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Journalism is in crisis, we’re told constantly.
But there’s another journalism crisis that has been disrupting and polluting the Australian media for more than a decade, a crisis that has nothing to do with broken business models, Facebook or the rise of so-called fake news.
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How does The Australian select targets for its holy wars? It’s not exactly complicated, says journalist and former Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes — the paper attacks “anyone whom it perceives to be a critic”. It’s about “whether you are on the Left or the Right and whether you fit with its commercial objectives or stand in their way,” says journalism professor Mark Pearson. “Like a true narcissist, it lets its own interests, agendas and catfights affect the quality of the journalism in its pages.”
These are The Australian‘s public enemies #1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6:
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How does The Australian inflict damage on its enemies? There are four main weapons, say media academics Matthew Ricketson and Andrew Dodd: “First, it unleashes a torrent of articles contesting even of the tiniest points, so as to wipe the critic’s original point from everyone’s mind; second, it attacks the critic personally and pitilessly; third — somewhat paradoxically — it ignores the critic; and fourth, when all else fails, it simply continues asserting something as true as if no one has ever shown it was false.”
The paper’s Holy Wars are quasi-military campaigns: strategic, tactical and psychological. They are unrelenting and take no prisoners. Here’s how it works:
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On Australia Day 2007, scientist Tim Flannery was named Australian of the Year at a ceremony on the lawns of Parliament House. “He has encouraged Australians into new ways of thinking about our environmental history and future ecological challenges,” declared then-prime minister John Howard as he presented Flannery with the award.
For The Australian, this was too much to take. In its news story, the Oz reported Howard as having “embraced his inner greenie”, and in its editorial said the decision would be “a controversial choice for some”.
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The architect of The Australian Holy Wars is a bluntly spoken, highly intelligent, intuitive newspaperman who adores Rupert Murdoch, despises the soft-left pretentiousness of rivals Fairfax and the ABC, and loves ink on paper.
In 2002, when he became The Australian‘s editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell harnessed all those passions to create what he describes as a “campaigning” newspaper — and, in the process, changed the ethical framework of Australian journalism forever.
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On a Sunday morning, soon after The Australian first launched what would become a five-year personal vendetta of almost 30,000 words against her, Gillian Triggs got a call from her son living in Paris. Why, he wanted to know, was she trending on Twitter ahead of pop megastar Taylor Swift?
Triggs was appointed as president of the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2012, and was previously dean of the Faculty of Law and challis professor of international law at the University of Sydney. The long-running campaign against Triggs flared up regularly during her tenure — especially during Senate estimates, but also in relation to The Australian‘s prolific writings on section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
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It was The Australian‘s classic investigative journalism that revealed war criminal and former Australian army reservist Dragan Vasiljkovic had changed his name and was working and living in Perth in 2005. He has just been sentenced to 15 years in jail in Croatia for his war crimes. And the Oz‘s recent pursuit of GetUp board member Carla McGrath, after her appointment to the Australian Press Council created an obvious conflict of interest, was supported by respected figures in journalism from all quarters.
That’s right. The Australian’s campaigns are not always irrational beat-ups or vicious personal attacks against ideological enemies. Often they’re genuine news stories that do the important work of civic journalism.
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“Writing about Rupert Murdoch and his family is perhaps not a great career move, given that they have such power and patronage in the media in Australia, the UK, the US and rest of the world.” When Paul Barry wrote those words, in his 2013 book Breaking News: Sex, Lies and the Murdoch Succession, he was prophetically charting his own fate at the hands of the the Murdoch family and their editorial retainers. Since then, Barry has become one of the highest-ranking public enemies on News Corp’s wanted list.
In many ways Barry is the prototypical target for The Australian:
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It’s a frustrating beast, The Australian. It’s got some great must-read journalism. And then there are its official dispatches from the front line of the culture wars.
Giving a name and putting a face on the enemy is central to how the paper reports the war. It gives a focus to the thousands of words thundering in an unending barrage, paragraph after paragraph. The faces say: “See! See! This is what we’re talking about!”
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It all started so nicely for Julian Disney, the seriously spoken, studious-looking former law professor, when he was appointed chair of the Australian Press Council in late 2009.
“Professor Disney,” noted News Corp in its formal submission to the federal government’s Finkelstein Inquiry into media regulation in 2011, “has brought a fresh set of eyes and really focused on what the council has needed to do in its priorities … in him our industry has the calibre of its leadership that was sorely lacking.”
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“When it first started to happen to me I was in dread of what was said on Insiders, on The Drum,” said one victim of an Australian Holy War. “I could spend half a weekend in agony over the latest piece on Saturday in The Australian. I don’t read a lot of it now. After a while I just took it as a daily battering.”
Roz Ward says she suffered real physical effects from the stress of the campaign against her. “One of the things that you don’t expect is the persistence of it, the longevity,” she said. As reported in Crikey, in a single month — from February 10 until March 11 — this year The Australian published 27 articles about the Safe Schools program: 18 news articles, three opinion pieces, two editorials and three editions of Cut and Paste. And it quoted more than twice the number of people attacking the program as defending it, led by conservative education academic Kevin Donnelly and senators Cory Bernardi and George Christensen.
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Yassmin Abdel-Magied describes herself as the “most publicly-hated Muslim in Australia” — thanks in no small part to a Holy War conducted against her by The Australian.
For someone who is a casual ABC presenter, engineer, writer, and activist, the paper’s coverage of her every move has been frenetic.
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With its small, elderly, highly conservative readership, The Australian lacks direct influence on the electorate. This is all the more so as staff cuts at the loss-making broadsheet, and a greater focus on campaigning journalism, have resulted in less investigative reporting and news-breaking (there remain plenty of “exclusive” drops, but few actual scoops).
That doesn’t mean the paper lacks clout. It still retains the ability to influence other outlets, especially in the morning news cycle, particularly at ABC Radio, with its wide regional reach, where many producers take their cue from what has appeared in the national broadsheet that morning in determining what issues to discuss. It may not have a large readership, but most journalists, editors and producers read it, ensuring its campaigns are noticed and, often, echo around the country.
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