The house of worthwhile journalism is burning down while its supposed guardians are out the back watering the geraniums.
On the same day Fairfax announced it would sack a quarter of its creative workforce the heads of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance and Australian Press Council both released self-righteous public statements that blathered at tedious length about “threats to press freedom” and “press freedom under attack”.
These threats, according to Paul Murphy, CEO of the media union, and Professor David Weisbrot, chair of the APC, include: the lack of protections for whistleblowers, criminalising public interest journalism, inappropriate defamation laws, the lack of shield laws, the over-use of suppression orders, secrecy laws, anti-terrorism laws, government resistance to FOI requests and the gender gap in media workplaces. It’s quite a list.
But what use will freedom from all those handicaps be if journalists have no proper outlet for their work? Surely that is the most fundamental issue facing our trade. While the great mastheads crumble into the digital dust, the media union and Press Council fret over subtle issues of professional practice that don’t (and have never) troubled their readers.
With the precious exceptions of the ABC and SBS there’s no decent journalism left in free-to-air broadcasting. The Age and Sydney Morning Herald are tumbling toward extinction, their managements seemingly avid for an online-only future. The Australian, awash to the gunnels with losses, is unlikely to outlive Rupert Murdoch by more than a decent period of mourning.
[Fairfax defends cuts, threatens to sack striking journos]
This crisis for quality journalism has nothing to do with legal constraints. It’s a business crisis. The real “threat” is the one neither the MEAA nor APC want to acknowledge: the internet. For 20 years the traditional media failed to respond adequately to news and opinion websites, and now they’re paying with their lives.
Yet still they don’t understand. Here’s Weisbrot in his May 3 media release:
“Membership of the Press Council is absolutely vital to safeguard press freedom … It is terribly disappointing that publications such as Guardian Australia, Buzzfeed, Junkee and Mamamia continue to shirk their responsibility to contribute to the industry’s self-regulatory regime.”
Talk about wanting to invite the fox into the hen house! The good professor clearly cannot recognise his enemies. Lively, energetic sites have been sucking eyeballs and advertising revenue away from the press for decades, and they aren’t the least bit concerned about what he condemns as “the litany of threats to free speech”.
Meanwhile, as the Fairfax journos settle in for their seven-day strike, Weisbrot is off to East Timor to help celebrate the first anniversary of that country’s press council, and the ACP executive director, John Pender, is in Jakarta as a delegate to a UNESCO conference. We can only guess if the proprietors who pay for the Press Council believe this to be an appropriate use of their contributions.
For the MEAA, Paul Murphy’s call to the “press freedom” barricades offers a tad more substance to essentially the same rhetoric (while failing to make even a passing reference to the Fairfax sackings), but still reads more like special pleading than a practical blueprint for survival. In step with the Press Council, the union is apparently more concerned about ideological purity than saving jobs.
[When Greg Hywood manned the barricades]
And again, what is revealing about Murphy’s multi-target broadside is that many of the concerns he ventilates on behalf of his members are the most familiar complaints that journalists make about the difficulties of doing their job, not examples of specific “attacks” on press freedom (whatever that undefined term might actually mean).
Thus, we get, “There is no respect for journalists’ essential need and ethical obligation to protect their confidential sources”. No concession that this “ethical obligation” can also be abused by journalists as a licence to fabricate. And later:
“There is a dire need to reform Australia’s uniform national defamation legislation that allows people to be paid tens of thousands of dollars damages for hurt feelings without ever having to demonstrate they have a reputation, let alone one that has been damaged.”
Perhaps the zealous Murphy has forgotten that for a plaintiff to succeed in a defamation action they must first establish that the imputation being complained of is false. In other words, the publication was in significant error, an error that in almost every case was made by a journalist.
[There is a war on media, and it’s time for journalism teachers to suit up]
Reporters, editors and producers like to tell us they are bullied into timidity by defamation law, yet it is far more common for our large media organisations to use their might and power to bully legitimate claimants into retreat. Even in their currently fragile commercial state, our major media companies still have the capacity to outspend and outlast most self-funded defamation plaintiffs.
And as a recent Crikey feature recorded, journalists themselves have been happy to enlist the defamation law when they feel they’ve been wronged or can sniff a hefty damages award in return for an error or indiscretion from one of their colleagues.
There are, of course, many aspects of a working journalist’s life that have become difficult as governments — often using the excuse of national security — seek to legislate in areas of inquiry and exposure that were formerly more lightly regulated.
But it seems extraordinary that at a time when the ranks of working journalists in Australia have been halved in less than 20 years, the MEAA and ACP should keep indulging in so much self-pitying piffle.
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Peter Fray
Editor-in-chief of Crikey
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Traditional media including broadcast is in rapid decline. The ABC is also shuffling the deckchairs to an online future while the government quietly kicks the shit out of it. We are in for rough ride but nothing will survive without funding. A profit driven future dictated by Facebook or Google could be the alternative.
Nice venting there and a good clarification of the hypocrisy of the MEAA – surely its very name, “Entertainment & Arts”, points to the problem of representing journalists?
However, one of the main exponents of ‘bullying’ of journos. was often the organisation for which they scribbled, afraid of putting off-side either a substantial advertiser or one of the proprietor’s clubby mates.
I’ll shed no tears for the plight of the minions who were happy enough to do their masters’ biddings and attack anyone at whom they were aimed when the pay cheques were fat & the living easy.
Now Niemoller’s point is prodding their arses and “they don’t like it up ’em!”
Yeah, terrific article, David, one that starts to niggle at the larger questions facing ‘journalism’, although I’d reckon it’s still falling a bit short. The ‘strategic epistemological implications’ of the internet has long been a hobby horse of mine, so forgive the length. In a way my modest medium (an obscure, unloved comments box in an already-dated online article) is part of my message, too.
As a profession (trade? vocation? business?) ‘journalism’ – that platitudinous catch-all – has to date only been tangibly defined by its operational media, what’s now at risk of becoming only a fleeting circumstantial marriage of mass media technology and advertising monopoly. The Sydney real estate market, the Harvey Normans, the McDonalds et al could be leveraged to pay the Kate McClymonts et al to spend expensive years investigating an Eddie Obeid only because there was no other mechanism for the latter (The Money) to reach a mass audience. That happy commercial equation is I think gone forever. It’s only commercial momentum and cultural habit that’s piping serious ad spends to newspapers, radio and TV now, and, for all the transitional excitement about online advertising, even the content/spruik calculus fuelling the Google/FB shift won’t have legs, I suspect. I don’t think there is a ‘business model’ that will ever again render information ‘monetizable’ in any industry-sustaining way, now. I might be wrong.
What is the internet, really? Like many have done, yes, I put it in the same epoch-shifting historical category as, say, the printing press, but too often those who get this fail to recognise what that really means. From the growth in universally available printed matter followed, chicken/egg style, an exponential growth in literacy, and then all the political and civic implications that flowed from that. When the masses no longer rely on a small literate elite – the educated class, the priesthood with its church-based ‘pulpit forums’, jobbing scribes – for the collection and dissemination of abstract ideas, it’s not just established ‘information business models’ that disappear, but an entire entrenched public epistemology.
That’s precisely the place we are at now IMHO. The largely unexpected and still-misunderstood triumph of ‘outsider’ political powers and ideas across the world is a direct function of a huge epistemological rejigging. It’s a terrible misjudgement for ‘serious journalism’ to regard figures as diverse as Steve Bannon, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Le Pen, Farage…and for that matter Anonymous, ISIS, Milo…or any online content producers, including comment box ranters like me, as some kind of oppositional antithesis to the established epistemology of ‘journalism’. Such would be akin to the professional calligrapher of the 17th century curling his lip at this new fad of ‘amateur’ copperplate.
‘Journalism’ needs to asking itself not what kind of new ‘business model’ is going to keep what’s rapidly becoming a boutique cottage industry viable. The answer is I suspect: nothing can. Once you universalise an operational trade skillset, the business it underpins goes out of business. And as much as we can agree to lament the likely demise (or ebbing away) of the core journalistic ‘qualitative differentiation’ that really does matter in an epistemological sense – prose close-editing (and subbing! Dear god, ‘Ecomomy’ on the front fucking page of newspaper of record!!!), sweep and scope of fact-collecting and checking, coverage of and access to authentic power, masthead continuity and collective memory, meaningful info-accountability etc – the sad reality is that these aspects of ‘journalism’ (because they are the expensive, the user-nonpaying bits) have already long fallen significant victim to journalism’s key failing: the ‘profession’s’ own unwillingness or inability to define and defend itself. You curl an acute lip at defamation, and the point is brilliantly apposite, one that can be extended to all those defining attributes I mention above. The platitudes journalists routinely toss about in self-defence of their ‘vocation’, their ‘profession’…about ‘accuracy’, about ‘truth to power’, about ‘accountability’, ‘facts’…well. The amorphous, undefined, increasingly anarchic anything-and-all-things practice of ‘journalism’ kind of makes a mockery of it. As consumers we are grown-up enough to grasp that no profession is perfect, and there will always be outliers, rogues, errors, cynics, grubs dwelling in the Fourth Estate, too. But like all would-be ‘professions’ what matters to your own viable credibility in the eyes of those outside it is, of course, is not whether or not as a group you operate error-free, but how your own procession polices itself when errors abound. Journalism has never done this (don’t wave the Press Council at me, for god’s sake), nor even accepted that it’s your collective responsibility to try.
And it matters, David. Fundamentally, in an existential sense, in an ongoing viability sense. More than any of you understand, it seems. It matters that, for example, a Rupert Murdoch tabloid editor can cynically deploy the life-savaging firepower of its front page at a young girl who tweets something about ANZAC Day that’s unpalatable to them but fairly unremarkable to (in fact largely unnoticed by) most of us…and no ‘serious journalist’ says ‘boo!’ about it. It matters that Fairfax’s editorial staff will go on strike, risking their redundancy payouts, when their own jobs are on the line…but won’t when, say, the commercial/advertising realities of the Real Estate market (very probably) have a seriously skewing effect on how they report the housing affordability issue. Or when a Michael West gets turfed, again, with a profound impact on the masthead’s reportage of taxation issues…stories, things that scream out for exactly the kind of vocational seriousness we are being asked, now, to go to the barricades to save. I could go on with exceptions-that-prove-the-rules-totes-moot, but I hope you get my drift: again, again, and again….journalism makes idealistic claims for itself that, again, again and again…just don’t match up to reality. Daily, far too often to ignore, now. It’s no accident that journalist routinely rate lower than politicians on the credibility and trust scale. Jesus, doesn’t that worry the shit out of journos? Yet your trade can’t seem to joint the dots. It doesn’t matter to us if it’s ‘only’ some Murdoch nufty who goes about hacking people’s phones for a throwaway story, it’s irrelevant if ‘only’ an ABC mung-beaner bends facts grossly to suit…unless the Laurie Oakeses, and Leigh Saleses, and Kate McLymonts, and all professionals, trade elders and heavyweights espesh…unite, loudly and with real professional effect, to defend your own journalistic territory against those kinds of grotesque abuses of its privileges from within, how the hell are we supposed to?
We can’t. We won’t. Increasingly…we aren’t. ‘Fake news’ isn’t starting to bite just because we’re all bored with dancing kittens, mate.
And you lot haven’t defined and defended your professional gig, David, not ever…so natch the internet is now taking the matter out of your hands, in the fundamental human matter of sentient epistemology: who gets to define ‘truth’ (and so falsehood), collate it, sort it, advertise it, argue it, universalise it, defend it, yep, monetise it too…re-connect it to the material world that governs us, in ways good, bad, opportunistic and downright dangerous. Perhaps it was inevitable anyway, but it won’t wash for journalists to lament the failure of us, your consumers, or ‘it’, your dying business model, to sustain it…when the product has been allowed to become so ill-defined and shabby.
Mate, stop tut-tutting about the internet with dainty little prissy-fits, roll up your sleeves, spit on the floor, and have a fucking go. Fight the information wars, not the business model one. That one is out of your hands, anyway, quite probably unwinnable.
I think what’s left now is for vocationally-charged journalists to ask yourselves: where to next for ‘information’, in words and pictures? What similar paradigm shifts will flow from this latest revolution in human communication – the universalising of the capacity to individually publish and globally disseminate abstract information – and the place to start is in the banal operational levels of what’s become as ‘journalism’. The McLuhanite toss-off about the medium and the message is apposite beyond belief now. ‘Journalism’ has for years been driven more than anything else by the operational banalities of the old media: the mere information ‘conventions’ that evolved out of simple imperatives of publishing rhythms, logistics, space, broadcast time, commercial calculus, legalities…so tight now is the stranglehold of pure ‘performance’ (including on the page) over ‘content’ that your trade sustains them as defining virtues in themselves. Journalism must never overtly mix reportage with opinion. (But you do! And…why-ever the fuck not, exactly? And…can you separate the two now? And…again, you do mix them anyway, you just prissily pretend otherwise). Or: Off the record/on the record…WTF is that, David? Who decides what is what? Where does it sit epistemologically, that ‘A Senior Source In Cabinet…’ fudge? That ‘It has been suggested…’, that ‘The Herald Understands that…’ News? A Grammatical Tic? House Style? ‘Fake News’? Is an unattributed quote ‘fact’ or ‘fiction’, or a convenient operational, a deadline-chicaning (a ‘journalistic’) cop-out? Deadlines? Why must a 24-7 newspaper even run an edition every calendar day nowadays, anyway? What if nothing’s happened? Why not just print the hard copy when you’ve got a decent edition ready to roll? Why not on-demand-equip your network of agencies? (There’s a cost saver!) And if there’s one big story for the day and not much else, why can’t the 7 pm TV news devote 20 minutes to it? We can get filler online anytime, now. An Op Ed must be 738 words long, no more? Um…again, why? I could read 10,000 hard copy Rundle words a day without my poor unwashed concentration flagging…. Do we need to drive a reporter and producer all the way out to the Parramatta Town Hall for that inane 30 second live cross follow-up to a corruption scoop, to watch some brain-dead Comms 101 graduate tell us that yes, she is indeed standing looking cutely authoritative in front of a…deserted, locked-up council building and no, nothing much is happening? Certainly not ‘news’…well, ‘fake’ news, sure. Oh yeah, Davo, there’s shitloads of faked news every day and night in the Meeja…and there has been for several decades at least. As I’m sure you pro’s all know better than anyone…
Well, those old-media operational demands have become a suffocating, a deadly journalistic strait-jacket, David. It’s not just your business model that the internet has killed. It’s the glamorous epistemological ‘mysteries’ of your trade too, mate, the banal but until now ‘secret magic’ behind the act of producing daily mass media ‘content’. When the first printed pamphlets started appearing, punters thought they were a kind of miracle, too. Then when everyone was writing their own, the content started to matter again, as an info-differentiator (a ‘value-adder’, say). I think the same thing is going on right now, with ‘journalism’. We used to marvel at TV Vox Pops, live coverage, combat footage, press conferences, multi-meeja artistry, special effects, clever editing, gutsy camera work, brilliantly snapped images…we used to bust our guts to get that 30 second go at Lawsy’s mike, a letter up, a snippet, a brief bit-part strut on your hallowed stages. Opinion columnists used to be intellectual rock stars. We took analysts, commentators, popular, concise expertise…seriously. Paid for it cheerfully.
But all the kids are doin’ that shit now, mate. We’re all ‘journalists’ out here, did youy hear? We don’t need the show biz side of ‘journalism’ now, we can DIY it…and yet that superficial stuff – the ‘medium’ – looks to be about the only part of it you lot are keeping in the bathtub. I think that’s a terrible strategic mistake.
David, I was sitting at dinner party with Judith ‘clickbait’ Whelan a few years ago. She’s as smart and tough a media cookie as you’ll get, and a fantastic journo (and a hilarious raconteur, a lovely person). But at one point I let slip to her my own long-discarded ambitions at finding space in your game – I am an aged carer these days, there are fewer crusty, wrinkled arseholes to deal with, I’ve found 🙂 – by way of mentioning my amateurish involvement with Margo Kingston’s early online journalism experiment at the SMH Webdiary. Her embarrassed pity (for Margo, and me, too) was instant and palpable. ‘Poor Margo,” she said. “Poor, poor Margo…”
Well, not for the onlytime, ‘Poor Margo’, one of the best and certainly the most prescient of the ‘mainstream’ journalists of her generation, was on precisely the only viable track to your profession’s survival even fifteen years ago, however pompously, self-importantly and stylistically cringe-worthy some of our (most of my, ouch) output was in formative practice. The reality of the internet is that it has already changed the way journalism works (can only work, must work), whether or not the serious mainstream professionals currently striking for their livelihoods like it or not. All information bets are off. The old functional parameters – including stylistical, conventional, operational – are goners. The epistemological hegemony of the democratic, civic future is up for grabs again. If the Paul McGeoghs, the Kate McLymonts, the Paul Kellys want the essence of journalism to survive, they need to cast off their old-era preciousness and habits about the mere ‘medium’, and fight the Net on its terms to make sure they, the vocational elders, steer the message to where it needs to go. Discard the Old Meeja’s ‘information performance’ aspects, the hollowed out façade of which is what so much ‘serious’ journalism has long become, and re-deploy your vocation to where the battle of just…’information’ is underway.
We both agree that it’s a fight that the real professionals need to win. Cheers. Sorry Crikey. But…you know. Old thread, no harm done, etc. No deadlines missed. Only eyes bored, bored out of choice, etc, etc, etc.
Typical ‘culture war’ rant. If this ‘David Salter’ sees the sacking of quality journalists as an attempt to degrade the quality of journalism, if he can’t see that this is as important as the whistleblower legislation and that the damage of data retention legislation can and does do to true journalism. That the work of journalists freelance and/or otherwise employed, in or outside Australia is under the protectorate of the MEAA, and the ACP. That “‘writers’ rights are somehow beyond the pale of Union for journalists. I admire the MEAA for its committment to international journalists (many of them non Australian) who have resisted pressures than David can not even imagina. David is obviously of the school that submits journalism to some kind of public relations tool. I am surprised that this article was actually published in Crikey.
PS: These comments by Salter are what I find disturbing; : the lack of protections for whistleblowers, criminalising public interest journalism, inappropriate defamation laws, the lack of shield laws, the over-use of suppression orders, secrecy laws, anti-terrorism laws, government resistance to FOI requests and the gender gap in media workplaces. It’s quite a list.
Without the list above (which the MEAA have promoted relentlessly) There is not ‘sufficient condition’ for independent journalism. Perhaps he recognises peripherally that the necessary conditions have changed, but so too does the MEAA, conducting workshops on new media and articles analysing the changing media environment. The MEAA to my mind is achieving more than ‘watering the geraniums’ (although I take on board his critique of journalists who have ‘buckled under’. Hopefully he is not one of them).