A Fairly Indignant Letter to the Editor

Sir: Your editorial (Quadrant, October) commendably castigated journalists for their indifference to and negligent coverage of national security matters and their hostile yapping at authorities responsible for investigating Dr Mohamed Haneef, suspected, rightly or wrongly, of association with Islamic terrorists who had just carried out bombings in the UK.

However, you surely overreach when you move in your editorial from specifics to a philippic against the honourable profession of journalism. Are you unaware of Auberon Waugh’s well-informed observation: “Generally speaking, the best people now go into journalism, the second best into business, the rubbish into politics and the shits into law”?

Your opinion that the coverage of the Haneef affair was “a tissue of dishonesty and lies” stands within your brief. But the extrapolation, “this is part of the modern journalistic technique—invent an offence, lie consistently about it, and then treat it for ever after as established fact”—come, come, my dear fellow, as a chief subeditor of long ago used to chide me when I was occasionally guilty of attempting to give Homeric (but never Munchausenian) dimensions to humdrum reality.

Especially in your commentary on political journalism it seems to me that you wield a broader brush than necessary to paint the bad side. Is it really the general case that journalists are no longer “reporters who go out and find the news” but “are in a world in which most of the news has to be invented day by day”? Are editors “so committed to the treatment of politics no matter how boring and trivial” that, as a matter of course, they “put absolutely meaningless rubbish on the front page”?

Taking a break from composing this cordial, if somewhat combative, letter to you, I went to breakfast and inspected the two newspapers that regularly make it to the table, the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, their issues, in this instance, of Tuesday, September 25. Neither did too badly from this random sampling.

The Australian, which has become outstandingly robust and reliable in recent years, had a lead story about objections by the Tourism Minister Fran Bailey, with a fair bit of NIMBY support, to the government’s intention of including wind power in its plans to develop clean energy sources. The main page one picture showed protestors holding a large sign that read: “Wind power is a total fraud.” This may well be the case. The newspaper’s lead story raised an important question that went beyond its tiresome over-coverage of an election campaign that hadn’t then begun.

This front page contained five other stories. Two were about politics. One reported increased support for the federal government in Western Australia—not inconsequential, because Labor hoped to win two government seats there to reach its winning total of seventeen. The second reported that Malcolm Turnbull had been “forced” to say he wouldn’t contest Liberal Party leadership against Peter Costello. Aha!, I hear you say, and it is hard to argue that the event will figure large in history. However, I am inclined to indulge the Australian in a little playing to the celeb zeitgeist.

Its other front-page stories reported a record jump in the stock market, allegations of a dodgy deal by Macquarie Bank and a government plan to publish assessments of schools’ performances. Pointers at the top of the page offered stories on inside pages about yet another marital crisis for Shane Warne, anti-government protests in Burma and an obituary of Frank Hyde, a famous radio broadcaster.

The Sydney Morning Herald, which has been floundering recently through a much-needed makeover under a new editor, but shows signs of finding its feet as a strongly local newspaper, with some subduing of the personal agendas of its journalists, led with a lively and informative report on the drought and water shortages, including a side-bar, appropriate for a metropolitan daily, about their effects on the price and availability of wine. Its second main story reported the state government to be having second thoughts about a promised new railway line. The other two stories were about a sex scandal involving a state government minister and (yes, yawn) another political opinion poll. Its top-of-the-page pointer was to reports about Sydney’s forthcoming Good Food Month. That seemed a reasonable choice, Sydney being Sydney.

Among the tabloid front pages that morning, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph led with “Lara Talks, Simone Walks”, an omnibus report on the romantic problems of Warne and another cricketer, Michael Clarke; Melbourne’s Herald Sun went with—Melbourne being Melbourne—“Brownlow Beauties” and some fetching pictures of the partners of star players at the Brownlow Medal dinner. The two papers fell short in dash and style of the New York Daily News’s front-page welcome to Iran’s President Ahmadinejad the same day, “The Evil Has Landed”, but they captured the attention.

I offer you, sir, all four Australian front pages as adequately intelligent and informative highlighting and reporting of a variety of events in a day in the life of Australia, including political events. All these papers will have had stronger and weaker front pages by the time my letter reaches you but I doubt any of them will have published much in the way of “absolutely meaningless rubbish”.

(Without wishing to hurt your feelings, I’d like you to know that your belligerence towards my profession caused me to turn to David Salter’s new book, The Media We Deserve, the title suggesting a more complimentary approach. Unfortunately, I found it unreadable, except for a nutty foreword by Stuart Littlemore, which ended with the proposition that “in Australia the government is a wholly owned subsidiary of News Limited”.)

Some of the thrusts in your editorial nick a tendon here and there but miss vital organs at which they may have been aimed. I doubt that your claim that journalists “are lucky to have a pass degree from a third-rate arts faculty” would stand up to investigation. I know quite a few with respectable degrees, including graduate degrees, and a handful with the good sense to have acquired degrees in journalism from first-rate American graduate schools. Most contemporary Australian journalists have adequate general educations.

However, if, as I suspect, you are offering a “could do better” assessment of Australian journalists and journalism, education is an area where this applies especially. What journalists lack, as you perceive and are offended by, is an adequate education in journalism. Rarely have so many talented and aspiring men and women been gathered together to perform an important task without a clear perception of what they are supposed to do or how to do it.

The somewhat Dickensian apprenticeship/cadetship system, which took children straight from school and taught them how to replicate the errors and shortcomings of their elders, has largely been abandoned. At least cadets/apprentices learned some professional techniques and a few had the good fortune, mostly on small-town newspapers, to be tutored by editors of high skill and commitment, with extensive personal libraries. Such happy mischance may also benefit a few youngsters taking undergraduate journalism courses —in effect, hands-off apprenticeships. It is difficult to imagine what students take away from courses in media studies. More attention should have been paid to Graham Greene, when he defined “media”, seeping into general use in the 1970s, as “a word for bad journalism”. One hopes that TAFEs don’t introduce plumbing studies.

Journalism education is most effectively conducted with adults who have already acquired first degrees in virtually anything, except media studies. The Universities of Queensland and Wollon-gong made praiseworthy attempts to start postgraduate journalism schools but, for one reason or another, failed to gain traction. Some enterprising university should follow the strategy of Notre Dame, in its Fremantle beginnings, by forging a relationship with an American university to secure academic and administrative guidance, the loan of key staff and creation of a student exchange program. Notre Dame might itself consider launching a postgraduate journalism school through these means, or Macquarie, keen to claim a place in the front rank of Australian universities. Or, best of all, both.

Fully qualified practitioners are urgently needed to plough a firebreak between journalism, online, print and broadcast, and the often poisonous babble of internet blogdom, with YouTube, for example, providing an unencumbered free ride for politicians into the hearts and minds of the people. Apart from this, postgrads would get the best jobs and make the most money.

There is some justification for your describing Australian journalism’s code of ethics as “always a bit of joke”. When the code was promulgated by the Australian Journalists Association, a trade union, in 1984—based on a 1944 draft—it had, in addition to being a decalogue, a distinctly Mosaic tone. I hope you see historical value in reproducing it here.

Journalists were required by the code to: 1. Exercise scrupulous honesty; disclose all essential facts; do not suppress facts; do not distort by wrong or improper emphasis; 2. Place no unnecessary emphasis on gender, race, sexual preference, religious belief, marital status, physical or mental disability; 3. Respect all confidences received in the course of journalistic work; 4. Do not allow personal interests to influence professional duties; 5. Do not be influenced by any consideration, gift or advantage; commercial consideration. Where appropriate disclose any such offer; 6. Do not be influenced by advertising and commercial considerations; 7. Use fair and honest means to obtain material; 8. Journalists must identify themselves and their employers before obtaining interviews; 9. Respect grief and personal privacy; resist compulsion to intrude; 10. Do utmost to correct any published information found to be harmfully inaccurate.

Like all black letter law, and law chiselled on stone tablets, the union code’s abstract stringencies imposed a heavy burden on weak human beings and, without a priesthood to interpret and qualify the code according to circumstances, it was a frequent source of sin. I personally found more than once an imperative to interpret for myself commandments 2, 3, 7, 8 and 9—in the AJA decalogue, that is, not Moses’. Different numbers give me problems there.

The union, now, through amalgamations, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, used all its thumbs in modifying the Code in 1997. Journalists were required only to “strive” for accuracy and fairness, and act with “sensitivity and discretion” in times of grief and tragedy—and any standard could be overridden “by substantial considerations of public interest or public harm”. That’s more or less how things work in practice, anyway, but by introducing its new rules in the form of an escape-hatch revision of a code that sought to portray journalists as shinier and more knightly than they actually are, the union succeeded in making them look more venal and unscrupulous than they actually are.

In fact, decent ethical standards—though your editorial challenges competence more than morality—exist within Australian journalism, policed by journalists at various hierarchical levels. For self-protection, the in-house police give the bouncer’s rush to habitual liars and counterfeiters. Error embarrasses. Tips, trips and duchessing are regarded as discreditable beyond a certain modest level and I recall no involvement by journalists in any medium in scandals remotely equivalent to the John Laws–Alan Jones cash-for-comment affair.

Using their special access to pursue personal agendas is the recurring mortal sin of Australian journalists. This is a product of weak editorship and is a disease of flu-like infectiousness: when one person or coterie gets away with it, others feel entitled. What journalists lack in their desire to conduct themselves decently is the support of prestigious arbiters (the role of the graduate journalism schools in the USA) and competent critics. The ABC’s pitiful Media Watch and the Australian’s gingerly weekly media section hardly constitute a critical entity. Perhaps Quadrant might lead the way, as it has in other fields, by identifying and cultivating an excellent journalism critic—other than, if I may say so without giving offence, yourself.

As you have no doubt detected, I took your editorial rather personally. It is inconceivable that somebody as self-interested as I could have wasted nearly sixty years (including my present boutique practice) in worthless activity in the company of mendacious dolts. After induction, I was never moved to seek employment outside journalism. The best unsolicited offer I received was to open a branch of an Australian trading company in North Korea but, after reflection, I decided money wasn’t everything.

The attraction of the job is that, in a career, you get a seat in the front stalls at most of the main events of your district, your city, your country or the world, depending on the milieu into which fate or personal action lands you. You travel and meet interesting people, including the appalling and loathsome. You are credentialled for prying into other people’s business, a virtually universal thrill.

You enjoy status as a member of an excluded profession. The temptation to join must be resisted. A friend who moved from newspaper reporting to political lobbying said, after a couple of years in his new job, that what he missed most was “the self-indulgence of objectivity”. If you indulge in objectivity you can’t expect anybody to trust you.

After a short while you realise that everybody from whom you gather information knows more than they tell you. This may be because they don’t want you to know but more often it is because you deal constantly, more or less as a passer-by, with people who have developed deep knowledge and expertise in particular areas through arduous study or experience. The journalist’s skill lies in making the most of glimpses. While there is room for specialists, journalists, generally speaking, need to deny themselves narrow expertise. A distinguished Australian judge once pointedly remarked that all American journalists reporting on legal matters had law degrees. I have no reason to doubt this but bet that, more importantly for doing their job, they also have postgraduate journalism degrees.

A bit further along as a journalist you realise that there are also and invariably among your readers some who know more about everything of which you write than you do. At this stage you become an adept. Failing to realise it leads to your being excoriated in Quadrant editorials.