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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the first three pages alone, she labels Morrison secretive, petty, vindictive, a liar, a bully and a betrayer of his closest colleagues. In case she hasn’t made herself clear, he’s also “a deeply flawed personality” and “a duplicitous, damaged leader with limited horizons and appalling judgement” who “rarely understood what Australians expected of a prime minister.”

Reporting how colleagues reacted to the news that Morrison had signed himself up to multiple ministries, Savva reaches for alliteration: Morrison is “messianic, megalomaniacal and plain mad.” Still steaming 384 pages later, in the book’s acknowledgements, she describes Morrison as the worst prime minister she has covered in a line stretching back to Labor’s Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s.

The headline revelations from Bulldozed have been well aired: former treasurer Josh Frydenberg denounced Morrison’s taking of his portfolio as “extreme overreach”; even Morrison’s most loyal colleagues, Stuart Robert and Alex Hawke, have been deeply critical of his actions; the governor-general and his wife expect their dinner guests to face the person next to them and sing the final verse of “You Are My Sunshine.” Particularly welcome is the fact that Savva has persuaded so many of her interviewees to speak on the record.

But what else does Bulldozed tell us — not just about the election campaign but also about the virtues and vices of that enduring phenomenon, the election book?

Savva is an experienced, well-connected political journalist who also spent nine years working in John Howard’s governments of 1996–2007, first as a media adviser to treasurer Peter Costello and then in the Cabinet Policy Unit. She knows politics from two perspectives, then, but her abiding interest is in the daily cut and thrust rather than how policy is created or run.

So she barely mentions robodebt, for example, despite Morrison’s having been social security minister when it was developed and prime minister when the government was forced to abandon it. The scheme was found to be unlawful, to have taken much-needed funds from low-income households, to have imposed acute anxiety and to have cost lives. It was at best punitive, at worst cruel.

But if, like many in the Canberra press gallery, Savva focuses less on policy than on politics, she differs in making sharp judgements derived from firmly held moral views. And she rarely fails to notice who does what to whom and to comment accordingly.

She notices, for instance, which politicians reached out to each other after the election loss and which didn’t. In the former camp is Josh Frydenberg, who called Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers to offer his congratulations despite having lost his own seat of Kooyong, and contacted Kristina Keneally to offer his commiserations on her failed attempt to move from the Senate to a lower house seat. Albanese called Frydenberg during the campaign to say he had ordered the removal of a photo posted online by a Labor supporter showing the then treasurer in a Nazi uniform, and Chalmers texted Frydenberg on election night to ask if he was okay.

Liberal MP Fiona Martin, on the other hand, lost her seat but received no call from her former leader because, Savva concludes, she had crossed the floor to vote against the government on the Religious Discrimination Bill. Other backbenchers did receive calls from Morrison.

Savva has a gift for the pithy summation. Of the inability or unwillingness of Morrison’s staff to save the doomed PM from himself — a failure that culminated in the burly Morrison crash-tackling a child on a soccer pitch in the campaign’s final week — she writes:

It was one stupid stunt too many, on top of so many stupid ones that preceded it, like washing a woman’s hair in a salon, or welding by lifting the protective mask with sparks flying, or playing the ukulele. No one dared tell him to stop. They kept feeding his addiction for prearranged acts of self-parody.

Although Morrison is Savva’s primary target, others don’t escape her acid tongue. Tony Abbott’s chief accomplishment as Liberal leader was to “destroy Julia Gillard and then himself.” Liberal backbencher Nicolle Flint resisted joining a WhatsApp support group for women because she was sick of women casting themselves as victims, until she “cast herself as a victim of a hateful campaign in her seat of Boothby in 2019 and announced her retirement from parliament.” Former National Party leader Barnaby Joyce cops this zinger: “Joyce was to Liberal voters what Roundup was to weeds.”

The great virtue of campaign books is their recounting of vivid scenes witnessed by their authors and well-reported details from inside the parties’ headquarters. Bulldozed is a fine exemplar of this tradition, though it offers more of the latter than the former. Its account of how Anthony Albanese spent election evening, for instance, is accompanied by a candid photo of the future PM wearing a footy jumper, ugg boots and a face flushed with excitement, sitting next to a smiling Penny Wong, who is leaning towards him.

We learn that Wong declined to be on a television panel after having to endure Labor’s unexpected 2019 loss on screen. Katy Gallagher, the ACT senator who filled that role in 2022, didn’t have a chance to eat during the television coverage and also failed to avail herself of a shot of the whisky fellow frontbencher Chris Bowen had stashed away. At 1am she found herself back in a hotel room, alone, savouring victory with a packet of chips from the minibar.

This kind of detail is catnip for political junkies. More substantively, though, Savva gives useful insights into how the parties went about their campaigns. She shows us the on-the-ground diligence of the Greens, who used a one-third increase in their volunteer numbers to knock on 260,000 doors around the country. She describes the teal campaigns in some detail — Monique Ryan in Kooyong attracting 2000 volunteers, for example, who knocked on 55,000 doors — and recounts sharp insights from Cathy McGowan, the former independent member for Indi, whose community-based campaign both inspired and offered a roadmap for the teals.

McGowan points to how, in 2019, Frydenberg had lost nearly 11 per cent of his primary vote in Kooyong, a party citadel, to independent candidate Oliver Yates and the Greens’ Julian Burnside. “If such a disorganised effort could reduce his primary vote to 49.4 per cent,” thought McGowan, “a better-organised, better-funded one could do a lot better.” Which of course it did.

Labor’s campaign was clearly better organised and better funded than it had been in 2019. And shrewder: Savva reports how the party’s national secretary, Paul Erickson, realised — when family circumstances required him to stay in the northern suburbs of Melbourne during the second half of 2020 — that the federal government’s attacks on premier Daniel Andrews fatally misread the dominant mood among locked-down locals. “Victorians wanted Andrews to succeed, not fail,” she writes, “because failure would lead to more illness, more deaths, and more pressure on the hospital system.”

As for this year’s Liberal campaign, it was equally clearly a mess, starting with the prolonged tug of war between the prime minister and the party’s NSW branch that led to candidates being preselected perilously close to the election. In that respect, Savva remarks, Morrison won the battle but lost the war: he got his way on preselections but failed dismally in his apparent strategy of sacrificing moderate Liberals to pick up outer-suburban seats.

The candidacy of Katherine Deves in the seat of Warringah, strongly supported by Morrison in the face of internal protests, epitomised the strategy in all its grisly brutality. When moderate Trent Zimmerman reluctantly attended a rally to support western Sydney candidates on the proviso that Deves wouldn’t be there, he was shocked to see the prime minister single her out from the podium. Former NSW senator Chris Puplick, also a moderate, went so far as to say post-election that Morrison’s strategy was an “act of treason” meriting his expulsion from the party.

Having been hailed as a master strategist after winning the 2019 election campaign, Morrison appears to have swallowed his own story, becoming convinced of his acumen as a campaigner and a prime minister. When he joined Mark Skaife in his Ford Mustang supercar at Bathurst in late 2021 and uttered the cheesy line that Australians were “looking out the front windscreen, not in the rear-view mirror,” Bulldozed reports that Peter Dutton remarked, “There’s a reason they call him Scotty from marketing.”

More importantly, Savva recounts how a key reason for the failure of the Religious Discrimination Bill was that the prime minister didn’t understand the bill’s implications. He didn’t see that it set up two potentially irreconcilable positions on the rights of religious bodies and LGBTQI+ people:

Once the implications of what he had done were explained to him, he is said to have responded by saying: “I didn’t mean that, that’s not what I had in mind.” One MP paraphrased his excuse thus: “He stuffed up, but couldn’t bring himself to say it.” Everyone felt dudded. The moderates were furious; the conservatives were incredulous.

It wasn’t only the prime minister whose self-perception went awry; so too did the news media’s, most of whose members took an awfully long time to realise that the 2022 election campaign was not a repeat of 2019. Well before the election, Morrison’s verbal bulldozing, characterised by many in the media as an impressive mastery of detail, was exposed — first in Sean Kelly’s excellent book, The Game, then on Shaun Micallef’s ABC TV program, Mad as Hell — as a sequence of non-sequiturs tending to collapse into a veritable word salad.

The notion that many members of the news media are unreflective and prone to herd behaviour is not new. The problem is that political narratives are like quick-drying cement. Billy McMahon was Australia’s worst prime minister and a figure of fun; Gough Whitlam was a political visionary but couldn’t run the economy to save himself. Both views have been challenged — by Patrick Mullins, biographer of McMahon (most recently in Inside Story), and by political scientist John Hawkins in the Conversation.

The quick-drying cement on the Coalition government of 2019–22 is that it was led by someone vying with McMahon for the title of Australia’s worst prime minister, whose deep personal unpopularity always made a 2022 election loss more than likely. But if the outcome was that obvious, why did so much media coverage either downplay what now seems conventional wisdom or ignore it altogether?

Savva is not immune from this affliction. She was certainly an early and consistent critic of Morrison’s leadership, but as Laurie Oakes reminded those attending the launch of Bulldozed in Canberra, she also wrote in her previous book, Plots and Prayers, that Morrison was “the most astute conservative politician of his generation.”

This contrast brings to mind the line uttered by Jack Nicholson as a mob hitman in the 1985 black comedy Prizzi’s Honor, when a particular character’s qualities are lauded. “If Marxie Heller’s so fuckin’ smart, how come he’s so fuckin’ dead?” Good question. Scott Morrison may well have been the most astute conservative politician of his generation and an epically failed prime minister. Explaining just how he went from one to the other requires more than a snapshot of the present, however vivid and well reported. •

Bulldozed: Scott Morrison’s Fall and Anthony Albanese’s Rise
By Niki Savva | Scribe | $35 | 391 pages

The post “No one dared tell him to stop” appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fetzer, for his part, drew on an undefined “research group” to compile a book whose title left no room for doubt about his view: Nobody Died at Sandy Hook: It Was a FEMA Drill to Promote Gun Control. (FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency.)

Despite his dispiriting experience with the Facebook group, Pozner continued his efforts, this time by writing opinion pieces for newspapers pointing out the extent to which he and other Sandy Hook families were being besieged by online hoaxers and by Jones. In 2014 he set up his own online group, HONR, attracting volunteers willing to help him push back against the conspiracy theorists.

The new group began asking the online tech companies to take down blatantly false information, citing specific violations of their terms of service. But they were blanked. Notices about pornography would get the online companies’ attention but little else did, writes Williamson, noting both the irony and the hypocrisy. “The publication of pornography is supported by the First Amendment, enshrined by the courts as a signal test of free-speech principles,” she writes:

But here were the social platforms, scurrying to take down porn while trotting out the First Amendment to explain why they didn’t remove abusive content. Why? Because despite what they say, the platforms are all about pleasing their advertisers, most of whom don’t want their ads adjacent to sexually explicit content.

Pozner and his volunteers then found a stronger lever — copyright laws. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits unauthorised use of copyrighted content on any digital medium, regardless of whether the material is registered with the US Copyright Office. The act doesn’t make internet service providers liable for unwittingly displaying infringing material, but it does require them to remove it once a complaint is received.

To illustrate their posts, the conspiracy theorists would copy images of Noah or other victims of the shootings and then upload them. That’s copyright theft, Pozner thought, and began filing takedown notices, with significant success. When he succeeded in having a picture of Noah removed from an Infowars item in 2015, Jones was apoplectic — admittedly his resting disposition — and spent almost two hours railing against this dire curtailing of his free speech.

Undeterred, Pozner and HONR continued filing notices. When James Fetzer’s book was published they shamed Amazon into removing it from sale. Mainstream media began publicising their efforts and eventually both Fetzer and Tracy were forced to leave their university posts.

In the way of the internet, though, Fetzer released a free PDF of his book that was downloaded at least ten million times. It was like playing Whac-A-Mole with the “conspiratorial–industrial complex,” as Williamson calls it.

Williamson, a journalist with the New York Times, begins her book by reminding readers of what happened on 14 December 2012 when Adam Lanza, a twenty-year-old former student of Sandy Hook who had been showing clear signs of mental disturbance since he was eleven, shot and killed his mother at their home and then drove to the school in Newtown, Connecticut. There, he used three guns to kill twenty children aged six or seven, and six of their teachers, before turning one of the guns on himself.

The details Williamson provides are bleak. Lanza was 183 centimetres tall but weighed only fifty kilos and slipped through the school’s gates and bollards “like a letter through a slot.” The Lanza family gave their home to Newtown after the killings, and the small town’s officials ensured the Lanza house and all its contents were destroyed to prevent anything finding its way onto the murder-memorabilia market.

This was the worst school shooting in American history except for the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, where twenty-seven students and five faculty members were killed before the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, committed suicide. As appalling as that shooting was, even more appalling was the age of the victims at Sandy Hook.

That in itself was a core reason for denying it happened, Williamson discovers when she tries to find what she terms “patient zero” — the origin of the conspiracy theories about the shooting. Although some inflammatory content from the time has been removed from the internet, the remaining records brought a disheartening realisation. “Within hours of the shooting,” she writes, “a mass of people more or less simultaneously decided that the shooting was faked.”

From the distance of a decade, writes Williamson, the shootings at Sandy Hook are clearly “the first mass tragedy to spawn an online circle of people impermeable and hostile to reality and its messengers, whether the mainstream media, law enforcement, or the families of the dead.” Since then, almost every high-profile mass tragedy — including the mass shooting at Uvalde elementary school in Texas earlier this year — has generated similarly disturbing online theories.

Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was among the seventeen injured at Virginia Tech in 2007, tells Williamson the reaction to the Sandy Hook shootings was familiar from her own experience except in one respect. “We didn’t have the disinformation campaigns and the fuel that social media platforms generally give them.”

Facebook had twenty million users globally in 2007; by 2012 the figure exceeded a billion. Around one hundred million YouTube videos were viewed daily on average shortly before the Virginia Tech shooting; by 2012 the “Gangnam Style” video had become the first on YouTube to be viewed more than a billion times. Twitter was barely a year old in 2007, with 5000 tweets sent each day; by the end of 2012 the number was 5000 tweets per second. When a University of Miami political scientist set a up a Google alert for the term “conspiracy theory” in 2011 he received five media articles a day; by 2016 the daily number was between fifty and one hundred.

In 2018, Lenny and Veronique Pozner, seven other Sandy Hook families and an FBI agent targeted by the conspiracists sued Jones for defamation. More or less simultaneously, the biggest social media companies, including Apple, Spotify, Twitter and YouTube, began dropping Jones and Infowars from their platforms. Even the streaming site YouPorn dumped Jones, saying without a trace of irony, “Hate has no place on YouPorn.”

In the four years since then, the defamation cases have been wending their way through the courts. They may seem straightforward: surely claiming parents faked their own children’s deaths for financial gain is about as egregious a statement as you could make? But, as one of the lawyers representing the families pro bono remarks, proving defamation in the United States is harder than proving personal injury.

This is especially so in the case of public figures, who must prove they were defamed with malice or a reckless disregard for the truth. Jones’s lawyers have argued the Sandy Hook parents are public figures because they have lobbied publicly for tighter gun controls. One judge described this as “a very interesting question of law” given the parents were “involuntary” public figures “speaking after their child was murdered in one of the most horrific shootings in American history.”

Alex Jones’s circumstances had meanwhile undergone a curious change that paradoxically rendered him more vulnerable, even as his notoriety has soared. His relentless fanning of conspiracy theories had turbocharged the popularity of Infowars, as had his bromance with Donald Trump, doubling traffic to his site to fifty million views a month and boosting viewings of its YouTube videos to in excess of a billion. In 2013 Jones’s business was already bringing in US$20 million in revenue yearly.

“Jones got away with saying all this stuff before because he didn’t have an audience,” says Kyle Farrer, a lawyer representing Pozner. “Who cares what some guy yelling at clouds is saying? But now his megaphone is significantly bigger. He’s talking to this big audience and now he’s saying this crazy stuff that has a real effect on people. It’s like his rise is his downfall.”

For Farrer’s fellow lawyer on the case, Mark Bankston, the only threat Jones takes seriously is one that threatens his business. “If you make him understand that these kinds of ‘journalistic’ practices have a cost and an effect, and that he won’t be able to profit off of causing pain to a family, I think that’s a victory too.” Particularly if that message is heard by his acolytes and imitators.

Jones’s growing problem was that no matter how ridiculous we might find his unhinged ranting or his non-stop promotion and selling of products with names like Prosta Guard, Real Red Pill, Superblue Fluoride-free Toothpaste and Combat One Tactical Bath Wipes (“Baby wipes for middle-aged men who serve in a thrown-together militia out in the woods”), he was slowly, ineluctably being drawn into courtrooms where he had to abide by others’ rules.

This was unforgettably illustrated in one of the lawsuits playing out since Williamson’s book went to press. As a clip from the Law and Crime Network shows, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble found that she needed to talk to Jones as if he were a disobedient third-grader.

Judge: You must tell the truth. This is not your show. You’re already under oath. You’ve already violated that oath twice today. It seems absurd to instruct you to tell the truth again while you testify but here I am. You must tell the truth while you testify. This [pointing to the witness box] is not your show… Do you understand what I have said to you?

Jones: Yes, I believe what I said is true.

Judge (cutting him off): You believe everything you say is true. But it isn’t. Your beliefs do not make something true.

In the end, the answer to the question of what went through Jones’s mind as he began spouting his bile against the relatives of the Sandy Hook victims in 2012 is: who cares? The reason why he is “angry, mendacious and heedless of the wreckage he creates,” as his former wife, Kelly Nichols attests, is less important than the fact he is at long last being held to account for his words.

So far he has lost every one of the defamation cases launched against him, not least because he has refused to cooperate in the standard legal process of discovery and given judges little choice but to rule against him. Now that he has filed for bankruptcy the key question is: will he be able to sequester his wealth from awards for damages or will his business be ruined?

That he is in this predicament rather than continuing to rant with a voice that sounds, as Williamson puts it, like “twenty miles of rough road” is because of the determination of the Sandy Hook parents, along with all those who lent their expertise to the task. Asking what has been going through their minds, not just on 14 December 2012 but in the ten years since then, is the more pertinent question. It is also a much harder one to answer, particularly if you really do stop to imagine walking a mile in their shoes. •

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
By Elizabeth Williamson | Penguin Random House | $49.99 | 482 pages

The post Bearing the unbearable appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

Trump’s presidency has been pored over in unprecedented detail. Midway through his first term it had already been the subject of eighteen books. But to the best of my knowledge there hadn’t until now been one devoted to understanding the relationship between Trump and television, which is what James Poniewozik provides in Audience of One.

This is a very welcome addition to the burgeoning Trump library — or, more precisely, the library about Trump, given that the president appears allergic to reading. As Poniewozik tartly remarks about Trump’s delivery of prepared lines following release of the infamous Access Hollywood tapes in 2016: “Few sights convey unhappiness as much as Donald Trump having to read something.”

A long-time television and media critic, for Salon, Time and then, since 2015, the New York Times, Poniewozik has written a book that is at once about how television has “reflected and affected our relationships with society, with politics, with one another” and about the current president’s symbiotic relationship with the medium. “Its impulses were his impulses; its appetites were his appetites; its mentality was his mentality.”

Donald Trump grew up in television’s early years and his coming of age coincided with television becoming the “greatest aggregator of a simultaneous audience ever invented.” To retain advertisers who were happy to pay millions of dollars to reach a mass audience, the three big American networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, needed to find what one network executive described as the “least objectionable program” — content, in other words, that never gave the viewer a reason to change the channel.

Trump first surfaces on network television in 1980, during NBC’s The Today Show, on which the host, Tom Brokaw, wears a suit the colour of toast and the whole set is decorated in shades of brown. As Poniewozik recounts it, Trump, then a budding real estate investor, slouches on the couch looking like a “prep-school kid at an interview for an internship he’s been assured that he’s going to get.” Critically, though, Trump’s manner is agreeable, his tone mild. Given an opportunity to engage in controversy, he demurs. It is the kind of bland breakfast television interview that typified the mass media age and Trump slots himself into it like a slice of white bread in a pop-up toaster.

It is also, to anyone who has listened to almost anything Trump has said (or tweeted) in the past five years, utterly at odds with his current persona. What happened? First, television changed: in the 1980s, network executives learnt the power of demographics: the attention of some (usually wealthy) people was worth more to advertisers than the attention of (usually poor) others. Then, around the same time, cable television began its rise; what had been a mass audience became a mass of niche audiences. Whatever your interest, a network existed to feed your knowledge and your passion. Which was good in some ways, but less so in others, as we will see.

On cable, especially on HBO, networks were no longer constrained by the need to make the least objectionable program. Unleashed was a series of antiheroes, the best known of whom were Tony Soprano in The Sopranos (1999–2007), Al Swearengen in Deadwood (2004–06, 2019) and Walter White in Breaking Bad (2008–13). Earlier series had worked on the premise that protagonists paid for their sins — that crime doesn’t pay — but, as Sopranos creator David Chase said, “Well, that’s false. Crime does pay.” The effect of these brilliantly written and performed shows was to induce viewers to engage emotionally with the antihero, even as they were horrified by what Tony or Al or Walter actually did.

But if the need to hold and contemplate two such conflicting emotions was key to these dramas’ power, there was an obverse problem: not all viewers could or would hold them simultaneously. New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum called them “bad fans”: “The Sopranos buffs who wanted a show made up of nothing but whackings (and posted eagerly about how they fast-forwarded past anything else).”

While television was fragmenting, for better and worse, Trump was rising spectacularly as a property developer, and then falling just as spectacularly. Despite a golden leg-up from his property-developer father, Donald was never the great businessman he claimed to be. But he did have a key insight, into himself and the American public. As Poniewozik writes, “In the 1980s, Donald Trump was a businessman who used celebrity as a helpful promotional device. By the 1990s, he was a celebrity whose calling card was the ability to play the figure of a businessman.”

Satirist John Oliver has devoted episode after episode of Last Week Tonight to showing the gobsmacking phoniness of Trump’s claims to be the great deal-maker. But the revelations, Poniewozik argues, have not had the disastrous effect on Trump’s career you would expect. Unlike Rupert Murdoch, who rebounded from his near-death experience with bankruptcy in 1990 to become an even more successful media businessman, Trump pivoted to become the star of a reality TV show, The Apprentice, which premiered in 2004.

If, as Vanity Fair contributing editor Fran Lebowitz has said, Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person,” then he had been collecting the necessary totems of success all his adult life: a private jet, a helicopter, an international hotel and a string of casinos, all branded with his name. His apartment in Trump Tower, writes Poniewozik, was “an orgasm of gold and chandeliers that outdid the palatial love lairs of The Bachelor.” The producers of The Apprentice would make ample use of these symbols in their program. (Indeed, if you’ve ever wondered why Trump shows up in so many pop culture moments from the 1980s and 1990s, it’s because, Poniewozik reports, he would make himself and his props available to almost anyone.)

Trump was bizarrely well suited to the mode and methods of reality TV because, to an alarming degree, that is how he actually sees the world. Poniewozik makes the point by outlining the moral universe of Survivor, a pioneering reality show he happily admits to having watched avidly since its premiere in the US in 2000. Survivor’s pool of contestants, living as a “tribe” in a remote location, had to work together for food and shelter but also vote members out, one by one, until the last one standing won a million dollars. “Nominally, the show was about humans against nature. The real game, and the real attraction, was human against human.”

The winner of the first season was corporate consultant Richard Hatch, the key to whose success was not his wilderness skills but his ability “to lie, to make alliances and break them, to convince people that it’s in their interest to hold their nose and work with you until you no longer need them.” In the finale of season one, “his vanquished opponents awarded him the million bucks in spite of this, or rather because of it. They recognised that he outplayed them.” What Survivor did, and still does, was to invite viewers to “compartmentalise morality from outcome.” The logic behind the Tribal Council’s final vote was that “Richard is bad, but he’s entertaining, and he played a great game.”

Who does that remind you of? Trump is bad (how long a list would you like to draw up?) but he’s entertaining (even his critics admit he is an attention magnet) and he plays a great game. Poniewozik reminds us how Trump treated the seventeen-strong field of candidates for the Republican Party nomination in 2016 as an elimination-based reality show, during which he wiped the floor with his opponents. Trump has little patience for reasoned arguments but does have a viper’s tongue and a hawk’s eye for an exposed nerve.

He also values loyalty far more than integrity, which he learnt from his mentor, Roy Cohn, the utterly amoral New York lawyer and fixer who taught him the power of doubling down in the face of any allegation of impropriety and never admitting defeat. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump famously asked early in his presidency, after FBI director James Comey and attorney-general Jeff Sessions had refused to put loyalty to Trump ahead of the law, or even standard departmental procedures. Both were subsequently fired by Trump.

Most of this has been known about Trump since his ghostwritten book, The Art of the Deal, was released in 1987. But a passage from the book assumes greater weight now that Trump is president, not to mention in the midst of an impeachment trial. In the passage, Trump compares Cohn with “the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty.” As Poniewozik notes, the implication is not just that loyalty outranks integrity but that integrity is never really genuine. “It’s just a put-on that phonies ‘boast about’ to make themselves look good while they stab you in the back.”

The corrosive effect of a reality TV view of the world and of Trump’s bullying of public discourse can be seen, Poniewozik writes, in the treatment of two phrases beloved of conservatives, “bleeding heart” and “virtue signalling.” In the Nixon era, conservatives at least acknowledged that bleeding-heart liberals were moved by genuine feelings. When Trumpian conservatives use the term “virtue signalling” they are implying that liberals are fakes and, in reality, no one is virtuous. When the administration provoked outrage in 2018 by separating undocumented families at the US–Mexico border and imprisoning their children, Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, responded on Fox News by mocking as a crybaby a Democrat strategist concerned about a child with Down syndrome separated from her mother.

Similarly corrosive of the institutions of government was the way Trump controlled the nomination hearings for the Supreme Court in the style of a network TV executive. When Christine Blasey Ford appeared before the nationally televised hearings in 2018 and accused nominee Brett Kavanaugh of having sexually assaulted her when they were high school students, Trump immediately saw how persuasive her testimony appeared on television. He compared it unfavourably, Poniewozik writes, with Kavanaugh’s earlier appearance on the Fox network where the nominee appeared meek and respectful of women. Kavanaugh got the message and responded heatedly to Ford’s allegations, his face red and twisted with rage. When this divisive, undignified performance worked, Trump tweeted his “review”: “Judge Kavanaugh showed America exactly why I nominated him.”

Add to “corrosive” the word “chaotic,” probably the term most commonly used to describe the Trump administration. Its roots can be traced to The Apprentice, in which the key scene of each episode was the gathering of contestants in a boardroom that “oozes cigar-club masculinity.” There, each would attempt to persuade Trump not to utter his barked catchphrase, “You’re fired!” What had happened during the program’s “challenges” might or might not influence Trump; now, it was mainly about “attempting to commune with the mind of Trump, to anticipate his moods and needs. There is no long-term strategy, only the moment.” As has become increasingly clear from the veritable pile-up of administration leaders and aides who’ve left or been deep-sixed since 2017, the mock boardroom was a blueprint for his government — a “dogpile of competitors, cronies and relatives throttling one another daily for survival,” according to Poniewozik.

There’s one more important televisual element to be noted in the Trump–television symbiosis: professional wrestling. It is well known that in 2017 Trump tweeted a video of himself at a World Wrestling Entertainment event pummelling what looked like a man with a CNN logo superimposed on his head — a message about as subtle as the blows he rained down. Less well known is that Trump has been in the WWE hall of fame since 2013 for his “Battle of the Billionaires” match (which he won, of course) with WWE owner Vince McMahon, from which the mocked-up video was taken. Apart from his love of hyped, gaudy spectacle, Trump has drawn from the world of pro wrestling a mode of public engagement that has paid rich dividends. Pro wrestling winks at what is real and what is fake. “Kayfabe,” the term used in the industry, means the matches may be fake (or, more accurately, carefully scripted and choreographed) but the rivalries between wrestlers are treated as real.

Trump’s campaign rallies, both in 2016 and this year as he campaigns for re-election, are almost indistinguishable from WrestleMania events. As Poniewozik writes:

A Trump rally, with the candidate holding forth for an hour-plus, chasing butterflies of thought, wasn’t a political speech like we’d come to know them. His language was rambling but direct: win, hit, bomb the shit out of them. Things were huge and beautiful. He played on existing American themes — vastness, dynamism, ambition — but stripped of the noble pretence. What was in it for you?

At early rallies during the 2016 campaign, journalists reported that the people they spoke to before the rallies were polite and chatty, like they were out for a night at a concert. Once they were inside, though, Trump whipped them into an atavistic frenzy. He loves their howling support, of course, and as of last October had held seventy-eight rallies since becoming president. Almost every time a crisis has hit his presidency, he has turned to rallies as to mother’s milk. Increasingly, the crowds’ fury has been directed at the news media filming the event, sometimes resulting in verbal and even physical attacks on these so-called “enemies of the people,” a phrase Trump uses apparently without knowing, probably without caring, that it has been deployed previously by people like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.

Politicians have long worked assiduously to get their message across to the public via the media while simultaneously avoiding scrutiny from journalists. At least as far back as George W. Bush’s presidency, they saw the essential flaw in objective journalism as a method: the principle of balance, supposed to be a bulwark against unfairness amid the daily crush of deadlines, is easy to game. The government, especially its leader, is quoted almost irrespective of what it says, simply because it is the government. And if the government is criticised, it is given the right of reply.

This means a government can bully the news media into following its chosen news agenda. In a media conference in early March 2003, shortly before the United States invaded Iraq, George W. Bush set out his justification for the coming war. In just under an hour, he invoked al Qaeda and the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 fourteen times. “No one challenged him on it, despite the fact that the CIA had questioned the Iraq–al Qaeda connection, and there has never been solid evidence marshalled to support the idea that Iraq was involved in the attacks of 9/11,” wrote Brent Cunningham in the Columbia Journalism Review later that year, when this and other rationales for invading Iraq were crumbling.

Before the invasion, only a few journalists were willing to step out from behind the safety of the “he said, she said” format and challenge the administration’s spin, as Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank of the Washington Post did in an article headlined “Bush Clings to Dubious Allegations about Iraq.” And their editors put the article not on page one but inside the paper where it “played as quietly as a lullaby,” as the New York Times’s then public editor, Daniel Okrent, described such questioning articles. As another journalist commented, “It’s a very good piece, but it is very tendentious. It’s interesting that the editors didn’t put it on page one, because it would look like they are calling Bush a liar.”

Donald Trump has been called a liar by the Washington Post and several other outlets. The Post has gone to extraordinary lengths to document what it says are 16,241 instances (as of 19 January) of false or misleading claims made by the president since he took his oath of office. If this illustrates how much further Trump has debased political discourse since the Bush administration, there remains an oddly timorous, ineffectual debate in media circles in the United States (and Australia, for that matter) about whether and when to say that the president has lied. This has a lot to do with the extent to which mainstream news media are unwilling or unable to see how politicians have blown up the standard news story and how they need to respond by updating the model for reporting politics. It’s easier said than done, of course, but as the presidential campaign gets under way and the impeachment trial unfolds, there is little evidence of progress in mainstream media coverage.

This means that whenever the Democrats’ allegations of impropriety are reported, Trump’s retorts — that his telephone call in 2019 to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was “perfect” and that the impeachment process is a “witch-hunt” — are also reported. Just as few mainstream news media reports note the hypocrisy of a person with a long history of allegations of sexual harassment against him using the term “witch-hunt,” so there are relatively few reports, especially on electronic media, that outline in any detail what Trump is alleged to have done to merit being impeached, and even fewer that examine the substance, or lack thereof, of the actual arguments being made by Trump and his lawyers in his defence. One shining exception was a Radio National Breakfast interview on 22 January with Professor Frank Bowman, author of the 2019 book High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump.

More often journalists focus on how the result of the impeachment process is a foregone conclusion because the Republicans control the Senate and a two-thirds majority is needed for the president to be found guilty of the charges. They ask, often in a glibly worldly tone, why the Democrats are even bothering. A more relevant question for them to ask is: what has happened to the world’s most powerful democracy when politics has become so partisan that one side will not only refuse to consider clear evidence of impeachable offences but will work ferociously to ensure that the trial will not be a trial in any real sense at all?

It would be easy to slide into despair at the state of mainstream media coverage or at the possibility that a president who views the world through the prism of reality TV — not least because he is as much a consumer as a creator of it — may win a second term of office. But as David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, wrote last year, despair is not an option; it is self-indulgence. Poniewozik, careful parser of reality TV that he is, is not beholden to it. He ends his book with a devastating anecdote about how Disney World’s Hall of Presidents has been updated, and subtly changed, since the inauguration of the forty-fifth president in 2017.

Part civics lesson, part kitsch, the Hall of Presidents runs through a film entitled The Idea of a President, which covers the writing of the constitution, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, the Great Depression, space exploration and so on. But a line from the previous version’s narration has been expunged since Trump became president: “All of liberty’s leaders have one thing in common, one trust that they have all accepted.”

The exhibit’s creators had a choice; either admit the original film’s idea of a president had dissolved or, to coin a phrase, make Trump great again. They chose the latter, with bizarre results. The film shows “Audio-Animatronic” semblances of every American president, with the Trump robot wearing “an expression unfamiliar from the face of the actual Trump: reverent, emotive, humble,” writes Poniewozik. “It looks awed by the moment, as if it might be moved to tears. It does not scowl. It does not smirk. It does not clench its fists or stab at the air when it speaks.”

The robot’s essential unreality may provide the most fitting and educational monument to this presidency. Poniewozik writes: “You see it, you hear it, and it triggers a voice inside you that says: This is not right, this is weird, this is not how I remember it at all. That voice you’re hearing? It’s called reality.” A reality TV worldview and approach to governing can only take you so far, in other words. The question is, how much damage will have been done to real people before the reality TV presidency is pulled by the network executives? •

The post “Its appetites were his appetites; its mentality was his mentality” appeared first on Inside Story.

The story comes to us courtesy of Patrick Radden Keefe, who has written what the judges of the Orwell Prize for political writing describe as a “haunting and timely portrait of The Troubles.” His book, Say Nothing, received the prize late last month.

A staff writer for the New Yorker, Keefe traces the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland from its beginnings in 1969 when republicans, most of them Catholic, rioted against the primarily Protestant loyalists who wanted Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom. The Troubles ended nearly three decades later, in 1998, with the Good Friday ceasefire agreement. By then, 3500-plus people had been killed, more than half of them civilians.

Keefe blends a clear explanatory narrative with nuanced portraits of key figures, beginning with Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was abducted by the IRA in front of her children, accused, probably wrongly, of being a “tout” or informer, and murdered. Then there are the Price sisters, Marian and especially Dolours, who committed terrorist acts for the IRA but eventually split bitterly with their commander. The commander was Gerry Adams, who held to the fiction that he had never been a member of the IRA, after he switched to leading the political party Sinn Féin and took a key role in hammering out the Good Friday agreement.

It was two years after that agreement when Paul Bew, a professor of Irish history at Queen’s University in Belfast, conceived the idea of commemorating the newfound peace with an archive of oral history interviews with key participants from both sides. Documenting the conflict was a sound academic impulse born, partly at least, of the silence surrounding the signing of the agreement. As Keefe writes, “In their effort to bring about peace, the negotiators had focused on the future rather than the past.” In South Africa, by contrast, the end of conflict in the early 1990s had been marked by the setting up of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Though by no means flawless, the South African process was a serious attempt at a public accounting of the damage wreaked by apartheid. The Troubles concluded without any formal process for commemorating, let alone understanding, what had taken place. “This queasy sense of irresolution,” writes Keefe, “was only complicated by Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge that he was ever in the IRA.”

He quotes Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” one line of which runs, “O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod.” While people in Ireland welcomed the prospects of peace, Keefe observes, “the sulphurous intrigue of the past would continue to linger.”

To advance his plan, Bew teamed up with Bob O’Neill, head of the John J. Burns Library at Boston College in the United States and overseer of its internationally famous Treasure Room, and recruited Ed Moloney, an Irish Times journalist who had reported on The Troubles and had a reputation as a straight, careful, tough-minded reporter. Moloney had deep sources on both sides of the conflict, giving him access to people who not only had committed terrorist attacks but would refuse to talk to outsiders knowing it could bring retribution, even death.

To persuade key figures like the Price sisters and high-ranking IRA member Brendan Hughes to talk, the team needed to recruit other members whose similarly thick contact books were combined with solid academic credentials. Moloney brought in Wilson McArthur, an East Belfast resident with strong connections among loyalists and a degree from Queen’s, and Anthony McIntyre, a tattooed former IRA member who had served seventeen years in prison for the murder of a loyalist paramilitary. Known to all as “Mackers,” McIntyre had got the study bug while in prison and eventually gained a PhD under Bew’s supervision.

Thus began several years of clandestine recordings of interviewees who had been assured their words would remain secret until after they died. One of them, Brendan Hughes, made Moloney promise that after Hughes’s death, his recollections would be published in book form. After Hughes died, Moloney published Voices from the Grave (2010), with a preface by two Boston College academics who described the book as the first in a planned series drawn from the Boston College Oral History Archive on The Troubles.

The book contained stunning revelations. Not only had Gerry Adams been an IRA commander, Hughes testified, but he had also personally ordered murders, including Jean McConville’s, and had directed the notorious 1973 bombings outside London’s Old Bailey courthouse that injured around 200 people. Adams strongly denied the allegations.

Having advertised the secret archive in spectacular fashion, Boston College seemed to be blindsided when the Police Service of Northern Ireland (known before the ceasefire as the Royal Ulster Constabulary) came asking for transcripts of the oral history to build a case against their long-time nemesis Adams.

Urged on by an anxious Moloney and his fellow interviewers, the college initially resisted. But the academics soon realised that they had failed, despite requests from Moloney, to get legal advice when they drew up the contracts they had asked participants to sign. If they had, writes Keefe, their lawyers would have told them that any guarantee of confidentiality would probably not survive a court order, which is what the police were threatening to seek if the college didn’t hand over the transcripts.

It also become clear that the university had failed to create a promised board of overseers when the archive was established. Indeed, the archive had been set up in such secrecy that other Boston College academics were disinclined to support the few who did know about it when they invoked academic freedom as a defence against the police demands. If they were going to stand up for academic freedom, they harrumphed, it would not be for a project conducted by non-specialist historians, one of whom had spent nearly two decades in prison for murder.

Universities are often accused (with some justification) of burdening themselves with overly cautious committees. But interviewing paramilitaries who had committed terrorist acts is scarcely what universities term a “low-risk ethics application,” and would clearly have benefited from more careful planning. The project drew on the expertise and contacts of the journalists but failed to protect them, or to protect interviewees who had divulged life-and-death information. The journalists weren’t blameless — Moloney had been the first to open the vault with the publication of Voices from the Grave, but at least in that book some names had been suppressed for legal and security reasons.

What were they all thinking? Perhaps there’s a clue in the epigraph to Keefe’s book, which comes from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”

For most of us, using violence for political ends can’t be justified. But others see things differently. That doesn’t mean they all sleep easy at night. As Keefe explores in portraits that are morally engaged but rarely judgemental, Dolours Price suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder while she, her sister and Brendan Hughes’s lives unravelled in alcoholism and physical illness, partly as a result of long periods in prison but also because of their struggles to reconcile their political ideals with their bloody actions.

This was one reason why they grew increasingly bitter — and felt impelled to speak out — about their former comrade Gerry Adams, who seemed entirely untroubled by his past. Adams has been questioned by police about the murder of Jean McConville but never charged.

In his Boston College interview, Brendan Hughes compared the armed struggle of the IRA to the launch of a boat: “This boat is stuck in the sand, right, and get them to push the boat out and then the boat sailing off and leaving the hundred people behind, right. That’s the way I feel. The boat is away, sailing on the high seas, with all the luxuries that it brings, and the poor people that launched the boat are left sitting in the mud and the dirt and the shit and the sand.”

It may be possible to sympathise with Hughes emotionally, writes Keefe, but it’s a folly not to acknowledge Adams’s trajectory from activist (at the least) to politician. “He may have possessed a sociopathic instinct for self-preservation,” Keefe writes, “and there is something chilling about how Adams, secure in his place on the boat, does not cast so much as a backward glance at those comrades, like Hughes, who are left behind. But, really, it was history leaving Hughes behind.” Adams may have been callous in his motivations and deceptive in his machinations, Keefe concludes, but he “steered the IRA out of a bloody and intractable conflict and into a brittle but enduring peace.”

And I would add that a reading of Say Nothing underscores both the value and the limitations of journalism and works of contemporary history. Historians like to wait until the dust has settled, but that leaves them prey to gaps in the record, inadvertent or deliberate. Journalists are forever itching to catch the moment, to fill the gaps in the record, but often fail, as George Bernard Shaw once observed, to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation. Contemporary historians like to have a bob each way, but even they need to leave the door ajar: witness the potential for Brexit to reopen the split between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland.

If the experience of the Boston project shows just how unhappily contemporary history can end, then Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing shows what can be achieved by combining a historian’s sense of perspective and respect for primary sources, a journalist’s earthy engagement with the here and now, and a novelist’s sense of story and the meaning beneath the conflict that drives it. •

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The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, set up in the dying days of the Gillard government, is scheduled to hand its final report to the Turnbull government this Friday. As well as scrutinising 1.2 million documents, the commission has held fifty-seven public hearings over 444 days. It has heard from 1300 witnesses, many of them offering gut-wrenching accounts of what they have endured, and its impact.

In private sessions, the commissioners have listened to testimony from almost 8000 survivors of child sexual abuse. On Thursday the commission’s chair, Justice Peter McClellan, will present a selection of these accounts, Message to Australia, to the National Library of Australia, where it will be publicly available.

To casual observers, the royal commission’s work might have seemed like an inquiry into the Catholic Church. Equally if not more disturbing, though, is the evidence of the sheer range of institutions that have failed children. As well as by institutions run by various denominations and faiths, children have been failed by governments of all political persuasions, schools both private and public, non-government welfare agencies, the judiciary, sporting bodies, the scouting movement and the Australian Defence Force.

Amid the extensive media coverage of the royal commission’s work, much attention has been paid to the testimony of individual victims of abuse. Institutional figures have been subjected to searching, sometimes searing, cross-examination by Gail Furness SC, the counsel assisting the royal commission. The news media’s abiding interest in the personal and the immediate, though, means far less attention has been paid to the structural reasons why institutions have failed to protect children, and why institutions have then ignored, deflected, doubted or even covered up revelations.

On these questions, the commission has much to offer. On its website are not just transcripts and lists of exhibits about each of the fifty-seven case studies, but also fifty-two research reports. Ranging in length from forty to 300-plus pages, they examine the causes of abuse in institutions, how to better identify it, the best examples of institutional responses and treatments for survivors, and how governments should respond.

Drawing on this research, we want to try to answer the question posed right at the beginning of the article. Before that, two caveats. First, it is important to remember that the great majority of sexual abuse of children happens not in institutions but within the family home, or in the community at the hands of relatives or family friends.

Second, sexual abuse of children is by no means a modern phenomenon — inquiries into child prostitution and incest were held in Sydney in the mid nineteenth century, for instance — but child sexual abuse has, in the words of Harvard University psychiatry professor Judith Herman, a history of “episodic amnesia.”

In her path-finding book, Trauma and Recovery, Herman writes that attention to child abuse and other psychological traumas has oscillated between periods of intense activity and periods of inertia. Why? “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.” The study of psychological trauma also brings people ineluctably into contact with human vulnerability and the human capacity for evil.

Sympathising with the victims of a natural disaster is easy, but when people are responsible for the trauma, by sexually abusing a child for instance, those who bear witness are caught between victim and perpetrator. To sympathise with the victim we must take on part of the burden of their pain, and do something about it. But the perpetrator makes the opposite demand, says Herman, and he (it is overwhelmingly men who sexually abuse children) usually occupies a position of power and authority. Speaking out demands not only will but courage.

With all this in mind, we focus here on a particularly useful research report written for the royal commission by Donald Palmer in collaboration with Valerie Feldman and Gemma McKibbin. A professor in the University of California’s business school, Palmer drew on the knowledge he accrued studying the dysfunctional culture of the business organisations that contributed to the global financial crisis.

The first thing their report makes clear is how little academic attention has been given to examining why institutions fail children. A search of the academic literature yielded 4400 articles about child sexual abuse but only forty-one — or 1 per cent — looking at the role of the cultures of institutions.

Mapping Palmer’s framework and the existing literature onto the commission’s case studies of seven institutional settings, the report found that children in institutions were sexually abused in one of two ways. They were attacked suddenly, with little prior interaction, as the commission heard was the case for inmates at the Parramatta Training School for Girls and the Institution for Girls in Hay. These attacks were easier for the perpetrators because the girls were imprisoned and subject to their absolute authority. The second type of abuse, seemingly more common in Australian institutions such as the Catholic Church, boarding schools and sporting clubs, unfolded over time, and inevitably involved grooming and secrecy. According to Gemma McKibbin, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, “You can’t have child sexual abuse in institutions without secrecy or grooming or both.”

Unrelenting routine and hard labour: Parramatta Training School for Girls in the mid 1960s.

With most cases of child sexual abuse taking place in the home or perpetrated by people they know, though, a third approach involves a “slippery slope of boundary violations.” Researchers say this abuse is more “haphazard” than the deliberately planned attacks commonly seen in institutions. Each time a social or personal boundary between the adult and the child is transgressed, the abuser is encouraged to escalate his or her behaviour. This is not to suggest that such abusers are any less responsible for their actions. Rather, the gradual shifting of boundaries is a variety of the grooming process.

Regardless of the pathway taken, though, the research is unequivocal: perpetrators are culpable for their actions and the children are victimised in equal measure.

Within institutions, researchers found that the perpetrators are more likely to plan their abuse carefully. Integral to this planning are the special attention, privileges and gifts given to planned victims. Critically, this grooming extends to the perpetrator’s own colleagues and the child’s parents and caregivers, and is designed to shore up his or her reputation as someone to be trusted. As a consequence, victims are less likely to report the abuse and, if they do, they are less likely to be believed.

This leads to the broader question of why child sexual abuse isn’t detected by those working in institutions, for which the research identified a series of reasons.

First, institutions’ hierarchical structures mean that they compartmentalise duties, encouraging employees to focus on efficiency rather than the merits of the tasks they carry out. This, says the report, is a root cause of “organisational misconduct,” whose most infamous expression was in the defence that they were just following orders used by Nazi officers at the Nuremburg war crimes trials.

The Caringbah Outside School Hours Care program staff handbook shows how the laudable aim of creating positive relationships between staff and children can mask grooming behaviours, making it difficult for staff to identify and report abuse. “You are doing a good job,” the handbook said, “when… your children are always hanging on you, holding your hand, or asking for piggyback rides.”

Second, so insidious is grooming that the child, by accepting gifts such as drugs or alcohol, can be accused by the perpetrator and those representing the institution as being complicit.

Third, the more status and power the perpetrators and their allies have in an organisation, the harder it is for the victim and those who observe the abuse to be heard and believed. They may even be punished by both the abuser and the institution.

The effect of this power imbalance is starkly illustrated in the case of a thirteen-year-old girl who swam for the Scone Swimming Club and was coached by Stephen Roser. His position of authority obliged her to follow his instructions when he told her to “float stomach down in the water in front of him and to wrap her thighs around his hips and stroke with her arms without using her legs”. While she was in this position he sexually abused her.

Palmer’s research found at least five other hurdles to the detection of abuse.

The first is known as “motivated blindness,” the tendency we have to overlook or downplay events that might affect us badly. This could explain why so many of the royal commission’s case studies include differing accounts of the same event. For example, a mother of a Geelong Grammar boy said she told the principal that a teacher, Jonathan Harvey, had made “sexual advances” towards her son. But principal John Lewis testified that she had only “complained” that Jonathan Harvey tried to massage her son’s thigh after a rugby injury.

The second is a variation of the first; “cognitive dissonance” occurs when staff in an institution observe behaviours in workmates that are, on the face of it, disturbing but don’t square with their existing perceptions. In these instances, Palmer says, staff either dismiss the behaviour as accidental or a one-off, or they alter their own perceptions to see the behaviour as benign or insignificant.

The royal commission heard how a worker at the Caringbah Outside School Hours Care program didn’t report her suspicions about her superior, Jonathan Lord (who was convicted of having sexually abused twelve children), because she did not feel comfortable making a complaint against a supervisor, even though, “on reflection, John did sometimes have children on his lap,” as she later testified. “At the time I didn’t think it was suspicious in itself, but I did think that it wasn’t a good look, as it made it look to the other children that he had favourites.”

Third, people have a simple desire to get along in the social setting of the workplace. This desire to bond, or “in-group bias” as the researchers call it, is the key to the fourth factor stopping the reporting of child sexual abuse. It happens when members think they are better than, or even morally superior to, those outside of their group. This is particularly evident in the Catholic Church’s belief that canon law has higher standing than the laws of secular society. It also helps explain the church’s initial belief that accusations of child sexual abuse were motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment.

Fifth, the imbalance between the perpetrator’s power and status and that of the victim and those who witness the abuse means it is less likely that the institution will either stop the abuse or report the offender.

Beyond these complex social dynamics, other characteristics of what the research report terms “total institutions” work against children’s safety. By their very nature, total institutions — of which a prison is the most obvious model — involve staff exercising total control by enforcing impersonal rules and procedures. These institutions exist in order to transform human beings.

Few institutions that care for and provide services for children have all the characteristics of total institutions. But some, such as the Parramatta Training School for Girls, the Institution for Girls in Hay, and the youth training or receptions centres of Turana, Winlaton and Baltara, exhibited most of the characteristics.

Boarding schools, especially as they existed in the period examined by the royal commission, exhibit a surprising number of these characteristics. They include Geelong Grammar, perhaps the nation’s most prestigious boarding school, which is the subject of one of the case studies discussed in the research report. (One of us, a boarder there between 1966 and 1975, can recall that the toilet cubicles in the primary school boarding house had no doors and that boarding house masters were required to watch over the boys in the communal showers each morning.)

Other organisations that care for children, such as daycare centres, sporting clubs, scout groups, schools and churches, display some attributes of total institutions: they constitute “alternate moral universes” that can hold all-embracing assumptions about human nature; they attempt to extinguish their members’ previous identities; they promote secrecy; they have unique power structures; and they have unique informal group dynamics.

All of these factors are evident in the Catholic Church, an organisation premised on the belief that each human being is flawed but capable of redemption; critically, this includes priests who sexually abuse children. Church doctrine also has its own clearly defined “alternate moral universe,” in which its members are expected to follow specific rules. Fundamental to their faith is adherence to canon law above secular law.

Following these strict rules helps the Catholic Church extinguish the previous identity of its priests by assuming control of every aspect of their lives, from how they dress and where they live to the character of their intimate relationships, as prescribed by the vow of celibacy.

The upholding of canon law also explains — but does not excuse, as the royal commission has made abundantly clear in the release of five reports about the church in the past week — the church’s practice of dealing with offending priests itself rather than reporting their crimes to the police. Among many examples heard by the commission was an account of how John Gerard Nestor, a priest in the diocese of Wollongong, was moved to another parish after offending, and went on to sexually abuse more children. Parishioners were not told of the previous crimes.

But the church’s belief in its own moral universe was also indulged by the wider community, both here and overseas. As late as 2013, in twenty-two out of fifty US states, clergy were exempt from the mandatory sex abuse reporting requirements followed by teachers, social workers and healthcare professionals.

In Australia, the commission heard that the Catholic Church wasn’t alone in receiving preferential treatment. Those in charge at the Parramatta Training School for Girls and the Institution for Girls in Hay may also have been given at least de facto protection, with one survivor saying she was told by the police, “We can’t do anything… It’s a government institution and you have been made a ward of the state and they are supposed to be the ones [who look after you].”

These institutions also tried to extinguish evidence of the girls’ pre-institutional identities by shaving their heads, confiscating their belongings and banning them from speaking to guards unless spoken to. Staff, who saw themselves as transforming lives, told survivors that they would “make you or break you” and branded them “liars.” Apart from being unable to report abuse unless directly asked by a guard, this also meant the girls were highly unlikely to be believed.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that secrecy also plays a part in child sexual abuse in organisations that don’t have the hallmarks of total institutions, such as schools, hospitals and local organisations including boys’ clubs, sporting clubs and scouts.

There is a paucity of research into these groups in Australia, but material cited in Palmer’s report showed that senior officials of Boy Scouts of America withheld from junior staff details of child sexual abuse by other staff members. Instead, they “quietly” referred abusers to counsellors to “straighten up” and then let them keep working, which, like the treatment of Catholic priests in Australia, allowed them to abuse again.

Total institutions, and institutions sharing some of their characteristics, can have very strong informal group dynamics that may influence the reporting of child sexual abuse. Managers and staff who work for organisations that don’t encourage any discussion of sex or of the problematic behaviour of co-workers may be reluctant to report their suspicions of abuse. Co-workers in these workplaces may see any criticism, however slight, as divisive.

A draft letter written by the principal of Geelong Grammar, John Lewis, intended for teacher Jonathan Harvey, demonstrates this reluctance to discuss child sexual abuse with any real frankness. It also shows the tension between trusting colleagues and looking after children in their care:

A real problem for your continuing work in the school… is that barriers of distrust have grown up between you and a good number of your senior colleagues. Without wishing to find members in that sort of situation several house masters for instance (not just from the current group) have found themselves in situations where they are torn between the trust which they would like to exhibit in a colleague and their responsibility. Their concern is over relationships with some pupils which they do not believe to be in the best interest of those pupils…

One staff member who worked with Jonathan Lord at the Caringbah Outside School Hours Care program said she would feel uncomfortable making a complaint “because although it is really good that we have lots of friendships with the team, things always seem to get back to people even if they are not meant to.”

The researchers found this impulse to trust superiors, peers or subordinates is stronger where there is a shared professional or religious affiliation. The Catholic Church has an elaborate organisational apparatus for dealing with complaints against priests, which includes the Congregation for the Clergy. This organisation is staffed by priests and known to favour fellow priests, as it did in the case of John Gerard Nestor, whose appeal was sustained, slowing his expulsion from the priesthood.

A final important contributing factor is the informal power dynamics operating among children themselves. The royal commission heard, for instance, that when a boy at Geelong Grammar was sexually abused at least some of his peers took part or did not step in to stop the abuse.

Informal power dynamics can also make it difficult for victims to report abuse. Survivors of abuse at the hands of fellow inmates in youth correctional institutions told the commission that they didn’t report the abuse because they feared retribution. It can also stop victims reporting the abuse for years, as appears to have happened with a survivor of abuse by swimming coach, Terry Buck. The victim testified he kept silent about the abuse because Buck, a fellow coach, enjoyed the status of “an Olympian and an Australian sporting icon.”

This article has only begun to sketch the complex set of interacting social, psychological and cultural elements that have allowed so many children in so many different institutions to be sexually abused. What is important to underscore is the fact that at the centre of every instance of child sexual abuse examined by the commission is a socially sanctioned imbalance of power between the child and those charged with the responsibility of looking after them.

The flood of testimony by adult survivors of abuse over the past four and a half years has revealed many things, not least an unintentionally and bitterly ironic illustration of the original problem of power imbalance. When adults testify to their abuse, they are usually believed; when children, especially those in the care of institutions, testify, they often aren’t. Yet that is when they most need to be heard because that is when they are most vulnerable. ●

By the same authors: Creating child-centred institutions

The post Why do institutions fail to protect children? appeared first on Inside Story.

It is unlikely many shareholders will be worried — as Margaret Simons was in Inside Story last week — by ACCC head Rod Sims’s finding that competition in the Australian news market will be reduced, though not substantially reduced, if the merger proceeds. As Simons argued, the ACCC’s decision accorded with its legislation, but the legislation is inadequate and outdated, and fails to tackle the news and information needs of people as citizens rather than as consumers.

Whether shareholders worry about such issues is their prerogative. But the supply of what is sometimes called public interest journalism, and what Fairfax Media’s chief executive Greg Hywood calls “quality journalism,” is vital to the nation’s democratic health, and for many decades Fairfax’s news outlets have been a core contributor. So the fate of Fairfax’s journalism is an issue for us all.

Can Fairfax’s journalistic culture survive, let alone thrive, once it is merged with Nine, which is in the business, as its title makes explicit, of entertainment?

Fairfax Media, along with almost every other media company in the world, has been struggling to find a new business model to replace the one from which it handsomely profited in the pre-internet age. A benign view of Hywood’s tenure is that by the time he took over as chief executive, in late 2010, the digital horse had well and truly bolted. Previous chief executives, whether through arrogance or incompetence, were defeated by what was a wicked problem for mainstream media.

Virtually no one foresaw that the strategy of expanding readership online while sloughing off print production costs would be derailed by the rise of global behemoths Facebook and Google, who between them have garnered most of the advertising revenues of newspaper companies’ around the Western world.

Unlike his predecessors, Hywood brought to the role of chief executive a strong background as a journalist, editor and corporate executive. He made difficult decisions to slash costs and to build new digital businesses that would profit from the company’s large online audiences.

Two key questions arise about the current state of Fairfax. How seriously have the seemingly endless rounds of voluntary redundancies weakened the company’s quality journalism? And how has Hywood, as the company’s public face, gone about communicating his strategy, both externally and internally?

The first question goes to the relationship between tangible matters like cost and intangible matters like reputation and influence. Whatever else may be happening in the rapidly changing digital media landscape, journalism that is interesting to the public (such as the travails of the Kardashian family) is in plentiful, profitable supply while journalism that is in the public interest (why so many institutions protected themselves rather than the children they were duty-bound to look after) is expensive to produce and doesn’t necessarily appeal to a mass audience, let alone advertisers. The latter is critical, though, to the credibility of a company’s journalism.

It is notoriously difficult to assess changes in the quality of journalism, for several reasons. The sheer proliferation of journalism makes it susceptible to a variation of the boiling frog principle: it looks much the same from day to day, so you need to look back a decade or more to discern significant change, and who has the time, let alone the inclination, for that? Second, the quality of the journalism that wins awards — and Greg Hywood loves to point to the number of awards won by Fairfax Media journalists — may be as good, if not better, than in the past, but the broad mass of journalism is more variable in quality and more susceptible to reductions in the number of available journalists.

Each day’s output may reassure readers of the company’s continued existence, but what stories haven’t been covered — or uncovered — because of a lack of resources? How many sources did the journalist talk to before writing his or her piece, and how much fact-checking was done? How much of the journalistic memory once supplied by subeditors has been brought to bear?

The second question, of how Hywood communicates, goes to the relationship a media company wants to create with its audience. Here there is an interesting contrast between the open dialogue that the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Katharine Viner, encourages with readers and the lugubrious, voice-of-God style that Hywood adopts.

To look back through Hywood’s public comments — in annual reports, presentations to market analysts, speeches and interviews — is to be told that Fairfax Media’s journalism has never been in better shape. Several themes emerge from his pronouncements.

First, “quality journalism” that wins awards and is “independent” became central to Fairfax Media’s business model after he took over in a way that it hadn’t been before. As he said in the A.N. Smith lecture in November 2011:

In “the good old days” when newspapers were a licence to print money the journalism was an added extra delivered by the proprietors to leverage political and social influence and in some cases a dollop of public good. The business in those days was the classifieds. They made the money, they drove the business. Not anymore.

This is only half true. Yes, advertising comprised the bulk of revenue earned by the company for much of its life, but a dispassionate reading of Gavin Souter’s two-volume history of the company, Company of Heralds (1981) and Heralds and Angels (1992), shows that these remarks about the company’s editorial goals cynically undervalue the journalistic culture that grew under the Fairfax family’s proprietorship.

Second, Hywood has extolled “quality journalism” as the focus of Fairfax’s rapidly changing business model while overseeing round after round of cuts to the very people who produce the “quality journalism,” namely the journalists.

It is hard to estimate the exact number of journalists who have taken redundancy packages in the past decade — figures are not always made public — but it does appear that the redundancy round in mid 2012, which saw close to 20 per cent of editorial staff depart, was the biggest in the company’s history. Redundancy rounds, albeit smaller, have continued in most years since.

To put it another way, a decade ago the Age and the Sunday Age had around 500 editorial staff. After the last major round of cuts at Fairfax, in 2017, marginally more than that number of journalists were spread across the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, including their Sunday editions, and the Australian Financial Review.

Third, Hywood muddies the concept of quality journalism by arguing that the quality of the journalism is not tied to the quantity of the journalists. In an opinion piece for the Financial Review in March 2016 he recalled that when he began with the newspaper, in 1976, it had twenty-five staff:

Still, the Financial Review was then, as it is now, with more than five times the number of reporters, the pre-eminent business publication in the country. Under the leadership of Max Walsh it defined the national economic debate and shaped the general political discourse. The business community got the news and analysis it needed and was held to account where necessary.

So when the cry goes up about Fairfax Media giving up on quality journalism because we are reducing staff numbers I am incredulous. Since when has quantity got to do with quality?

You might argue that one Max Walsh was worth several ordinary reporters, but it strains credulity to believe that a significant reduction in the number of journalists employed by a company won’t have an impact on quality, especially as some of the most talented and experienced journalists of their generation are among those who decided to leave.

Indeed, one of them, the late Michael Gordon, is being honoured by the Melbourne Press Club this Friday with the announcement of a fellowship in his name. In the language of the sport he loved: if Hawthorn was asked to field a team of twelve instead of eighteen each week, what would be its prospects for winning a premiership?

Fourth, Hywood deploys figures disingenuously. In the example above, he writes that the Financial Review had five times as many journalists in 2016 as it had in 1976 and that the Sydney Morning Herald had about seventy-five journalists in 1968 during the “time of the legendary ‘rivers of gold’” when the Herald had a virtual monopoly over classified advertising in Sydney. But this is to vault over a key reason for the large expansion of staff numbers during the 1980s and 1990s: the introduction of a range of weekday supplements and the Good Weekend magazine.

Occasionally, Hywood does acknowledge the impact of cost-cutting on the business. Perhaps not surprisingly, this admission was wrung from him in May 2017 by senators questioning him for a parliamentary inquiry into the Future of Public Interest Journalism:

What we did say in these lay-offs is that we want this to be the last big structural redundancy round, because we have been working for years to get our metro publishing businesses to the point where they can be sustainable in this market environment, and it has taken us quite a number of very difficult decisions, very confronting decisions.

Fifth, the invocation of “quality journalism” tends to be surrounded with business-speak. As he said in the company’s 2017 annual report:

Fairfax will continue to thrive as a high-value, broadly based, digital-rich business of powerful information brands, marketplaces and entertainment assets… We remain focused on our strategy to grow shareholder value by leveraging our award-winning journalism and content to engage audiences, communities and businesses.

So everything is fine at Fairfax Media, and there is no relationship between the quantity of journalists and the quality of the company’s journalism. Or if there is, then way more journalists are working there now than in the so-called golden days. Or, okay, we had to take difficult cost-cutting decisions, but don’t worry because we’re transitioning into the world of information brands.

These different strands of rhetoric may be aimed at presenting a strong sales pitch to shareholders and institutional investors, but they are frankly baffling to everyone else.

The contradiction between the corporate spiel emanating from Fairfax headquarters and the spirit of fearless truth-telling that underpins quality journalism is glaring. And it could well be weakening the close ties that readers have long had with Fairfax’s newspapers.

That may not trouble Nine Entertainment, for whom other parts of Fairfax, such as the online streaming service, Stan, and the online house advertising site, Domain, are more financially attractive than the struggling mastheads, but it is worrying for anyone with a commitment to public interest journalism.

And it is interesting, inspiring even, that this week Katharine Viner announced that her company’s recent strategy of appealing for support for their investigative journalism, which remains free online, has so far yielded voluntary contributions from more than a million readers around the world. •

The post A broken record of quality journalism appeared first on Inside Story.

Woodward’s near contemporary, Seymour Hersh, has unearthed more scoops, of sharper bite, than his celebrity counterpart. In the best-known of these stories, he exposed the war crimes committed by American soldiers at My Lai during the Vietnam war, unearthed misdeeds of the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1970s, and exposed the roots of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American prison guards at Abu Ghraib in 2004.

Why is Hersh less well known or lauded than Woodward? It’s a fascinating question. The two men may be in the twilight of their careers — Hersh is eighty-one, Woodward seventy-five — but their approach to journalism differs in crucial ways. And, in Donald Trump’s America, there is a strong argument that what is needed is more Hershes and fewer Woodwards.

This is not to say that Hersh’s journalism is without flaws. His reliance on confidential sources, for instance, has long attracted criticism. But his recently published memoir, Reporter, gives us an opportunity to recall, or find out, just how many major disclosures he has been responsible for over the past fifty years.

Reporter also highlights how much has changed in American political life, and how much hasn’t, and sets some of the febrile reporting of the Trump presidency in a cooler historical context. And it gives us Hersh’s own perspective on the value and the limits of his prodigious journalistic labours.

Born in 1931 one of the twin sons of Jewish immigrants, Hersh grew up on the south side of Chicago. From his early teens he was expected to help his father in the family’s dry cleaning business after school and on weekends. Isadore Hersh’s idea of a fun Sunday was to take Seymour (usually known as Sy) and brother Alan to the store to mop the floors and then to a Russian bathhouse on the West Side where the boys themselves would be scrubbed down with rough birch branches. The pay-off was fresh herring and root beer for lunch.

Hersh learnt only recently that in 1941 the entire Jewish population of his father’s birthplace, the village of Šeduva in Lithuania, had been executed by a German commando unit aided by Lithuanian collaborators. His father never discussed the war or the Nazis. “In his own way, Isadore Hersh was a Holocaust survivor as well as a Holocaust denier.”

It is a blunt declarative statement that Hersh, rather like his father, doesn’t take any further. Indeed, his family background and childhood occupies only the first four pages of this memoir. Then he is out in the world, finding his way.

A keen reader of literature and history from an early age, he graduated with a degree from the University of Chicago before moving on to law school, hating its dryness and moving out. Looking for work in 1959, he stumbled on to the City News Bureau, or CNB, a local agency that supplied stories, mostly about crime, to Chicago’s newspapers. There, he learnt the virtues of speed, accuracy and scepticism: as a senior editor used to tell reporters, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

The CNB had been the model for the play (and, later, film) The Front Page, and a biographer of Hersh, Robert Miraldi, writes that it was not uncommon for CNB reporters to impersonate a city official to induce people to provide information. Hersh used similar methods when he was tracking down Lieutenant William Calley, who had been charged over war crimes committed at My Lai in Vietnam.

Journalists should use subterfuge only as a last resort, not as an opening gambit, and only on stories genuinely in the public interest. Judging by his memoir, and checking it against Miraldi’s 2013 biography, Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist, it is clear Hersh has deployed dubious news-gathering methods during his career. Sometimes — but not always — these methods are justified by the importance of the stories (the My Lai massacre clearly qualifies here) and the degree of difficulty Hersh faces in nailing them down.

Almost as important, Hersh learnt in his time at CNB about self-censorship and racism in the media. One night he overheard a police officer say to a fellow officer that he had shot and killed an unarmed robbery suspect in the back. Asked if the suspect had tried to run away, the officer said, “Naw. I told the nigger to beat it and then plugged him.”

Hersh took the story to his editor, who dissuaded him from writing it even after he obtained the coroner’s report showing the suspect had indeed been shot in the back. Hersh backed down, “full of despair at my weakness and at the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship.”

It’s fair to say that since then Hersh has hardly ever backed off from a story or been accused of self-censorship. He is notorious for browbeating sources to provoke a reaction, and he wears out editors in a similar way — even those lauded for their tough-mindedness, like Abe Rosenthal at the New York Times or David Remnick at the New Yorker. Editors tire of his belligerent advocacy for his stories — Hersh is an old-school newsroom typewriter-thrower and expletive-utterer — as well as his reliance on confidential sources for stories accusing those in power of lying, corruption or worse.

Equally, Hersh has earned a reputation for being a ferociously competitive, hard-working investigative journalist who is feared and intensely disliked by those he targets, from former secretary of state in the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger, to Richard Perle, a powerful business figure connected to the Bush administration, who once said, “Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly.”

Hersh became internationally famous in 1969 when he broke the My Lai massacre story. American soldiers had killed up to 504 Vietnamese civilians; of them, 182 were women (seventeen of them pregnant), 173 were children and sixty were men over the age of sixty. Historian Kendrick Oliver describes it as a pivotal event not only in the Vietnam war but in American history.

Before My Lai, war crimes by American troops had rarely, if ever, been disclosed in the news media. A massacre of between 250 and 300 civilians, mostly women and children, had taken place during the Korean war, for instance, but was not disclosed until nearly half a century later by an Associated Press investigative team.

The atrocities at My Lai had taken place in March 1968, but they were not revealed until late the following year and not by the mainstream news media. Hersh, freelancing in Washington, followed up a public interest lawyer’s tip with a tenacity and resourcefulness that rivals Wilfred Burchett’s trip to Hiroshima after the atomic bomb in 1945, which I’ve written about for Inside Story. Hersh’s revelations about the events at My Lai were initially turned down by outlets such as Life magazine and the New York Times. Eventually, a small, independent, anti-war news agency run by a friend of Hersh managed to sell it to newspapers around the country, not including the New York Times.

On the same day as this initial, muted response to what were shocking revelations, President Nixon sent his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, out to deliver a speech criticising the “liberal eastern establishment” media’s coverage of the war. “The day when the network commentators and even the gentlemen of the New York Times enjoyed a diplomatic immunity from comment and criticism is over!” Agnew declared. His speech and its reception — it drew a standing ovation — are a marker of the hostility towards the press that has only intensified under President Trump’s relentless stoking.

The big television networks ignored the My Lai revelations until Hersh found a soldier in Calley’s company who could be persuaded to be interviewed by Mike Wallace on CBS. Paul Meadlo then admitted on national television that he had killed women and children. “It sent a shudder through the nation,” recalled Hersh’s publisher friend, David Obst.

The shudder became a seismic shift three years later, in 1972, when Woodward and his colleague at the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein, began reporting on the implications of the break-in at the Democratic Party’s headquarters at the Watergate hotel-office complex. The Watergate story, which begins with dirty tricks by low-level Republican Party political operatives and ends with president Richard Nixon’s forced resignation in August 1974, is well known; what is less well known is the role Seymour Hersh played in it.

By 1972, having won a Pulitzer Prize for his My Lai disclosures, Hersh was in the Washington bureau of the country’s most prestigious newspaper, the New York Times, covering national security issues. The Times, “a cathedral of quiet dignity,” according to Gay Talese’s history, The Kingdom and the Power, was slow to respond to Watergate. The problem, as one of its then editors, Bill Kovach, pithily put it, was that the Times “hated to be beaten but didn’t really want to be first” on stories that genuinely challenged power and authority. Spiro Agnew hated the newspaper for being liberal and eastern, but the third word of his description — establishment — is crucial: the Times was part of the establishment.

After numerous Woodward and Bernstein disclosures, the newspaper’s hatred of being beaten outweighed its reticence about being first, and managing editor Abe Rosenthal instructed Hersh to begin covering the story. Most of the key sources were already dealing with Woodward and Bernstein, including the most famous anonymous source in media history, “Deep Throat” (revealed three decades later to be deputy FBI director Mark Felt).

Even so, beginning in early 1973, Hersh broke several important stories about Watergate, including the key disclosure that those on trial for the Watergate break-in were being paid “hush money,” allegedly by the Committee to Re-elect the President. Woodward and Bernstein hated being scooped, but they liked seeing Hersh verify and amplify their revelations in the nation’s most powerful newspaper.

The three journalists competed as fiercely as they respected each other’s work ethic. The difference was that the Washington Post duo wrote a book about their Watergate coverage, All the President’s Men, that sold 2.7 million copies on its release in 1974 and was turned into an Oscar-winning Hollywood film starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. No newspaper journalists had ever been as famous or glamorous.

Hersh has only good things to say in his memoir about Woodward (they played tennis on Sundays for many years, and occasionally shared notes about sources), but Miraldi documents Hersh’s envy of his better-known counterpart. “It’s a very crass materialistic thing to say, but it’s a fact,” Hersh once said drily. “I wouldn’t mind making a million dollars on a book. Having Robert Redford play me would not bother me at all.”

That mattered less than the extraordinary series of stories Hersh unearthed about national security during this period, including his revelation that the United States had illegally and secretly bombed neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam war. Just before Christmas 1974, Hersh revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency, in violation of its charter, had “conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed government sources.”

The CIA story prompted Congress to set up a commission of inquiry, headed by Senator Frank Church, to investigate the legality of the CIA’s covert operations, drug-smuggling activities in the Golden Triangle, and attempts to interfere in other countries’ politics. The Church Commission’s work paved the way for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

If Hersh’s influence and reputation reached a peak in the mid 1970s, they fluctuated over the next three decades as he alternated between producing revelations (about Panamanian leader General Manuel Noriega’s corruption, for instance, and his dubious relationship with the American military and intelligence agencies) and becoming mired in controversy (as he was after he took a deep dive into the details of JFK’s extramarital affairs while he was president, in The Dark Side of Camelot).

Sometimes he experienced both at once, as when he alleged that duplicity was central to Henry Kissinger’s career, in his 1983 book The Price of Power, for which he interviewed more than 1000 people and spent a year on background reading. If, despite unremitting ferreting, Hersh failed to find the smoking gun that would have destroyed Kissinger’s career, the book has held up to scrutiny over time, and Kissinger’s reputation has been tarnished.

The combination of working with David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks prompted a series of significant stories, epitomised by Hersh’s reporting of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. The CBS television program 60 Minutes II broke the story just before the New Yorker, but Hersh obtained a fifty-three-page internal army report on the events by Major-General Antonio Taguba, which enabled him to demolish the trope on conservative radio talk shows that Abu Ghraib was simply about a “few guys going nuts on the night-shift.”

Instead, Hersh wrote, the roots of Abu Ghraib could be found in defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to expand a highly secret program of interrogating Iraqi prisoners. The operation “embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.”

Hersh’s reporting after 9/11 culminated in his ninth book, Chain of Command, which won numerous awards but sold nowhere near as well as even one of Woodward’s quartet of books about George W. Bush’s presidency, Bush at War, Plan of Attack, State of Denial and The War Within.

If the lack of attention chafed Hersh, a comparison of these works shows Hersh hewing more closely to the promise of public interest journalism. “Bob has become the diarist of sitting administrations,” says Bill Kovach, a former editor at the New York Times, “and Sy has continued to be the muckraker. Sy continues his outrage.”

Or, as Mark Danner, himself a respected American investigative journalist, puts it, where Woodward relies for his disclosures on officials at the highest level of government, Hersh’s sources come from lower levels of the government and intelligence bureaucracy. Where Woodward provides the “deeper” version of what is, essentially, “the official story,” Hersh uncovers a version of events that “the government does not want public — which is to say, a version that contradicts the official story of what went on.”

Most of Woodward’s books, then, stay close to the moment’s conventional wisdom about any given administration. His first two Bush books, published in 2003 and 2004, show the president as commanding and decisive. It was only in late 2006, after State of Denial was released and it was apparent to even the least interested citizen that the war on terror had been poorly conceived and was being poorly executed, that Woodward began meting out criticism. As Slate editor Jacob Weisberg wrote, the state of denial applied as much to Woodward as it did to the Bush administration. For his part, within weeks of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Hersh was reporting in the New Yorker that the CIA and the FBI were ill-prepared to deal with al Qaeda and were riven by intra-agency rivalry and mistrust.

Over his long career Hersh has undoubtedly made errors. And some of his predictions have proved to be wrong. But he has acknowledged at least some of these lapses in his memoir — not something that comes easily to journalists, let alone investigative journalists.

As Steve Weinberg, a former director of Investigative Reporters and Editors in the United States, writes, “Any journalist who does that many high-stakes stories and has to depend on so many sources, whose truthfulness cannot always be determined, may be misled some of the time.” Hersh himself told his biographer, “I am a mouthpiece for people on the inside. You get a sense I am a vehicle for a certain form of dissent.”

That’s not what you get from Woodward, who says he persuades political leaders to talk because “essentially I write self-portraits.” Whether or not he has persuaded Donald Trump to speak on the record, it seems unlikely that Fear: Trump in the White House will provide a “vehicle for a certain form of dissent.”

Does Hersh have in him another searing exposé, or is his memoir a swan song? You’d hope the former, but it feels like the latter. He is still promising a book about former vice-president Dick Cheney, but Cheney hasn’t been in that job since 2009 and Barton Gellman thoroughly documented his malign influence on American politics a decade ago in Angler: The Shadow Presidency of Dick Cheney.

And as Alan Rusbridger, former long-time editor of the Guardian, notes, Hersh’s reliance on anonymous sources is being overtaken, or at the least offset, by new approaches to journalism that draw on myriad communication technologies to forensically investigate events and issues.

Regardless, Hersh has already given us a lifetime’s worth of disclosures in the public interest that even at the distance of several decades are as important to read as they are disturbing. •

The post Seymour Hersh, reporter appeared first on Inside Story.

Legitimate concern has been expressed at the government’s plan to cap redress at $150,000 per person rather than the commission’s recommended $200,000. The recommendation that priests be added to the list of those subject to mandatory reporting requirements has been supported by the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, though it was immediately rejected by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.

That there is division within the Catholic Church about how to respond to the commission’s final report is evident — as Joanne McCarthy, the journalist whose work helped spark the royal commission, writes — in the church’s unwillingness to make public the 1000-page report of its Truth, Justice and Healing Council, which it has had since March.

The ceiling on compensation and breaking the seal of confession are questions that spark debate if not outrage among the general public, but they are just two among the 409 recommendations made by the commission in its seventeen-volume report. In fact, the sheer scale of the royal commission’s work — even its executive summary runs to 220 pages — poses a challenge. How do we absorb and debate its many recommendations? Not only has it gathered vast amounts of information, evidence and testimony but the issues it covers are complex and the subject matter distressing.

In an earlier article for Inside Story, we asked how it was that so many children had been failed by so many institutions for so many years, and found illuminating answers in the fifty-two research reports produced by the commission. Given that it is impossible to deal with the royal commission’s work in a single article and that institutional failure was our previous focus, the need to create child-centred institutions will be our subject here.

It’s fair to say that when the royal commission began five years ago the community’s overall knowledge of how to identify, report and respond to child sexual abuse was as limited as the literature on the topic. As a report for the commission by Portland State University’s Keith Kaufman and British researcher Marcus Erooga concludes, “there was no existing empirical evidence or theoretical base on organisational culture and institutional child sexual abuse, beyond recognition that it was important.” An Adelaide research team, Michael Proeve, Catia Malvaso and Paul DelFabbro, found that the “overwhelming majority” of available research is based on known perpetrators, and there is not enough information to “make predictions about the likelihood of being a perpetrator.”

Researchers acknowledge the need for more work on sexual abuse by peers and abuse of children by women, given the large number of women working in education. The latter point was highlighted by the recent arrest of Malka Leifer, a former principal of an Orthodox Jewish school in Melbourne, on seventy-four counts of child sexual abuse. Those allegations are an outlier, however; the royal commission found that all but 6.2 per cent of the 6875 survivors who attended its private sessions were abused by a male.

It is important to remember that far more children are abused within families or by someone they know than they are in institutions, but this does not lessen the gravity of the fact that more than 4000 individual institutions were reported to the commission. Its final report declares that “the sexual abuse of children has occurred in almost every type of institution where children reside or attend,” with some institutions having multiple abusers.

The final report also found that many institutions did not have a culture of prioritising children’s interests; instead, “some leaders felt their primary responsibility was to protect the institution’s reputation, and the accused person.” On the information the royal commission received, “the greatest number of alleged perpetrators and abused children were in Catholic institutions.”

If we are much clearer now about the magnitude of abuse and the urgency of the task ahead, we must not squander the courage of the 8000-plus survivors who told their stories to the royal commission, nor negate the efforts of its 680-strong workforce. We now know that child sexual abuse has been occurring for generations and that to assume it will not continue in the future would be a tragic mistake.

The message from researchers is just as unequivocal: society must demand its institutions redefine what it means to exercise power over children in their care.

How might we achieve this? Some answers can be found in the research reports prepared for the royal commission by Kaufman and Erooga and by Donald Palmer. Each points to the seemingly simple conclusions of two researchers working separately, David Finkelhor and Edgar Schein. The fact that they published their findings more than thirty years ago underscores the need to build stronger bridges between academics, those who run institutions and the community.

In 1984 Finkelhor established four conditions that enable perpetrators to sexually abuse a child. First, of course, they have to be motivated to commit the abuse. Then they have to overcome “internal inhibitors” that they may have, such as thinking child sexual abuse harms the child. The next step is to overcome any external barriers between themselves and the child, such as adult supervision. Last, the abuser has to overcome the child’s own resistance.

This makes one point very clear. We need to make it harder for perpetrators to abuse — regardless of the institution they are in, whether that is a day-care centre, respite service for disabled children, church, school or youth detention centre — by increasing the risk of being caught and limiting the opportunities to offend. It also means — and this critical ingredient was absent in many cases reported to the royal commission — that institutions must ensure that they foster a child-focused culture “led by senior management and wholeheartedly endorsed and owned by staff at all levels,” in the words of Kaufman and Erooga.

The researchers argue that the current system reles too heavily on screening techniques. “The best way to reduce the risk of institutional child sexual abuse,” write Kaufman and Erooga, “is to avoid dangerous practice rather than attempt to screen out allegedly dangerous people.” Screening is important in employing staff and accepting volunteers in organisations that care for children, of course, but it is “far from guaranteed to deter or detect all individuals who might present a risk.”

A 2012 study by Erooga, Debra Allnock and Paula Telford found that only one person in a sample of twenty-one convicted institutional sex offenders had a previous conviction. Perpetrators told the researchers that they took advantage of the “policies, climate, culture and norms” of institutions to gain access to children. Again, research offers guidance, this time from Edgar Schein in 1984, whom Palmer credits with developing one of the “earliest and most authoritative analyses of organisational culture.”

Schein argues that leaders convey a sense of identity in five ways: by the people they hire and fire; by the behaviour they reward and punish; by the issues they choose to focus on; by how they handle crises; and by their own attitudes and behaviour. Palmer’s research shows that organisational leaders who “talk to staff members, parents and children about child sexual abuse outside the context of formal training sessions are conveying that the issue is important to them, and implying that it should be important to others as well.”

Strict screening techniques can be seen as a kind of fire hose wielded by authorities to keep a known threat at bay, but it is more important that the institution itself is fire-proofed, with employees from the ground up equipped to define, deter and report any attempt to abuse children. All those who deal with children should be a fire wardens, identifying themselves as protectors of the children in their care.

Schein says the first step is to “unfreeze” internalised attitudes that otherwise block an organisation’s training efforts. Second, the organisation needs to inculcate the ethic that there is zero tolerance for child sexual abuse. And finally, the new culture must be “refrozen,” which means reinforcing the new attitudes.

Palmer argues that Schein’s concept of “engineering artefacts and practices” could be yet another way for institutions to combat child sexual abuse. Sporting clubs, for instance, could give awards not only for winning races but to recognise children and coaches “for behaviour consistent with assumptions, values and beliefs, and norms that help prevent child sexual abuse.” Older, more accomplished athletes might be asked to serve as “big brothers” or “big sisters” to younger, less accomplished athletes.

The same report argues that there is a strong need to “combat the endorsement of grooming behaviour.” In the case of boarding schools, it suggests purging the organisation of the belief that teachers need to develop close personal relationships with students and instead emphasising strong boundaries and the development of “more professional relationships with students (in which the teacher is viewed as having expert knowledge and the student is viewed as their client).”

What the testimony of survivors to the royal commission laid bare was the fact that one of the greatest barriers to victims’ disclosing child sexual abuse is fear they will not be believed. A 2015 study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies cited by Erooga, Allnock and Telford says that children must be sent very clear messages that they will be believed when they report abuse. The research team recommended that legislation be created to strengthen victims’ rights to privacy, which would foster more humane treatment of victims and encourage reporting of abuse. The team also suggests setting up ways that victims could report from outside the institution, encouraging anonymous reporting and making the process less onerous.

Palmer’s research found that children are less likely to report their abuse when the institution has a “macho culture” that prizes stoicism in the face of harsh treatment by staff or peers. This should be replaced, he says, by the belief that reporting such treatment is a sign not of weakness but of strength, honesty and maturity. The research advocates a cultural shift whereby those working at a residential childcare facility would opt to accept children’s reports of abuse at face value and treat them as “true, until proven otherwise” rather than as untrustworthy.

How does the commission propose that these and other insights be translated into action? In its sixth recommendation the commission proposes that ten Child Safe Standards be adopted by all levels of government and by all institutions and organisations that care for children, regardless of size, duty or denomination.

According to the standards, child safety should be embedded in institutional leadership, governance and culture. Children should participate in decisions affecting them and be taken seriously, and families and communities should be informed and involved. Equity should be upheld and diverse needs taken into account. People working with children should be both suitable and supported. Processes to respond to complaints of child sexual abuse must be child-focused. Staff need to be equipped through regular training with the knowledge, skills and awareness to keep children safe. The physical and online environments must minimise the opportunity for abuse to occur. Built into the Child Safe Standards is a recognition of the need for continuous review and improvement. Policies and procedures must also document how the institution is child safe.

The commission has shown that children are too often terrified to speak out. We must learn to read their silence or at the least create an environment sufficiently open to encourage them to speak up without a fear of being ignored or dismissed. As vigilant and well intentioned as we might be as individuals and as members of organisations, the commission warns that there remain serious, systemic problems that will require a concerted national effort to overcome. We must develop a unified model of reporting child abuse across Australia while simultaneously removing the barriers to reporting. Beyond this, we need to improve the training, education and guidance that informs us what we should report and how we should go about it.

The news media performs a vital role in holding power to account and ensuring that vulnerable people’s stories are heard. In its final sitting day last December, the commission noted that many media outlets had provided extensive coverage of its work but the chief commissioner, Justice Peter McClellan, singled out the value of the ABC’s reporting on every one of its case studies on television, radio and online almost every sitting day.

As the commissioners write in their acknowledgment of the importance of each survivor’s testimony: “The survivors are remarkable people with a common concern to do what they can to ensure that other children are not abused. They deserve our nation’s thanks.” These remarkably heartfelt words from royal commissioners also serve as a stinging call for all of us to ensure such widespread tragedies do not occur again. •

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Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House became, in the words of its author, an “international political event.” Wolff is a smooth media performer versed in the arts of self-promotion, but in this case the claim is no exaggeration. The controversy set off by the book dominated the news cycle for weeks. It has already sold 1.7 million copies, and is being adapted for television.

The publicity was helped by none other than the book’s main character, who, in an unprecedented presidential move, announced he was going to sue for defamation and invasion of privacy. Undeterred, the publishers brought forward the release date by four days. All Trump had managed to do, said Wolff, “was call more attention to my book. He just shoots himself in the foot at every opportunity.” It was another case of Trump’s characteristic approach, “malevolence tempered by incompetence.”

During the blizzard of media interviews, Wolff asserted he had “got to a truth that no one else had gotten to.” Everyone around Trump, he said, believes “he’s a charlatan, a fool, an idiot and someone ultimately not capable of functioning in this job.” Fire and Fury’s conclusion is that “Trump is deeply unpredictable, irrational, at times bordering on incoherent, [and] self-obsessed in a disconcerting way.”

Drawing on around 200 interviews and access to the most senior officials in the administration, this is a searing portrait of a White House gripped by infighting and political and policy failures. At the book’s centre is an individual who is intellectually, emotionally and ethically unfit to be president. Many, mainly small points in Fire and Fury have been challenged on factual grounds, but the central narrative has essentially gone unchallenged, whether by Trump, his aides or a seemingly envious Washington press corps chafing at Wolff’s disdain for them.

Wolff is both wrong and right when he claims that he reached a truth no one else has. He is wrong because a key reason why Fire and Fury feels intuitively right is that hundreds of journalists and authors have painstakingly built a house of facts about Trump with which Wolff’s picture is in accord. Through the daily reporting and investigative journalism of the New York Times and the Washington Post, the searching analysis by the New Yorker, the probing television interviews on CNN and the books by Michael D’Antonio (The Truth about Trump), Joshua Green (Devil’s Bargain), David Cay Johnston (The Making of Donald Trump), and Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher (Trump Revealed), many of the most salient facts about the president and his administration are already known.

It is from the work of these and many others that we know about Trump’s background (more privileged than he professes), his business acumen (a lot thinner than his boasting would have us believe), his business dealings (at best roguish, at worst criminal), his attitudes towards women (a long history of misogyny and philandering), and his attitudes towards people from different backgrounds (a long history of racism and support of white supremacists). Fire and Fury surfed the wave of all this prodigious journalistic energy.

If Wolff is wrong to claim he’s the first to expose Trump, he is right to say that he articulated key features more forcefully and compellingly than others have. Here it is worth underscoring the impact on readers of material recounted in a narrative style. So much of the meticulous investigative reporting about Trump has been presented in the dry formality of news reporting and the necessarily careful phrasing of a piece vetted by a media outlet’s lawyers.

Wolff’s writing in no way resembles what Tom Wolfe called “the pale beige tone” of news reporting. His tone is by turns arch, snarky and deliciously gossipy. His “arsenic-laced prose,” as one critic calls it, may be whip-smart but it is not overly reflective, let alone self-reflective. His style is personal but never in the self-questioning way that Helen Garner, for instance, has made famous. The effect on readers is to feel that Wolff is a knowing but irreverent guide who has taken them inside the centre of events.

Among the most telling examples of ineptitude and chaos in Fire and Fury is the story of how Wolff gained access to the White House. When the book exploded into the public realm in January 2018, many people had the same thought as Wolff’s former editor at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter: “The mystery is why the White House allowed him in the door.”

Part of the answer is that although Wolff, now sixty-four, might seem to many people to be an overnight sensation, he has had a long career in the New York media. As New York Times media writer Michael Grynbaum once observed, Wolff “has for years been a prime piranha in the Manhattan media pond.” Indeed, one friend of his says that he relishes conflict. “Everywhere I turned was someone who hated me,” Wolff is said to have commented, with a smile, after one party.

In the course of a colourful and controversial career, Wolff had already met Trump. He had made a cameo appearance in a pilot episode of a Trump-branded reality-TV project, Trump Town Girls, which involved beauty contestants selling real estate. Amazingly, though mercifully, the series never went to air.

In the first months of Trump’s presidency, Wolff made several sympathetic-sounding interventions. The day after Trump’s election victory, Hollywood Reporter had a story headlined “Michael Wolff: Trump Win Exposes Media’s Smug Failures.” He referred to the media as Trump’s opposition, a theme that was taken up by many in the administration. Then, around the time of the inauguration, he wrote an article for Newsweek titled “Why the Media Keeps Losing to Donald Trump.” He told CNN that “the New York Times front page looks like it’s 1938 in Germany every day,” and said the media was having “a nervous breakdown” covering Trump.

Illustrating again the force of Oscar Wilde’s dictum, “the flatterer is seldom interrupted,” one unctuous Wolff appearance on CNN in February 2017 elicited a phone call from the president complimenting him on his perceptiveness. Wolff told Trump he wanted to write a book; Trump told him to talk to his staff. In Wolff’s initial pitch, his working title was The Great Transition: The First Hundred Days of the Trump Administration, signalling a sympathetic counter to the slew of negative news in the “liberal” media. Trump’s staff were initially noncommittal, but in the chaos of the White House many of them apparently thought that cooperation with Wolff had been authorised.

This seems a classic case of journalistic bait and switch — or, in writer Janet Malcolm’s terms, seduction and betrayal. As Wolff told one interviewer, “I certainly said whatever was necessary to get the story.”

He would go to the West Wing lobby, he has recounted, but would often find that whomever he had an appointment to see would keep him waiting for long periods. Over time, sitting there waiting, he became almost a fixture. People would talk to him because he seemed “the most non-threatening person in the Trump universe.” There is some debate about the extent to which Wolff spoke to Trump himself, but given how many times Trump has been interviewed and how much access we all have to his mind via his compulsive tweeting, there probably was not an awful lot to be gained by yet more interviews.

There was, however, much to be gained from access to Trump’s aides, and it is their intensely unflattering view of Trump that is at the book’s core and is so revealing. Wolff has said this himself — that his aim was to represent how Trump was seen by those closest to him — and it is the singular focus on these close-up perspectives, as well as the sheer volume of negative testimony, that creates a narrative of such momentum.

Take, for instance, the night of the 2016 election. According to Wolff, almost everyone in the Trump team not only thought they would lose but were also cannily positioning themselves to cash in on the opportunities presented by the national exposure the campaign had provided for the Trump brand. The candidate himself, in a matter of hours, went from believing there was no way he could win to pale-faced shock at the prospect that he might (with Melania crying tears “not of joy”), and then on to blithe certainty that he would be a great president.

This episode might reveal a shocking level of cynicism and grandiosity, but it is no surprise. If Wolff’s account had showed Trump as a well-read policy wonk who posed as a populist simply to win votes, that would be a surprise. But by positioning the reader inside campaign headquarters at a crucial moment, Wolff’s account feels viscerally honest.

The other key to Wolff’s access was Steve Bannon, with whom he had many conversations, and whose views permeate the book. It was on Bannon, by then departed from the White House, that the wrath of Trump and his staff fell most heavily after the book’s publication.

But this raises a further question. Why did Bannon divulge so much to Wolff? According to Wolff, both Bannon and Roger Ailes, who had been head of Fox News for the previous twenty years, were guests at his home for dinner in early January 2017, and Wolff suspects that Ailes told Bannon that Wolff was someone he could trust. Indeed, it is clear that Wolff and Ailes had a good relationship at this time. “Ailes, accused of sexual harassment, was cashiered from Fox News in a move engineered by the liberal sons of conservative eighty-five-year-old Rupert Murdoch…” writes Wolff. “Ailes’s downfall was cause for much liberal celebration: the greatest conservative bugbear in modern politics had been felled by the new social norm.”

This is, to put it mildly, the kindest construction anyone could put on the forced departure of the disgraced Ailes. For a more realistic, and damningly documented perspective, read Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room, reviewed last year in Inside Story. But Wolff’s seeming regard for Ailes may well have made it easier for him to elicit observations from Bannon.

Ailes’s endorsement of Wolff is all the more amazing given the history of Wolff’s book about Rupert Murdoch, published in 2008. Wolff enjoyed unprecedented access to Murdoch and his immediate entourage, including fifty hours of interviews with Rupert himself. As an unabashed Wolff wrote later, he was invited to write a biography of Murdoch as “a weapon in [the internal News Corp] war against Ailes.” As such, he had to make “a devil’s bargain not to talk to Ailes.”

The Murdoch book’s acknowledgements suggest that Gary Ginsberg — a News Corp vice-president for corporate affairs, one-time aide to Bill Clinton and now an executive at Time Warner — recruited Wolff for the task. According to Wolff, Murdoch and those close to him were determined that his legacy would not be defined by Fox News. Wolff claims that Murdoch’s wife Wendi had turned the mogul almost into a “liberal” and that his four adult children were more or less liberal in their views. (Liberal is a word of infinite elasticity in Wolff’s usage, never further dissected or probed or qualified.)

Wolff argues that Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal was part of the attempt to define his legacy. If this is true, it failed spectacularly. A decade later, he is more closely tied than ever to Fox News, if not to the British phone-hacking scandals.

Whatever role Wolff’s book had in the war against Ailes, Ailes himself cannot have been displeased with it. Wolff repeatedly asserts that Ailes is the only person Murdoch is afraid of, and nearly every other reference to the former Fox News head is about his talent and successes.

As Ailes’s likely role shows, whatever Wolff believed at different times, and whatever his ethical standpoint and willingness to make “Faustian pacts,” a journalist’s relationship with sources involves two sides with two sets of interests. Did no one in the White House know Wolff was a “prime piranha in the Manhattan media pond”? After all, the president, a fellow New Yorker, has long been obsessed with the media and its portrayal of him (as Tina Brown recounts in the diaries of her years as editor of Vanity Fair between 1983 and 1992)?

The fact that Trump is notorious for not being a reader, according to Wolff — and also, earlier, to Trump’s ghostwriter on The Art of the Deal — may explain why he had not read Wolff’s biography of Murdoch. (Wolff later said he constantly feared that a phone call from Murdoch to Trump would end his access.) Perhaps the rest of the president’s staff were incurious about Wolff’s earlier works, too. Or perhaps the new administration was simply overwhelmed by the unexpected transition to government and didn’t pay Wolff any attention.

No doubt the ease of his access partly reflects an outstanding feature of the Trump White House: its lack of internal cohesion. And, as is so often the case in politics, internal conflicts lead to a surfeit of leaks. Despite their contempt for the ways of Washington politics, Trump staffers have engaged in its time-honoured, subterranean communication wars with unprecedented gusto.

Indeed, according to Wolff, it is the president himself who is the source of at least some leaks, albeit sometimes indirectly because of his habit of unburdening himself by phone, late at night, to a circle of business associates and confidants. Again, this is consistent with Trump’s history. Mark Singer did a classic tag-along profile of Trump for the New Yorker in 1997 that was updated during the 2016 election campaign and released as a short book. He drew attention to Trump’s bizarre habit of routinely telling him that what he was about to say was “off the record but you can use it,” which he then used to devastating effect in the profile:

Trump, by the way, is a skilled golfer. A source extremely close to him — by which I mean off the record but I can use it — told me that Claude Harmon, a former winner of the Masters tournament and for thirty-three years the club pro at Winged Foot, in Mamaroneck, New York, once described Donald as “the best weekend player” he’d ever seen.

Such blind egoism may have been funny in the nineties. But the stakes are so high now that there is a strong public-interest justification for Wolff’s bending the rules to get the story — though there is little evidence he gave such scruples much thought.

Wolff responds to the charge that he deceived White House officials and broke confidences either with outright denials or by arguing that the noble end justifies any slippery means. It is possible to take these ethical questions seriously but also argue that Wolff’s deception was justified because the story he had to tell about the occupant of the most powerful office in a global superpower was in the public interest. It’s also possible that the character of this extraordinary administration, and its breaking of so many precedents, means that the challenges of reporting on it may demand extraordinary strategies. On the other hand, many journalists who have revealed important stories about the Trump administration have done so without resorting to deception.

Kyle Pope, publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, said recently that each administration gets the chronicler it deserves. For the measured, reflective Barack Obama, it was New Yorker editor David Remnick; for the brash, nasty Trump, it is Michael Wolff. It’s a smart observation, though it vaults over the many less-heralded journalists whose work an authoritarian president would love to muzzle. ●

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Probably: that the votes of the Nick Xenophon Team’s senators and the amendments of their leader were crucial to the bill’s passing.

Probably: that the “whole media industry” supported this “reform,” which promised to bring analogue-era laws into the digital age.

As Mumbrella’s Tim Burrowes put it, “Soon, there’ll be a podcast studio in every newsroom,” which would be fine if you have the funds to pay the people who make podcasts.

Probably: that the new laws will enable the local media industry to compete against the new tech giants, Google and Facebook, who are “hoovering” up millions of dollars of advertising revenue that previously went to said local media industry.

Maybe: that the removal of legal restrictions on the ownership and reach of local media companies could lead to a rash of mergers that will somehow favour Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia.

Maybe but not likely: that while all the negotiations were going on, a committee of the Senate has been inquiring into the future of public interest journalism in this country.

Even less likely: that the two biggest commercial media companies in Australia — News Corp and Fairfax Media — didn’t see fit to make a written submission to that inquiry into the future of the very activity they’ve been insisting is threatened by outdated media laws and the rise of Google and Facebook.

If you’re confused by any of this, don’t blame yourself. You’ve been victim to the mainstream news media’s permanent blind spot — reporting on itself. Or, to be more precise, reporting on power plays between governments and media companies.

The two groups are perennially locked in an ugly dance. Both have a deep interest in and an intimate knowledge of how the other operates and both have difficulty separating their interests from any broader commitment to the electorate and the public. Yet both play a vital role in holding the other to account: where politicians have the power to legislate, the news media has the power to expose, ridicule or influence.

Like companies in any industry, media companies lobby governments in pursuit of their interests; but unlike companies in other industries, media companies have a 24/7 megaphone at their disposal.

Here, as always, it is important to separate the business of the media companies from the activity of journalism and to understand that when media companies and journalism are discussed in mainstream media, the interests of the former almost always overshadow the latter. This is why mainstream media coverage of the latest instalment in what Margaret Simons has called “the long, sad and sorry saga of media regulation in Australia” has been sorely lacking.

When the government and its supporters in the media claimed that the “whole media industry” supported the government’s proposed legislation, this simply meant that the government was doing what the major media companies wanted. The views of those who didn’t support the legislation, or who questioned aspects or proposed extra measures, were barely reported.

By my reading, the coverage of the government’s media package has been, by turns, missing in action (commercial television, with the exception of the emotive, context-free pleas to viewers by Ten presenters fearful about the network’s survival), relentless lobbying masquerading as reporting (News Corp publications, especially the Australian), exclusively business-oriented (the Australian Financial Review), constrained (Fairfax Media’s two metropolitan daily newspapers, whose national affairs coverage is now largely indistinguishable), and cautious to the point of being cowed (the ABC, with the exception of Media Watch, but not with the exception of a Radio National that no longer airs The Media Report).

Yes, outside the mainstream news media there has been more searching and thoughtful coverage (Nick Feik’s cover story for the July issue of the Monthly being a good example), but for many people evening television remains a primary source of news and, in any case, as Nielsen’s ranking of news websites shows, the most popular are owned by the biggest, best-known media companies.

Whatever else has been happening in the media landscape — and there’s no doubt a lot has been happening — journalism’s role both as a vehicle for, and as an engine driving, the free flow of information is as important as ever. In the past, media companies made money by connecting advertisers to the readers/listeners/viewers the companies attracted through their journalism; advertisers were willing to pay a lot for this access. It’s not that the journalism was unimportant for companies like News or Fairfax, but when the bulk of your revenue comes from advertising, then advertisers unavoidably become the higher priority.

Now that advertisers have found more effective ways of reaching audiences, they have been abandoning the traditional media companies. These companies are fighting desperately for commercial survival, which is why they have been lobbying the federal government to allow commercial broadcasters to reach the entire population of Australia, rather than 75 per cent of it, and to lift restrictions preventing any media company from owning more than two out of the three traditional media platforms — newspapers, radio and free-to-air television — in any market.

As can be seen from these pre-internet terms, the existing late-1980s laws had nothing to say about online media or, for that matter, subscription television. Governments thought or hoped that the subscription television sector would extend competition in the media landscape when it was introduced in the 1990s, but over time it has come to be dominated almost entirely by Foxtel. Foxtel’s ownership is shared by News Corp and Telstra, but it is the former that effectively runs the network.

The largely unregulated development of subscription TV is important for what’s happening now because it has enabled content- and talent-sharing to weaken media diversity. This phenomenon could well be magnified when the biggest companies act on the federal government’s new media laws.

We might not see a repeat of the rash of media mergers that accompanied Labor’s new media laws in the 1980s, but we could well see mergers between the three commercial television networks and the three main regional commercial television networks. Equally possible are mergers between the two big print/online companies, News Corp Australia and Fairfax Media, and commercial radio and television networks.

It is certainly true that the mainstream media companies face an existential crisis. And it’s true that legislation was needed to give them a chance of competing with the new tech behemoths. But it’s also true that the government could aim to regulate Google and Facebook, and set in place a mechanism so that at least some of the money they make from journalism could be funnelled back to the companies whose journalists create the content in the first place. This would provide those companies with an incentive and a means to continue producing journalism.

It’s not as if the big tech companies can’t afford it. Google and Facebook are among the biggest companies across all industries anywhere in the world. Their market capitalisation dwarfs even that of Murdoch’s global media empire.

A content tax or levy on Google and Facebook was briefly aired by the Senate inquiry into public interest journalism in June 2017 and received some support from media executives. But at the inquiry’s most recent public hearings, in Melbourne in August, Senator Xenophon bluntly told witnesses appearing before the committee (whom I was among, on behalf of the university where I work) that the government was not interested in such a proposal. And that, it seemed, was that.

Since then, however, the government has given ground and agreed to set up an inquiry into the impact of the new digital environment (that is, the impact of Google and Facebook) on media, to be conducted by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Depending how jaundiced you are about government-ordered inquiries, this is either a necessary step to develop the public policy groundwork or a handball into the too-hard basket. It could be both, of course.

It’s also true that even the federal government’s repeated affirmation of its commitment to media diversity reflects a somewhat undernourished understanding of the term. For a start, communication minister Mitch Fifield’s repeated assertions that there is more diversity of opinion online than ever before ignores two facts: that there is less diversity of news reporting because the big media companies have been sharing more and more news copy across their mastheads; and even if we limit the field to opinion, the newspapers and news websites that reach the most people are exhibiting less diversity.

In the pre-internet age, Andrew Bolt’s influence was confined largely to readers of the Herald Sun in Victoria. Today, his columns appear across many more News Corp Australia outlets, including newspapers in other states, on his company-published blog, on his eponymous program on Sky News, and on the Fairfax-owned 2GB. That’s quite a reach, taking up space that other voices might have occupied.

The minister also appeared to conflate the prospect of any government support for media diversity with support for existing mainstream media companies. Incentives to encourage new entrants or support small, recently established media outlets didn’t come into his equation. Some new outlets have certainly emerged, whether they’re specialist titles like Crinkling News or local editions of established overseas outlets, such as Guardian Australia and the New York Times, but the experience of the past decade has underscored the stony fact that if the big media companies in Australia are struggling, so too are the smaller ones.

There is much to be said for the agility engendered by the internet, but a good deal of evidence also shows how difficult it is to marry journalism with commercial success, especially journalism of the kind that requires original reporting, which can be time-consuming and resources-intensive.

While the minister has been negotiating with Senate crossbenchers to secure passage of his media bill package, Labor backbencher Sam Dastyari has been chairing the Senate committee into the future of public interest journalism, which was set up in May 2017. Mitch Fifield has largely ignored the committee’s work, partly because it is chaired by an opposition senator and partly because he has been fiercely focused on getting the media package passed. Yet many of the seventy-one submissions received by the committee offer thoughtful, well-researched ideas about how to solve a public policy problem facing the nation: namely, that journalism conducted in the public interest is under severe threat in Australia.

The crisis besetting the major commercial media companies has meant that an estimated 3000 journalists have taken redundancy packages since 2012, according to the New Beats research team (of which I am a member). Some have found work at other news outlets, but it is undeniable that an enormous pool of journalistic talent and experience has departed at the same time as newsrooms are expected to produce more stories across more platforms. Not at all surprisingly, increased demands on journalists have led to thinner reporting and the eradication of most levels of sub-editing has led to more errors.

In the absence of any substantial ideas from government, it has been left to the crossbenchers to use their voting leverage to push through at least some measures aimed at improving public interest journalism. Of these, the most active has been senator Nick Xenophon. After what he described as the most intensive and stressful negotiations of his two-decade political career, Senator Xenophon secured a three-year, $60 million package to support small publishers, assist media in regional and rural Australia, and help media companies to employ cadet journalists.

While the mainstream news media quickly began canvassing the possibilities for media mergers under the new laws, others began to raise questions about the deal Xenophon secured, including Tim Burrowes, founder and content director of Mumbrella, an online news and events company covering media and marketing, and Lenore Taylor, editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia.

Writing in his end-of-week newsletter, Burrowes pointed out that the regional/rural and small publishers fund won’t cover salary spending, despite the fact that salaries, especially journalists’ salaries, are the major outlay for many media companies. Capital expenditure, which is essentially all that will be supported by the new fund, is less urgent. As Burrowes put it, “Soon, there’ll be a podcast studio in every newsroom,” which would be fine if you have the funds to pay the people who make podcasts.

Burrowes also argued that supporting the employment of 200 extra cadet journalists in regional and rural Australia could well have the opposite effect to what was intended. “Given the choice between employing an experienced journalist at full cost, or a cadet with a wage subsidy of $40,000, which path do you think publishers will choose?” he wrote. “And where will be the senior jobs at the end of these cadetships?”

Taylor, an experienced, Walkley award–winning political journalist, went straight to the shenanigans that went on behind closed doors during the negotiations. In an article published over the weekend, she pointed out how carefully she believed the package had been crafted to exclude the Guardian Australia from being eligible.

She quoted Xenophon saying that during negotiations the government had been determined to exclude the Guardian Australia. He had faced the “Hobson’s choice” of acceding to the government’s “narrow, blinkered ideology,” he said, or losing the package of support he had developed for regional and rural media outlets. The government insisted that support for small publishers extend only to those owned and managed by an Australian company.

During last-minute negotiations, wrote Taylor, the need for those eligible to be Australian-owned was waived selectively:

Such a veto didn’t apply when the government gave $30 million to Foxtel during earlier media law wheeling and dealing, with the vague purpose of broadcasting more women’s sport and little or no documentation. Foxtel, of course, is half-owned by News Corp Australia, another Australian company with a foreign parent, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (The $30 million was widely seen as Foxtel’s “compensation” for the fact that commercial broadcasters had won reductions in their licence fees).

Fifield confirmed to the Senate that News Corp would fail the new foreign-based parent entity “control test” established as a criteria for the three-year Xenophon fund.

That didn’t matter when it came to the $50 million “innovation” part of the fund because it was designed for smaller publications and News Corp and Fairfax were already ineligible. But News Corp–owned regional media did want some of the $8 million allocated to help employ trainee journalists, so for that part of the Xenophon deal the criteria became convoluted.

Taylor argues that if the package were really intended to encourage more local journalism, there were good arguments for including the Guardian Australia, which employs eighty people around the country and reinvests its revenue in Australian journalism.

The Guardian Australia has undoubtedly been a significant addition to the local media landscape. Apart from the number and calibre of journalists it employs, and the number of Walkley awards it has won in the short period since it was created in 2013 (seven, according to Taylor), it is an openly left-of-centre publication that will be attractive to some readers and the reverse to others. Its political stance undeniably puts it at odds with the Coalition government. Equally important, the Guardian Australia ranked sixth on the Nielsen top ten news websites in June 2017, ahead of both the popular Melbourne Herald Sun and the Melbourne Age, which is historically the home for left-of-centre readers.

Popularity is noticed by politicians; so, too, is journalistic clout. The Guardian Australia has published numerous articles that have earned the enmity of the Coalition, beginning with revelations in 2013 that Australian intelligence agencies looked to tap the phone of the Indonesian president and his inner circle. In other words, the detail of the changes reveals another sorry chapter in the history of media legislation.

The federal government certainly had difficult public policy dilemmas to contend with, and it is rarely easy to secure clear support for legislation from any commercially competitive industry. The legislation could well achieve some good, and its measures to assist small and regional and rural publishers are welcome, but its provisions are too narrowly drawn. They favour existing mainstream commercial media over new entrants, they punish an influential outlet that is seen as an ideological enemy, and they fail to take advantage of good ideas being aired to stop the erosion of public interest journalism. When governments and big media companies dance together, the picture isn’t pretty. ●

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It also offers a key to the power of Clarke’s satire: his brilliance in adapting forms, especially media forms, for satirical purposes. This can be seen in his remoulding of staple journalistic forms, ranging from standard news reports to sports commentary and the interview.

Clarke thought that a satirist should think about solutions as well as problems. He never kicked somebody because they were down, but he also thought there was little point kicking somebody simply because they were up.

If all Clarke did, though, was parody journalistic forms, his work would not have risen above the level of a television sketch show. Instead, he inverted these journalistic forms to ask questions and critique those in positions of power and authority. According to conventional understandings of the news media’s fourth estate role, scrutinising power and authority is exactly what journalists do. Clarke was not a journalist; indeed, the failings of journalism were a common target of his satire. Yet his adapting of journalistic forms carried the bite both of satire and of revelation.

His work was genuinely subversive, though he was careful never to advertise it as such. It took the trained eye of Barry Humphries to point this out. In a foreword to a selection of Clarke’s work, the creator of Dame Edna Everage writes:

John Clarke sees the skeletons in our closets, and I am amazed he has not grown very rich on offshore hush money. In Australia the Powers that Be are very powerful indeed and are protected by draconian laws of libel that would make an Australian Private Eye unthinkable. The press bullies, hoods and monomaniacs who hold, or have recently held, high office demand critical immunity. Fortunately for John Clarke he can always be dismissed as a harmless wag, an amusing ratbag and an anodyne parodist. If he told us what he sees and what he knows about Australian society in any other way but his Jester’s guise he would, long ago, have met with a very nasty accident.

From gumbooted clodpoll to national treasure

Born in 1948, Clarke grew up in Palmerston North, a small town in country New Zealand for which he had fond memories but which, as he used to say, was “not exactly Vienna at the turn of the century.” At university he took to writing and performing in revues, where he slowly developed the character of Fred Dagg, originally a gumbooted, singlet-wearing clodpoll who spoke plain truths about those in power. He described the conservative NZ prime minister in the 1970s, Robert Muldoon, simply as a “well-known gross national product.”

Dagg became extraordinarily popular in New Zealand, but Clarke found the experience suffocating and migrated to Australia in 1977. Here, he spent time learning about the country before offering his work anywhere. “As a satirist I wanted to have a grip on things before I opened my mouth,” he said. When he did, Dagg had been transformed from a physical presence on television to a voice on radio. In the process, the contrast between the gumbooted yokel and the pithy truths he spoke became a contrast between a broad Australian-accented voice and a collection of truths expressed far from pithily. Instead, the language was by turns indirect, ornate, blunt and inventive, as this 1981 Fred Dagg commentary on home buying makes clear:

Like so many jobs in this wonderful society of ours, the basic function of the real estate agent is to increase the price of the article without actually producing anything, and as a result it has a lot to do with communication, terminology and calling a spade a delightfully bucolic colonial winner facing north and offering a unique opportunity to the handyman.

Operating out of the mythical Dagg Advisory Bureau, Clarke’s ninety-second monologues were soon syndicated across the ABC’s many local stations. They ranged from topical comments on, say, progress or lack thereof at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, to dissections of particular industries, such as advertising (“We kicked off with a light lunch that lasted about five hours.”). At the height of its popularity, however, the segment was taken off air by ABC management for reasons that were not at all clear but clearly infuriated its creator.

Clarke nevertheless became one of Australia’s most successful satirists, much loved by audiences and revered by peers. His work appeared in newspapers including the Age (his mock newspaper quizzes) and the National Times (in a column entitled “A Month of Sundays”), the Bulletin (early versions of his question-and-answer interviews) and Brian Toohey’s Eye, where he adopted Damon Runyon’s style and argot to portray politicians as gangsters. Much of his work has been reprinted in books and on his website. He was part of the pioneering satirical television series The Gillies Report, which broadcast in 1984 and 1985. In recent decades, he was most often identified with the mock question-and-answer interviews he produced with Bryan Dawe, which first appeared in print and on ABC radio in the late 1980s and were then aired on television, on Channel Nine’s A Current Affair between 1989 and 1996 and on ABC television, mostly on 7.30, since 2000.

Apart from writing and performing his own material, Clarke worked with many other artists: as an actor (with Sam Neill in Death in Brunswick in 1990), as a collaborator (with Paul Cox on the Australian Film Institute award-winning feature film Lonely Hearts, in 1981), as co-author (with Ross Stevenson of the stage production A Royal Commission into the Australian Economy, in 1991), as an adaptor (of Aristophanes’ The Frogs for Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney, in 1992), as dramaturg (for Casey Bennetto’s Keating: The Musical, in 2006) and as the creator of documentaries (such as Sporting Nation, in 2012). Sometimes, he worked on the writing, producing and performing of a program, as in the mockumentary The Games, which examined bureaucratic ineptitude and political chicanery during the two years of planning for the Sydney Olympics. He and Andrew Knight also co-wrote a satire, Blockbuster, about how films are funded in Australia; not altogether surprisingly, it found little favour with film-funding bodies and has never been made.

The Clarke technique

The breadth of Clarke’s career is clear; what is less evident from this brief summary is the nature of his humour and how it sits in the broader Australian tradition. Though he rarely discussed his ideas about satire, he did open up in Wanted for Questioning, a 1992 collection of interviews with thirty Australian comedians by Murray Bramwell and David Matthews, perhaps because the authors were academics and he judged the book would be read by few. In any case, what he said is worth quoting at length:

You could argue, as I have done, that Australians are very pungent, disrespectful of authority… and that they give the people in power a constant caning… But you could argue that the government in this country, by and large, is not that powerful and that there have been a series of recent prime ministers who have been failures and tragedies of almost Shakespearean dimensions. That the real power in Australia is held more obviously by a small group of billionaire bullies than is the case in Britain – and they are not the people that get the caning. So it could be said that satirists, about whom it is often said that they are such great snipers, are constantly shooting the messenger.

Clarke is referring partly to the entrepreneurs who made a killing after the Hawke Labor government deregulated the financial system in Australia in 1983, but primarily he is talking about the concentration of media ownership in Australia, which in many ways has become worse, not better, since that interview. What is also clear in the quotation is his high ambition for satire. In a review of The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, Clarke criticised the editor, Frank Muir, for describing Jonathan Swift as a bitter character who “could hardly be called a humorous writer.” For Clarke, Swift was among the greatest satirists because “he attacked greed and corruption wherever he saw them and he smote the authorities hip and thigh” while Muir “does everything he can to defuse any effect humour might have other than to amuse the clergy.”

In Clarke’s view, satire needed to have a social purpose. It should go beyond a prime minister slipping on a banana skin, and shouldn’t simply blow raspberries at those in power. “I think satire is helpless if it doesn’t have a positive aspect,” he told Bramwell and Matthews. The book’s title was Clarke’s but readers didn’t know that, which illustrates not only his subversive wit but his generosity and tendency to small-note himself. (That’s a grateful homage to Mr Clarke, by the way, who taught me the bite of inverting a common phrase.)

Clarke thought that a satirist should think about solutions as well as problems. He never kicked somebody because they were down, but he also thought there was little point kicking somebody simply because they were up. “I do think there are issues and paradoxes and I think it is hard to express an idea without conceiving its opposite.”

One-time collaborator and long-time Clarke friend Andrew Knight once told me, “I think the yardstick of any satirist is how much they are disliked [by their targets] but he is the most generous and encouraging person in an industry that is cancer-ridden with people who want to jump on you.” The wonderful humanity attested to by Knight and many others this week does not mean Clarke viewed the world’s woes with bland equanimity. Andrew Denton, himself a well-known satirist, has said, “At the heart of all great Australian comedy is a red hot kernel of anger.” He could have been speaking about Clarke who, to meet – and I met him and wrote about his work on several occasions – could seem like a roiling well of outrage.

Clarke shied away from direct confrontation, however, which to him “is very often an affair where people repeat their positons and become polarised, which makes it difficult for either party to back down.” Instead, he expressed his “red hot kernel of anger” about the world indirectly through satire and, within that, indirectly through elaborate metaphors. Unlike, say, John Oliver or The Chaser team, who attack their subjects front-on and at full throttle, Clarke compressed and recalibrated the intense emotions he felt into satirical conceits that appeared to have no animus, as Barry Humphries has written, but still knocked the target akimbo.

Paradoxically, despite the range of roles Clarke played and projects he participated in, he almost always presented a version of himself. He was not a character actor. Whether he was playing Alan, a stage hand for a decidedly amateur theatre company in Lonely Hearts, or Dave, Sam Neill’s offsider in Death in Brunswick, he was pretty much the same: deadpan of face, laconic of voice, alternately world-weary and stroppy (Alan) or world-weary and stoically wry (Dave). For The Games, he dispensed with all pretence. His character, head of the Logistics and Liaison team, is called John Clarke and was, by turns, world-weary, stroppy, stoically wry and knowing. The other characters in The Games retained their own names, too, which added to the frisson of national anxiety that Australians felt about staging a global event such as an Olympic Games.

But while for The Games’s Gina Riley playing a version of herself was an exception – she is best known for playing Kim in the satirical comedy Kath & Kim – for Clarke playing himself was part of a continuation. You might deduce from this that Clarke was not a good actor, but he has said that in his childhood, when his mother used to take him along to an amateur theatre company she belonged to, he developed a suspicion of actors being actorly; he much preferred his mother when she was being herself. He was actually a very good performer but he insisted, consciously or otherwise, on doing it on his own terms.

Upending the question-and-answer interview  

Just what were Clarke’s own terms? Well, you can see them most clearly in the mock interviews he did with Bryan Dawe. The Q&A interview is a journalistic staple in which politicians, celebrities and sportspeople have been trained – usually by former journalists – to avoid journalists’ questions or to verbalise at length. It has been pretty much spun dry. Where Clarke’s former colleague Max Gillies made his reputation for the uncanny precision of his impersonation of former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and other politicians, Clarke never made any effort to impersonate the politicians and celebrities he satirised. Instead, he fielded questions from Dawe, as himself, while maintaining he was someone else. In the 1980s, the initial surprise at seeing a middle-aged, balding man wearing no make-up or wig speaking as if he is British prime minister Margaret Thatcher or actor Meryl Streep was funny enough in itself, especially when the latter engaged the interviewer in chit-chat about the “natural” colour of her/his hair and whether “Meryl” would wear a wig for her role as Lindy Chamberlain in the upcoming film Evil Angels.

More importantly, though, the decision not to impersonate the subjects allows us to focus on what they are actually saying. For example, in an interview in 1990, Clarke, as Bob Hawke, is asked about the science and technology minister, Barry Jones, who had just lost his place in the ministry because he did not have the backing of Labor Party’s factions.

Dawe: The Hobart conference seems to have gone very well.

Hawke: Fabulous success, standing ovation I got; they all got on their feet and ovated, right at me…

Dawe: How did the Barry Jones decision this week help with that healing process?

Hawke: I’d like to say something about Barry Jones if I may. He’s a very remarkable fellow. He it was who warned ten years ago that we had no manufacturing basis in this country and that the sunrise new technology industries gave us an excellent opportunity to get one. He it was who also warned of the greenhouse effect.

Dawe: Did we get any of those new technology industries?

Hawke: No, but the countries who listened to Barry Jones did…

Dawe: So how did Mr Jones help with this healing of the wounds within the party?

Hawke: By standing aside for a dumber man.

The first thing to notice is Clarke’s attack on Hawke’s vanity, underlined in the use of the arcane word “ovated.” The second is that good policy is no match for factional alignment (crystallised in the acid line: “By standing aside for a dumber man”) and the third, at the distance of twenty-five years now, is just how prescient Jones – and Clarke – were in identifying the importance of new technologies and the need for Australia to take action on climate change. Nor is this prescience an isolated event. Clarke’s commitment to examining issues in detail before satirising them means he consistently shot up warning flares.

Running to about two-and-a-half minutes each, the mock interviews usually contained one main satirical point that is prosecuted throughout. There is no space for digressions and no interest in providing a rounded or balanced view of the subject or issue.

Some of the most successful mock interviews turned on a comic conceit, such as one with Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a National Party figure who owed his longevity as premier of Queensland to an electoral gerrymander and a garrulously folksy manner that cloaked a ruthless political warrior who had courted property developers and sent police on to the streets to crush any political dissent. In 1987 Sir Joh finally and fatally overreached, launching an ill-conceived tilt at transferring to federal politics that succeeded only in derailing the election campaign of his federal National colleagues and their coalition partners, the Liberal Party, as they sought to win office. Bjelke-Petersen had long been regarded (and underestimated) as something of a buffoon but, instead of making that obvious joke, Clarke’s satirical conceit was to write a script for “Sir Joh” as if he had always aspired to a career in the front rank of comedy.

Dawe: Are you the sad clown? The commedia dell’arte clown?’

Sir Joh: Well, I think I’m a very Australian clown. I think I’m a very Australian clown. I’m not immune to life’s bleaker side, obviously, but I don’t think I’m consumed by it either. I frequently find, for instance, the things which worry people a lot… I find very funny. personally, I find them very, very funny, and I wouldn’t want that to sound as if I don’t care.

The interviewer then presses “Sir Joh” to nominate a favourite joke he has played on the Australian public. For sheer laughter and audience response, “Sir Joh” can’t go past his “Joh for PM” campaign.

Dawe: Why do you think it actually worked as well as it did?

Sir Joh: Various factors. First of all, let me say that it had been done before. It wasn’t an original idea, people had been…

Dawe: But you brought something to it didn’t you?

Sir Joh: Well I like to think so. I had a lot of luck with the timing. For instance, for a start I announced I was running for prime minister when there wasn’t an election on.

Dawe: Yes.

Sir Joh: Pretty funny. Pretty funny.

Dawe: Yes it was.

Sir Joh: Right from the kick-off, I mean that is pretty funny. Then, an election was called, and where was I?

Dawe: Disneyland.

Sir Joh: Pretty funny. Pretty funny. Pretty funny. You’ve got to say that’s pretty funny. I had a lot of luck with the timing. It couldn’t have been better for me. There I am running for prime minister when there’s no election and then there is an election and I’m at Disneyland, being photographed with big-nosed people in the background and speaking of my personal… I mean it was pretty funny.

Dawe: Couldn’t believe your luck.

Sir Joh: Couldn’t believe my luck. On a plate. Literally on a plate.

Dawe: Sir Joh, thank you very much for your time.

Sir Joh: Thank you, you’ve been a wonderful audience.

Pretty funny indeed. You notice how Clarke mimics a conventional chat-show style so that the interview gradually becomes a conversation which leads us to notice the contrast between the smoothness of the chat and the stumbling circumlocutions we were used to with Sir Joh. And, finally, we see that the mock interview does not aim to capture Sir Joh’s character but draws our attention to the impact of his behaviour on ordinary citizens.

Just as it is commonly said that newspaper cartoonists can achieve with a few brush strokes what it takes journalists hundreds of words to say, so the same has been said of the mock interviews. For the everyday person who alternates between feeling powerless to influence governments and anger at being told lies about what they have done, there is something particularly satisfying in satire such as Clarke’s. Either the politicians’ dissembling is pierced by his laser-like scrutiny or they become puppets controlled by the satirist and made to reveal their behaviour.

So, when Australia’s federal treasurer in the 1980s, Paul Keating, a man who had long been on very good terms with himself, led Australia into what he described as “the recession we had to have,” he was made to say in a mock interview the very words he would never have uttered: that the state of the economy was his fault and “Tell the people I’m sorry.” This is a distinct advantage satirists enjoy over journalists. As Peter Meakin, former head of news and current affairs at Channel Nine, once commented, “When Ray Martin [then the host of A Current Affair] is interviewing Paul Keating, he is dependent on what Keating says.”

The unionisation of childhood or the childishness of unions

If Clarke’s inversion of the question-and-answer interview is his best-known satire, and his invention of the mythical sport of “farnarkeling” one of his most loved creations, I’d like to finish by reminding readers of his reworking of the standard news report to portray the particular pleasures and perils of raising children. The impersonal style and formal tone of the news report have long been the subject of parody and satire; Clarke’s contribution was to use it to report the activities of the Federated Under Tens and the Massed Five Year Olds. Writer Shane Maloney has said these pieces of Clarke’s are a commentary on the childish behaviour of many trade unions, which is certainly plausible, but for me the tone is of an exasperated but loving parent rather than an aggrieved citizen. As you will see, I trust.

Australia ground to a virtual halt on Tuesday when the Federated Under Tens’ Association withdrew services, stating that in their view it was an unreasonable demand that they wear a sun hat in the sun. They further suggested that the placement of sunscreen lotion on or about their persons was an infringement of basic human rights and was “simply not on.” Wednesday saw the dispute widen when an affiliated body, the Massed Five Year Olds, showed their hand by waiting until management had about a hundredweight of essential foodstuffs in transit from supermarket to transport and then sitting down on the footpath over a log of claims relating to ice cream. The Federated Under Tens, sensing blood in the water, immediately lodged a similar demand and supported the Massed Five Year Olds by pretending to have a breakdown as a result of cruelty and appalling conditions.

The problem had been further exacerbated by a breakage to one of the food-carrying receptacles and some consequent structural damage to several glass bottles and a quantity of eggs, the contents of which were beginning to impinge on the wellbeing of the public thoroughfare.

As far as I know, only three of these short monologues have been reprinted in Clarke’s anthologies, but what is striking about them is the precise use of jargon (industrial in this case), the satirical conceit (of parenting as a never-ending negotiation) and the deliciously chosen words (“beginning to impinge on the well-being of the public thoroughfare”). With a topic like parenthood, which taps many people’s deepest feelings of love as well as frustration, Clarke doesn’t express his feelings directly but deflects and reshapes them into monologues that convey, albeit indirectly, something essential and well-nigh universal about how it feels to raise children.

This appraisal has covered only a portion of Clarke’s work and does little more than begin mapping his satirical brilliance and influence. If it is undeniably tragic that he died at such a relatively young age, it is equally true that his forensic intelligence is needed now more than ever. The bullshit-detection business has lost one of its finest exponents. •

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It’s hard to know which is uglier, the casual homophobia or the creepy surveillance of anyone and everyone connected to Fox, including the proprietor’s son, one of the most senior executives in News Corporation.

That we know this happened is thanks to the reporting of Gabriel Sherman, media writer for New York magazine, who in July 2016 broke the story of the women who alleged that Ailes had sexually harassed them at Fox News. Unlike a later scandal, when Donald Trump’s boasts of grabbing women by their genitals failed to derail his presidential campaign, these revelations had a measurable impact: Ailes’s departure from the television network he had launched for Murdoch in 1996.

I say departure because it is hard to know what word to use when one of the most powerful men in the American media can (a) be forced to leave in disgrace the television network he led so successfully for two decades but (b) receive a massive payout to do so. To be plain: the penalty for being a serial sexual harasser of women was a cheque for US$40 million.

Ailes strongly denied the allegations, but he did leave Fox. No doubt part of the payout was to help him deal with lawsuits brought against him by Fox anchors Gretchen Carlson and Andrea Tantaros.

But just as sexual harassment is about power rather than sex, so Ailes’s payout is about the power he wields rather than justice for the eighteen women who, according to Sherman, came forward in the wake of Carlson’s original allegations to describe a network that operates “like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion–like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny,” as Tantaros’s lawsuit puts it.

Power is what Ailes has always wanted. He may have lost much of it now, and it may be that the network he moulded so carefully has been overtaken in influence by far-right websites like Breitbart. But amid the anxiety about former Breitbart chair Steve Bannon’s becoming senior adviser to president-elect Donald Trump, it is easy to forget the role Ailes has played in shaping how both media and politics operate today.

Gabriel Sherman’s The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided a Country is essential reading on this score, especially since it was scarcely mentioned in Australia when it was released in 2014. Sherman shows how the seeds of Ailes’s downfall lay in his openly sexist comments about women, his offer in the 1980s to a prospective employee of a pay rise if she had sex with him, and later, at Fox, his insistence that his camera operators focus on women’s legs. At one meeting he barked that he hadn’t spent good money on a glass desk on set for his presenters to be wearing pantsuits.

Sherman’s reporting prepared the ground for women to speak out against Ailes, and for that alone we should be grateful. By 2014 Ailes had become not only one of the most powerful but also one of the most feared media executives in the most powerful country in the world. Researching the book wasn’t risk-free for Sherman: in 2012, according to CNN’s media reporter, Brian Stelter, Ailes directed underlings to build a dirt sheet about him.

The Loudest Voice in the Room reveals in exhaustive detail the extent to which, from very early in his career, Ailes fused the worlds of politics, journalism, public relations and entertainment. It is not simply his trajectory from media adviser for 1968 presidential candidate Richard Nixon to cable network news executive, though that is central to his history, it’s also the fact he has muddied the distinct values of these roles along the way, and there is little evidence he has ever seen anything much wrong with that.

Ailes was hired in 1974 by Television News Incorporated, or TVN, for his public relations skills, but he so impressed the board of the fledgling network that he was made news director a few months later. He saw no conflict of interest, though, in TVN’s offering a paid “image consulting” service to corporate executives. “It seemed appropriate to Ailes that a news organisation could offer PR advice to the very powerful people its journalists were covering,” Sherman writes.

In the early 1990s, when Ailes was setting up a business news network for NBC, he drew a US$5000 monthly consulting salary from tobacco company Philip Morris to provide PR advice. According to internal Philip Morris memos, it was suggested that Ailes should prime Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk radio host, “to go after the antis for complaining” about a big tobacco PR campaign to protect its markets.

From early in his career, Ailes showed great flair for producing entertaining television. He had studied Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films for the Nazis, and particularly admired her use of camera angles, discussing with a colleague how placing the camera below a subject’s eye height “gives him dominance,” making for a “hero shot.” He understood the power of the visual and how it could overleap rational thought and bury itself in a viewer’s gut.

When he was setting up Fox News, he recruited one of his early bosses from his time on a daytime chat program, The Mike Douglas Show, Chet Collier, who would say, “Viewers don’t want to be informed; they want to feel informed.” By now it was 1996, and Ailes and Murdoch had executed a piece of “messaging jujitsu” by giving their new service the slogans “Fair and Balanced” and “We Report, You Decide.” However much the content on Fox News has been shown to be anything but fair and balanced, it remains true that the slogans tapped into a scepticism, even a hostility, towards the mainstream media.

That scepticism has something to do with the fact that the bulk of journalists and editors hold more progressive or “liberal” political views than many of their compatriots, but it also reflects audiences’ intuition that the news media is never as objective as it likes to say it is. This is only partly a product of the gap between journalists’ reporting and their personal beliefs. Mainly it’s a result of trying to pretend that the messy and rushed process of news gathering, especially for complicated and contested issues, can be smoothed away and the news presented objectively by “voice of God” news presenters.

“Ailes had proclaimed to the New York Times that television was ‘the most powerful force in the world,’” writes Sherman. “And yet the network’s slogan was built on the premise that ‘it was up to you to decide if we’re fakers or if we’re telling the truth,’ as Messer [one of the ad men who came up with the ‘We Report, You Decide’ slogan] said. What Ailes was selling, at its heart, was not news, but empowerment. Fox was putting forth the notion that its audience could come to their own conclusions, while ‘feeling informed.’”

Over the next two decades, having performed this twist, Ailes proceeded to junk long-held standards of journalism and use his network primarily as a propaganda vehicle.

Initially, Fox was staunchly behind the Republican Party, which primarily took the form of tearing down the Democrat presidency of Bill Clinton. When the story broke in 1998 about an affair between Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Ailes immediately set up a new evening program called Special Report and assigned five producers and correspondents to cover every aspect of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigation of the affair.

When the al Qaeda terrorist attacks occurred on 9/11, Fox outdid all its competitors in its belligerent patriotism and its denunciation of anyone questioning either the link between the attacks and Saddam Hussein or the need to invade Iraq.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Fox gave extensive, uncritical airtime to the so-called Swift boat controversy. As Sherman notes, where the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal at least had at its core a real story, the Swift allegations began as a campaign commercial that sparked a “cable-ready controversy over what the underlying facts might be.” The key point is that the controversy rather than the story became the prime driver.

By the mid 2000s, Fox had become a “perpetual conflict machine” that had fans rather than viewers. As Sherman notes, by 2009 its audience was more than double that of its cable rivals, CNN and MSNBC, and by 2016 it was earning US$1 billion annually, accounting for a fifth of 21st Century Fox’s annual profits.

Ailes began to experience delusions of grandeur, signing up to commentary positions five of the prospective Republican Party presidential nominees for the 2012 election and proclaiming that, though profits were strong, “I want to elect the next president.” But when the Republican Party leadership didn’t do what Ailes wished, Fox turned to increasingly extreme right-wing political movements such as the Tea Party, whose influence was fanned, if not impelled, by the network.

After the disappointing performance of Republican candidate Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, and with another four years of Democratic president Barack Obama in prospect, Fox News’s ratings and influence began to dip. At the same time, social media was becoming more and more important. It was a communication channel that bypassed mainstream media and so reduced its profitability. It was also a potent mechanism for fanning not just the controversies baked into Fox’s modus operandi but also wilder, even unhinged, conspiracy theories.

Ailes didn’t want to invest in new technology, such as touchscreens and holograms, believing that his viewers, predominantly older white males, preferred the simplicity of a traditional television newscast.

Then, of course, came the ascendancy of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign. The two men have been friends, and both have trafficked successfully in exploiting people’s fears. But Ailes was forced to leave Fox News just hours before Trump accepted the Republican Party presidential nomination in July.

Sherman reported in October that Ailes had briefly offered Trump advice during his preparation for the presidential debates. But since then, Ailes has not featured publicly in stories about Trump’s transition team and has largely faded from view. Now, as the world awaits the full impact of a Trump presidency and new words such as “alt-right” and “post-truth” are respectively being short-listed for and winning the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year, it is important to remember, as Jelani Cobb wrote recently in the New Yorker, that we should really call out these shiny lexical baubles for what they are: fascism and propaganda.

There is much to be fearful of in a media world that has been so profoundly marked by the likes of Roger Ailes, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that his demise was spurred by old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. Sherman interviewed 614 people for his book and employed two fact-checkers, Cynthia Cotts and Rob Liguori, who between them spent 2098 hours vetting his manuscript for “accuracy and context.” The endnotes come to ninety-eight pages. Since the book’s publication, Sherman has written a further thirty-three articles for New York magazine about Ailes’s travails.

Ailes and his entourage did everything they could to smear Sherman. He was called a “phoney journalist” – by Fox presenter Sean Hannity, of all people. Breitbart devoted 9250 words to denigrating him, including quoting an anonymous Fox source who described him as “Jayson Blair on steroids” – a reference to the disgraced former New York Times journalist who fabricated articles and abused drugs (and evidence, if it were needed, that those at Fox have undergone total ironyectomies).

The smear campaign didn’t work. There are all sorts of reasons for Ailes’s demise – not least Rupert Murdoch’s gradually loosening grip on corporate power and the rising influence of his two sons, who both loathe Ailes. But the adherence in Gabriel Sherman’s work to facts and to fairness – he gave Ailes many opportunities to present his version of events – is a much-needed reminder of long-established journalistic virtues and cause for at least some optimism in what was, as I noted at the outset, a very ugly year. •

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You might be surprised by how many common understandings about Hiroshima were hidden from the public for months, even years. To give just one example, the unofficial names of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki – “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” respectively – are well known today but were kept secret until 1960.

It’s important to remember the context of the first news reports about the bombing. August 1945 was near the end of the sixth year of the second world war. The Manhattan Project, whose scientists had raced to develop an atomic weapon before the Germans, was cloaked in secrecy. The dropping of the bomb by the Enola Gay, high above Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August, was carried out in secret.

Even the scientists responsible for its development were not initially aware that the bomb had been dropped, according to Ray Monk’s 2012 biography of Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan Project. The news came sixteen hours later, in a lengthy press release issued in the name of the president, Harry Truman, which read in part:

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British “Grand Slam,” which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.

With no other information at hand – the Pentagon didn’t release any photographs – newspapers and radio stations had to rely almost totally on that press release. From the outset, the US government was able to create what Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell, authors ofHiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, term an “official narrative” built on a half-truth.

Hiroshima did contain an important military base – up to 40,000 Japanese soldiers were stationed there at the time – but the bomb was aimed at the centre of a city of 350,000 people. Civilian casualties were inevitable, and mention of a military base was undoubtedly designed to obscure that fact.

Indeed, the number of civilians killed, injured or affected by radiation sickness was continually downplayed or contested by the government, in particular by the director of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves. It was Groves who had inserted the reference to “an important Japanese army base” in the press release at the last minute.

Only in the third paragraph of his statement did Truman reveal that an atomic bomb had been dropped, and no mention was made of the possible effects of radiation. Nor was anything said about what would later become a central plank in the government’s justification for dropping the first nuclear weapon – that its use would save many American lives by avoiding the need to invade Japan to end the war.

The following day, the government issued a further fourteen press releases outlining the background to the Manhattan Project, including the testing of a bomb a month earlier in New Mexico, all of which heralded “the birth of a new age – the age of Atomic Energy.”

The only photograph released showed General Groves studying a wall map of Japan. Again, with little else to go on, newspapers and radio stations ran the government-supplied material, most of which had been prepared well in advance, primarily by William Laurence, a science journalist seconded to the Manhattan Project from the country’s most respected newspaper, the New York Times.

Those press releases were simply gobbled, uncredited, by journalists. Laurence found this discomfiting but he also detected an almost religious significance in the dawning of the atomic age, according to Lifton and Mitchell, and had few qualms about its Japanese victims.

Within days of the second bomb being dropped, the Japanese had surrendered. Potential public disquiet about the devastating impact of the two bombs was outweighed by overwhelming relief that the war was over. The first reports from Tokyo radio about “bloated and scorched” civilians were downplayed by the president in an address to the nation and derided as Japanese propaganda in the press, especially the newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst.

That pattern of reporting looked set to continue after General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Japan in late August and immediately ordered Hiroshima and Nagasaki off limits. He invited journalists to report on the signing of surrender papers by the Japanese on board the USS Missouri on 2 September. Of the hundreds of journalists in Japan, all but two did what MacArthur told them.

One was George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, who visited a kamikaze base near Nagasaki, where he shook off an army escort and saw for himself the damage wreaked by the second bomb. He sent his lengthy dispatch to MacArthur’s headquarters for clearance and that was the last he saw of it. It was not published until four years after his death in 2002, in a book entitled First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, edited by his son, Anthony Weller.

The other was an Australian named Wilfred Burchett, who was working for London’s Daily Express. Burchett showed great independence, resourcefulness and courage in making the trip alone from Yokosuka to Hiroshima. He had good fortune, too; a Daily Express colleague in Japan, Henry Keys, also wanted to go to Hiroshima. They flipped a coin; Keys lost.

Burchett’s reputation was later tarnished by allegations that during the Korean war (1950–53) he sided against the allied forces and even interrogated Australian prisoners of war. But that controversy does not tarnish his achievement at Hiroshima. He has recounted in several publications how he became the first Western journalist to visit Hiroshima after the bomb; my account draws primarily on the last of his several volumes of autobiography, Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist, which was published posthumously, and his 1983 book Shadows of Hiroshima.

“Don’t go to Hiroshima,” a representative of the Japanese news agency, Domei, advised Burchett. “Everyone is dying there.” Unlike those who had worked on the Manhattan Project, he had little idea of the dangers of radiation fallout. He engaged in an elaborate ruse to slip away from the other journalists before spending twenty-one hours getting to Hiroshima.

He travelled by train, with much of the trip spent in the dark as the train swept through long tunnels. At each stop, Burchett needed to ask the name of the station. He did not speak the local language and he dared not mention the name Hiroshima as he was sure it would inflame the Japanese soldiers who were crammed into a carriage alongside him.

The situation was tense; the Japanese had surrendered but the treaty was only now being signed on board the Missouri. When Burchett arrived in Hiroshima, he was thrown in jail overnight by two local policemen despite protesting that he was a journalist. In the morning, he showed them his letter of introduction to the local Domei representative, which improved his standing in their eyes.

Having strapped on a pistol lent to him by a colleague, Burchett then simply walked out of captivity. Nobody stopped him. He began walking around the city and was appalled at the level of destruction.

He headed for the city’s police headquarters, where the Domei representative told him the police wanted to kill him. Astonishingly, it was a member of the Kempeitai, Japan’s secret police, who saved Burchett’s life, accepting his pleas to be allowed to show people around the world what the bomb had done to the city and its citizens.

Burchett went to one of the local hospitals, 1.3 kilometres from the epicentre of the blast, and was sickened by the sight of men, women and children dying from what the doctors told him was radiation sickness. He went outside and, sitting among the ruins, wrote his report on his battered Baby Hermes typewriter. Critically, the local Domei representative tapped the dispatch out in morse code and transmitted it to Tokyo, as arranged with Henry Keys.

By now, Tokyo had also been declared off limits by MacArthur, so Keys would have had to get past the American military police to get into Tokyo by train. Instead, he sent another local Domei representative in to pick up Burchett’s copy, which finally arrived late on the evening of 3 September.

For reasons that are unclear, only the first 200 words of a 3000-word dispatch had come through. For Keys, though, it was sufficient eyewitness confirmation of the effects of the bomb. He supplemented Burchett’s material with his own, but an American censor wanted to stop the story being transmitted.

The war was over, Keys insisted, and censorship should therefore have ended. While the censor went off to refer the matter to a higher authority, Keys stood over the telex operator and ensured that the story was sent to London under Burchett’s byline. On arriving back in Yokohama, Burchett was distraught to learn of the missing copy, and in his published accounts he has restored the full text. But part of his motivation for republishing the full report was no doubt the controversy that surrounded his role in North Korea, and later.

The lead paragraph of Burchett’s worldwide exclusive report, which was published on the front page of the Daily Express on 5 September, is as follows:

In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly – people who were uninjured in the cataclysm – from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.

The story was picked up around the world, aided by the Daily Express’s decision to make it available free to anyone who wanted it. The American military angrily denied the story. At a press conference held in Tokyo on 7 September, senior US officials, including the deputy head of the Manhattan Project, Brigadier-General Thomas Farrell, denied the story and accused Burchett of falling victim to Japanese propaganda.

Burchett asked how the brigadier-general explained the fact that fish were still dying when they entered a stream running through the city’s centre.

“Obviously they were killed by the blast or overheated water.”

“Still there a month later?”

“It’s a tidal river, so they could be washed back and forth.”

“But I was taken to a spot in the city outskirts and watched live fish turning on their stomachs upwards as they entered a certain patch of the river. After that they were dead within seconds.”

At this point, the press conference was ended.

Burchett scooped his colleagues by getting to Hiroshima first, no doubt, but as John Pilger writes in Ben Kiernan’s Burchett: Reporting the Other Side of the World 1939–1983, “In comprehending and identifying an ‘atomic plague,’ he had rumbledthe experimental nature of this first use of a nuclear weapon against people.” At Burchett’s funeral, the eulogy was delivered by American journalist T.D. Allman, who commented: “It was a considerable ordeal to reach Hiroshima but it was an infinitely greater accomplishment, back then, to understand the importance of Hiroshima.”

One of the reasons the US government delayed announcing the dropping of the bomb for sixteen hours was to confirm that it had succeeded in meeting its aims. As Lifton and Mitchell write, “Until that moment no one knew for certain that the weapon would work.” Those working on the Manhattan Project were well aware of the possibility of radiation fallout from the bomb, but the government had already censored a newspaper article that reported radioactivity from testing in July.

William Laurence’s press releases made no mention of that fallout. When he returned to the New York Times and wrote a series of articles about the wonders of the atomic age, he downplayed early reports of radiation sickness at Hiroshima. His articles nonetheless helped him win a Pulitzer prize for reporting in 1946.

Within days of the disastrous press conference following Burchett’s article, President Truman sent a confidential request to American newspaper editors and broadcasters requesting them, for reasons of the “highest national security,” not to publish information about atomic bombs without first consulting the War Department. Press coverage virtually ceased for several months.

Then, on 31 August 1946, just over a year after the dropping of the bomb, the New Yorker put aside all its regular features – the droll cartoons, the arch Talk of the Town pieces – to devote an entire issue to a single piece of reportage. Entitled simply “Hiroshima,” the 31,000-word article was the first to report in any sustained way what it had been like to be in the city on the day the bomb was dropped.

“Hiroshima” questioned the official estimate of 78,500 killed by the bomb and put it at more than 100,000. It refuted the claim that poor construction caused most of the destruction at Hiroshima and cited new information estimating that radiation sickness was responsible for about one in five of the fatalities.

Valuable though it undoubtedly was to bring this information to public attention, this is not primarily why the article is remembered today. What gave the article its reputation, as much as anything, was the way it was written.

Earlier in 1946, Time had published a first-hand account written by a German priest in Hiroshima, John A. Siemes, that made some, but not much, impact. The New Yorker’s article had a massive and immediate impact. After quickly selling out at newsstands, the entire article was read out in a special advertising-free broadcast by ABC television over four consecutive evenings. Albert Einstein ordered a thousand copies of the magazine to distribute. By November, “Hiroshima”was available as a Penguin book, which became a bestseller and remains in print.

Were Americans now ready, a year after the war, to contemplate their former enemy’s suffering? Or did “Hiroshima” make them do it? Most likely it was a combination of the two.

The author, a war correspondent and novelist named John Hersey, visited Hiroshima in May 1946 and interviewed between thirty and forty survivors, before selecting six whose stories he told in sequential narration. He had initially conceived of an article documenting the bomb’s power and its destructiveness, but had decided he wanted to “write about what happened not to buildings but to human beings.”

The choice meant that questions about whether the bombing was vital for ending the war, for instance, would not be considered. The writer Mary McCarthy criticised Hersey for his focus on the effects, but with the support of the New Yorker editor Harold Ross, he believed it was important to convey the events of the day the bomb fell as far as possible through the perspective of the survivors.

It would have been entirely understandable if Hersey had felt overwhelmed by the accounts of the hibakusha (literally, explosion-affected persons). Hersey had felt “a kind of horror” throughout his three weeks in Hiroshima, but this prompted him to reflect: if that was what he experienced eight months afterwards, how must those in the city on 6 August 1945 have felt?

Instead of expressing directly how he felt, though, Hersey channelled his energy into enabling the reader, as far as possible, to empathise with the bomb survivors’ experiences. As literary critic Dan Jones writes, the bomb attack demanded Hersey “provide forms for understanding what has been called history’s least imaginable event.”

You might think that Hersey’s approach is a classic example of essayist Percy Lubbock’s “show, don’t tell” method of storytelling, but that only partly explains what Hersey did. If the dropping of the atomic bomb was “history’s least imaginable event,” and if the official narrative had reduced it to more readily imaginable matters – it was a very powerful bomb rather than a qualitatively different kind of bomb; it was necessary to end the war; the Japanese were the enemy – then how does a writer persuade readers to even begin imagining?

“I had never thought of the people in the bombed cities as individuals,” one reader, a university student, wrote to the New Yorker. If that sounds an odd thing to say, it underscores how we can cauterise our imaginations when we’re faced with events of this kind, and highlights the chasm we need to cross to empathise with the victims.

Hersey’s rare achievement was to do that for millions of people then and since. On the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb, his account is well worth rereading. •

The post Managing Hiroshima appeared first on Inside Story.

IN HIS MID-TWENTIES, the American writer Joe McGinniss created a landmark work that opened our eyes to how politics is marketed to voters. He was also the subject of one of the most surgically precise strikes in journalistic history when his ethics were compared – unfavourably – to those of a convicted murderer. In significant ways McGinniss’s work, and how it was received, illustrates just how far long-form journalism has come in the past four decades or so.

When McGinniss managed to inveigle himself into the team advising Richard Nixon in his quest for the presidency in 1968, Americans were accustomed to relatively perfunctory and superficial media coverage of such events. The shining exceptions were Theodore White’s book-length accounts of the 1960 and 1964 campaigns, both of which were simply entitled The Making of the President. White set out to take readers with him into the smoky backrooms where the human drama of the campaign was on show. For a book about politics to succeed, White wrote, it “must have a unity, a dramatic unfolding from a single central theme so that the reader comes away from the book as if he [sic] had participated himself in the development of a wonder.”

Phooey to that, said McGinniss, whose book The Selling of the President 1968, showed that the smoky backrooms had actually been devoted to developing a very effective advertising campaign to transform Nixon from a dour grump fearful of television to someone who could appeal to ordinary voters. Central to that transformation was Roger Ailes, now head of the Fox News Network. “Let’s face it, a lot of people think Nixon is dull,” says Ailes in McGinniss’s book. “They look at him as the kind of kid who always carried a book bag. Who was forty-two-years-old the day he was born.”

The importance of image-making and selling short, simple messages may be so commonplace today as to be a truism, but The Selling of the President 1968 played a pioneering role in shaping that perception. It became one of the top ten bestselling non-fiction books for the year, catapulting the youthful McGinniss to national fame.

Largely undiscussed at the time, except in those smoky backrooms, was the question of just how McGinniss gained such extraordinary access to the Nixon campaign and what exactly were the ground rules for that access. What was on the record, and what was off? Was there any distinction between the two in such circumstances? If anything and everything was fair game for the journalist, it did not take much imagination to see that in future only fools and narcissists would ever let any of them within cooee.

It was on these issues that Janet Malcolm, a longtime writer for the New Yorker, shone a light of laser-like intensity after McGinniss wrote about a horrific case in which an army doctor, Jeffrey MacDonald, was accused of murdering his pregnant wife and two small children.

The opening paragraph of Malcolm’s 1989 article, published in book form the following year, has since been called “one of the most provocative in American journalism” by Elizabeth Fakazis. It’s worth quoting in full:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he [sic] does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of non-fiction writing learns – when the article or book appears – his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

Malcolm’s words created a furore among journalists. They asked: what about less-than-credulous widows, or downright sneaky politicians who tried to manipulate journalists to write them up in flattering terms or to bury anything that made them look bad? How could Malcolm condemn an entire profession on a single case, asked others? Why did she not mention a libel suit in which her own journalistic practice was being questioned? And, finally, why did she write with such infuriating certitude?

Martin Gottlieb, writing in Columbia Journalism Review, said the vehemence of many journalists’ responses suggests Malcolm had hit a nerve. Fakazis noted that there had been little media interest in the libel suit that Jeffrey Masson had brought over her hostile profile of him in the magazine until after Malcolm’s article about McGinniss had been published in the New Yorker and then it had been overwhelmingly negative.

The journalists’ objections were not entirely misdirected, however. Malcolm doesn’t ignore the role of sources, but she does underplay the source’s role and power in their relationship with journalists. And she pins a great deal on this one case study of journalistic practice.

Malcolm did ignore in her article the lawsuit brought against her over an earlier article, and probably should not have. And the elegantly stinging certitude that characterises Malcolm’s prose points to a paradox in her work; she articulates, even delights in, the ambiguities of issues in prose of ringing unambiguity.

The dual effect of Malcolm’s approach has been to substantially create and influence a debate, both for better and for worse. Her insights were soon reflected in the academic literature, and are routinely cited, usually with a wry grimace, by working journalists today. The problem is that Malcolm’s writing offers an insight into journalist–source relationships rather than a framework for analysing the range of characteristics in such relationships in their complexity.

Her insight, I think, also applies less to daily journalism where practitioners rarely spend enough time with a source to develop an emotional relationship that might later feel like betrayal to the source. They are more relevant to those working on long-form or book-length projects, as Joe McGinniss was for his 1983 work about the MacDonald case, Fatal Vision.

MacDonald and his legal team approached McGinniss to write about his murder trial, offering unfettered access to MacDonald and the legal team’s strategy in exchange for more than a quarter of the US$300,000 advance and one third of any royalties from the book that McGinniss would write about the case.

When the book was published, MacDonald sued, not for defamation but for breach of contract. How did this happen? Well, McGinniss agreed to the insider access he would get to the MacDonald team, and to the handsome book advance, but during the trial he began doubting the innocence of his principal source. He didn’t share these doubts with MacDonald or his legal team, but by the end he agreed with the jury that MacDonald had murdered his family.

He had developed a close relationship with McDonald before the trial, staying at his home with him, drinking beer, watching sport on television, jogging together and, as Malcolm puts it, “classifying women according to looks.” But to write a book-length account he needed information about MacDonald’s childhood, his marriage and military career. Because he wasn’t allowed to interview MacDonald in prison, he gathered that material primarily by correspondence. The prisoner wanted to see the manuscript but McGinniss refused on the ground that he needed to retain editorial independence. It was only when Fatal Vision was published that MacDonald learnt unequivocally of McGinniss’s change of mind.

In his action against McGinniss, MacDonald cited a clause in their agreement exempting the journalist from libel claims “providing that the essential integrity of my life story is maintained.” The breach of contract case was heard in 1987 before a judge and jury. Intriguingly, according to Malcolm’s account, “five of the six jurors were persuaded that a man who was serving three consecutive life sentences for the murder of his wife and two small children was deserving of more sympathy than the writer who had deceived him.”

Malcolm quotes extensively from a series of around forty of McGinniss’s letters to MacDonald in jail and from his cross-examination at the trial. They showed in great detail the rarely exposed underbelly of journalistic practice. In his first letter, McGinniss sympathises that anyone could see MacDonald had not received a fair trial, and laments:

Goddamn, Jeff, one of the worst things about all this is how suddenly and totally all your friends – self included – have been deprived of the pleasure of your company. What the fuck were those people thinking of? How could twelve people not only agree to believe such a horrendous proposition, but agree, with a man’s life at stake, that they believed it beyond a reasonable doubt? In six-and-a-half hours?

If McGinniss often presented himself to MacDonald as a friend, he later told Malcolm that the former army doctor was clearly trying to manipulate him, and that he had been aware of this from the outset. “But did I have an obligation to say, ‘Wait a minute. I think you are manipulating me, and I have to call your attention to the fact that I’m aware of this, just so you’ll understand you are not succeeding.’”

MacDonald’s lawyer, Gary Bostwick, swooped on the switch in McGinniss’s behaviour. To some, it may appear axiomatic that a journalist is not a friend, but Malcolm interviewed four of the six jurors in the case, reporting that they were worried by the slippage between friendship and journalism. “The part I didn’t like was when MacDonald let McGinniss use his condominium, and McGinniss took it upon himself to find the motive for the murders,” said one of them. “I didn’t like the fact that McGinniss tried to find a motive for a book that was a bestseller, and that’s all he was concerned about.”

Well-known writers including William F. Buckley Jr. and Joseph Wambaugh testified in support of McGinniss’ practices, but they did not fare well under cross-examination. In his closing argument, Bostwick said that the practitioners’ argument that they would do whatever was necessary to write their book was one that had been used by demagogues and dictators throughout history to justify their actions.

Journalists’ ruthlessness in pursuing news is hardly news: what made Malcolm’s work of media criticism “newsworthy” was that she put under a microscope a rarely discussed aspect of journalist-source relationships. Journalists sometimes present a friendly face to sources before attacking them in their news stories, but the process is quicker, cruder and less ethically complex than in long-form projects where practitioners must go beyond a dazzling smile and create a deeper level of trust with principal sources.

The evidence suggests MacDonald was manipulative and deceitful. But so, too, was McGinniss when he befriended MacDonald and sent him letters giving him the impression he believed in his innocence. The publishing contract might have protected McGinniss’s editorial independence but once he agreed to share his book earnings with MacDonald he had, in effect, signed a Faustian pact. He would have known that a guilty finding was always on the cards, and when that eventuated he would have had to share his royalties with a convicted triple murderer. McGinniss’ editorial independence was crippled by the financial agreement with his principal source.

Where few were prepared to defend McGinniss in that respect, the question of when journalists might be justified in deceiving their principal sources, and the nature of the fine line between trust and friendship, are murkier subjects. But although Malcolm’s brilliant insight identified a key aspect of the journalist–source relationship, a close reading of The Journalist and the Murderer reveals that she believes there are only two ways for such relationships to go: either seduction followed by betrayal or a relationship kept at a safe distance.

She aims to avoid the seduction–betrayal fault in her own work, she writes, by always putting the needs of her “text” ahead of the “feelings” of her sources, but then she observes that McGinniss’s decision to stop being interviewed by her freed her from any “guilt” she might have felt in portraying him harshly. Malcolm rightly excoriates McGinniss for deceiving MacDonald, but she does not seem able to envisage the possibility of journalists openly disagreeing with principal sources while continuing to work with them. She actually describes the journalist-source relationship as “the canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism,” about which “nothing can be done.”

NOTHING? In studying the work of a range of writers and interviewing Estelle Blackburn, David Marr, Margaret Simons and other prominent Australian practitioners, I’ve found that a good deal has and is being done about this thorny issue. Those embarking on long-form or book-length projects can negotiate relationships with their principal sources that take on elements of the kind of informed consent that is commonplace among ethnographers, for example. The practitioner and the principal source can work out the ground rules, including how much access principal sources give to practitioners, how much editorial independence practitioners retain and how to negotiate the inevitable tensions that will arise in balancing the two.

Most writers are acutely aware of Joe McGinniss’s dilemma but many have said that they were willing to confront interviewees if they disagreed with them over an issue or when they believed they were lying. “If I’ve got criticisms, I find it useful to lay them out and see how they respond. It’s all good material,” says Michael Lewis, author of numerous narrative non-fiction books including Moneyball and The Blind Side. Richard Preston, author of the bestselling book about an Ebola virus outbreak, The Hot Zone, says he has learnt the importance of remaining calm in the face of lies when he was interviewing FBI agents for another book-length project. The agents simply “point out contradictions between the evidence and the suspect’s statements,” he told Robert Boynton for his book of interviews with nineteen leading non-fiction writers, The New New Journalism.

Where Lewis’s stance appears essentially pragmatic and Preston has learnt an effective way to confront difficult sources, Alex Kotlowitz told Boynton he keeps in mind the needs of his readers. At one point when he was researching the death of a black teenage boy found floating in a river running between a black community and a white community in south-western Michigan, Kotlowitz was told by one black woman it was inconceivable the boy had tried to swim because “we don’t swim. We don’t run to the water.” Kotlowitz says the comment brought to mind a remark made on national television by Al Campanis, general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, that blacks lacked the natural buoyancy to swim. He says he had to challenge the woman’s remarks “because otherwise I’d be left thinking, as would my readers, ‘Why didn’t I ask her the next logical question?’ I’d risk losing my connection to my reader.” Equally important, these statements prompted Kotlowitz to think about why such views prevailed. “And I learned much of it had to do with the ambiguous place of rivers in African American history.”

Richard Ben Cramer, author of a massive account of the 1988 presidential election campaign, What It Takes, told Boynton he learnt from his newspaper reporting work in Baltimore that if he needed to criticise a source in print he should let the source know ahead of deadline. “One politician who was my friend was sent to jail because of what I and others wrote in the paper. But I told him what I was doing every step of the way… I told him he might want to tell his wife before it hit. And he appreciated that. He sent me gifts from jail.”

Perhaps even more bracing are the lengths that Gitta Sereny went to inform Mary Bell about the likely additional problems she would face if Sereny agreed to her proposal to work together on a book in which Bell would give her account of how, at the age of eleven, she came to murder two small boys in Newcastle, England. It was a shocking crime that appalled a nation; three decades later, Sereny, who had covered the original trial as a young journalist, was interested in understanding how children come to commit such terrible crimes and how they might be prevented in future. Before her death in 2012, Sereny’s career had been devoted to exploring particularly difficult subjects such as the lives of Hitler’s confidante Albert Speer and the kommandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, Franz Stangl. Sereny asked Bell:

Did she realise… that such a book was bound to be controversial? That people would think she did it for money? That both of us would be accused of insensitivity towards the two little victims’ families by bringing their dreadful tragedy back into the limelight and, almost inevitably, of sensationalism, because of some of the material the book would have to contain? Above all, did she understand that readers would not stand for any suggestion of possible mitigation for her crimes?

Sereny’s deep compassion for Bell is evident throughout her 1998 book Cries Unheard but she does not hesitate from confronting her subject when she believes she is lying or being manipulative.

It is entirely possible, then, for journalists working on book-length projects to disagree with their sources and maintain a working relationship. It could be argued that openness between practitioner and principal sources about the project and a preparedness to discuss areas of disagreement are barometers of good practice. It is not inevitable, as Janet Malcolm, argues that everyone will end up doing a Joe McGinniss, though I would not for a moment suggest that the pattern of seduction and betrayal is defunct.

Sadly, McGinniss appeared to learn little from his dissection by Malcolm’s rhetorical scalpel. Via his website, he continued to defend his account of the Jeffrey Macdonald case in Fatal Vision. While it should be said that the justness of Macdonald’s conviction continue to be contested and that at least some of his criticisms of Malcolm’s book carry weight, McGinniss’s reputation suffered in recent years, especially for his 1993 biography of Ted Kennedy, The Last Brother, which was slated by Jonathan Yardley, the chief reviewer at the Washington Post, as “a genuinely, unrelievedly rotten book, one without a single redeeming virtue.”

Among its many sins, according to Yardley, was that McGinniss had, without Kennedy’s cooperation or consent, written an interior monologue for the senator the night in 1969 when he drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick after a party and his companion, Mary Jo Kopechne, was drowned.

Can authors of narrative non-fiction write interior monologues for their subjects? Well, that’s another thorny question for long-form writers and their readers. •

The post Seduction or safety? appeared first on Inside Story.

THERE’S a famous gag in the American sitcom Frasier where the world’s most neurotic psychiatrist, Niles Crane, recalls one of his patients’ “rather amusing Freudian slip.” Dining with his wife, the patient meant to say “Pass the salt,” but actually said, “You’ve ruined my life, you blood-sucking shrew.”

This scene came to mind while I was watching the recent ghastly demise of Victoria’s police commissioner Simon Overland, which was nominally prompted by an ombudsman’s report critical of Overland’s mishandling of crime statistics but at least partly driven by a blizzard of damaging media leaks against him. As Margaret Simons astutely noted in Crikey on 16 June, the day Overland’s resignation was announced by the Victorian government, “One person’s brave whistleblower is another’s dubiously motivated criminal leaker.”

Exactly. Butting the husband’s humdrum pleasantry up against his homicidal impulse is what makes the line in Frasier funny. Without that, it’s more likely a prelude to domestic violence. Likewise, if you look at the Overland case through one prism you see a shining example of the public value of whistleblowing; but from another angle all you can see is a mess of feral office politics, government indecisiveness and media machination.

How do we disentangle the various strands? My interest here is in the way leaks and anonymous sourcing operate rather than what’s wrong with policing in Victoria, which is clearly important but outside my area of expertise.

In her 16 June article, and in a subscriber-only piece for Crikey the following day, Simons began the process of setting out the complicated web of relationships and agendas – within the police force, between the force and governments past and present, and between police, politicians and journalists – that lies beneath the rare and disturbing event of the resignation of a state’s most senior law enforcement officer. At the heart of the affair are two specific cases in which information was revealed without authorisation. One was treated as a “public interest disclosure,” the other as a “leak.”

On page seven of the report that precipitated Overland’s demise, the Victorian ombudsman, George Brouwer, writes: “In late February 2011 I received a complaint from a whistleblower that Victoria Police crime statistics released by Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe on 28 October 2010 had been manipulated for political purposes and the data was misleading.” The whistleblower provided supporting documents that Brouwer determined constituted a “public interest disclosure” under the Whistleblowers Protection Act 2001, and the ombudsman began investigating.

Brouwer found that the quarterly crime statistics report had been released before the usual date under pressure from the previous Labor government. A media release accompanying the statistics said that assaults in Melbourne had fallen significantly, by 27.5 per cent, but in fact the incomplete data was not robust enough to support that claim. The favourable statistics were used prominently by the Labor police minister, James Merlino, in a debate about law and order on radio station 3AW with the man who was to replace him as police minister after the election, Peter Ryan.

On page fifteen of the report Brouwer refers to a Victoria Police intelligence brief leaked to the Neil Mitchell program on 3AW, which made its contents known on 28 February 2011. The brief provided crime statistics showing that in Melbourne’s central business district some categories of assault had increased in the past year, which undermined the media release issued before the state election. Brouwer regards these documents as a leak rather than a “public interest disclosure” even though they concerned the same topic – crime statistics – and had come to his attention nearly simultaneously.

The difference, in his eyes, was that the first set of documents had been provided to his office, and therefore attracted the protection of the Whistleblowers Act, whereas the second set had been leaked to the news media. (Complicating the picture is the fact that the Act doesn’t define “whistleblower.”)

Just over a week later Brouwer informed the Office of Police Integrity, or OPI, about his investigation, only to be told that the OPI was already investigating the leaking of the intelligence brief. The ombudsman’s deputy wrote to OPI director Michael Strong raising concerns about the OPI investigation proceeding at a time when the ombudsman was “investigating the underlying and far more important issue of the falsification of crime statistics.”

On 17 March Strong agreed to put his investigation on hold until the ombudsman’s investigation was concluded. Again, it is not immediately clear why one investigation would be seen as more vital than the other. The ombudsman’s investigation preceded the OPI’s investigation, but other than that we are back in the murky world of what might be whistleblowing but could be infighting, or may well end up being both.

Brouwer was aware of the muddiness of the waters. “One only has to read the newspapers to see that it is a regular occurrence for confidential Victoria Police information to be leaked to the media,” he wrote. “Sometimes this may be for personal reasons including payback and for others it may be for altruistic reasons such as revealing the facts surrounding a police activity. Although I am not investigating the leaks of the intelligence brief, I am concerned about the culture and propensity for this to occur. In this case, the misleading use of the crime data may have motivated the leaks.”

Watching these events from the outside, they appear baffling. Here is a police commissioner who by all accounts played a key role in combating organised crime and dealing with the notorious “gangland wars” and police corruption in Victoria in recent years – vital tasks for a police force, you’d think.

Certainly, the ombudsman found Overland guilty of serious misjudgement, contributing to a perception that his office had become politicised. But if Overland had had the support of his minister he probably would have survived the findings. That he did not have the support of the police minister, Peter Ryan, or of the recently elected Liberal–National coalition government overall, is among the key elements in his demise.

That much was clear well before Overland resigned. We know this as a result of a veritable torrent of stories in the news media quoting anonymous sources who criticised Overland’s leadership style and the police force’s continued mismanagement of issues such as its crime statistics database, and who revealed an unauthorised briefing of a senior government adviser by the then deputy police commissioner, Sir Ken Jones.

Sir Ken repeatedly refused all offers to comment publicly after he had resigned from the force and had been ordered to leave immediately because Overland suspected he was leaking to the media. But his views about Overland’s leadership, and even his own emotional state, continued to be ventilated comprehensively in media coverage based on information from unnamed informants “close to Sir Ken.”

I am not suggesting Victoria Police is without significant problems or that public airing of them through the news media is necessarily bad. What bothers me is the extent to which the media moved from reporting events to influencing them, with little or no acknowledgement that it was doing so. Whether individual journalists became active players in events I don’t know for sure, but it does look that way.

Simons, who has been following these and related events, suggests that when the OPI eventually does release the report of its investigation into the police intelligence brief leak, probably in August, it “is likely to be very uncomfortable reading for a number of people, not least the state government and the media.” She questions the news media’s ability to deal fairly with a report “that is likely to be very bolshie indeed about the role of confidential sources, leaks and relationships of convenience between news media and the factions in the police force.”

The OPI report, then, is shaping as one of those rare moments when the underbelly of journalistic practice is exposed via an official investigation. It will be instructive to see how the result is reported.

The OPI is about to be replaced by a new anti-corruption body following widespread concerns that it has misused its wide-ranging, highly intrusive powers and failed to secure convictions in the most serious police corruption cases. This means that its flaws rather than the media’s will most likely be the focus of coverage.

It’s rare that journalists reflect in any depth on their role in the events they report on, and it’s rare that news organisations discuss in any detail with their audience how they cover events. There is little in the culture of journalism that encourages open discussion about the pitfalls as well as the benefits of dealing with sources. Only recently one of Australia’s most senior journalists, David Marr, said that journalists should never complain about leaks: “We live by leaks. They’re our lifeline.” He was joking, but the joke bespoke an attitude of welcoming the benefits of receiving leaks without counting any of the costs.

THE relationship between journalists and their sources is simultaneously central to journalism and the subject of muddle, mythologising and plain misinformation. The careful cultivation, husbanding and protection of vital but vulnerable human sources of information was central to one of the landmark works of investigative journalism in Australian history, “The Moonlight State,” Chris Masters’s 1987 expose of corruption in Queensland for Four Corners.

For every one of Masters’ invaluable sources inside the police, though, there are probably a hundred occasions when a journalist is leaked information that ranges from useful but only part of the picture to gossip or outright lies. The trench-coated “Deep Throat” divulging secrets of state in an underground car park to Bob Woodward in the movie All the President’s Men has fanned the myth that this is how much of journalism is done.

A journalist’s source may be someone concerned about bastardisation at a military college – a matter of genuine public interest, and subject of a government investigation right now – but he or she may also be a politician seeking refuge in anonymity in order to pour into the journalist’s ear vitriol about a rival within their party – a matter of interest to the party and precious few others.

The source may also be what Lenore Taylor, a senior political journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald appearing on the same program as David Marr, referred to as “managed government leaks” – a disguised media release that is “dropped” in the laps of selected journalists. As the American political journalist James Reston once observed, “The ship of state is the only known vessel to leak from the top.” Sometimes, indeed, the politician leaking information to a journalist is the very same politician trenchantly demanding an inquiry into the leaking of other information to journalists.

The dubious use of sources finds its nadir in coverage of celebrities. For a 500-word article about singer Britney Spears’s domestic troubles that ran in the American magazine People in late 2005, anonymous “friends” or “sources” were cited fifteen times, according to Norman Pearlstine, then editor-in-chief of Time Inc., owner of People.

It is, of course, part of the journalist’s job to gather information from a range of sources, and journalists develop bulldust-detecting skills, but it would be a rare journalist who hasn’t either been duped or used by a source with an axe to grind.

Journalists’ potential susceptibility to manipulation is magnified by the fact that they work outside the organisations they report on. It is commonly said among people working in organisations, whether the police, the military, the bureaucracy, churches or companies, that even well-informed journalists are a long way from knowing what actually happens inside these complex institutions. Journalists who doubt this might reflect on the accuracy of, let alone the insights offered by, reporting of the inner workings of their own organisations – and remember this concerns journalists reporting on their own industry rather than those about which they probably have no firsthand knowledge.

Reston’s comment is a rare one. Mostly, journalists do not talk publicly about the tradecraft of dealing with sources. Although this is a defensible position in individual cases, this reticence has hardened into a general silence on the issue. Dealing with sources can be ethically sticky, psychologically entangling and pretty much essential to doing the job.

Such a silence doesn’t help journalists, let alone their sources – not to mention the audience. The original code of ethics for the Australian Journalists Association, created in 1944, required a journalist “to respect all confidences received by him in the course of his calling.” Apart from the old-fashioned language, what is noteworthy is that the code had no more to say on the topic than those thirteen words.

The current code of ethics is a bit more expansive: “Aim to attribute information to its source. Where a source seeks anonymity, do not agree without first considering the source’s motives and any alternative attributable source. Where confidences are accepted, respect them in all circumstances.” While this is an improvement, it still understates the extent to which journalists every day and on all manner of stories grant sources anonymity. Without that, many sources won’t talk, and both they and the journalist know it.

As Jack Shafer, media columnist for Slate, has pointed out, “The surplus of journalists and the relative scarcity of knowledgeable sources allow the sources to pick the rules of engagement. If a reporter insists that a source put the information on the record, the source can always say, ‘Screw you,’ and shop it to a publication that will agree to anonymity.”

Chris Masters is one journalist who resists granting sources anonymity. “Journalists bang on all the time about the sanctity of sources,” he writes in his 2002 book, Not for Publication, “and you are still left wondering how much hard thinking has gone into the subject… It makes sense for all parties to be clear about their respective obligations.” He goes on:

If a witness tells you something that they believe to be correct and they had sound motivation in doing so, the confidence should be honoured even if the facts are later challenged and perhaps contradicted. But if you come to a secure understanding that the witness has deliberately misled you in order to mislead the public, I see no good reason to maintain the confidence.

THESE issues are vividly explored in Off the Record: The Press, the Government and the War over Anonymous Sources, Norman Pearlstine’s fascinating account of his bruising, dispiriting experience during what became known as Plamegate – dramatised in the 2010 film, Fair Game. During his period as head of Time Inc., Pearlstine became caught up in this complicated inside-the-Beltway scandal, which began in mid 2003 when a Bush administration official anonymously revealed Valerie Plame to be a covert CIA agent. The leak appears to have been payback for an opinion page article by Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, which argued that the administration had deliberately misled the world in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq by alleging, against the evidence, that Saddam Hussein’s regime had sought to buy high-grade uranium from Niger.

President Bush appointed a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, to investigate the leak, which eventually led to the conviction for perjury of vice-president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Along the way, the inquiry turned into a brawl between the courts and news organisations that refused to reveal the identity of their sources for stories about Plame and Wilson.

Pearlstine became involved because a political journalist with Time magazine, Matt Cooper, was one of the journalists who wrote about Plame and Wilson. Initially, Time Inc. refused to comply with the special prosecutor’s request to reveal sources, but after the Supreme Court upheld a District Court order Pearlstine directed Cooper to comply, which earned Pearlstine the ire of many in the news media for whom protecting confidential sources is almost a matter of tribal honour.

Reflecting on the issue, Pearlstine writes, “The more I learned about the use of confidential sources, the more I came to understand how their misuse was undermining the press’s credibility.” Pearlstine’s memoir contains some of the most honest and rigorous thinking I’ve read about the journalist–source relationship. No one – not the journalists, nor the Bush administration officials, nor the special prosecutors – comes out of it with reputation intact.

“We need to distinguish between ‘anonymous’ sources, whose names we leave out of stories, and ‘confidential’ sources, whose names we won’t disclose in litigation,” he concludes. “We must also be more honest with our sources, and we must be vigilant to make sure our sources are honest with us. Reporters must explain that they cannot promise more than the law allows, and they shouldn’t make promises that are against the public interest. Journalists aren’t above the law, and we have to stop acting as though we are.”

How do we distinguish between day-to-day anonymous sources and those to whom we should promise confidentiality? “The source who seeks confidentiality should typically be risking livelihood, life, or reputation, and there should be no other way for the reporter to get the information than from the source… Confidential-source status should never be granted to government officials who are trying to spin a story, especially if they are breaking the law when they do so.”

In an eight-page appendix Pearlstine publishes model editorial guidelines that build on existing guidelines at Time Inc., the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. These have been reprinted on Pearlstine’s website, and are well worth reading.

Shield laws that protect journalists refusing to divulge the identity of their sources exist in thirty-five American states but not federally, Pearlstine writes. In Australia, federal parliament passed a shield law for journalists in March 2011 after years of campaigning by the news media, which now hopes similar laws will be passed by states and territories.

Shield laws certainly bolster freedom of the media, which is a good thing, but the Australian act does little to address the issues raised in this article. Amending the Evidence Act 1995, the law puts the onus on an aggrieved party to show cause why a source’s identity should be revealed and this cause must outweigh any likely adverse effect on the source and must outweigh “the public interest in the communication of facts and opinion to the public by the news media.”

So far, so good. But as an analysis by the Parliamentary Library says, the onus applies “whether the piece is a less edifying article or whether it is an investigative piece making the weighty contribution to our democratic system which journalists can make. There is no capacity for the court to consider the worth of the individual piece.” Comments the library’s Kirsty Magarey: “This could have interesting effects.”

I’m sure journalists wouldn’t welcome judges parsing the merits of their every article – judges are scarcely known as the journalist’s best friend – so we come back to the need for us journalists to think carefully before granting any old source anonymity. The problem with this is that the practice is as common as café lattes in newsrooms today.

That makes even more urgent the need to discuss these issues openly, both inside news organisations and elsewhere. There is a paradox that lies at the heart of watchdog journalism. We habitually demand the right to scrutinise those in positions of power and authority on the ground that keeping secrets is something that at best should be kept to a minimum and at worst breeds unaccountability and even corruption. Yet, we journalists demand the right to keep our own secrets, our sources’ identities. Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves the same hard question we ask others? •

The post Leaks, sources and passing the salt appeared first on Inside Story.

FOR AMERICAN writer Mark Danner the Bush administration defined itself forever when it responded to the killing of nearly 3000 people on 11 September 2001 by declaring a war on terror “unbounded in space or time.” A year into the Obama administration, the new president is trying to redefine the war on terror, “to shape it and to limit it,” but has had only partial success. Obama promised to close the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay and renounced the torture of terrorism suspects, but Guantanamo is still open and none of the architects of the Bush administration’s torture policy have been brought to account.

“We are in a state of exception, a kind of soft state of emergency, that has precedents in American history, during the civil war and the first and second world wars, but we have reached what I regard as a Nuremberg moment,” says Danner. “Torture remains legal, for all intents and purposes, in the United States. We have known about its use since the Washington Post ran a 5000 word investigation in late 2002 before the United States invaded Iraq.

“Most graphically we know about it from the photos of the hooded man and the leashed man among others at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 and we know about it from the many government documents now publicly available on the internet. We remain in a state of exception. President Obama has not delivered us from it.”

Danner, a professor of journalism and a longtime writer and analyst of American foreign policy, is in Australia speaking in Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney to coincide with the release of his latest book, Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War. On Tuesday evening at the Australian National University he told his audience that one of the most disturbing features of the Bush administration was former vice-president Dick Cheney’s ability, almost singlehandedly, to wrench the Republican Party and many Americans around to his attitude to the use of torture against terrorism suspects.

“Cheney calls it ‘extreme interrogation techniques’ but we know that what he is talking about is torture. So the Republican Party’s attitude towards torture is now very clear: they’re for it. The Democrat position is not so clear. President Obama is clear; he says he will stop torture and will change official policy but when he’s asked about what will be done about those in the previous administration who drafted the infamous ‘torture memos’ and those who carried out the policies, he says ‘We will look forward, not back.’”

To Danner’s ear, this is a “pernicious phrase. If we follow this line no one would ever be prosecuted for anything. A Department of Justice report released in the last few days criticised the lawyers who drafted the torture memos but said ‘they do not deserve ethical sanction.’”

And it seems many in the United States agree. Danner points to an opinion poll released in April 2009 by the non-partisan Pew Research Center that found a majority of those surveyed (54 per cent) believed the use of torture against terrorism suspects was sometimes or even often justified. “This is the first time in over five years of Pew Research polling on this question that a majority has expressed these views,” the report found. “Another 16 per cent say torture can rarely be justified, while 25 per cent say it can never be justified.”

Conversely, a substantially higher proportion of people surveyed in twenty-one other countries opposed the use of torture, even when dealing with a “terrorism suspect who may have information that may save innocent lives,” according to a report released in November 2009 by the non-profit US body, the Council on Foreign Relations. Where the Pew survey put the percentage of Americans unequivocally opposed to torture at 25 per cent, the comparable figure in the council’s survey averaged across the twenty-one countries was 57 per cent. In Britain and France the proportion was higher: 82 per cent; in India and Turkey it was closer to the American figure but still higher, at 41 per cent and 49 per cent respectively.

IN PERSON, Danner seems like many a globe-trotting journalist. When I interviewed him last week, he lamented the fact that he was talking over coffee in Lindrum’s, a Melbourne boutique hotel, when he felt he should be on the ground in Iraq reporting on next month’s elections. “I haven’t been to Baghdad since 2007; I really should get back, but I’m here for this,” he said, waving his arm and referring to his visit to Australia to promote his book.

Despite holding dual professorships at the University of California in Berkeley and Bard College in New York, Danner primarily identifies himself as a journalist: “correspondent” is the term used on his business card. And when answering a question about how the Obama administration is dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan, he clutches his head as he remembers that Robert Silvers, his longtime editor at the New York Review of Books, is sweating on him to produce an article about President Obama’s approach to foreign policy. “I can feel this beam of his thoughts coming into my head even though he is half a world away. I’m talking when I should be writing.”

It’s through Danner’s writing, especially, that you begin to appreciate what a rare kind of journalist he is. Like many foreign correspondents, Danner puts great store in seeing things with his own eyes, even if that means getting dangerously close to violent events. Here, for instance, is a chilling moment from Stripping Bare the Body, when Danner, then twenty-nine, and other correspondents were in Haiti during the lead-up to a planned election in 1987 that followed the sudden exile, courtesy of a US government-provided aeroplane, of president Jean-Claude Duvalier. They are following a tractor-trailer carrying soldiers serving General Henri Namphy’s interim regime when it comes to an abrupt stop and soldiers leap out, charging at a small mud house.

“We had pulled up about fifty yards back and got out of the car; now we stood in the middle of the road, transfixed. All at once, the soldiers became conscious of us. They froze in their charge, then turned to face us. Everything seemed to stop: The slender young men in olive green stared at us over their automatic rifles, their faces impassive, and we stared back, pens poised over notebooks, cameras clutched at chest level. No one moved. Finally, very deliberately, the lead soldier moved his rifle in a wide arc, back and forth, at the level of our chests – once, twice, three times. That was all it would take. It would be that easy.”

There is a frozen moment; then the soldiers get back in their truck, leaving the journalists flat-footed on the road. Danner comments: “Whoever had been about to be beaten or killed would have at least a few more minutes to enjoy life in Botel.”

He goes on to describe a series of appalling massacres of Haitians by soldiers and the feared Tontons Macoutes militiamen as citizens set out to vote. The attacks forced the election to be abandoned. The events he describes not only shock but raise many questions about the impoverished island in the Caribbean, and this is where Danner differs from many foreign correspondents: on top of witnessing events, he spends an equal if not greater amount of time reading books and studying history to understand better the events he reports.

The value of his approach is particularly evident today, little more than a month after the earthquake in Haiti killed more people than died in the 2004 tsunami, prompting saturation global media coverage that within weeks slowed to a trickle.

In the articles reproduced in this book from a three-part series published in the New Yorker in 1989, Danner prods readers to look further than the daily news media’s necessarily superficial attention to the “spectacle” of chaos, ruin and grief that follows a natural disaster. Compare the opening of Time magazine’s 25 January cover story about the earthquake, which began “Tragedy has a way of visiting those who can bear it least,” with a piece Danner wrote for the New York Times on 21 January. Where the Time opening is glib and the magazine’s coverage confines itself largely to the natural disaster, Danner wants readers to appreciate that something more than our impulse to charity is needed if there is to be any real recovery in Haiti.

Danner is always looking to lay out resonant facts, such as how, in 1804, African slave-soldiers in Haiti led the only successful slave revolt in history, and how the neighbouring United States and other colonial powers not only imposed a crippling trade embargo on Haiti but required it to pay its former overseer reparations.

“The new nation, its fields burned, its plantation manors pillaged, its towns devastated by apocalyptic war, was crushed by the burden of these astronomical reparations, payments that, in one form or another, strangled its economy for more than a century. It was in this dark aftermath of war, in the shadow of isolation and contempt, that Haiti’s peculiar political system took shape, mirroring in distorted form, like a wax model placed too close to the fire, the slave society of colonial times.”

AS IS EVIDENT in the passage about the Haitian soldiers quoted above, Danner writes vividly about the events he witnesses, but unlike some he is never content simply to tell stories, let alone the hero-correspondent’s “war stories” about close shaves with death. He includes such material, he says, because the correspondent’s first task is to “tell what happened” even though being in the middle of violent political events is deeply confusing and offers the correspondent only a partial view.

The bulk of Danner’s articles include substantial analysis, much of it drawn from his reading, but also from interviews with experts and close study of primary source documents, in which he meticulously peels away the fly of government action from the fly-paper of government rhetoric.

Unlike many, Danner has long been committed to making widely available the primary source documents he writes about. When he converted to book form a lengthy New Yorker piece about a 1981 massacre of villagers at El Mozote in El Salvador, he included an additional 100 pages of documents selected from thousands of pages released years later by the Clinton administration. He also appended a list compiled by human rights investigators of the names and known details of the 767 villagers whose murder had been staunchly denied by the anti-communist Salvadorean government and by the Reagan administration.

Apart from the Haitian series, Stripping Bare the Body includes Danner’s reportage from the civil wars in the Balkans in the 1990s. But the biggest section is devoted to the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He was among the minority of journalists in the United States who vocally opposed the US government’s plan to invade Iraq, including in widely publicised debates with high profile colleagues such as Christopher Hitchens.

In 2009 he obtained a copy of a Red Cross report about mistreatment amounting to torture of so-called “high value detainees” held in secret prisons operated by the Central Intelligence Agency around the world. Red Cross officials had interviewed the detainees in late 2006, and parts of their report had been revealed by other journalists, including Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, but Danner made the entire report available through the New York Review of Books.

He says he has learnt the necessity of restating even obvious truths. In the debate Hitchens’ arguments were predicated on there being a clear link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. “There was never any link between the two. I was thinking that it was so obviously crap that I did not need to refute it, but I did, because the more often it was stated, by Christopher, not to mention by President Bush, the more that many people believed it.”

More recently, he has been bemused by the absence of public anger toward former vice-president Cheney, who within ten days of Barack Obama’s inauguration began criticising the new president for renouncing the use of torture in the fight against al Qaeda. “Cheney has attacked Obama relentlessly for months now, as if the actions of the previous administration, of which he was a vital part, played no role at all in creating the tremendously difficult problems besetting Obama.”

It is hard to disagree, especially after reading the thirteen reports and essays on Iraq in Stripping Bare the Body, which lay out just how disastrous the invasion of Iraq has been, for Iraqis, for American troops and for global opinion of American foreign policy, through policies and practices that were both misguided and mismanaged.

From the decision to invade Iraq, grounded in spurious evidence of Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, to interagency brawling in the US government that meant there was no postwar planning, and from lying about whether torture was being used on suspected terrorists to re-defining torture as any interrogation practice that fell short of killing someone – these government actions, Danner argues, have caused and are causing incalculable damage.

For Danner the use of torture is repugnant, but beyond that he reminds us that a report commissioned by the administration after the Abu Ghraib photos were publicised in 2004 found that nine out of ten detainees brought to the prison were of “no intelligence value.”

He shreds the Bush administration’s stance on torture, which defended its questionable reliability in obtaining valuable information while lying about its use and misunderstanding how much damage it was doing to often innocent victims and to its stated policy goals. “One does not reach democracy, or freedom, through torture.”

Apart from anything else, the Bush administration’s policies, which reached their nadir in the Abu Ghraib scandal, played into Osama bin Laden’s hands. “What better image of Arab ill-treatment and oppression could be devised than that of a naked Arab man lying at the feet of a short-haired American woman in camouflage garb, who stares immodestly at her Arab pet while holding him by the throat with a leash?

“Had bin Laden sought to create a powerful trademark image for his international product of global jihad, he could scarcely have done better hiring the cleverest advertising firm on Madison Avenue.” •

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