like myself and from other marginalised groups have kicked down the doors to be let in, and there’s still nowhere near enough of us.”

If newsrooms reflected the diversity of the nation, said Faruqi, they would make different judgements about how to report matters of race. “When it comes to reporting things like sexual assault or racism, I’m very happy to be on the side that says it’s bad when powerful people do bad things to less powerful people. And my reporting is going to take that perspective.”

But reflecting the nation doesn’t necessarily mean revealing some progressive nirvana. As Sunderland pointed out, opinion polls suggest most Australians are in favour of capital punishment. It isn’t a “live, active debate at the moment,” but if it ever were, “the ABC and responsible media” would need to find a way of teasing out the arguments as fairly as possible. “We should not say the ABC has decided that we have a particular view and we’re going to use that to filter what we report.”

Bogle expressed frustration at old-fashioned news reporters and editors who had a “naivety and lack of internet fluency” about how content was used online. Mainstream media not only ignores social media, she argued, but exercises a wilful ignorance — “a kind of snobbery” — and refuses to take any responsibility about how their work can “flow through to those forums.”

A critical article about the rise of neo-Nazi groups might be used by the very same groups to promote their cause, for example. Or a headline about vaccine side effects would be used by anti-vaxxers, shorn of its context. Journalists need to recognise that they aren’t the only ones speaking, she said; otherwise their approach is arrogant and dangerous.

Bogle implied that social media requires journalists to be more prepared to make explicit judgements. The Trump era led American journalists to reconsider what objectivity meant. CNN, for example, had started to call out Trump’s lies. “I am curious about whether Australian newsrooms would ever feel confident enough to make that kind of call.”

So what can we take away from this “war in newsrooms” — albeit a conflict that was conducted courteously, on stage, at a literary festival?

Journalism has two traditional roles. The first, articulated in the journalists’ code of ethics, is to “describe society to itself.” At first glance, that might imply a passive role — merely recording what is going on.

The other is to hold power to account, including — as Faruqi argued — by interrogating the often-accepted, often-invisible assumptions about who should be heard, and what constitutes legitimate authority.

But where does advocacy in journalism begin and end? It is one thing to advocate for the victims of sexual assault, for example. It is one thing to report, as is the case, that the evidence suggests most complaints of sexual assault are true. But does that mean we should uncritically believe alleged victims — such as the woman who made allegations against Christian Porter, or the men who accused George Pell?

Even those who abhor both those men would surely see the risk if this became accepted practice — the risk of a dangerous slide of journalism into vendetta.

Is there a tension between the passive “describing” role of journalism, and the active holding to account? I think the debate about objectivity, properly understood, reveals that they are in fact the same. If we describe society to itself, that description will include a constant attempt to see more clearly, to understand the hidden.

For example, it will include reporting that domestic violence is one of Australia’s biggest social, economic, human rights and criminal problems, and that it is all-pervasive. It would include the shocking fact that women are most at risk of violence in their homes. Until very recently, though, domestic violence was regarded as mostly a private matter.

Describing society to itself would include acknowledging the realities of the founding of modern Australia, including the violence of invasion and its present-day legacy. Yet, until recently, we barely spoke of this.

Describing society to itself implies a constant effort to see the water in the goldfish bowl, to reveal the reality of our condition. And that objectivity implies performing the other journalistic role — the constant interrogation of power. The two roles are the same.

Journalism should be engaged in a constant effort to see better and report better. It is an art and a process, not a science or a destination.

I like to think of journalism as being like the art of drawing maps. We can choose what to map — population, waterways, streets or mountain ranges. But one principle is universal. Maps should be useful. If they leave out important features, or distort the lay of the land, they will not be useful and can be dangerous.

Journalists should strive to be good map-makers. Without that discipline, we will all be lost. •

The post War in the newsrooms appeared first on Inside Story.

Probably even more than now, Newspoll was the pollster the political class most obsessed over.

You can read it in the Financial Review here; it apparently earned a private rebuke for the Fin from the then Oz editor (who is now the Fin’s editor-in-chief). But the very next Newspoll did include two-party-preferred figures, and they have ever since. I like to think I played a part in this positive development for humanity, but Simon Crean’s office — which had been complaining to the Australian for quite a while — might have claimed some credit too.

Unfortunately the subsequent Newspoll preference-allocating strategy left much to be desired, culminating in egg on its face at the 2004 election. More on that here.

The point of this skip down memory lane is that, finally, with total major-party support ever-declining (it hit a postwar low of 74.8 per cent in 2019) and preferences becoming ever more important, all pollsters had climbed on the two-party-preferred wagon.

Until last month. That’s when Nine’s Age and Sydney Morning Herald introduced us to their new Resolve Political Monitor, a monthly dive into not just voting intentions but also a range of other issues. There’s a lot to like about it, including a smashing online presentation and an informative “About the data” section. If it all stays online for years (we can only dream of decades) it will be a useful historical resource.

But the killer is flagged in the headline to Tory Maguire’s explainer: “New polling does away with the two-party preferred results and gets behind the issues.”

What? Yes, they’re publishing primary vote numbers but not two-party-preferred numbers. Here we go again.

The decision is cast as a high-minded attempt to improve the tone of Australian political commentary. According to Maguire, “Our readers told us in the past they did not appreciate the ‘horse race’ nature of the way we reported the results of TPP questions” — that’s two-party-preferred — “and they wanted something deeper.” Resolve boss Jim Reed, formerly of the political advisory company once known as Crosby Textor, casts the exercise as akin to the work private pollsters perform all the time for political parties. It’s “about understanding what is going on and helping [parties] decide what to do about it.”

Now it’s true that political opinion polls, outside election campaigns, are something of a blight on our democracy. When Malcolm Turnbull spoke in 2015 of the Abbott government “losing” Newspolls it was a sign that the things had become a competition in themselves. For at least a decade we’ve observed beleaguered party leaders attempting from time to time, usually unsuccessfully, to generate a Newspoll “boost” to shore up their position.

The only solution to this problem would be to do away altogether with contemporaneously published voting-intention polls. If everyone did this, the world would be a better place. But it won’t happen; people interested in and around the politics (like us) crave them.

The Guardian and its pollster Essential have moved some way in this direction, publishing voting-intention figures only in aggregated form, once every quarter. In between, they give other regular and non-regular survey results. According to Essential boss Peter Lewis, “it leaves space for us to focus on the issues and attitudes that inform votes, rather than seeing the vote as the end in itself.” Fair enough. (Not so Essential’s eccentric decision to leave undecideds in its published primary and two-party-preferred numbers.)

But publishing primary voting intentions without a two-party-preferred figure makes no sense whatsoever. Maguire writes that “years of leadership contenders using polling as a justification for knifing incumbent prime ministers led, understandably, to the perception the polling was distorting politics, not just examining it.” Indeed, but on the Labor side at least the knifers have tended to discount the two-party-preferred numbers and cite primary intended votes and personal ratings instead. “Yes, the poll says we’re ahead on the two-party-preferred, but we can’t win with that primary vote/personal rating” was the catchcry leading to Kevin Rudd’s 2010 demise, and had also been used against opposition leader Kim Beazley (by Rudd’s and Julia Gillard’s supporters) in 2006.

Nine and Resolve will still give us personal ratings; indeed, the first report highlighted Scott Morrison’s big lead over Anthony Albanese as preferred prime minister. But if there’s one thing worse than the political class obsessing over two-party-preferred poll numbers, it’s the political class obsessing over primary support and personal ratings.

Resolve’s primary votes have a problem too. Pollsters have long known that including minor parties in their initial voting-intention questions tends to overstate their support. The problem is, leaving them out — to be included in a second question for those who nominate “other” — understates them. (If I ran a polling outfit I’d do half the respondents one way — just the major parties in the initial question — and half the other way, and then combine the two.)

Resolve’s methodology — it tries to replicate the ballot paper — might be okay at election time when candidates are known, but at other times is almost designed to overstate minor-party and independent support. In the first outing, the question “Which party would you number ‘1’ on the ballot paper — Liberal/National, Labor, Greens, One Nation, Independent, Other?” (with options presumably rotated) found implausibly low primary votes for major parties. It will continue to do so unless it’s changed. This probably wouldn’t matter so much if Nine were publishing two-party-preferred figures, where these problems largely wash out. But it isn’t.

The inclusion of One Nation in the opening question is especially risky: it ran in barely a third of electorates in 2019, so mentioning it to all respondents overstates its vote even more — unless it happens to contest all 151 seats next time.

Like Essential’s Peter Lewis, Reed references the 2019 election, when all pollsters put Labor on around 51.5 per cent after preferences and voters instead delivered the Coalition that number. But being shy about two-party-preferred numbers simply points to a lack of confidence. And remember: the primary voting figures contributed about two-thirds of the 2019 error. (About a third can be put down to preference allocations that favoured Labor too much.)

Opinion polls generate excellent publicity for the pollster and good clickbait for the organ that runs them. An arrangement between the two guarantees they will always be on the front and home pages, entrails extracted, importance exaggerated. For it to be worth Resolve’s and Nine’s while, it can’t be any other way. Sure, the headline two-party-preferred figure is facile, but it’s not as facile as whatever else is headlined instead.

What will Nine’s chief political correspondent, David Crowe, write about in the next instalment, in two weeks’ time, apart from again noting the continuing low Coalition primary vote? (Labor’s is also suppressed by Resolve’s methodology, but that offsets an increase found by the other pollsters, leaving it on around the 2019 result.) An issues poll, or Labor’s improved lead on healthcare and aged care, something like that? Interesting, but will it bring in the readers?

Meanwhile, observers such as this writer will go straight to the primary votes and estimate our own two-party-preferred numbers, albeit with the handicap of starting from numbers rounded to the nearest integer.

For what it’s worth, Resolve’s first poll probably comes to a rounded Labor lead of 51–49. After preferences. •

The post Polling’s least-worst option appeared first on Inside Story.

People forget, for example, that fourteen years ago Four Corners journalist Chris Masters, one of Australia’s most distinguished investigative journalists, made a program and then published a massively controversial book about radio shock jock Alan Jones. He analysed Jones’s political influence and revealed that he was gay — which was no secret but also not widely known. He published disturbing allegations about Jones’s relationship with the boys and young men under his care when he was a teacher and rugby coach.

Masters was predictably accused of both homophobia and left-wing bias. It was said that he would not have tackled a similar figure on the left of politics. He was also accused of unduly invading Jones’s personal life. “The subject here is power and abuse of power,” he responded. “It is what I have been taught to confront.” Those words could equally be used today by the women of the press gallery who are reporting on sexism and sexual abuse in the halls of power. They too have been accused of behaving like advocates rather than journalists.

Those words are especially relevant to the work of Masters’s successor, Louise Milligan, whose “Inside the Canberra Bubble” report screened on Four Corners last November. That program revealed details of cabinet minister Alan Tudge’s personal life, and specifically his affair with a staffer at a time when he was proclaiming the sanctity of traditional marriage.

Masters went on to say that his reporting was grounded in fact. It was a fact that Jones had been asked to leave the King’s School, with a “compelling reason” being his closeness to some of the students. “The story is mostly of emotional manipulation,” Masters said at the time. “It may not be the expected story. It is the story I found.”

Masters’s reporting is a useful point of reference for the controversies of the past few months, not only because it crossed the public–private divide but also because of decisions made by the ABC. Having aired the program on Alan Jones, the public broadcaster controversially reneged on its agreement to publish Masters’s book.

Although critics suggested that the politically stacked board had inappropriately intervened, documents released under freedom of information legislation showed that senior executives were the key decision-makers. They decided that the ABC’s book publishing arm was a commercial venture, not core business, and the likely defamation action against Masters’s book would be too expensive. The book was published by Allen & Unwin and became a bestseller. Jones didn’t sue.

At the time, social media barely existed. Today, the ABC will have to defend the social media activity of Louise Milligan, as well as its “core” broadcasts and publications, in the defamation case brought by former attorney-general Christian Porter, the subject of a more recent Milligan report. From this we might conclude that the broadcaster has acquired some courage, or that it has become reckless, or is not in control of the social media presence of its reporters. The defamation action will be expensive, and consequential. Porter denies all the allegations against him.

Apart from Milligan and the women of the Canberra press gallery, the “campaigning and advocacy” accusation has been made recently against the ABC’s health reporter, Norman Swan. He annoyed the Morrison government in the earliest days of the pandemic by advocating for lockdowns and “go early, go hard” public health responses. The fact that the government often moved in line with his recommendations didn’t stop it from accusing him of overstepping the line of objective reporting.

Then there is the constant rumble of News Corp, with its own campaigns against issues and individuals — including its critics — usually in opinion columns but also discernible in news reports.

So how are we to assess these examples? It is easier to do from the perspective of history.

The case of Donald Woods, the journalist immortalised in the film Cry Freedom, is a prime example of how time can help clarify the relationship between journalism and advocacy. When Woods was writing about race relations in South Africa in the 1970s, he was seen as an advocate — in his case for the end of apartheid. The country’s government regarded him as so dangerous that it ultimately forced him into exile. But we now see him as a hero, because it is clear that his cause was just. It wasn’t so obvious at the time: indeed, he supported apartheid until his friendship with activist Steve Biko opened his eyes.

So let’s use the quest for justice as our measure. Are journalists speaking on behalf of those who lack power? Are they exposing facts that powerful people don’t want seen?

When they’re reporting on the victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse, good journalists are hardly likely to side with the perpetrators. Yet it is only recently that they have sufficiently interrogated the role of religious institutions in perpetrating abuse. Eyes had to be opened. That took time, and pressure from advocates outside journalism.

Awful complications arise when the reporting includes unproven claims against individuals — such as the allegations against Cardinal George Pell, and now against Christian Porter.

In defending Porter, prime minister Scott Morrison has made frequent references to the presumption of innocence, which is indeed a vital safeguard against autocracy, vendetta, error and mob rule. But the rule of law is not the only thing that matters. It is essential to a just society, but not sufficient.

For centuries the legal system has failed to achieve justice for women and children. Most sexual crimes don’t enter the legal process; even when they do, justice is hard to achieve. Good journalism can reveal that the laws themselves, or their administration, need to change. This is where it can make a difference, and it is the field in which journalists such as Milligan are working.

Publishing unproven allegations is desperately uncomfortable, legally fraught and hugely consequential — but it is a legitimate part of journalism. It should not be done lightly, and only when there is evidence (even if that evidence is short of proof) and public interest involved.

The differences between advocacy and journalism can be hard to discern in the heat of a controversy. The distinction is about facts and about justice — which implies a disruption of power.

Norman Swan is not a specialist in infectious diseases or vaccines, but he constantly talks to people who are, helped by relationships of trust built up during decades of responsible reporting. For the most part, what he advocates is the logical conclusion from the facts. This is good journalism.

Australian political reporting, meanwhile, is in the middle of a paradigm shift. The ABC’s 7.30 anchor, Leigh Sales, has summed it up, saying that she is reconsidering her “unspoken rule” that politicians’ private lives are out of bounds. “Have I been educated in, and almost brainwashed, into a system that has protected powerful men at the expense of women?” she asks.

The distinction between advocacy and journalism comes up in almost every first-year journalism class. Students tend to come in three different kinds. There are those who want to be sports, travel or fashion journalists, more because they like sports, travel or fashion than because of any sense of mission. There are those who are in the wrong place and in the process of working that out. And there are those who want to change the world. Often they become the best students.

I don’t think I have ever encountered a student who says at the outset, “I want to objectively report in formulaic prose and never disclose my own opinion or personality, nor act against injustice.”

In a well-run journalism class, students will learn that journalism does change the world, and for the better. Usually it does so incrementally, and chiefly by publishing facts, including facts previously overlooked or hidden. Journalists will seek out and publish all the relevant facts, including those they wish they hadn’t unearthed. Advocates will seek out and privilege convenient facts, closing their eyes to others.

Not every piece of journalism in recent months should get a clean bill of health. I get worried when I see journalists — often on social media — pushing for a particular legal outcome, or assuming that published allegations must necessarily be true, or ought to be true, even when they haven’t gathered sufficient evidence to inform a proper story.

The justice system has its role, and journalism has a different, broader role. Each should respect the other. The arc of justice is easier to perceive in retrospect than in the mess of the day-to-day, but in the meantime journalists and their audiences should keep in mind that the simple act of publishing facts can be radical and world-changing.

Without facts there can be no effective advocacy. Reporting must come first. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The arc of justice appeared first on Inside Story.

That’s more than a bit over the top, but the story of the Conversation is nevertheless significant in a time of fake news, public relations spin and hollowed-out mainstream newsrooms. Not least because its unique business model seems to be sustainable — something News Corp might envy as it watches the advertising revenue that has paid for most journalism continuing to ebb.

News Corp, indeed, has been happy to talk up the Conversation, though for entirely self-interested reasons. In evidence before the current Senate inquiry into media diversity, News executives pushed back against the view that their organisation is too dominant. We are in a sunlit upland of unprecedented diversity, they argued, thanks to independent online outlets such as the Conversation and, indeed, Inside Story.

The Conversation was founded by Andrew Jaspan, a British-Australian journalist who arrived in Melbourne in 2004 to become the editor-in-chief of the Age and Sunday Age. He had a chequered history, founding or editing leading newspapers but repeatedly falling out with his colleagues.

When he first began talking to universities about establishing a new media outlet, he was recovering from a bruising exit from the Age after a unanimous vote of no-confidence by the paper’s journalists. But even his fiercest critics concede that the Conversation was a stroke of brilliance. Only someone with Jaspan’s entrepreneurial and marketing skills could have got it off the ground.

The idea, he wrote in 2012, was a response to the newsroom cuts, the increase in public relations–driven media content and the spread of what we now call “fake news.” He had watched as the management of Fairfax slashed costs, and he had noticed that “among the first to leave were the specialist reporters with expertise in science, health, environment, business, politics, law and police rounds.”

Jaspan’s brilliance was to conceive of universities as a kind of “giant newsroom” full of expertise. His idea was to have journalists collaborate with academics to write content suitable for a broad audience, but with the academics remaining in control of the copy.

Fortunately for Jaspan, the then vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Glyn Davis, came from a family of journalists and had a long history of supporting university participation in the media. As vice-chancellor of Griffith University he had overseen the establishment of the Griffith Review; at Melbourne he would establish the Centre for Advancing Journalism (where I was once director and now hold an honorary position). He found Jaspan a post at the university and helped him get the idea in front of other vice-chancellors, who were quick to understand and support the concept. They shared a “frustration with traditional media,” Davis says, and its failure to involve universities in the conversation.

By the time it launched, the Conversation had $10 million in funding — $3 million from a brace of universities, $3 million each from the Victorian and federal governments, and the rest from the Commonwealth Bank. Gradually, all Australian universities signed on. They remain members and owners of the not-for-profit corporate structure.

Jaspan’s entrepreneurial flair had not subsided. The Conversation spawned international editions, which now include Canada, Africa, France, Britain, the United States, Spain, Indonesia and New Zealand. But in April 2017 it all came close to crashing down. After months of tensions, Jaspan was forced out by the board.

He was a victim of his own success. The Australian staff had largely accommodated his idiosyncratic management style, but with the launch of the US and British editions, the Conversation had recruited senior journalists who pushed back, wanting more autonomy.

One industry insider quoted in Crikey neatly summed it up. “Andrew Jaspan invented one of the best global publishing ideas of a generation… then the staff said they couldn’t work with him anymore. It’s tragic that the only way the idea could keep going was by pushing out the founder.”

Davis says he has “very painful” memories of the decision. “Andrew vehemently denies the ‘founder’s syndrome,’ which is that the founder becomes an impediment to the next stage. He’s entitled to dispute that, but I have to say that there was a strong view amongst others that for the thing to prosper, it needed to move beyond its founders, which is not only Andrew but also me. Its subsequent success tells its own story.” Jaspan was the “brilliant entrepreneur” needed to get the project going, he adds, and “those who followed were more the media professionals who knew how to run a system and expand it.”

Jaspan moved on to a position at RMIT University, and then to Monash University, where he is now described as the director and editor of the Global Academy, which “aims to develop new forms and narratives for global journalism.”

Meanwhile, the work goes on. The Conversation’s Australian edition publishes about twenty articles a day on its own website, which are also available for other media organisations to use for free.

Typically, an article will be generated by an editor ringing an academic. The editor, Misha Ketchell, says the common view that academics can’t meet media deadlines and can’t write clearly is mostly untrue. Some write jargon and are precious about their prose, but most submit good drafts and “we sort out the rest through negotiation.”

The journalists’ key contribution, he says, is an awareness of the news cycle. “It’s us going to the researcher who is most relevant and saying this is in the news, and there is an opportunity for you to really do something that’s going to be very useful and there’s an audience that really wants access to this content.”

The ABC and the Guardian republish frequently, and most mainstream media use at least some of the content. News Corp, Ketchell admits, doesn’t use “as much content as we would probably like.” But not everyone in the media is a fan. Critics say the Conversation makes life harder for freelance journalists and small independent media. In theory, only academics are allowed to write for the Conversation, and they are not paid for their contributions. But there is fudging around the edges.

Veteran political correspondent Michelle Grattan is the most prominent example. She has an academic post as a professorial fellow at the University of Canberra, which makes her eligible to write for the Conversation, where she is described as the chief political correspondent. The copy she writes is  similar to what she once delivered for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, with no clear academic research component.

Davis acknowledges that the most common complaint he hears in academia is that the Conversation isn’t academic enough. “Some people say it’s tried too hard for a broader audience, and so the level of the discussion is not always what you want it to be. Then people say that it’s mostly junior academics who write for it.” Davis thinks those criticisms should be taken seriously but “that doesn’t necessarily mean they are right.”

Ketchell, meanwhile, credits the Conversation with helping to combat misinformation during the pandemic. It supports journalism by providing free content that other media can run on their sites, he says, attracting audiences and therefore advertising dollars. “We also employ journalists,” he adds.

After the unpleasantness of Jaspan’s departure, the organisation resolved into a kind of international federation, the Melbourne mothership providing technological and back-end services in return for a small percentage of global revenue.

Each international edition has a slightly different business model. The Canadian, French and British editions run much like Australia’s, supported mostly by universities. The African edition has some university members but is mainly funded by philanthropists, which “changes the emphasis,” as Ketchell acknowledges. The US edition is a hybrid, with some university support but mainly philanthropic funding, and Indonesia is still seeking funding. New Zealand, likewise, is in development, supported by Melbourne.

As for the Australian edition, Ketchell says it costs about $5 million a year to run and employs about thirty staff, many of them part-time. About half its funding comes from the universities, with the rest from philanthropic foundations and about 20,000 individual reader-donors.

Last year the audience increased by 70 per cent, with one article on coronavirus by three ANU academics attracting 1.5 million readers. The most popular article ever published, in 2016, was “How Long Does Sex Normally Last?” by the University of Queensland’s Brendan Zietsch. (Answer: 5.4 minutes on average.) It got 8.5 million reads.

On Tuesday this week, the Conversation published a lead story from a Macquarie University historian on policies to combat misogyny, a couple of articles on the impact of climate change on the floods, and pieces on the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, the withdrawal of Covid payments and, deliciously, Voltaire’s Candide and what it tells us about human folly in times of crisis.

A survey of the media habits of 2000 Australians by the University of Canberra found that about 4 per cent access the Conversation each week — similar to the online audience for the Adelaide Advertiser, for example, and twice that of Crikey and the Saturday Paper. The audience leans hard to the left, with 65 per cent describing themselves as left-wing.

So is all this sustainable? Ketchell thinks so, though he acknowledges that Australian universities are increasingly cash-strapped. Davis agrees. Universities couldn’t achieve equivalent impact for their researchers any other way at the same cost, he says. All of which means the Conversation, like Rupert, is likely to remain a uniquely Australian contribution to the media ecosystem. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Australian media’s latest export appeared first on Inside Story.

More importantly, though, oppositions are no longer like the Labor Party of 1950s South Australia, patiently resigned to continuing failure. Today’s parties are restless on the opposition benches and ruthless in seeking victory. Any leader who doesn’t look like delivering electoral success is on borrowed time.

The landslide election victory of Mark McGowan’s Labor Party in Western Australia last Saturday sent ripples through opposition parties across the land. The Liberal Party was reduced to two seats, its lowest ever tally, and Zak Kirkup became the first opposition leader to lose his own seat in a WA election in eighty-eight years. Antony Green estimated that the combined swing to Labor in this and the 2017 election was around twenty-six percentage points.

The repercussions in the east were immediate. Within just two days, agitation intensified within the opposition parties in the two largest states.

Monday saw Liberal MLA Brad Battin pushing for the Victorian Liberal Party opposition to declare the leadership vacant. Leader Michael O’Brien comfortably squashed the move the following day, twenty-two to nine. He remains in the job, but the safest prediction is that the party will stay entangled in turmoil. Battin didn’t even go through the ritual renunciation of further challenges, and news reports suggest other contenders are circling.

Former premier Henry Bolte once proclaimed Victoria to be the jewel in the Liberal crown. Now it seems to be the most divided branch in the country.

Slightly more subtle was the agitation in Labor’s traditional powerhouse, New South Wales. Over a decade or more, the well-oiled machine driven by such renowned powerbrokers as John Ducker and Graham Richardson has rusted into mediocrity, losing three state elections straight. Despite the scandals and divisions in Gladys Berejiklian’s Coalition government, Labor is still making little progress.

That problem was sensationally played up in a poll published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday. State Labor’s primary vote was just 23.9 per cent, said the headline, and the story talked of a nine-point swing against Labor since the last election. “It’s catastrophic and it’s historic,” contributed former leader Morris Iemma. Labor “would suffer its worst primary vote in almost 120 years,” the article went on, putting “further pressure on the embattled opposition leader,” Jodi McKay.

None of these alarmist claims takes account of the fact that 18.9 per cent of respondents said they were undecided. Once they are distributed across the parties, the swing against Labor is nothing like a nine-point catastrophe. In the 2019 NSW election, the Coalition polled 42 per cent and Labor 33 per cent, which translated into a two-party-preferred 52–48.

McKay became leader following that election after a long contest with fellow right faction member Chris Minns. Minns had the support of two key unions known to be hostile to McKay, the Australian Workers’ Union and the Health Services Union, both of whose leaders are quoted in the Herald article. The Herald reported that the AWU had sponsored the poll and given it to the paper; no doubt the union was happy with its investment, but Herald readers were less well served.

Another Herald poll — by Ipsos in October 2020 — is more revealing. It showed that 22 per cent approved of McKay, 25 per cent disapproved and, more importantly, more than half the electorate had no opinion at all. State opposition leaders always struggle for visibility, and the pandemic has made their problem worse.

Mark McGowan is basking in unparalleled success, sitting on the highest leader approval rating in the country. It’s easy to forget that he badly lost his first election as opposition leader in 2013 — yet the party, against the trend, kept him on as leader. Nor were the next four years smooth sailing. In 2016 former federal minister Stephen Smith, who wasn’t even an MP at the time, challenged him for the leadership. Would Labor have triumphed in 2017 and 2021 if MPs hadn’t rallied around McGowan?

Leaving aside the merits of McKay or O’Brien, what seems to be happening is that the ineffectual performance of opposition parties is destabilising their leaderships in ways that rarely improve their electoral prospects. The WA Liberals, looking for their fifth leader in as many years, should know this better than anyone.

Labor election victories over the past year — in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia — suggest that the pandemic has helped incumbents, at least at state level. This has no doubt fed into the thinking of political strategists in New South Wales and Victoria. But it is far from clear that changing leaders is the solution.

We can’t yet say whether the post-pandemic advantages being enjoyed by state governments will flow to the federal government. There, the polls are much closer, with Labor currently ahead. Perhaps Scott Morrison and his colleagues should remember the fate of Winston Churchill in 1945. Churchill’s prestige as wartime leader was not sufficient to hold back the mood for change and reconstruction. In a shock result, a grateful nation swept Labour into government, thanks partly to women voting in record numbers. •

The post Borrowed time appeared first on Inside Story.

In Victoria, we had the Daily Dan — premier Dan Andrews’s marathon 120 days of answer-all-questions media conferences, some of them lasting more than two hours. No matter how aggressively journalists asked their questions, Andrews never lost control. Their aim was to rattle the premier’s cage and provoke a grab for the television news, but they were mostly props in the Dan Andrews show. His power was undisturbed.

Meanwhile in Canberra, prime minister Scott Morrison stuck to normal methods of media management, holding his press conferences in front of an open door so he could leave at a moment of his choosing. He wasn’t held to account either — among other things, for the failures in aged care that led to so many Covid-19 deaths.

If you care about the role of a free media in a democracy, it was all very dispiriting.

But then something else started going on. Since November last year, when Four Corners’s “Inside the Canberra Bubble” went to air, we’ve seen a different kind of journalistic work being done. It is uncertain and uncomfortable because it is part of a paradigm shift in society and in journalistic practice.

We can see the change in the difference between the treatment of rape allegations against attorney-general Christian Porter and the coverage of allegations against Labor leader Bill Shorten a decade ago. The two cases aren’t directly comparable, of course: Shorten was being investigated by police at the time, and most of the media let that process play out. The police decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.

If those allegations were made today, journalists would undoubtedly call for Shorten to stand aside until the investigation was complete. Porter faces no such investigation, which is one reason why the media won’t let it go.

We are watching a new field of journalism opening up within the media’s traditional endeavour of exploring alleged abuse of power. Almost everything about it is uncomfortable and unpredictable, with complicated and uncertain ethical boundaries. These dilemmas are being worked out through practice, and in interactions largely out of the public eye.

Meanwhile, an examination of recent journalistic history tells us a lot about the challenges of journalism — in particular, the impact of defamation law on what the public gets to hear and the responses politicians get away with. With this in mind, we can see the hole in the middle of last November’s Four Corners report. Louise Milligan knew about the rape allegations against Christian Porter but was unable to air them for legal reasons.

As a result, the program felt thin. It revealed a consensual affair involving human services minister Alan Tudge and staffer Rachelle Miller. Porter was accused of a longstanding pattern of misogynistic behaviour, and of having canoodled with a young female staffer in a public bar. These seemed like slim pickings, and prime minister Scott Morrison responded by suggesting that the Australian public understood “human failings.”

With the benefit of hindsight, that program takes on new meaning. Milligan referred to women who appear to have been unwilling to speak publicly. She referred to Porter’s time as a part-time lecturer at the University of Western Australia, with former students describing “incidents of inappropriate behaviour” including “sexualised comments about female students and a gratuitous focus on violent and sexually graphic material in the legal cases he taught.”

And then there was the strange, almost strangled, exchange with senator Sarah Hanson-Young about her dealings with a “pretty distressed young woman” who was talking about Christian Porter. “She told me that she’d found herself in somewhat of a relationship,” said Hanson-Young. “And that, clearly, [she] had found herself in a position that, at some point, she didn’t want to be there. I’m not going to speculate why or how… [S]he started crying. And it was quite clear to me that there was a lot more going on than she felt she could say.”

Last Monday, Australia’s political class was waiting for Four Corners’s follow-up episode. Did Milligan have new material on Porter that would change the government’s political calculations?

She did not. Rather, the program gave a detailed account of the allegations already on the public record, together with commentary and the testimony from friends of Porter’s accuser, “Kate.” The only new revelation — vigorously promoted by the ABC throughout Monday — was that Kate had detailed her allegations to a sexual assault counsellor eight years ago.

What is significant here is that this point was mainly aimed at other journalists — specifically Crikey’s David Hardaker, Sky News’s Andrew Bolt and others who were suggesting Kate’s allegations were unreliable because they were based on memories “recovered” through repressed-memory counselling in 2019. The new Four Corners material made it clear that was unlikely to be true.

Here we have one of the most dispiriting aspects of contemporary journalism: media outlets defining themselves in opposition to each other, and their political positions seemingly determining which “facts” they credit and report.

This is happening on all sides. Ever since breaking the story about Kate’s allegations, Milligan has used her social media to promote and advocate for her story. She has amplified lawyers’ calls for an inquiry and defended herself against allegations from News Corp papers. And so, even as the attorney-general faces such grave allegations, even as the government is weakened by two of its ministers being on stress leave, the journalists risk becoming the story.

Clearly, some of the attacks on Milligan’s work have been wildly inaccurate. It is unrealistic to expect her not to defend herself. Yet she, too, has gone beyond the reported facts. She tweeted last week that she had been asked by NSW police if she knew of other allegations against Porter. “Not in your jurisdiction,” she claims to have replied. Her Twitter followers drew the obvious conclusion.

Choose your outlet; choose which “facts” get prominence. We’ve seen where this can lead. In the United States, the rise of Fox News caused other outlets — notably CNN — to define themselves in opposition to its partisanship. Those two networks became mirror images, giving every appearance of caring more about discrediting each other than serving the public.

So far, prime minister Scott Morrison and his ministers have held fast to their refusal to hold an inquiry, claiming that doing so would undermine the rule of law — a view disputed by some of the country’s best legal minds. In the face of flat denials, political scandals are hard to maintain without new disclosures and developments. If there is nothing new to say, then the story fades from the headlines. Will that be the case here? Can Morrison and the government tough out the calls for an inquiry?

The journalism on Four Corners is far more than a performance. It is the hard, admirable stuff, running against the tide of legal and government pressure, taking courage and institutional backing. But there is always the risk that the performance of journalism will obscure the importance of what’s being reported, and that this will dissipate the pressure on government for an independent inquiry. If so, we will all be the poorer. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Muting the messenger appeared first on Inside Story.

Right through the postwar years the Financial Times was a remarkable host to great journalists and a rich source of insight and revelation. But it fell into the passionless and ultimately damaging embrace of people who neither understood nor cared for its purpose, their neglect accentuated by a wholly destructive period of digital mania circa 1996–2000.

Barber, on this account, crashed into the halls of power and staged a one-man coup. The good news is that, unlike so many in the media who consort and conspire for the sole purpose of acquiring a position of power, Barber had a serious purpose. And he delivered.

At its heart, the Barber strategy was about the role the FT plays for its readers. Barber made that notion of value the foundation of his response to a new media environment in which the reader is quite literally the judge of success. The key to his triumph is how he expressed that primacy of value, and it’s important to understand this as a life-or-death issue for the news media.

Barber’s account reads as a diary, its progression of calendar highlights revealing the fragile confidence of those who take seriously the job of editing an important source of news. Amid anecdotes and fun observations is a blunt recognition of office politics; an honest acknowledgement of the reality that, often, the best sources of information are not nice people; and some unfiltered insights into the highwire act of leading smart, articulate people.

This is a book with lots of editor-meets-extremely-powerful-and/or-rich-person moments, including a quite funny aperçu in which he announces at a Washington cocktail party, hosted by Christopher Hitchens, that he aims for the downfall of Paul Wolfowitz. Barber is not sober; Wolfowitz is standing behind him. Along the way, Barber’s predecessor Andrew Gowers is cast as the man who shot the albatross, seemingly unable to find a role that didn’t quickly become associated with disaster.

Barber, on the other hand, had a ball. Most importantly of all, his account contains a trail of crumbs on a path to what, in my estimation, is the re-formation of the best of English-language newspapers.

The FT’s first digital presence was in the hands of a former consultant (it’s amazing how many people in the early digital media came from McKinsey) who aimed to drive the paper’s wealthy readership into its dairy-like partnership with a financial services company. During 1999–2000, giving away content for free, the FT lost serious money while peers were clocking record earnings from the dotcom boom and Y2K ad spends. (A personal recollection: I met the FT.com guru in 1997 and just after, at the Economist, I was confronted by the contrary attitude: “Why would we build a website?” The point being that there was no money in it. The FT’s owner, Pearson, owned half of the Economist.)

Barber grabbed the editorship in 2005, when the FT was still losing money and lustre within a company, Pearson plc, that had been whittled down from a rich menagerie of random assets and turned into a global education business. With a newspaper.

The reader is left to wonder what the FT’s chief executive, John Ridding, wanted when he replaced Gowers with Barber. Barber says he went in with a plan to meet the demands of the internet’s influence on reading habits and media business models. He describes five “strategic imperatives,” the first being to develop the newspaper and website in tandem.

FT.com had been run as a wholly separate operation. It was striking to visit its City offices at 1 Poultry EC2, a postmodern edifice with windows framing the Bank of England. (In sharp contrast, the newspaper had moved from its historic Bracken House to a utilitarian office block adjacent to Southwark Bridge.) Where the FT, at its best, offers an intelligent view of events and insightful interpretations of complex affairs, the initial FT.com strategy had all the subtlety of its pink stone office building. (Not much.)

Barber’s first principle relied on creating a valuable news media product, whether in print or digital form. Four further points reinforced that choice: building on its international audience, restoring its strength in British business news, sharpening its (global) financial news, and investing in talent. In reality, this could only be a plan if someone with authority backed it by turning editorial value into cash. Barber had such a person in Caspar de Bono, whose curious title was, and still is, managing director B2B.

“Editorial transformation was key to the FT’s commercial proposition, which relied heavily on business subscriptions from banks, accountancy and law firms,” writes Barber. “This B2B business was run by Caspar de Bono, a brilliant, obdurate man who spoke in short sentences.” Barber doesn’t claim it, so I expect that either Ridding or de Bono were the people who took editorial faith to the bank.

The FT went back to paid subscriptions in 2001. (I suspect it had no choice, given the damage done to what had been a premium product.) Over the next few years it gradually adopted what it now calls a direct relationship with readers. Translated: it cut out the aggregators — notably Dow Jones’s Factiva database, which is effectively a discounter of premium news to premium clients, but also Apple’s and Google’s app platforms — and generally began a steady progression towards what is now a pricey subscription even for larger organisations. As it progressively advanced its value-gathering, the FT refused to allow anyone else to clip the ticket.

Barber had a tough task as the public face of a pricing strategy that, as de Bono once said, reflects the culture. Journalists — especially columnists — like big audiences, and the internet gives egos a metric. Barber had to manage the inane “information must be free” argument. But he goes to the heart of this matter in an anecdote about Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, a Wall Street big shot.

The FT sued Blackstone over its staff practice of sharing FT passwords to avoid paying extra subscriptions. When Barber meets Schwarzman in a conference at the Davos forum, Schwarzman predictably claims that the FT’s pricing is extortionate. Barber talks about the FT’s survival, then tells Schwarzman, “So there comes a moment when I say: fuck you.” “I get it,” says Schwarzman.

Two ideas came to challenge journalists in this time. One was celebrity. Social media offers the illusion of fame, with evidence. It is a beast that demands feeding and rewards bad behaviour. The second idea was even more dull: the idea of 24/7 instantaneous news. Barber treats this as an issue of his “platform neutral” position, which is to say: at some point the website gets first dibs and the newspaper comes second. Here, he doesn’t engage the wider issue of news as a commodity.

I like to imagine I can take some personal credit for the big event in the FT’s recent history. In about 2009, I pitched to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun the idea that they should join with an English-language publisher to take advantage of its extensive news sourcing in Asia, and especially China. I got no bites as representative of the Australian Financial Review. But the Nikkei CEO I pitched to was the same one who bought the FT in 2015, saving it from the alternative ownership of Axel Springer. A lot of Nikkei staff thought the FT a dud call. But it has progressed firmly to profit, and now more than a million subscribers are paying a hefty annual fee.

Barber loved his job, and reading his book you can see why. He had an awful lot of fun. But beneath that, there’s the enthusiasm and wilfulness that makes good news outlets what they are. There’s no doubt that he created a great place for good people to work. And it says enough about him that he happily cites, in the course of an apt anecdote, the character reference published by the Daily Mail: “a weapons grade social climber and name-dropper extraordinaire, with a statesmanlike aura.” •

The post Clipping his own ticket appeared first on Inside Story.

Margaret Thatcher’s epic fall had the lot. The vertiginous week that followed Diana’s death came close. Since that 1990s peak, the pictures have got small. Brexit, Scotland, wars, elections: all have dipped well below the decade’s high bar (though the first two are having another go in extra time). Between the craving for release and the means to satisfy it there now lies an abyss, whose hallmark is the political–media spasm, or PMS. Facilitated by classical politics’ and canonical media’s submission to social media, the PMS is defined here as an unhinged, self-cannibalising public furore that debases whatever is ostensibly at issue. Not just the rotten fruit of this millennial declension, the PMS is its very avatar — as is exhibited, with fitting bathos, by Tony Abbott’s starring role in a recent production.

More dirt bucket than welcome mat, the instant local reaction to a Sun report on 25 August trumpeting the pick of “our wizard of Oz” for an undefined role promoting London’s post-Brexit trade was also impressively viperous. The ousted member for Warringah was described as a “failed Australian prime minister” (passim), “right-wing Australian anglophile” and “antipodean mercenary”; a “man of primitive opinions” and “one of the most notorious attack dingoes of Aussie politics”; “a has-been from the other side of the world of whom we know little and care less” yet also a “travelling player on the right-wing thinktank circuit” and one of a “clown parade of other fruit loops”; an “unreconstructed example of Australian chauvinist manhood”; a “walking dinosaur… defective, morally bankrupt, intellectually inadequate”; and a “strange” and “unnecessary” choice because of his antediluvian views on climate change, same-sex marriage and labour rights, and his “political gunslinging,” “inability to command loyalty” and “directionless leadership.”

Haughtiest of all, naturally from a Guardian star columnist, was Abbott’s depiction as an oddball “from the remaindered bin in Australia” who “might see his role pushing British exports as an escalating scale of rugby club dares,” and the move itself “like learning that Theresa May had accepted a part on Neighbours, possibly as some kind of Mrs Mangel reboot.” Abbott, congeniality itself in a Zoom chat with the House of Commons foreign affairs committee three days later, told a bumptious Labour MP, “I do not normally read the Guardian; I am sure it is a wonderful newspaper, but it is not my staple reading.” This didn’t get into the paper.

The prize for invective-solely-designed-to-go-viral (from a strong field) went to Labour’s shadow trade secretary Emily Thornberry, carrying the unfair advantage of five years in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet: “[A] man addicted to picking fights — confrontational, aggressive, thin-skinned and nasty,” “sexist,” “sleazy,” “Islamophobic,” an “offensive, leering, cantankerous, climate change–denying, Trump-worshipping misogynist.” Her 800-word volley began with responses from among the “host of Australian political contacts” she had texted with the news (variations on “that must be a joke,” their “uniform theme”), and ended: “[If] Tony Abbott is the best answer Boris Johnson can come up with [to Britain’s trade deal void], we’re in even more trouble than we think.”

“During his brief, two-year premiership,” those contacts had told her, “his trade minister — Andrew Robb — succeeded in translating the previous Labor government’s legwork into agreements with China, Japan and South Korea, as well as progressing Australia’s involvement in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. All Abbott did was come along at the end of the process and sign the treaties. He has no hands-on experience of trade negotiations whatsoever.”

The one–two punch — he’s a cad, and clueless on trade — was something everyone could pitch in with, from arts, environmental, LBGT+ and sporting celebrities to MPs and diplomatic veterans of the Uruguay round. London mayor Sadiq Khan (“misogynistic and homophobic views”) and Scotland’s premier Nicola Sturgeon (“He’s a misogynist, a sexist, a climate-change denier who shouldn’t be any kind of envoy”), neither of them ever slow to hitch a ride on a passing bandwagon, drew from the now ubiquitous litany, though Labour leader Keir Starmer once more proved to be a canny operator: “I have real concerns about Tony Abbott and I don’t think he’s the right person for the job. And if I was prime minister I wouldn’t appoint him.”

Abbott’s exact status was still unknown, as the man himself confirmed on 1 September at that Commons hearing: “I think I would call it a role rather than a job… there is nothing official as yet.” Responding with good humour to grandstanding darts from Labour and Scots nationalist MPs (“a bit of lively banter and partisan sparring… brings back happy memories [of] the parliamentary chamber floor”), his message, consistent with many op-eds and speeches since the 2016 Brexit vote, was that London should follow up a bilateral trade deal with Canberra by joining the interim Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

More spicy were comments on end-of-life care and lockdown’s “psychic damage” at a lecture that morning to the Policy Exchange think tank — whose chair is Alexander Downer, formerly Australia’s high commissioner in London — which showed the Guardian’s diplomatic editor “how Abbott’s courting of controversy made his possible appointment by Johnson a high political risk.”

On the other side, the cheerleading of the Sun (or “Murdoch’s Sun,” to use the correct vernacular) lacked the paper’s usual fizz, given its exclusive that the “forthright Aussie” is “to be unveiled as Britain’s new trade deal supremo” or, more formally, “joint President of Britain’s relaunched Board of Trade.” Johnson himself, as so often in these months, was absent from the front line, leaving ministers to defend the still-hazy appointment.

A mannequin could plausibly have done better. Health secretary Matt Hancock, a gung-ho crusader amid every Covid-19 setback, quailed at a Sky News presenter’s checklist of Abbott quotes. Liz Truss, the Panglossian trade secretary who doubles as minister for women and equalities, when asked “why is it right that someone who is widely viewed as sexist, homophobic and a climate-change denier should be representing Britain around the world?” replied, “What I’d say about Tony Abbott is that he’s a former prime minister of Australia. Australia is a key ally of the United Kingdom and he has done a very good job in areas like trade.”

Through this wan defence, Australian ex-diplomats had already bowled some scornful zingers. Abbott would be “a sporadic distraction, as is his wont” in any Australian–UK process, not “window dresser” but “window breaker,” former trade negotiator Tim Ward opined in the right-wing Telegraph, adding that “[given] how destabilising his very presence seems to be, it could even be viewed as a cunning ploy by Australia to rattle the other side.” Mike Rann, who preceded Downer as high commissioner, said Abbott was known for “picking a scrap with anyone,” then nailed press coverage with a sly mention of Johnson’s most hapless cabinet placeman.

A trio of ex–Australian PMs who had jousted with Abbott, now regulars in London’s media firmament and treated with the deference that status entails, also joined the fray, thickening the flavour of an Australian proxy war fought on British shores, a kind of contrived semblance — once more, the second time as bathos — of ABC’s spellbinding The Killing Season.

Beyond doubting that Abbott could actually negotiate on behalf of the UK (“awkward to say the least”), Malcolm Turnbull added little to the caustic portrait of “wrecker” Abbott in his hefty autobiography, while Kevin Rudd (“Is the UK joking?”) took another chance to assail “Bozo the Clown’s” climate and health record. “If the UK goes through with this, he will be an albatross around their neck.” Julia Gillard’s own Sky News gig was a model of message discipline, first in promoting a book, then in holding to a tight script over her viral 2012 speech, fixedly not naming its targets. (“I stand by every word but I don’t think I need to add to it. It’s not for me to work out who should be the UK trade envoy or specialist.”)

For their part, some of Abbott’s ideological confrères were initially stunned by the way that the Sun’s 250-word pebble had, Withnail & I–like, set off an avalanche by mistake. A more downbeat tone might have served them better. (“Oz reject is Brit pick,” or “Aussie ex-PM bats for Blighty” — more originals on request.) Talking to themselves, they had omitted to game-plan his character and record becoming headline news in the old country. But as the vitriol fed on itself, as per the modern PMS, a retaliatory barrage, notably male-heavy, was let loose, its gist that Abbott was being traduced and merits the post.

Lamenting “personal abuse” and “cheap caricature,” the monthly Critic’s political editor Graham Stewart saw Abbott in eminent terms: an “Anglophile former prime minister of one of Britain’s friendliest allies” and a former Rhodes scholar and monarchist on whom the Queen bestowed the Order of Australia “for his life of public service” (accolades become a mite rickety) with an effective record of “bilateral diplomacy.” Daniel Hannan, prolific evangelist for Brexit and the Anglosphere, echoed the claim (“He knows how to get ambitious trade deals done. We are lucky to have him”), as did Downer (“Tony has huge experience of navigating through the thorny bushes of trade agreements”), while the Adam Smith Institute’s Matthew Lesh said he can “provide the advice and advocacy to get deals over the final, contentious hurdles that inevitably develop at a political level.”

Lesh’s vigorous polemic conceded “some questionable comments” by Abbott “in the past,” but defended him by referring to the supportive testimony of Abbott’s sister Christine Forster and late gay friend Christopher Pearson, the “deranged hatred” of a left now “rushing for the pitchforks,” how British views of Abbott have been “twisted” by Gillard’s “out-of-context speech,” and even Peter Hartcher’s morning-after column in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Being a conservative, with traditional social views, should not disqualify someone from all positions in public life,” Lesh argued.

That same day, 4 September, former Abbott adviser Terry Barnes published an eerily similar piece (a “flawed” man who “has said unwise, even stupid, things in the past — who hasn’t?”… whose image is “framed by his political enemies”… “vicious caricature”… “a skilled negotiator who can reconcile competing interests”… “nobody remembers the context of that fiery speech”…).

The PMS, imperious offspring of the pre-internet era’s “media circus,” is happiest in a vacuum. Information tends to get in its way. By now this one had lasted for nine days without a single new fact. Equally familiar was this PMS’s pattern: an ogre, affixed with twittified bio and shaming quotes, becomes the pretext for cartoonish, self-inflatable sloganeering that not only elicits an imitative defence but also shapes even the less reductive outpouring. The only thing in doubt was how it would exhaust itself.

Whispers of another backflip, a motif of Johnson’s premiership, began to spread. But on 4 September, with Julia’s Sky interview also doing the rounds and another weekend’s torrid headlines in sight, a hard-hatted Boris, asked where Tony stood in light of the row, delivered a typically writhing answer: “There’s going to be an announcement about the composition of the board of trade. I obviously don’t agree with those sentiments at all, but then I don’t agree with everyone who serves the government in an unpaid capacity on hundreds of boards across the country. And I can’t be expected to do so. What I would say about Tony Abbott is this is a guy who was elected by the people of the great liberal-democratic nation of Australia. It’s an amazing country, it’s a freedom-loving country, it’s a liberal country. There you go, I think that speaks for itself.”

By late afternoon, it was official: “the Honourable Tony Abbott” would be one of nine advisers to the board of trade, just as the Nine group’s Bevan Shields had intimated on day one, channelling an evidently impeccable source. (Abbott will serve in “some sort of advisory capacity,” he had posted.) The board, one of eleven committees tasked with refuelling UK strategy in key policy areas, includes Patricia Hewitt, the Canberra-born former trade secretary in Tony Blair’s government, Linda Yueh, economist and broadcaster, and investment banker William Russell, also mayor of London’s financial district as well as a member of the previous board suspended in July. That Russell functions as a friend of China’s establishment, with the ineluctable tangles the position now involves, raised zero interest amid the PMS.

That, for the present, was that. Now, between quarterly meetings with new colleagues, Abbott can get down to the work — unpaid, expenses aside, and scarcely glamorous — of “[engaging] extensively with industry, communities, farmers and consumer groups across the UK, to ensure a range of voices are heard as the UK develops its independent trade policy.” As he customises this bland spec, Zoom-networking an Australia–East Asia–UK triangle, progress will also depend on Brexit’s endgame with the European Union (in short: a trade deal or not?), and even on how Britain’s stew of economic and political uncertainties, not least the course of Boris Johnson’s government, plays out. Among these, a “growing Tory love for Australia,” albeit tendentious and needy, is cohesive for the party, with Abbott himself the emblem. It’s not you, it’s us, might well be the unspoken declaration.

More tasty are incipient signs of a roving commission for Abbott. The Financial Times reports this week that home secretary Priti Patel’s pondering the idea of sending far afield the migrants (Iranian, Afghan, Sudanese and more) who crossed the English Channel on small vessels “is further evidence of the influence of Tony Abbott’s ideas on Boris Johnson’s government.” Ascension Island in the south Atlantic was one candidate, Shetland in the North Sea another. (This chimera jolted recall of an observation by the CIA’s Frank G. Wisner in 1949, regarding the doomed Anglo-American venture to oust Albania’s communist regime, as recounted by the KGB spy Kim Philby: “Whenever we want to subvert any place, we find the British own an island within easy reach.”)

Here is the second potential seed of the next Abbott spasm, the first being the fintech entrepreneur Anne Boden’s barbed declaration of pride when her own trade board membership became known: “[It] is important that we have challenging voices at such an important body. I support diversity and so did this woman,” linking to Julia Gillard’s famous speech.

The PMS was wilting from the moment of Johnson’s interview, though the Guardian’s autopump turned Friday’s front-page lead “Pressure on PM to drop ‘misogynist’ trade adviser” into Saturday’s “PM appoints ‘misogynist’ Abbott as trade adviser.” By then the next spasm was being given lift-off by Extinction Rebellion’s two-week protest carnival, as the eco-activists’ blockage of roads and newspaper deliveries, plus its mounting of a Titanic-themed posh tea party and a model lighthouse named Greta Thunberg, incited the gamut of reaction from fury to ridicule.

Abbott fever left no trace. That may have owed a little to the swift handover to Extinction Rebellion. But two factors are more fundamental (and also fit XR, Dominic Cummings’s lockdown trip, and Black Lives Matter in its local variant). First, the PMS exists in an eternal present, absorbing into itself all other temporalities. In a flash, it dominates. Once popped, it vanishes. Thanks to a first in human history — the melding of instant amnesia and instant retrievability — it is also ever available for an encore. When that hits, and the manic carousel is unblushingly reprised, there is no sense of a previous iteration, since everything now belongs to the new eternal present.

Second, the PMS is always primarily about itself, reducing to effluent its notional subject and putative ethical concerns. Driven way beyond its natural life or level by value-spawning attention, clicks and noise, it operates to disallow any resolution or release. It can never offset the vast resources it devours and the coercive hyperbole of its language. Thus the PMS is a guarantor of disappointment.

From the consumer side, to accept the PMS on its own terms would be to overlook its many foreclosures. An oblivious British public was given no hint that Abbott himself, if unlikely ever to be stuck with the most plangent judgement in The Killing Season’s four hours — Jenny Macklin’s “people are complex” — might be viewed in other than Manichean terms. Neither his own capsule self-portrait in response to David Marr’s Political Animal — “a more nuanced and complex character than perhaps many of the standard left-leaning critics would concede” — nor the book itself, nor anything else from the Abbott oeuvre, got a look-in. The PMS can’t accommodate nuance, complexity — or curiosity.

Neither did themes pertinent to Abbott’s heralded job receive much attention during the PMS: the contours of an Australia–UK trade negotiation, the tenability of the Anglosphere, and the wider Tory infatuation with down under (Isaac Levido’s key strategic role in Number 10 as but one example) — or even the fate of its Labour counterpart. The British Foreign Policy Group’s Sophie Gaston, viewing “today’s antipodean dalliance” in equable terms (“something feels unique about the Australian influence in British politics in 2020”), was an exception.

The political–media spasm can well afford to ignore such laments. The now-unguarded public realm, beneficiary of and in thrall to social media’s flattening of silos, is its playpen. No wonder the great national drama — as music hall to film, or silents to talkies — could not survive. What the PMS can offer in place is less than clear. But when so many are happy to play Bozo the Clown, perhaps that hardly matters. •

The post Captain Abbott’s pick appeared first on Inside Story.

“Historical,” you say?

The article itself, by Simon Benson, is a little less assertive, reporting a 2 per cent first-preference Coalition increase from a fortnight ago and a “corresponding fall for Labor, which has returned to near-historical lows of 34 per cent.”

In Newspoll terms there’s nothing historical about it; the Gillard government of 2010–13 often registered primary-vote numbers less than 30 per cent, bottoming at 27.

But in the context of actual election results the Australian is on safer ground. A 34 per cent primary vote would be, well, historically very low, although an improvement on the 33.3 per cent Labor got at last year’s election.

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that 34 per cent is a small proportion of the electorate. Past Labor leaders, successful or otherwise, would find it hard to believe the party could sink so low.

Can Labor win with 34 per cent? Not if the Coalition is on (as this Newspoll has it) 43, the Greens are on 12 and One Nation is 3. It would probably lose with about 49 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, which happens to be Newspoll’s estimate. But if the previous fortnight’s Newspoll was replicated at the ballot box — 36 per cent for Labor versus 41 for the Coalition — Labor would get a two-party-preferred vote of about 51 per cent in today’s climate, which is usually enough for victory.

It’s the “c” in “compulsory preferential voting” that keeps Labor competitive at the federal level. If it were an “o” for optional (like in New South Wales) you could shift another 1 or 2 per cent (more like 2) from Labor’s two-party-preferred column into the Coalition’s.

Way back in the decade before last, Labor “sources” seeking to undermine their leader — those who denigrated Simon Crean because they wanted a return to Kim Beazley, and then those among the Crean/Gillard forces getting their own back against Bomber — would confide to journalists that “it,” the Labor primary vote, “needs a four in front of it” if the party is to be at all competitive. (Usually this would be prefaced by “mate,” because it is written somewhere that this is the preferred mode of address of party apparatchiks when dealing with our fourth estate.)

Then Labor won a slender two-party-preferred majority in 2010, with 38 per cent of the primary vote. (That involved overhauling a five-point primary-vote deficit with preferences, mostly from the Greens. It was only the second federal election at which the primary-vote loser won the two-party-preferred vote; the other was the Hawke government’s second re-election in 1987.)

So for the last ten years it’s been “(mate,) it needs to be in the high thirties.” But the truth, in our voting system, is that neither side’s primary vote means much in isolation; the result depends on what the other side gets, and what the minor parties and independents receive and where their preferences flow. One of Labor’s worst results ever, the landslide after the 1975 dismissal, came off a 42.8 per cent primary vote, which the party would have killed for at any election over the past decade. (Preferences in 1975 barely improved it, to an estimated 44.3.)

It is little noted that in 2019 the Coalition’s 41.4 per cent was its second-lowest primary vote since the second world war and the creation of the Liberal Party. Its lowest was in 1998, which those with long memories will recall the Howard government survived despite losing the national two-party-preferred vote by a Trumpish 2 per cent.

You get the picture: it’s two-party-preferred votes that count, not primary ones.

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that Australia’s oldest political party attracts barely a third of the national primary vote. Is it on the way out? You bet it is. So are the Liberals and Nationals. It’s not if, but when.

In the meantime, there are still elections to contest and two-party-preferred majorities to aim for. •

The post How low can you go? appeared first on Inside Story.

In developing the job guarantee proposal, Pearson has linked up with economist Bill Mitchell, a leading proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT. Mitchell argues that fiscal deficits are not inherently bad and that seeking to control inflation by maintaining a “buffer” of unemployed people (the current orthodoxy) is economically damaging. While the lively international debate about the feasibility of MMT is important, the job guarantee proposal doesn’t stand or fall according to how you view MMT.

Proponents argue that a universal job guarantee, set at the minimum wage, would have three important benefits. It would act as an “automatic stabiliser” (in Keynes’s terminology) by countering undue rises or falls in demand across the economy. It would forestall the significant economic and social costs of structural unemployment. And it would allow the central bank to focus squarely on managing inflation rather than having to attend to both inflation and employment targets.

In an opinion piece in the Weekend Australian, Pearson made plain what was driving his interest in this issue: “My people, consigned to welfare and structural exclusion from the real economy in the post-60s era of growing unemployment, have been victims of public policy choice for which there existed a better and more humane alternative.” He went on to outline his long campaign against passive welfare and its “bitter harvest”: “social problems, broken families, intergenerational poverty, lower life expectancy, egregious rates of out-of-home care for children, juvenile detention and adult incarceration.”

Although the necessary legislation would be national, the scheme would be administered through local government, Pearson wrote. He distinguished it from work for the dole — “It’s a full-time, minimum-wage job” — and stressed that the payment would replace unemployment benefits and end the churning of “hapless clients” through welfare-to-work programs.

Three weeks later, Pearson and Mitchell followed up with a two-pronged argument for their idea. First, focusing on the employment gap for Indigenous citizens, they cited a recent national cabinet pledge (not then public) to raise the Indigenous employment rate from 49 per cent to 60 per cent of working-age people by 2028. When it was finally announced on 29 July, the target was set at 62 per cent by 2031. With the mainstream rate currently 75 per cent, this new Close the Gap target concedes that four in ten Indigenous people will be without a job for the indefinite future.

Second, focusing on mainstream employment, they pointed to current estimates of 7.4 per cent unemployment and around 11.7 per cent underemployment. Figures recently published by Mitchell suggest that an annual $50 billion in government outlays could create 1.24 million jobs and bring employment down to 4 per cent. This fiscal stimulus would also have the flow-on effect of increasing private sector demand for labour, and its cost would come down as the private sector picked up.

Pearson and Mitchell point (persuasively, in my view) to the illogicality of the government’s recent decision to withdraw fiscal stimulus in the face of ongoing community shutdowns and rising unemployment.

Finally, they argue that separating Indigenous disadvantage from mainstream disadvantage is a poor policy choice:

[It] allows a pall of exceptionalism to be cast over the constantly depressing and outrageously out-of-step numbers that characterise Indigenous disadvantage. It’s as if the country — inured to the bad numbers — has come to accept that little can be done.

The country needs to address inequality and poverty as an Australian problem, not just an Indigenous problem.

So, how should we assess Pearson and Mitchell’s job guarantee plan?

The Australian’s editorial on 8 July 2020 provided an early critique. Headed “The Promise and Pitfalls of Modern Monetary Theory: Printing Money Doesn’t Reduce Deficits or Create Lasting Jobs,” the editorial takes aim at Pearson and Mitchell for overreach, the cost of administration, and the putative lack of fiscal self-control if “a populist National, a clueless Green, or a Labor class warrior” were they to control the Treasury benches.

“Pearson’s is a mammoth, brave proposal, one that would redefine the role of the state,” said the editorial, conceding that “In the midst of the greatest social and economic calamity in ninety years, there has to be more scope for imagination and ambition in our policy approach.”

Nevertheless, it saw a number of hurdles. The cost and administration of the scheme “would be vast,” work incentives would be skewed, some citizens wouldn’t want to work or train, and welfare would still be required for those who fall through the cracks. “While the policy edifice is failing Indigenous people, a neat solution is a chimera,” it summed up, concluding with the trite observation that:

we live in a complex, even messy world… How can you hope to manage the economy?… As an analytical tool the theory [MMT] has merit. But with printing money in the real world, there is a day of reckoning or just a long stagnation. Our income can never be guaranteed, so we need to earn and pay our way.

The value in this editorial is that it begins to set down the outlines of the case against the Pearson–Mitchell proposal — and it appears to be a collection of time-worn chestnuts synonymous with the slogan “private good, public bad.”

The Australian relies on the ideological trope that fiscal responsibility (austerity, in other words) must at all times be paramount in policy-making and administration — an idea already blown to smithereens by the pandemic. It also assumes that government’s role should be minimised and the concomitant red and green tape shredded — a view also blown out of the water by the exigencies of the pandemic. And its argument rests on a belief that complexity and messiness make for expensive policy and programs. Well, yes, but that reflects the world we live in. Markets and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” are amazing mechanisms for allocating resources, but they require strong and independent regulatory oversight if they are to work in the public interest.

What is missing from the Australian’s critique is an acknowledgement of the devastating costs (both financial and intangible) of an unemployment rate in excess of 10 per cent — and much higher among young people — over a sustained period. A recent Productivity Commission working paper on the consequences of the global financial crisis reports that “workers aged twenty to thirty-four experienced nearly zero growth in real wage rates from 2008 to 2018, and workers aged fifteen to twenty-four experienced a large decline in full-time work and an increase in part-time work.” Imagine what the commission will report in 2030 about the consequences of the current crisis.

A second omission from the Australian’s response is any acknowledgement of past policies directed at full employment, including New Deal–era programs in the United States and Australia’s own 1945 White Paper on Full Employment, which underpinned the postwar boom. The white paper’s full employment focus continues to this day as one of the legislated core functions of the Reserve Bank.

The third major omission is any conception of a dynamic and evolving role for government not just as a provider of public goods but also as a manager of risk. A job guarantee can be viewed as an institutional mechanism to retain, strengthen and develop the nation’s human and intellectual capital. To take just one example, the laws governing limited liability corporations are a form of risk insurance for shareholders. As the American economist David Moss points out in When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager, it wasn’t initially obvious that such innovations were required or would work. Today, they underpin the financial markets that raise most of the world’s capital for investment. I don’t hear any calls for this “red tape” to be removed.

Ultimately, though, the problem with the Australian’s editorial is that it focuses on the costs of delivering a job guarantee but entirely ignores the costs of failing to deliver one. Yes, a job guarantee would have implications for other policies. But it should be included on policymakers’ list of potential priorities and assessed against all others.

Leaving employment policy to the private sector is a choice of policymakers and governments, and it has serious consequences for citizens who can’t find work. Conveniently for governments, employment levels are made to seem as if they are someone else’s responsibility. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of the government (and indeed the opposition), the current orthodoxy allows governments to avoid hard decisions about social priorities. It means they can dodge the question: is full employment a priority or not?

In other words, I am a strong supporter of the Pearson–Mitchell proposal. If implemented, it would expand social inclusion, alleviate financial disadvantage and undoubtedly have other positive spin-offs for individuals, while providing a considerable impetus to social and economic infrastructure in local and regional communities. It would also make a huge contribution to eliminating Indigenous disadvantage, although it is not a silver bullet in that regard.

Like any complex public policy proposal, the guarantee will present challenges. As with planning for postwar reconstruction in the 1940s, designing the scheme will throw up many issues, the administrative systems required will be complex, and unintended consequences will emerge, particularly in the implementation phase. Tension is inevitable between the Commonwealth, as the funder of the program, and the delivery agencies (currently proposed to be local governments) over modes of operation, allocation of labour resources, and lines of accountability and reporting. These are not insurmountable challenges, but they do point to the importance of maintaining a degree of flexibility in the overall architecture of the scheme.

Despite the substantial merits of this proposal, though, the likelihood of any Australian government implementing it over the next five years is close to zero. This is not down to any fault in the proposal; it reflects the quality, risk aversion and blinkered ideologies of our governments and public institutions.

Would any modifications to the proposal make it more attractive to government? While a key virtue of the Pearson–Mitchell proposal is that it is universal, it may be that a second-best option, more limited in scope, will have a better chance of being implemented. This wouldn’t preclude the eventual adoption of a universal scheme and would provide an opportunity to test what will inevitably be a challenging and complex reform.

The economic and social crisis arising from the pandemic certainly demands more than business as usual, and its impact is likely to persist well beyond the current political cycle. This suggests that a proposal focused on the current crisis — rather than an open-ended scheme — might be more politically palatable. With a ten-year horizon, for instance, the effectiveness of the policy could be assessed based on its tangible record in cushioning the economic impacts of the crisis.

Another possibility would be to introduce the job guarantee across remote Australia, replacing the current Community Development Program, which is widely acknowledged outside government circles to be less than effective and highly punitive in its implementation. The levels of unemployment and underemployment are far worse in remote and very remote Australia, and it is already clear that current policies are doing very little to turn that around.

Even this scaled-back version would meet political resistance, but the Commonwealth’s very modest Indigenous employment ambitions in the new Closing the Gap program — and the absence of any strategy to meet even those meagre targets — suggests the need to try something new. A mainstream job guarantee in remote Australia would automatically target a substantial proportion of the most disadvantaged Indigenous citizens in the nation.

However a job guarantee program is rolled out, the unique circumstances of remote Australia will require particular attention. Indigenous organisations would expect to co-design the program, and community-controlled organisations would expect accreditation as job providers. The decentralised demographics and legitimate cultural aspirations of the remote Indigenous population will also create challenges. The lack of resources for managing the extensive and growing Indigenous land estate will need to be a focus, and the guarantee must build on successful innovations like the “working on country” programs that fund over one hundred ranger groups across the nation.

In what is clearly shaping to be a once-in-a-century financial, health and social crisis, the job guarantee is an idea whose time has come. It would align squarely with both major parties’ claim that job creation is the key priority for government. It would provide stimulus over the next decade. It would build rather than waste our most precious national resource, the skills and intellectual capital of our citizens. It would provide a strategy to reject the idea that the nation’s prosperity requires the impoverishment of a significant proportion of our citizens, particularly our youth. And it would open up employment opportunities to structurally excluded Indigenous communities and citizens — a choice the nation has lacked the political will to reverse.

In the shadow of a potentially existential climate crisis, we need all hands on deck. The national interest requires that we use all the human resources available in economically, socially and environmentally productive ways. •

The post All hands on deck appeared first on Inside Story.

The team behind the paper says that a circulation of about 15,000 will make the Northern Rivers Times a viable business. The early signs are good: when they first announced the new paper, they reported receiving more than 16,000 messages of encouragement, and on the day the first issue appeared nearly 900 emails arrived from businesses, the community and politicians — not only from the northern rivers area but from all over the state. The first three issues have covered a diverse range of topics, including local council news, community events, education, health and sport, and each edition includes a TV guide, classifieds and a community billboard. The paper’s aim is to meet audiences wherever they are and whatever they want, and not just online.

Almost since the first European settlers arrived, regional and community newspapers have been at the heart of Australian life. But last summer’s bushfires and this year’s pandemic have accelerated the collapse of local papers that had already been shrinking in the face of digital disruption.

In April, with sales and advertising down during the first wave of Covid-19, Australian Community Media, which owns 160 regional newspapers including the Canberra Times, the Newcastle Herald, the Border Mail and the Bendigo Advertiser, temporarily suspended its non-daily print editions and shut down four printing sites. News Corp, which has the largest network of local papers, stopped the print editions of more than a hundred community newspapers and converted most of its titles to digital-only.

All told, according to the Public Interest Journalism Initiative, more than 200 news outlets have been suspended or closed since January 2019, 80 per cent of them during the pandemic. This has left a critical gap in local news provision.

But the trend isn’t all one way. News Corp announced last month that it will launch fifteen new digital-only mastheads in major centres of regional Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia this year, with a plan to establish up to fifty digital titles across Australia over the next three years. News Corp also foreshadowed the return of the print versions of three local papers in Sydney — the Wentworth Courier, the Mosman Daily and the North Shore Times.

Meanwhile, community-backed papers have emerged in a range of regional towns where existing print editions had been suspended. The new papers include the Yass Valley Times, the Southern Highlands Express, the News in Naracoorte, South Burnett Today, the West Queensland Echo, Wet Tropic Times, the Ararat Advocate, the Hunter River Times and the Braidwood Changing Times, with more in the pipeline.

This flurry of activity has a clear message: local news is essential for regional communities. These communities want their stories told. But while these new ventures are a cause for optimism, not all towns will benefit. Other measures are needed to preserve and expand the strengths of local news-gathering.

When we surveyed 2038 news consumers in regional areas across Australia in November and December last year, we found that a majority of them (88 per cent) — and especially those with lower socioeconomic backgrounds — access local news sources regularly. One in five reported having been affected by the closure or merger of a news service in their area in the past five years. If we conducted the survey again today, the affected number would likely be much higher.

Not only did one in five respondents say they had lost a local news service, one in four said they had no local TV news service or newspaper. One in three said there was no local commercial radio servicing their community, and more than half (55 per cent) told us ABC local radio doesn’t have a presence in their area.

Instead, almost a quarter were accessing local social media sites to get local news. The use of these sites is growing: almost half of the respondents said they have joined a social media group, such as Facebook Groups or group chats on WhatsApp, to get local news. These hyperlocal sites are now the fourth-most-used source of local news among regional news consumers.

Our study reveals that people who live in areas that have lost a local newspaper or TV news service believe the loss of local information has reduced their sense of belonging. According to these consumers, the remaining news offerings in their area are not meeting their needs.

This lack of satisfaction is serious, because people in regional Australia rely more heavily on local news services than do their counterparts in cities. The Digital News Report: Australia 2020 shows that more than twice as many regional news consumers access local newspapers (24 per cent) compared with city consumers (11 per cent).

It is the desire for community connection that drives the need for local news in regional areas. Respondents told us they access local news to know what is going on in their local area (87 per cent) and to understand how things may affect them (86 per cent).

In a separate study of regional journalists we found that many of the reporters working for local news outlets, particularly independent newspapers, live locally, which gives them a deeper local knowledge and a sense of commitment to the community they are reporting on. This may be one reason why regional audiences have greater trust in local news (63 per cent) than news generally (48 per cent). Regional Australians who regularly consume local news also say they are satisfied with the relevance (84 per cent) and accuracy (81 per cent) of local reporting.

Where gaps exist, regional audiences are keen for new offerings. About a third of those who don’t currently have access to traditional local news media are willing to financially support a new online grassroots news service. People who live in areas that have lost news outlets, and those who get their news from community newsletters, bulletin boards, local social media groups, websites or other local residents are particularly interested in supporting additional local news options. So are younger people and those with higher levels of education and income.

Yet the amount people are willing to pay for an extra local news service is still quite low. Fewer than half (46 per cent) are willing to pay up to $5 per month for a monthly subscription, regardless of whether that is for just one news brand or a bundle of titles.

These modest amounts highlight the dilemma facing the news industry as it struggles to replace lost advertising dollars with payments by readers. While the culture of paying for online news is slowly gaining traction among Australian news consumers, only 14 per cent are currently willing to pay. According to the Digital News Report: Australia 2020 only 8 per cent of Australian news consumers have an ongoing news subscription. The majority may never pay.

The financial struggle facing the Australian news industry is worse in many regional areas, particularly with Covid-19 having affected local businesses and advertising sales. In response, some short-term relief has been offered from a range of sources. For instance, the Australian government created a relief package in April, including a $50 million public interest news-gathering program. The Australian Communications and Media Authority announced that forty-one small and regional publishers will share $5 million in innovation funding. As part of a $2 million investment, seventeen newsrooms across Australia will receive funds from the Facebook Journalism Project Relief Fund. And Google announced emergency funding for local newsrooms.

Longer term, the federal government is pushing ahead with its code of conduct for negotiations between news outlets and the major technology platforms. Administered by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the code will require the major platforms to share advertising revenue with news organisations. Its precise impact on different media outlets is yet to become clear.

Meanwhile, the search for additional revenue continues. News Corp’s digital-only experiment in local publishing will be interesting to watch. Behind a paywall, it will offer hyperlocal news content written by journalists living and working in the community, the kind of news local audiences say they want. But the current business model means local journalists face low pay, long hours and isolation, particularly when they work in single-person newsrooms.

Overseas, various models for local news are being tested, four of which are particularly noteworthy. Berkeleyside is a direct public offering funded by more than 300 readers. Devil Strip is a cooperative model under which members of the local community become shareholders in “a publication owned and operated by the people of Akron for the benefit of the people of Akron.” The Colorado Media Project is a philanthropically funded statewide local news initiative providing funding, training, technology and other opportunities.

The most ambitious is the English-language version of the Correspondent, which has been crowdfunded by more than 50,000 founding members from 130 countries to produce ad-free journalism. Rather than a set rate, subscribers are asked to pay what they can afford. This model is based on the success of Holland’s De Correspondent, which has been providing daily news since 2013.

The common thread is that these experimental outlets engage and interact with their supporters not only as readers but also as contributors of their knowledge to stories and participants in the business itself. The aim is to maintain meaningful and long-term relationships between media outlets and their audiences.

Whether it’s online or offline, local news certainly seems to be in demand both from readers and from advertisers. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution: each local media outlet will need to tap into its unique market with multiple revenue streams, multi-platform delivery, and tailored offerings to stop the decline of local journalism. •

The post Here is the news (good and bad) for local readers appeared first on Inside Story.

Much has been written about press freedom and its virtues. As far back as 1644, John Milton penned a polemic pamphlet, Areopagitica, railing against the censorship of Britain’s publication licensing system. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” he demanded. Over the subsequent centuries, the conjoined principles of free speech and a free press became tenets of liberal democracy. In many countries press freedom remained illusory, but — at least in some parts of the world — an uncensored media prospered throughout the twenty-first century.

Today, that progress is faltering. In the past decade, journalists have been jailed or murdered in record numbers. Populist leaders decry “fake news” while police target reporters during protests. Secrecy offences, libel lawsuits and national security laws are being used to silence the press across the globe. Australia is no exception.

Following the raid on her apartment, Smethurst became the inadvertent face of a campaign for greater safeguards for Australia’s press. On Secrets is not a manifesto, but it provides a searing and deeply personal account of the indignity of the raid and a nuanced perspective on the challenges Australians face.

On that wintry Canberra day, the police handed Smethurst a warrant alleging that she may have breached the Crimes Act. The allegations related to her reporting in the Sunday Telegraph that the government was contemplating empowering the Australian Signals Directorate to spy not just on foreigners but also on Australian citizens. The controversial proposal, which remains on the political agenda today, was communicated to Smethurst by a source she refuses to reveal. Its publication would see the journalist’s life turned upside down for almost a year, during which the AFP considered charges and News Corp fought the raid in the High Court.

On Secrets begins with the ringing doorbell, as Smethurst recalls those painful hours in considerable detail. It is filled with dark humour — “the raid had transformed into something of a law-enforcement-style Marie Kondo experience” — but above all a sense of hurt. While the media made much of the AFP searching Smethurst’s underwear drawer, she writes, this “was far from the worst thing to happen that day.”

For seven hours, police rifled through Smethurst’s belongings while she and two News Corp lawyers watched helplessly. The AFP searched personal letters, copied the contents of her iPhone and peeked inside her oven “on the off-chance I had stored secret documents in my grill.” Eventually it was over and Smethurst was left alone as news of the raid began to circulate around the world. “It was still and silent and I cried until I had no more tears,” she writes. “I wanted to hide under my doona so that is what I did.”

These raw recollections are the most compelling element of On Secrets. It is easy to see press raids — along with the exasperated media executives and mute ministers that subsequently appear — as political theatre, just another act of high drama in the crowded 24/7 news cycle. But Smethurst reminds us that journalists are humans, too. Having had her inner sanctum violated, she promptly moved to her partner’s home (“a raid-triggered cohabitation. Who said romance was dead?”), while trying to remain positive about the prospect of imprisonment: “Perhaps I would become a powerlifter.”

The remainder of this pithy book is spent weaving macro observations about the challenges to press freedom in Australia with details of the raid’s aftermath (including, just a day later, the AFP raid on the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters). Smethurst’s commentary on what ails the Australian media — inadequate whistleblower protections, weak protections for free speech, a dysfunctional freedom of information system, draconian anti-terror laws — offers little in the way of novelty. But invigorated by her personal experience, it still packs a punch. “I believe the raid on my home was about more than evidence gathering,” she writes. “It sent a message to would-be whistleblowers not to speak up.”

The question of what to do about this state of affairs is rather vexing. Following the furore over the twin raids, Australia’s major publishers united behind the “Your Right to Know” coalition and ran an unprecedented joint front-page in October. “When government keeps the truth from you, what are they covering up?” the papers asked. The coalition has also set out a list of desired legislative reforms to prevent the progressive criminalisation of public interest reporting.

After some initial debate, though, the campaign has largely gone quiet. “I now know how impossible it is to truly appreciate something until it is denied to you,” writes Smethurst. “But if journalists struggle to get excited about press freedom, it’s an even harder task to rev up the public about the need for greater protections for the press.”

Nor are the courts offering much help. In April, the High Court found that the raid on Smethurst’s apartment was unlawful. While News Corp had sought to contest the constitutional validity of secrecy offences on free speech grounds, Australia’s top judges instead determined the case on extremely narrow statutory grounds, holding that the warrant failed to meet ordinary requirements. It was, as I and other commentators said at the time, a pyrrhic victory for press freedom. The ABC, meanwhile, lost its challenge to the legality of the other raid in the Federal Court.

Although the AFP ultimately determined that they would not be proceeding with charges against Smethurst, the ABC was given no such reprieve for their reporting of allegations of potential war crimes by Australian troops in Afghanistan. A brief of evidence is currently with the director of public prosecutions. In other words, in Australia, in 2020, a journalist faces the possibility of jail-time for reporting on state-sanctioned wrongdoing.

At one point in On Secrets, Smethurst quotes the aphorism, usually attributed to a famous American publisher, that “news is something which somebody wants suppressed: all the rest is advertising.” All Australians should be alarmed at the federal government’s attempts to suppress embarrassing revelations, silence whistleblowers, muzzle the press and shroud its operations in opacity. Australia fell five places in the latest World Press Freedom Index, and monitoring group Civicus rates the country’s civic space as “narrowed.” The degradation of press freedom is not something that happens only in far-off autocratic lands; it is happening here, now, right before our eyes.

It can only be hoped that On Secrets galvanises public concern about the challenges faced by the media, and the threats to Australian democracy more broadly. Recalling the moment that the AFP accessed her iPhone, Smethurst observes, “It might not sound like a hardship and doesn’t deserve comparisons to the horrifying violence inflicted by some countries on journalists, but this was an incredible intrusion.”

A purportedly authorised raid on the home of a journalist certainly doesn’t compare to the extrajudicial imprisonment or cold-blooded beatings faced by reporters in some nations. But press freedom doesn’t die overnight — it bleeds out with a thousand cuts. If Australians are not vigilant, those comparisons will gradually become less outlandish. By then, it will be too late. •

The post Something somebody wants suppressed appeared first on Inside Story.

As the slow-moving wave of protests and statue-toppling sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement makes its way to Italy, it’s hardly surprising that this monument to a man who talked openly about the crimes he committed as a twenty-six-year-old army officer serving in Ethiopia is sparking bitter divisions. The tougher question is why Italians allowed it to be erected in the first place.

If Montanelli still polarises Italy almost twenty years after his death, it’s because postwar Italian history remains so divisive. A few months before I moved there as a nine-year-old with my family in the dark winter of 1978, prime minister Aldo Moro had been executed by his communist kidnappers, and Italian democracy was hanging by a thread. The iron curtain was still dividing Europe and the internal pressure from far-left and far-right paramilitary groups was constant and oppressive. Those “Years of Lead” were dominated by bombings, kidnappings and assassinations; democratic institutions, yet to heal after twenty years of fascist dictatorship and the effects of a de facto civil war, were teetering.

My Italian father, an old-school centre-right liberal, brought Montanelli into our lives before we could even speak the language. In the early seventies, the famed journalist had left Corriere della Sera, the Milan-based daily that had been his spiritual home since 1938, interrupted by six months spent in fascist jails under a death sentence that was never carried out. The Corriere’s drift to the left in the 1970s had convinced him to establish his own newspaper, Il Giornale Nuovo (later simply Il Giornale — literally, “The Newspaper”). It was this daily, and the columns that Montanelli wrote for it, that my father would quote from when talking about politics. Il Giornale was always around; it’s what we read over breakfast.

I’m not sure if my father knew much about Montanelli’s time in Africa — my guess is that he didn’t. What I do know is that our home became a shrine to Montanelli’s writing, with the history books co-written by the journalist, the ambitious “Storia d’Italia,” arriving in weekly instalments as part of the subscription deals that were popular at the time.

In a country where language is often used to conceal or obfuscate, Montanelli’s prose was clear and concise, with an often-humorous turn of phrase. He was a great communicator — arguably, the best of his generation. And the liberal, secular values he expounded seemed refreshingly radical in a society where political discourse was dominated by the communists, the corrupt and corrupting Christian Democrats, and a loony right that no respectable Italian would touch with a barge pole.

Montanelli had paid a price for his convictions. In 1977 he had been shot by the Red Brigades, a group of communist terrorists, as he left a Milan hotel. Under the punishment, referred to as gambizzazione, bullets are fired into a person’s legs with the intention of maiming them. Bizarrely, the newspaper where he had spent most of his career, Corriere della Sera, reported the shooting but refused to identify Montanelli as the victim. He recovered and returned to work.

He remained editor and columnist of Il Giornale right up until the man who had become its publisher, Silvio Berlusconi, decided to enter politics in 1994 —something Montanelli identified as an unacceptable conflict of interest. He left the newspaper he had founded and established La Voce, which only lasted a year. By then, my family had long returned to Australia, but in 1995 I was back in Italy visiting relatives and bought the last-ever edition of La Voce, which is now at the bottom of a box in my Melbourne garage. Il Giornale continued, fulfilling its destiny as the lapdog of Berlusconi, as Montanelli had predicted.

The Montanelli statue is made of bronze and can be found in a park close to Milan’s Porta Venezia — in fact, the park itself is now named after the Tuscan-born journalist. The statue was cast from a famous photo, taken in 1940, showing Montanelli sitting on a stack of books against a wall with a portable typewriter on his lap, hitting the keys. The photo marked the journalist’s return from Finland, where he had been covering the early days of the war. Although he’s wearing a hat, the statue leaves his bald head uncovered.

Even before the statue was erected, the photo had come to represent the fearlessness of Italian journalism — a notion foreign observers find hard to reconcile with the demonstrably servile approach to power among the country’s journalists. The significance of that photo meant that the statue came to embody something more than Montanelli’s liberalism and independence of thought — it became a monument to journalism. It was erected in 2006 in a spot not far from where the Red Brigades had attempted to put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Montanelli’s marriage — or so he defined it — to an Ethiopian girl when he was a twenty-six-year-old officer was well known when the statue was commissioned. There’s a 1969 television interview on YouTube in which he talks openly about how he had “bought” the girl after paying the father 500 lire — a sum that also got him a horse and a rifle. He’s asked for more information by the interviewer who, far from being horrified, mentions how the girl was rumoured to have been the most beautiful in what was then the Italian colony of Abyssinia.

Later, though, Montanelli is taken to task by a member of the studio audience. The journalist appears baffled by the question. “There was no violence because girls in Abyssinia get married at the age of twelve,” he says. The audience member doesn’t let him off the hook. “If you did it in Europe, you would be raping a child.” He concedes that would be the case.

Writing in 2000, a year before his death, Montanelli provided more insight into what he insisted had been a legitimate marriage — though there was never any possibility of the girl returning with him to Italy when his tour of duty had ended. The details are almost too disturbing to recount — making their recounting all the more important. She had been infibulated as a baby, making it almost impossible for Montanelli to complete the rape; it was only with “the brutal intervention of her mother,” as he later wrote, that he was able to proceed.

The fact that Montanelli was able to write about what he had done without fearing social ostracism — let alone prosecution — says something about the racism that underpins Italian society. How would this type of violence be broadly socially acceptable without the premise that the girl, whom Montanelli called Destà, was racially inferior? Montanelli simply told the country that Africans were different and that this is the age at which they married, and the country broadly accepted the explanation.

There’s plenty still to be written about the cultural manifestations of Italian racism and how the country’s ill-fated colonial experiences may have played a part in it. My humble observation is that because Italy abruptly lost its African colonies in 1943, with the collapse of the fascist regime, the country never had to deal with colonial independence movements and immigration from former colonies.

In fact, the country I moved to in 1978 was as monocultural as they get— the only non-European faces we saw were the Moroccans who walked along the beaches selling carpets to tourists. There hadn’t been a black Italian leader since Florence had been led in the 1530s by Alessandro de’ Medici, the illegitimate son of an African slave. No one I knew had met a black person, and any knowledge people had of Italian colonialism came from the fading memories of parents and grandparents who had served in the Italian colonies of Ethiopia, Libya and Somalia — memories echoed and further distorted by popular culture.

Even today, the words of the fascist wartime song “Faccetta Nera” would be familiar to most Italians. “Little black-faced girl/beautiful Abyssinian/wait and hope that the time is nearing/when we will be close to you/we will give you another law and another king.” Subsequent verses get even more granular: “Little black-faced girl/little Abyssinian/we will take you to Rome, freed… We will march with you/we will parade before the Duce and the king.” The notion of African conquest and the beauty of young black girls is a legacy of fascism that even an anti-fascist like Montanelli wasn’t immune to — he often remarked on Destà’s looks and had a photo of her in his study.

Add to that the clunky, cringe-making racism of Italy’s postwar cultural boom. At my Catholic summer scout camp we would often sing the 1960s hit “I Watussi,” apparently inspired by the height of the Tutsi tribes of Rwanda and Burundi. “We are the Tutsi/The very tall negroes/with each three steps/we move six metres/the shortest of us/is two metres tall.” This song and the dance that accompanies it is still used as the final encore in dance halls today.

This is all objectionable, of course, but it’s what you get when you haven’t had to grapple with multiculturalism and haven’t had to ponder whether people of African descent are entitled to a place in your society. Unlike France, say, Italy hasn’t needed to consider the possibility of an African Italian claiming his or her right to a respectful relationship with fellow citizens; Italian society hasn’t had to accommodate diversity at any level.

Montanelli’s abuse of a young girl was indeed rooted in racism; but the decision to allow a statue to be erected at the centre of a modern and increasingly multicultural city like Milan has, I suspect, more to do with the lazy racist culture that even the most progressive of Italians allow to slosh around. I can vouch for the fact that not a single member of my scout group was racist — in fact, you’d struggle to find Italians more committed to social justice. Yet around the campfire we’d sing the Tutsi song because — well, why not? It was just a song, right?

The controversy of the Montanelli statue immediately led to the same political divisions I had witnessed when we would fight it out in meetings during my high school days. The centre right and what remains of the liberals — including former classmates of mine — immediately circled the wagons, saying that Montanelli was neither a racist nor a child abuser; the post-communists argued the opposite, saying that the statue had to go. When I mentioned the issue to my ninety-year-old father, now in a Melbourne nursing home, he immediately knew what to think: the communists weren’t even going to let Montanelli rest in his grave.

That’s not to say my father’s take is entirely wrong. I’m in no doubt that there are communists who are still pursuing Montanelli for his strong liberal advocacy at the height of the cold war. What’s more, my father’s belief that the left would do well to examine the legacies of its own scoundrels is also fair. But that’s not the point. Montanelli was the centre right’s scoundrel; he was the liberals’ paedophile. Say what you want about the politicisation of the debate over his statue, that fact is immutable.

For any thinking Italian liberal, the conclusion has to be that the Montanelli statue must come down. It should be removed not by vandals or a howling mob, but by municipal workers instructed to do so by city authorities. This should be done to pave the way for an inclusive society in which black Italians can be participants rather than bystanders. But even more importantly, it should come down because if the liberals side with the predator rather than his twelve-year-old victim, then they’re worthy of the brutal ideologies Montanelli spent his life fighting. •

The post Italy’s Black Lives Matter moment appeared first on Inside Story.

Sport, of the type that so many of us consume as spectators, is also nothing if not big business. Retailers, like elite sporting organisations, used to be wary of controversies in case they alienated a swathe of their customers. Modern businesses, however, are often keen to position their brands, adapt to new demographics, or promote issues dear to their owners or chief executives. Think of Qantas and marriage equality. Or Ben and Jerry’s and just about any progressive cause.

Between the brands and the fans, what about the stars of the show? How are the players and coaches who actually “do” the sport implicated in this branding, and do they have any freedom to express their own views? What whips and reins do those who control sport — the club managers and league officials — wield?

Take the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in the United States but has evolved and spread to many countries, Australia included. One of its powerful early tokens in the United States involved NFL players “taking a knee” when the national anthem was played before major games. For his troubles, the leader of this protest, Colin Kaepernick, was pilloried by none other than the US president, and hung out to dry by his sport.

Yet the tide has turned. Kaepernick is now a heroic figure and even President Trump says he should be welcomed back. Police at BLM demonstrations are now “taking a knee” in fellowship with demonstrators. When football restarted in Australia recently, both Australian rules and rugby league teams followed suit, in solidarity with the movement.

The most prominent Australian case of a speaking-out sportsperson has been that of Israel Folau. Folau used his personal Twitter account to condemn gay people in particular, and those he sees as sinners in general. His persistence with such inflammatory remarks led to his sacking from rugby union. Rugby Australia said he had breached its code of conduct on respectful and non-discriminatory behaviour. Folau’s lawyers said his right to religious expression was being stifled. The case settled.

The formal elements of Folau’s case are familiar. An employer-imposed code of conduct is tacitly agreed to by the employee on hiring. But the employee uses his or her social media presence to make out-there comments. Rather than treat the remarks as the inane emanations of someone paid to run fast or jump high, the wider public piles on and the sport’s custodians react with disciplinary force.

Lawyers then parse distinctions like “was the employer trying to suppress the political or religious content of the speech, or was it driven only to protect its image and the values of its code?” Put this way, there is an intractable clash between an individual’s freedom of expression and the freedom of a club or league to dissociate itself from such expression.

Although Folau’s case involved speech outside work hours and workspace, some people will still sympathise with the club or the league. Not only may the sport pay young athletes handsomely, it also gives them leverage into lucrative sponsorships and a platform to speak out from. If the sport pays the piper, these people believe, it should call the tune. But even the most managerialist among us must admit that employers cannot rule over every aspect of our lives. The law must find an accommodation of sorts.

When it comes to speech on the field or at events run by a sport, however, there is little doubt where the law lies. Employers can control virtually all expressive acts on such occasions. To do so they don’t even need binding codes of conduct. They can rely on their general power of control, through the “obedience,” “loyalty” and “proper conduct” owed by employees.

These ancient duties are implied in every employment relationship by judge-made law. So a club can direct players as to how to behave and appear, at games and promotional appearances alike. The leagues themselves, which negotiate and distribute the spoils of broadcasting rights, wield similar control via the clubs and by nailing down codes of conduct.

So far, so-so, you might think. A league may be obliged by its broadcasters to keep games free of gratuitous symbols and expression. If not, what starts as a piquant sideline can quickly become commonplace and annoying. Remember streaking — those nude dashes by spectators across fields, sometimes carrying flags or with slogans emblazoned on their bodies? When streaking began in the 1970s, it felt liberating. But familiarity bred contempt, and broadcasters eventually banned the images. Today, draconian fines apply to any spectator encroaching on the sacred field.

The problem is that nothing really requires sports to wield their power consistently. Consider two instances, illustrated here. They happened some time apart, but they demonstrate the inconsistency point neatly. Each involves a player from the same famous English soccer club, Liverpool FC.

Laurence Griffiths/PA Images/Alamy

Matteo Ciambelli/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The first image shows Robbie Fowler, a Liverpool striker who now coaches in Australia. After scoring in a high-profile match in Europe in 1997, he raised his team jersey to reveal a t-shirt emblazoned with a message supporting dock workers in a long-running industrial dispute. Fowler was publicly disciplined and fined 2000 swiss francs — not for cheekily riffing off the CK (Calvin Klein) trademark but for breaching the European football association’s policy against any political logos or messages.

Contrast the second illustration, which features Liverpool’s current goalkeeper, Alisson Becker. At the end of the most celebrated match in the 2019 calendar, just as his side was raising the European Champions trophy before an audience of hundreds of millions, Becker lifted his jersey to reveal a bespoke t-shirt. His featured a cross and a heart joined by an equals sign. Read it as “Christ is love.” For his religious expression, Becker faced no sanction.

Before sporting contests it is common to see players from different creeds cross themselves, look skywards or kiss the grass. You might say, well, faith is a personal matter and superstition to quell nerves is rife in sport. But Becker’s was no private ritual; he was deliberately capturing the public stage in an identical way to Fowler. Sanctioning political but not religious expression seems an arbitrary distinction. Religion is no less divisive than politics.

The spectre of the lone star seizing centrestage is actually a fair way from the archetypal examples of sport engaging with sociopolitical expression. The more typical case involves clubs and leagues themselves coordinating the expression and requiring players to take part. Exhibit 1 in Australia is the military presence and the bugler at Anzac Day football rounds. Exhibit 2 is the singing of “Advance Australia Fair” at the start of matches. Each of these formal rituals is an expression of a certain strain of nationalism or view of history.

Not everyone in the stands takes part. The charitable view of these rituals is that they are not enforced patriotism but attempts to transcend club-versus-club tribalism by invoking a unifying theme. But critics see Exhibit 1 as a cynical co-option of veterans or, worse, of militarism. Making hay while the sun shines on the sporting field, as if it were a battlefield.

Other expressive branding exercises are more benign. Australia’s best-known rugby league club, the South Sydney Rabbitohs, long had a logo of a white rabbit on the run. More than a decade ago, it adopted a black rabbit as a variant for its home jerseys. This was not just a tweak to sell more merchandise. The club’s traditional home is Redfern and its teams have fielded many of the finest Indigenous players.

Many will say that sport is tribal enough without adding political or religious divisions to the mix. Others will say that sport is ineluctably mixed up with politics and religion. From governments targeting sporting grants at marginal seats through to Olympian-level bribery and corruption, sport is enmeshed with politics, ethno-nationalism and big finance.

From the more sublime aspects of anti-racist causes to the more ridiculous, sport easily merges into current affairs. For an example of the ridiculous, former Collingwood football coach Mick Malthouse recently made headlines accusing the AFL of selling its soul by staging a game annually in China. Malthouse called for the game to be cancelled as some kind of retribution for Covid-19. In turn, in an off-field version of an on-field brawl, he was mocked by at least one current coach and club chief executive.

Sport seems to be a kind of everyperson’s seasoning for political discourse. In return, sociopolitical controversies within sport allow its tendrils to spread from the back page to the front. At the level of the individual player or event, sports want to manage their brand. But whatever the passing effects of any expressive controversy, in the end it is all a form of profile. Oscar Wilde may have said that the only good thing about sport was that it involved special clothing. But as he also said, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” •

The post Speaking freely in special clothing appeared first on Inside Story.