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.

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

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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.

I would reward him, or acknowledge him, with words like this:

Someone much better than me at pulling out figures from such reports has used a pen and paper to work out where the ACT overspends compared to the rest of Australia and where it under-taxes.

And that was the point: Tim could do with a piece of paper and a pen what I couldn’t do, and what most people couldn’t do.

Anyway, I was about to move from one office in the press gallery to another to work with him as his deputy. I happened to be speaking to Melbourne economist Nick Gruen, who told me that Tim Colebatch was extraordinary.

Gruen said he had read something Tim had written, based on figures no one else knew about, and asked Tim where he had got them from. He said Tim sent him Tim’s figures — pages and pages of photocopied calculations done by hand. Tim had dug into several different documents (before the age of spreadsheets), copied out masses of figures by hand and combined them to discover something that wasn’t at all apparent from any of the individual documents. It must have taken hours. Nick said he had a vision of Tim’s wife (Mary) watching the television while Tim did sheet after sheet, calculation after calculation without complaint.

And then when I got to the Age, Tim did it all the time.

Peter, I know you’re doing the jobs figures today. I’ve just pulled out the six-month trend growth for each state, set it alongside the previous six months and this is what it shows…

Tim’s figuring produced a much greater insight than the Australian Bureau of Statistics press release or summary itself, which almost everyone else was content with.

It was not only journalists and those of us who worked with Tim who noticed this. When he died, an ABS official who had dealt with him wrote on the social media platform X that:

Most journos develop stories by cutting-pasting from media releases. Tim was a whip-sharp user of economic data who actually read statistical publications to develop his own take on the situation.

Another wrote:

As a public servant often required to provide background on the how of policies or programs to journalists, I can vouch for how genuine was Tim Colebatch. No journalist approached an inquiry with more open-mindedness, understood the issues more deeply, nor cared more.

Tim’s method — open-minded methodical inquiry — gave us truths that no one else had discovered.

In 2011 when high inflation figures came out and all manner of highly credentialed journalists began writing that there was a breakout and that inflation would stay high, Tim looked inside the figures and saw that almost all the underlying pressure was ebbing away, even though the official measures of underlying inflation didn’t say so. Tim wrote this, explaining why, was not thanked by his highly credentialed competitors, and was right. Soon after, inflation dived to a new lower plane and didn’t return to where it had been, until Covid.

All through 2011 the employment numbers seemed suspiciously flat. The usual growth was missing, making it look as if the economy was off the boil. Through a tip-off at a conference, Tim had learnt that it wasn’t employment that was behaving strangely, it was the way the ABS calculated its figures. The Bureau multiplies the number of people it surveys by whatever number it needs to in order to represent the Australian population.

But the Bureau’s estimates of the Australian population had been wrong, and it had been slowly winding down the multiplication factor each month throughout 2011, which made it look as if employment hadn’t been growing, even though it was. The contact at the conference would have found it hard to explain to anyone else what had happened. I didn’t think Tim would be able to explain it in the Age. I suggested he hold off until we could finesse it. He said no, he would write it then and there, which he did in perfectly clear English, helping change people’s understanding of where the economy was heading.

For readers, Tim made his writing look simple, easy, obvious, and obviously right, even though to produce it he had had to do some very complicated figuring — the kind of things few other people could do. And he gave what he wrote moral force. He would make the reader feel that anger was justified, that something was egregiously wrong even though it hadn’t seemed egregiously wrong until Tim had uncovered it.

In most years until the Howard government halved the headline rate of capital gains tax in 1999, more landlords made money than lost it: landlords as a group made money renting out properties, which is how it should be. After Howard’s change, landlords as a group lost money, every single year. Landlords became losers, overwhelmingly deliberate losers, in order to negatively gear and sell their properties later for a capital gain that would be barely taxed.

Of course landlords dived into the market pushing owner-occupiers out of the way. Of course this pushed up prices. Of course this meant that Australians who would once have been owner-occupiers had to make do with renting from the same people who had pushed buying out of their reach. Of course it was wrong. Tim made you feel outraged with him, even about things he would not have been outraged about until he had uncovered the data.

In a piece for Inside Story in 2017 entitled “Yes, There Is Such a Thing as Too Much Immigration,” Tim presented findings that affronted him, partly because he wished they weren’t true. He said that in net terms an extra 474,000 people had found full-time jobs over the previous eight years. But only 74,000 of the jobs went to people born in Australia. The official figures had been “ignored by analysts” (which is probably because they, like me, wouldn’t have known where to find them).

“I am unambiguously pro-immigration,” Colebatch wrote, “but if the level and nature of the immigration are not working for us, I suggest we turn down the tap.” That wasn’t a conclusion Tim had wanted to come to, but it derived from the data, the only source of truth.

One night (we worked late more often than not) I asked him what kind of reporting he liked best. Was it political reporting? Was it what the government was planning? He said it was statistics. Because they were the truth: the pure truth rather than being in part the product of spin or in part an account of who had said what.

Which isn’t to say Tim didn’t like politics. His reporting on electorates, polls and political trends was unmatched. And it was a resource for other reporters. Tim understood each Victorian seat, the distribution of preferences in each seat, how counting would develop, what a change of boundaries would do, and the way in which each Senate count would evolve over a fortnight.

Writing in Inside Story last April he raised the possibility that Anthony Albanese might turn out to have led Australia’s last majority Labor government. We won’t know for some time whether that turns out to be correct, but we can know, right now, that it was a possibility that presented itself to Tim after a careful and deep dive into everything electoral.

Remarkably, Tim didn’t think that what he did was extraordinary. Never in his writing did he suggest it was, and nor did he talk down to the reader. He took the reader (and fellow journalists) with him on a journey and made it seem obvious.

Australia Day wasn’t a thing back in 1971, but Tim joined the Age on 25 January, the eve of Australia Day, as one of five cadets, the only one who was a graduate. Mark Baker, who joined with him that day, said he wasn’t like the others:

We were juveniles, bemused, in awe of Tim. Bespectacled, he carried books in a stylish cloth shoulder bag and was always reading. While we were working out how to type with two fingers, Tim was writing serious analysis pieces on Bangladesh.

Tim quickly gravitated to writing analysis, and then editorials, but editorials grounded in data, writing lightly but not once-over lightly. And some of his editorials were masterpieces. One, prepared as a summer holder, examined official Tasmanian reports about plans for flooding the Franklin River. When it was published, while Tim was overseas, it turned the Franklin into an issue on the mainland. Victorians were talking about it.

Tim took on the environment round and kept reporting on the plans to destroy the river. He reported from the Franklin during the 1983 election campaign, explaining how the Commonwealth could stop the damming, which it did.

Some of Tim’s colleagues have told me he was a contrarian. But he wasn’t. He wanted to know the truth wherever it took him. One colleague from near the beginning, Tony Walker, put it better. He said that what defined Tim was his outsider’s perspective. This made Tim, he said, “not a typical product of Melbourne Grammar.” He was prepared to find out and analyse, rather than regurgitate his prejudices.

Although Tim must have started out with some prejudices. He told me that before he started reporting from Melbourne’s parliament house, he’d assumed that the Labor members of parliament must have been pretty good, representing the interests of the workers. Then he saw them.

Someone else reporting Victorian politics at that time was Frank McGuire, who worked in parliament house for the Melbourne Herald while Tim worked for the Age, and who later became a member of Victoria’s parliament. He told me that Tim set the standard for factually accurate, evidence-based, insightful analysis. While it has always been important, these days it’s rare.

In his obituary for the Age, Tim’s long-term colleague Damien Murphy paints him as something of a time capsule, carrying with him the ethos of the time when quality journalism, centred around the Age, took off:

Many of the journalists of the 1960s and 1970s took its ethos and went on to become huge influences in print, television and radio across Australia: They included Mike Willesee, Jennifer Byrne and Neil Mitchell. Eight edited metropolitan daily newspapers. Others chose literature, the law and politics. Some returned. But only one member of that generation remained on staff in a direct unbroken link to the era.

At a time when so much of modern political reporting became transactional — “I’ll report this in return for you telling me that” — Tim wouldn’t do it. In Canberra, the treasurer’s staff would hand me information in return for what they hoped would be good publicity. They never tried it with Tim.

Not that Tim wouldn’t engage with them. At press conferences, he would call them out. When treasurer Wayne Swan presented a graph that Tim thought was dodgy, Tim simply stood up and said so, and why. I remember thinking at the time that no one else in the room would have had the courage — and the confidence in their own judgement — to do that. From few other people would the treasurer have meekly accepted it.

Tony Walker had a word for this quality of Tim’s — “unyielding.” Tim wouldn’t say something unless he was sure it was right, and then he wouldn’t retreat for the sake of maintaining relationships. Michelle Grattan, his long-time Canberra colleague, put it this way: he constructed his own journalistic framework and operated within it, rather than running with the pack.

More than many other people, journalists (including myself) are needy. We thrive on praise. I’ve never known Tim to seek it out, and when we worked together I rarely offered it, although I figured he knew how extraordinary I thought he was. Afterwards, when he retired, and later as his days were becoming numbered, I told him every time we met.

It was the same in the office — he hated noise, he hated interruptions, he hated messiness. There are those who say Tim’s corner of the Age office in parliament house was messy. They are wrong. It was piled high with papers and ABS reports, but it was extremely neat. Tim knew where every single document was and could find it instantly.

In the office he ran the beer fridge and used it to send money to children he supported. Two of his keenest interests were India and Indonesia, where he wanted to go as a correspondent but never did. He did go to Washington, in the Reagan years, and was earlier tapped for a post, China correspondent, which he turned down because, legend has it, he had just been made president of the North Melbourne tennis club.

He reported on tennis for the Age and Inside Story. He loved tennis, he played tennis well, he was a ball boy at what’s now the Australian Open, and he met his wife Mary at the tennis.

And he loved Melbourne. This is important, and was important for Tim’s decades of work in Canberra. He had a mental social and electoral map of Melbourne. He knew how people felt in Melbourne, in different parts of Melbourne, and he could write about it with more understanding and moral force than people who hadn’t left.

His meticulously researched biography of Victorian premier Dick Hamer, whom Tim dubbed the liberal Liberal, owed everything to Tim’s deep understanding of Melbourne and also to Tim’s total respect for the truth.

In 2022, in the early days of his treatment, Tim wrote a review of another biography of a Victorian leader — Sumeyya Ilanbey’s biography of Dan Andrews. Tim said she depicted Andrews as someone who decided issues on political grounds and treated “their merits as secondary.” For Tim, there was no greater transgression.

I remember getting ready to leave the office one night. Tim was still there, working with sheets and sheets of paper and doing sums with a pen.

“What are you doing, Tim?” I asked.

“I am looking at British temperature records from the 1800s,” he told me. “I am trying to get a handle on the extent to which there has been global warming.”

“Tim, no one else would do that,” I said. “Everyone else uses secondary sources.”

“Shhh! Don’t tell,” he replied, and I left him to go on checking.

In October last year, Tim and I caught up at our local cafe, as we had done regularly for years. He told me the antivirals seemed to be holding back his cancer, but he didn’t think that would last.

And then he apologised. He had been up into the early hours of the morning attending a virtual press conference held by the International Energy Agency in Paris to outline its update on the path to limiting global warming to 1.5°C. He had interrogated the officials online, and he told me he still thought that if a lot of things fell into place we might just keep global warming to 1.5°C.

And then he walked home to write the piece. He concluded it by saying the Albanese government was

in danger of overpromising on targets while underdelivering on policies to achieve them. Its carbon price is limited to 200-odd companies, it is walking both sides of the street on fossil fuels, and most of the reviews it has launched have yet to produce outcomes. This is what happens when you allow the political staff to take charge of policy.

It was his last message to readers of Inside Story. •

The post How journalism should be done 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. •

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That someone was Chris, Bronwyn’s son, who spent several evenings in October 2011 waiting near Ray’s flat, a large spanner in hand. He also recruited his best friend Zak, who waited beside him each evening with a steel pipe. Zak in turn recruited Spider, friend of no one, who hefted a baseball bat while he spent Bronwyn’s money in his head.

How was justice meted out to these five in the Northern Territory a bit over a decade ago? Bronwyn got an eight-year prison sentence with a four-year minimum. Chris, Zak and Spider each got life, with minimums of eighteen years for Chris and twenty each for the others.

As for Ray, he got a quick but brutal death, courtesy of Chris’s wrench, and was dumped in a roadside clearing, one of the few spots in the outback a body is likely to be found. That was one reason the rest of them were swiftly caught. The other was that Spider forgot to delete the group’s texts from his phone before the police brought him in for a chat.

Did you pick Zak and Spider as equal worst of the survivors? The judge who sentenced them, Dean Mildren, sure didn’t. If he could, he’d have given Spider credit for pleading guilty and testifying against the others, and Zak still more for pulling out of the plan early. But, as journalist Dan Box incredulously reports, the pair’s judge lacked the power to do justice.

Box produced an impassioned documentary about the judgement, The Queen & Zak Grieve, in 2017, successfully pressing for the Territory government to show Zak some mercy. Now he’s written a far less certain book about the case. What’s changed in six years? Mainly, Dan Box.

Box opens his third book with a confession: he made his documentary because he “wanted to win another Walkley.” He’d won a couple the previous year for his reporting on three murders in Bowraville, including the first such award for a podcast. But he never won a third and soon left the Australian and its podcasting scene to Hedley Thomas.

The Englishman doesn’t reveal exactly where he went, but he mentions enduring occasional snow and regular depression. He also decided to speak with Zak for the first time. He wrote letters to Grieve “to reassure myself that I’d been right, and he really wasn’t a killer.” The pair’s correspondence is the heart of this book, the recently released The Man Who Wasn’t There.

I don’t think Zak is the title character. He was barely a man in 2011. The nineteen-year-old spent his time in Katherine on his Xbox and watching anime, and he’s been in stasis ever since. And he was very much there for most of the plot against Ray.

His co-conspirators split on whether Zak was still there during Ray’s final minutes or had pulled out hours before. Zak’s judge had to give him the benefit of the doubt on that point, but Box didn’t have to. Since the documentary, he’s read phone texts casting doubt on Zak’s claim that he cut ties when he realised that what he’d agreed to wasn’t a beating but a killing.

“You have to ask, Why lie?” writes Box of Spider, who testified that Zak was the first person Ray saw in the last horrible moments of his life. By contrast, Chris — “a kind and decent person, for a killer” — had every reason to “protect his friend.”

At some point in their correspondence, Zak became Box’s friend too. Box writes that this may be why his “doubts about Zak’s involvement in the murder itself have receded.” When it’s someone “you care about… it’s not enough to say this is not your fight [and] you don’t have to pick a side.”

In 1991, Helen Garner famously picked a side early on and, like Box, spent a book (The First Stone in her case) mulling over her instincts. Then, in 2004’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation, she befriended a bereft parent and, like Box and Zak’s mother Glenice, came to share her rage at the machinations of justice.

Some couldn’t stand how Garner inserted herself into the narrative, but I prefer my true crime writers to be there. You can see the difference in Box’s two works on Grieve. His documentary, made before he said more than a handful of words to his subject, ended with a dogged pursuit of a possible fourth co-conspirator who was never charged at all.

Box’s book reveals that Chris himself had named a fourth participant. But this time the journalist opts not to go there. Naming names, writes Box, “risks causing hurt, not just to his family, but to Zak’s also.” And to Zak. “Knowing whether Zak was right or wrong no longer matters to me.”

It never mattered to the courts. In 2014’s This House of Grief, Garner looks a man in the eye who drove his three kids into a dam and sees a failed suicide rather than a vengeful homicide. Either way, Robert Farquharson was still a murderer and so is Zak Grieve, whether he was there at the end or not.

Zak was guilty of conspiracy as soon as he joined Chris’s plan, and was guilty of murder the moment it succeeded. Conspirators can pull out of planned crimes under Australian law, but withdrawal is a tricky, unpleasant and fallible method of avoiding unwanted convictions. Zak had to not only exit before Ray was struck but also do whatever he could to save Ray’s life. His jury ruled that he failed one or both of these tests.

It’s a fair rule, but Territory law made it very tough in Zak’s case. A decades-old statute requires that murderers serve at least twenty years in prison. There’s one exception for good people who kill bad ones, hence Chris’s eighteen-year minimum. But Zak (and Spider) weren’t eligible, in part because Zak sometimes sold cannabis but mainly because neither of them knew much about Ray.

Thanks to Box’s documentary and a petition by his lawyers, Zak ultimately got a lower sentence, courtesy of the Northern Territory government’s power to grant mercy. This combination of legislative toughness and executive whim produced the same outcome that justice would have: a twelve-year minimum sentence, which expired last week.

Rank these punishments. Life in prison. Losing your life. Losing your child to prison. Losing your child.

Garner’s This House of Grief is named after a line in a 1930s Hungarian novel that laments how a troubled crime journalist’s “finest years had slipped by in this treasury of pain, this house of power and grief.” The author, Desző Kosztolányi, was describing a bustling Budapest police station, while Garner was thinking of Victoria’s Supreme Court.

Zak’s house for much of his twenties was the Darwin Correctional Centre. Known as Holtze, it’s a freshly built failure housing a thousand residents with no respite from heat or boredom. The in-cell screens, replacing the correspondence courses Zak once devoured, have never worked. The library he worked in was shut. His sole escape is handwriting a sprawling sci-fi novel he sends outside in five-page instalments that are checked for security threats.

Zak shared a wing with other lifers, including Chris, Spider and backpacker murderer Bradley Murdoch. One eighty-year-old got parole after his minimum twenty years but asked to stay in Holtze to avoid burdening his family. He hung himself on a ceiling fan when he learnt that the Territory government had banned lifers from work release. Authorities replaced the fans with desk ones.

Here’s how some other punishments have been meted out in recent years:

Spider never got his own documentary or the credit Mildren recommended for ratting on Zak and Chris. Friendless as ever, he’s the only one of the conspiracy still left in prison.

Halfway through his eighteen years, Chris died in his cell, bleeding from his anus. It wasn’t what you might guess. Many Holtze residents passed their days using Kronic, a potent synthetic cannabis they often concealed in their bodies.

Murdoch, who has never revealed where he hid Peter Falconio’s body, even when he was offered a transfer to Western Australia, hated the drug. He told Chris’s coroner that Holtze was to blame: “That’s why other people smoke Kronic. It takes them to another place.” Authorities gave the lifers board games.

Zak saw another culprit. When he and Chris took Kronic, they took turns to ensure that the other didn’t suffocate when they became “stuck.” But Zak was sent to another wing three days earlier for making a sexist joke. He wasn’t there for his best friend. Again.

Box might name another. Zak’s mother Glenice, attending the inquest to see her son testify, “found Chris’s mother Bronwyn sitting watching from the public gallery.” Bronwyn, who was convicted of manslaughter, has always said she had no idea Chris would murder Ray himself. She told Glenice “she would soon be leaving Darwin, to go somewhere small and isolated.”

Did you pick these punishments as the worst ones? Box wouldn’t. His daughter Poppy “counts off the days she’s spent in hospital along one wall,” he writes, “using coloured pens to draw four vertical lines with a fifth running diagonally through them, like some kindergarten prisoner.” Halfway through his correspondence with Zak, Box felt a lump in his nine-year-old’s tummy. The doctors gave her a fifty-fifty chance.

Zak was released last week. He’d already told Box it wasn’t an end: “I’m on a life sentence. On parole.” So are Box and his daughter. She had two years of chemo but the tumour is still there. “We leave hospital knowing we will be back there, every three months, over and over, always in fear, always not knowing.”

Why would Box include this in his book? Well, how couldn’t he? He’d learnt what mattered, and it wasn’t justice. “While I wouldn’t recommend having your child diagnosed with cancer as a cure for depression,” he writes, “it seems to have worked for me, at least.” Being there is a complete nightmare, of course. But not being there is worse. •

The Man Who Wasn’t There
By Dan Box | Ultimo Press | $36.99 | 320 pages

The post This house of Grieve appeared first on Inside Story.

Can a purgatory of this kind be avoided? Can you slow down the perception that time is raging like a careening mobility scooter as you approach extinction?

The most famous strategy — as set out in Graham Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt — is to travel. Greene’s book features a character called Honest Jo Pulling, a wealthy bookmaker who, as the eponymous Aunt explains, “felt that by travelling he would make time move with less rapidity.”

After a long and relatively stationary life, he purchases a ticket on the Orient Express. Unfortunately he’s carried off the train in Venice after suffering a stroke. Undeterred, the adventurous would-be rover buys a ruined palazzo with fifty-two rooms. He moves in and re-embarks on his journey — but this time with a scaled-down itinerary.

Every seven days, he packs his belongings into a weather-beaten suitcase and sets out not for Turkey or Persia or beyond, but for the next room along the corridor. “I’ve seldom seen a happier man,” explains the Aunt. “He was certain that death would not catch him before he reached the fifty-second room.”

Sadly, the old bookmaker dies in transit — between rooms fifty-one and fifty-two. His last words: “Seemed like a whole lifetime.”

The fictional Jo Pulling and the non-fiction writer John McPhee have never met, of course. But they do share a singular idea: it’s possible, they believe, to decelerate senescence.

McPhee has spent much of his professional life turning observation and research into prose for money. Now, at the age of ninety-two, he clearly qualifies as a grandee in the great game of journalism.

He’s been a (very) long-time staff writer at the New Yorker; he’s won a Pulitzer; he’s been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton; he’s written more than thirty books. He is a master — indeed, part inventor — of what the kids call creative non-fiction.

The optimism inherent in his latest book, Tabula Rasa: Volume 1, is fully intended because McPhee claims to have found the secret to eternal life (or at least the perception of it): like Jo Pulling, who never stopped moving, McPhee intends to never stop writing.

“Old people projects,” McPhee explains, “keep people old. You’re no longer old when you’re dead.”

McPhee’s old person project is to resurrect and publish the many stories he failed to deliver for various reasons throughout his long career. Even if he can’t get out on the road — or river, or ocean — anymore, he can still pry open the filing cabinets in his basement and rediscover the faded notes of long-ago false starts.

In this endeavour he claims to have been inspired by his fellow American, Mark Twain. McPhee counts Twain’s autobiography as the greatest old person project in history. Twain wrote it in parts, with the intention of adding chapters of memoir to his existing works, thereby extending their copyright and making money in the future for his daughters.

For this task, Twain counselled a random, digressive, structureless structure, McPhee winkingly explains, with yarns tumbling together like a haberdashery in an earthquake.

The great man’s memoir runs to 735,000 words. “If Twain had stayed with it, he would be alive today,” says McPhee.

As any journalist will tell you, finding the story is the hardest part of the job. The second-hardest is convincing an editor to commission it.

Editors in my experience are parsimonious, opinionated to a fault, and casual in their cruelty. When he was Australia’s immigration minister, Philip Ruddock was known in Jakarta as “the minister with no ears.” He was probably an editor in a previous life.

Editors refuse to understand, even when you explain it to them in plain English (something they claim to relish, by the way) that they are making a terrible mistake by rejecting your unquestionably great idea for a story.

Luckily for McPhee, he’s had a few wins. You don’t get Pulitzers for stories you didn’t write.

One day at New York’s Pennsylvania Station back in the early 1960s McPhee stood in front of a new-fangled invention: a machine that automatically juiced citrus fruits for frazzled New York commuters. McPhee saw the flicker of an idea.

He finagled an audience with William Shawn, legendary editor of the New Yorker, and delivered his one-word pitch: “Oranges.”

Part of the Shawn legend is the speediness of his response to mendicant writers. Straight away he’d say either “No. Sorry. Not for us” or — as he did in this case — “Yes. Oh, my, yes.”

The pitch turned into a piece called “Oranges,” and then into a hardback called Oranges. And then into several paperback editions, also titled Oranges. It’s possible Mr McPhee’s epitaph will read: “Here lies the guy who wrote a whole book about oranges.”

Convincing Mr Shawn to say “Yes, oh, yes” became a passport to adventure for McPhee. He wrote about tennis, nuclear engineering and basketball; about how to make bark canoes and how to explore the Alaskan wilderness. He wrote about rivers and dams. (He loves a good paddle with interesting people.) Much of his best work is about nature, including the slowest story known to humankind: geology.

Like all good journalists, McPhee enjoys the challenge of making the average reader come to appreciate something they may not know they could be interested in.

But, as Tabula Rasa reveals and revels in, sometimes McPhee would schlepp all the way from Princeton into New York on the train only to hear Mr Shawn invoke his paid-up membership of the Editors and Bastards Club by murmuring, softly but definitively, “No. Not for us.”

McPhee wanted to — but never got to — write about golf course architects, the Outward Bound inventor Kurt Hahn, the Swiss bridge engineer Christian Menn, and the Spanish comunidad autónoma Extremadura.

Sometimes it wasn’t Shawn’s fault; sometimes the myrmidons of Corporate America stood in his way. He never, for example, got to traverse California’s Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta on a Unocal tanker called the Cornucopia because the trip was nixed by a party pooper from head office.

Sometimes he did the preparatory work but couldn’t find the right structure. Long ago he wanted to write a piece about The Music Man’s creator Meredith Willson, famed for being the only composer to write not only a Broadway musical’s tunes but also the words and the book. Try as he might, McPhee could never get the idea to take voice and sing.

I could go on. Like many toilers in the Literature of Fact (the name of his course at Princeton), McPhee spent a lot of his precious time on Earth not writing things. Bonjour tristesse.

The flotsam and jetsam of McPhee’s writing career — the features forced down the gangplank, the pieces tossed impulsively overboard, the pet projects abandoned on desert islands — are all brought back to a glowing afterlife in this compact and thoroughly enjoyable book about the endless vagaries (and occasional joys) of the writing life.

According to press reports, the nonagenarian McPhee is contracted to deliver Volumes II, III and IV. He might yet live for ever. Let’s hope so. •

Tabula Rasa: Volume 1
By John McPhee | Farrar Straus Giroux | $49.99 | 192 pages

The post The old codger project appeared first on Inside Story.

Two high-rating television series devoted to the volatile lives of celebrity newsreaders show how the role has transformed. Morning Wars (Apple Plus) presents the contemporary newsroom as a chaotic epicentre through which producers, presenters, assistants, camera operators, technicians and guests make rapid transit as they attempt to head off a breaking story and give it their own spin.

ABC TV’s The Newsreader takes us back to the less frenetic media world of the 1980s, but acceleration is already a central theme, with presenters Helen Norville (Anna Torv) and Dale Jennings (Sam Reid) constantly running to front the camera as the latest rapidly unfolding story threatens to leave them in its wake.

It’s instructive to watch the two series in tandem. As a symbolic indicator of the growing stature of the presenter in the twenty-first century, the desk in Morning Wars has grown to absurd proportions, and the high voltage personalities who preside over it exercise dynamic influence. Promoted as celebrities in their own right, they become the brand that sells the news and know that their own survival is at stake in the cycle of evolving crises.

As the third season opens, the network, UBA, is the target of a takeover bid by maverick tycoon Paul Marks, whose love of high-speed vehicles — from cars to space rockets — evokes obvious associations. Played by Jon Hamm, he’s nicely matched with Billy Crudup as Cory Ellison, UBA’s own corporate Machiavel. Playing squash together, they plan a publicity stunt in which one of the star presenters, either Alex Levy (Jennifer Anniston) or Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), will take a trip in the space shuttle, live to air.

Each of these four principals has a different kind of leverage in the power play. What unites them is a determination to upstage any real-world news with their own storylines. It’s a risky enterprise for each of them, subject to sabotage by the others and by external players. When a hacker takes the network down mid-show and then threatens to release a cache of embarrassing communications, strategic realignments happen at lightning speed.

Some of these moves produce compelling items for the daily broadcast. The chair of the network’s board, Cybil Richards (Holland Taylor), is outed for a racist text and forced to do a mea culpa interview with the target of the slur, new presenter Chris Hunter (Nicole Beharie). In a ruthless encounter, both parties vie for new levels of frankness: Richards through candour and contrition, Hunter to force a reckoning for a whole suite of offences on the part of management.

The scene makes compelling viewing, not least for the culturally diverse staff gathered in the studio, whose reactions are shown in close-up. Perhaps they’re relishing it a bit too much, and there will be other kinds of repercussions. Until someone fronts the camera to give the wheel another spin, what happens next is anyone’s guess.

The Newsreader portrays a contrasting world in which television reporters are still chasing actual events rather than creating a hyperreality revolving around themselves. Compared to its US counterpart, the Australian series is a scaled-down production, reflecting the simpler enterprise of current affairs reporting at the time as well as the constrained budgets of today’s Australian producers.

The cast is smaller but strong, and director Emma Freeman makes the most of a talent pool that includes — as well as Torv and Reid in suitably charismatic lead roles — William McInnes as the irascible boss and Robert Taylor as the problematic eminence grise who has been forced to cede the anchor role to the next generation but is looking for payback. Michelle Lim Davidson suppresses her comic talent to play an earnest young producer crossing the cultural divide from a migrant family to the evolving multicultural environment of the television business.

Well-researched storylines draw on landmark events, including the July 1987 federal election, Melbourne’s Hoddle Street shooting a month later, the impending break-up of Charles and Diana, and the 1988 bicentenary. The ABC has released a weekly podcast hosted by Leigh Sales and Lisa Millar detailing the background to these events. Interviews with journalists involved are correlated with perspectives from members of the cast and production team.

In the second podcast, journalist Steve Carey, who was part of the original media response to the Hoddle Street massacre, recalls the experience as one of utter chaos, in which the reporter was just one more figure on the scene, as confused a witness as anyone else. On-screen, writer Kim Ho effectively grounds the episode in the detail of recollections such as Carey’s, while spinning a personal story for Norville, who makes a spontaneous decision about coverage of the fatalities just as the families are receiving the shock. The interwoven lines of tension make for a tightly constructed script.

For all its relatively modest production values, The Newsreader at its best gains dramatic traction of a kind that eludes Morning Wars, where the constant borderline hysteria palls and the ethos of hyperreality lacks genuine urgency.

So what is it that fascinates us about the news presenter as a public figure? Following their interview with Anna Torv, Sales and Millar recall Jana Wendt as a defining presence: the glamour, the command of the medium and the capacity to identify the running edge of a story.

But things have changed since Wendt’s prime years on 60 Minutes (1982–87) and hosting A Current Affair (1987–92). Judging from social media, the public are more frustrated than fascinated by those who tell the stories that make news. No doubt in an attempt to tackle this problem, Sales has compiled a collection of some thirty interviews with colleagues in television journalism, inviting them to reflect on the particular skills and qualities called for in their profession.

Storytellers features such distinguished contributors as Chris Reason, Marian Wilkinson, Robert Penfold, Stan Grant and Niki Savva beside younger talents who offer insights into newer problems and challenges facing reporters and presenters. Disability reporter Nas Campanella talks of the importance of voice quality in creating an empathic relationship with viewers. Bridget Brennan, who has become the ABC’s Indigenous affairs editor after a period as Europe correspondent, focuses on the selection and genesis of stories.

The interviews are brief, occasionally revealing, but not probing; together they seem too random an assemblage to offer any overarching perspectives. If there is a consistent theme that threads through the collection, it is the nervous challenge of holding the story together in a wide range of entirely unpredictable situations. As Lisa Millar says, “You never know what might happen.” •

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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? •

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It is a difficult thing to write a biography of a writer who drew on his own life so fully for his fictions and journalism, and with many friends and lovers very much alive. In Frank Moorhouse: A Life Catharine Lumby allows her subject to take the lead, interviewing him, tracing his experiences through his substantial personal archive and talking to his friends.

Lumby decided not to write a literary biography but to concentrate on placing Moorhouse within his milieu, drawing out some of the contradictions in his personality and adding new information about his background that make his work even more intriguing. She adds to our understanding of Moorhouse’s writing without grappling too seriously with its ongoing significance as literature.

The biography follows a loose chronology, beginning with his parents’ origins and his family life in Nowra and then describing his escape to Balmain and embrace of the writing life. It deals with his idiosyncratic “rules for living,” his fight against censorship, his ambitious commitment to a trilogy of historical novels about a woman working for the League of Nations, and his frequent returns to the Bush. If you are a Moorhouse reader you will enjoy it immensely; if you are part of the generation who grew to adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s you will recognise Moorhouse’s role in helping break down the moral constrictions on ordinary middle class Australians.

Moorhouse’s parents, Frank and Purthanry Moorhouse, were not merely upstanding citizens of Nowra but exceptional people in their own right. Readers may have guessed that Frank senior was the model for the smalltown soft drink manufacturer, T. George McDowell, who first appeared in The Americans, Baby and returned in later fictions right up to Grand Days. Moorhouse gave his father’s commitment to community and his belief in self-discipline to McDowell but not his creativity; Frank senior invented a machine to preserve milk that changed the lives of dairy farmers in Australia. His agricultural machinery business prospered so well that he expected all three of his sons to join it. Frank went his own way, but his rigorous daily work routine was a clear legacy of his father.

Purthanry was an equally impressive person, president of the local Country Women’s Association, a girl guide leader and a homemaker concerned with living well. Moorhouse acknowledged that his mother’s concern for aesthetics and social protocol gave him one model for Edith Campbell Berry in his historical trilogy, but he came late to an awareness of the more complex lives of his own parents.

In his last years he realised that his mother had befriended a local Aboriginal woman, Belle McCleod, who helped in the house. Together they set up a CWA branch in the Aboriginal community at Worrigee on the edge of Nowra. He had missed the story of the Indigenous people living close to him.

The entire Moorhouse family were committed to the scouting movement, with Frank senior a scout leader, Purthanry a leading girl guide and all three sons boy scouts. It isn’t difficult to see Moorhouse’s concerns for correct behaviour and good preparation, and his need for regular forays into the bush, as an inheritance from the scouts. Lumby notes the creative tension between Moorhouse’s resistance to convention and his fascination with the protocols that make social and working life run smoothly.

Moorhouse made the journey from a country town to inner-city Sydney and beyond it to Europe. Driven by curiosity about people and their social world he discovered art and fine living at the same time as he was exploring various forms of sexuality. He never completed a university degree but his desire to learn led him to pursue matters often regarded as trivial or beyond acceptability.

Lumby tells us of significant moments in his life, such as his first experience of a camembert cheese, his relish in eating oysters from the shell and, of course, his fastidiousness about martinis. While these subjects may seem frivolous, in his fiction Moorhouse often undermined his obsessions with irony: his oft-quoted advice to anyone lost in the bush was to mix a martini and wait for someone to turn up to correct your method.

After an early marriage Moorhouse realised that he couldn’t remain monogamous, let alone exclusively heterosexual, and set about living a life outside the “bourgeois” confines of conventional suburbia. From his mid-twenties he determined to own neither a car nor a house, and sometimes juggled credit cards to ensure he could eat out for every meal. At times, he relied on the generosity of friends to keep him housed and fed. Women often took the role of provider of financial as well as domestic support, though they sometimes found his rules for living rather self-serving.

Lumby nevertheless renders bohemian life in Balmain as youthful and glamorous, the members of the libertarian Sydney Push meeting for philosophy discussions before seducing each other in pubs. Despite his unfaithfulness and exasperating fastidiousness about domestic life, Moorhouse’s lovers remember him as generous and, of course, he was funny.

In his fiction and journalism Moorhouse reported on his exploits in the sophisticated, cosmopolitan world that many suburban Australians dreamt about. His “discontinuous narratives” resisted the plotting of the traditional novel, observing the lives of characters making their different ways in a shared society. In stories as much reportage as fiction, Moorhouse showed us his version of Sydney’s bohemianism.

Lumby draws on other critics to respond to Moorhouse’s fictions and, apart from the occasional charges of sexism in his early work, they are all positive about his achievements. I am not a member of the Edith Campbell Berry fan club — the club Annabel Crabb imagines to be full of mainly women enthusiasts for Frank Moorhouse’s League of Nations heroine who ask themselves in a crisis: “What would Edith do?”

Edith strikes me as insufferably self-important, a kind of Barbie doll that Moorhouse dresses up in different clothes (cowboy suits, silk lingerie, capes) and tries out in careers impossible for most women of her generation. I was dismayed to see the wonderfully perceptive and funny observer of the foibles of real people in the contemporary world had moved off to a dreamland of historical fiction, where a Miles Franklin award might be (and eventually was) acquired.

In his grand trilogy, unlike his earlier fictions, Moorhouse was not writing about a world he had experienced — except, perhaps, in the sex scenes. After I read the celebratory appendix on file registries in Grand Days, I felt the need to tell him personally that these were familiar to anyone who had worked in a government department. By the time I read Cold Light, I wished that I had also explained to him that married women could not become permanent employees in the public service until 1966. Once he had married Edith off, she could never be promoted. If he had known, he might have kept her single so she would not be relegated to an outer office in Canberra rearranging the pencils on her desk and watering the pot plant.

Of course, that is judging fiction against historical reality and the novels may best be read as documents of Moorhouse’s own imagination and obsessions. Some realities, such as the actual restrictions on women’s lives, could only limit his fantasies.

On the back of Lumby’s book the publishers express astonishment that this is the first biography of Moorhouse, suggesting that they, too, imagine a fantastically cosmopolitan world where authors are given their due. In Australia, literary biographies are usually reserved for the long dead, and they can seem to mark the end of interest in a writer (studies of both Patrick White and Elizabeth Jolley, coincidentally, declined after their biographies appeared).

For readers of my generation, Moorhouse takes his place alongside Helen Garner as the recorder of the 1970s and explorer of possibilities for contemporary life. His work will always be significant to us. Pace Annabel Crabb, what reader in their thirties and forties knows of it? The work may yet fade away, like so many other writers who were significant in their moment.

Perhaps the difficulty is in the public preference for the monumental novel over the evanescent observations and speculations that Moorhouse wrote so well. Moorhouse, the performer, may matter more than Moorhouse the writer of a trilogy. This is why this biography matters: it tries to appreciate the performance of a life, not simply its residue of work.

While I will continue to resist the Edith fan club, I am now fully signed up to the Frank Moorhouse club. Frank, forgive me. I wish this book had been published before you died so that you could enjoy more of the acclaim you longed for. •

Frank Moorhouse: A Life
By Catharine Lumby | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 304 pages

The post Grand days 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.

Australia’s luck, Horne suggested, had acted as a buffer for the mediocrity of its elites and might well be running out. Even on that supposed sewer of public discourse, Twitter, you will occasionally find someone reminding us of the book’s killer line: “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck.”

The relevance of that famous remark to Australian public life almost sixty years later is debatable. Is “second-rate” now too generous for our elites? Do many Australians feel a great deal less lucky in 2023 than their counterparts of 1964, in an environment of global warming, soaring house prices, rising inequality and democratic decay?

Ryan Cropp has written a fine biography of Horne. Based on a University of Sydney doctoral thesis, Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country is fundamentally a study of Horne’s public life — his role as editor, writer, thinker, administrator and activist. Cropp might sometimes seem reluctant to take us too far in probing the inner or private life, but he is perhaps following some of his subject’s own hesitations in such matters.

The book is also a reminder that universities continue to produce authors who can write for a general audience without sacrificing academic rigour. Horne himself, addressing graduating students at the University of New South Wales in the mid 1980s, was critical of the taste for “legitimating rituals,” “secret languages” and “moribund Talmudisms” in universities, the trend towards over-specialisation and the contracting audiences. Cropp would surely impress him with the accessibility of his writing and ideas.

Much was happy about Horne’s childhood as the son of a schoolteacher who was also a returned soldier. His early years were spent in Muswellbrook, but as David, his father, became increasingly difficult to live with, the family moved to Sydney. David Horne’s mental health would eventually collapse, and accusations of sexual misconduct were made by a student. If Donald’s earlier life in a country town had been largely carefree, the famous pessimism associated with the early decades of his intellectual life might date from those latter experiences.

The basic outline of Horne’s early years would have been familiar enough to many young Australians of the era: the troubled Anzac father; the move from country town to big city; the bright state school boy who creates plenty of sparks at the university — editing the student newspaper as a stirrer and crusader — but leaves without a degree, his studies interrupted by unsatisfying war service.

Yet Horne also had exceptional talents, even if they took some years to yield the fruit that might have been expected to come earlier. Like many of his contemporaries at the University of Sydney he came under the influence of the Challis professor of philosophy, John Anderson, and he carried a version of Anderson’s realism and libertarianism into his intellectual and professional life.

“If history can be spoken of as having ‘lessons,’ one of its lessons is the futility of human schemings,” Horne said in the late 1940s. “Historical situations arise from other factors than, and often in spite of the desires and intentions of men.” That made any form of planning by government, or perhaps any effort at social improvement by anyone, a futile exercise.

Horne’s activities as a student journalist attracted the attention of the legendary Daily Telegraph editor Brian Penton, who employed him even while Horne remained at the university, and again a few years later. The core of Horne’s thinking, such as it was in the period before he turned forty, seems to have come mainly from his understanding of Anderson, but the hectoring, aggressive style came from Penton.

In fact, the early Horne, as painted by Cropp, is a deeply unattractive figure. The retrospective assessment of one of the friends with whom he fell out — that Horne was a “posturing prick” — seems accurate. Put bluntly, he comes across as a chancer and, at times, a bully, a master of the putdown with “weathervane critical instincts.”

Cropp allows us to see as much, but shows forbearance in offering judgement. He lets the suggestion hang over his narrative that much of the bitterness of Horne’s persona came out of personal trauma, and it is hard not to see the decline of Horne’s family life in his remark that “the harsh fact of human existence is that there are always clouds on the horizon.” He read voraciously, but the intellectual shallowness and derivative nature of most of what he had to say before the late 1950s are striking. And he could be brutal in his dealings with others, especially with pen in hand and press at the ready.

He was also good at serving powerful masters, to his (and often their) advantage, while seeking to maintain the conceit that he was really an outsider gatecrashing the party. We are familiar with his kind of elite populism from our own times. Invective triumphed over argument, ritualised scepticism over evidence, the too-clever-by-half smart alec over the searcher for truth.

All of that might have been forgivable in a student journalist or politician; it is less so in a man in his late twenties spouting nonsense about economic planning and rising totalitarianism among Canberra politicians and bureaucrats. It is among the ironies of Horne’s career that he barracked so hard in the 1940s and 1950s for the political and policy mediocrity that he would later condemn in his most famous writing.

His curriculum vitae during these years was various but untidy. He was bright enough to be among a dozen recruits into the Department of External Affairs’s diplomatic cadet scheme. He gained some pleasure from the study, but disliked Canberra and drifted towards journalism — and then back to his hero, Penton, and to Sydney. There was an early marriage to an English divorcée, Ethel, and the two of them were soon off to England. Horne thought of Australia as dull and second-rate and wanted an escape.

In Britain, living with his wife and some of her relatives on a farm — and for a time in London, which suited him better — Horne learnt that there was also a local franchise on the dull and second-rate. He became a would-be novelist: his two efforts each failed to find a publisher. Cropp presents him as somewhat in the spirit of England’s Angry Young Men of the era — but obviously without the literary success. He became involved in local Conservative politics, a would-be revolutionary of the right come to clear away the political rubbish of postwar Britain, then drifted back into journalism, writing rubbish for a tabloid before taking up a job with his old paper, Sydney’s Telegraph, in London.

For the paper he reported from Kenya, where the Mau Mau rebellion was beginning, and wrote of “terrorists,” “brutes” and “black monsters” who were “filled with an animal-like bloodlust that nothing can control.” As ever, he was good at writing what the powerful wanted to read, condemning critics of colonialism for their naivety. As Cropp points out, readers would not have known from Horne’s account that the whites were doing almost all of the killing. Still, Horne thought he might become a foreign correspondent: “Horne of Africa.”

We don’t normally think of Horne as one of the Australian postwar expatriates, presumably because his time there was only four years and his fame came in Australia a decade later. But there are good reasons to think that these years mattered a great deal to his intellectual development and later thinking. He didn’t do well among the British, but nor did he think highly of them — despite having arrived with a fairly conventional middle-class Australian view of Britain as the measure of all things. It is hard not to connect his later nationalism to this experience.

But perhaps that is to draw too straight a line — for as always with the rising Horne, it is wise to follow the money, or at least the ambition. In 1954 he agreed to return to Australia at Frank Packer’s behest: he would edit a new tabloid, Weekend. He agreed he would come back for six months, and left his wife behind in England, but he remained in Australia and the marriage ended.

Weekend was tabloid trash but sold very well, reaching a half-million circulation and boosting Horne’s stocks in the company and the world of Sydney journalism. The aspiring novelist who had abandoned mediocre Australia now built a career wallowing in that very same mediocrity as the editor of a rag that featured swimsuit models, but it also meant he was a well-paid Packer executive.

The identity as “intellectual” remained, however, and Packer was prepared to indulge him by supporting a new venture, the Observer. It was part of an efflorescence of new quality publications of the late 1950s and early 1960s that also included Tom Fitzgerald’s Nation. A talented group of writers and thinkers coalesced around these publications — Peter Coleman, a former philosophy lecturer and future politician, worked on the Observer, for instance, and the young art critic Robert Hughes would write for both publications.

Packer’s acquisition of the ailing Bulletin brought the Observer to an end, for he wanted Horne to edit it and refused to support two such publications. Horne famously modernised the Bulletin, removing the “Australia for the White Man” slogan from the masthead as well as much of the old staff. But Packer removed Horne himself from the job in 1962, causing him to fall back on tabloid editing. That was never going to last, and it didn’t. A humiliated Horne temporarily left the Packer stable.

Next for Horne came a period in advertising, and a role editing Quadrant. In many ways, his timing for the latter was poor, for that magazine, founded in 1956, was an instrument of the cultural cold war and, as would soon be revealed, was receiving CIA funding. Horne had nonetheless found a group of intellectual — and dining — companions in the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, which published the magazine.

But he was moving leftward. A cold warrior with the worst of them in the 1950s, a stance that proved a useful substitute for thinking seriously about the complexities of international politics, Horne now began to have second thoughts. Or rather, he began to think. He remained staunchly anti-communist, initially supporting Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war, for instance. The Bulletin under his editorship also published meaty — and sometimes rather obsessive — articles about communism’s influence in various corners of Australian life.

But he seems now to have regarded cold war anti-communism as an inadequate instrument for considering Australia’s place in the world. Where once it had seemed five minutes to midnight for isolated Australia in a world of unforgiving international rivalry, he now wanted to talk about the implications of the decline of the United Kingdom for a country that had long regarded itself as part of Greater Britain. He wanted to talk about how Australia, still attached to racial exclusion, might relate to Asia other than as part of an anti-communist alliance. How might Australia adapt to the opportunities offered by new technologies? How might it begin to think and act for itself instead of simply moving from under the domination of an old empire and into the orbit of that newer power in the world, the United States?

Horne was a legend of the long and liquid lunch, and an enthusiastic conversationalist. Many of his friendships with figures on the right would decline as he moved leftward. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties was more a signpost along the journey than a fork in the road: it encapsulated many ideas he had been developing, and had often already placed in print, well before its appearance at the end of 1964.

The book’s basic optimism about the Australian people was a contrast with his earlier Pentonesque attitude, which condemned them for their complacency. It was the leaders who Horne now thought mediocre. In a country where most were partisans of one or another of the parties, he confused everyone by condemning both the Liberals and Labor, Bob Menzies and Arthur Calwell.

As late as 1965, though, having returned to the Packer fold, he was playing a leading role in Liberal leader Robin Askin’s successful state election campaign (a matter Cropp strangely overlooks). He had not yet abandoned the Liberals. That would come later, with the rise of Whitlam, whom Horne came to think of as the kind of moderniser he had been wanting for years. He was devastated by the dismissal of Whitlam’s government, and played a role in leading anti-Kerr protests. Along the way he lost more friends on the right, who now saw him as a Labor stooge.

The Lucky Country had made Horne a famous Australian, and his life, ever after, was that of a celebrity, not merely a public figure. There would be many more books, including a highly regarded autobiographical trilogy, most of them worthy and interesting, all attracting significant media and public attention, yet none as successful as the first, freakish success of 1964.

Never, in Australian cultural history, has a book been better suited to a moment — but that moment passed, and more quickly than most moments because this was the 1960s. Cropp does well in taking us through the rest of the oeuvre right through to Horne’s brave, posthumous Dying: A Memoir, without dwelling too long on any particular publication.

Horne would leave journalism for academia — the University of New South Wales — in the 1970s, and he turned out to be rather good at it, even as he continued to balance the life of national figure with the everyday duties of university work. He read widely, including theoretical works by Antonio Gramsci and Roland Barthes. Where his earlier books had been intuitive and polemical, he now sought to provide greater system and depth. It was a testament to his openness of mind that he was willing to do so, and Cropp rightly gives him credit for it.

He was prolific, a workaholic, a buzzing enthusiast for ideas, books and argument. He took on the role of chair of the Australia Council for the Arts and threw himself into that with the same energy that he gave to most things. He was a co-founder of the Australian Republican Movement in 1991, but found himself increasingly marginalised. It is surely remarkable, and disgraceful, that neither the ARM nor the Howard government was able to find a place for him at the Constitutional Convention of 1998. By then, he was a venerable elder but seemed to come from another time. Still, he continued to write, to publish books, and to ponder the country’s future.

As in any successful biography of a complex subject, puzzles remain. Just how much of the bitterness of Horne’s early career in public life, and the pessimism of his theory of history, came from the ordeal of his father, and how much from Anderson and Penton, is hard to say. Similarly, the greater optimism, and pluralism, of Horne’s mid- and late-life public persona seem to map rather uncannily onto a second and happier marriage to Myfanwy (née Gollan), herself a journalist and the daughter of a journalist.

Two children, a girl, Julia, and a boy, Nick, came along to complete the family, and the impression is of a happy home, if one designed to ensure that Donald was able to get on with his professional life, and especially his writing, without too many disturbances or interruptions. Cropp has a little to say about these matters on the way through and especially near the end of the book — enough to suggest their importance to the public man and the critical thinker and writer. But they form a subplot in this book, not the main story.

Cropp concludes that we will not have another Donald Horne, and it is easy enough to see why that would be so. It is one of this book’s achievements to contextualise his remarkable career and show how our own times are not his. Horne was what Patrick Buckridge, Brian Penton’s biographer, has called an “editor-intellectual.” Penton was the model, and figures such as J.D. Pringle and Paul Kelly would come later. But in an age of media concentration and shrill op-ed commentary, that species is dead, even while Kelly lives on.

Horne’s career assumed the existence of a public sphere in which one could participate as a citizen, a place where ideas could be debated between rational beings, possibly oiled by a few bottles of wine. Horne’s early efforts often failed to rise to that ideal, but in the second half of his life he played the role of editor-intellectual and then citizen-intellectual with notable success.

In our own times, civil disagreement has become more difficult, even as Australia, as a nation, faces dilemmas that are sometimes uncannily similar to those Horne grappled with: how to respond to the decline of a great empire; how to respond to the changing balance of power in our region; how to modernise our political life and constitutional arrangements so that they better reflect our present rather than our past. Horne’s example of vigorous but respectful disagreement, as Cropp shows in this compelling and important biography, is well worth revisiting. •

Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country
By Ryan Cropp | La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. | $37.99 | 384 pages

The post Donald Horne, citizen intellectual 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.

John Carey called Morrison’s study “astute and revealing,” and it made the shortlist for the James Tait Black Prize, Britain’s longest-running biography award. As it happened, Carey’s own William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies won that year. Revealingly, Carey incorporated Golding’s classic debut novel into his title, suggesting that without overt semaphoring even informed readers might struggle to recall the 1983 Nobel Prize winner.

Morrison once told me his publisher had admitted that only four writers in English could be guaranteed a readership sizeable enough to make a biography an attractive business proposition: Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell. Which in part explains why D.J. Taylor’s new biography of Orwell does not come subtitled The Man Who Wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell needs no prompt. But the subtitle of Taylor’s Orwell: The New Life is revealing, for his own Orwell: The Life was published in 2003. And that raises the question: how is Taylor’s new life of Orwell “new”?

Orwell hoped no biography of him would be written, but the renown of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the enduring appeal of Animal Farm made that unlikely. He died in 1950 at the age of forty-six, but nearly three-quarters of a century on he is regularly quoted (and sometimes misquoted) by journalists and politicians, and taught in schools, a writer whose impact on language and the public imagination extends to people who have never read him.

His early death meant he never truly experienced that celebrity. Homage to Catalonia, for example, now understood as a classic account of the Spanish civil war, sold fewer than 700 copies in his lifetime. And while he came to be acknowledged as a great essayist, most of his short works first appeared in obscure journals with paltry readerships.

In many ways, though, he is a biographer’s dream, a quirky figure with a sharp intelligence and sharper opinions who lived a brief, eventful life in troubled times. The years between 1903 and 1950 witnessed two world wars, the British Empire’s decline, the rise (and sometimes fall) of left- and right-wing totalitarian regimes, a global depression, the Spanish civil war in which he fought, and the cold war, which he is credited with naming in his 1945 essay “You and the Atom Bomb.” Even better for the biographer trying to construct the narrative arc of his life, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published barely six months before his death. To add to the pathos, he died alone at night in hospital, haemorrhaging from the effects of the tuberculosis that haunted his life.

Born Eric Blair in India to parents who were minor figures in the Anglo-Indian community administering that part of the Empire, he was educated at an English prep school he later eviscerated in “Such, Such Were the Joys,” a memoir so libellous it was not published in his lifetime. He then seemed to consciously squander the prestigious and highly competitive King’s Scholarship he had won to Eton, rejecting the route to Oxbridge taken by contemporaries such as Cyril Connolly and Steven Runciman, later a renowned classicist.

Instead, he worked for five years in Burma with the Imperial Police before returning to England, then spent the next half-decade trying unsuccessfully to write novels in Paris. (He managed only a few articles in Parisian newspapers — in French.) He worked there as a kitchen hand and in England as a teacher, living for brief periods among tramps and itinerant rural workers and mooching off his bemused parents, by now in retirement in the staid English town of Southwold.

He used much of this experience in articles and essays, novels and documentaries. In some sense he was his own biographer, although critics and actual biographers sometimes struggle to distinguish fact from fiction. Did he witness “a hanging” — the title of his first great essay — in Burma? Or, given its undertones of Somerset Maugham, is that work actually a short story? Or some hybrid? Is another essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” an eyewitness account or a crafted “sketch” (the term Orwell used for it) using a first-person narrator for dramatic effect?

Taylor thinks treating both as “straightforward pieces of autobiography” is “a mistake.” “A Hanging” was published in 1933 under the name Eric Blair, while “Shooting an Elephant” appeared in 1936 as the work of “George Orwell,” a pen name that first appears in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Biographers suggest that Blair adopted it to avoid his parents being publicly embarrassed by the book’s squalid details. “George Orwell” was only one of four names he suggested to his agent, two others being the uninspired “Kenneth Miles” and the laughable “H. Lewis Always.” The published title was also a late choice. Potentially, Eric Blair’s first book might have been published as The Lady Poverty, by H. Lewis Always. Thankfully, Down and Out in Paris and London and George Orwell prevailed.

Writing by Eric Blair continued into 1935, and the BBC hired Orwell under his real name during the second world war, but critics often see the adoption of the pseudonym as part of an ongoing psychological and political evolution. In this reading, Blair sheds many of the trappings of middle-class life, though the accent honed at Eton never leaves him and he might dress formally for dinner. He adopts the somewhat ascetic, combative and consciously quirky persona of Orwell, dressing with a provocative déclassé dowdiness and rather clumsily adopting working-class mannerisms such as hand-rolling cigarettes and drinking tea from a saucer.

All this suggests some level of inauthenticity, and Taylor repeatedly points to Orwell consciously fashioning a persona: “as well as being a biography,” he writes, “what follows is, ultimately, a study of Orwell’s personal myth, what might be called the difference between the kind of person he was and the kind of person he imagined himself to be.”

We might read this as less duplicitous than aspirational, but the undoubted tensions between middle-class and working-class perspectives finds literary form in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). This bifurcated study begins with Orwell’s report of conditions in working-class sections of northern England, a section meant to shock and educate middle-class socialists in southern England likely to read it. The book’s second half presents Orwell’s account of his upbringing and political development, a precursor to his idiosyncratic argument for an English socialism, shorn of Soviet affectations, in which the middle class merges in solidarity with the working class.

Homage to Catalonia road-tests Orwell’s developing socialist views in extreme circumstances, while Coming Up for Air (1939) tracks with wry affection the journey of a nostalgic Everyman who yearns for a past now long gone but senses impending war. The transformation from 1933’s Eric Blair to 1939’s George Orwell is dramatic, but had he written nothing after 1939 he would have at best been a literary footnote. Instead, he writes Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), two of literature’s greatest political fictions.

Without these late works, Orwell would hardly warrant one biography, let alone the half a dozen that have appeared from Bernard Crick’s 1980 study to Taylor’s latest life. But that simple sequence conceals a fraught narrative. Orwell’s second wife Sonia knee-capped Peter Stansky and William Abrahams’s early biographically based studies, The Unknown Orwell and Orwell: The Transformation, denying them the right to quote from Orwell’s work. She also floated the idea that Orwell’s friend Malcolm Muggeridge would write the first authorised biography, possibly to put off other potential candidates. Then, after selecting Crick, a political scientist, she disavowed his study as too dull, trying unsuccessfully to break the book contract. Sonia Orwell died before Crick’s account of Orwell was published to general acclaim — Orwell’s friend, the writer Julian Symons, called it the “definitive biography.”

When a study authorised by the Orwell Estate eventually did appear, Michael Shelden’s Orwell: The Authorised Biography (1991) took pains to dismiss Crick’s biography as a collection of facts that failed to illuminate Orwell’s character and motivations. (Crick returned fire in the 1995 reprint of his work.) Shelden’s study reflects his training as a literary scholar interested in character and motivation, while Crick adopts a more objective social science approach.

Jeffrey Meyers’s Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (2000) seeks to portray Orwell as a more problematic individual, a man with “a noble character, but [who] was also violent, capable of cruelty, tormented by guilt, masochistically self-punishing, sometimes suicidal.” Neither Crick nor Shelden paint Orwell as saintly, but Meyers strives to present him as a dark figure, without fundamentally changing the narrative outline of his life.

Biographers from Meyers on have enjoyed access to The Complete Works of George Orwell (1998), a twenty-volume set brilliantly edited by Peter Davison that presented not only Orwell’s published work but also masses of previously unpublished letters and documents. This and other material made available in the ever-expanding Orwell Archive at University College London afford and sometimes demand more recent reappraisals.

The centenary of his birth in 2003 prompted two more biographies, Gordon Bowker’s George Orwell and Taylor’s Orwell: The Life, proof that publishers saw an audience large enough to justify concurrent studies. Bowker continued the desanctification of Orwell, accepting him as a “writer of great power and imagination” but making much of what he saw as his subject’s deceptive character, infidelities and chauvinism. He declares that the “main thrust” of his book is to “reach down as far as possible to the roots” of Orwell’s emotional life,” to get “as close as possible to the dark sources mirrored in his work.”

Taylor’s biography is less lurid, but he too exposes Orwell’s less-appealing qualities. And he intersperses the chronological biographical narrative with short essays on topics such as “Orwell and the Jews,” examining Orwell’s problematically complex attitudes, or “Orwell’s paranoia,” about “malign exterior forces that he suspected of interfering in his and other people’s lives.”

Like Bowker, Taylor understands Orwell as a great writer — both come to praise Orwell rather than to bury him — but he too acknowledges substantial personal flaws. Taylor even includes a short “case against” Orwell, written in the persona of a Marxist critic who claims that “as a novelist, Orwell scarcely begins to exist” and declares him a “hopelessly naïve” political thinker. Taylor himself is far more positive.

Unusually, both of Orwell’s wives have merited biographies. The title of Hilary Spurling’s The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell (2002) overtly connects Sonia Orwell with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Julia, while Sylvia Topp’s Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (2020) argues for the influence of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, on his life and writing. Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, published this month (and reviewed for Inside Story by Patrick Mullins), advances that general case, presenting a complex mix of critique and life writing that faults Orwell himself for largely “erasing” Eileen from his writing and accuses previous Orwell biographers (all male) of failing to pay due respect to Eileen’s intellect and emotional support, as well as to the “free labour” that allowed Orwell to pursue his life as a writer at the expense of her own considerable abilities and ambitions.

Funder’s fictionalised vignettes, based on known facts and exchanges of letters with Eileen’s female friends, reposition her centrestage. All this takes place within a larger investigation of “wifedom,” the general condition Funder maintains continues to require wives (including herself) to operate within patriarchal power arrangements detrimental to their own flourishing. Provocative, fluent and energetic, Wifedom will activate lively debate among Orwell scholars and the general readers interested in Orwell and his milieu.

Which brings us to Taylor’s New Life. As with Funder, Taylor has access to new information unknown to earlier biographers, including Eileen’s often deeply personal letters to her friend Norah Myles, made public in 2005, which detail her life with Orwell from 1938 to 1941. Recently uncovered caches of letters also illuminate Orwell’s already known relationships with two women he pursued romantically before and after his marriage to Eileen.

Revelations have also emerged about Eric Blair’s problematic last meeting with his teenage love, Jacintha Buddicom, an event that might count as sexual assault. And Taylor assigns much greater importance to Orwell’s “ever-supportive Aunt Nellie,” who proved a key benefactor. Nellie’s living in Paris offered him literary and political connections in that city; her friends Francis and Myfanwy Westrope ran the bookshop where Orwell worked in the early 1930s; Nellie secured the spartan cottage Orwell and Eileen lived in through much of the late 1930s.

Women play a far more significant role in The New Life than in Taylor’s earlier book, so that Norah Myles, who does not appear at all in The Life, is referenced more than twenty times in the recent work, part of a more extensive and nuanced account of Eileen’s life and friends. Taylor also accepts Robert Colls’s criticism in George Orwell: English Rebel (2013) that Orwell’s depiction of the working class in The Road to Wigan Pier effaces the vitality of working-class life. Integrating these and other pieces of information and scholarship adds colour and shade to the image Taylor previously depicted, without changing the outline.

Taylor also deals with the relative paucity of primary information about key sections of Orwell’s early life, particularly at Eton and in Burma. All biographies are complex weaves of available evidence and interpretation, but how to proceed if little evidence exists? Michael Shelden, for example, took Orwell’s essay about prep school, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” almost as documentary, even though it was written when Orwell was in his forties and many of his contemporaries thought it exaggerated.

If Shelden accepted the essay too easily as fact, at least it was written by Orwell himself. Taylor at times adopts an odder tactic, at one point deploying the novel Decent Fellows by a rough contemporary of Orwell’s at Eton, John Heygate, to convey a sense of the school a decade earlier. Taylor’s claim that “all this sheds a fascinating light on Orwell’s time at Eton” seems a stretch. And on the question of whether Orwell saw a man hanged in Burma, Taylor connects Orwell’s essay to Thackeray’s 1840 “Going to See a Man Hanged” claiming that the later narrative “could not have been written in quite the same way without the ghostly presence” of Thackeray’s account. This claim, simultaneously large and odd, is somewhat undermined by the fact that The Complete Works of George Orwell makes no mention of Thackeray’s piece.

Even the best real detectives (as opposed to the fictional ones) must deal with the reality that sometimes there is no evidence to be found, and Taylor is honest enough to admit more than once that we simply do not or cannot know. At other times, though, he uses questions to generate potential answers, so that in a late “Interlude” titled “Orwell and his World,” he asks: “Some basic behavioural questions: What was Orwell like? How did he seem? If you were in a room with him, how might he conduct himself and what would you talk about?”

This is a little too close to “showing your workings,” an unnecessary act given the impressive amount of detail Taylor fashions into a coherent and insightful character study. He also retains from his earlier biography the two- or three-page essays on topics he deems worth individual attention. Some are only cursorily rewritten, while new ones are added: “Orwell and the Working Classes” or “Orwell and the ‘Nancy Boys.’” The latter begins with the terrible line “Orwell’s dislike of homosexuals follows him through his work like the clang of a medieval leper bell.” While the topic itself is significant, the dislocation of the narrative that this and similar pieces effect is heightened by its coming immediately after a chapter ending with Eileen’s death during an operation for uterine tumours; the juxtaposition is jarring.

For all this, Taylor assembles a wealth of information, some of it new, much of it intelligently reinterpreted, into what can justifiably be claimed as a “new” biography based on decades of close attention to Orwell’s life and mythology. The occasional medieval leper bell apart, he writes with a fluency that injects the narrative with vitality and significance. The New Life is a knowing biography, incorporating changes and advances in our knowledge and assessment of Orwell without being modish or attempting to defend the indefensible (or at least reprehensible) aspects of his life.

Almost alone among his contemporaries Orwell can still attract a sizeable new audience. W.H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh are still lauded, but they seem figures from a past that is recognisable as the past. As proof of Orwell’s status as a still-relevant writer, at least five books about him have appeared or will appear in 2023: Taylor’s biography; Peter Stansky’s The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War; Glenn Burgess’s Orwell’s Perverse Humanity; Masha Karp’s George Orwell and Russia; and Peter Barry’s forthcoming George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality. To which we might add Anna Funder’s Orwell-adjacent Wifedom.

Have we hit peak Orwell? Perhaps. But just as the election of Donald Trump in 2016 rocketed Nineteen Eighty-Four back to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, so the prospect of a second Trump presidency suggests that Orwell might again speak to a new set of readers. To this we can add the menace of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and their abominable clones. The man whose writing spawned the adjective “Orwellian” seems unlikely to go out of fashion. •

Orwell: A New Life
By D.J. Taylor | Little, Brown | $34.99 | 496 pages

The post The self-fashioning of George Orwell 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.

That firepower wasn’t enough. In a succinct summary of his judgement yesterday, Justice Anthony Besanko found that three newspapers — all of them part of the Fairfax group at the time — and their journalists had established the “substantial truth” of their reports that Roberts-Smith had murdered and assaulted unarmed Afghan prisoners. A Victoria Cross–winning war hero was instantly labelled a war criminal.

Notably, Justice Besanko accepted as true the report that Roberts-Smith had kicked an unarmed and handcuffed captive, Ali Jan, backwards off a cliff and then ordered a subordinate soldier to shoot him dead. Further details will emerge when the full 1000-page judgement is published on 5 June. A further fifty pages containing sensitive national security details goes to a more select readership.

What next? Roberts-Smith remains a free man. The defamation case was not a criminal trial. A judge finding substantial truth on the balance of evidence in a civil trial is not the same as a judge or jury finding guilt beyond reasonable doubt in a criminal case, as some of Roberts-Smith’s former colleagues in the Special Air Service Regiment were quick to point out.

The Seven Network — whose owner Kerry Stokes paid for Roberts-Smith’s legal expenses over 110 days of hearings as well as those of some supporting witnesses — has said Roberts-Smith continues in his job of managing the network in Queensland, though on leave, pending review.

Lead counsel Arthur Moses SC asked for and received stay of judgement to consider an appeal. An estimated $25 million has already been spent by the two sides; whether Stokes wants to put up more of his money remains to be seen. The defence side will seek to claim its share of this from Roberts-Smith and “third parties” (entities controlled by Stokes). So the Perth-based magnate could be up for most of the legal bill.

Will he quit or double down? If an appeal does proceed, it could delay a final resolution of the civil action for another year or more.

Watching it all closely will be the Office of the Special Investigator, or OSI, the war crimes unit that was revealed during the trial to be examining Roberts-Smith’s actions in Afghanistan. Will an appeal be an obstacle for the OSI if it is thinking of a move against the former soldier?

The OSI was set up after the defence force inspector-general, Justice Paul Brereton, found “credible” evidence that twenty-five current or former special forces personnel participated in the unlawful killing of thirty-nine individuals and the cruel treatment of two others during the Australian army’s deployment in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. Where the evidence justified it, the OSI was charged with launching prosecutions.

Under a former secretary of the federal attorney-general’s department, Chris Moraitis, and with former Victorian Supreme Court justice Mark Weinberg as special investigator, the office has a powerful array of federal police and legal investigators hard at work. Its first fusillade came in March, when a former SAS soldier, Oliver Schulz, became the first Australian serviceman or veteran to be charged with the war crime of murder, in his case for the alleged killing of an Afghan man in Uruzgan province in 2012. Schulz, who was given bail, is expected to be tried next year or in 2025.

Some other governments that fought in Afghanistan, including Britain and Belgium, are believed to be closely studying the Australian model. The OSI has also opened a close liaison with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, an important move because Australia, as a signatory to the Rome Statute setting up that tribunal, must show it is vigorously investigating and prosecuting any war crimes or crimes against humanity committed by its own armed personnel or citizens. Otherwise, the ICC is entitled to launch cases itself, with Australia having to hand over the suspects.

We also now know that the United States warned Canberra in early 2021 — via a US embassy defence attaché to Australian defence force chief General Angus Campbell — that the human rights violations detailed in the Brereton report might oblige the US military to suspend cooperation with Australian special forces under US legislation known as the Leahy Amendment.

Some might find this threat a bit rich given the United States’ counterinsurgency record and the character of some local forces it has sponsored, but the American military for many years cut contact with the Indonesian special forces, Kopassus, over its killings and abductions of government critics. That Australia now risked being tarred with the same brush must have been a shock.

With the Americans watching and Brereton having found credible evidence of specific war crimes, the Morrison government had little choice but to follow the judge’s recommendation for a formal criminal investigation. Now, with a federal judge finding “substantial truth” in the allegations against Roberts-Smith, the current government has added interest in the OSI’s work.

A finding for Roberts-Smith would have been a strong warning light for the OSI. The light has turned green, though the OSI would need to feel confident it has the high standard of proof required for a successful prosecution. It must be encouraged by the fact that former members of the tight-knit SAS have moved from being anonymous sources for the Fairfax journalists to protected and indemnified witnesses for Brereton, and then to in-camera sworn witnesses before Justice Besanko.

That these soldiers have risked ostracism to testify does, to a large extent, save the “honour of the regiment” for the SAS. Since Brereton, the unit has also been intensively retrained in the rules of war. The warped command system described by Brereton, whereby seasoned non-commissioned officers came to overawe both the younger lieutenants and the captains above them, has also been tackled.

But the question of responsibility doesn’t end with the soldiers committing the alleged offences. Fellow soldiers didn’t come forward. Officers failed to monitor their soldiers closely, signed off on falsified reports of enemy encounters, or implicitly condoned the practice of planting “throwdowns” (weapons or radio sets) on the bodies of killed civilians.

One of the most sickening allegations against Roberts-Smith was that he murdered a one-legged Afghan man and took his prosthetic leg back to base as a war trophy. In an unauthorised bar on the main Australian army base in Uruzgan known as the “Fat Ladies Arms,” Roberts-Smith and other soldiers used this leg as a beer-drinking horn.

The existence of this bar, flouting the rules against alcohol on operations, can hardly have escaped the attention of any of the officers or non-commissioned officers running the operation. That this breach of orders was tolerated perhaps shows the leeway afforded the SAS troops.

In the wake of the Brereton report, at least two serving or retired generals tried to hand in medals won as commanders in Afghanistan but were asked to hold off. ADF chief Angus Campbell’s decision to withdraw the unit citation from special forces personnel who’d served in Afghanistan was overruled by Peter Dutton as defence minister.

This week in Senate hearings, Campbell said a review handed to defence minister Richard Marles two weeks ago had considered whether “a small number of persons who held command appointments” should lose medals or honours. Campbell himself was commander of the Middle East task force covering Afghanistan in 2011–12, regularly visiting Australian troops in the field from his base in the United Arab Emirates, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his role. Pushed by independent senator Jacqui Lambie, a soldier for ten years, Campbell said he was himself included in the review.

A wider responsibility rests on the political leaders and policy advisers who sent soldiers into an unwinnable conflict in which forty-one would be killed and many more injured, and after which dozens would commit suicide and others, partly for want of control and discipline, seem likely to face imprisonment.

Kim Beazley, newly appointed chair of the Australian War Memorial council, faces some immediate challenges. Two of his predecessors — Kerry Stokes and former defence minister Brendan Nelson, who appeared as a character witness for Roberts-Smith — left an unexploded bomb: an exhibit of Roberts-Smith’s combat gear and material extolling his heroism.

It may be tempting to simply remove the display. But rather than a historical airbrush, an exhibit about the Brereton inquiry and the OSI might better suit the times. Even Charles Bean, the AWM’s founder, included the 1918 rampage in 1918 by Anzac troops against Palestinians at Surafend in his official history of the first world war.

A sad reminder that the whole operation was never really about the Afghans came when the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade withdrew its embassy from Kabul at the first sign of US withdrawal, two months before the city fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Thousands of Afghans who had worked with Australian forces or agencies were left at risk of vengeance.

This week Australia’s former inspector-general of intelligence and security, Vivienne Thom, reported on their plight to the government. Responding, ministers including Marles, foreign minister Penny Wong and attorney-general Mark Dreyfus blamed the Morrison government and said criteria for asylum would be expanded. But Afghans have been given only until the end of November to apply — how they would do that in the absence of an embassy is unclear — and the program will close at the end of May next year.

Brereton’s recommendation that Canberra not wait for the end of investigations and trials to pay compensation to Afghan victims and bereaved families was put in the too-hard basket eight months later when the Taliban took Kabul.

The dust of Uruzgan, as sung about the Australian diplomat who performs under the name Fred Smith, will keep blowing in. •

The post Heart of darkness 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.

The task is complicated by a paradox. As well as having a great gift for friendship Robert was in many ways a very private person. So I’ll leave it mainly to the extract below — from a short family history he was working on — to give a sense of the forces that created a gifted reporter who published thousands of carefully crafted pieces over a more than fifty-year career.

Robert spent his childhood in Wingham, a NSW town on the Manning River, where his parents ran a residential hotel. Those years left him with warm memories of the character and pace of postwar country life, tempered by a growing sense that change was inevitable. More importantly, life at the Wingham Hotel — a microcosm of rural Australia — fuelled in him an intense curiosity. Journalism seems always to have been the logical end point of those early influences.

After studying politics at the University of New South Wales he took up a cadetship with the Sydney Morning Herald, where his reporting skills were soon apparent. He became known to readers outside Sydney after he moved to another Fairfax paper, the National Times, to write and edit features.

He was also contributing Australian news to the Guardian in London, and it was probably those pieces that attracted the attention of the Independent, the exciting new paper launched by a trio of journalists in London in 1986. One of his first assignments as the paper’s Australian correspondent was the legally delicate job of covering the Spycatcher trial. Reporting on this attempt by the British government to suppress the Australian publication of a controversial MI5 memoir was complicated by a ruling by the Law Lords back in London, who had declared any mention of the book’s contents off limits for the British media.

After more than a decade with the Independent Robert was appointed Australian correspondent for the Economist, to which he continued contributing — regularly then occasionally — until quite recently. Throughout those years he also contributed to Australian magazines including Australian Society, Anne Summers Reports, the Good Weekend and, from 2009, Inside Story. For a time he wrote editorials for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Somehow during these years he found time to write a history of British nuclear testing in Australia, a book about rural Australia’s social and economic upheaval and a biography (extracted here) of the pioneering rock journalist Lillian Roxon.

Among his articles for Australian Society were two on the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. That interest in Indigenous affairs carried over into two outstanding pieces for Inside Story based on visits to Bourke and Moree to see innovative justice projects in action. Among his other features for Inside Story was a profile of the maverick western Sydney Liberal Craig Laundy, an account of the migration-led revival of Dubbo, and a report on the unveiling of a new statue, also in Dubbo, of Aboriginal rights leader William Ferguson.

He was a fierce critic of Australia’s treatment of refugees and an equally fierce advocate of an Australian republic. He wrote meticulously but responded amiably to editorial meddling. His circle of friends and acquaintances was wide, and he was invariably a welcoming presence during my visits to Sydney. I am among the many who will miss him enormously.

Here, then, is a short extract from Robert’s last writing project…

On Friday 20 September 1946 the Wingham Chronicle carried a small item near the top of its “Personal” column: “Mr and Mrs Dave Milliken, of the Wingham Hotel, are being congratulated on the birth last weekend of a son and heir.”

The son and heir was me. My sister and only sibling, Sue, had been born six and a half years earlier, but no one ever called her a daughter and heiress. My birth came in the first year of the baby boomers, the post–second world war generation whose arrival presaged big social change. But old attitudes on women’s role in society, and much else, still died hard.

Heir to what? My grandfathers, Harry Cross and James Milliken, had separately built enterprises of the kind around which life on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, and in many other rural regions, revolved: a country hotel and a dairy farm. The worlds these tow institutions encompassed had barely changed in at least fifty years. But they were about to do so, not least for their baby-boom grandchildren.

It was probably 1950 when the first of us boomers became aware of the world around us. Shorn of the privations of economic depression and war, we were defined by youth and renewal: the opening up of education, the postwar rebuilding, the arrival of different sorts of people from the mono-Anglo immigrants of our parents’ generation, and a new popular culture captured largely by the biggest glamour figures of all time, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. All this spelled confidence. How could we not be different?

I’ve long wanted to write about my childhood in an Australia that has largely passed, where people in New South Wales, at least, lived according to simpler patterns and precepts. Political trends and social mores seemed set in stone; few, if any, questioned them. There were no movements to advance the interests of women, immigrants, First Australians, gay people and others outside society’s masculine conformity because they barely seemed to exist.

Inevitably, my two grandfathers — whose businesses defined much about the rural Australia I entered — provided the stepping-off points. The first baby boomers were born during a crucial transition, from the tail end of the era of European expansion to the opening up of new cultural frontiers.

The Wingham Hotel, also known as Cross’s Hotel, stood confidently and invitingly at the entrance to Wingham, a town of perhaps 3000 people on the Manning River, about 320 kilometres north of Sydney. The Milliken farm, “Magheramorne,” faced the Wallamba River at Darawank, a hamlet near the Pacific Ocean about thirty-six kilometres southeast of Wingham.

Before the days of motels and licensed clubs, country hotels like ours played key roles in country life. They were the places where people stayed, ate, met, did business and, at the Wingham Hotel at least, lived. The residents weren’t people just looking for somewhere cheap to doss. They were what today would be called young professionals, for whom the hotel offered comfort and security.

In my first few years, residents included a pharmacist, a doctor, an ex–prisoner of war from Changi, and the venerable Miss Paterson, who became Wingham’s first female health inspector in 1949. They were the “permanents” who, in some ways, became part of the family.

Yet social mores kept familiarity at a distance. We called them Mr, Mrs or Miss, never by their first names (the honorific Ms hadn’t been coined). When I met her again fifty years later in her retirement in a mid-north coast beach town, Miss Paterson gave a sense of how these rigidities were starting to break down when she landed in Wingham after the war.

“There was a first-name basis largely, and I didn’t think that was right,” she told me. “You weren’t going to have a disciplined staff if they were going to call you Bill and Joe and whatever. So I was trying to educate them, but I don’t think I had any success at all. In the office itself, the girls all called one another by their first names, but maybe I just looked difficult. The town clerk always called me Miss Paterson. Some of the labourers would come in and say, “Is Jim in?” meaning the town clerk. I’d give them a lecture, and say Mr-whoever-was-the-town-clerk was in.”

Social life was more relaxed, with people expressing their feelings in sayings that have largely fallen out of use. Instead of swearing, publicly at least, they said “Strike a light,” “Spare me days,” “God strewth” or just “Strewth” to convey shock or exasperation, and “God give me strength” for outright disapproval.

I didn’t inherit either the hotel or the dairy farm, but each of them has remained embedded in my imagination. That’s because the hotel in particular, but even the farm, were such vibrant places where people, not machines, computers and algorithms, were the drivers of daily life.

By the time I was born, both grandfathers were dead. My parents, Thelma (known as Thel), Harry Cross’s elder daughter, and David (known as Dave), James Milliken’s youngest son, had married in 1939 and, the following year, taken over the Wingham Hotel in partnership with Thel’s younger sister, Jennie. We lived as a family in a sprawling flat upstairs, and while Thel, Dave and Jennie were running the business downstairs Sue and I were endlessly fascinated by the colourful cast of characters — staff, patrons, diners, drinkers, travelling salesmen and visitors of all kinds — who thronged the hotel’s kitchen, dining room, bars and lounges.

In some ways, it was like living in a frontier town of the kind depicted in the Westerns that featured in Wingham’s two cinemas (then known as picture theatres) in the 1940s and 50s. One artist’s depiction of the approach to Wingham — looking across the Cedar Party Creek bridge and up the rise of Wynter Street to the Wingham Hotel — evokes the town entrance of my childhood, unchanged as it must have been for decades. I imagine coaches bringing people along the dirt road and bullock trains taking freshly sawn native cedar and eucalyptus logs from forests in the hills around Wingham, down Isabella Street to the wharf, where they were shipped to Sydney and the wider world.

Wingham’s own world was a self-sufficient one. There were no supermarkets, no clothing or hardware chain stores owned by distant conglomerates. Local families — the Moxeys, the Gleesons, the Maitlands, the Mellicks and others — owned and ran the local businesses that provided food, groceries, clothes, farm equipment and almost every provision townsfolk needed.

This self-sufficiency helped to give Wingham and its district’s tight-knit population a strong sense of identity. So did the local economy, which revolved around dairy and beef farming and timber. It belonged to a world in which most of Australia’s exports came from the bush. That, too, was about to change, as hardships from the past faded away and the new golden age, born with the baby boomers, began.

Thel, Dave, Jennie and their generation had lived through two of the worst events of the twentieth century: the Depression of the 1930s and the second world war. The war had come to the Wingham Hotel in various ways. Family friends went, or were sent, to live there, seeking sanctuary from isolation and attack. And Dave fought battles of a different sort with government authorities over the rationing of beer.

Although the war had ended just a year before I was born, through my childhood eyes it was as if it had never happened. A new world of abundance and prosperity was unfolding.

A fortnight after I was born Ben Chifley won the 1946 election for the Labor Party, claiming Australia was “about to enter upon the greatest era in her history.” The start of the baby boom fuelled demand for housing and consumer goods, and a big rise in immigration helped to underpin postwar economic expansion. As the historian Stuart Macintyre observed, “The third quarter of the twentieth century was an era of growth unmatched since the second half of the nineteenth century.”

Along with growth and prosperity, three events in 1949, three years after I was born, roughly defined the world I was entering. Mao Zedong led the Chinese Communist Party to power, founding the People’s Republic of China. The Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic weapon, ending America’s monopoly as a nuclear power. Those two events consolidated the cold war: a strategic rivalry between the West and the Soviet Union and its allies, including the fear of nuclear war, that was a fundamental feature of the 1950s.

The third significant event of 1949 that helped fix Australia’s political world happened closer to home. Bob Menzies, founder of the Liberal Party, won the 1949 federal election, and remained Australia’s prime minister for a record seventeen years. Menzies was a consummate politician for whom the economic boom at home and the cold war’s uncertainties abroad facilitated a hold on power. The government’s anti-communist rhetoric pervaded the 1950s, with Menzies warning of Australia falling victim to a “thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.”

There was little sense of a new form of postwar Australian nationalism emerging. Another twenty years had to pass for that to happen. Menzies, the ultimate Anglophile and monarchist, folded Australia’s identity into its British colonial heritage just as that world was growing rapidly out of date. In a speech to the US House of Representatives in 1950, he declared: “The world needs the United States of America. The world needs the British peoples of the world.” He made no mention of his own land as a separate sovereign entity.

As a child at Wingham public school, opposite our family’s hotel, I attended Empire Day, a curious annual celebration of the British Empire, with bonfires and fireworks, that ceased only in 1958. The Biripi Aboriginal community, who’d lived in the Manning Valley for tens of thousands of years before the Crosses, Millikens and other settlers arrived, were not included. The empire had robbed them of their lands and much of their cultural heritage. They were not seen, and nor did the school mention their names or story. As a child, I didn’t know they existed; to my knowledge, I never saw an Aboriginal person in Wingham.

In the first years of the baby boomers, Aboriginal Australians were kept in their colonial-era places, the missions and settlements, usually in squalor. Purfleet, near the Manning town of Taree, and a settlement in Forster, at the mouth of the Wallamba River, offered my first childhood glimpses of Aboriginal people, but only as we drove past, and with no discussion of who they were or how they got there. Righting injustices was not part of Australia’s immediate postwar agenda.

Too much else was happening to redefine postwar Australia as a land of wealth, confidence and leisure. The first Sydney–Hobart yacht race was held in 1945. Australia started making cars in 1948. Construction of the most ambitious public enterprise — the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme — started in 1949. Many of the workers who built that project, who comprised the first wave of immigrants drawn from European countries other than Britain, were trailblazers of the multicultural profile that eventually changed the country’s human face.

The changes didn’t stop at home. Overseas, Australia was joining the American Century. To replace our old dependence on Britain, we looked across the Pacific to form security alliances with our new “great and powerful friend,” as Menzies called the United States, which had led us to victory in the Pacific war. America’s cultural influence reached a zenith during the 1950s, when the first wave of baby boomers came into childhood. The surge of popular culture from America included the birth of rock-and-roll, resonating among a new generation in an Australia that had given barely any encouragement to local voices in film, drama or music.

All this gave a young baby boomer the sense of an exciting and prosperous, yet secure world. Menzies’s reassuring tones on the radio and in newsreels (television didn’t come to Australia until 1956) helped see to that. The rhythm of life in the sheltered worlds of the Wingham Hotel and the Magheramorne farm, and elsewhere, hardly varied from one year to the next.

And yet it was about to change. In the mid 1950s, Thel and Dave sold the Wingham Hotel, bringing to an end a family ownership of three generations. We moved to Glory Vale, a beautiful farm near Gloucester, also on the Manning River. I rode a horse every day to a one-room bush school. In this unlikely place, we had a brush with Hollywood glamour when the star Anne Baxter settled incongruously for a time further along the Manning. A way of life for rural Australians would soon pass forever. •

The post Boomer time 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.” •

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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. •

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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. •

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Still Pictures, Malcolm’s just-published final work, is a collection of twenty-six short chapters, or meditations, on this relationship. It amounts to a fragmented yet highly evocative autobiography, a genre of which she also remained wary to the end.

Most, though not all, of the chapters begin with a photograph. A few contain no reproductions at all, a few contain several, but mostly there is just one photograph, acting as a starter culture for the reflections that follow. The illustrations as they appear on the page are small and of low resolution; they don’t seem to have much of a life or significance of their own. Some come, we are told, from a cardboard box marked “Old Not Good Photos,” clearly signalling their lack of aesthetic value. They certainly don’t leap from the page, demanding our attention. It is Malcolm’s words that make them.

The title, Still Pictures, refers to the essential quality of photographic images, their status as frozen moments in time. The subtitle, “On Photography and Memory,” provides a bit more of a hint of what to expect. Are photographs, these frozen moments, the embodiment of memory, or at the very least stimulants to memory (whether those memories are collective or private), or do we accord photographs a status and power they don’t really merit?

Which takes us back to the main title, and its subtle ambiguity. Photos and snapshots, made with the greatest care or taken casually and unthinkingly, may well provide keys to the past. Or they may, in the end, still just be pictures.

Malcolm repeatedly approaches this question, before feinting and dancing away from it. We are not to be treated to conventional or indeed unconventional analysis of why this or that image works or doesn’t work, of why it might qualify as art. This is no surprise, given that she became, over many decades of engagement with photographs and their impact on our view of the world, increasingly uninterested in the theoretical exploration or artistic appreciation of photography.

In an email exchange with fellow writer on photography Geoff Dyer in 2014, published in the journal Aperture, she asserts her complete lack of interest in that trio of giants of photographic theory, John Berger, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. Their “writings on photography have meant almost nothing to me,” she tells Dyer in characteristically take-it-or-leave-it style.

Malcolm does however directly follow the Barthes of Camera Lucida in her insistence on the essentially private nature of our response to photographs. In Still Pictures, her readings of the photographs she has selected are partial, tentative and very personal. Our interaction with a photograph is “always, at bottom, a private reading,” Barthes wrote, a reading in which the subject of the photo intertwines with our own past and our own memories. It is not the photo that we see, but what it says to us, the memories it evokes.

Malcolm differs from many a speculative and freewheeling reader of photographs in that even what is for her a very personal image, one with an earlier version of herself in the frame, may not offer very much in the way of material. Photos, like memories, possess a natural resistance. “I am in the front row, third from the left,” she says of a class photo, but beyond that “the picture brings back no memory.” Another image, of Malcolm, her sister and “three people I don’t recognise,” is dismissed as “barely readable… It has no artistic merit and summons no memories.”

This is one of many comments Malcolm makes on the failure of photographs — photographs in this case related directly to her own life — to deliver in the memory department. I remember nothing, she will say of a photograph, yet paradoxically Still Pictures is packed with memories. Even as she tells us that, memory-wise, this or that photograph is a disappointment, the memories take off — usually in unpredictable directions, but memories all the same.

“Barely readable.” Janet Malcolm

In that image of a young Janet, her sister and the three women she does not (at first) recognise, the figures are variously arranged, in a row, against a car. The woman on the left of the frame is half standing, half leaning behind and against the driver’s open door, her face full on to the viewer, framed by the car window. A frame within a frame.

But Malcolm — and this is a sign of her dismissive brilliance — gives only the most cursory nod towards this rather obvious piece of compositional analysis. Instead, she mimics the process of looking more closely at a photograph and of a memory suddenly coming back to her. She does, after all, remember this woman in the window, but then the memory begins to fade. “There may have been some tragic story, or there may not.”

“I have a memory,” she remarks in a further reflection, and the memory sounds from her telling of it to have many of the qualities of a photograph. It is from her teenage years. Leonard and Sue are “standing together at the back of an assembly hall.” It is a highly romantic, evocative image. Both of them “exceptionally good-looking.” They form a composition on their own, apart from their “unformed” fellows. Their apartness, Malcolm says, has “stayed with me through the years.” But it isn’t a photograph, she reminds us — it’s a memory.

In this retained, unphotographed memory, Malcolm resists what can often seem to be the inevitable takeover of memory by physical and digital images. Images from our personal archives pop up unbidden on our screens and we have rapidly learned to call them what they call themselves, “memories.” Advertisements for cameras and smartphones exhort us to “make memories.” We frequently ask ourselves whether it is the event, the person, the landscape that we remember, or the photos we have of them, and we can be forgiven for suspecting it’s the photos.

In defiance of photography’s takeover bid, Malcolm makes the case for memory as memory, rather than slave to photography. In pursuit of this objective, her repeated failures to remember the events captured in a photograph can sometimes seem almost too insistent — a way of putting photographs in their place.

Yet time may be on her side. We now have the capacity, by means of AI and image-generation models, to turn memory into image using text commands, upending the balance between the two. Malcolm’s memory of Leonard and Sue, standing at the back of the assembly hall, can now be turned into a photographic image, stealing a march on the camera.

For Malcolm, Leonard and Sue notwithstanding, “most of what happens to us goes unremembered,” either by us or by photographs. When photographs of past events do exist, they don’t necessarily help in the process of recall. Rather than acting as memories on our behalf, photographs from school and holidays and family occasions can unsettle us, exactly because we may not remember anything about the event, or the people recorded in the photographic moment. A photograph, even one in which we recognise ourselves, can leave us questioning our own capacity to remember much at all.

We will sometimes look at a photograph of our past selves and be unsettled by how long ago it seems. Even or perhaps especially if the image comes with a date-stamp, we can feel disoriented. The date just doesn’t seem right. The photograph could easily belong to an earlier period of history, before ours. Instead of bringing back our youth, a photograph can push it further away. “I am struck,” Malcolm says of that school photo, “by how different the girls look from some of the girls of today, as though they were living in the nineteenth century and being photographed by Mrs Cameron.”

At the same time as she identifies the gaps that separate photography and memory, Malcolm also emphasises their similarities. She likens the events of our lives to photographic negatives — “the few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.” The photographs we retain in our heads are the ones we have developed, curated and stored. The others have been discarded with the contact sheets.

Strikingly, Malcolm compares the creation and retention of memories to a photographic process that is now outdated, one of analogue cameras and darkrooms and developing fluid; it is an old method for old memories. But this metaphor has a notable absence: there is no mention of the photographer, no human hand placing the negative in the tray. In the same way, the images that Malcolm reflects upon in Still Pictures are by photographers unknown or unsung.

Occasionally, a professional, named photographer does intrude. Decades after they were taken, a small bundle of photographs turns up unexpectedly in the mail. They are part of a set by Marjory Collins, one of the remarkably gifted photographers deployed by the Office of War Information to document American life during the second world war. Malcolm’s family, as Czech immigrants, was selected to be photographed as part of a “propagandist” project designed to show America’s rich and welcoming social variety.

Young Janet Malcolm with “Slečna.” Marjory Collins/Library of Congress

The photograph that begins the chapter shows Janet’s teacher of Czech in pedagogical pose, pointing at the blackboard, while Janet herself, not yet tall enough to do so with ease, reaches up aspirationally with her chalk, her back to the camera. What follows on from the image is a moving reflection on the teacher, known to her pupils only as “Slečna,” or “Miss,” about whose life Malcolm knew and knows little. She can speculate, but can’t in any meaningful sense remember, either the events depicted in the photograph or the specific moment in which it was taken.

The unexpected package contains only a dozen or so photos — the one of “Miss” at the blackboard and other moments involving her childhood self — but there must, we infer, have been a good many more. Indeed “must have” becomes a brief refrain. Marjory Collins “must have” spent several days on these photo sessions. She “must have” sat in that empty chair after taking her photos of the family at table.

By this stage, a third of the way through the book, we are already unsurprised as Malcolm distances herself from these photos of her and her family: “I have no memory of the sessions with Marjory Collins.” In Malcolm’s memory, Collins as photographer is near to invisible.

“Outstandingly terrible.” Janet Malcolm

In her final chapter, “A Work of Art,” Malcolm returns to this question of authorship in photography. She recalls the publication in 1980 of a collection of her photography pieces, Diana and Nikon, pieces that had previously appeared, without illustrations, in the New Yorker. To support her text, Malcolm selected examples, by prominent practitioners, “of a new kind of avant-garde photography that took its inspiration from — and to all intents and purposes was indistinguishable from — the home snapshot.” The provocativeness of that word “indistinguishable” foreshadows what comes next.

Among her examples of “artless” photography, Malcolm includes a bit of mischief — an “outstandingly terrible snapshot” of unknown provenance that her husband had long ago chanced upon and kept for its very awfulness. She connives to attribute the image to her husband, thereby identifying him as creator rather than mere collector. With gotcha delight, Malcolm describes in Still Pictures how this interloper of an image, with its newly assigned authorship, assumes an afterlife of reiterated artistic merit, solely because she has deemed it such.

In her study of the impact of social media on memory, The End of Forgetting (2019), Kate Eichhorn argues that the ubiquity and digital longevity of photos mean that “the ability to break away from the past is severely compromised.” How can we move successfully into the future, she asks, “carrying an archive of past images?”

Photographs are everywhere, their numbers increasing daily to reach yet further unimaginable heights. Everyone takes them, looks at them, exchanges and archives them. They are in danger, we fear, of overwhelming our lives, substituting recorded memories for the real thing, for what we have come to defiantly call our “lived experience.”

For Janet Malcolm, this is to exaggerate the power of photography. Her personal, randomly retained collection of largely undistinguished images is not so much a burden as a mystery. These photos stimulate memories, again often at seeming random, but they don’t substitute for them. Sometimes we connect with the past our photos represent, sometimes we don’t. The memories contained within the photos are anything but simulacrums of her own — the most she can expect is that if she looks at an image long enough, a connection will form, and something in the frame will “begin to speak.” •

Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory
By Janet Malcolm | Text Publishing | $29.99 | 155 pages

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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. •

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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.

Jill witnessed Indonesia’s military incursions first-hand when she was part of a student delegation visiting the new nation in 1975 to celebrate its release from Portuguese colonial rule. A group of journalists covering the invasion for the Seven and Nine networks asked her about conditions at Balibo, a town on the border with Indonesian West Timor that she had just visited.

It was a bush warfare situation out there, she told them, but if they kept their heads down they should be okay. Regardless of their precautions, though, all five journalists in the group were murdered by members of the Indonesian military and became known as the Balibo Five. Journalist Roger East, who was sent to investigate their deaths, was also executed.

Jill — who died in Melbourne on 2 December aged seventy-seven — began doggedly and dangerously seeking the truth about the murders and reporting on conditions more broadly in Timor-Leste. She spent twenty years in Portugal working with the Timorese resistance-in-exile and making secret visits to the island (from which she was banned by the Indonesian government). On one occasion she was captured and briefly imprisoned. Her determination to keep the story alive often met with media indifference and Australian government attempts to play down a complex geopolitical situation.

Her first book, East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism, was published in 1978, three years after Indonesia’s invasion, and her 2001 study, Cover-Up, became the basis of the highly regarded feature film Balibo in 2009.

Timor-Leste regained its independence after much bloodshed in 2002. By then, Jill had set up the Living Memory Project, which recorded the testimonies of former political prisoners and victims of torture. Her reporting also played a crucial part at the 2007 NSW coroner’s enquiry into one of the murders, which finally established the role of the Indonesian military in all the journalists’ deaths.

“I was told recently that my coverage of the Balibo story was what really alerted people to the East Timor issue and that began it all,” Jill said in a documentary we made together for ABC Radio National in 2017. “I felt proud of that… An injustice is an injustice and it doesn’t change with time and people need to be brought to account.”

After moving back to Australia in 1999, Jill lived in Darwin and then Melbourne, where she wrote Finding Santana (2010) about her secret return to Timor-Leste for a rendezvous with guerilla leader Nino Konis Santana. But her last book, published in 2014, was quite different.

Run for Your Life covered her unhappy childhood with outwardly respectable but violent adoptive parents in the Victorian seaside town of Barwon Heads, and her political awakening at Monash University. Her well-honed sense of rebellion made her a natural for membership of the radical Monash University Labor Club, and her achievements included disrupting a Billy Graham evangelical gathering and being one of the only female speakers at Melbourne’s 1970 anti–Vietnam war march. She also ran a feminist bookshop — Alice’s Restaurant — in Greville Street, Prahran, and helped found an early feminist magazine, Vashti’s Voice.

Jill found out later that her adoptive mother had dobbed her in to ASIO for subversive activities. When she gained access to her file she was amazed and amused by its size.

It was only when she reached her sixties that Jill decided to risk finding out about her birth parents, and that story too is covered in Run for Your Life. To her relief (and with a great degree of trepidation) she discovered that her mother was still alive and willing to meet. “I’ve thought about you every day” were the first words she said to Jill when they spoke by phone.

Having known Jill since her return from Portugal I was honoured to be asked to drive her to the rendezvous with her mother at an anonymous bus stop in a northern suburb in 2013. The woman we saw walking briskly towards us was remarkably like Jill, with her short crop and outfit of baggy trousers, loose shirt and small beaded necklace. Given the age gap was only fifteen years, she could have been Jill’s older sister.

The hug they shared was their first bodily contact in sixty-eight years. They quickly established how much they had in common: both were atheists, passionate about history and politics, and fiercely independent. As Jill said at the time, “I think we shared more than a few genes.”

Although her mother died two years later, the reunion was profoundly healing for both of them.

Jill was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the end of 2016. It was a particularly cruel diagnosis for a woman whose life had been spent travelling and uncovering truths in very dark corners of the world, and she took it badly.

In the radio documentary about her life, we covered her medical diagnosis and its ramifications, which included severely curtailed freedoms.

As she commented rather bitterly, “People say that my capacity to cope with [dementia] is very limited but I don’t see it that way, because I have spent most of my life as a foreign correspondent and I’ve been under fire from the Indonesian army and from the American air force and I’ve come up against quite hair-raising situations; I’ve survived all of these, some people might say through my rat cunning.”

Jolliffe was nuggetty, cynical, sometimes ornery but also generous, witty and fiercely principled. She was also a very fine journalist and, for the people of Timor-Leste, a hero.

One of many fine tributes to her came from Timorese leader Xanana Gusmão: “Jill was an activist, a rebel and a fighter. At great cost to herself, she persistently exposed the reality of the Indonesian military occupation of Timor-Leste and supported the struggle of our people. She is one of us.” •

The post Running for her life 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.

While Keiron Pim says nothing further about Schapiro in his biography of Roth, Endless Flight, we know that the essential part of the teacher’s prophecy came true: Roth went on to achieve international fame as a journalist and a novelist. His career took him from Brody to university studies in Lviv, to Vienna, to the Habsburg army during the Great War, to long periods of residence in Berlin and Paris, and on extensive travels throughout Europe, including as an exile from Nazism in the 1930s.

As all these journeyings perhaps suggest, any attempt to assign Roth a distinct religious, ethnic or political identity on the basis of his own actions or words would fail. He was born into a Jewish family and Jewish traditions, but was known to attend the Catholic Mass. He moved from Lviv to Vienna because — as he told a Polish-speaking uncle — he “could not be unfaithful to the German language” but rhapsodised over Paris the first time he went there, writing to his editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung that: “I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world… Whoever has not been here is only half a human, and no sort of European.” He was pacifist and a socialist in his younger days, but joined the Habsburg army in 1916 and later advocated a restoration of the Habsburg monarchy, believing it preferable to the other forms of conservative and nationalist rule that threatened to overtake — and of course eventually did overtake — Austria in the 1930s.

Pim sees Roth’s shifting self-concept, and his experience of and fascination with the Austro-Hungarian empire, as two important factors that attract twenty-first century readers to his works — those readers who “recognise his crisis of identity; and, not least, are primed for a nostalgic pull towards the aesthetics and perceived values of his Mitteleuropa as its last inhabitants fade from view.”

It is clear from Pim’s pages that the intriguing contradictions he identifies in Roth’s personality and mentality do not mean that Roth was always an admirable man, or an easy man to deal with. He lied repeatedly about his service in the Great War, claiming experiences of combat, capture and escape that never occurred. His complex relationship to his Jewish heritage included abuse of his employers at the Frankfurter Zeitung, with whom he had various contractual disputes, as “scheming Jews.” While he adopted the habitus of a Habsburg gentleman from the mid 1920s onwards — wearing narrow-cut trousers like an army officer’s, carrying a walking stick, indulging in chivalrous flourishes such as kissing women’s hands and sending them yellow roses — he was anything but gentlemanly in other ways, writing while at university in Vienna that female students were “no more women than streetwalkers” were, engaging in affairs throughout his marriage to Friedl Reichler, and — during his relationship with the German author Irmgard Keun in exile in the mid 1930s — sleeping with one fist grasping Keun’s hair from sheer possessiveness.

He was also a heavy drinker for about half of his life, and an alcoholic in his last years; Keun left behind a harrowing description of how he retched for extended periods every morning before vomiting blood and bile. And Roth’s hopes of restoring the monarchy to Austria eventually moved from wishful thinking to black farce; I doubt that I have ever read anything more ridiculous than Pim’s account of how, in 1938, Roth and others planned to smuggle the exiled Otto von Habsburg to Vienna in a coffin purporting to contain the body of an Austrian commoner who had died abroad, whereupon Otto would be proclaimed Emperor. (“With the monarchy thus restored, Roth believed that the British monarchy would ally with their Austrian peers and France to present a strong front against an expansionist Germany.”)

Given that Pim identifies various qualities in Roth’s writing as attractive to twenty-first century readers, I found his attitude to Roth’s fiction surprisingly mixed. He describes Roth’s most famous work, The Radetzky March, which chronicles the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire, as “one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.” (I would prefer to say that it is one of the greatest German-language novels of the twentieth century.) Beyond this, though, he often qualifies his praise of one work or another, if he praises it at all.

Thus, Zipper and his Father is “a wonderful novel,” but also the first to contain a “thoroughly realised, deeply imagined, three-dimensional character,” which of course says little for its predecessors. Similarly, while The Antichrist is “of biographical interest,” it is “a dissatisfying work to read.” Moreover, Tarabas is “not among [Roth’s] best works” and Confession of a Murderer is “weak.” As  for the short story “The Triumph of Beauty,” it is misogynistic, and “an ugly blemish on [Roth’s] œuvre.”

Pim’s remarks about Roth’s journalism are more positive. This is the work that first made Roth famous, and in which he claimed (in a letter to one of his editors in 1926) to be doing nothing less than “paint[ing] the portrait of the age.” Pim positions Roth’s journalism adroitly within the sometimes arid literary debates of the 1920s (and after) about “New Objectivity.” He praises Roth’s accounts of a journey in eastern Europe in 1924 for showing “how beautifully he wrote about phenomena others perceived as ugly,” and singles out his sketches of cities and lives in southern France in 1925 for particular attention as “the peak of what we could call Roth’s ‘lyric journalism’.”

Pim also notes numerous incidental but striking facts about Roth’s newspaper work: for example that in the year 1927 he travelled to nine different countries in search of material; that the Frankfurter Zeitung deleted criticisms of Mussolini in his despatches from Italy in 1928 without consulting him; and that the same newspaper paid Roth one mark per printed line (with a guaranteed minimum of one thousand marks per month), which prompted him to handwrite his copy in such a way that one line in manuscript corresponded to one line in newsprint.

Pim’s accounts of Roth’s work more generally also contain a number of fascinating details. His novel The Spider’s Web, which was published as a newspaper serial in 1923, was the first novel to mention Hitler. (I am not sure how this could be proved absolutely, but it seems highly credible given the date.) When a newspaper interviewer asked Marlene Dietrich in 1936 about her favourite book, she nominated Roth’s novel Job. And — more chillingly than these passing references — the manuscripts and other papers Roth left behind when he emigrated in 1933 were fortunate to survive a Gestapo raid on his German publisher. Similarly, the papers from exile that survived after Roth’s death in France in May 1939 were preserved by a redoubtable elderly Parisienne who told one of Roth’s cousins in 1946 that she had hidden them under the concierge’s bed.

Alhough I read Endless Flight with interest, I sometimes felt that Pim was unnecessarily eager to provide comprehensive information. For example, I could probably have done without the half-page description, plus photographs, of how the street and the building in Lviv where Roth lived in 1913–14 look today: “The chipped wooden handrail is supported by an art nouveau balustrade, and as you tread the wide, worn steps they croak like marshland frogs.” And I could definitely have done without the footnote explaining that Pim’s grandmother lived in the same street as Friedl Reichler’s family in post–Great War Vienna and speculating rather bathetically: “Perhaps my ancestors were even acquainted with Roth owing to his regular visits to the apartment across the street. There is no way of knowing, as they are all long gone.”

As the quotation about the steps that “croak like marshland frogs” suggests, Pim sometimes attempts a colourful or evocative style. Though other readers may disagree, I found some of these attempts rather pretentious or clichéd. Thus the passage about the steps is followed by some rather breathless remarks about Lviv: “In the twenty-first century this palimpsestic city has a strange mystique… The present here is a membrane pressed upon by a heavy past: you feel its weight without knowing its details,” and so on. And Pim’s evocation of the view from the hotel where Roth stayed in Paris in 1925 put me in mind of a travel brochure:

The windows of the Hôtel de la Place de l’Odéon look out from between blue shutters over an eighteenth-century Parisian plain dominated by the eponymous neoclassical theatre, before which roads spear out like compass points, tempting the visitor to pursue every angle into the Left Bank. To the hotel’s right runs the Rue de l’Odéon, which was home in the early twentieth century to a community of Anglophone authors and the Shakespeare and Company bookshop; in 1922 its owner, Sylvia Beach, published Ulysses by James Joyce, who dubbed the area “Stratford-on-Odéon.” The gorgeously sombre twin-towered church of Saint-Sulpice stands 200 yards to the west.

Pim sometimes also uses this portentous style to prop up political and literary judgements for which he offers very limited evidence. His description of Roth’s first foray to Berlin, in 1920, prompts him to declare that the Weimar Republic was “a curious mixture of postwar chaos and compromise dressed in unattainably high ideals that lent it a haunting capacity for failure” — a pronouncement that sounds more like wisdom after the event than informed intellectual analysis, notwithstanding Pim’s brief references to such phenomena as the proportional voting system (which of course has operated successfully in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949).

I was also puzzled by Pim’s opinion of Stefan Zweig, a literary colleague who lent Roth considerable support during their exile:

Zweig is less remarkable for his own artistry than for what he connotes, namely the bohemian Viennese coffee-house culture… from the fin-de-siècle to the entre-deux-guerres period. Judging by his work alone it is hard to gauge how he gained such prominence…

His memoir The World of Yesterday is a detailed and valuable exposition of that era… His prose is often engaging, but never irresistible. It is competent and smooth, but too smooth, too dispassionate, written with pathological reserve… Where Roth is a double espresso, Zweig is a half-decent mocha, served lukewarm.

Pim’s grounds for this lofty dismissal of Zweig are unclear, beyond a few passing observations, including the remark that some of Zweig’s fellow authors “mocked his grasp of grammar.” Moreover, if I have interpreted correctly a paragraph in Pim’s acknowledgements about his familiarity with German literature and language, he has not read Zweig in the original.

Endless Flight is well produced and well edited. There are many intriguing  photographs, though a few (like that of the present-day railway station in Brody) seem rather superfluous, and most of the photos are annoyingly small. I found no misprints, and only one error of fact — when Pim says that the Frankfurter Zeitung paid Roth in “deutschmarks” rather than reichsmarks; the deutschmark did not exist until 1948. In noting the latter point, I send a prayer — assuming there is a deity that protects literary reviewers — that I have not made any errors myself here. •

Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth
By Keiron Pim | Granta | $49.99 | 544 pages

The post Portraying the age 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.

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.

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.

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.

It was frightening and depressing. Some reporters were even attacked in the street. Hidden by the violent actions and rhetoric, though, was another, less explicit message. What the protesters wanted most was basic, accurate information — including about themselves — even as they were attacking those most likely to provide it.

At the order of the police, the livestream from the news media helicopter was cut. (The ban was later overturned by the courts.) The protesters had been using it to find each other, and without it they were lost. Appeals went out on Telegram for people in tall buildings to post shots of the street to help guide them.

Confusion grew about where to meet, and where the police were. Social media channels were filled with conflicting messages and instructions. Almost certainly the groups were being disrupted by misinformation from outsiders, and perhaps also from undercover police.

After the first frightening two days, dwindling groups of protesters roamed the city, sometimes literally in circles, trying to find their fellows and amass sufficient numbers to mount a meaningful protest. In this chaotic and leaderless display of civic unrest, social media could only get them so far.

The lesson? To take effective political action you need a lot of things, not least information you can trust. But that’s the optimistic take; pessimistic conclusions can also be drawn.

While mainstream media organisations needed to hire private security to protect their journalists, others were out in the field without need of protection. These “alternative” media and “citizen journalists” included the Real Rukshan and the far-right Rebel News. Rukshan’s live YouTube feeds of the demonstration even gained the attention of mainstream media, which is one of many ironies. The protesters loved him, chanting his name when he appeared among them. He lacked the access to interview the premier or CFMEU boss John Setka, as he said on his livestream, but he could speak to the people on the streets.

All this is food for reflecting on the widespread hostility to mainstream media, and the difference between professional and “alternative” or “citizen” journalism.

Campaigns against mainstream media outlets from what we might broadly call the left have been a feature of the pandemic, especially in the lockdown capital, Melbourne. (I’m using the words left and right as a crude shorthand. They are inadequate descriptors of the spectrums of beliefs in the groups I am talking about.)

Rather than advocating violence, these campaigns have used social media to encourage people to cancel their subscriptions to the city’s newspapers, the Herald Sun and the Age, because they are perceived to have undermined the Labor state government’s public health measures and failed to take the side of their readers against business figures who want the lockdowns to end.

The longest-standing and most organised campaign has targeted the Herald Sun. It was begun by Dave Milner, a columnist for the Shot — itself an “alternative” outlet, and an offshoot of the Chaser — which has added reportage and commentary to its traditionally satirical repertoire. Milner wrote a series of articles excoriating the Murdoch press for its critical reporting of the first lockdown, and for doing an “appalling job of conveying what life is like here to the rest of the country… making a difficult situation even harder.”

In October last year, Milner drew a comparison with the British city of Liverpool, which successfully boycotted Rupert Murdoch’s Sun after it blamed the survivors of the 1989 Hillsborough stadium crush for the deaths of its ninety-six victims. The Herald Sun was doing something similar, he said, and deserved a similar boycott. “It needs to be socially unacceptable to read and sell the Herald Sun… Cafes shouldn’t stock it. Newsagents shouldn’t sell it. If people see it in the supermarket it should be moved to the toilet paper aisle where it belongs… This is personal now, like it was for Liverpool.”

In what Milner describes as an “organic” response to his articles, the Shot began to sell stickers and other items bearing slogans such as “Fuck Murdoch” and “Don’t Read the Herald Sun.” About 30,000 stickers have been sold, he says, mostly to Victorians. “Don’t Read the Herald Sun” and “Fuck the Herald Sun” remain the top sellers.

More recently, a much lower-key campaign, largely confined to Twitter, has run against the Age in the wake of its publishing what has become known as the “enough” editorial on 1 September this year. The Age called on public health authorities to better factor in the damage caused by lockdowns.

As media academic Denis Muller commented in the Conversation, it received a visceral reaction, feeding into the highly politicised narratives of hope and threat that have become inextricably bound up in the pandemic response in Australia. In a letter to subscribers about the “extraordinary” response, editor Gay Alcorn acknowledged that some people had cancelled their subscriptions, but said they were outweighed by new subscribers.

To its credit, the Age published letters to the editor slamming the editorial as well as boosting it, and also republished Muller’s piece.

I hope you’re getting the picture here. Mainstream media outlets no longer have the field to themselves. They are still key players, but in a messy, ratty, vibrant and sometimes frightening ecosystem. They are constantly being nipped and jabbed. At the extremes, during the far-right protests on Melbourne’s streets, their reporters have been threatened and physically attacked.

The Age’s “enough” editorial sparked a Twitter campaign kicked off by the anonymous @PRGuy17, in which people were urged to cancel their subscriptions. @PRGuy17 has been one of Twitter’s most prominent supporters of premier Dan Andrews and the #istandwithDan hashtag. (He did not respond when I sought comment.)

So have the campaigns calling on people to cancel their subscriptions had any impact in the world outside the silos of social and alternative media? The anecdotes are many, but the truth is hard to determine.

There’s no perfect way of measuring news media readership across all platforms, but the industry has made various attempts. This year the Enhanced Media Metrics Australia system, or EMMA, launched with fanfare eight years ago, was dropped and replaced by Think News Brands, or TNB, which uses data compiled by Roy Morgan. Whereas the EMMA data was published quarterly, the TNB figures have so far been available only in boosterish reports that don’t break down readership by individual masthead.

On request, though, TNB provided me with these figures for news readership among people fourteen and older at two points in the pandemic:

Herald Sun
June 2020: 4.593 million
June 2021: 4.719 million

Age
June 2020: 5.913 million
June 2021: 5.963 million

Not much encouragement there for the cancellation campaigners — and this pattern accords with research by the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre.

But I don’t think the TNB figures give us a definitive answer to the question of whether the mainstream media are pissing off their subscribers. They are based on the assumption that the outlets’ readership is a certain multiple of the numbers of paid subscriptions. News Corporation’s most recent quarterly earnings statement shows the Herald Sun has 146,026 paid subscribers, combined print and digital, as of 30 June 2021. The non-subscription paid circulation of its print masthead — through newsstands and newsagents — which wasn’t declared this year, was 213,964 in 2020.

As for the Age, the TNB–Roy Morgan report claims 5.9 million readers over the age of fourteen, which is about 400,000 more than Victoria’s total over-fourteen population.

Given these outlets are paywalled, how can they have readerships so much larger than their subscription and other paid-circulation base? Asked to explain, Roy Morgan offered “a couple of things to consider.” These included out-of-state readership on digital platforms, and the fact that some “off-platform aggregations,” such as Apple News, don’t have paywalls. The figures also included readership in cafes, offices and the like — though that would surely be insignificant during lockdown.

Even taking all that on board, I regard these figures as rubbery and optimistic. A reader revolt could well be hidden within them.

When I sought comment from the Age and News Corp about the impact of the campaigns, a News Corp spokesperson told me that paid subscriptions for the company’s Australian mastheads were growing strongly — from 647,600 in June last year to 810,000 this year — “demonstrating how strongly our journalism resonates with mainstream Australia.”

The editor of the Age, Gay Alcorn, sent a longer and more thoughtful response. She acknowledged that the paper was less than perfect. “Do we sometimes publish a poor headline? Yes. Do we sometimes do a story that I worry later was not quite there? Of course.” She said:

The accusation seems to be that anything critical or questioning of state government Covid policy is inherently undermining of public health messages and is therefore irresponsible to publish. It has been strange at times. A piece by Greens candidate Celeste Liddle questioning the Victorian curfew was attacked as irresponsible to publish — I am not sure most people who attacked the headline even read the piece. A piece by Jon Faine — who our conservative readers say is pro-Andrews — was attacked because he suggested that lockdown fatigue was real and the government had to change its language to reflect that. This was supposedly an example of Age hostility to Andrews.

I think our health and science coverage has been second to none. Our state political coverage is the best in Victoria. We have striven to go deeper, with Explainers and Q and As on complex issues. We have covered in depth the vaccine rollout, the long-term impact on the CBD economically and socially, the equity divide revealed by the pandemic, the impact on universities, the civil rights issues, Australians stranded overseas, and many more. Recently, we sought reader questions about what they wanted to know about the roadmap and were inundated with questions and we continue to answer them. That is useful journalism, essential during these times.

And in an increasingly polarised media landscape, she added, the Age was “different” because it sometimes challenged its readers’ prejudices.

This is an important point. Most professional journalists, asked to distinguish themselves from “citizen journalists” and alternative media, would reach for concepts such as adherence to the facts and impartiality.

But what are we to make of those claims when faced with front-page headlines from the Herald Sun such as “Premier’s Grab for Absolute Power” and “Dictator Dan no longer just a nickname.” The paper has run good, straight reporting on the pandemic as well, but at times it seems to believe that taking a provocative and partisan stance is just as much a part of its business model as it is for the Real Rukshan.

The Age has not been so partisan, but it too has sometimes mixed reportage with opinion and failed to adequately correct errors, including on public health matters.

All this means the line between professional and partisan “alternative” media is less clearly drawn than journalists like to pretend. Which is another way of saying that — even as business models erode and attacks mount — the mainstream needs to do better.

The University of Canberra research shows that trust in media among its survey respondents rose to 53 per cent at the beginning of the pandemic — a record figure. By June this year, though, just 43 per cent of respondents said they trusted the news media. Meanwhile the number of heavy news consumers had fallen back to four points below pre-pandemic levels.

These figures suggest that readers are indeed turning away. That should worry us all. As those protesters found, we all need information on which we can rely; without it, we are going round in circles, hardly knowing who or where we are. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Information warfare appeared first on Inside Story.

Her humility as much as her humanity was perhaps the secret of her success, why those for whom she fought so passionately and tenaciously throughout her life trusted her and shared their stories — and why she was able to pierce the defences of the powerful to reveal often shocking truths.

Jan Mayman, who has died at the age of eighty, was the most important journalist of her generation in exposing the systemic cruelty, neglect and injustice suffered by Indigenous Australians — long before most of the mainstream media were awakened to that grim and abiding reality.

For Jan, the turning point came in a hotel in the town of Roebourne on the northwest coast of Western Australia in 1983. A teacher friend had told her the alarming story of a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal boy who had died in police custody in Roebourne after a brawl with police officers. She flew north from Perth to investigate.

After the Aboriginal Legal Service lawyer refused to talk to her, a tall Aboriginal man approached: “I’d never met him before, he just beckoned me and I sort of followed him… He led me to a hotel room and he had eight Aboriginal people, all men, and they were lined up sitting on two beds and he said, ‘Tell her.’ And they all told me this shocking story.”

John Pat had joined a drunken confrontation with four off-duty policemen outside the Victoria Hotel on the evening of 28 September 1983. According to the witnesses, he was struck in the face by one policeman and fell backwards, striking his head hard on the roadway. Another officer kicked Pat in the head before he was dragged to a waiting police van, kicked in the face, and thrown in.

Other witnesses, who had been across the street from the police station, said Pat and several other Aboriginal prisoners were beaten as they were taken from the van and, one after another, dropped on the cement path. Each was then picked up, punched to the ground, and kicked. According to one observer, none of the prisoners fought back or resisted. An hour later, when police checked on Pat in his cell, he was dead.

The dramatic story was accepted by Age editor Creighton Burns, who ran it on the front page. The subsequent inquest, which led to the four policemen being charged with manslaughter, triggered the public outcry that precipitated the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. Jan Mayman’s reporting earned her a Gold Walkley, the highest accolade in Australian journalism.

It would be the first of many powerful stories detailing injustice over the next four decades. These included more cases of abuses and deaths in custody, the plight of stolen generations survivors and the battle to protect sacred Aboriginal lands against the encroachment of mining — notably the epic struggle by the Yindjibarndi of the Pilbara against Twiggy Forrest’s Fortescue Metals.

Jan became a champion of Indigenous rights with an unlikely colonial pedigree. Her grandfather, George Mayman, was a pioneering gold hunter and mine owner in the Kalgoorlie goldfields.

She was never comfortable in the tough, ego-driven world of journalism, where she was always an outlier, a freelancer who worked for some of the biggest newspapers in Australia and overseas but was never really embraced by the mainstream. Her independence was an asset, but she always struggled to earn enough money and was fearful of ruinous litigation without the guaranteed backing of a monied publisher.

She was both a powerful reporter and an elegant, evocative writer — a rare combination in journalism. While her investigative journalism was compelling, her writing captured the beauty of Aboriginal lands and powerful mystery of Indigenous traditions.

A generation before the killing of George Floyd in the United States ignited the Black Lives Matter movement around the world, Jan Mayman had exposed the ugly truth of endemic racism and abuse in Australia to a largely indifferent or ignorant mainstream audience.

The royal commission triggered by her journalism promised a sea change. Its 339 recommendations lit the path to reducing deaths in custody, imprisonment rates, inequality and disadvantage. “Few Australian royal commissions have attracted stronger, more passionate media attention than the 1991 final report,” journalist Wendy Bacon would write. The failure of that promise of change broke Jan’s heart.

The issues on which she fought so hard remain as far from resolution as ever. In the thirty years since the royal commission, almost 500 more Aboriginal people have died in custody. To John Pat’s name have been added others whose deaths are etched in shame – Mulrunji Doomadgee, Mr Ward, Ms Dhu. But most are forgotten numbers on a roll without end. •

The post The trailblazer 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.

During his golden years as editor of the Northern Echo (1961–66) and Sunday Times (1967–81), this rare blend of qualities propelled a chain of power-shaking scoops on many topics: from air pollution and cervical smear tests, through corporate tax avoidance and espionage cover-ups, to the blighting foetal deformities caused by an unsafe pregnancy treatment produced by the multinational Distillers company. Such hard-won breaches in the ramparts of official and corporate secrecy helped change laws and lives.

These two decades of editorial clout, fortuitously aligned with the liberalising arc of the 1960s and 70s, were the pinnacle in a working life of astounding longevity. Their foremost legacy is a perpetual glow around the very name of Harold Evans. Understandably so, for by turning both the Sunday Times’s “investigative journalism” and its “Insight” team into kinetic brands — then, at their climax, invoking editorial independence to resist Rupert Murdoch’s effort to sack him — he made himself one too.

The overlaid memory of that joust, as of Insight’s prosecutory storylines and courtroom skirmishes, would seal Evans’s reputation, and be reflected in many awards from his peers, from the worthy (two press institutes’ gold medals for lifetime achievement) to the cringy: an ever-trumpeted 2002 choice by a self-chosen handful of readers of the British Journalism Review and Press Gazette as “greatest newspaper editor of all time,” above twenty other nominees, all British and male, many distant and long unsung.

In the latter case, Evans’s tour de force acceptance essay (“My first thought was to check out the obituary page of The Times for reassurance”) paid those forerunners rich tribute, claimed a retroactive vote of his own, drew precepts from a tour of his greatest hits — and thus, in overall effect, flattered the wisdom of the exercise and its verdict. At seventy-four, Harry’s showmanship and genius for self-promotion, as much as his sheer panache in making words sing, were undimmed.

Decades earlier at the Sunday Times, a thriving paper known for “exposure reporting” long before Evans’s arrival, many had shared in the credit for its next-generation coups. Its burgeoning Insight squad, with Phillip Knightley, Bruce Page and Murray Sayle among the paper’s self-styled “Australian mafia,” continued to deliver the goods, far-sighted editor-in-chief Denis Hamilton the guidance, munificent proprietor Roy (Lord) Thomson the funds. The unstinting Evans, a wizard of publicity to match his editorial flair, was the catalyst. “Harold could be wild and impulsive, but he had the sort of crusading energy a Sunday editor requires,” Hamilton would say of his appointee, this much-recycled utterance invariably losing a qualifier: that Harold had “need always for a stronger figure behind him to see that his talents were not wrecked by his misjudgements.”

A midlife switch was to freeze Evans’s newspaper romance in aspic, and his early fame with it. In plain terms, a vain year-long shutdown of Times Newspapers Ltd from November 1978, sparked by printing unions’ staff demands and resistance to new technology, led to the company’s papers (including the daily Times) being auctioned. From a scrum of financial and political intrigue, Rupert Murdoch’s News International emerged in March 1981 holding the murky ball (“the challenge of my life,” said the tycoon, describing Evans as “one of the world’s great editors”).

Evans was persuaded to become editor of the Times, across a short bridge at the papers’ joint works at Thomson House on Gray’s Inn Road. But a fractious year later he was asked by Murdoch to resign, which he did after holding out for a week (itself a media sensation). Evans’s eventual formula was that he resigned “over policy differences relating to editorial independence.” His embittered memoir of the saga (Good Times, Bad Times) complete, he relocated to New York in 1984 with his second wife, zippy magazine editor Tina Brown, working there for Atlantic Monthly Press, editing US News & World Report and launching Condé Nast Traveler. Then, from 1990, he was publisher at Random House, where Joe Klein’s (initially “Anonymous’s”) Primary Colors was among his successes. Propulsive coupledom, reaching its zenith in the mid 1990s, buoyed his profile, as would his steadfast bashing of Murdoch (not least during the Leveson press inquiry of 2011–12) and of resurgent threats to the type of journalism he cherished.

This disjunction in Harry’s career — the ultimate British newspaperman turned transatlantic celebrity publisher — would always make it hard to see the whole. More so, as the surface contrast between its two halves was acute. Where the fitful second was laced with high-end networking and lucrative dealmaking, the first had a perfect narrative arc whose climactic duel simulated a mighty clash of values. The fact that martyr and villain stuck fast to their allotted roles (or could easily be portrayed as such) kept the storyline ever exhumable. On occasion their paths would cross, as when Murdoch’s own manuscript briefly landed on Evans’s desk. “The wheel of fortune makes me your publisher as you used to be mine,” wrote Harry, leading Rupert to call the whole thing off.

In that first half, the dramatic symmetry of Evans’s long rise and slow-motion fall also fitted the culturally potent image of the valiant journalist or editor. His Panglossian autobiography My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, published in 2009, evokes the “newspaper films” of his childhood: “I identified with the small-town editor standing up to crooks, and tough reporters winning the story and the girl, and the foreign correspondent outwitting enemy agents.” That art’s blessing was a life in its image conferred on Evans a halo, dutifully polished in Britain’s media circles whenever his name came up, to which the details of his American experience (including citizenship, in 1993) would add not a speck.

As in the movies, uneven reality — in this case Evans’s editorial virtuosity, the feats (ever more roseate) of those Northern Echo and Sunday Times years, and the events of 1981–82 — was tidied into a seamless fable. His exit from London allowed it room to grow; fond tales of the press’s glory days gave it regular watering. A trade entering the digitised rapids could do with a hero to muffle its fears, and Evans, epitome of the age now under siege, was in a class of his own.

The campaigner

In a longer view, fate and chance, as well as exceptional will and ability, won Evans that esteem. Harry Evans’s steep ascent from modest origins in Patricroft, a district of Eccles — an “L.S. Lowry landscape of bent stick figures scurrying past sooty monuments of the industrial revolution,” in his words — was testing all the way. Equally, his early years were a good foundation: deeply loved as the eldest of four brothers, the family edging beyond poverty and upwards, remarkable parents who “[took] it for granted their boys would climb Everest.”

My Paper Chase’s portrait of his parents — father’s “phenomenal numeracy” and comedic gift (“We were part of the performance and his performance, like good theatre, always seemed fresh”), mother’s “ambitions for a better life,” which led from factory floor to her turning the terraced house’s front room into a grocer’s shop — signal that no child had a better start. Pride in his parents, whose evocative 1924 wedding-day photo is a highlight of the book, joined that in the leap from his mid-Wales grandfather, who left school at nine in 1863 for a labouring life, to his editorship of the Times. Yet Harry was phenomenal in his own right: such was his preternatural energy, it is tempting to imagine almost every obstacle in the route from Patricroft’s Liverpool Road via Gray’s Inn Road to Broadway giving up the ghost at the first encounter. Harry would never stop earning his charmed life.

Here he is as captain of St Mary’s school in Manchester in 1943, for example, where “[the] English teachers nominated a handful of candidates” for a planned magazine “and I was utterly shameless in campaigning to win the editorship,” or applying for his first newspaper job a year later and redrafting his headmaster’s testimonial (excising “too impetuous at present,” inserting “I wish him the glittering success he so deserves.”) Already, the ballast of Harry’s ultra-competitive spirit was a fervent attachment to the idea of newspaper journalism as his life’s purpose.

That sense of vocation had been seeded, he would often recall, by a holiday encounter with “weary and haggard” British soldiers in coastal north Wales in mid 1940. The mood of these survivors of the Dunkirk evacuation, sent across the country to recuperate, so contrasted with uplifting press reports of strong morale that the nearly twelve-year-old Harry — trailing his “compulsively gregarious” Welsh father, a train driver, who strode over from the beach to talk to the men — was bewildered. “Only two years later, when my ambitions to be a newspaper reporter flowered, did I understand that Dad was doing what a good reporter would do. Asking questions. Listening.”

This “epiphany on Rhyl beach,” the “first vague stirring of doubt about my untutored trust in newspapers,” also crystallised Harry’s eagerness to “involve myself in their mysteries.” Arrival at the Ashton-under-Lyne Weekly Reporter in 1944 would yield graphic social history, also in My Paper Chase, in the language of rapture: the huge Linotype “iron monsters” operating with the “autocratic urgency of hot metal marinated by printer’s ink,” men “crouched in communion” before them, an office “piled high with papers, telephone directories, pots of glue, spikes and a full-size glass kiosk with a chair and a candlestick telephone inside.”

Harry was never one to under-egg the pudding. Completing a portrait that mirrors, doubtless with its own fictive touches, the ennui of Michael Frayn’s evergreen “Fleet Street novel,” itself published in 1967 but set a decade earlier, are a “ginger-haired middle-aged reporter with a pipe clenched in his teeth” and “another wizened walnut of a man hunched over a desk [at] a window overlooking the market square,” working with “ancient typewriters on even more ancient desks that were sloped for writing by hand.” .

Two years’ solid experience at this century-old local paper with its thirteen daily editions was followed by two more of national service, where Evans created a newspaper for fellow Royal Air Force conscripts. That opened a channel to university study at historic Durham, a north-east cathedral city, where he edited the student magazine and went on to complete a masters in American foreign policy. Back home as assistant editor at the Manchester Evening Times from 1952, and soon married to Enid Parker, a biology graduate and now schoolteacher, he was awarded a Harkness fellowship in 1956-57 to study in the United States, where the young couple’s extensive travels provided a close-up view of the civil-rights tumult.

Harry, still under thirty, going places for sixteen years, was now a coming man. The Guardian, sister paper of the Evening Times, was mooted as his next berth, a move stymied by the top brass’s opposition to internal staff transfers. Instead, in 1961 he became editor of the Northern Echo, a historically Liberal daily based in Darlington, a market town and railway hub twenty miles south of Durham. A prominent regional paper, its main rival the Leeds-based Yorkshire Post, the Echo had been edited through the 1870s by W.T. Stead, daredevil inventor of popular journalism in Britain, for whom the job was “a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil.”

Evans soon made a splash. His team spotlighted the malodorous, lung-busting pall issuing from Middlesbrough’s chemical plants and the ear-drilling roar of mega-lorries through Echo readers’ towns and villages. A brief Sunday Times item on British Columbia’s cervical cytology program led to his reporter Kenneth Hooper’s landmark 1963 series, “Saving Mothers from Cancer,” its full-page opener, “The Tragedy of Thousands Who Need Not Die,” kindling the armoury of pressure that a year later saw cervical smear tests available in principle to every woman in Britain.

So often, that knack for noticing, and being nagged by, an issue already in circulation would produce a big story — one, moreover, that came to be associated chiefly with Harry himself, in part by his insistent coverage, in part by the way (expansively selective, it might be said) he orchestrated the plaudits.

There had, for example, been four books, a joint press effort and a parliamentary debate airing claims of a miscarriage of justice over Timothy Evans, a pliant Welshman hanged in 1950 for killing his infant daughter in a Notting Hill flat (and charged too, though not tried, for strangling his wife, Beryl). When a local Liberal manufacturer wrote to the paper exhorting a new push to exonerate a man whose bad breaks in life included having a mass murderer as a downstairs neighbour, the Echo’s newsroom initially featured the letter as a slow day’s stopgap. But Harry’s promotional nous swiftly made his namesake the Echo’s new lead cause, with “Man On Our Conscience” following “The Lorry Menace,” “The Smell,” and more.

A senior judge’s review of the case denied full vindication to Timothy Evans, even perversely deducing that he was innocent over the baby but had murdered Beryl. Yet the momentum for redress did secure the executed man a pardon in 1966, and three years later Harold Wilson’s Labour government, having already suspended the death penalty, abolished it. That Harry reworked the saga with himself as the linchpin might have led even W.T. Stead’s glowering portrait on the Northern Echo’s wall to crack a smile.

The moment

The high road to London was opening. Evans was already known there, and not just by Fleet Street’s talent spotters. In 1962, he had joined the presenters’ roster on What the Papers Say, a pacy late-night weekly round-up on Granada, the groundbreaking Manchester-based arm of Independent Television. The program displayed choice extracts from the week’s headlines, reports and columns, each given a pitch-perfect comedic slant by offscreen voice actors, threaded by pithy scripts from a single, straight-to-camera journalist. With his dapper good looks and dry Mancunian tones, Harry was a clever hire among a rolling mix of seniors and thrusters.

Such opportunities arose in a definite social moment, from 1957 to 1963, when the abrasions of rapid social change were most vividly felt in industrial northern England. In these years, “the north,” that country of the mind — far from coterminous with the actual region, as with Fleet Street and the newspaper industry — was catapulted to an unexpectedly modish berth in the national imaginary.

The northern vogue had been heralded in its ur-text, Richard Hoggart’s celebratory lament The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957. It spread via a tranche of emotionally truthful novels, films and plays, as well as Granada’s Coronation Street serial, which dramatised the theme of generational tension (while offering London a voyage of discovery to an outlying planet). Just as quickly, against a backdrop of exultant ridicule from the concurrent, largely Oxbridge, satire boom, it sank into imitation and canny nostalgia.

Above all, the Beatles’ early success brought the phase to a suitably ambiguous close. The group’s electrifying jolt added joy, wit and optimism to the north’s new–old connotations (authenticity, poverty, melancholy, communalism, boorish masculinity, dreams of escape often thwarted). In crowning the region’s enhanced appeal — and hauling its centre of gravity west to the Atlantic port city of Liverpool — the Beatles also made its previous terms look antiquated.

The moment’s principal benefit was to Harry’s cohort: northern working-class boys born just too late for a wartime call-up, adolescents in the 1940–51 Churchill–Attlee era, nourished by family, public library and welfarism, their sound basic education providing a ladder to grammar school, perhaps university, two years of national service fuelling impatient ambition. Together, these influences formed an apprenticeship to the middle class, even to the part of creator or activator.

Evans was among the older of the group, like Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving), Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall (Billy Liar) and Tony Richardson (the middle-class director who adapted Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey) — all bar the precocious Delaney born in 1928–29. Its members carried the uncharted ambiguities as well as the enticements of their newly mobile class and regional status. Some of those who, unlike Billy Liar, did jump on the train south became luminaries of British public life by making an asset of their northernness, while others did so by shedding local attachments, and accents, in order to fit in. Harry’s was a third way: when he invoked his northern background to New York audiences, most often to deride England’s taints of class, this would serve as a measure of how far he had come.

The mentor

Within the newspaper world, Evans’s performance at the Northern Echo and on What the Papers Say turned into an audition for the London stage. The big break, in 1966, came as an invitation from Sunday Times editor Denis Hamilton to work as his assistant. A year later Evans landed the editorship when the Thomson organisation, owners of the paper, purchased the Times and Hamilton became editor-in-chief of both. The venerable pair (the daily being founded in 1795, the weekly in 1822) were thus brought under the same owner for the first time, a factor — often masked by their similar titles — that took on greater significance as Times Newspapers Ltd, or TNL, entered crisis in the late 1970s.

Now Evans was again walking in Stead’s shoes, the earlier Northern Echo editor having become deputy to John Morley at the Pall Mall Gazette in 1880 then, three years later, succeeding him in the chair. Stead had quickly netted an array of scoops, culminating in an 1885 exposé of the business of child sexual exploitation by London toffs under the authorities’ blind eye. Procuring a thirteen-year-old girl as evidence of the traffic, Stead was sent to jail for three months via a parliamentary bill rushed into law in response to his own story.

The Stead–Evans parallels are resounding. Many colleagues would come to speak of Evans in terms that eerily chimed with those of Stead’s assistant at the Pall Mall Gazette, Alfred Milner: “I cannot recall one who was anything like his equal in vitality… I don’t suppose any editor was ever so beloved by his staff… It was such fun to work with him. The tremendous ‘drive,’ the endless surprises, the red-hot pace at which everything was carried on… His sympathy, his generosity, his kindliness were lavished on all who came within his reach.”

Also akin to Harry’s finest were Stead’s walloping, if in his case prurient, taste in headlines (“The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”) and eclectic investigative unit — veteran feminist reformer Josephine Butler, the Salvation Army’s Bramwell Booth and brothel-keeper turned activist Rebecca Jarrett. And if Evans wasn’t locked up for his principles, he raised the prospect, with a touch of melodrama, in replying to Phillip Knightley’s tip that rivals, disregarding legal qualms, were about to usurp him over the thalidomide story: “I’m tempted to publish anyway. I’ll go to jail. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll go to jail. Bloody hell, it’d be worth it!”

The audacity of Stead and Evans, each a decade younger than their patrons, led them to eclipse the latter in what passes for journalism’s collective memory. Ineluctable or not, that is a disservice to Morley, a principled, scholarly Liberal from Blackburn, north of Manchester, who eventually left journalism for politics; and to Hamilton, a Middlesbrough reporter in his teens who rose by his mid twenties to acting brigadier in war and returned to steer a newspaper group before himself editing the Sunday Times. Equally, it is a disservice to history, for it hoists the whirlwind talents of the more glamorous pair above the singular weave (of inheritance, relationship, contingency and action) in which these talents were enmeshed.

Hamilton, for his part, as well as recruiting Evans laid the groundwork of the latter’s good times in London. He had spent a decade running the Kemsley stable, a mix of national and provincial papers, when in 1958 he made use of his war service under Montgomery to clinch serialisation of the field-marshal’s memoirs for the Sunday Times, a coup that widened a circulation lead over its Observer rival opened by the 1956 Suez crisis. Hamilton became editor in 1961, two years after Thomson’s buyout of Kemsley, and in his six years at the helm took the paper’s sales from under a million in 1959 to a record 1.5 million.

If by this time Denis Hamilton was a consummate establishment insider, eventually to be knighted, his distinction was to be an innovator with foresight. From the editorial plan, graduate training scheme and “big read” of the Kemsley era to the colour magazine, Insight and business section of the Thomson one, Hamilton made the newspaper a weekly event, outpacing the rival Observer and new Sunday Telegraph, while keeping the horizon in view. “More and more I was convinced the Sunday Times should analyse and amplify the news and what lay behind it [in order] to do what television didn’t do,” he reflected, thus drawing “potential readers with greater leisure and affluence.” Hamilton’s strategy, from the big read (“our secret weapon”) to “Atticus,” vignettes of upper-class life by Kemsley’s influential foreign manager Ian Fleming, anticipated the blockbuster weekend newspapers of the 1980s.

The original Insight team of Ron Hall, Clive Irving and Jeremy Wallington was enlisted by Hamilton in 1962 after the youthful trio’s experimental, admired news-in-depth weekly Topic had folded after a few months. At the Sunday Times, their exposure of London’s rental housing underworld (symbolised by the figure of Peter Rachman), a fake Beaujolais scam, and the Profumo affair’s tentacles added punch to the paper. Working on the scandal that brought down Britain’s defence secretary, said Irving, “would tip us into the future of long-form, narrative reporting.”

The nous that had led Hamilton to these bright sparks informed his choice of a replacement when Kemsley’s purchase of the Times forced a company reshuffle. Roy Thomson, self-made son of a Canadian barber, now domiciled in his ancestors’ Scotland, strictly upheld editorial independence (“no person or group can buy or influence editorial support from any newspaper in the Thomson group” was his “creed”) but also took against Frank Giles, number three at the paper and the obvious choice. “Harold’s north country cheek matched Roy’s own,” recalled Hamilton. “In order to convince myself — and others — that Harold was the man, I asked him to set out his ideas of where, over the next few years, the Sunday Times should go. This paper, written over a weekend, was an impressive document that tipped the scales.”

To adapt an old phrase, those who talk of Harold Evans shouldn’t be silent about Denis Hamilton. The British Library’s former head of newspapers, Ed King, wrote of his memoirs: “I was struck time and again by Hamilton’s great capacities: for dealing with people successfully, for being able to take criticism, for delegating work and responsibilities, for learning, for sustained hard work, for seizing the moment, for his incorruptibility. Above all, he had the (constantly exercised) ability to reflect on gaps in the newspaper market, to think ahead, to plan a campaign of action for the future. For many years, Fleet Street was a sufficiently large canvas for his abilities to show at their best.”

For Hamilton, hiring Evans was a conscious act of rejuvenation, one of many. Yet as with Morley vis-à-vis Stead, collaboration sharpened differences. Evans “proved himself an editor with immense flair,” Hamilton would reflect, but “had a great weakness for self-projection” and “was the world’s worst recruiter”; Harry, invited to read a poem at Denis’s funeral in 1988, called him “my mentor for some twenty years,” a note never repeated, even in My Paper Chase (whose 500 pages and ample bibliography, moreover, contained zero reference to his own Good Times, Bad Times). For all that, their partnership — and Roy Thomson’s fortune — helped deliver another decade of dominance for the Sunday Times, until in the late 1970s the paper’s share of Britain’s fracturing social contract brought the whole operation to an impasse.

The boy scout

“I’m handing you a Rolls Royce,” Denis told Harry as they descended to the composing room to see off the last edition of the Hamilton era at Gray’s Inn Road in January 1967. The weekly, sixty-four page (later seventy-two) ad-friendly package of features, serials, comment and foreign reportage, strong on graphics and photographs, had maintained a firm commercial lead. Harry soon made its reportorial language more direct and its presentation more appealing, its muckraking busier if increasingly distended.

Above all, the Sunday Times took on a distinct swagger, which tended to make it more envied than admired in press circles. That had a rationale, for the paper’s assets — market dominance, cash to burn, abundant staff, a hotshot editor-ringmaster touting his wares on TV chat and quiz shows — were hardly those of an underdog. And when Harry sued the satirical magazine Private Eye for needling him as “Dame” (he saw its feeble link to the actress Dame Edith Evans as an “imputation of effeminacy”), the crusader evinced a censorious instinct and odd sense of priorities.

Yet even taking account of the unlimited resources at his disposal, Evans’s exploits as editor were substantial. Several of the major Sunday Times investigations of the next decade entered journalistic folklore, in large part because they entailed positional or legal tussles with a state intent on the lid staying clamped. Among them were the backstory of Kim Philby, the suave British NKVD agent who infiltrated MI6 at the top level and in 1963 fled to Moscow; reporting of Northern Ireland’s conflict that filleted the official version of key episodes; publication of Labour cabinet minister Richard Crossman’s diaries, penetrating thick walls of confidentiality; and exposure of negligence and cover-up over the birth of thousands of disfigured babies (mainly between 1955 and 1962) whose expectant mothers had taken thalidomide for morning sickness.

In each case, a “state of knowledge” timeline was the basis of a detailed narrative, constantly updated, with plenty of personal dramas and cliffhanger moments. It might branch in all directions — Elaine Potter’s meticulous research into the pregnancy drug’s testing failures, and Marjorie Wallace’s tender interviews with stricken families, for example, counterpointed by reports and graphics on the issues at stake: press freedom, state secrecy, corporate powers, citizens’ rights. A book-length Insight-branded digest could soon follow, its sales (as of the Philby or Ulster potboilers) recouping much of the newspaper’s costs. Chance and design had made for a winning formula: albeit the hunt for more makeweight quarry, and there was plenty, exposed little beyond Insight’s style of portentous urgency.

At its best, the Sunday Times’s journalistic alchemy saw Evans’s sparkling life-force, quicksilver judgement and ire at restrictive laws — libel, contempt of court, official secrecy — kindle his smart newshounds’ ingenuity and grit. Evans was an “all-rounder, a brilliant technician, famously courageous,” recalled Godfrey Hodgson, Insight editor for four years. “He could grasp the point and scope of a story at speed. When Anthony Mascarenhas brought in his 1971 scoop on the repression in then East Bengal, which led to the birth of Bangladesh amid millions of refugees, a cholera epidemic and war, Evans swept away a pedestrian headline (written by myself) and replaced it with a single word, “Genocide,” in 72-point type.” Then, “after the first edition had gone on a Saturday night” his “seminars over a glass of scotch were models of instruction and motivation.”

Harry’s lessons went beyond the inner sanctum. On broadcast media and contributions to the weekly Listener or New Society, he was a lucid champion of bold journalism as pillar of a free society, and the more persuasive for his framing the case in moral and empirical, as opposed to doctrinal, terms. In the same spirit, his Northern Echo proselytising had been circumstantial rather than planned, he declared, “arising from frustrations and disquiet as we encountered instances of a vast carelessness in public life,” while at the Sunday Times, seeing London’s hidebound institutions at close range, he had come to detect “a chronic but unsuspected malaise in the functioning of British democracy.”

If such sentiments dovetailed with the social progressivism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Evans was more inclined to finesse anti-establishment sentiment than inhale it. In the spirit of Stead’s “government by journalism,” he wanted to clean up the temple, not pull it down. This disposition marked his whole career: just as at Durham’s student debates, a natural Labourite and go-getter, he had recoiled from “the warriors of cold reason,” he was averse to the heavy radicalism of the 1960s and 70s, and — this time born just too early — rueful in missing that elusive thing, the sexual revolution.

For all his cogent justifications of dragon-slaying, Harry remained the boy scout he had in fact been: neither cynic, ideologue, nor even much of a political animal at all (an “apolitical liberal,” his buddy Robert Harris called him). Proximity to the exalted, with their titles and trappings, could beguile as ideas did not. “He sometimes seemed too keen to please the powerful,” the scrupulous Hodgson listed among his faults.

At root, this deferential streak was just another part of Evans’s all-embracing, all-consuming personality. The tendency might be overt, as when he held back Murray Sayle’s timely dissection of the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972, or enfolded into investigative work’s grey zones, such as liaising with MI6-adjacent personnel during the Philby story to keep the intelligence agency in the loop and at bay. Harry was too bumptious for artifice anyway: in an office lie-detection experiment in 1979 with visiting celebrities he “failed to lie successfully” (as did Sunday Times reporter Isabel Hilton, who wrote a deadpan account of the episode).

That personality, always more consequential than any public views Evans might espouse, drove (and could also block) the paper. Insight’s investigations bore its imprint, from their often drawn-out gestation to the way their ambivalent endings were oversold as victories. Harry’s divided attention, and his intoxication with a process under his nominal control, could entail a loss of focus. The Philby story, for example, had to be rushed out when it was found that the Observer was splashing on the memoirs of Eleanor Philby, third wife of the “third man.” Similarly, the trigger for launching the thalidomide campaign in 1972 was that a trio of Daily Mail features on an afflicted family had got ahead of the Sunday Times’s long delayed coverage after Mail editor David English decided to brave legal constraints. Worse, the resolute father was now telling lead reporter Phillip Knightley that Murdoch’s News of the World had its own thalidomide series in the works.

Knightley, going to his editor with the information (and aware that “Rupert doesn’t give a damn about the Attorney-General”) found a panicky Evans “determined not to lose the story.” Looking back in his 1997 autobiography A Hack’s Progress, he cited the Sunday Times’s snail’s pace, as well as families’ distress over skewed compensation and media exposure, to argue that the whole thalidomide effort “was not the great success it was made out to be, and that the full story is as much about the failures of journalism as about its triumphs.”

Fleet Street’s competitiveness was central to investigative journalism in the period. So too, and also barely recognised, is the role of Denis Hamilton before and after Evans’s arrival at the Sunday Times. In his own account Hamilton found that the “emotional and highly strung” Evans needed “constant counsel and comfort — for instance, when we took on the law over the Thalidomide case (which was his idea) I controlled the whole campaign. No sentence appeared in the newspaper without my having seen it beforehand, and I ran the strategy, as I did the fight against the Cabinet Office over the Crossman Diaries. [In] the end we won the right to publish the diaries, though in the book which Harold Evans later commissioned to record the case my name did not appear, to my great interest. I didn’t object — I came to know, over the succeeding twelve years, Harold Evans’s strengths and weaknesses better than any man in Fleet Street.”

This blunt rectifying impulse is alone of its kind in Hamilton’s overview of his career, taped during cancer treatment by his historian son, Nigel, and published in 1989 as Editor-in-Chief: The Fleet Street Memoirs of Sir Denis Hamilton. The reams of exalted make-believe that two decades later would fill Evans’s own My Paper Chase, treating Hamilton (where present at all) as in effect a hapless extra in Harry’s biopic, were his posthumous reward. That aside, an Evans-centric prism impedes grasp of these Sunday Times years. They are far more complicated, and thus far more interesting, than chronic romanticism and veneration allow.

The lord of misrule

The Sunday Times’s illumination of shadowy worlds added to its own glare. But Harry, the editor as impresario, always had much more on his plate — as well as in his pockets, up his sleeves and under his hat. On the inside, life at the paper became more of a rollicking Range Rover ride across bumpy terrain.

Prue Leith, a freelance food writer, once entered Harry’s office as he faced the window, doing star-jumps. “As he shook out his arms and legs, he said, ‘Oh, I just have to get rid of some energy.’” Skiing was a new passion, he went on, and — anticipating reality TV by decades — he intended to commission a band of journos also in their forties to learn its joys. He did too, and a book (How We Learned to Ski) came out of it. All the while, he was completing the instructional Editing and Design: A Five Volume Manual of English, Typography and Layout (comprising Essential English for Journalists and Writers, Handling Newspaper Text, News Headlines: An Illustrated Guide, Pictures on a Page: Photojournalism, Graphics and Picture Editing, and Newspaper Design).

Harry “understood the craft of journalism better than any of us,” said his colleague Magnus Linklater, editor of the “Spectrum” pages, who also recalled daytime squash games at a Pall Mall club where he “would turn up late, clutching a sheaf of papers and gallop to the telephone. Then he’d scurry into the changing rooms, talking nineteen to the dozen. I can never remember him motionless. His walk was a half-run. He was exhausting to compete against… and liked beating me, partly because I was fourteen years younger.” Linklater, an urbane Scots Etonian, also spoke of Harry’s “combination of intellectual ferment with almost naiveté,” as when he would buttonhole the corridor “tea ladies” to ask if they found the paper’s stories offensive.

At Gray’s Inn Road he managed to be at once ubiquitous and elusive. “‘Where’s Harry?’ was the cry that went up most days on the editorial floor,” wrote features sub Elizabeth Grice, where the editor “was quite often a blur. A slight, mercurial figure, he moved so fast and with such will-o’-the-wisp unpredictability between the editorial floors and the print room that it was impossible to locate him with any certainty. Sightings were passed from reporter to reporter in the event that someone needed to know. He boasted that his door was always open but he was not always inside it.”

Harry’s relentlessness could irk colleagues, as when at the last moment he would needlessly sub-edit copy (or duplicate the paper’s chess notation on a miniature set to confirm its accuracy). It could also elicit awe, in terms again reminiscent of Milner on Stead: “He would go on debating, with the printers screaming for ‘copy,’ till he sometimes left himself less than half an hour to write or dictate a leading article; then he would dash it off at top-speed and embody in it, with astonishing facility, the whole gist and essence of the preceding discussion.”

Richard Dowden recalls a 10pm alert that a rival paper was reporting the collapse of DeLorean, a flagship sports car company in Northern Ireland. When Dowden got through to the owner, Harry, “dancing with agitation,” seized the phone, “scribbled some notes and threw them at me. ‘Clear the front page!’ he shouted. I couldn’t read Harry’s shorthand so he began to type at frenetic speed. He gave it to the compositor. In a matter of minutes Harry Evans had taken lightning shorthand, typed out the story, and relaid the front page, making the interview with [John] De Lorean most of it. He then went to the stone, where the hot type was set, and within minutes the presses were rolling again. He then began calling government ministers. The problem was that the story was wrong. But as a newspaperman Harry Evans had an unsurpassed brilliance.”

Dowden’s vignette is in fact from Evans’s Times coda, a month before his sacking by Murdoch, thus evidence that he hadn’t changed. Many colleagues’ fondness is similarly fringed with ambivalence. The Sunday Times’s literary editor Claire Tomalin compared working under Evans to “being at the court of Louis XIV. When he beamed his attention fully on any one of us, we were all, men and women, a little in love with him… Harry was loved, even if we sometimes swore at him when his attention was distracted or his favours divided.”

The sense of a quasi-monarchy under arbitrary rule persists, albeit infused with genuine warmth. Philip Norman, whose competition entry had earned him a place on staff, was touched by the editor’s balm: “With Harold Evans it was more than working for a newspaper, you felt personally that you worked for Harry. Editors tended to be sulking autocrats… but Harry was everywhere, running from the subs desk to the writers, perpetually in motion… He was the boy king, Henry V, and anybody would have done anything for him. He didn’t overlook anybody, we were all special.” For Godfrey Hodgson, the editor “was, in fact, loved by most of his staff, not an easy thing for a man with power over the careers and reputations of ferociously ambitious and competitive people.”

A recollection by Knightley hints at the ambiguities at play. “[Harold Evans] wore his editor’s skills so lightly. He was master of every branch of journalism. He could lay out a page, choose a photograph, dash off a leader, write a headline. The only thing he couldn’t do was say ‘No.’ So he gave a job to anyone who asked, which meant that the Sunday Times was wildly overmanned. It had so many curious staffing arrangements that I doubt anyone really knew how many journalists worked there. Or what they did. Evans never tried to bring order to the editorial department’s creative chaos. He simply encouraged journalists to get on with whatever appealed to them. Such freedom was unprecedented and I mourn its passing.”

Where some regarded his anti-method as wasteful and damaging, Harry saw only benefit, citing his promotion of Elaine Potter to work alongside Bruce Page: “She’d not had a great deal of experience in journalism, but she’d acquired an Oxford Ph.D., and, as important, squatter’s rights to a freelancer’s chair in the features department. Some of our most successful recruits were squatters; they were tested by the exigencies of sudden demands for labour and the best, like Elaine, survived with the complicity of editors until I could find a place on staff.”

Potter, commending Harry as “fierce in pursuit of wrongdoing,” and for his stress on “the importance of repetition, of staying with a story if you wanted to make a difference,” says — with much unspoken between the lines — he “surrounded himself with forceful journalists, all of whom wanted to be heard, none of whom would readily give way to the considerable editor of a great newspaper. Undaunted he would do battle with this fierce crew who spent even more time jousting with each other.”

Harry’s support, job-enhancing and moral, could inspire great loyalty. Marjorie Wallace, enlisted at a Highgate tennis club by a figure of “missionary zeal” whom she at first thought “slightly crazy” as he insisted on finding her a child-minder that very afternoon so she could start work, found him “a true crusader with fierce moral purpose who put his head above every parapet.” Well into her stint at the Sunday Times, she expected to lose her job after confessing to her editor that, under family pressures, her copy had long dried up, but instead was told with a smile: “Don’t worry. Every journalist has a fallow period.” Yet she also writes that Harry “could be capricious, frustrating and infuriating. When a promotion came up at the paper, he would offer at least five of us the job before leaving us to sort out who got it between ourselves. It created a highly competitive environment that had its ruthless side.”

Harry thrived as lord of this misrule, all of it kept afloat by the most innocently enlightened of press moguls, Roy Thomson, who had defined “the social mission of every great newspaper” as in part “to provide a home for a large number of salaried eccentrics.” But misfiring appointments and ballooning payrolls did cause strain between Evans and Hamilton. “In a couple of extreme cases I had contracts rescinded, which led to a showdown with [Evans] in which I said that recruitment above a certain salary had to have my permission,” the editor-in-chief recounted.

Such reproval cut no ice with Harry, whose derision for his paymasters was a career motif. He had paid big sums to get inside information on thalidomide and Paris’s DC-10 crash in 1974. His ill-starred year at the Times featured rapid turnover where incomers were better paid than those who left or were let go, both factors triggering staff resentment. Visiting the Northern Echo in 2000, having received an award at the nearby university, he was asked by its newish editor for a word of advice. Harry’s pithy reply, with its show-off expletive, was: “Don’t take any notice of the fucking beancounters.” No editor ever regarded a proprietor’s bounty with as much airy contempt.

The liberated zone

In the many-ringed circus that was the Sunday Times of the 1960s and 70s, the colour magazine — design pioneer, aesthetic blast, sales magnet, radical chic show — went its own way. It too would be embroiled by tensions over cash, authority and personnel during Harry’s time at the paper, its redoubt on Thomson House’s fourth floor becoming, he confided, a “source of enormous frustration.” The awkward dance that ensued between its autonomy and his search for control doesn’t fit easy accounts of his brilliant career, which means it gets no traction there.

Dreamed up in 1961 by Roy Thomson and the marketing department, brought to fruition in February 1962 by Hamilton, the then “section,” or informally “supplement” — the law barring magazine publishing on a Sunday — had withstood gigantic losses in its first year to become an editorial success and lucrative advertising funnel. Hamilton’s strategic confidence plus intrepid marketing had overcome that nervy start. Capping the turnaround was the team’s anniversary “Moscow picnic” in February 1963, when the chirpy Roy Thomson interviewed Khrushchev and offered to buy Pravda.

Under a coterie of independent, exacting spirits — notably artist-editor Mark Boxer and literary editor Francis Wyndham, art director Michael Rand and graphic designer David King — the magazine’s blend of big subjects, top names and bold visuals rivalled Insight in defining the Sunday Times to the public. And its renown was as great, imaginative openness to swirling Sixties currents making it part of the decade’s “revolt into style.” The newspaper’s id to Insight’s super-ego, it might be said.

The magazine was piloted in its first three years by Boxer, another astute Hamilton pick. (“I felt he had the necessary kind of iconoclastic attitude, a chap I’d have to restrain rather than ginger up.”) Mark “lived on the front edge of life,” said his successor Godfrey Smith, himself more a Falstaff, under whom the lotus years took wing, with their epic lunches and staff jaunts, one such, to Sarajevo for the feature “A Day in The Life Of,” spawning no copy at all because Michael Rand judged the photographs too weak to use.

Hamilton’s personal attachment to his baby (“perhaps the most successful innovation in postwar quality journalism,” he called it) was such that he had kept the magazine out of Evans’s hands, ostensibly to allow the new editor to focus on the main paper, though he later elaborated: “I confess that in my heart I was really worried stiff about [Evans’s] at times impulsive approach.” The magazine was granted years of latitude to resist intruders and replenish itself.

The fourth floor had the seductive thrill of a liberated zone. For those outside, it was a problem child: “frivolous, self-absorbed, anarchic, [prone to] self-indulgence and money-wasting” were the vibes picked up by a young James Fox as he went to work alongside Wyndham and “hard-working, hard-typing” fashion editor Meriel McCooey, their office the magazine’s “subversive cultural centre and magnet for visitors.” That the latter included depraved gangsters with contrarian appeal, from the Kray twins to the predatory far-left guru Gerry Healy, whose acolytes included the Redgrave theatrical family, had a taste of self-styled vanguards paying court to each other.

Evans recoiled more from the magazine’s distinct angle on news stories, as for example when the texts accompanying Don McCullin’s photographs of Nigeria’s civil war had greater sympathy for the Biafran side than the paper’s reporting. He “would want to pull out articles — usually on grounds of taste — when they were already on the cylinder, at the cost of thousands of pounds,” wrote Fox. A chance to bridle the magazine came in 1972 when Godfrey Smith’s move to associate editor at the paper freed Evans to deploy the versatile Magnus Linklater behind enemy lines. (“Go in and sort that lot out,” was the brief.)

The new broom soon warranted the choice by unearthing £70,000 worth in paid-for commissions lying idle. But the magazine’s uncommon ethos and “brilliant people” inveigled Linklater, whose expensive advance to Patagonia-bound Bruce Chatwin convinced Evans that the magazine was “self-indulgent, mired in triviality, out of touch.” Linklater rode accusations of “going native” for two years before Harry abruptly replaced him with the breezy populariser Hunter Davies, a pal from Durham and Manchester days, whose stab at curbing the renegade took a year to fail. The struggle for control, in Fox’s words, was “eventually settled by Murdoch.”

Linklater’s farewell party, within hours of returning from lunch to be told of his transfer to assistant news editor (no one was ever pushed out of the old Sunday Times), had combined mutiny and wake. Harry dared to come, Meriel McCooey, his very antithesis, yelling at his ashen face: “You! I mean you! William fucking Randolph Hearst! Do you know what you’ve done?” In the silence, Michael Rand’s remark to art assistant Roger Law rippled across the room and sank deep: “The party’s over, boys.”

The twilight

Fleet Street’s teeming warrens, marinated in alcohol and trade gossip, rarely spilled their own guild secrets further than Private Eye’s “Street of Shame” column. Newspapers’ domestic life was off limits, as the playwright Arnold Wesker found in 1971 when Evans gave him permission to “wander freely through the offices of the Sunday Times to gather material,” only to find that his dramatic theme — journalists’ corrosive desire to cut everyone down to their size — made his work unwelcome. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Wesker’s 1972 play, The Journalists, based on his eight weeks at the paper, was scuttled when the actors refused to perform it. Between artistic defects and the tug of Healy’s cult, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, there was a lot of blame to go round.

A whiff of the power games and raw emotions at the Sunday Times did filter into intellectual journalism’s periodic overviews of the news machine. Two liberal observers were notably alert to the paper’s internal fissures and shrewd about Evans’s capacity to handle them. Anthony Sampson, in the third, 1972, edition of his Anatomy of Britain, sketched a publication “driven on a loose rein” by Evans, who is “pulled in several directions” by journalists “competing fiercely with each other for exposures and scoops.” The Sunday Times “likes to give something for everyone: it has left-wing politics and right-wing politics, exposures and court circulars, and it has romped ahead on this formula. But its corporate character, partly as a result, is uncertain.”

In a similar vein, an anonymous New Statesman profile in 1975, bearing the stamp of the magazine’s editor Anthony Howard, used W.T. Stead’s demise aboard the Titanic to propose that Evans’s “unwieldy vessel” needed its pilot “to set a course”:

“The major decisions he takes; the more mundane ones he puts off. The result is a paper where no one quite knows what is happening, where the wrong men are left in the wrong jobs, and an almost accidental ‘policy’ of divide-and-rule causes some unhappiness and irritation. The man who did not like taking unpleasant decisions on the Northern Echo still fears unpopularity. If Harold Evans realised how much actual authority, and professional respect, as well as affection, he commands among his staff, he might (as one of his executives put it) ‘calm down and organise a better newspaper.’ But his combination of talents is also his weakness: intelligent, charming, a brilliant journalist, he still has to prove it, still has to be seen to be good.”

These judicious appraisals of the upper deck skirted the iceberg below: the unremitting war between management and print unions, with journalists caught in the middle. Newspaper production was at the mercy of “chapels,” or union branches, each led by a “father” who acted as a spiky guardian of shop floor customs and his extended family’s interests. There were fifty-six chapels at Thomson House alone. A stoppage by one, on the flimsiest of grounds, would halt the paper. In the mid 1970s, the Sunday Times was losing millions of copies a year. (“Industrial anarchy,” Harry called it.) “The management lived in fear of strikes, and we were all obliged never to offend a printer,” wrote Claire Tomalin in A Life of My Own.

The Sunday Times’s revenues were badly hit, its ambition to grow sales to two million long busted, though it stayed profitable. The Times, less secure in the tough weekday market, was in dire trouble, draining each year £2 million from Thomson’s coffers, fortunately swelled by his agile investments in television, travel and North Sea oil. William Rees-Mogg, the paper’s editor, likened the beleaguered Times to “a man at the end of a windswept pier in some cold and out-of-season resort.” Tim Austin, its long-serving style guru, voiced despair in more prosaic terms: “You didn’t know if the paper was going to come out at night. You would work for it for ten hours and then [the unions] would pull the plug and you had wasted ten hours of your life.”

To his last breath, Roy Thomson implored Denis Hamilton to introduce modern typesetting, already operating across his American stable. The proprietor, comically frugal in his own life, lavish with his cherished papers (“Spend what you want, Denis, but never tell me the amount!”) died in 1976, ownership passing to his less engaged son, Kenneth. After two more years of attrition, a frazzled TNL board stopped the presses in hope of forcing a quick agreement to introduce new technology in phases, along with pay and staff reforms. Instead, most TNL workers took jobs at the papers’ rivals, who eagerly boosted output to draw homeless readers.

The Gray’s Inn Road hiatus lasted through most of 1979, that hinge year, a mammoth £40 million loss, and a silo of resentments primed to burst. And all for nothing: when the presses again rolled, war instantly resumed. In 1980, the journalists — who had been paid through the lockdown — joined the fray, striking for a second big increase in months. For Hamilton, “it was the last straw. Without the journalists’ loyalty we had nothing left to fight for.” Kenneth, the new Lord Thomson, tired of the hassle, put the group on the market.

While the Sunday Times was still a going concern, the Times faced the abyss, as Rees-Mogg’s leader (“How to Kill a Newspaper”) had grasped on their restart. A disentangling of ownership would doom the establishment flagship; a joint purchase might see it unloaded anyway after a decent interval. Any new proprietor needed tools to deal with that implacable iceberg. The papers were back on the streets, at the behest of the chapels. This time, the party really was over.

The seachange

It took until March 1981 for Rupert Murdoch to clinch the title deeds to Thomson House. His News International Ltd, the British arm of his group, was the last viable bid once Lord Rothermere’s Mail stable, which coveted only the Sunday Times, was discounted, and Evans’s fundraising for a buyout of his paper by management, senior editors and advisers had got nowhere (those damned beancounters). “Harold Evans, though he made a great show of leading a cavalry charge intent on buying out the owners, soon threw his hat in with Murdoch’s camp,” recalled Hamilton, while Linklater said Evans was “open to the charge of bad faith [as he] switched sides.”

It was an endorsement Evans spent the rest of his days wriggling away from. In January, following their first conversation, he had described Murdoch as “robust and refreshing. I liked him hugely. There is no doubt he loves newspapers,” and — having consulted staff who he said were of similar mind — confirmed his “preference” in a private note to the Thomson executive Gordon Brunton (“between Murdoch and Rothermere I myself would choose Murdoch for a variety of reasons [though as you know I believe systematic safeguards are required]”).

Harry, like most of those involved, had come to believe that News International was the least worst outcome in business terms. But the deal’s mesh of personality, politics and law made it an enduring source of dispute. It had been smoothed by Murdoch’s courting of Margaret Thatcher, prime minister since May 1979 (when Harry was among a chunk of London’s liberal-left dignitaries to vote for her), and by her trade minister John Biffen’s non-referral of the Murdoch company’s bid to an oversight commission that might have barred it on grounds of excessive market share. These episodes were later invested with ever more tortuous conspiratorial significance, Harry still swinging the lead pitchfork long after the crowd had melted away.

The larger truth is that there were no good options. TNL’s woeful stalemate crystallised that of British society in the period. In each case, years of dislocation were unavoidable, though its precise form was full of contingencies. In the shorter term, the Times could well have gone under without a quick resolution. For his part, Evans ever regretted accepting Murdoch’s invite to edit it (“my ambition got the better of my judgement”) and leaving the Sunday Times (“my power-base as a defender of press freedom”). But had he stayed, it would be under a more vigilant owner and exacting financial regimen. For things to stay the same in his fiefdom, they were bound to change.

In the event, he did go over to the Times, clutching Murdoch’s non-interference guarantees, which were to prove worthless once Rupert’s henchmen Richard Searby and managing editor Gerald Long started turning the screws. The editorial floor was uneasy too. Did Harry metamorphose in the crossing? Not at all, he was ever his ebullient self. This hardened the disfavour of senior Times staff, who (the newspaper’s official historian wrote), “looked upon Evans and the smart and cocky journalists he brought with him from the Sunday Times as aliens from the planet Lower Class. The foot soldiers too went into shock. Here was an editor who rewrote their copy and their headlines, redesigned pages and didn’t go home until he had conducted a post-mortem of the day’s work.”

Yes, good old Harry. One who saw it coming was Denis Hamilton, who added to this litany the editor’s “taking over the duties of his leader-writers, leaving them unemployed” and “constantly (as he had done with me) overspending, or temporarily disguising expenditure.” Hamilton, who as TNL’s chair was key in endorsing Murdoch (“not a perfect purchaser” but “the best available”), had warned him against the choice of “my own protégé from the Sunday Times” (an equally rare note): “I told Murdoch it would turn out disastrously, and it did.” Evans’s appointment was “Murdoch’s fault, from start to finish, a great error of proprietorial judgment,” and not the only one, for he “was a poor picker of men.” In deprecating Evans’s and now Murdoch’s calibre as recruiters, Hamilton does not reflect on his own; but the undertow of regret over Evans in his memoirs (not Murdoch, it was far too late in the day for that) is tangible if unadmitted.

Evans’s tenure began in March 1981 amid a morass on the home front that offered news riches: Thatcher vulnerable, an economy sunk in recession, urban riots, IRA hunger strikes, Labour’s Bennite left on the up, a breakaway to the party’s right, much talk of political “realignment.” For six months, he wrote of the company’s new boss, “Murdoch was an electric presence, vivid and amusing, direct and fast in his decisions, and a good ally against the old guard… I did find his buccaneering, can-do style very refreshing.” Soon those same qualities ended the romance, hitched as they were to overt editorial interference in the paper’s coverage of Mrs Thatcher’s economic travails.

Without Murdoch’s support Harry was exposed, even more so as he lacked aides with a reliable political compass. At the Sunday Times, olympian political editor Hugo Young had been Harry’s lodestar. A belated bid to entice Hugo to the Times culminated on 2 March 1982 with a desperate memo in third-person style, filed in Young’s outstanding archive: “his editor would be utterly committed to him,” vowed Harry, even suggesting Hugo might “be well placed as an insider to succeed to the chair.” The pleading bullishness was all too forlorn, as was soon confirmed by Young’s diplomatic reply (“I feel I can pursue my journalistic interests, and help maintain our shared interests, here for the moment,” was its gist), the last clause presaging his move to the Guardian in 1984 when Murdoch denied him the Sunday Times editorship.

The fin de siècle air of this bleak exchange was appropriate: a week later, Murdoch told Evans to step down, which he did after six histrionic days. An always unwise and often strained cohabitation — both men having arrived at the Times as brash interlopers with differing ambitions — had met its foretold end, leaving rival accounts to pick over the carcass for decades. In this context, Andrew Knight’s coda to the Times’s own obituary of Evans is apt. Knight, a long-term News International affiliate and chair of Times Newspapers since 2012, recalls that Harry’s early choice of Bernard Donoughue as leader-writer and “opinion guru” introduced a “personality ingredient” that “signalled to me his likely demise at the Times.”

Knight observes that the “undogmatically centrist” Harry’s “lack of nous” in hiring Donoughue — who had advised Labour prime minister James Callaghan before working for Knight at the Economist — “caused loss of sympathy inside the paper” and “gave extra ammunition” to a Times staff “who did not enjoy Harry the way his tight-knit Sunday legion had done.” It still surprises, he writes, that Harry, “though a man of action and warmth rather than strong politics, did not divine the likely office politics of his new daily newspaper when it played so effectively to Murdoch’s ‘clear-water’ world view. Murdoch’s was a post-Seventies view already in course of being borne out by events. I was not there but I suspect it was not was not a hard decision, knowing the staff turmoil on The Times, for the independent national directors of Times Newspapers to agree to replace Harry with [his deputy] Charles Douglas-Home.”

In principle, Donoughue was well placed to grasp the politics of his own arrival at Gray’s Inn Road, for he had noted (and in doing so would make famous) a quiet, back-seat remark made by the avuncular Callaghan during the 1979 election campaign. Bernard had said that “with a little luck, and a few policy initiatives here and there, we [Labour] might just squeeze through.” The PM replied: “I should not be too sure. You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now a sea-change and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”

Callaghan’s intuition proved sound, though a bodyguard of auxiliaries would be needed to bend history in the right direction. Murdoch’s rout of the print unions in 1985–86, enabling the newspaper industry’s makeover, added oil. By that mid decade, the world of Harry Evans in his pomp on the Gray’s Inn Road was becoming as remote as the Ashton-under-Lyne Weekly Reporter. But a casualty of progress, a music-hall remnant in the film-star age? Far from it. With trademark élan, Harry reached the other side having pulled off a rare midlife combo: Atlantic crossing, new career footing, revamped private life. If that too would link Murdoch and Evans, deeper still was the reciprocity of their casting: menacing dark versus radiant light, with nothing in between.

The second life

This second life had a long gestation. Donoughue’s diary on 27 October 1976, in the midst of a British financial crisis, records: “I went to see Harry Evans in the flat of his lovely new girlfriend — Tina Brown. He told me that the Sunday Times had got its story that the IMF would insist on a sterling parity at $1.50 from Washington… Harry is still angling for the Director Generalship of the BBC.” The two men were players at the game of power: Donoughue had ambitions of his own to run the Bank of England. But over the private life of “one of my closest friends,” he was well behind the curve.

Tina, at twenty-two, was a kinetic Oxford graduate whose pen, vim and allure had by then felled an eclectic swathe of London’s male glitterati. It was three years since Harry, given Tina’s New Statesman clippings by the agent Pat Kavanagh, had asked Sunday Times features editor Ian Jack to commission her, sponsored her stay as a New York freelance, and lined up a staff contract (blocked by the journalists’ union chapel as Tina hadn’t served time on a local paper, to Harry’s fury at Jack’s expense). From late 1974, wrote Harry, “[we] corresponded about her work, and then about newspapers and literature and life, and so our relationship began. I fell in love by post.” Private Eye, already taunting Harry’s new motor-bike-and-black-leather look, was soon noting events where “[the] Dame was accompanied by his beautiful and talented young discovery Tina Brown.”

Enid Evans, wife of Harry for twenty-five years until their 1978 divorce, and mother of their three children, continued to teach, work as a magistrate, and support educational initiatives in the family’s Highgate, north London home patch until her death in 2013. “We preserved an affectionate friendship that has endured to this day,” wrote Harry in 2009, describing their union as “serene.” (Harry’s gestures at self-inquiry work to deflect it: “I told myself it was a typical mid-life crisis”; “Hamilton was a master delegator. I was a meddler. He was reticent. I wasn’t.”)

Harry and Tina married in August 1981 at the East Hampton, Long Island retreat of the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee, who had “made a second marriage with his paper’s intrepid and glamorous young Style writer, Sally Quinn.” (In fact a third.) “After champagne and cake, we drove into Manhattan for a honeymoon, all of one night at the Algonquin.” Work called: Tina back to London as editor of the high-society Tatler, Harry “to meet Henry Kissinger at the Rockefeller family estate in the Pocantino hills of New York State where I was editing a second volume of his White House years.”

The event stands as a fitting entrée to luxuriant decades of professional and social whirl, the British duo’s super-networked celebrity at once status marker and career enhancer. While Tina edited Vanity Fair (1984–92), the New Yorker (1992–98) and the Daily Beast (2008–13), in between blowing upwards of $50 million on her Miramax-funded Talk magazine (1999–2002), Harry spent a protracted New York apprenticeship editing US News & World Report, perennial third to Time and Newsweek, then a sleek travel monthly with an ethical tinge (“The Harry Evans called back and said: Malcolm Forbes and some other billionaires are taking their yachts up the Amazon. Would you be interested in covering that for our first issue?”) before reaching the big league in 1990 as editorial director of Random House, where over seven years his penchant for star names, vast advances and hyperactive marketing swelled then near burst his own repute.

Through a frenetic period, Tina and Harry gained extra cachet as A-list, paparazzi-buzzed Manhattan party hosts to grandee celebrities (think Bill Clinton, Nora Ephron, Bianca Jagger, Henry Kissinger, Madonna, Salman Rushdie, Simon Schama), each gathering signalled by their triplex apartment’s furniture being consigned to a giant truck which would trundle around Manhattan for the duration. A book might be its pretext, the author its prime guest, “social butterfly” Harry doing a turn at the microphone — which, as Jacob Bernstein says in a neat portrait of these vanished times, “Mr Evans did not have to be an expert on a subject to monopolise.”

The apogee of their power coupledom, and perhaps of a brief age of liberal swank tout court, lay in Harry’s fundraising for Tony Blair before the 1997 election, when New Labour’s made men would fly in to parley with wealthy influencers such as investment banker and New York Review of Books contributor Felix Rohatyn. The journalist and Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal hosted a Washington party where Tony’s speech had its obligatory self-deprecating jest, his “I remember Tina well. We went to Oxford together. She gave the most fabulous parties to which she never invited me” the cue for Tina to complete the double act with “We’ll soon put that right!”

Such jaunty mateship provoked transatlantic chatter that Tina or Harry might take a big job in a Blair administration: envoy in Washington for her, arts minister for him? In turn, their London media slots, charity hooplas, or honours (Brown’s CBE in 2000, Evans’s knighthood in 2004) gave plugged-in locals a vicarious taste of their Manhattan aura. But distance mainly kept apart the two segments of the Tina-and-Harry show and of their individual careers. In London, Harry was journalism’s departed knight, the local head boy made vaguely good across the pond; in New York, he was Tina’s consort — dubbed “Mr Harold Brown” by the gossip queen Liz Smith — then, via an opportune vault, her co-star. The prescribed terms had no room for seeing Harry’s story as one, noting its recurrences, or considering that his American trajectory might cast retrospective light on his British one.

Most snippets that did reach London matched the frame, as when Evans’s sponsoring of disgraced Clinton aide Dick Morris’s memoir unleashed a “wave of indignation” in New York; so “shaken” was he by the furore, reported the Independent’s John Carlin, that “were [Evans] to receive a flattering offer back in Britain, he might be tempted to return. After all, back home he is regarded by his peers as a rock of journalistic integrity. In America, whose culture he has manifestly understood but cannot wholeheartedly embrace, he has come to be regarded as an unprincipled opportunist — in much the same way, in other words, that he regards his nemesis, Rupert Murdoch.”

The souring mood led to investigative auditing of strains in the couple’s media dominion. Suzanna Andrews’s “The Trouble with Harry,” a formidable New York magazine cover profile in July 1997, sparked by the “amalgam of theatrics, money and controversy” that Evans had “gleefully detonated” in promoting Morris’s work, went on to track how “the marketing champ of the book business,” noted for his “eager courting of the famous and powerful,” had become “the poster boy for the publishing crisis.” A Random House shuffle that raised Ann Godoff to editor-in-chief and marginalised Evans, plus evidence of colleagues’ dislike of his way of operating (variously “cynical,” “tasteless,” “downmarket and shameless”), gave the investigation further topicality.

Evans was moved to a top-floor office — piquantly, days after Blair entered Downing Street — for what became a six-month sojourn before his departure. In an echo of his unhappy Times finale, the backdrop to Harry’s ousting from the Random House frontline was a divided staff. Again, most insiders were relieved. Robert Kolker’s “Waiting for Godoff,” published in March 2001, quoted one that “Evans’s event-planning department came from Hollywood, and his mammoth book advances sometimes seemed to come from there too,” while a “long-established star” said of Godoff: “Harry thought he was a character playing a publisher. She’s the real deal.” Marlon Brando (a $5 million advance on another fiasco) was out; Arundhati Roy, Susan Orlean and Zadie Smith in. Ruth Reichl, food writer and memoirist, describing Godoff as “probably the anti-Harry,” illustrated the point by distinguishing “people who constantly try to remind you of how important they are, and people who constantly try to make you forget it.”

Another sign that New Yorkers were cooling on the Tina–Harry show was a book-length dissection of the hot couple’s Manhattan years. Judy Bachrach’s Tina and Harry Come to America, an acrid if thorough account of the couple’s “uses of power” in the city’s circuits of wealth, glamour and literary commerce, proved ill-starred in its release date, July 2001, and its racy tone. Yet Bachrach’s argument, and Andrews provides more discreet back-up in Evans’s case, has a kernel: that Tina–Harry’s forte was to be the advance guard in American upper-end publishing’s move from seriousness (if also sluggishness) to vaudeville.

The patronage of two moguls was central to the couple’s ascendancy: S.I. Newhouse Jr. (owner of Condé Nast, the New Yorker from 1985, and Random House 1980–98), Mort Zuckerman (owner of US News and World Report and several papers, plus Atlantic Monthly Press 1980–99). A third, broadcasting magnate Barry Diller, was a key Tina patron. An ad hoc part of the deal was Si and Mort’s resort to expediency in handling their charges. When Harry was catapulted to Random House, the “whole editorial wing — Bob Loomis, Jason Epstein — was against him,” and staff were “openly defiant,” an editor there told Suzanna Andrews. “Everybody was sure that Harry had gotten the job because Si wanted to keep Tina happy.”

But Si, “the Howard Hughes of the media world,” in Nicholas Latimer’s term, and Mort, the mercurial real-estate tycoon and “ultimate parvenu,” also godparent to one of the couple’s two children, found Tina and Harry equally adept in the uses of expediency, which in their case lay on a spectrum from tawdry via crafty to creepy. At the former end was a light pre-publication mugging of William Shawcross’s Evans-sceptical biography of Murdoch, carried in Tina’s second issue of the New Yorker, which sparked the wrath of Shawcross’s friend, novelist John Le Carré.

The pincer at work on the New Yorker’s Daniel Menaker struck him on the way to meet Harry following an out-of-the-blue call, as described in his wry memoir The Mistake. “Where are you going at this time of day?,” a colleague asked. “‘To see Harry Evans,’ I say. ‘Oh, no!’ she says. And at this point, with a cold, sick feeling, I realise what’s going on: Tina now wants me out of the magazine and has persuaded her husband to offer me a job.”

Menaker would flourish as a book editor, starting with Primary Colors (his title too). But still. “In work,” Harry wrote in My Paper Chase, “Tina and I remained the mutual support team we’d always been in editing and writing at all levels.” This opus, par for the course, had no mention of Menaker, nor of Dick Morris, nor Wyndham or McCooey, nor Wesker, to name just these. Donoghue pops up once, unavoidably, for his diary is quoted: a cabinet minister is daunted by Harry’s “granite” toughness on open government. Mort Zuckerman, a mainstay for fifteen years — one of those “capricious billionaires” to whom Evans was a “courtier,” wrote media analyst Michael Wolff — gets two condescending references (“I told my boss Zuckerman he’d completed his apprenticeship as an owner in record time,” goes one).

The creepiness quotient soared when Harry’s $2.5 million advance for Morris’s dud provoked the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd to imagine Evans entreating J.D. Salinger (“Look, Jerry, fiction is in big trouble. This is the age of the memoir. I got Colin [Powell] $6 million. I got Dick $2.5 million, I got Christopher Reeve $3 million… I’m an expensive hustler… Join the party, Jerry… Tina will serialise it”). Brown’s New Yorker — whose advertisers she had hosted at an event promoting Morris’s book, with the author as star guest — got further into the mire by disparaging Dowd in its pages, again without mention of its editor’s interest. Evans, in his often brittle interview with Andrews, referred to Dowd as “that silly woman in Washington.”

Evans’s gaucherie towards some women, hinted at in Andrews’s coy reference to his “famously flirtatious manner,” is pursued with relish in Judy Bachrach’s book. Elsewhere, a Manchester pal and later Sunday Times colleague, Peter Dunn, says that “in truth, there was always a puppyish innocence to [Harry’s] games.” That aside, his intolerance of criticism — or even alarm at its prospect — could go much farther than being “magnificently aggrieved” (Andrews again) when interviewers proved other than fawning. Evans sent frequent hassling letters to Bachrach and her publishers as she researched her work, then used Britain’s litigant-friendly defamation laws to thwart its release in the country. Bachrach says she was “bent out of shape” by Evans’s sheaf of “ominous” preemptive complaints, including an enigmatic warning that the author “would see [the couple’s] whitened bones as you walk through the desert.”

Tina and Harry’s brazenness was a motif of their two New York decades of “ghastly chic” (Dunn’s label, in a New Statesman review of Bachrach’s proscribed book, dated 10 September 2001). Harry’s writs blitz on Private Eye continued, securing one win, Donoughue on that occasion his joint plaintiff. “There is something to be said for British libel law because it encourages better journalism,” he would say as he went on to intimidate the gadfly Toby Young, then half Evans’s seventy years, whose latest piece had teased that Evans, given a post-Random House berth by Mort Zuckerman at the tabloid New York Daily News (to its staff’s dismay), might be running out of friends. Evans — who had the nerve to tag Young a “journalistic stalker” — demanded via London’s courts an apology, legal fees, damages and that he “desist forthwith from further defaming, denigrating and ridiculing Mr Evans and his wife.”

Evans would then upset even Mort, to whom he was “the decathlon champion of print,” by gratuitously puffing Tina’s buzzy new venture, Talk, on the Daily News’s front page. In the wake of Talk’s hyped-to-the-Miramax launch party at the Statue of Liberty, costing half a million dollars — “a decadent fin-de-siècle bash for Hollywood stars, supermodels and assorted cultural and business titans” — it now had Harry’s “outer-borough, lean and mean tabloid machine” rooting for it.

There is enough material here for an entire conference, as the psychiatrist says in Fawlty Towers. The point is underlined when Bernard (now Lord) Donoughue’s diaries — at their worst a cloying inventory of Labour and establishment cronyism across five decades — reach May 1996, twenty years on from that night at Tina’s, and a lunch with Harry at the Garrick club:

“Harry was in great form. We discussed all our past deeds and misdeeds. He was delighted I had defeated Murdoch on the Broadcasting Bill, sharing the sense of revenge for Murdoch’s appalling treatment of us on the Times. We both agreed we made a mistake in 1982 in not joining Melvyn Bragg in taking over Tyne-Tees television. We would all now be multimillionaires (Melvyn is anyway)… He and his wife Tina Brown have done very well in America, an astonishing success story… Today he still refers to lovely Enid as ‘the wife’ and Tina as Tina. Nobody can help loving Harry and he gets forgiven for everything. At lunch we discussed friendship and loyalty. He said there are no true friends in New York… once you have failed at something no one wants to know you. Drinks in the evening with Melvyn Bragg, another true friend. He is very keen to take over the Arts Council when we’re in government.”

The Murdoch motor

Tina and Harry adjusted to a less flamboyant epoch with several gear changes. Brown launched her Women in the World network in 2009, a year after the Daily Beast, and added The Vanity Fair Diaries to The Diana Chronicles; Evans’s long, late phase as oracle wended through Guardian columns, BBC radio talks, editorship-at-large with Thomson Reuters from 2011, chairing the European Press Awards jury, the hagiographical 2016 documentary Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime, and his last book, 2017’s Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters, whose didactic spirit was in character if out of fashion. Through it all, one thing that never receded was Harry’s obsession with Rupert Murdoch.

Invariant as this was, its substance could veer from unremitting rancour. Four years after the Times bust-up, Wapping’s newspaper revolution — anticipated by Eddy Shah’s short-lived Today and crowned by Andreas Whittam-Smith & co’s Independent — eventually led Harry, long averse to the print unions’ militant arm, to stand with his enemy’s enemy. “Rupert Murdoch did a great service to the British press when he defeated real gangsters in the press unions who were killing newspaper after newspaper. He beat them by ruthlessness and cunning,” he told the Indian author Seema Chishti in 2007, depicting Rupert almost as the star of one of those newspaper films of old.

My Paper Chase, as honeyed as his 1983 memoir was jaundiced — retrofitting his life’s every episode into an uplifting yarn — struck a yet more effusive note: “Wapping was brave in concept and brilliant in execution… a redemptive blow for the freedom of the press… [Murdoch] proved positively heroic.” He went further: “Today [2009] I have no residual hostility towards him. On the contrary, I have found many things to admire: his managerial effectiveness, his long love affair with newspapers, his courage in challenging the big three television networks in the US with a fourth, and altogether in pitting his nerve and vision against timid conventional wisdom.”

That tone reverted to outright loathing with the 2011–12 Leveson inquiry into “the culture, practices and ethics” of Britain’s press, when Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid News of the World was one of the titles arraigned for a decade’s accessing of messages on the cell phones of royals, celebrities, and people in the news — an intrusion that unravelled when the desperate family of a missing thirteen-year-old was given false hope by the deletion of voice messages from her phone.

The Guardian’s front-page lead blaming the tabloid turned out to be false (a phone setting was the cause); but the News of the World, for once target rather than instigator of a media frenzy, was closed down by Murdoch in July 2011. Murdoch prefaced his testimony to a Commons’ committee days later with “This is the most humble day of my life,” and later told the Leveson panel that the practice “was totally wrong, I regret it and it’s going to be a blot on my reputation for the rest of my life.”

Evans, at eighty-three Murdoch’s elder by three years, seized the occasion as one of supreme personal vindication. Both witness to the furore and pundit, long treated by a reverent media claque as the voice of history itself, he used Leveson’s capacious terms of reference to squeeze every press violation in modern Britain into the bottle of Murdoch’s purchase of Times Newspapers: “[The] seminal event was thirty years ago,” he instructed Brian (Lord Justice) Leveson, the inquiry chair: “All flowed from the excessive concentration of power in a single media corporation.”

With Leveson as fortuitous lubricant of the attention he craved, Harry was again in his natural zone as the anti-Rupert made flesh (so snug that he dared to tell Leveson without fear of rebuttal: “It’s not nice to see Britain become the tourist libel capital of the world”). As well as delivering his own testimony on the 1981–82 imbroglio, he scorned Murdoch’s in (where else?) Tina’s Daily Beast, then retrieved Good Times, Bad Times from the memory hole with a score-settling new preface excoriating his adversary. Brian Leveson’s weary references to “who said what to whom in 1981,” after having endured Evans’s punctilious monologues, well conveys the hallmark of all three.

“I’m a radical again now, you know, Peter,” he had told Dunn while writing his Times memoir, an oddly revealing admission of pliability. Three decades on, Leveson’s providential summons to the unfinished battle supplied another warrant for self-radicalisation. Reheated epithets sold as fresh propelled him to the headlines, from 1994’s “Murdoch is the stiletto, a man of method, a cold-eyed manipulator” to his 1982 vent, preserved by Hugo Young: “evil incarnate, the very personification of it,” a man who “had his heart removed long ago, together with all his moral faculties.” And the new preface, drawing on Ian Kershaw’s notion of “working towards the Führer,” even invoked Hitler to explain Murdoch — though a day after the Observer published it, Evans’s own Reuters cut the reference from its otherwise identical version.

If Murdoch’s shame justified Evans’s return to venomous attack mode, it also revealed the grip of a fixation that had gnawed away at him since 1981–82. (And had bitten others too, as David Elstein shows in a remedial essay.) Losing to his enemy-rival had been a visceral offence to Harry’s winner-takes-all spirit. Now, towards the end as at the start of his career, fate and chance had given his exceptional will and ability an opening. Leveson’s inquiry was the culmination of his overwrought, one-sided combat. With his nemesis on the run, life once more had risen to the level of myth.

The truth shift

Leveson’s spectacle fortified Evans’s media platform as righteous scourge of past abuses by the wrong sort of newspaper and, increasingly, of new threats to media freedom. Award events cascaded with fellow senior editors’ pious declarations of “love” and “worship” of the great man. These would continue to attend Harry on his next years’ tireless round of high-grade conferences and festivals, summits and interviews. There was also an acclamatory tour to promote Do I Make Myself Clear?, whose skeletal biography described Good Times, Bad Times, the only book cited, as “the story of political intrigue in a dispute with Mr Rupert Murdoch over the integrity of the political coverage by the Times.” To the end, Harry remained an avid curator of his brand (and updater, as he would gild oft-told anecdotes with fresh details, none ever picked up).

In 2018, Tina oversaw Harry’s ninetieth birthday party at Cliveden House, a sumptuous aristocratic pile southwest of London whose “rich and decadent past [is] speckled with intrigue.” As his British chums paid tribute on a “cloudless summer evening,” Robert Harris “didn’t so much interview Harry about his working life as press ‘play.’” That covers just about every such encounter over his last two decades, though Decca Aitkenhead’s approach in 2005 was a rare pearl in an ocean of treacle; had it been allowed to set the standard, it might even have done him, and certainly reportage of him, more credit.

That said, each late contribution had its moment of seasoned advice: “The most important thing a journalist can do is to ask questions,” “It’s more important to find out than to sound off,” “I was much more interested in truth than I was in campaigning,” and (quoting “Mr Bannon’s” comment, “the press is the opposition”) “Do not regard that as a compliment. That is a disaster, because you lose the defence of ‘we’re only telling the truth.’”

Evans’s death from congenital heart failure last September released an avalanche of tributes, their core of affection perhaps best expressed by two American colleagues: Klara Glowczewska, a Condé Nast Traveler editor (“what I cherish most were those two years with Harry: the pleasure and privilege of being in close proximity to the delightful ferment of such a creative, kind, driven, and enthusiastic mind”) and Roger Friedman, publicity director at Atlantic Monthly Press (“Harry’s vital enthusiasm for life, his electric energy, how he communicated that there was nothing you couldn’t do — and let’s do it now — changed my life. Thirty five years have passed and there isn’t a day I don’t think about him at least for a second”).

Harry’s own posthumous reward was that many obituaries and accolades were brimful of versions of events that he had helped inculcate. Around these, other elements gathered: a proper De mortuis nihil nisi bonum instinct, misty nostalgia for his galvanic editorial years, his allies’ custodian and partisan impulses, the coercive sanctimony of twittified media.

A few panegyrics hit every target: “The long life of Sir Harold Evans — Harry to those of us lucky enough to be among his friends — was an epic of decency, courage and moral determination… At a time when the press is fighting back defensively against the caricatures of populist ranting — that print and news media are just the echo chamber of the liberal elite — Evans’s own career is a supreme reminder of the indispensability of fearless journalism to democracy grounded in truth.”

Such effluvium, with its stifling pomposity of language, worked well enough for its main aim, to hail Evans’s entry to the pantheon. (Typical of the eulogies, it is also strewn with crass errors of a kind that made Harry lunge for his pencil.) Harry’s memorial there was assured long before the Leveson year’s wave of adulation, and reinforced by the post-Leveson decade’s media turmoil — truth wars, trust deficits, tribal rifts. Now it was time formally to anoint him. Who better than Harold Evans to symbolise all that is noble about journalism, especially of the newspaper and investigative kind?

In that turmoil, however, lay a catch. Through the twenty-tens, a new psychic dispensation was being quickened by stark geopolitics, hectic social media, and the chill political economy of newsprint. With truth under assault, from Moscow and Damascus to Washington and London, and its enemies in plain sight, its defenders were upholding a universally virtuous cause. The catch — which struck the more zealous rather as temptation, then opportunity — was to feel and speak and act as if they were not just standing for truth but in possession of and wielding it. Truth was acquiring an extra register as password to associate membership of a newly anxious clerisy, if still with great institutional power and cultural capital. Again, who better than Harold Evans, foremost champion of truth-seeking as journalism’s foundational value, to help finesse the shift?

Together, those encomiums and this lexical nudge are a foretaste of Evans’s afterlife as accessory of the truth-owners. No doubt, his own emphasis on “how hard it is to get to the truth” rested on the bedrock of principle that underlay a free society’s journalism, one that guarded its practitioners even as they might chafe against it. To slide from truth-as-ethic (the “raw integrity of truth,” in his term) to truth-as-instrument (“my/our truth” masquerading as ecumenical) was unthinkable. Yet in performing to the max his headline role as journalistic icon, Evans ever indulged his friends’ sycophancy and their own infractions of media codes. Each side’s bad faith was permissive of the other, and in its way — each forgiven for everything — also restraining. That equilibrium over, the Evans brand is now in the hands of its trustees, and at least as important, of the times.

Could it be otherwise? In principle, this attempt to see Evans “as he really was,” protean gifts and grating flaws together, might open his whole career to more rounded scrutiny. There are stiff barriers to any such opening, however. The incurious reverence is calcified, and for the romancers of journalism self-servingly useful. Just to get to the starting point — recognising that the self-inflating bubble of adulation benefits neither history, nor journalism, nor truth — would require a mental spin.

The perverse effect of that adulation is to reduce what it exalts. Once and forever mythicised, Harold Evans is trapped — and so is the history he was part of. Release holds the chance to see both in their fullness, of which the sense of life as fable is itself an ingredient. In truth there is nothing to fear. Evans will retain an elemental lustre. He did climb Everest from Eccles, after all. He got the job, the story, the place, the glory and the girl. He etched an indelible imprint, recast every tale in his image, and left the world trusting in his myth. Always with a newspaper to hand and a deadline in mind. Avē atque valē, Harry. •

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This six-part series is the latest in a long line of TV series and telemovies set in Australia’s 1980s, including dramatisations of the magazine industry (Paper Giants: Magazine Wars) and the lives of prime minister Bob Hawke (Hawke), ultramarathon runner Cliff Young (Cliffy) and rock group INXS (INXS: Never Tear Us Apart). Each appealed to the nostalgia of two groups who have money to indulge their taste for it: boomers and generation Xers, who were either young or middle-aged during that decade.

But more years have passed, making The Newsreader as much period drama as The Doctor Blake Mysteries, or — going back further — the long-running serial The Sullivans. The latter, set in Melbourne in the second world war, began screening about three and a half decades after the beginning of that conflict. The Newsreader is set in 1986, thirty-five years ago.

Centred on a television newsroom, the romantic drama at the show’s heart involves “difficult” star newsreader Helen Norville, played by Anna Torv, and ambitious up-and-comer Dale Jennings (Sam Reid). It is hard to avoid the parallels with the American romantic comedy Broadcast News (1987), in which the telegenic “star” is the blond, glitzy and shallow newsreader Tom Grunick, played by William Hurt. That film’s romance lies in the triangle between Grunick, the talented and highly strung Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) and the intellectually substantial but physically unremarkable Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), who is destined to be the also-ran in both his professional career and his love for Jane.

The Newsreader’s Helen combines many of the qualities of Broadcast News’s Tom and Jane. Like Tom, she is glamorous, popular and an on-screen natural: the cameras love her. Like Jane, she lives for her work, she wants news to be more substantial and serious, and her private life is a bit of a disaster. Dale is likeable and handsome in a slightly dorky kind of way — the kind of colleague who is subjected to good-natured teasing to his face and mild ridicule behind his back. He keeps a videotape collection of all his TV appearances, has worked a little too hard to get his voice right, and blows his first chance to read an “update” by reading too fast — a colleague suggests he’d make a great race caller — and then too slow. (I was again reminded of Aaron in Broadcast News who, finally given the chance to read to camera that he had long craved, sweats so profusely that he seems in danger of collapse.)

A love triangle is developing in The Newsreader, too, although not one that would have been risked in a mainstream comedy like Broadcast News. Gay cameraman Tim (Chai Hansen) is sufficiently obsessed with the developing relationship between Dale and Helen to let Dale know that his interest is other than platonic. And there are plenty of hints that the boyish Dale’s sexuality remains somewhat unresolved.

TV often evokes past times through their consumer technologies, and the 1980s — the last decade before the digital revolution — especially so. At the beginning of the first episode, the producers of the 6pm news have a mishap with some footage on a video cassette: a replacement has to be made. Messages arrive on fax machines — more than the computer, the key office technology of the era. Our eyes are assailed not by bright pastels of the kind often used to evoke the 1960s and 1970s but by the relentlessly subdued beiges, tans and fawns of wood-panelled settings, if not of Jane’s spectacular shoulder pads.

But the office politics speak to our own times as much as the 1980s. Those who have the most power are male, stale and pale; I’m no expert on the subject, but I have a feeling this world wouldn’t be completely unrecognisable to today’s journalists. The experienced boss, Lindsay (William McInnes), is both exasperated with Helen and dependent on her for ratings — and ultimately protective of her in an old-fashioned way that is tinged with the hint of sexual attraction. The male anchor, Geoff Walters (Robert Taylor), evokes something of the gravitas of the two venerable Brians of 1980s TV news in Australia, Henderson and Naylor; but his insecurity and taste for intrigue mean he can’t quite pull it off. His highly ambitious wife Evelyn (Marg Downey) stokes his ambitions, convincing him that great days are still ahead for him.

Women’s power is more fragile, uncertain and conditional. Helen drives a hard bargain, but because she teeters on the edge of falling apart she never quite carries the freight of that very 1980s figure, a woman succeeding in a man’s world. Perhaps better evoking women’s professional life in that era is Noelene (Michelle Lim Davidson), a Korean-Australian, who is seemingly the newsroom’s most competent employee. It’s clear she’s going to spend a career being taken for granted and cleaning up after people like Rob Rickards (Stephen Peacocke), a likeable enough Aussie sporting jock without too many social graces who seems to be vaguely sweet on her.

Each of the three episodes so far has centred on a historical event evocative of the time: Halley’s Comet, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and the release of Lindy Chamberlain. In this weekend’s episode, it will be the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson paired with the bombing of the Russell Street Police Station. All sorts of other period references are strewn through the first three episodes: Paul Hogan makes an early, obligatory appearance as Australian of the Year, and it isn’t long before we are discussing AIDS and, on a lighter note, the new butterfly enclosure at Melbourne Zoo and the Cabbage Patch Kids.

There is something slightly fetishistic about all of this: the effect is sometimes like “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” that Billy Joel song packed with historical references. But history is essentially used as a way of orienting and providing the setting for the romantic drama. No one is likely to come out of The Newsreader with a much better understanding of the 1980s than they already have, and it is hard to imagine anyone who didn’t live through the decade making much of the many events that are referenced.

The Newsreader is enjoyable enough, sometimes funny, pleasingly nostalgic and well acted. The writing is engaging rather than sparkling. But perhaps the gestures to banality are part of the point, for the series is self-conscious about the stereotypes, clichés and fictions in which television news trades, then and now. And it is in its evocation of that media world — one that was on the cusp of radical transformation — that The Newsreader might be at its sharpest. While it is hardly an elegy, its characters do sometimes appear to be sleepwalking into a night that will bring to their cosy little world greater terrors than anything their own times were capable of sending their way. •

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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.

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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

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A decade ago, former members of Intelligence Unit 8200, the Israeli defence forces outfit responsible for collecting and decrypting signals intelligence, set up a Tel Aviv–based cybertechnology company called NSO Group Technologies. By 2019 the company was valued at approximately US$1 billion. You can buy an awful lot of secondhand books — and quite a few secondhand bookshops, for that matter — with that kind of dough.

The company’s big money-spinner is a digital surveillance technology called Pegasus, which it licenses to governments around the world. Israel has strict rules on exporting this type of spyware, but it has never knocked back a request from NSO to sell its products overseas.

Pegasus is an authoritarian’s dream come true. It can give you secret access to the phone calls, texts, photos and emails of just about anyone with a smartphone. It will track the phone’s location and collect any data it transmits to Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype and other apps. It even allows you to secretly activate a smartphone’s microphones and cameras, turning targets’ phones into bugging devices they carry everywhere with them. I imagine the sales pitch is pretty concise: “Dear Mr Authoritarian, wouldn’t you love to get inside your enemy’s smartphone?”

The existence of Pegasus is no big secret. NSO freely admits it has sixty government agency clients — spies and cops, presumably — in forty countries, but it says its clients are “the good guys,” who use Pegasus to fight terrorism and crime. And anyway, it’s the clients who are responsible for using the spyware, not NSO Group.

Since around 2016, however, tenacious journalists and hardworking watchdog groups have been exposing how NSO’s clients have misused Pegasus. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that some governments have used this cybersurveillance technology to abuse the human rights of reporters and political opponents.

The New York Times reported in 2019, for example, that the Mexican government had used Pegasus not only to capture the drug kingpin El Chapo, but also to track and harass at least two dozen journalists whose work it didn’t like. The same article reported how another client of NSO Group, the United Arab Emirates, used Pegasus to spy on Ahmed Mansoor, a prominent human rights activist. Mansoor was arrested in 2017 by UAE authorities and is serving a ten-year sentence for using social media platforms to “publish false and misleading information.”

Last week, the negative publicity about NSO Group and Pegasus went up a couple of notches. Someone leaked 50,000 phone numbers of potential Pegasus surveillance targets to Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based organisation that safely stores the work of threatened journalists from around the world, and the human rights group Amnesty International.

Following the template established by previous worldwide mega-leaks, including the Panama Papers in 2016, a consortium of seventeen media organisations, including the Washington Post and the Guardian, has been checking and publishing the stories arising from the leak.

At the start, the Pegasus Project had two jobs: to find out who owned these phone numbers, and then to get as many phones as possible into a lab for analysis.

In the end, Amnesty International’s Security Lab was able to forensically analyse sixty-seven smartphones supplied to them by human rights activists and journalists. Amnesty’s boffins found that thirty-seven had either been penetrated or tampered with by Pegasus. As a back-up, Amnesty’s work was peer-reviewed by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

Meanwhile, more than eighty journalists working on the project were able to establish that many of the leaked numbers were indeed the real numbers of activists, dissidents, journalists, government officials, politicians and even heads of state (“three presidents, ten prime ministers and a king,” according to the Washington Post).

This looks like strong evidence that at least some NSO clients are misusing NSO Group’s technology. Predictably, the company disputes the claim that the leaked phone numbers are surveillance targets. A lawyer representing the company declared to Forbidden Stories that “the data has many legitimate and entirely proper uses [and has] nothing to do with surveillance or with NSO.”

In a statement to the Pegasus Project, NSO Group said it “will continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action based on the results of these investigations. This includes [the] shutting down of a customer’s system, something NSO has proven its ability and willingness to do… and will not hesitate to do again if a situation warrants.”

Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, is having none of this. “NSO Group can no longer hide behind the claim that its spyware is only used to fight crime,” she said this week. “It appears that Pegasus is also the spyware of choice for those wanting to snoop on foreign governments.”

The revelations of the Pegasus Project highlighted the need for strong regulation to rein in a wild west surveillance industry, Callamard went on. “States must implement a global moratorium on the export, sale, transfer and use of surveillance equipment until a robust human rights–compliant regulatory framework is in place. The Israeli government should also not authorise licences for the export of NSO Group’s cybersurveillance technology if there is a substantial risk it could be used for human rights violations.”

There are over seven billion people on Earth and five billion of them are attached to their phone as if it’s an extra limb. As the British anthropologist Daniel Miller puts it, “The smartphone is no longer just a device that we use, it’s become the place where we live.” And the NSO Group has created a very efficient crowbar for getting inside. •

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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).

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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. •

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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.

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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.

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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.

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. •

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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. •

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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.

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.

Becker knew she owed a debt to three remarkable women who had paved the way for her, and she tells their stories in this sensitively written and utterly absorbing new book. That it’s taken her this long is testimony not only to the hardships they endured, their singular achievements and their shattered lives, but also to the time she needed to fully absorb the meaning of their experiences and her own.

Some things change quickly, others take longer. After recent revelations about precarious employment among ministerial staffers in Canberra, few would say there’s been much progress on that front. Yet in ways dimly grasped at the time, the conflict the Vietnamese call the American war, which had spread to Laos and Cambodia by the time Becker turned up in Phnom Penh in 1973, did mark a turning point — for women, for the United States, and for us in Australia.

Two of the women profiled in You Don’t Belong Here arrived in Saigon in 1966, the year the United States became more deeply mired in a war it could never win. Back home the sexual revolution was under way, powered by the advent of the oral contraceptive. But it wasn’t yet a feminist revolution, which would take far longer, as we’ve so disturbingly seen.

The reception French photojournalist Catherine Leroy got from the military, her male superiors and her colleagues is a telling case in point. A petite blonde, she marched unannounced into the Associated Press office in Saigon angling for an assignment. Initially Horst Faas, head of photography, was taken aback. “She was a timid, skinny and very fragile young girl who certainly didn’t look like a press photographer,” Becker quotes him saying.

After a series of tame assignments, Leroy went to Da Nang on her own initiative to photograph the Buddhist demonstrations there. Faas bought two of her photos — striking images of Vietnamese civilians taking cover from sniper fire behind gravestones in a stonemason’s yard — and they were sold around the world. She was determined to do more.

French and strong-willed, Leroy was blithely unaware that she’d crossed a significant line. The US military had a longstanding prohibition against women reporting from the battlefield — though, as Becker explains, since America hadn’t declared war on North Vietnam, technically speaking the ban wasn’t in force. A press card opened all doors, and Faas saw that Leroy got one. She elbowed her way onto helicopters ferrying the press to operations, and took haunting, beautifully composed pictures of what she saw.

Eventually Leroy was taken on a secret operation to photograph America’s first air offensive of the war. She jumped with the paratroopers and on the descent grabbed her camera from around her neck and shot the parachutes as they opened “above and below and sideways.”

For all that, it was catch-22 for Cathy, as she became known. Had she been appropriately “feminine” she would never have taken the photographs she did. She smoked and drank and her language was blistering. In short, she acted, when she had to, like a man. And eventually some of her male colleagues did their damnedest to get rid of her because of it.

Like Leroy, Frances FitzGerald came from the middle class, in her case its highest reaches, and like the others was chary of openly identifying as a feminist and being slated as a “women’s libber.” Her mother was the socialite Marietta Tree, lover of Adlai Stevenson, twice the Democratic presidential candidate and later president Lyndon Johnson’s UN ambassador. Her father, Desmond FitzGerald, had been head of the CIA.

With her connections, there was no need for her to play dirty like Leroy did. The brass were familiar with her father, and she hooked up with Ward Just, one of the most respected of the male correspondents.

FitzGerald was charming yet studious. She quickly understood that the war was unwinnable for the simple reason that American policymakers knew next to nothing about Vietnam, its history, its culture or its people. Cold war imperatives had blinded not only them but also many in the press corps. She learned what she could through serious research, contacts and forays into the countryside, and started sending pieces on the fabric of Vietnamese life as it was endured in this latest of foreign interventions. After she left Vietnam she wrote Fire in the Lake, judged by many to be a classic account of the war. Of the three, she’s the only one still alive, and has carved out an impressive career as a writer and historian.

For Australians, the story of the third woman, Kate Webb, is of special interest. The daughter of Leicester and Caroline Webb, she spent most of her early life in Canberra, where her father headed the political science department in the newly established Australian National University.

As an intelligent, sensitive teenager, her life was blighted by a tragic accident that killed her best friend, and for which she was held — and held herself — responsible. Then, when she had rallied enough to enrol in a course at Melbourne University, came the news of her parents’ death in a car accident. She left university and moved to Sydney, where she became a journalist. Intrigued by the passionate protests against the Vietnam war during President Johnson’s controversial visit to the city, she elected to go there herself in 1968.

Everything about Webb’s story is enthralling. The war absorbed her, as brave a heroine as anyone could be who must have felt she had nothing more to lose. She was thoroughly professional but took one risk too many, and was captured in Cambodia, to where she’d moved, by the North Vietnamese. Though taken for dead, she survived and was eventually released.

Reading Becker’s account, I wondered why no one has written a novel or a television series about Webb. But maybe that’s the point. The crucible that was Vietnam has faded in our collective memory, overtaken by subsequent wars and different enemies. This magnificent book reminds us, though, of how pivotal it was.

It was the first war America lost, a shock to a society stuck in triumphalism, and the start of its slide. For Australia, the irony is that the war we entered to hold back the “yellow peril” created the refugees who would forever change our demographic composition. And the women who went there set a new standard for reporting, developing a deeper, more humane way of writing about war and its terrible, needless suffering. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Crossing the war-reporting lines appeared first on Inside Story.

As befits a well-executed act of bastardry, there had been no warning. The Australian government, which had been negotiating with the Silicon Valley giant over the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, was caught by surprise, as were the platform’s users. Newsrooms that had built distribution strategies around Facebook-elicited clicks scrambled to regroup.

Less than a week later, just as suddenly, Facebook was back at the negotiating table. The point had been made, and the deal with the government, when it came, did little to reduce the impact of the company’s shock-and-awe response to Australia’s landmark media code. It was a tantrum that echoed around the world — exactly as it was designed to do.

On day one of the operation, local media had been quick to conclude that Facebook’s plan had backfired. The list of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire was indeed impressive: community groups, the WWF and its save-the-koala campaign, the Bureau of Meteorology, ABC Kids, health authorities and, of course, the now much-derided North Shore Mums group.

For the Australian media, Facebook had reminded the world not only of its power but also of its scattergun approach to moderation, with the platform seemingly unable to differentiate between the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Local Health District. The void left by news would be filled by anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and whatever charlatan Facebook’s algorithm coughs up on any given day.

But the political ruckus was a small price to pay for the message that was sent to other jurisdictions around the world — Canada, Britain, India and France — where similar regulatory moves are being countenanced. At the drop of a hat, Facebook has the power to cut loose the local media businesses that have come to rely on the platform to distribute their content. News needs Facebook more than Facebook needs news.

Local media had every right to take umbrage — after all, the legislation to enshrine the media code hadn’t even been passed. What made it even more unexpected was the fact that Google, the other target of the proposed legislation, had started to play ball with both Australian and international publishers in a bid to avoid being forced to a negotiating table overseen by an independent arbitrator — a nightmare prospect for a big tech company.

Yet the outrage over Facebook’s Australian news purge overlooked the backdrop to the move. The News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code may well have been the boldest attempt anywhere in the world to force digital platforms to pay for journalism, but it’s not the first time Facebook has been on the receiving end of innovative regulation in Australia. Over the past few years, digital platforms have been clobbered by Australian laws and enforcement in ways that are simply unthinkable in other countries — and Facebook has been bearing the brunt of that.

Australia’s 2019 “abhorrent violent material” legislation is just one example of what the social media platform has had to endure. Under the law, Australian-based Facebook employees could be jailed for up to three years if the company fails to remove designated violent content in an “expeditious” manner. Facebook’s Australian boss, Will Easton, is reportedly not involved with the company’s local strategy, which is being guided by head office, yet he could still wind up behind bars if live-streamed content, such as the 2019 mass shootings in Christchurch, isn’t removed quickly enough to satisfy the vague wording of the legislation. Nobody accepting a job with Facebook’s Australian business would be unaware of what they are signing up to and no democratic country has comparable legislation in place.

This also suggests that Australian laws targeting platforms are part of a more complex global mosaic. In the United States, judges at both state and federal level already have Facebook in a headlock, with myriad allegations that the tech giant has violated antitrust or privacy laws. French lawmakers are pursuing objectives similar to those of Australia’s media code, albeit using copyright law; India is pushing back on the use of Facebook’s WhatsApp; and the European Commission, the EU’s regulator, has unfinished business with Facebook over its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp.

Facebook knows that regulation is catching up with it, and it knows that Australia’s efforts to tamper with its business model had to be shut down quickly and ostentatiously, before other jurisdictions followed suit. The North Shore Mums got themselves caught up in what may prove to be the most significant regulatory tangle of the century.

If turnout is an indicator of success for a press conference, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s 16 December effort was a flop. There was just one journalist in the house — a Sydney-based colleague of mine — to hear ACCC chairman Rod Sims announce a court action against Facebook, Facebook Israel and a Facebook-owned company called Onavo. Yet Sims’s words that day attracted the attention of business editors, and reports of the Federal Court of Australia lawsuit quickly bounced around the world.

The Onavo case is significant. The ACCC is tackling Facebook over data-privacy issues — something it has already done, twice, against Google, with one suit delving into what consumers did and didn’t know about Google’s Android operating system. But Australia’s 1988 privacy legislation, which is only now being overhauled, is a hopelessly inadequate tool for safeguarding the rights of people who use digital platforms. Penalties under the Privacy Act aren’t large enough to deter global tech giants, and the privacy enforcer, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, is overstretched and underfunded at the very time privacy challenges are mounting.

By contrast, Australia’s recently updated body of consumer laws — known collectively as the Australian Consumer Law, or ACL — places significant firepower and additional investigative tools in the hands of the comparatively well-resourced ACCC. Since 2018, the regulator has been able to ask courts to impose fines of up to $10 million per offence, or three times the value of the monetary benefit received by the company, or 10 per cent of the company’s global annual turnover — whichever of the three options is the largest. That 10 per cent penalty places Australia at the forefront of global privacy enforcement; even the EU’s groundbreaking General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in 2018, fixes penalties at a mere 4 per cent.

The ACCC knows that it has a lethal weapon at its disposal, and its lawsuits against Google and Facebook are likely to reveal the law’s efficacy as a deterrent. By contrast, the information commissioner has been relegated to more narrowly defined privacy cases, such as Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data breach, which saw the usually unadventurous privacy watchdog file action in the Federal Court that mirrors what is unfolding in other jurisdictions — including Canada, where an almost identical lawsuit appears to be floundering.

But pursuing what are essentially privacy cases under consumer law requires lateral thinking. For example, the ACCC isn’t arguing that Google breached the privacy of users of its Android operating system by not informing them that their phones gather information about their whereabouts even after location-tracking settings have been disabled. The ACCC will instead argue that the search giant’s failure to inform Australian consumers of its data-gathering, storing and processing was a breach of its duties under consumer law. It’s about failing to protect consumers.

Which brings us back to Onavo, the Israeli company behind a free, downloadable software application offering a virtual private network, or VPN. Facebook acquired Onavo in 2013 — a deal driven by Onavo’s access to data that is now viewed as highly controversial.

Onavo’s app, called Onavo Protect, promised its users absolute privacy — it was the app’s key selling point. But the ACCC alleges that the company was in fact hoovering up data from its mobile users, and that the data ended up under Facebook’s control. In Sims’s words, “hundreds of thousands” of Australians were affected by Facebook’s alleged actions, none of them aware that their online habits were being monitored by the owner of their privacy-focused VPN. So great was the concern over Facebook’s relationship with Onavo, says the ACCC, that Apple and Google removed the product from their app stores.

While this lawsuit is unfolding in Australia, Facebook has been targeted by twin competition lawsuits filed by the Federal Trade Commission, one of the two competition regulators in the United States, and forty-eight state attorneys-general. The platform has been accused of extending its monopoly of social media through anticompetitive acquisitions — known as “killer” acquisitions — and of devising strategies to exclude its competitors.

The Onavo documents filed in the US case are likely to make an appearance in the ACCC’s local lawsuit because they reveal what US prosecutors will argue was an early-warning system to alert Facebook to current or future threats to its monopoly. Any evidence of users flocking to a particular software, for example, could be dealt with either through a pre-emptive acquisition or by finding other ways to defuse the threat, according to the complaint filed by the US states.

The ACCC is likely to stick to the straight and narrow of Australian Consumer Law by arguing that Australian users should have been informed that Facebook was making use of their data. But the competition law elements fed in from the United States will boost the Australian regulator’s understanding of how Facebook operates — an understanding now recognised as world-class following the landmark Digital Platforms Inquiry, the eighteen-month probe that ultimately led to the formulation of the media bargaining code.

The ACCC’s developing expertise in digital markets is arguably a bigger threat to Facebook than any single piece of legislation. That knowledge is permeating the regulator’s ongoing probe of digital advertising, which is being closely monitored by lawyers working on a lawsuit, filed in Texas by ten US states, taking on both Facebook and Google over their ad-tech practices.

Meanwhile, the ACCC’s growing scepticism about Facebook acquisitions of other technology companies, which are clearly designed to gain control of vast swathes of data, is now feeding into the regulator’s review of specific deals it is examining, including Google’s move on smartwatch maker Fitbit and Facebook’s completed play for Giphy, a company specialising in GIFs.

In fact, nothing illustrates the ACCC’s fear of Facebook’s control of data better than Facebook’s completed acquisition of Giphy, which is now subject to a behind-the-scenes investigation by the watchdog. Rod Sims doesn’t seem to believe that Facebook has any real interest in GIFs of Kanye West going from a smile to a frown or Oprah giving the camera her “I told you so” look; the tech giant simply wanted to get its hands on the data that changes hands every time you download something from Giphy.

Of even greater concern to the ACCC is the fact that every time you use a Giphy GIF on a rival platform, you are embedding Facebook’s data-gathering software — a kind of digital Trojan horse. “This would be right in the middle of their systems and it would help Facebook scrape the data of their rivals to see what their rivals are doing,” Sims told me recently.

Keen observers know that Australian home affairs minister Peter Dutton unliked Facebook years before the platform decided to purge news from its Australian feed.

In December 2018, federal parliament adopted the world’s first laws targeting encrypted messaging services, which allow law-enforcement agencies to demand access to decrypted messages — in other words, to build a “back door” into international encryption standards. The law’s top two targets were Facebook’s encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Not surprisingly, Facebook pushed back — but then, so did most Silicon Valley and Australian software companies. Scott Farquhar, co-founder of the Sydney-based software giant Atlassian, said the legislation amounted to “legislative creep” and warned that rules earmarked for serious crimes and terrorism may ultimately be used to prosecute traffic offences.

Dutton bristled at the criticism and used a National Press Club of Australia speech in 2018 to accuse American tech giants of dodging taxes and complaining about assisting authorities in democracies while cosying up to dictatorships in “grown markets” — by which he presumably meant China. Two years later, Dutton returned to the theme and singled out Facebook, saying that its plans to provide end-to-end encryption for its Messenger service would create a platform for child abuse. “Facebook would not allow in their workplace the abuse of women or children and yet they provide a platform that enables perpetrators to carry out that very activity,” Dutton said, no doubt knowing that once you’ve accused your adversaries of supporting paedophiles they’re unlikely to return your calls.

For Australian police forces and spy agencies grappling with money laundering and terrorism, access to encrypted messages was an important win. They argued that a key to unlock encrypted messages is now an essential part of their investigative toolbox, just as law-enforcement agencies could tap the phones of suspects in more innocent, pre-digital times.

For Facebook, though, the encryption laws were a disaster. By building a back door into its global encryption, said the company, Australia was paving the way for global criminal syndicates that are looking for weaknesses in secure communication. “Cybersecurity experts have repeatedly proven that when you weaken any part of an encrypted system, you weaken it for everyone,” a Facebook spokesperson said when the legislation was being reviewed in 2019. “The ‘backdoor’ access you are demanding for law enforcement would be a gift to criminals, hackers and repressive regimes, creating a way for them to enter our systems and leaving every person on our platforms more vulnerable to real-life harm.”

It’s not that these arguments fell on deaf ears — it’s more that the Australian government treated them with contempt. Since the MV Tampa entered Australian waters in 2001, the country’s centre-right coalition has staked its reputation on national sovereignty — or, at least, its understanding of national sovereignty. It was never going to accept arguments that it had a global responsibility to maintain the integrity of encrypted messaging services at the expense of national priorities. It argued that its responsibility was towards the people that live within Australia’s borders; the suggestion that it couldn’t apply local regulation to technology companies doing business here was never going to fly.

The 2019 legislation on abhorrent violent content, rushed through parliament in under a week, raised the same global concerns. The Coalition government dismissed them just as quickly. Facebook argues that its global operations mean that its Australian staff can’t be held responsible for, say, a piece of extreme terrorist content uploaded in Kazakhstan by someone with no links to Australia. The prospect of local Facebook employees ending up in jail if the company failed to act quickly to remove extreme violent content was at odds with the global nature of the internet, Facebook said.

This time, it was attorney-general Christian Porter’s turn to ridicule the suggestion that the government didn’t have the right to regulate what was appearing on Australian screens. If television stations were to broadcast extreme terrorist content, they would lose their licence — why should Facebook be any different?

That debate set the tone for the Australian government’s current interactions with Facebook. In April 2019, Porter said that discussions with the tech giant had convinced him that the social media platform had “no recognition of the need for them to act urgently to protect their own users from the horror of the live streaming” of the Christchurch massacre.

What had become clear then and remains clear today is that Facebook knows it’s on a hiding to nothing in Australia. The platform has zero friends among lawmakers and is treated with outright suspicion by a competition watchdog that reckons it understands the platform’s business model better than enforcers in other parts of the world. Meanwhile, time and time again, the Australian government has pushed for policy designed to hurt Facebook while mocking suggestions that a global platform was somehow out of the reach of local laws.

If Mark Zuckerberg does eventually decide that the time has come to turn his back on Australian news, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Garner began as a novelist of small observations, a recorder of how women try to live out feminist principles in love relationships and domestic life. As she says several times in her diaries, she will never win the Miles Franklin award, yet she has become a major literary figure of her generation. She works close to life, crafting her own responses to the world around her. At this stage of her career, it appears logical for her to throw off all pretence and offer readers her notebooks as well.

There is pretence of a kind at work here, too, of course. This material from manuscript notebooks has been selected carefully to provide us with entertaining and revealing glimpses of the writer’s life.

Yellow Notebook records Garner’s self-doubt and struggle to establish herself as a fiction writer while trying to maintain family life in Melbourne. It is full of the kind of observations that appear in her stories, alongside a growing understanding of the nature of her own art. Amid frequent reflections on her own failings are sharp insights into her approach to art. As far back as 1981 she wrote that “meaning is in the smallest event. It doesn’t have to be put there: only revealed.”

Admirers of The Children’s Bach and Postcards from Surfers will enjoy Yellow Notebook’s account of the creation of those stories and notice the many elements of Garner’s life that would contribute to the screenplay for The Last Days of Chez Nous. The French husband, the father, the daughter and the student boarder, even some of the most memorable dialogue, are on display as Garner’s second marriage falls apart and she leaves the rented house to her daughter and her friends.

For those anxious to know, Garner answers a question she is frequently asked — “Where do you get your ideas for fiction?” — as generously as possible. We see her developing a clear-eyed understanding of her own strengths and limitations as an artist. On the one hand, there is the constant pressure to “make things up”; on the other, the joy when the stories come “pouring out.”

One Day I’ll Remember This reveals a more confident writer, defiant in the face of the condescension that both critics and casual acquaintances frequently offer her. She retains her optimistic commitment to sexual love and begins a new relationship with V, a married novelist from Sydney deeply interested in the visual arts. Despite all her misgivings, this develops into her third marriage to Murray Bail (an identification obvious to any curious reader). The joys and struggles of their relationship give this book a narrative arc that makes it read like a novel.

Together, the two writers struggle to work and maintain their individual confidence in what they do. Garner’s sociability and domestic instincts conflict with V’s need for solitude and resistance to the routine demands of housework. V, a creature of Sydney and its art world, takes Garner to meet famous artists and their put-upon wives. She realises that she belongs in Melbourne, in her own house with a garden, mixing with her wide circle of friends. While Sydney supports the visual art elite that V admires, Melbourne offers a more open and communal music scene where even amateurs like Garner can dance and play instruments. V obligingly moves to Melbourne, but their different perspectives continue to drive the marriage towards its inevitable end.

This relationship produces some significant arguments about art as the two writers engage in an almost parodic acting out of the traditional positions of men and women artists. As the Australian literary world, influenced by poststructuralist theory, moves against realism in the 1980s, Garner acknowledges that her own talent is low on the hierarchy: “I need to devise a form that is flexible and open enough to contain all my details, all my small things. If only I could blow out realism while at the same time sinking deeply into what is most real.”

Bail’s interest in mythic and modernist form fits a more respected artistic mode, and he would go on to win the Miles Franklin in 1999 for Eucalyptus, a novel he began while living with Garner. In their various homes, the argument about artistic hierarchy is symbolised by ongoing disagreements about the placing of V’s cherished painting by the New Zealand modernist, Colin McCahon. In one hilarious scene, Garner cleans the bathroom while V stands at the door advising her to stop writing about that “bullshit” period, the 1970s, and she responds that the portrayal of relations between men and women in his work feels like the 1950s rather than the “no place” and “no time” he believes it to be.

This pattern of self-criticism and mutual criticism, with casual, gratuitous criticism from friends and acquaintances, makes published literary criticism seem superfluous. With friends like these, who needs reviewers?

The publication of Cosmo Cosmolino causes an estrangement from her old friends in Sydney, O and R. It is not the fact that real people can be identified in the story, “The Recording Angel,” that causes the breach but its analysis of Garner’s relationship with O. No one seems to regard the story as fiction. In her defence, Garner insists that it is a loving picture of the complexity of a long friendship, though she also sees that it is “brutal.” She is distressed to have caused her friends pain but finds “a hard nut of something in the centre of my heart,” a kind of ruthless honesty. Eventually, they forgive her.

Garner’s declining interest in fiction may have hastened her movement towards journalism and the subjective non-fiction that has become her forte. The diary reveals the background to many of the essays that were collected in True Stories (1996), including her Walkley award-winning “Killing Daniel.” We learn that Garner’s first experience of a murder trial was to support a friend whose daughter was a victim. She finds the trial of Daniel’s killer harrowing, as indeed is the essay she wrote about it. In keeping with her interest in domestic relations, Garner chooses to write about how the courts handle the intimate crimes of sexual and domestic abuse that are increasingly the concern of public feminism. It is salutary that she rejected the possibility of writing about Ivan Milat’s random murders of strangers.

Garner’s “hard nut” arms her against the critics of The First Stone, soon to lead to her alienation from a generation of feminists. She includes a fateful note about her initial response to the charges against the master of Ormond College: “I wrote the guy a letter. Hope I won’t regret it.” The various legal injunctions before publication draw out what V calls her street-fighting quality, making her more determined to see the book through.

When the storm breaks, Garner receives a mass of letters, many from young women declaring she has betrayed feminism and they will never read her work. She is reviled in cafes and praised in supermarkets. Is any other Australian writer so recognisable? In the course of these diaries, the woman in the post office and the man at the bank declare themselves as her readers, and on one occasion she gets her hot water connected early because the supervisor has read all her books. When The Last Days of Chez Nous appears, she is grateful for the anonymity of the screenwriter.

These diaries reveal the social nature of literary life in Australia, especially in the heyday of publishing in the 1980s and 1990s. In a small community, writers can’t help but meet each other and their critics. Patrick White, Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley and Tim Winton (thinly disguised as J) all make appearances. Garner also takes some cheeky swipes at the big names — Saul Bellow is a windbag; Australia’s mighty poet attacks her in his column then insists on walking home with her from a festival reading. Some characters are designated simply as the great reader or the biographer.

Life is so much more complex than any written form can possibly encompass. These cleverly selected fragments gesture towards the many things that happen contemporaneously in every life — family irritations, spiritualism, operations and dental work, motels on the Hume Highway, Sydney’s mighty thunderstorms, the ownership of country cabins and dogs. They can be read as an autofiction of domestic life, as the background to admired books and films, as an account of the life of art at a certain period in Australia, or as an apologia for Garner’s work and a demonstration of it in action. Garner declares that she can only do what she does, asserting the value of her own subjectivity. She insists that one can be an artist and still love ironing. •

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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.” •

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Numbers in the church were limited by the pandemic, and only two of us could sit in each pew. People from different families weren’t supposed to share a pew, but I had been asked if I was happy to sit in the second row next to one granddaughter and behind another, both visibly grieving. I felt like a fraud: losing April didn’t feel as visceral as the loss twenty-five years ago of my own maternal grandmother, who had been living on the other side of the world.

But a few minutes into the eulogy I could see why I’d been given that seat. Having begun by saying he would try to put his grief aside while he celebrated his mother’s life, April’s son Shane listed some of her many achievements as a writer. She had contributed to most of the leading Australian publications and to some overseas, including the Sunday Times in Britain and Life magazine in the United States. She had been the editor of Pol magazine and Craft Australia. She had written ten published books — the first, a murder mystery, as the twenty-year-old April McKee-Wright, the last, The Craftsman, as the seventy-nine-year-old April Hersey. Her health manual and memoir, The Insulted Heart: Recovery from Bypass Surgery, published in 1996, was probably her most successful book.

Shane reminded us that “April was a very stylish Australian woman.” In fact, he said, she “wrote the book” on style. “No, she really did. It was called Australian Style, published in 1970.” He held up a copy of the still-stylish hardcover she had written with the designer Babette Hayes — I’d looked at it that week at the State Library — full of orange-hued, bold-patterned interiors and her clear, engaging prose. Shane told me afterwards he’d learnt the value of a good prop when making a speech, and gave me the copy (one of several in the family) to keep.

The only time he had to pause to compose himself during the eulogy was when he began to talk about April’s defence of her parents’ legacy. “You may think of April’s house in Wright Street as a welcoming family home with a lovely garden,” he said of the house he had grown up in. “I see it differently. For me it was her fortress, where she fought for her parents’ reputations over many decades, first her father’s and then her mother’s.” He felt my biography of her mother had made April feel she had won the war, and that knowing it was being written “gave her the strength to continue to the age of ninety-six years old.”

I could see that April had reconciled herself to many sources of grief — the early loss of her sister, the breakdown of her marriage, the death of her daughter after decades battling brain cancer. She had little to say about these heartbreaks, perhaps because nothing could be done about them. But she’d never let go of the idea that she could salvage her parents’ reputations. And that might have been an impossible place — a fortress — for a biographer to walk into.

I didn’t meet April Hersey until she had already lived longer than most people expect to. It was August 2012 and she was eighty-eight. I’d heard that the daughter of the Australian writers Zora Cross and David McKee Wright was still living at Glenbrook, in the lower Blue Mountains, on the block of land her parents had moved to in 1919. I found her address online and wrote a letter telling her I had become fascinated by her mother’s life and work and wanted to write a biography.

The next day I was browsing in the children’s section of a large bookshop in the centre of Sydney when an unknown number appeared on my phone. It was a fitting place to take a call from the youngest and last surviving child of two writers for whom book-buying was a passion and almost a curse.

April was delighted by my plans. She said she would write but had wanted to call first. In her letter, which arrived the day after that, she wrote that her mother “certainly deserves to have a well-researched and I hope sympathetic history of her life.” The poet whose collection Songs of Love and Life stunned the Australian literary world in 1917 had been mythologised as some kind of femme fatale. “She was a dedicated writer,” April wrote, “who worked all and every day at her Remington typewriter with a pen close handy for the innumerable corrections that she made.”

The brief letter conjured a convincing image of Zora Cross through the eyes of her closest witness, the child whose mother was always writing — all and every day. It placed the poet’s reputation on one side of the scales, weighed down with all the criticism over the years: that her writing hadn’t been worth much, that her obsession with it had been a delusion. On the other side of the scales would be the biography, lifting up the stubborn weight of the life.

A few weeks after the letter arrived I took the train to visit April at Glenbrook. When I pushed through the metal gate, I was greeted by a barking dog. Then April appeared — a small woman with white hair and glasses — shooing the dog away and walking up the path towards me using two ski-poles to help her balance. Her warm welcome cancelled out the dog’s hostility. “Cathy,” she flattered me, at forty, through her clouding cataracts, “you look about nineteen.”

I followed her down an overgrown path to a stone and wood house. Inside were books, small oil paintings, unmatched patterned china on open shelves, a large noticeboard full of family photos, and a long list of names and phone numbers. We ate homemade asparagus quiche while she told me stories about her parents, then we sat in the garden among roses they had planted. Having read so many of the letters Zora wrote from that place, I felt as though I’d stepped into a favourite novel and had to be careful not to spoil it for everyone.

Soon after our first meeting, April and her family organised a party for me in her garden. I was nervous about being celebrated before I’d put more than a few words on the page. It felt like a launch for a book that was only an idea, willing it into existence. One of April’s neighbours — the descendant of a prominent nineteenth-century thinker — suggested I make a speech and, seeing my strong preference not to, made one himself.

The long grass had been cleared and tables set up under the trees. I was trying to imagine how the five-acre block had looked through April’s childhood and young adulthood. The land had long since been subdivided to provide homes for April’s son and daughter. People were pointing in various directions: That’s where the original house was before the termites destroyed it. That’s where Zora’s son Ted had his study. That’s where Zora’s small house was.

Someone recalled how few objects there were in Zora’s house, how sparely furnished it had been, and April put it down to poverty. But others suggested it was always possible to fill rooms, even without much money. The sparseness was more about her lack of interest in the physical world, her obsession with writing. When the family put in a new kitchen for her, she’d wondered what she would do with all the cupboards until it occurred to her that she could use them to store drafts of the novels she was writing.

A granddaughter told me that all she really knew about Zora was that April had laughingly recalled serving tea to visitors at the age of three because her mother had been so absorbed in her writing. It was April’s light-hearted version of the slightly darker tales of Zora’s parenting, told by her stepchildren, that had found their way into print. And just because they weren’t the sort of stories people tell about male writers didn’t mean I could ignore them.

April always stressed how much she’d loved her mother, even if she could at times be “maddening.” Her pride in Zora’s commitment to writing coexisted with her knowledge that there had been a cost to it. When we were drinking tea at her kitchen table on a weekday morning a year or so after the party, she told me Zora was always very encouraging; she was interested in everything the children did, but “she wasn’t the kind of mother who turned up to school sports days.” I had to admit it was my children’s swimming carnival that day. “Oh, you must go,” she said.

Unlike her older brother, Ted, who inherited Zora’s ambition to write something that would endure, April’s grand writing plans often fell away in favour of journalism that would bring in money to support her family. But even if she didn’t think of it as having literary merit, there was still an art to it. At the gathering in the garden after the memorial service, Shane remembered how seriously his mother took her writing work, and how good she was at it. When she had a job on a local newspaper, she would get an idea, do her research and put a story together so quickly she was told to take it easy because she was making the other writers look bad. It might be about the local butcher, he told me, but after reading April’s report you’d be thinking, “I hadn’t realised it was such an amazing butcher’s shop!”

April had seen enough of her mother’s experience as a struggling artist to avoid it herself. In the 1970s she had a job with World Vision, travelling to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand to document extreme poverty. She would write up the stories to be narrated by celebrities in the charity’s marketing campaigns. She told me she would sometimes look at how people were living in those countries and think many of them were doing better than her family had when she was a child. She had a slightly mischievous look on her face when she said this, because she knew it wasn’t fair to compare Zora’s genteel deprivations with the abject need of the developing world. But the thought had still crossed her mind.

When she was in her early twenties, in 1946, the magazine Australian Woman’s Mirror ran a full-page profile of April in its “Readers Who Write” section. With the title “Poet-writer Daughter of Poet-writer Parents,” it told of her precocious writing ability, citing her first poem, written at the age of two-and-a-half: “In the morning milko,/ Sat we, sat we, sat we, late last night.” She would tell me she wrote it because “that’s what the adults were doing” in her first years, “talking until the milkman came.” She received her first rejection slip for a collection of poems, “Songs of Babyhood,” at the age of five, being given the reason that they were “too immature.” And at ten she wrote an unpublished melodramatic novel. Finding success in the children’s pages, she struggled at first to graduate to the regular press. Daily editors considered her stories “too good,” she told the Mirror, and the editors of weeklies turned them down as “too bad.” This philosophical attitude to the vagaries of literary ambition never deserted her.

At twenty-one, when the profile was written, April was trying to break into the theatre. She spent her time studying playwriting, memorising leading roles from Shakespeare’s plays and learning to tap-dance. She had recently appeared in a “semi-professional musical comedy” at the Conservatorium, and had a job as a typist for a publishing company. But alongside all that activity, she was the “poet-writer daughter,” trying to resurrect the faded reputation of her father — a former Bulletin literary editor and poet — who had died when she was four. “Every spare moment,” the article concluded, “she spends sorting out her father’s works for her proposed The Life and Works of David McKee Wright.” The book was never completed, but a biography by Michael Sharkey appeared in 2012.

Later, April wanted to write a memoir of her mother’s life, but again it proved impossible. Like many of us, she could write about anything except the subjects closest to her. And this added to her sense of frustration when she saw Zora’s or David’s legacies abused.

In 1986 she stormed out of a commemorative event for the publisher Angus & Robertson, disgusted by the portrayal of her mother on the stage of the Sydney Opera House. The playwright had mined the publisher’s archive to find the juiciest letters written to its director George Robertson, and the relatively unknown Zora’s epistolary outpourings had put her centrestage. At the play’s comic conclusion, an actress playing Zora declared her passion — a combination of quotes from her letters and from her love poems — in an attempt to seduce Robertson. April told me she wrote to the publisher to say she would never again give permission for Zora’s words to be used in this way.

My biography also depended on April’s permission to quote Zora’s words. And she told me she wished her mother hadn’t written those “silly letters” that undermined her reputation as a serious writer. But it was Zora’s passionate correspondence that had sparked my interest in her. I saw the letters she mailed off to powerful literary men — and others — as part of her life as a writer. And even if there was a level of performance to it, she left behind a more intimate and engaging record of her experience than many other writers.

Where April envisaged a biography that portrayed her mother as a brilliant poet sometimes thwarted by the publishing industry, I was also drawn to the dark comedy of a writer who couldn’t quite move on from being hailed as a genius for her early work. Where April wanted her mother’s poetry to endure — and much of it also resonated with me — I was just as interested in why it was once so popular. I appreciated what Zora was trying to do when she subverted conventions and persisted with her ambitions as much as I appreciated what she wrote. And whether or not I could place on the scales a biography of sufficient weight, I was the writer who had wandered into the garden when April knew she had to let go. “You have to write it as you see it,” she told me.

As I left the wake, I looked over at April’s house in the garden on the slope down to the gully. Obscured by trees was the trickle of water that some locals call Zora’s Creek. The block had been sold and the new owners had plans to reuse the sandstone in the walls to build a larger house closer to the street. But the construction was yet to begin, and in the meantime April’s house stood empty. The garden that hadn’t had her attention since she moved to a nursing home many months earlier looked colourless and still, as though a breeze could blow through it without rustling any leaves. I could see how the daughter had animated the setting of her parents’ lives.

April once told me she had been digging in that garden one day when she found a stone that looked as though it had been shaped into a tool. She wondered if a local Darug woman had used it to dig edible roots from the soil. “And I thought,” she smiled, “people have been living on this land for a long time.” I asked if she’d kept the stone, and she said she had. But neither of us suggested she should go into the house to look for it. Holding eye contact, we kept the story in the air between us. Her gesture to the longer passage of time and the accretion of forgotten lives seemed like a way of easing the responsibility I’d taken on to write her mother’s life. It was as if she were saying, I’d like you to do this, but it might be enough that you want to. •

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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. •

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The review will explore questions of “context,” Arthur stresses. The weight of the task ahead falls very much on that word, and on the extent to which historical and situational context can be reconciled with what she calls “evolving standards.” This challenge is hardly unique to Magnum, so it is not surprising that the organisation has been aware for some time now of the need to engage with its vast collection of historical material, and with the complexity of interpreting past ways of seeing.

Recent articles on the Magnum website with titles such as “Old and New: Working with and Responding to the Photographic Archive” and “Breaking Out of the Archive Trap” have tackled the status of the individual image by emphasising the importance of the context in which it was made and the context in which it is seen. Magnum has also encouraged photographic projects that revisit and interrogate its own work, applying a contemporary perspective to Magnum’s trove of images of China, for example, or Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous “Man and Machine” series from 1968.

The agency has devoted particular attention to highlighting the process by which its photographs were and are created. The substantial volume Magnum Contact Sheets, published in 2011 and edited by Kristen Lubben, shows in absorbing detail, complete with mark-ups and annotations and recollections from photographers, how published images were selected from the reams of “contacts” that characterised photographic practice in the pre-digital age. “Unique to each photographer’s approach,” writes Lubben, “the contact is a record of how an image was constructed.”

A rather different “process” can also be seen at work in a series of Magnum-sponsored Live Labs held in collaboration with a variety of cultural institutions around the world over the past two years. Here, says the agency, the “process of making, editing, printing and curating the work is performed in full view of the public.” The audience “is invited to ‘join’ the journey,” and in doing so to “highlight the collaborative nature of production at the heart of the Magnum Photos cooperative.” It’s an ambition that, at this stage of the journey, doesn’t sit entirely comfortably with the culturally persistent trope of the star photographer that is at the heart of Magnum.

What these varying approaches to photographic history and practice have in common is a recognition of the overriding importance of context — using the word in the broadest sense — in allowing the viewer of today to form a judgement. An image that may once have been accepted at face value may now raise questions in the mind of the viewer: questions about the ethical issues involved in breaching privacy, for example, or photographing controversial subjects, or undertaking the kind of photographic manipulation that masquerades as spontaneity. And beyond that is the question of when the questions stop. When does the revelation of process, of what goes to make a photograph, stop being explanatory and start being overwhelming?

Magnum Photos was founded as a cooperative in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, “Chim” Seymour and George Rodger, all of whom had built significant reputations, and reached vast audiences with their images of Spain in the 1930s and of the second world war and its aftermath. With the gradual involvement of newer recruits such as Eve Arnold, Inge Morath and Werner Bischof, Magnum cleverly combined its brand of humanistic, engaged photography with the business savvy needed to seek out new clients and deliver a product according to a brief.

A lot of photo agencies have come and gone since those years, but Magnum — despite changes in technology, distribution and consumption — remains a major cultural force. Its unusual model of cooperative entrepreneurship appears to have survived pretty much unscathed, with Magnum members exercising complete authority over admission to the ranks. And ranks there are, with an ascending hierarchy of nominees, associates and, finally, the elusive and desirable category of member, from which, like monarchs, only a very few have abdicated and none, as Magnum attests with some pride, has been dethroned.

In this impressively researched study of the early decades of Magnum, Nadya Bair uncovers the complex interactions of artistic ambition and business acumen that somehow produced a kind of order out of chaos, and shows how an organisation that inspired intense loyalty and commitment was able to balance the image of the lone, intrepid and in most cases male photographer, so important to its profile, with the realities of entrepreneurial endeavour.

Bair highlights the role played by marketers and picture editors and other behind-the-scenes staff, many of them women, who managed the processes of picture-making, from identifying photographic opportunities to setting schedules and not infrequently selecting, on behalf of the photographer and from a vast array of contact prints, what would work best on the page. While never detracting from the artistic and professional achievement of the photographers themselves, Bair shows how the organisation conspired, in effect, to downplay the role of its backroom staff in order to keep the photographer in the foreground.

As individual Magnum photographers became increasingly well known and in demand, so it became more important to emphasise their unique visions and minimise the role of the apparatus that kept the show on the road. Cartier-Bresson, ever a dab hand at self-mythologising, increasingly let it be known that his success in the postwar years was more in spite of than owing to Magnum, but if anything this kind of public lament only enhanced the overall brand. The idea of the lone artist resisting the constraints of capitalism, all within a framework that brought recognition and financial reward for the individual, for the agency and for the commissioning organisation, suited everybody.

Magnum was equally successful in managing and exploiting a further contradiction, between the idea of the photographer as a silent witness whose personality and presence are minimised in the interests of giving full weight to the subject, and the photographer as artist, adventurer and active mediator between the world and the viewer. This romanticised notion of the fearless photojournalist, simultaneously distanced and engaged, continues to exert cultural force today, in fiction and in film. It didn’t hurt that those early Magnum photographers were often highly photogenic themselves — George Rodger, the “handsome young photographer,” or Robert Capa, with whom every woman in the Paris office was said to be in love.

The contradiction between being apart from the action and embedding yourself remains inherent in the profession. Magnum continues to embody this tension, even as viewers have grown more alert to its implications. The agency remains culturally significant, not because membership is essential to professional success but because of how it has set the cultural parameters for what it means to be a photojournalist — concerned, humane, fearless, truthful. And successful.

Magnum photographers made an astonishing number of images during the postwar period, the vast majority of which were never published. These unseen images were referred to as “dead” material, in the manner of the 7000 or so pictures, taken by George Rodger for the Economic Cooperation Administration, that “were mostly filed away in the ECA archives.” The oversupply of visual images — and the difficulty of telling them apart — is regularly cited today as a function of the digital era. But as Bair shows, the portable camera and overproduction have long gone together for the professional photographer, as well as for many an amateur. Indeed, as she has it, “if the medium in which the agency worked had any single defining quality, it was overproduction.” The editorial eye — that indefinable instinct for what would be the right, and most striking, image — was vital to the success of the enterprise.

With the advent of digital photography, the process of selection has devolved more and more to the photographer. But in the early days of Magnum, when photographers were often working on assignment in remote areas without access to photographic laboratories, they might not be able to see their own work. Rolls of unopened film would be sent off in the post, to be dealt with back at base. Many people might then be involved in the process of editing and selecting what to publish or to offer for publication. This was no simple matter: in late 1948, as Bair notes, “the entire Magnum staff in Paris spent November and December editing Cartier-Bresson’s 300 rolls of film” brought back from an assignment in the Soviet Union.

It was Cartier-Bresson who famously coined the term “the decisive moment” to describe his photographic method, a phrase that by extension seemed to capture something essential about Magnum. It suggests a rare ability to spot the potentially iconic scene or subject in a moment, and to capture it with a click. It plays down the processes of pre- and post-production in favour of the inspired instant. Contemporary art photography has rather turned away from and in some cases actively rejected this idea of photographic genius, favouring instead an emphasis on overt staging rather than spontaneity, on exploiting the ever-expanding options for post-production effects, and on celebrating technical artifice.

But for all that, the idea of the decisive moment retains enormous power. While the term has always been misleading in the sense that it airbrushed out the role of the picture editors and all the others involved in the chain of production, it was accurate in the way that it caught the importance of the photographic eye, the quality that made a photograph instantly recognisable as a Cartier-Bresson or a Werner Bischof or an Eve Arnold. It was part of the Magnum style.

Bair catches something of this essential contradictoriness within the Magnum enterprise in her clever title, The Decisive Network. The moment of capturing the image was decisive, but so were the processes and the interconnections surrounding that moment. She shows, for example, the surprising extent to which a photographic assignment was framed and specified beforehand. Rita Vandivert, working from Magnum’s New York office in the late forties, instructed photographers working on the major magazine project “People Are People the World Over” to “cable before shooting” should they ever feel an overwhelming need to deviate from their detailed brief.

In a fascinating chapter on Magnum’s collaboration with the influential travel magazine Holiday, Bair notes how such instructions sometimes became superfluous because Magnum photographers “learned to gravitate towards florist shops filled with bright bouquets, ‘pretty girls’ dressed in red, and particularly bright blue skies and pools of water.” As for the other end of the production line, that was when the real business of making a photograph began, at least according to John Morris, Magnum’s most senior administrator throughout the 1950s, who was known to remark that “shooting is only the beginning.”

A strong streak of idealism accompanied the commercial savvy of those foundation years. There was an emphasis on “the cultural unity of the world,” on the role that photography could play in bringing people together and leading them to recognise commonalities across cultures. Magnum images featured prominently in the famous Family of Man exhibition that opened in New York in 1955 and subsequently toured to more than sixty countries. The exhibition, which drew massive visitor numbers, has been criticised, not least by Roland Barthes, for its naivety and sentimentalism, with its emphasis on the family as humanity’s unifying commonality. Morris, who was instrumental in ensuring the agency’s involvement, represented the time’s prevailing view that the exhibition showed that “there are really no foreigners any more.”

Morris’s remark was accurate as far as it went. Foreignness could be captured and also made less foreign by photographs, particularly if images appeared under such harmonising rubrics as “youth” and “family.” But Magnum photography could promote the ideal of inevitable progression towards a harmonised world while simultaneously highlighting difference — even in The Family of Man, or in “People Are People the World Over,” published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1948 — by showing stark discrepancies in social relationships, living conditions and implied political backgrounds.

In “People Are People,” eleven families from different countries were selected to have a visual record made of their daily lives. The shooting schedules were highly choreographed to ensure direct comparability from family to family. “The pictures of women, standing or sitting at their stoves, were astonishingly similar,” notes Bair. But, as she also points out, this does not entirely override the discernible differences in material wellbeing and notions of domesticity and privacy.

By highlighting the paradoxes inherent in the making of a documentary image, Nadya Bair makes an important contribution to the growing reassessment of photographic history. In doing so, she shows Magnum to have been an organisation creatively built on paradox. The idea of the decisive moment coexisted with the often drawn-out processes of pre- and post-production; the lone and intrepid photographer coexisted with the realities of teamwork and cooperative endeavour; and the humanistic worldview coexisted with a sure grasp of commercial reality.

In her introduction Bair highlights the particular difficulties photography poses for drawing clear boundaries between recording a subject and manipulating or even, by implication, exploiting it. She notes how the phrase “small baby crying over rations” appears in a Magnum shooting script as an example to the photographer, capturing images of postwar damage in Europe, of a suitable “tear-jerker” to transmit back to base. Whatever else this tells us, it is a reminder that any ethical failings we may now discern in photographic images were not simply attributable to the photographer, or to the commissioning director or the backroom editor, but to the demands and expectations of the viewer. There is no escaping context. •

The post The editorial eye 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.

It was three days later, when the second atomic bomb was dropped, that the now-familiar photo of the mushroom cloud rising nearly fourteen kilometres into the air above Nagasaki was released to the media. Taken by Lieutenant Charles Levy from an observation plane accompanying the bomber, it epitomised American military might.

But not the effects of that might. Photographer Yoshito Matsushige’s images of the destruction in Hiroshima were confiscated by the American military and only published once the peacetime occupation ended in 1952. Until then, few people outside the city had seen evidence of what happened to the people inside it.

Having used great resourcefulness to get into Hiroshima, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett provided the first eyewitness account of what he called “the atomic plague” in the London Daily Express on 5 September 1945. Blume perhaps underplays Burchett’s worldwide scoop, but her focus in Fallout is to illuminate the importance of John Hersey’s article, simply titled “Hiroshima,” published a year later in the 31 August 1946 issue of the New Yorker.

At that time, and indeed right up to 1992, the New Yorker didn’t publish photographs. Hersey’s 31,000-word article occupied an entire issue of the magazine, a first in its twenty-six-year history. That is a lot of words, and Blume argues that they, more than photographs extolling military power or showing shattered buildings, have informed views about atomic bombs because they told the stories of six survivors from the moment of the bomb’s impact to several months afterward.

Since the publication of “Hiroshima” it has been hard for anyone to pretend that the impact of nuclear weapons on people, instantaneously and in lingering radiation sickness, is anything but horrific. Blume uses a quote from Hersey as her book’s epigraph: “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has been the memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”

Here’s a paragraph from “Hiroshima” that, once read, is hard to forget. It concerns the efforts of one of the survivors, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, to save others:

Mr Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandspit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment. Then he got out into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat. Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly.

By now the tide has risen, making it harder for him to get across the water. Hersey continues:

On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, “These are human beings.” It took him three trips to get them all across the river.

By bringing readers down from the aerial view of the city to people on the ground, Hersey opened space for them to imagine themselves in the shoes of a people whose military just a few years before had bombed Pearl Harbor, killing 2400 people and bringing the United States into the second world war.

Hersey’s decision to strip out any discussion of the debate about whether the two atomic bombings were necessary to win the war exposed him to criticism, particularly from Mary McCarthy (best known as author of the novel The Group), that he had reduced the uniqueness of the atomic bomb attack to the kind of “human interest” story that follows every natural disaster.

There is something to McCarthy’s criticism, but it’s not a big something. The fact that “Hiroshima” has little to say about the bomb’s necessity or otherwise flows from Hersey’s choice, encouraged and then patrolled in the drafting by New Yorker editor Harold Ross, to focus on “what happened not to buildings but to human beings,” as Hersey later put it. To portray the reality of their experience he needed to convey that perspective and that perspective only. It is this, though, that enables a mass audience to sympathise, even empathise, with the Japanese — something few had been able, or willing, to encourage.

No newspaper human-interest story has ever been as artfully composed as “Hiroshima,” either. Hersey drew on the structure of Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which he fortuitously came across while travelling to Japan. Wilder portrayed the interconnected lives of five people who were destined to die when a suspension bridge over a canyon in Peru broke with all of them on it.

Hersey uses a similar sequential narration device to tell the stories of six survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. The opening paragraph captures what each of the six was doing at the exact moment, 8.15am, when the bomb was dropped.

Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk, was “turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.” Dr Masakazu Fujii was “settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital.” Hatsuyo Nakamura “stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house.” Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge “reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house.” Dr Terufumi Sasaki “walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen.” And the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto “paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer.”

In cutting from one person to the next, Hersey uses a cinematic effect completely familiar today but novel, in both senses of the word, in 1946.

His achievement was journalistic as well as literary. Blume lays out in detail just how much news “Hiroshima” contained. The number of deaths was 100,000, significantly higher than the US military’s official figure. Contrary to the official reason for choosing Hiroshima — that it was a military base — the overwhelming majority of the city’s population was civilian.

General Groves had consistently denied or downplayed the level of radiation sickness in the bombed cities, and told a Senate committee on atomic energy in late 1945 that doctors assured him radiation poisoning was “a very pleasant way to die.” But Hersey showed that levels of radiation poisoning were still alarmingly high in 1946 and that it wreaked terrible suffering on victims.

“Hiroshima” had an enormous impact. According to media historian Kathy Roberts Forde, all newsstand copies — priced at 15c — sold out within an hour. Within weeks, writes Blume, the magazine was selling for US$6 at secondhand bookshops. Albert Einstein, the Nobel prize–winning scientist and pacifist, requested 1000 reprints which he sent to leading scientists. The full article was read on the American Broadcasting Company radio network over four consecutive evenings.

As many as eighty newspapers and magazines around the world clamoured for rights to reprint the story, which Hersey granted with two conditions: that the proceeds go to the Red Cross and that the article run in full. It was published in book form in November 1946 and, according to Jeremy Treglown’s 2019 biography of Hersey, Mr Straight Arrow, sold more than 600,000 copies within a year.

Despite Hersey’s steering clear of the issue, or perhaps because of it, “Hiroshima” provoked the first full public debate about whether the United States was right to drop the bomb. “As I read, I had to constantly remind myself that we perpetrated this monstrous tragedy. We Americans,” one reader wrote in a letter to the New Yorker. An internal New Yorker report said Hersey’s article provoked a stronger response than any other in the magazine’s history, according to Forde. The great majority of the 400 letters were favourable, including a good number from readers who had noticed and praised Hersey’s “masterful storytelling.” A small number were critical: “Wonderful. Now write up the massacre of Nanking,” of Chinese people by Japanese soldiers in 1937, wrote one.

The response of commentators across the media was overwhelmingly positive. The New York Times editorialised:

The disasters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were our handiwork. They were defended then, and are defended now, by the argument that they saved more lives than they took — more lives of Japanese as well as more lives of Americans. The argument may be sound or it may be unsound. One may think it sound when he recalls Tarawa, Iwo Jima, or Okinawa. One may think it unsound when he reads Mr Hersey.

What is remarkable about this editorial, writes Blume, is how at odds it is with the newspaper’s earlier, fervent support for the dropping of the atomic bomb. Not to mention the fact that one of its journalists, William Laurence, had been seconded in April 1945 from the newspaper to the Manhattan Project, where he wrote most of the press releases the media relied on in the days following the bombing.

After Burchett reported “the atomic plague” in September 1945, Laurence was among the journalists given a guided tour of the site of the original atomic bomb tests in New Mexico. His story, headlined “US Atom Bomb Site Belies Tokyo Tales,” reported that Geiger counters revealed “a minute quantity” of radiation in the ground, showing that Japanese claims of people dying from radiation sickness in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a fiction.

When Hersey’s article was published, Laurence was about to release his own book, Dawn Over Zero, in which he extols the virtues of the nuclear power he had seen in July 1945, when the first bomb was exploded at New Mexico, and on board one of the planes in the bombing run for Nagasaki:

It was as if the earth had spoken and the suddenly iridescent clouds and sky had joined in one affirmative answer. Atomic energy — yes. It was like the grand finale of a mighty symphony of the elements, fascinating and terrifying, uplifting and crushing, ominous, devastating, full of great promise and great forebodings.

Blume lays bare the deeply entwined relationship between the most respected newspaper in the United States and the top-secret Manhattan Project. That relationship might have been covered by earlier writers such as Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell in Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, but what hasn’t previously been covered — and what is one of the most extraordinary parts of this carefully researched, crisply written book — is the extent to which the New Yorker cooperated with the US military before publishing “Hiroshima” — for better and for worse.

Like the rest of the American media, the New Yorker sent stories to the War Department for clearance. The level of censorship of the magazine’s war coverage, though, had been light, according to Blume. The Office of Censorship closed down in late September 1945, but in early August the following year, just as Hersey and his editors at the New Yorker were feverishly editing “Hiroshima,” President Truman signed into law the Atomic Energy Act. The act restricted publication about “all data concerning the manufacture or utilization of atomic weapons.” Use of any such data that might harm the United States could “be punished by death or imprisonment for life.”

The magazine’s editor, Harold Ross, and his deputy, William Shawn, were worried this new restriction could kill their article. On advice from their lawyer, they felt they needed to get official clearance. They decided to send it not just to any government public relations officer but to General Groves himself.

Why? It isn’t clear. The records of the New Yorker, held at the New York Public Library, and General Groves’s papers have intriguing gaps, but Blume has pieced together the available information. She offers informed speculation about exactly what transpired in the negotiations between Groves and the magazine.

Blume points to speeches Groves had made defending the dropping of the atomic bomb. If anyone didn’t like the way the United States ended the war, his argument went, then they should “remember who started it.” She also shows that the United States’ own scientists had been to Hiroshima and discovered for themselves the extent of the damage and its lingering effects.

Groves had been the architect of the postwar information suppression campaign, but he was also concerned to protect the United States’ upper hand in the nuclear arms race, especially against the Soviet Union. Atomic bombs were now part of the world, he wrote in a memo in early 1946, and “We must have the best, the biggest and the most.”

Blume suggests that, perversely, the eyewitness accounts in “Hiroshima” could even have been “seen as an advertisement for the effectiveness of the weapon whose creation General Groves had spearheaded — and he had become increasingly concerned with receiving credit for his role in creating the war-winning weapon.” In other words, “Hiroshima” could be good PR for the general and the United States. Blume rightly describes this stance as “cynical,” and could also have described it as chillingly hypocritical.

After receiving the draft article, Groves called Shawn on 7 August 1946 and said he would approve the story. But he wanted to discuss “changing the article a little” in ways that “would not hurt the article” — words guaranteed to make any journalist’s blood run cold. But the negotiations were successful, and the article was run.

Blume shows what was lost, and what was left in or overlooked by General Groves. In the former category was a categorical statement by Hersey about Americans being wilfully kept in the dark about the exact height of the bomb’s detonation and the weight of uranium used. Gone was Hersey’s indignant line that “Trying to keep security on atomic fission is as fruitless as trying to keep a blanket of secrecy on the law of gravity.” Gone, too, was the fact that some parts of a comprehensive government report about the bomb’s effects were being kept secret.

What Groves let stand, though, was Hersey’s most disturbing revelation: in Blume’s words, that “the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history and then tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”

That the atomic bomb was not simply a more powerful bomb than any other but a qualitatively different kind of bomb was Hersey’s point — and Groves’s too. For Hersey, enabling people to see the bomb’s exact impact should prompt them to believe it should never be used again. For Groves, that should prompt readers to fear what their nation’s enemies might do and trust what their military leaders could, and would, do if necessary.

No atomic bomb has been dropped in a war since 1945. This might speak to the enduring power of “Hiroshima,” but nine countries have nuclear weapons, including North Korea and, of course, the United States, both of which have dangerously unstable and capricious leaders today. The Doomsday Clock, created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is set at one hundred seconds to midnight, the closest since the nuclear watchdog was set up in 1947.

As Albert Einstein reflected in 1949, “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth — rocks.” With that in mind as we commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, read — or reread — “Hiroshima.” •

The post The making of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” 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. •

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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. •

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The latest Digital News Report: Australia, the sixth annual study of national news consumption trends, provides further evidence that Australians still rely on the news media — directly or indirectly — regardless of its financial difficulties. Drawing on a survey of 2131 people in late January and early February, the report finds that compared with last year’s report, the proportion of respondents who qualified as “heavy” news consumers increased from 52 per cent to 70 per cent; the number of Australians who accessed news more than once a day rose by 4 per cent during the 2020 bushfires and by another 14 per cent in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The study finds that more than two-thirds (69 per cent) of Australian news consumers shared or interacted with news sharing on social media by talking in person with others, talking online, and sharing on messaging apps. This is a 6 per cent increase in the past year.

Two categories of consumer — those who don’t trust news and those with a high level of political interest — tend to share more. Among the first group, this may reflect a feeling that information needs to be “fact-checked” by discussing it with other people. The latter groups are more interested in news generally and therefore their sharing of news reflects their higher overall engagement.

The proportion of consumers who find their news via social media has gradually increased since our first survey in 2015, and jumped six per cent over the past twelve months to 52 per cent. Older news consumers are catching up with their younger counterparts, with a 6 per cent increase in news-seeking via social media among baby boomers and a 5 per cent increase by those aged seventy-four-plus.

News consumers are also diversifying their sources of news and information. On climate change, our survey shows people mainly receiving information via TV news, with around 15 per cent seeking more detailed information from specialist blogs and websites. According to a supplementary News and Media Research Centre survey during the Covid-19 pandemic, Australians have also sought information about the coronavirus from non-news sources. About a third of respondents went directly to the Department of Health website, for instance, at least partly because of concern about the reliability of other sources. These trends reflect the breadth of online information sources available and the shift in the public’s perceptions of what constitutes “news.”

During the bushfires, overall trust in news was down to 38 per cent, 6 per cent lower than last year and in line with the global trend. Regional news consumers generally have less trust in news, and their distrust is deeper than among city consumers. This year’s survey recorded a steep decline in trust among print news readers, while radio news listeners maintained a level of trust similar to last year’s. But trust in news about Covid-19 during the pandemic was a much higher 53 per cent.

There are several likely reasons for this “trust bump.” First, when people are asked to think about “most news,” much of what they call to mind may not be relevant to their lives — an obvious contrast with news about the coronavirus. In response, groups normally not interested in news are consuming more of it. In contrast to a news update on a sports match or what happened in parliament, tuning into news about the coronavirus is central to everyone’s health and wellbeing.

Second, the news media has treated informing the public about the pandemic as a social responsibility. While the traditional emphasis on conflict and sensationalism has featured in the coverage, many news outlets have focused on providing constructive information from authoritative sources rather than generating clickbait and fuelling dissent. These results reflect how contextual factors can influence perceptions about trust. The challenge will be for news organisations to try to extend this extra trust in reporting on the coronavirus to news coverage more broadly.

The data also highlight that local news still matters in a crisis. Almost half of news consumers (45 per cent) say they are “very” or “extremely interested” in local news, and local newspapers and their websites were cited as the top source of local news (41 per cent). But almost a quarter of news consumers are seeking information about their community from local social media groups and other alternative news sources as well as traditional news. This suggests traditional news media are not fully meeting consumers’ needs, and especially the needs of younger consumers.

When asked if they would miss their local news services if they were to close, 81 per cent of respondents — especially those on low incomes and in regional areas — reported that they would miss local radio the most. Three-quarters would miss local newspapers (76 per cent) and nearly four out of five (79 per cent) would miss local TV. Given this survey was conducted during the bushfires, this likely reflects the particular importance of local radio in keeping communities up-to-date and safe during emergencies.

But who is prepared to pay for this sought-after local news? A persistently low 14 per cent of Australians are paying for online news. Given the choice between paying for Netflix and paying for news, Australians show an overwhelming preference for a videostreaming service. But consumer behaviour might be changing. Subscription to online news is the fastest-growing and most common method of online news payment. The number of respondents subscribing to online news has doubled from 4 per cent in 2016 to 8 per cent in 2020. Interestingly, younger respondents were more likely to pay — and especially generation Y, 20 per cent of whom were news subscribers.

Still, news subscriptions alone cannot cover anywhere near the full costs of producing news. To be fair, though, consumers have never fully covered the costs of producing news: traditionally, subscribers to print newspapers contributed around 20 per cent of revenue, with advertisers covering most or all of the balance. Free-to-air television has always been entirely reliant on advertising, and even pay TV is rarely based on a full fee-paying model. The real problem is not that audiences aren’t paying; it’s that online advertising has shifted away from journalistic content.

With Australia introducing strict social distancing in March, major news platforms saw a surge in their audiences. Advertising income, on the other hand, plunged as media buyers withdrew their spending and sport events were cancelled. The local news media landscape consequently shrank at a time when the public needed it the most. More than one hundred News Corp local newspapers have closed or suspended their print editions because of the rapid decline in advertising, and Australian Community Media suspended many of its local print editions as well. Regional broadcasters are planning to stop their local news bulletins as advertising dollars dip by 50 per cent.

News businesses, digital platforms and the government will need to reconsider how to maintain a healthy news ecosystem and keep citizens informed. Paying attention to what news consumers are telling us would be a good starting point.

Our survey confirmed that social media and search are now the two major pathways to online news, with a growing number of people accessing news through mobile alerts, newsletters and aggregator apps. News consumers are trying to find efficient ways to curate and organise the vast amount of news available to them. Rather than go directly to the news-brand websites themselves, audiences are increasingly relying on Google and Facebook to find what they want.

The decline in print and traditional broadcasting will most likely shift consumers, particularly in the regions, towards social media. While social media provides a fast and diverse range of information, we also know that news found on social media is trusted less and consumers are concerned about encountering misinformation there. Not everyone has the skills or energy to navigate through this vast range of information, and the media industry and government need to respond more effectively to this reality. The ACCC’s digital platforms inquiry recommended the government invest in media literacy for children and the wider community. With the growing use of misinformation in politics and elections, it is important that action is taken on this front.

In many ways, the bushfires and Covid-19 have acted as a circuit-breaker. They have reversed some of the downward trends in news consumption and the negativity revealed in the previous five years of the Digital News Report: Australia survey. Interest in news was up during the survey period, people were consuming news more, and the slide in trust had been reversed — all of this in response to relevant and generally high-quality reporting of the global pandemic.

Public interest journalism undoubtedly plays a major role in democratic societies and everyone — even those who don’t consume the news — benefits from news that calls governments and organisations to account. But we know news media businesses are struggling to adapt to the digital environment, and we know they haven’t yet found a sustainable means of surviving. •

The survey behind Digital News Report: Australia 2020 was conducted by YouGov using an online questionnaire between 17 January and 8 February 2020. The sample is drawn from an online panel of 89,850 Australians and is reflective of the population that has access to the internet. Respondents must have consumed news in the past month, which meant that 7 per cent of the initial survey respondents were excluded. 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.

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AAP’s closure had been announced before the coronavirus turned the world upside down (and there’s now a chance the service will be taken over rather than shuttered), and the newspapers that finally fell victim to the pandemic — like the Sunraysia Daily in Mildura, currently celebrating its centenary, and the Yarram Standard in Gippsland, in operation since 1875 — had already been weakened by years of attrition.

But it was the immediate crisis that propelled the Morrison government into action, as it has in so many other parts of the economy. By rebadging and revamping its stalled Regional and Small Publishers Innovation Fund as the Public Interest News Gathering Program, it will make $50 million in support available to regional publishers and broadcasters in financial year 2020–21.

But what about the long-term rot eating away at the whole industry: the migration of advertising to the big technology platforms? When News Corp Australasia’s executive chair, Michael Miller, announced the closure of sixty community titles across four states at the beginning of April, he called on the Morrison government “to make 2020 the year digital platforms start paying publishers to use their content.”

Three weeks later, treasurer Josh Frydenberg and communications minister Paul Fletcher announced that the government was directing the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, or ACCC, to develop a code requiring Google and Facebook to pay when they link to news publishers’ sites. Echoing Miller’s words, Frydenberg declared that “it’s time the tech titans were held to account and… we get payment for original journalistic content.” Communications minister Paul Fletcher doubled down: “One set of businesses [are] acquiring content from another without the opportunity for a fair discussion about what they pay for it.” Responding to the announcement, the Australian proclaimed that the “policy will end the plunder and save mainstream news,” with editor-at-large Paul Kelly arguing that the announced proposal will “check one of the greatest scams in history.”

If this looks a lot like government by News Corp, it’s important to remember that the proposed code governing dealings between the digital platforms and the news media was recommended by the ACCC itself. And the government’s move brings together two sentiments with wider appeal: first, that we need to do something to save the journalism that forms the fabric of our society and the basis of our democracy; and second, that Google and Facebook need to be cut down to size. Labor’s only criticism was that it had already called for the fast-tracking of the mandatory code. “It’s beyond time to put the blowtorch on Big Tech and make them pay for content they’ve been taking for free,” said the Greens’ media spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young.

But will the proposed link levy really “save the news”? Or might the pandemic-driven impetus be squandered and Australian journalism continue its decline?

The government’s case rests on four apparently straightforward propositions: search and social platforms take content created by journalists; the platforms derive billions of dollars of advertising revenue from that content; publishers are therefore entitled to a share of the platforms’ profits; and making this happen will provide a tangible solution to the dire predicament facing the news business. These might be widely shared beliefs, but none of them stand up to scrutiny. Let’s take them one at a time.

To begin with, Google, Facebook and other digital platforms don’t republish articles from news outlets — they publish what are known as “snippets,” one or two algorithmically generated sentences from a news story, possibly with a photo, to accompany the headlines and links in our search results, helping us decide if we want to click on them. Snippets don’t infringe copyright, and if publishers want to stop them appearing, they easily can. It’s just a matter of inserting “nosnippets” tags in their code, as last year’s report from the ACCC’s digital platforms inquiry helpfully explained.

Snippets stand to news stories as previews and reviews stand to movies; the sample helps us decide what we want. By publishing them, the ACCC found, search and social platforms help increase publishers’ audience just as trailers and reviews help a film. And contrary to some submissions to its inquiry, the competition watchdog found that the appetite for news is not sated by the snippets themselves. Which explains why Rupert Murdoch never followed through on his 2009 threat to prevent Google from indexing News Corp stories, though he could have, and why News and other publishers continue to permit the publication of snippets.

The platforms don’t steal content, and nor do their profits derive from audiences that have been built with other people’s journalism. Ever since the internet unbundled the newspaper in the noughties, journalism has simply not been a necessary ingredient in the business of aggregating and selling readers’ attention. This first became apparent with the emergence of businesses like Craigslist, realestate.com.au and carsales.com.au. The billions of dollars of advertising revenue that flow to Google and Facebook do not rely on journalism any more than do the millions that have moved to classified ad sites.

As Joshua Benton from Harvard’s Nieman Lab puts it, Google “makes money when you search ‘dry cleaner south boston’ or ‘what’s a good toaster oven,’ not so much ‘was that a gunshot i just heard south boston.’” Google has found a way to create an audience and sell it to toaster manufacturers without journalism having anything to do with it. It doesn’t steal news stories on Syria, or the attention they attract: indeed, Google doesn’t serve ads alongside links to news articles (in either Search or News).

Because the platforms don’t siphon off revenue that belongs to the content creators, the attempt to recover these supposedly ill-gotten gains will inevitably fail. We know this because that’s what has happened wherever similar laws have been introduced. When France introduced a link levy late last year, Google simply changed its default settings, meaning French publishers now have to opt in to allow snippets to appear (in which case Google doesn’t have to pay). In terms of how things might work out here, France represents the relatively benign scenario. When Spain introduced a link tax in 2014, Google closed down Google News there. Not only did the laws fail to deliver additional revenue to publishers, overall news consumption shrank by between 5 and 10 per cent.

The government would have us believe that these failures are evidence of the purity of its own purpose. “In France and in Spain and in other countries where they have tried to bring these tech titans to the table to pay for content they haven’t been successful,” Josh Frydenberg acknowledged when he announced he was going to attempt to do just that. “But we believe this is a battle worth fighting.”

But, as Crikey’s Bernard Keane points out, Spain’s link tax hit smaller, newer and less well-known sites the hardest. Without Google, the cost of searching for news increased, and so audiences were more likely to fall back on the sites they knew best, a development that overwhelmingly favoured large, long-established newspapers with strong brand awareness. While the well-known sites experienced a 5 per cent fall in visitors, traffic to small publications shrank by 13 per cent. The latter included sites like El Diario, a digital startup with a focus on sustaining serious journalism with a membership model. So Spain’s law ended up hurting exactly those sites it should have been helping.

Even if it worked, the proposed levy would be redolent of the worst kind of protectionism that, in a vain attempt to recreate a world that has disappeared, at best serves the short-term interests of entrenched players. Reacting to the government’s announcement, Paul Kelly said that “the size of this revenue share will be pivotal for news publishers. Unless this is meaningful, the project falters.” But it is highly unlikely that the digital platforms will agree to paying anything. Being required to pay to link to a website is as bizarre, and unreasonable, as it sounds. As much as the government’s foes are mighty, its endeavour will likely fail because its argument is weak.

In the improbable event that a face-saving agreement is forged, the payments will likely amount to little. Payments for snippets can’t and won’t compensate the news industry for the fact that it is no longer essential to the business of selling advertising: mandatory payments won’t bring back the advertising lost to search and social any more than to classified sites, and they won’t restore the exorbitant prices media companies could once charge for advertising when they had a monopoly over our attention.

Former South Australian senator Nick Xenophon wrote last month that his biggest regret in politics was not getting a better deal for Australian journalism when he negotiated the Regional and Small Publishers Innovation Fund and the ACCC inquiry in exchange for supporting the government’s media ownership laws. Xenophon believes he did what he could but it was not enough. Now, he says, we have to get it right. “And my abiding fear is that if we blow this opportunity, it will be too late, and the damage to our democracy incalculable.”

With Labor and the Greens in lock step with the government’s strategy, there seems little hope that effective support for journalism will be forthcoming any time soon. More newspapers will close, more journalists will lose their jobs, and the desertification of Australia’s news landscape will continue apace. But there is an alternative. Instead of imitating international policy failures, we could instead take inspiration from successful examples of support for the press.

Britain, Norway, Korea and other countries provide news publishers with a complete exemption on their value-added taxes (akin to our GST), and other places, like Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, give a partial reduction. The zero-rating of VAT on newspapers in Britain amounts to an indirect subsidy of A$610 million annually, and was extended to digital news publications in March. Sweden provides direct payments that amount to 15 to 20 per cent of revenue for the second and third newspapers in a market, which are the scheme’s main beneficiary. With a population of ten million people, it has seventy-three daily newspapers and sixty-nine weeklies, and, in contrast to the dangerous levels of ownership concentration in Australia, eight large newspaper groups share 82 per cent of the market.

The case for public support for journalism is founded on a recognition of the basic economic realities of the digital era. Advertising will no longer cross-subsidise journalism to any substantial degree. News media can only stand on its own feet by maximising subscriptions, donations and other payments from readers. But the market will significantly underproduce public interest journalism because even freeloaders can enjoy the benefits of a functioning democracy, accountable government and relatively low levels of corruption and corporate malfeasance.

If we want to revive public interest journalism, including newspapers that have served local communities since the nineteenth century, we need to squarely face this fact. Only a well-designed system of public subsidies can ensure that we stem the tide of newspaper closures, restore jobs in journalism, and continue to sustain journalism that is integral to the health and vitality of our society.

This isn’t a fringe view. Public Funding of High-Quality Journalism, a report commissioned by the ACCC as part of its digital platforms inquiry, concludes that “experience from the countries we have surveyed provides some confidence that useful schemes can be designed, which can deliver effective outcomes, value for money, accountability and independence from government.”

The Public Interest Journalism Initiative, or PIJI, headed up by former ACCC chair Allan Fels, advocates the introduction of tax concessions, which can be set at a rate that provides a 100 per cent or more reduction in taxable income for specified types of expenditure. Tax concessions are already used to stimulate industrial research and development across OECD countries, including Australia, and Fels’s group contends they could similarly work to promote public interest journalism. Research commissioned by PIJI on the costs and benefits of such a scheme concluded that it would warrant concessions worth between $380 million and $740 million annually. “This research is extremely robust,” Fels says. “It shows that tax concessions are a legitimate avenue for the support of public interest journalism, which is declining rapidly and is a critical foundation for our democracy.”

After researching the theoretical and empirical basis for media subsidies, Norwegian economists Jarle Møen and Hans Jarle Kind concluded that “there was empirical evidence suggesting that at least some of the subsidies to the news industry have the desired effect.” Of all the possible forms of government intervention, Møen and Kind found that tax concessions are the most powerful tool for promoting public interest journalism.

“In principle a subsidy that targets public interest journalism is exactly the right tool,” Jarle Møen tells me via email. “Tax credits or other indirect subsidy schemes that directly reduce the marginal cost of investing in journalism are the most efficient scheme to increase the quality and quantity of journalism and stimulate investigative journalism.” Tax concessions, Møen explains, “will make it profitable to hire more journalists because the value of what an extra journalist produces stays the same while the cost is lowered.” He adds that “a crucial question is to what extent the government succeeds in increasing journalism that creates additional value for society rather than gossip columns and pure entertainment.”

PIJI contends that Australia’s R&D tax incentive offers a useful model in this respect. The Tax Act distils a widely accepted definition of the targeted activity to precisely delimit the expenditure that receives preferential tax treatment, detailed guidance is provided to help businesses interpret the tax code, and monitoring and compliance occurs through the tax system.

In the same manner, PIJI argues, a definition of the kind of journalism that supports the democratic process, informs about matters of public concern, exposes wrongdoing, and provides analysis that makes public events intelligible can be operationalised in the tax code, ensuring that the subsidy achieves its intended goal. An analysis by the Centre for International Economics indicates that every dollar of tax revenue foregone under such a scheme is likely to lead publishers to invest one extra dollar in public interest journalism.

The five countries that topped the Reporters Without Borders 2020 World Press Freedom Index — Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands — all provide direct or indirect subsidies to their newspapers. So news organisations can be publicly funded without compromising their independence, just as we already finance political parties without bias or interference from the government of the day, and subsidise research and development without commercial favouritism. And one of the virtues of the tax concessions proposed by PIJI is that any and every news organisation that invests in public interest journalism, as defined in the Tax Act, would benefit.

As Jarle Møen points out, though, “large media organisations have time and again proven themselves to be effective lobbyists, and their self-interest is often not aligned with what we consider well-designed policies. Political parties also tend to intervene in favour of news outlets that they consider supportive.” There could hardly be a more apt description of the Morrison government’s present efforts, heedless of the evidence and distorted by lobbying.

No doubt the government, in very uncomfortable fiscal territory already, also wants to believe that no serious spending is necessary — that a touch of competition policy can put Humpty Dumpty back together again. But other research commissioned by PIJI, which asked over 1000 Australians the extent to which they’d support paying more tax to increase public interest journalism, indicates that the community would be willing to pay between $380 and $740 million per year to support the news industry. Given Google and Facebook earn more than $5 billion in Australia annually but pay only $40 million in tax, another good way to fund subsidies would be to make them pay a fair share of tax. But this is a confrontation that the government doesn’t appear to have an appetite for.

The Coalition’s reluctance to intervene in the economy and provide substantial public support for journalism (outside regional Australia) is unsurprising enough. After all, it has stripped $783 million from the ABC over the last decade. But if the point of an opposition is to offer alternative policies that will better serve the nation, and the purpose of left-of-centre parties is to articulate the role that government can play to create a better society, then Labor and the Greens should be taking Professor Fels’s proposals off the shelf and making them famous. Instead of endorsing the government’s quixotic attempt to make Google and Facebook pay to link to news sites, they should be articulating the case for a serious subsidy scheme to support public interest journalism.

To the credit of both parties, they have demonstrated more initiative when it comes to the ACCC’s recommendation that subscriptions to non-profit media outlets be made tax-deductible. “The ACCC has made recommendations around tax settings to encourage philanthropic support for journalism which the government does not support,” says shadow communications minister Michelle Rowland. “Labor will hold the government to account for this decision.” That’s a good thing, but if changed tax settings only apply to non-profit news outlets, the significance for the industry as a whole will be limited. “The Greens support extending tax-deductible status to news media subscriptions, donations and purchases to all Australians,” says Sarah Hanson-Young. Such a move has significant potential to help news organisations adapt to a world in which the lion’s share of their revenue comes from readers.

The idea that government has a role in supporting public interest journalism, once unthinkable in Australia, has slowly but surely entered the political mainstream. The 2017 Senate inquiry into public interest journalism; the government’s subsequent deal with Nick Xenophon; and its response to the acute problems in regional news brought on by the Covid-19 crisis, however limited and inadequate — all these mark a growing recognition that, without concerted action, the devastation of the news industry will continue unabated. The crisis represents an opportunity to address chronic issues.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” says Nick Xenophon. “Conventional political wisdom, conventional ideologies have been turned on their head. Now is the time to say this makes sense for our democracy.” But no matter how urgent, necessary or accepted they might be, good policies need proponents in parliament. Our politicians must recognise that advertising will no longer fund the journalism we need, and that means government should act. •

This article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post When the market for news fails appeared first on Inside Story.

So declared a story by two members of the Sydney Morning Herald’s press gallery bureau based on “sources familiar with the negotiations” over the draft resolution.

Once again, Australia saves the world. Yet a closer examination of the emerging resolution, which Chinese president Xi Jinping also supported, reveals it to be nothing like as strong as the original proposal from Scott Morrison’s office.

Recall 22 April, when multiple news outlets carried reports from their Canberra correspondents that Australia was calling for reform of the World Health Organization. If necessary, went the plan, independent investigators would be given “weapons inspector powers” to investigate the source of disease outbreaks.

“Just got off the phone with US President @realDonaldTrump,” Morrison tweeted the same day. “We had a very constructive discussion on our health responses to #COVID19 and the need to get our market-led and business-centred economies up and running again.”

But almost immediately it became clear that Canberra was way out on its own. Emmanuel Macron, Boris Johnson and other leaders phoned by Morrison demurred at the timing and nature of the proposal.

China already had its hackles up after foreign minister Marise Payne’s earlier floating of an “independent investigation,” which a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman described as “political manoeuvring.”

In terms of its likely passage and acceptance, Morrison’s inspections proposal was preposterous. The veteran diplomat John McCarthy called it a “nice hoary bellow from our domestic political ramparts” but “a policy mistake.” Rod Barton, one of the former weapons inspectors in Iraq, pointed out flaws in the analogy. He might have added that the inspectors’ reports about Saddam Hussein’s evident lack of weapons of mass destruction were ignored by Washington, London and Canberra in the 2003 rush to war.

Back to the Canberra press gallery, though, and its role in helping whip up a crisis out of a bad brainstorm in the prime minister’s office. On 26 April, the Australian Financial Review’s Andrew Tillett interviewed the Chinese ambassador, Cheng Jingye, who elaborated the foreign ministry view. “Some guys are attempting to blame China for their own problems and deflect the attention,” he said. “The proposition is obviously teaming up with those forces in Washington to launch a political campaign against China.”

This was not yet a story. As Jocelyn Chey, a former Australian consul-general in Hong Kong now at Western Sydney University, has pointed out, Tillett then pushed and pushed Cheng with a series of “What if?” questions. Finally the ambassador conceded that if Australia came across as hostile to China, its public might reconsider buying Australian wine or beef, travelling here, or sending their children to our universities.

This threat of “trade retaliation” then blew up into a major theme of Canberra politics the following week. And instead of cool rationality, a wave of patriotic flag-waving took hold of senior members of the press gallery, urged on by China hawks in Canberra’s military-industrial circles.

The latter notably include Peter Jennings, director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, financed by the defence department, military suppliers including Lockheed Martin, BAE, Northrop Grumman, Thales and Raytheon, and the governments of Japan and Taiwan. It was time for Australia to diversify its trade away from China, he wrote. Just like that.

Business leaders and vice-chancellors who tried to point out that the finger-pointing at China could have economic consequences were derided as traitorous. They “can’t handle the truth” about China, said Channel Nine’s Chris Uhlmann. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher described Cheng’s rather mild words as “gangsterism.”

“Cheng’s warning laid bare what those in political, diplomatic and foreign affairs circles have always known about the regime in Beijing,” wrote the Australian Financial Review’s Phillip Coorey. “It was a glass-jawed bully that viewed bilateral relations as one-way affairs that should be skewed in Beijing’s interest.”

Iron ore tycoon Andrew Forrest’s springing of a Chinese consul on a press conference with health minister Greg Hunt, “followed by a similar attempt at appeasement” by Kerry Stokes (who has the Caterpillar machinery franchise for China), “came as no surprise to those in the know,” wrote Coorey.

As James Curran, Sydney University’s specialist on the US alliance, observed, “It is one thing to be rightfully wary of the brand of Chinese exceptionalism espoused by Xi Jinping, quite another to thrash about in mouth-foaming fulmination.”

Whether Beijing was already planning trade retaliation when Cheng gave the interview we may never know. Its commerce ministry always has a grievance up its sleeve, as it showed when Canada’s pork and canola exports were blocked soon after the arrest of a senior Huawei executive in Vancouver.

But act it did, putting an 80 per cent penalty tariff on Australian barley as punishment for the alleged use of subsidies barred by the World Trade Organization and suspending certification of four large abattoirs. Effectively, Australia has lost some $900 million a year in barley exports to China and a large portion of its $2.6 billion in beef exports.

If anything, the China hawks in the press gallery doubled down. The Herald’s Hartcher praised Morrison’s assertion that “we are standing our ground on our values and the things that we know are always important. And those things are not to be traded. Ever.” Hartcher then noted that some business leaders and state governments were urging Canberra to use diplomacy and pragmatism to protect the trading relationship. “And, of course, when a business person calls for ‘pragmatism,’ the word used this week by Elders chief executive Mark Allison, he is calling for the abandonment of principle,” he added.

There’s been nothing in Canberra reporting to suggest that this loss of trade might have been the fault of Morrison, a close circle of advisers inherited from Tony Abbott, or the hawkish think-tankers and journalists who believe defence strategy can somehow be pursued without reference to the economy.

As the editorial board of the Australian National University’s East Asia Forum, headed by trade expert Peter Drysdale, noted, there was already “furious agreement” — including from Beijing — about the need for an investigation of Covid-19.

“The question has been about the nature and the timing of an inquiry, as well as the febrile international political context into which the Australian idea was lobbed,” the EAF board said. “There was no developed Australian proposal. There was no consultation with regional neighbours or partners, and they, not only China, were bemused at Australian guilelessness in spearheading a Washington-touted idea.”

Canberra had thus isolated itself from the region. “Later back-pedalling to distance Australia’s stumble-bum diplomacy on the crisis from the venal re-election politics of the Trump administration convinces no one but its proponents,” the board said. These evidently include some senior press gallery figures.

The burying of differences in Geneva this week, which produced a WHO-led inquiry with existing powers when the emergency subsides — a goal a properly advised Morrison might have seen as the only realistic one — doesn’t mean harmony is restored.

Trump is clearly out to scapegoat China for his own mishandling of the pandemic as he approaches the November elections. Poking Beijing further on trade and technology has already started.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping will hold the delayed meetings of his rubber-stamp congresses in coming days facing new questions about his ability to hold power beyond the previously normal two five-year terms. The Covid-19 shutdown means near-zero economic growth in China this year, the first such falter (barring the Tiananmen blip) since the Mao Zedong era. Xi also faces a rebellious Hong Kong and a Taiwan with its standing enhanced by its early intelligence on the Wuhan outbreak and its effective preventive measures.

Climbing out of recession means China will continue to rely on raw materials from Australia. Its only alternative sources are on the Atlantic seaboard, and already iron ore prices are shooting up. It’s in what former Howard government minister and long-time China trade-fixer Warwick Smith calls China’s “discretionary spends” — processed foods, education, tourism and other services — that further retaliation could come.

If China does make the transition to a consumption-led economy, these sectors will be a source of high-income jobs for Australians. They are worth pursuing at least as much as other emerging consumer markets. Rather than preparing for war or butting directly against Chinese communism, Smith advocates “patience, no quick judgements, and no emotionalism.” Which doesn’t make a good media story.

Instead of constantly looking for what “the Chinese” are up to, our journalists could take a step back and learn some lessons from this latest episode. They could go to Hartcher’s own recent Quarterly Essay, Red Flag, which concluded with the reasonable point that despite the pervasiveness of China’s political influence-buying efforts and its United Front Work within the diaspora, Australians can have faith in their institutions’ capacity to resist subversion by a regime that, unlike the Soviet Union of the 1940s, has no local following.

They could consider that the 1.2 million people of Chinese descent in Australia came here mostly to get away from the People’s Republic, not replicate it. They, and the 230,000 students normally resident here, are a threat more to the communist system than ours, especially if we upgrade the student experience. (Melbourne University’s Fran Martin has found that a majority go home disappointed, not having made Australian friends.)

They could consider that our own expertise, along with that of friends like the United States, Canada, Europe, South Korea, Japan and Israel, at least keeps us up with the level of cyber espionage coming out of China and Russia.

In short, we are not at war and we don’t need to match the “patriotic” journalism of Beijing’s intemperate Global Times. •

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Turnbull remains one of the great puzzles of Australian public life. This book does only a little, at least consciously, to clear that matter up for us. Unconsciously, it’s rather more revealing: for, as his former business partner Nicholas Whitlam has suggested in the Weekend Australian, it’s a deeply evasive book in places. But its evasions are more meaningful than the “revelations” that have been the subject of many a sensational media article in recent days — and much more so than the sensational text messages, diary entries, WhatsApp conversations and all the rest on which Turnbull draws to provide his insider’s account.

This reader’s sensation was often that of a member of a jury being addressed by a skilled if not entirely scrupulous barrister. But there are also hints of a hard sell. By the end of the book’s almost 700 pages, I felt like someone trying to get away from a pushy salesman determined to press the latest mobile phone on me.

Turnbull, of course, has been on sale since the 1980s, and his particular blend of skills has invariably drawn a good price in the market. Kerry Packer saw his value early, and Malcolm didn’t let him down when, as the “Goanna,” the multimillionaire was subjected to allegations of criminality arising from the Costigan royal commission. Turnbull thinks he discredited Frank Costigan, but he was really just the paid advocate of a bully whose habit of keeping millions stashed in his office safe understandably aroused suspicion. Costigan, after all, had already found Australia’s wealthy elite riddled with clever crooks, many of whom were none too fussy about going into business with waterfront thugs in their efforts to avoid paying tax. But the young and ambitious Turnbull was clever enough to turn his defence of Packer into a civil liberties crusade and his role as Packer’s counsel into hot personal PR.

Turnbull also did much for his public profile in the case against the Thatcher government’s efforts to stop publication of that excruciatingly dull and thoroughly paranoid cold war memoir, Peter Wright’s Spycatcher. Turnbull, tender about Packer’s reputation, seems unworried that the book’s central claim — that MI5 chief Roger Hollis was a Soviet mole — was almost certainly false. But then Hollis was dead and, unlike Packer, didn’t have Turnbull on a retainer. Once again, Turnbull was the great crusader for right against might; in his summing up during the trial, he compared the cause of publishing Wright’s miserable book with the struggles of Australia’s shearing unions in the 1890s, a topic on which his mother, Coral Lansbury, had written.

It’s no surprise to find that there are plenty of actors in the family; Angela Lansbury is a relative. The account of his childhood is a mixture of nostalgia and pain — born before his parents wed, he was the product of a doomed marriage of ill-suited partners. The absence of his beautiful and talented mother, a writer for radio, is at the heart of the early part of the book, even while Turnbull seems to go out of his way to make it otherwise: “I don’t think I could have been any closer to Coral, nor do I think she could have been a better or more attentive mother.” Except that she leaves. And then she arranges for the furniture to follow her to New Zealand, where she had moved with a new husband, her third. Malcolm is told that she was merely studying for another degree over there; his father failed to inform him that his mother wasn’t coming back. “So, her absence crept up on me, like a slow chill around the heart,” he recalls.

But that’s almost the last we hear of Lansbury, who made an academic career in the United States: I suspect that the chill didn’t disappear any time soon, if ever. Turnbull provides an affectionate portrait of the father left behind, who was a bit of a lad, more like an older brother. But Bruce Turnbull scraped together the money to send Malcolm to Sydney Grammar as a boarder, which young Malcolm at first hates, because he is a bedwetter and is bullied. He eventually flourishes under the guidance of inspiring teachers.

Young Malcolm liked history and recalls writing an essay on Cosimo de’ Medici. That might explain a little: Cosimo was a Florentine banker, founding member of the dynasty that effectively ruled Florence, and a patron of the arts, architecture and scholarship. His indictment in 1431 accused him of “having sought to elevate himself higher than others.” Imprisoned for a time, he later made a triumphant return to political rule, becoming the city-state’s grand and visionary statesman. Any of that sound familiar?

When the artist Lewis Miller accepted a commission in the early 1990s to produce portraits of Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull, he decided on a homage to the Renaissance portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino by Piero della Francesca, held in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. An unimpressed Turnbull apparently thought that the resulting painting made him look like a “big, fat, greedy c—t.” (Ray Hughes, the Sydney dealer who arranged the commission, valiantly defended the artist by explaining that Miller was a realist painter.) But it’s hard to shake off the feeling that Turnbull has modelled himself on his image of a Renaissance-era Italian merchant-statesman, right down to the republicanism and the landed estate outside the city walls (actually, in the Upper Hunter).

Still a student at the University of Sydney, Malcolm is already doing political journalism for print radio and television. Like Paul Keating, he sits at the feet of old Jack Lang, and is attracted to “the romance and history” of the labour movement — presumably, in large part, through his mother’s influence — while always feeling like “a natural liberal, drawn to the entrepreneurial and enterprising.” With a good private school education behind him and an abundance of talent, energy and ambition, life now seems like pretty smooth sailing; opportunity just falls into his lap. He attends an Oxford Union debate while on a trip to England and speaks from the floor on the importance of a free press. Sure enough, Harold Evans, the Sunday Times editor, is present and sends him a note asking him to drop by in London. When he does, the next day, Evans immediately offers Turnbull a job, which he declines so he can finish his law degree back in Sydney. But there is a handy connection for the future. Life is sweet.

The run of luck continues. Back in Sydney, Turnbull turns up to write a profile of barrister Tom Hughes; he ends up marrying his daughter, Lucy. Soon, he is working for Packer, travelling the world signing up the West Indies team to World Series Cricket and arranging the Australian licence for Playboy. Then there’s a Rhodes Scholarship — although not on his first application — and a good degree from Oxford, despite his spending much of his time mucking about in journalism in London in the middle of a printers’ strike at The Times. The young man who admires the romance and history of the labour movement now tries to line up a deal that would have Packer come in, take over Times Newspapers, and break the unions. It is already clear enough that the cause dearest to Malcolm’s heart is Malcolm. There is no mention of the shearers’ unions on this occasion.

Tragically Bruce Turnbull, now a wealthy and successful hotel-broker, is killed in a light-plane accident soon after Malcolm returns to Sydney. Malcolm is now married, the owner of a Hunter Valley property inherited from his father, and a member of the bar; but what will Malcolm do with his life? He is not shy of aiming high. His “ambition was to get to the top of the profession and equal, if not excel, Lucy’s father.” It is a revealing way to frame one’s ambitions: to better one’s wife’s father, who was possibly the country’s leading barrister and a former federal attorney-general.

By the time he is forty, Turnbull has achieved his dream of financial independence. When he moves his family into a massive and luxurious waterfront mansion in 1994, he says that he has achieved what his father had always told him would be “the ultimate home”; fittingly, it overlooks the block of flats in which his father raised him. But interpreting such material is a job for Dr Freud and his followers, and not for an old-fashioned historian such as this reviewer.

Malcolm really begins to rake in the millions as a merchant banker in the late 1980s. His speciality is restructuring media companies, which are all over the shop in the wake of new media laws, the recklessness of some of the business figures involved — including Alan Bond, Christopher Skase and (Young) Warwick Fairfax — and the market and financial turmoil of the era. Turnbull falls out with Packer in the battle to control Fairfax, but Packer has already cheated him, so that’s okay. From there, it’s an even bigger fortune as an IT entrepreneur with OzEmail, and various dealings in mining and forestry in out-of-the-way places like Siberia, China and the Solomons, which are all aboveboard and environmentally friendly — nothing to see here.

Next, he closes his investment bank and joins Goldman Sachs, becoming managing director of its Australian operations. Paddy Manning’s biography of Turnbull points out that Turnbull became a partner in the firm just before it listed on the New York Stock Exchange. His new shareholding is likely to have added tens of millions to his wealth: one estimate put it at $70 million at the time Turnbull left the bank in 2001, much more than he made from his OzEmail investment. None of this is mentioned in A Bigger Picture. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that this particular evasion is better for the image Turnbull wishes to present in this book of a far-seeing, cutting-edge IT entrepreneur rather than the remarkably fortunate recipient of an enormous windfall.

Inconveniently — because he is moving, inexorably, towards a political career — Turnbull becomes entangled in one of the greatest corporate disasters in Australian history, the collapse of insurance company HIH. He assures us there is nothing to see here, either. Once again, you’ll end up rather better informed if you go to Manning’s biography.

His public profile increases enormously through his role in the Australian Republican Movement. The chapter on this topic is probably the most passionless of the book. It’s true he’s at the disadvantage of having written books on this subject before. But reading it now, it’s hard to imagine he ever cared enough to put in all those hours and hand over the $5 million he claims he paid to keep ARM going, but a lot of water has passed under the bridge since the defeat of the referendum in 1999. By the time he became prime minister, he couldn’t have made his lack of interest in pursuing the matter more apparent short of knighting Prince Philip. His predecessor already had that covered.

In 2004 he enters parliament via a good old-fashioned branch stack. He’s barely in the door before handing out advice on how to reform the tax system, which upsets the treasurer, Peter Costello. Still, John Howard soon promotes him to ministerial office, and, naturally, he is responsible for “one of the most enduring reforms of the Howard government,” the Water Act. Entering opposition late in 2007, he has to endure Brendan Nelson as leader, though apparently he has absolutely nothing to do with his fall. Nothing to see here.

Then, just four years after entering parliament, he becomes leader of the opposition. Good job. Malcolm tells us that, unlike Tony Abbott, he’s a “builder not a wrecker,” but he nonetheless opposes the Rudd Labor government’s second and larger fiscal stimulus during the global financial crisis because it wasn’t needed. China would have fixed everything anyway. In fact, he concedes almost nothing to the Labor government’s efforts to deal with the GFC. Malcolm always knows best, even in the worst economic crisis for eighty years, when plenty of minds at least as good as his own hadn’t a clue what was going to happen next.

He is deceived by weird and ill Treasury official Godwin Grech, who convinces him with a fake email that he has the dirt on Rudd. Turnbull is ashamed of himself — not, apparently, for accepting leaks from a senior Treasury official, but for allowing himself to be deceived and making that the basis of corruption accusations against Rudd. Turnbull loses the leadership in the midst of a party bust-up over the government’s proposal for a carbon pollution reduction scheme, which Turnbull wishes to support. He is betrayed by colleagues he trusts, and not for the last time. He goes into a deep depression in which he has suicidal thoughts and takes antidepressants. It is the most obviously honest section of the book. “I feel at present like a complete and utter failure,” he writes in his diary.

He decides to leave politics and then decides to stay. When the Abbott government is elected in 2013, he is given the communications portfolio with responsibility for the National Broadband Network, which keeps him busy. He doesn’t put a foot wrong, and the result is an NBN that is one of the best in the world. Nothing to see here, except “the largest single piece of infrastructure in Australia’s history.” Labor’s “smouldering trainwreck” is now “a success story.” Well done, Malcolm.

For Turnbull, there’s really no policy issue that won’t be resolved by turning his gigantic intellect to it — guided by a few corporate mates and old Sydney connections and the occasional academic researcher or clever staffer — and then applying a technical fix of some kind. So, cutting business tax is really just common sense because it will bring in investment and produce “jobs and growth.” There’s no need to ask whether it’s fair or even whether it leads to more investment or jobs, because Malcolm tells us it’s all good. On the other hand, he won’t touch negative gearing because it won’t help housing affordability as police and teachers own investment properties and the problem is really one of supply.

Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin make a hash of running the country. Abbott is “crazy” and “a threat to the nation and its security.” Scott Morrison is duplicitous and plotting, Peter Dutton extreme and plodding. Turnbull takes advantage of the gathering chaos and the well-founded fear that Abbott was leading the Coalition to defeat to move against his leadership. He wins the prime ministership, but Abbott, despite public undertakings of forbearance, undermines him from the very earliest days until Turnbull’s eventual fall. Still, the nimble Turnbull cleverly reforms the Senate voting system and engineers a double dissolution election for mid 2016. As ever, everyone including the media is left floundering and Malcolm is the smartest person in the room, the smartest person on every page.

But then things start to go wrong. Malcolm almost loses that election. It’s not his fault, however; it is Labor’s big lie that the government wanted to privatise Medicare. While recognising that his party has tended to unreliability on Medicare at times, including with Abbott and Joe Hockey’s 2014 budget proposal for a co-payment, not once does he pause to ask if he might have had anything to do with why the “lie” works. Could it be because Malcolm looks, sounds and acts like just the kind of guy who would try to privatise Medicare? Like a grammar school sook complaining of the beastly behaviour of the other boys on the rugby pitch, he makes a sulky, angry and graceless speech on election night that provides the country with a valuable insight into why so many people who have had to work with Turnbull rather dislike him.

Anyway, in the end it’s all okay because Australia by this time has entered a truly golden age of enlightened leadership: economically rational, socially progressive, firm, just and sane in its international dealings even when they involve tyrants like Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Luckily, nimble Malcolm solves the problem of how to deal with the marriage equality issue. Opposed by both hardliners in his own party and a Labor opposition intent on using the issue for political gain, Malcolm finds a way through — the smart technocrat is triumphant again. He claims same-sex marriage as one of his government’s greatest achievements. For good measure, he denigrates the Yes campaigners; let’s not share any of the credit for reform, which is such a rare commodity these days. This chapter, along with his embarrassing special pleading about why he rejected the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, provides an especially vivid illustration of Turnbull’s chutzpah, opportunism and elitist understanding of politics. Cosimo de’ Medici would have understood it all too well.

A Bigger Picture leads us on a lengthy excursion through international meetings, policy triumphs and media conspiracies. Turnbull is proud of achievements, such as the foreign interference laws, energy infrastructure including Snowy 2.0, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (minus the United States). He defends Gonski 2.0 as good policy, but clearly also enjoys the politics of flaunting his old Sydney Grammar School chum in the faces of the Labor Party and teachers’ unions. With this Renaissance prince, Machiavelli’s Cesare Borgia is usually not trailing too far behind Cosimo de’ Medici.

Turnbull thinks he would have won the 2019 election if not for the blow-up of August 2018 triggered by legislation for a National Energy Guarantee. Indeed, he thinks that was why his enemies were determined to be rid of him. They were quite prepared to destroy the government in preference to having him continue as an enlightened and liberal prime minister.

The last part of the book tells the tale of the demise of his leadership. Here, we are treated to the melodrama of Tony Abbott’s vengefulness, Peter Dutton’s mad ambition, Mathias Cormann’s cowardice and treachery, and the quiet duplicity of Scott Morrison — all of it oiled by the remorseless hostility of the Murdoch media and right-wing shock jocks. The right of his own party are “terrorists” determined to blow up the government. Others become persuaded that the only way forward is to give in to the “terrorists.”

I sometimes found this a distasteful book — not as distasteful as, say, The Latham Diaries (2005), but there are enough similarities to notice. Its combination of special pleading, broken confidences and bitter scorn will now become part and parcel of Turnbull’s reputation, and will confirm and harden the opinions of detractors. On the other hand, he is being naive if he imagines that a book so obviously self-serving will be taken at face value by the future political historians whom this historically literate man clearly has in view.

Nor will it alleviate the sense of disappointment that many, quite rightly, feel about Turnbull’s prime ministership. His prime ministership was not without its achievements, but Turnbull never really explains why someone who prides himself on being his own man allowed himself to become a hostage to the right of his own party, and to his Coalition partner, as readily as he did. Perhaps it was just vaulting ambition; once he had the prize in hand, and having been deprived of the leadership before, his main aim was to keep it.

Giving way to the right and the Nationals on issues such as same-sex marriage and climate change might have seemed a reasonable price to pay. But it was a strange course for a man who prides himself on being a canny deal-maker and, before the 2016 election at least, was holding all of the best cards. I don’t think it’s quite true to blame sheer opportunism, because I take seriously Turnbull’s claim that he is a constructive politician for whom power needs a purpose. My best guess is that Turnbull’s famously high estimation of his own intelligence and ability resulted in his overestimating his capacity to manoeuvre around those he regarded as lesser men and women — which was pretty much everyone else.

Turnbull certainly didn’t see coming the problems caused by his near loss in the 2016 election. It crippled his political standing and made his government vulnerable to internal revolt on the floor of parliament. But it would be psychologically impossible for Turnbull to admit that it was Bill Shorten, whom he regards with something of a grand duke’s condescension towards a rag-and-bone man, rather than Abbott, Dutton, Morrison or Cormann, who did the most to bring him undone. Nor could he have anticipated the difficulties in parliament caused by all those section 44 ineligibility cases.

Turnbull is unusual among Australian politicians in being willing to talk publicly of love, and it is clear that there is plenty of it in his own marriage and family life. But I suspect that, despite a bluster that many see as arrogance, he carries a lot more pain from his childhood than he is willing or able to disclose. I gained no sense from this book that religious belief plays a major role in his life, although he has converted to the Catholic faith of his wife’s family, and it might also mean more than he is willing to hint at here. There is certainly driving ambition, backed by the energy, bravado and intellect to achieve things most would find impossible.

Yet it has also been a career marked by big failures in things that have clearly mattered to him. As the history of Australia’s past fifty years is written, Turnbull will feature as a phenomenon more than as a politician or prime minister. In that respect, he will likely acquire a different kind of historical reputation from that of one of his few rivals as a larger-than-life public figure, Bob Hawke. The relatively modest nature of Turnbull’s achievements as prime minister will almost certainly ensure that he is not regarded as anywhere near as significant as Hawke. As with The Hawke Memoirs (1994), however, it seems a pity that this supremely gifted man was unable to produce a more generous and gracious account of an accomplished public life. But in Turnbull’s case, perhaps that is more a mark of what our politics has become than of his own character. •

The post The Prince appeared first on Inside Story.

Ham’s account, which won the NSW Premier’s Prize for Australian History, depicts a protest movement pitted against the men who fought in Vietnam as much as the governments who sent them there. In a chapter titled “Baby-killers,” Ham recounts allegations that demonstrators appeared at airports, abusing and even spitting on soldiers the moment they touched down in Australia.

One veteran quoted by Ham recalled being attacked as soon as he got off the plane in Sydney. “Outside Mascot airport, hundreds of demonstrators pelted him and his fellow troops with rotten fruit,” Ham tells readers. Another soldier described family reunions inside an airport terminal being interrupted when “these motherfuckers come bursting in carrying placards… One I’ll never forget as long as I live… a placard saying ‘CHILD KILLERS.’” A third veteran attested to an airport demonstration at which a woman lunged at him and spat in his face.

Reacting to incidents like this, Ham’s assessment of the anti-war movement is scathing. Describing the protesters as a “fifth column,” he comments acidly that “perhaps silence is the only refuge open to them. If so, their silence condemns them: none has publicly recanted; none has apologised.” That, of course, assumes they were guilty of the sins alleged.

Intrigued by these claims, Dapin scoured digitised newspapers from the period for reports of anti–Vietnam war demonstrations at Australian airports. He found no reports of incidents at any airports, nor any reports of protesters insulting, abusing or spitting at soldiers anywhere else. None at all. What he did find was that the first allegation of this nature wasn’t published until 1982, a decade after the last Australian soldiers had returned home from Vietnam. Ultimately, Dapin concluded that airport demonstrations, spitting and jeers are the stuff of myth, not history.

Ham, on the other hand, stands by his original assessment of the evidence. “The argument that airport protests against the Vietnam war weren’t reported, ergo, they didn’t happen, is illogical and absurd,” he wrote recently via email from Paris. “I spoke to many veterans, not just the ones recorded in my book, who recall clearly encountering hostile anti-war protests at Australian airports on their return from Vietnam… Dapin is, in essence, calling them liars. I believe the soldiers’ accounts. And I stand firmly by my account of the history of the anti-war movement.”

In fact, Dapin goes to great lengths to avoid calling anybody a liar, but he does conclude the allegations are untrue. His research extended well beyond the mainstream press, and he found no contemporary record of conservative Australia criticising the anti-war movement for targeting soldiers. “The National Civic Council’s News Weekly, the scourge of the student left and tireless chronicler of radical outrage, recorded no airport demonstrations,” he notes. ASIO, which spied intensively on the peace movement throughout the war, produced no reports of airport demonstrations. Dapin even trawled through archives of materials produced by the anti-war movement itself in search of flyers, posters or polemics that might point to any of the fabled airport confrontations. Again, he found nothing.

Similarly, there is no contemporary evidence of Australian soldiers being called baby killers or anything similar. The term didn’t appear at all in the Sydney Morning Herald during the war years, and the Canberra Times made only two mentions of “baby killers” during the period: one related to a lethal virus, the other to a cot death. In News Corp’s and Nine’s digital archives, the first mention of “baby killers” in relation to Vietnam veterans doesn’t appear until 1997. “There are thousands of photographs of anti–Vietnam war demonstrations in archives throughout Australia,” writes Dapin, “and I have been unable to find a picture of a banner reading ‘baby killers.’”

During the entire period of the war, just three confrontations between protesters and soldiers were documented. In June 1966, at Sydney’s welcome home parade for the first men to return from the Vietnam war, a young woman poured red paint over herself and ran between the marching veterans as they approached Sydney Town Hall. In 1969, when the recently returned Ninth Battalion marched through the streets of Adelaide, roughly two dozen protesters carried out a silent vigil with placards reading “Peace Now” and “Withdraw Them All Now.” And in May 1970, men from the Third Battalion, R.A.R., turned up at a student protest in Adelaide, repeatedly charging and attacking the demonstrators. One soldier punched a nineteen-year-old woman, rendering her unconscious. “These events were not rumoured or recounted for the first time many years after the fact,” Dapin pointedly comments. “They were photographed and reported in the press the next day.”

Paul Ham believes there’s a plausible reason why the airport confrontations alleged in his book were never reported. “By the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the peace movement was so ubiquitous that small protests simply weren’t newsworthy,” he wrote to me. “University sit-ins, street marches, public protests were happening often by late 1968… and the press grew weary of them.” This might explain why some, even many, incidents went unreported. But it doesn’t explain why none was ever reported.

The issue is not that the press tired of the airport demonstrations: there’s no report of any to get tired of. It wasn’t that the mainstream press ignored an issue covered by others; conservative Australia apparently chose to ignore the anti-war movement’s misdemeanours as well. And, on Ham’s logic, the left itself avoided any public debate of the merits of targeting troops at airports; no activist wrote about whether such a tactic might be counterproductive or worse.

Ham’s example of the veteran who was supposedly pelted with tomatoes at Sydney Airport relies on the testimony of a pseudonymous “Mike” in a pamphlet published in 1987 by a veterans’ counselling service. “We got our satisfaction afterwards,” Mike says in the pamphlet. “150 toey, angry lads from Vietnam versus 400 demonstrators — they didn’t stand a chance. The cops were very good about it. They seemed to be otherwise occupied for a while.”

Dapin scoured newspaper archives from the period, surmising that an airport riot involving 550 people, inspired by one of the era’s great political controversies, must have attracted plenty of press attention. But it turns out that there is simply no mention of the alleged incident, or anything like it, in any newspaper from the time. To believe Ham’s evidence, we have to imagine that the Australian media missed this story entirely.

Ham insisted by email that “all the servicemen I interviewed told me they’d experienced some form of abuse on their return home, mostly verbal insults etc., at airports and public places or in their own communities and homes… To assume that the story of the past is limited to press reports and whether there’s an official document to account for an event (which I call “document-fetishism”), is not only bad history; it’s anti-history. It ignores the voices of those who experienced these events.”

Dapin doesn’t ignore those voices; he draws on conversations with more than a hundred Vietnam veterans he interviewed for an earlier book, The Nashos’ War, and reflects at length on the nature and reliability of oral history. Indeed, he begins Australia’s Vietnam by describing an article he wrote for Good Weekend in 2007 based on interviews with members of the Queensland chapter of the Vietnam Veterans Motorcycle Club. One veteran told Dapin how his unit was forced to sneak home under the cover of darkness, their flight home rescheduled to avoid demonstrations at the airport in Australia. Another said he was spat on and a bucket of paint was poured all over him by a student activist. “We came back with the general consensus that we were a bunch of bloody idiots, bludgers, baby killers, morons,” the club president recalled.

Reflecting on this story, Dapin explains that he didn’t bother to ask for specific details about when and where the alleged incidents happened, or whether there were any press reports at the time. He didn’t need to. The stories made sense. They were the kind of things everybody knew had happened. Thus he shared the stories with his readers, repeating them “faithfully and uncritically.”

But he now believes they were untrue. This is not because he thinks oral testimony should be ignored. It’s because he recognises that it needs to be subjected to critical scrutiny and interpreted in the light of other available evidence. To accept Mike’s story about the mass riot at Mascot (relied on by Ham), we have not only to believe that police turned a blind eye but also that protesters — hardly unpractised at making their voice heard — failed to raise so much as a peep. Indeed, if we are to believe that airport demonstrations occurred frequently, we have to imagine that authorities allowed them to occur without making a single arrest, pressing any charges, or making any arrangements or laws that might have prevented them.

Ham cites at length a veteran who claimed he was confronted by a large demonstration, and spat on, when he caught a connecting flight to Brisbane, the day after his unit had arrived in Sydney. What is the likelihood, asks Dapin, of demonstrators going out to the airport on the off-chance of confronting a soldier who had got in the day before? The notion that flights arrived during the night to avoid demonstrations, which Dapin himself once uncritically reported, turns out to have been publicly debunked long ago: it was simply so planes could be available for commercial use in the daytime.

Despite the chasm between veterans’ personal recollections and the documentary record, Dapin believes these men generally feel they are telling the truth. Their mistaken memories are symptomatic, he argues, of our capacity to unconsciously confuse, alter, ameliorate and assimilate. As stories have been told and retold over time, he suggests, invented details have been subsumed into sincere recollections of the past in a way that helps make sense of tragic, confusing and often overwhelming events. “It is difficult to communicate an abstract idea of social alienation,” Dapin perceptively observes, “easier to weave a story around a sentiment, to provide the material answer to the question that even the most sympathetic listener silently demands — what happened to you that made you feel that way?”

For his part, Ham points to the testimony of Harry Whiteside, who alleged that he was confronted by spitting demonstrators at the airport and called a “bloody kid killer.” But his recollection, housed at UNSW’s Australians at War Film Archive, exemplifies exactly what is so problematic about this kind of evidence. Recorded in 2004, more than three decades after the alleged events, his statement isn’t questioned, challenged or examined in any way. Whiteside’s testimony is also laced with palpable anger and animosity. “I just had this wild desire to plug a magazine on and clean them all up,” he says at one point. None of this disproves his claim. It just gives us pause for thought before accepting it.

Dapin agrees with Ham that many veterans tell stories like Whiteside’s — he has heard them firsthand. Does their sheer number, then, make it likely that they have at least a kernel of truth, despite the dearth of authenticating evidence? This conclusion would be more plausible were it not for the unambiguous evidence that our collective memory of the Vietnam years has become profoundly distorted in other ways as well.

On a Saturday morning in October 1987, tens of thousands of returned soldiers marched in the Vietnam Veterans’ Welcome Home Parade in Sydney before an estimated crowd of 100,000, including the prime minister, Bob Hawke. The parade, a decade and a half after the last troops returned, was conducted on the widely shared assumption that no such event had occurred during the war itself.

The assumption was wrong. Massive parades occurred across Australia throughout the Vietnam war, and Dapin lists them all in an appendix to his book. In a city of fewer than two and a half million people, 300,000 Sydney-siders turned out to honour veterans returning from Vietnam in June 1966, for instance. The cheering crowds clapped and threw confetti; more than once, women ran out from the crowd to plant a kiss on the cheek of one of the marching men. “There were schoolchildren seeing their first march, and shrilling their excitement,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported. “There were wigged and robed barristers, leaving courts to line the footpath in Macquarie Street and add a measure of dignified applause.”

Newspaper reports of enormous welcome home parades in subsequent years describe “the traditional welcome to homecoming troops,” “hundreds of thousands packing the pavement,” prolonged cheering and “barrages of tickertape.” The crowds far outnumbered even the largest anti-war moratoriums, and yet they have vanished from history, their disappearance a monument to our collective capacity to misremember this controversial period.

Even today, the amnesia endures. Dapin places the multiple Herald reports of enormous public celebrations of Vietnam veterans in the sixties and seventies alongside one from Anzac Day 2013. “None of them were welcomed,” it solemnly reports. “The official ‘welcome home’ parade for Vietnam veterans was not held until 1987.” In defending his account of the supposed hostility faced by returning veterans, Paul Ham summoned the myth that they were denied welcome home parades. “Is it any wonder,” Ham emailed, “the Vietnam veterans had to wait until 1987 for a real ‘Return Home Parade’? The very point of which was a massive public effort to right the wrongs that had been inflicted on so many of them.”

The American sociologist and veteran Jerry Lembcke conducted a similar investigation to Dapin’s in the late 1990s, publishing his findings in a book called The Spitting Image. Lembcke also found no credible evidence of soldiers being spat on, or veterans being confronted at airports; like Dapin, he found that the first allegations of such incidents only surfaced long after the war had ended.

Lembcke also discovered something even more remarkable. The first-ever representation of an anti-war airport demonstration was in an Oscar-winning Hollywood feature film released three years after the fall of Saigon. In the film, Coming Home, the fictional protagonist is accosted by protesters as he reunites with his waiting wife in the airport terminal. Chanting “One, Two, Three, Four, we don’t want your rotten war!” the demonstrators continue to heckle the couple as they get into their car and head for home. Every one of the allegations by people who claimed to have witnessed such incidents was made after that film and others like it were released.

In the late seventies, Lembcke explains, Hollywood began to represent the Vietnam war primarily as a story about the homecoming experience of American veterans. And it is at this point that protesters, albeit fictional ones, started appearing at airports and assailing soldiers as though they were the enemy. In 1982, the maligned and marginalised former Green Beret John Rambo came to personify the theme of home-front betrayal. “I did what I had to do to win. But somebody wouldn’t let us win,” he says in First Blood, which topped the American box office for three weeks straight and ultimately grossed US$125 million. “Then I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport. Protesting me. Spitting. Calling me baby killer, and all kinds of vile crap. Who are they to protest me? Huh?”

The myth-making moved up a gear in the second Rambo film, when the hero was called on to rescue American POWs still languishing in Southeast Asia, only to be constantly betrayed from above. He is sceptical from the start: “Do we get to win this time?” he asks his erstwhile commander. Back in Vietnam he bares his heart to a nascent love interest. “When I came back to the States, I found another war going on. A war against the soldiers returning.” As further sequels followed, rip-offs were released and Rambo became a cult figure, the image of the betrayed veteran slowly seeped its way into our cultural common sense.

Australians, like Americans, have come to remember the Vietnam homecoming depicted by Hollywood over what actually occurred. As Mark Dapin observes, “The existence of the same impossible stories in the US, Australia and New Zealand make it difficult to allow any other conclusion.” But he makes one significant qualification. In America’s case, it’s true that most of the three and a half million Americans who served in Southeast Asia didn’t receive a welcome home parade during the war. In this respect, our mythology appears to borrow more from American reality than American movies.

The mistreatment of Vietnam veterans is so embedded in Australia’s official memory that in 2006 then prime minister John Howard was moved to apologise on the nation’s behalf. “The sad fact is, Mr Speaker, that those who served in Vietnam were not welcomed back as they should have been at the time,” he told parliament. “And I think the nation collectively, Mr Speaker, whatever our views may be, and I include those who supported the war as well as those who opposed it, we collectively failed those men at the time, and they are owed our apologies and our regrets for that failure.”

The attempt to make amends continued with the onset of commemorations of the centenary of the first world war, with the veterans affairs minister declaring that Vietnam veterans’ service and sacrifice had gone unrecognised. As governor-general, Vietnam veteran Peter Cosgrove would claim that only with a welcome home parade held in 1987 did “the Australian community start to put things right,” setting aside the “virulent,” “political anti-war activism” that had “marginalised and stigmatised” veterans up to that time.

Oddly, Mark Dapin might also be partly responsible for the failure of his revisionist history to take hold. In a strange turn, he suggests that the myths about the anti-war movement are nothing more than the harmless expressions of veterans’ subjective experience. “The significance of the airport demonstration stories,” Dapin writes, “may lie less in the fact that the accounts are false than the feeling that their meaning is true for those who remember them and believe they were the victims of an organised campaign of public harassment and shaming.”

Thus, in the final analysis, his book elevates these smears to the status of mythological expressions of personal truths. “Does it matter that the airport demonstrations did not happen?” Dapin asks himself. “The veterans are not libelling anybody: no protester — or even group of protesters — has even been named as having taken part. Why not just let people be?” Because in the mythology that has been given credence by journalists and historians, taken seriously by politicians and enshrined in official declarations, protesters become traitors and dissent collapses into disloyalty.

And what of that one isolated case of a protester targeting the soldiers themselves? The woman who threw paint over herself near Sydney Town Hall in 1966 was Nadine Jensen, a twenty-one-year-old typist from Campbelltown. Before being restrained by police, she ran between the ranks of marching soldiers, bumping into several, and finally threw her arms around the commanding officer at the head of the march.

In court the next day, she stated that she had acted alone and was not a member of any political party or organisation. Her action was “symbolic of the blood being shed in Vietnam,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. She “thought it was her personal responsibility to do something about the situation in Vietnam,” the paper continued. “Miss Jensen said there was a moral issue at stake and she felt that if people examined themselves they would find Australia’s involvement in Vietnam was not justified.”

Jensen expressed regret that she had appeared hostile towards the troops themselves. That was not her intention, she told the court. “My action was not so much against the soldiers but against authority itself,” she said. “My action may have been wrong in that I should have been protesting against those people in Australia whose attitude was one of complacency and apathy.” She was right to make this concession, but her slight was innocuous in comparison with the government policy she was opposing. In symbolising the bloodbath to which we were a party, placing centrestage what too many were willing to put out of sight and out of mind, Jensen called on her fellow Australians to face up to the consequences of their actions.

In court in June 1966, Nadine Jensen was found guilty of offensive behaviour. But Jensen countered with her own accusation. “I know Australians are very brave physically, but I think they should show more intellectual and moral bravery.” She was right then, and the malevolent misrepresentation that still swirls around the anti-war movement suggests the enduring relevance of her rebuke. •

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Moorehead ranged over the peninsula with the venerable Major Tasman Millington, who had arrived in 1919 to help establish the imperial war graves and stayed for forty years to tend them. “Except for occasional organised tours not more than half a dozen visitors arrive from one year’s end to the other,” Moorehead wrote. “Often for months at a time nothing of any consequence happens, lizards scuttle about the tombstones in the sunshine and time goes by in an endless dream.”

In the years leading to the centenary of the landing in 2015, Anzac Cove and its rugged, scrubby hinterland was in danger of being trampled to dust by hordes of Australian pilgrims anxious to tap the wellspring of our national identity — the place where our traits of courage, sacrifice, mateship and resilience against impossible odds were first displayed to an awestruck world despite the perfidy of hopeless military leaders driving a lost cause.

Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of Australians, old and increasingly young, have flocked there. In April 2015 more than 10,000 attended the dawn service, with thousands more turned away in a hotly contested ballot for spots on the crowded shore. While the traffic has eased in the aftermath of the saturation commemorations of the centenary, the fervour lives on.

But this year the Anzac battlefields will once more be as deserted as they were a week before Christmas 1915, when the last of the diggers stole away in the depths of night, miraculously without a single casualty. Now Turkey and Australia, reunited in peace, are united in lockdown as the coronavirus reigns. And as a planet under quarantine ponders how we might build a better post-pandemic world, perhaps we might also consider a rethink of the view of the Gallipoli campaign in Australian history.

The assessment of the campaign still taken as gospel by most Australians — and still driven monotonously through Australian school curriculums — is that Gallipoli was an unmitigated and pointless disaster driven by callous British generals and leavened only by the heroism of the first diggers, 7600 of whom died needless deaths while another 18,000 were wounded.

The foundation of that mythology was largely the work of two journalists, one of whom essentially plagiarised the other. Between them they sowed the popular fiction of Australians as some kind of military master race and, in tandem, the equally exaggerated thesis that the campaign was an ill-conceived folly that did nothing to advance the Allied cause in the Great War.

Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett was a buccaneering beat-up merchant straight from the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire on the press, Scoop. Doyen of the small group of correspondents accredited to cover the campaign, the man from the London Daily Telegraph was an inveterate gambler, a voracious womaniser and a serial bankrupt. He also had a fine and sometimes ferocious pen.

Ashmead-Bartlett’s florid account of the landing at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915 was the first to be published in Australia, a week before the hapless official Australian correspondent, Charles Bean, beset by accreditation problems, was able to get his relatively lacklustre dispatch through. The British journalist’s story, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 8 May, caused an eruption of patriotic jubilation as readers who had spent days fearing the worst rejoiced in a victorious account that might have seemed too good to be true.

The journalist described “a race of athletes” storming ashore and rushing the enemy’s trenches with empty rifle magazines and just the “cold steel” of their bayonets: “It was over in a minute. The Turks in the first trench either were bayoneted or ran away.” He wrote of wounded men cheering as they were towed back to hospital ships. And he described a Turkish counterattack the next morning met by a two-hour barrage from British warships: “Then, amidst the flash of the bayonet and a sudden charge by the Colonials… the Turkish broke… and fell back, sullen and checked. They kept up incessant fire throughout the day, but the Colonials had now dug themselves in.”

The dispatch, immediately reprinted and distributed to schools by the NSW government, was written four days after the landing. By then Ashmead-Bartlett knew full well how perilous the military situation was, how close the commanders had come to abandoning Anzac Cove during the mayhem of the first night, how massive the casualties had been and how, far from being safely dug in, the troops were clinging desperately to the hillsides under relentless Turkish fire. The truth was that while the Anzacs had indeed fought tenaciously, they had little to show for their huge sacrifices and they and their leaders had gravely miscalculated the strength and determination of the Turks.

No sooner had he erected the gilded pedestal on which he placed the Anzacs than Ashmead-Bartlett began to attack its foundations. And before long he would be aided in his task by the arrival of a gormless Australian journalist who stopped briefly at Gallipoli on his way to manage a cable news service in London.

The British journalist had grown up and grown famous in the freewheeling era of correspondents who flitted unchecked between opposing military and political forces in a series of colonial wars and local skirmishes across Europe and North Africa in the decade before the first world war. He was infuriated by strict new controls on the movement of journalists and the censorship of their work imposed by Whitehall in late 1914. At Gallipoli he vented his spleen against the commander, General Sir Ian Hamilton, even though Hamilton was not responsible for the rules and, as a champion of greater press freedom, did his best to bend them.

As the stalemate reached in those first hours at Gallipoli remained largely unchanged in the months that followed and a major offensive mounted in August failed to break it, the frustration of the politically well-connected Ashmead-Bartlett boiled over. He resolved to write to British prime minister Herbert Asquith arguing that the campaign be aborted and Hamilton sacked. Censorship controls made it impossible for him to send such a letter, but he found a willing smuggler for it with the arrival at Gallipoli in early September of journalist Keith Murdoch.

Murdoch, who sixteen years later would pass the gene of political intrigue and self-promotion to his son Rupert, was an enthusiastic conscript to the conspiracy. The letter was duly penned, but the courier only got as far as Marseilles before he was intercepted by military police who seized it. Undeterred, Murdoch proceeded to London where he audaciously produced a far more incendiary 8000-word epistle of his own — informed by the coaching he had received from Ashmead-Bartlett, his patchy recollections of what the British journalist had written, and scattered impressions formed during the mere four days he’d spent on the ground at Gallipoli. It was a beat-up that, a generation later, would have put to shame his son’s Fleet Street rags.

The Murdoch letter, addressed to former Australian prime minister Andrew Fisher, the high commissioner in London, synthesised what would become the two unshakeable pillars of popular Australian perceptions of Gallipoli: all the British commanders were terrible and the Anzac troops were strapping, almost god-like heroes: “It is stirring to see them, magnificent manhood, swinging their fine limbs as they walk about Anzac. They have the noble faces of men who have endured. Oh, if you could picture Anzac as I have seen it, you would find that to be an Australian is the greatest privilege the world has to offer.”

Murdoch declared that the August offensive had cost the Allies 35 per cent of their strength, or 33,000 men. (In fact, total Allied casualties were 21,500 against vastly greater Turkish losses.) He claimed that during the ill-fated August landings at Suvla Bay, officers were ordered to “shoot without mercy” any troops who lagged or loitered. (No such orders were issued.) He claimed that many of the 90,000 troops who landed at Suvla had died of thirst. (Although there were severe water shortages, none of the troops at Suvla — actually 30,000 in number — died of thirst.) He said an Australian general was “staggered” to see the IXth and Xth Corps retreating from the Anafarta Hills behind Suvla. (Staggering indeed: there was no Xth Corps at Suvla.)

Unlike Ashmead-Bartlett, who had not attacked Hamilton by name — instead leaving it to the reader to draw the obvious conclusion — Murdoch went straight for the jugular. After smearing the British troops as “toy soldiers… merely a lot of childlike youths without the strength to endure or brains to improve” and dismissing Hamilton’s entire headquarters staff as lazy cowards (never mind that three of them had won the Victoria Cross and would later die in battle), he denounced the general (himself twice nominated for the VC) and demanded his sacking. “I cannot see any solution which does not begin with the recall of Hamilton,” Murdoch wrote. “It is plain that when an army has completely lost faith in its general, and he has on numerous occasions proved his weaknesses, only one thing can be done.”

The intrigues of Murdoch and Ashmead-Bartlett found willing ears in London, where frustration was already mounting over the lack of success in the Dardanelles and pressure was growing from the generals on the Western Front to divert the men and matériel from Gallipoli to bolster their struggle. In mid October, Hamilton was recalled to London and, ignoring his argument that victory was within the Allies’ grasp, the government soon confirmed plans to evacuate.

And so Gallipoli was cast in Australia as a defining moment of our national character but an abject military failure.

What was not recognised at the time, and is still largely forgotten, was how much had been achieved during the eight months of the campaign. The Allied landings in April 1915 were the biggest amphibious assault in the history of warfare, waged against an enemy given months of warning of the impending attack, with superior manpower and firepower and in full control of the high ground. And the lack of men and matériel that hampered the tenacious General Hamilton from the outset would never be properly rectified.

After the war, ample evidence emerged to vindicate Hamilton’s conviction that, had his army stuck it out through the bitter winter into 1916 and been adequately reinforced and resupplied, it would have broken through at Gallipoli, neutralised Turkey and helped bring the war to a much earlier conclusion. It would be revealed that twice — during the naval attack at The Narrows in March 1915 and during the August offensive — the Allies had come breathtakingly close to victory.

In 1917 German journalist Harry Stuermer, who had been based in Turkey, revealed that Turkish defences at The Narrows were at breaking point after the British and French bombardment on 18 March 1915 and, desperately short of ammunition, would have been unable to withstand a renewed attack the following day — had the naval commanders not lost their nerve after losing several warships. Ismail Enver Pasha, the Ottoman war minister, later verified the account: “If the English had only had the courage to rush more ships through the Dardanelles they could have got to Constantinople.”

Stuermer also wrote that the Turkish leadership was convinced the Allies were about to break through in August. There was panic in Constantinople and the state archives and bullion reserves had been moved to Asia Minor in the expectation that the capital was about to fall.

The decision to open a new front at Suvla Bay, north of Anzac, as part of the August push was a brilliant tactic to outflank the Turks that unravelled under the incompetent leadership of the ageing Lieutenant General Frederick Stopford, who inexplicably ordered his troops to pause and rest as soon as they had landed. It was later confirmed that Stopford’s force faced just 1500 Turks who were taken completely by surprise. The general’s prevarication gave the Turks time to reinforce and hold their ground, largely because of the initiative of Colonel Mustafa Kemal, who a decade later would emerge as president of the Turkish republic. When General William Birdwood, one of the most distinguished commanders at Gallipoli, made a return visit in 1936, the Turkish army’s chief of staff, General Fahretein Pasha, told him, “When we saw your troops landing there we were taken utterly by surprise, and we wired Constantinople advising the government to evacuate the capital as the British would be through.”

Keith Murdoch’s great conceit — still propagated through media, movies and miniseries by his doting son — was that his courageous whistleblowing ended an unconscionable slaughter and saved countless Australian lives. What is forgotten is that the Allied toll of 110,000 casualties during the eight months at Gallipoli, terrible as it was, equalled the losses incurred in about three weeks of heavy fighting on the Western Front. The Australians liberated from the Dardanelles, in part through Murdoch’s agitation, headed not for safety but for the more ghastly killing fields of Flanders.

What is also largely forgotten about the retreat from Gallipoli is the impact that the freeing of six divisions of Turkish troops and their German overseers had on the future course of the war. Just as the eight-month campaign had meant those forces were tied down and unable to fight elsewhere — a much-underestimated dividend — their release had very serious consequences. “Within a few months,” wrote Maurice Hankey, the Australian-born secretary of the British War Council, “the Turks were rioting all over the East, capturing our besieged army at Kut (April 29), attacking our vital communications through the Suez Canal (July) and penetrating far into Persia; in August they even sent a corps to help the Germans in Galacia where the Allies, with armies even larger in aggregate than had been employed on the Peninsula, were everywhere on the defensive.”

One of the few who had argued in vain for the navy to persevere in the Dardanelles was Commodore Roger Keyes. Keyes would later be one of the few senior officers to fight strongly in support of Sir Ian Hamilton’s efforts to stop the evacuation and continue pressing the Turks.

In 1925, Keyes, by then an admiral and commander of Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet, steamed through the Dardanelles. Overcome with emotion, he told Britain’s official war historian, Cecil Aspinall-Oglander, “My God, it would have been easier than I thought; we simply couldn’t have failed… and because we didn’t try, another million lives were thrown away and the war went on for another three years.” •

Letters from a pilgrimage: Ken Inglis’s dispatches from his April 1965 trip to Gallipoli with 300 Anzac pilgrims

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