Opinion polls tell us that newspaper journalism is the least respected or, if one is harsh, most despised of professions. Only car salesmen consistently rate lower. Worse, respect for journalism has declined over the last quarter century: according to Morgan polling, about 15 per cent of the public in 1976 gave a positive rating for journalist's ethics and honesty, by 1999 it was down to 9 per cent.
Similarly, a 1995 Morgan poll, conducted as part of a World Values Study, found that only 17 per cent of the public had confidence in newspapers, far behind institutions like the police (75 per cent), armed forces (66 per cent) and major corporations (56 per cent). Twenty-two per cent of the public had no confidence at all in newspapers, 61 per cent little confidence.
Clement Attlee described democracy as government by discussion. Journalists are purveyors and gatekeepers of public discussion. A free press is a necessary part of democracy. Newspapers can convey debate in rather more detail and depth than TV or radio. If the public lack confidence in the press, if they feel disconnected from it, then the press is that much weaker against assault. Worse, it makes it more likely the public will feel disconnected from politics and public life generally.
Yet the profession seems unable to learn the lessons of the republic debacle. Coverage and commentary was overwhelmingly for a "Yes" vote. The failure to carry a single state gave anyone who needed it a public warrant to ignore the press and press opinion as completely unrepresentative of public opinion. Yet, with Media as a conspicuous exception, there seems to have been little attempt to grapple with the experience and its lessons for Australian journalism.
Instead, we have had the same hectoring over mandatory sentencing and reconciliation as we had over the republic. In an August 1987 Review article, Gerard Henderson criticised the herd-mentality of the Canberra "Rat Pack". Almost 13 years later, the problems have got worse. Australian journalists appear to be the Bourbons of our times, forgetting nothing and learning nothing.
A certain amount of pack behaviour is understandable. The problem with journalism is one's mistakes are so very public (don't I know it). Safety in numbers leads journalists at crises or on Leader road-trips to check each other's copy so they are not out-of-step with the common "line". Journalists also suffer isolation from their audience -- this is particularly so with the Canberra Press Gallery.
It is fellow-journalists with whom they socialise, most regularly interact and who hire and fire them. Hence a socially isolated profession -- after the Republic vote, one experienced journalist told me that he did not know anyone who was going to vote "No" -- and look to each other for approval of their output. In day-to-day terms, journalists' most important audience are fellow journalists. And, in this status-conscious age, the easiest thing in the world for journalists to agree upon is their shared virtue and then write to display that virtue to each other.
This only works, of course, if one agrees about what virtue is. But they have similar social backgrounds, similar educational experiences. It is not hard to signal to each other what virtue consists of, especially as a watered-down version of the typical indulgences of humanities academics is there for the taking. And they are wordsmiths, so virtue is naturally defined as having the right opinions. The consequence is the hectoring we have seen over Hanson, over the Republic, over mandatory sentencing and over reconciliation.
Peter Manning's recent piece in Media (April 20) relating a conversation with John Howard provides, as sociologist Katharine Betts from Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology has noted, an excellent example of the use of opinions as status-markers. From Manning's report, John Howard is clearly asking Manning to explain the criteria by which he judges what is racist: Manning takes the fact that Howard even asked as a sign of Howard being tempted by racist perdition. Being of the virtuous in contemporary Australia is like being a gentlemen in 19th century England: if you have to have the criteria explained, then clearly you are of a different (inferior) class.
There can be few things more preposterous than members of a disrespected profession putting themselves forward as members of a moral elite. Yet that is precisely what any regular reader of the "quality" press is constantly confronted with.
Journalists can only seek to claim an authority they don't have by trading away the only authority that they can or should have. Journalist's proper authority is truth -- that they report Australia to itself; that we see ourselves and our place in the world through the eyes and ears of journalists. The dictum that comment is free but facts are sacred is not some precious tosh; it is the only basis on which journalism can stand proud as a profession, can claim authority. It was thus particularly disappointing to see The Australian's political editor, Dennis Shanahan, writing that a Government submission to a Senate inquiry that pointed out the facts that not all the removed Aboriginal children were stolen and that 10 per cent hardly constitutes a generation, represented "a politically unnecessary and dangerous attempt to impose intellectual rigour on the debate". (The Australian, April 8). The lack of critical analysis over the "stolen generation" has shown that journalists have learnt nothing from their collective embarrassment in falling for the Hindmarsh concoction. When the Hindmarsh royal commission found the ludicrous story in the "secret" envelope was cooked up over a few beers one night, where were journalists to say "sorry, we got it wrong"? Why were the "dissident women" (such a revealing phrase) such as Dulcie Wilson so ignored by the press? As a friend said, where was the gutter press when you needed them?
But if journalism becomes an exercise in display of a common virtue based on having particular opinions, then views and truths awkward for those opinions become threatening to journalists. Journalism becomes polemic and reporting becomes propaganda. Worse, since elite status can only come from being different from the common herd, journalists are driven to parading how different their views are from common opinion, from those of the public they are supposed to be serving.
Hence one gets the startling phenomenon of journalists such as The Australian's national affairs editor, Mike Steketee (The Australian, May 29) berating an elected Prime Minister for having the same opinions as those of the public who elected him. Leadership becomes defined as agreeing with the commentariat and disagreeing with the public: ask Paul Keating how electorally clever that is.
Pamela Bone in The Age (October 21, 1999), turned a mere seven percentage point difference in majority approval of Jeff Kennett between men and women into a paean to women's superior wisdom yet, a mere 19 days later (November 8), she dismissed the 55 per cent vote against the republic as a case of ignorance and apathy. Instead of looking to genuine lessons, all we got was a display of conspicuous virtue, of journalism that serves the writer, not the public -- indeed, denigrated the public.
The problem extends to far more serious journalists, such as the Nine network's political editor and Bulletin columnist Laurie Oakes. Oakes is undoubtedly a first-class journalist whose memory for political facts and events is simply terrifying. Nor is he an ideologically-driven soul. Yet he, too, is apparently infected by journalistic conformity. Why else would Mr Hard-Edged Analysis predict terminal trouble for John Howard on the basis of an issue which barely rates in the public eye? Such was his analysis (The Bulletin, November 16) of Howard's win on the Republic -- an issue whose nomination by the public, according to Morgan polling, as an important issue peaked at 4 per cent. Meanwhile, he derides paying attention to popular concerns as "wedge politics" which fractures "national unity" (The Bulletin, April 11) -- the latter observation looking suspiciously like press conformity.
The republic and reconciliation are clearly terribly important to the press. But why, except as ways to display virtue? They are far less important to the general public. It is typical of the isolation of journalists that, to the extent this disjunction is reported, it makes the general public appear to be moral cretins.
The Australian's Paul Kelly is the doyen of his profession and clearly one of Australia's finest journalists. Yet he pulls the race card again and again: against Howard in 1988, against Peacock in 1990, against Howard over Hanson, against Howard over reconciliation. He is against the evils of "race-based" politics -- apart from race-based apologies and property-rights. If Kelly and co. had allowed mainstream politicians to openly discuss difficult issues of national identity and race, there would almost certainly have been no space for Hanson to make her destructive play. You cannot convince those for whose concerns you do not allow a voice.
Indigenous issues are genuinely difficult. But the central problem is cultural distance -- hunter-gatherer cultures do not equip their members well for industrialised society -- and cultural collapse. Journalists parading their anti-racist virtue provide no answers and divert attention from the hard questions. Australia vividly lives up to black American writer Thomas Sowell's comment (Jewish World Review, January 4, 1999) that if one believed that everyone should be under the same rules, that labelled you as "a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today". But such peregrinations are a natural result of using "racist" as a moveable tag to define virtue by stigmatising other people and views.
The key point is not political ideology: The Australian Financial Review columnist Brian Toohey is a journalist of obvious Left sympathies, yet that does not get in the way of his getting to the facts. The point is about quality of reportage and diversity of comment. The Bulletin's Virginia Trioli, infected with the commentariat's moral self-indulgence, fulminated at length against mandatory sentencing (for example, in the February 29 issue) but showed no signs of having wrestled with the elementary and journalistically central question: why is mandatory sentencing popular?
The Age's Tim Colebatch did note that popular suspicion of judicial leniency was behind the popularity of mandatory sentencing (The Age, April 6). But this was a rare bit of common sense from the commentariat, and an even rarer one from that newspaper. Why, for example, after the dispute in 1998 between stevedore company and Patrick and the Maritime Union of Australia, did The Age's dispute on-line archive provide links to the websites of the MUA, an MUA-support group and the Commonwealth Department of Workplace Relations and Small Business, but not Patrick, even though its website was very informative and accessible? Better journalists well-understand that moralistic self-indulgence is purchased at the expense of journalistic quality. An Age journalist once confessed to me "but Richard, we make our living from gratuitous left-wing crap". A former senior Age journalist noted that its news coverage during one period of the Kennett era was so one-sided it left its readers trying to decode whether the latest anti-Kennett piece was a real one or just another Age anti-Kennett propaganda piece.
The Sydney Morning Herald has similar problems. The problem is not one of ownership: the Australian Financial Review is a much better newspaper than either of its Fairfax stablemates -- the Monday after the May 28 reconciliaton march across Sydney Harbour Bridge, it alone permitted dissident opinions on its opinion page. The problem is their internal cultures. The Australian provides an interesting intermediate example, in that it can be as hectoring and lecturing as any, but the wry wisdom of Frank Devine, the informed incisiveness of Alan Wood, the cool common sense of Nicholas Rothwell, the perception and independence of Glen Milne, the intelligent understanding of Asa Wahlquist and, on his better days, Dennis Shanahan provide counterbalancing voices to indulgent conformity that are missing from the Fairfax dailies.
It is a sign of the narrow-minded provincialism of the Australian intelligentsia that there is so little willingness to concede a place for conservative ideas in the spectrum of public debate. There is a lack of conservative voices in the media. Many of those demonised as conservatives are just grumpy sceptics: left-libertarians mugged by reality. Conservative is used as a "boo" word. Since cultural and national identity issues are the prime areas for display of progressivist virtue, social conservative is a double-boo phrase and a sign of perdition. (And as an opposer of censorship, and supporter of the right to pleasure, of legalisation of narcotics and of gay marriage and adoption, I am hardly a social conservative: my concern is with the health and diversity of debate).
John Howard is rhetorically challenged. This gives him a problem when he is being assessed by the wordsmiths of the media, but does not create it. As the most prominent social conservative in Australian public life, John Howard becomes the Great Satan, the definer of what is not virtuous. The difference between Howard's "sincere expression of sorrow and regret" over the past treatment of Aborigines and a formal and apology for what others did in past generations is not worth all the ink spilled on it except for virtue-display purposes.
Even the normally independent Glen Milne recently pontificated (The Australian, May 22) on the potentially serious consequences for Howard from backbench nervousness of offending the press and, in the process, repeated the tired old saw (15 years old and counting) about Howard being "yesterday's man". At least Milne promised to talk another time about whether it was right that the press should have such apparent power (Glen, we are still waiting). The Sydney Morning Herald's Margot Kingston's recent dialogue with Philip Adams on Radio National's Late Night Live -- dissected by Piers Akerman (The Sunday Telegraph, May 21) who noted the factual errors, and was rightly scathing about the slandering of the Howard Government as being indifferent to the possibility of Aboriginal deaths (which was not in prospect) from a waste-water spillage at Energy Resources Australia in Kakadu -- is a particularly grotesque example of the abandonment of serious journalism for indulgence in moral vanity.
The commentariat and the public face each other across gulfs of mutual contempt. The difference is, the public's contempt is justified. But neither is healthy for Australian society and Australian democracy.
The press has become too dominated by the indulgences of journalists. It is time for the editors to step forward and ensure a much wider diversity of views, less self-indulgence and more professionalism; and a greater respect for the reading public that that entails.
No comments:
Post a Comment