Cheryl Kernot loves Jack Robertson’s missives against journos and has asked for his email address. Journalist Chris Wallace wishes to advise Jack that her income from journalism is zero. Complaints against the pollies-v-journos poll go on, with this from PIERRE DU PARTE of Woorigee in NSW: “How about a bit more scope for the sensible skeptic, like “None of the above” or “Don’t trust any of the buggers” or “I only trust Margo” options?” JAMES COLLINS of Chatswood disputes my convenient theory that pollies beat journos by voting for themselves. “You’ve got to be kidding yourself. I’d rate the majority of politicians as more decent and honest than the average Australian. Journalists would be only just higher than bankers. At heart I’d say politicians and journalists are equally dishonest but politicians are more accountable now than they’ve ever been, due to the media exposure they get and this keeps them more honest than they’d otherwise be. Journalists are manipulative, two-faced liars who do their best to tailor news to their personal or organisational agendas, your colleagues at News Limited being the worst of the bunch. On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d rate politicians to be honest 7 out of 10 times and journalists 3 out of 10.”
Despite my attempt to draw the line under this anti-journos debate, you don’t want to stop. So here we go again, starting with a couple of rare pro-journo contributions (for balance).
DELL HOREY
I have been trying to work out why I don’t agree with Jack (Webdiary November 3). He raises some valid points and I certainly believe journalists should disclose potential conflicts of interest – and hand the story over to someone else if necessary. And sometimes the need for the journos to find the “right angle” obliterates the issue. But his solution raises too many problems.
It is important for journos to help hold politicians to account because they have the time and resources to be able to do it properly and if they don’t ask questions because of personal factors – who will ask? Jack’s proposition effectively ties your hands and you will end up merely regurgitating MPs’ press releases and leave their spin unquestioned.
Already there is a sense that politicians and journos know the true story – what is going on behind the scenes and who the real hypocrites are – but if you follow Jack even when there is a legitimate chance to expose a pollie – it can’t be done, just because we don’t vote for journalists! The end result is an even cosier group and the rest of us are left knowing that we are being sold a pup. Where would it leave us – police couldn’t book anyone if they ever take a pen home from work, a judge can’t listen to divorce cases and voters certainly can’t hold a government to account if we have made a bad financial decision or paid a bill late. Then how could we judge a health system if we haven’t come up with something better.
The role of moralisers-on-our-behalf has been played by Government Ministers – and I don’t like it. It is especially hard to take when they are so hypocritical. I think it is important to remember that politicians (and journalists) are only human – but that doesn’t mean that we should turn a blind eye to their behaviour. In fact I get more worried when stories are not reported.
I think the real issue is the sensationalism that attaches to stories – all mock horror and little genuine information. The 2-second grab is a big problem – unimportant incidents and major matters all get much the same treatment – the “spin” is all important. I think the public has to take some responsibility too – we let them get away with it – watch the crappy current affairs programs etc If we want to be treated better we need to be prepared to take the time to understand the issues – including what a Westminster system of government means and the role of ministerial responsibility in it.
The Reith story exposes the Government’s hypocrisy on a number of grounds. Most people can understand the story, the amount of money involved (a billion dollars is a little bit a too unreal) and most can relate it to their own lives. Refugees (or the politically correct illegal queue jumpers are outside most Australians experience and so they are happy to swallow the government’s line. I would like journos to find a way of getting Australians to understand their plight – the strategy of the government seems to be to dehumanise them and isolate them.
If you follow Jack’s argument – that you should be careful in your criticism of politicians because they all mean well and have a terrible lifestyle – where does that leave us with the people they try to demonise in an attempt to win popular support for their policies. I would think that most union officials have also taken on their role not for the glory and wonderful lifestyle, and they want people they know and respect to keep their jobs and a reasonable rate of pay. Should Reith be encouraged to continually bag all unionists?
The Trish Crossin incident is interesting especially now that the coalition has gone soft. I think Trish Crossin was wrong not to follow the right procedures in regards to letting people drive her car but she isn’t a minister in a Westminster system of government – I am not sure what the appropriate punishment should be. I think a LOT of people have little idea of why Reith’s position in the Telecard affair is important. (An aside — if TC gave notified someone orally that the person could drive her car, who was that person and why didn’t they follow up the written permission? Or was she sent the appropriate form and failed to return it?) Anyway, it seems unlikely that the written authority would have changed what actually happened, but Reith’s act of giving his son the card did in fact set off the chain of events.
We want politicians to be accountable but just standing up for election every 3 years is hardly sufficient. We want important issues to be reported responsibly but more sensationalist stuff gets higher ratings. We complain about politicians and their spin yet Beazley is called a “windbag”. We want a socially responsible government with good economic credentials yet complain if the political parties get too similar – or even if the Labor party takes on some economic rationalist clothing. It is interesting that we can hold so many contradictory opinions.
PS: I hope Mike Seccombe gets the FOI on the parking space – after all the flak that Keating got I can’t believe what Howard has got away with – I thought he had to live in Sydney because his son was doing the HSC – he’ll be through uni soon – and Abbott calls people job snobs if they resist up-rooting their families for a low-paid job. I must admit that I thought that some journos wanted a change of government after 13 years of Labor because it would make their work more interesting. [For Secco’s efforts, see Webdiary November 5].
REG BARLOW, freelance journalist.
It was very refreshing to see you publish your net monthly salary (more than most journos would be game to do I suspect).
Having said that, I suspect that many people wouldn’t truly appreciate the reality of what pressure there is journalists to produce accurate and concise copy. As one the very few freelancers about these days it continually amazes me the amount of people who are willing to line up and criticise those who would try and get to the bottom of a good story.
They don’t realise the amount of research and probing that’s needed to get a story into the three media spectrums (radio, television and print). While Jack has some valid points I would challenge him to try and make a living as a dedicated freelancer who needs the cards to fall his way to make a respectable living.
JOHN MINER, who used to work for Paul Keating.
There is something missing from this debate: the audience.
How well do we equip ourselves to judge? For example, you had to point out to one correspondent that Pauline Hanson’s One Nation won more votes than the Australian Democrats. This correspondent is entitled to judge but how well has he equipped himself to do so?
That is also, of course, the problem with democracy. The polling booth which receives the greatest number of votes at every Federal election is in London. Some of those voters are in the region short-term, but others have been absent from Australia for long periods: how sure are we that they know what’s going on in Australia? Yet they have the right to vote.
And that’s a simple example, chosen only to enable me to say without giving too much offence that the right to vote or the capacity to read a newspaper does not guarantee that every person has the same ability to form an informed and intelligent judgment.
What we have are media and political systems that are imperfect because the essential part of each is not the journalist or the politician, but the public.
The variation within the public in the quality and quantity of information received, in the ability to process it, in the biases, prejudices, enthusiasm, interest, logic and emotion of the public, is endless. It varies with age, region (going back a bit, the Democrats are bigger in some parts of Australia, like Adelaide, than is One Nation), socio-economic circumstances, education and probably a whole lot of other factors.
The basic assumption of our political system is that every citizen is entitled to have a say in choosing the government under which he or she must live. It is almost a corollary that the intelligent have no greater right to input in forming a government than the less intelligent, which is an admirably democratic view since they all have to live under the one system. Less justifiable is the assumption that the informed have no greater right to a say than the ignorant, the diligent no greater right than the uninterested.
The second-line assumption is that, in a compulsory ballot, the biases one way and another will cancel each other out. There’s no logic that can prove this, and the complexity of the issues make it impossible to prove from analysing a vote, but statistically it is probable. In other words, she’ll be right, mate. At least as far as the ballot.
Media critics can cast their vote on newspapers every day, radio stations every hour and the internet every second. Those that succeed in establishing trust will survive.
The sum of my argument, I suppose, is that it’s only part of the picture to look at the transmitters of a message: without a receiver, there is no message. Determining the value of any message is a power entirely dependent on the interpretation of the receiver.
I suppose I should confess that I have worked as a transmitter of messages for two metro dailies and, later, for the leaders of three governments. Now I’ve graduated to the position of power instead of influence, a member of the public, a receiver of messages. What a motley crew we are – much more so, I say from my experience, than journalists and politicians. However they range from the model of rectitude to the reprobate, from the intellectual to the ignorant, we vary more. Which is why they will never satisfy us all.
CON VAITSAS
Margo I apologise to you & Greg Abbott for being offended by remarks about homosexuals. (Webdiary November 6) Everyone I know is aware of where I stand on homosexuality. But lets face it, the majority of politicians like to use gays as whipping boys (pardon the expression) to their own advantage so they can muster votes from the conservative voters that exist out there.
But I still think we should be aware of their sexuality because there have been politicians who have been “gay bashers” & in private been involved in homosexual affairs. So it’s those kind of pollies that we should hunt down & expose as well.
DANIEL JEFFARES
Having spent the past year away from Australia I have the benefit of perspective, which is a function of distance but also the welcome respite from that most Australian of afflictions – “new positivism”.
As some of your readers have pointed out, journalism is reduced to either the blind support of a faith (the ‘limpics for example) or the red-eyed fury of the Telecard scandal. Has it ever occurred to your readers that Australians are simply being farmed by a coalition of big business and big government which is never going to let you get away with actually debating the real issues in the public domain?
Like Singapore, you will be granted a marginalised role in which you will be permitted to encourage the intellectual elite to let off a bit of steam from time to time. But the real issues will never see the light of day.
Let’s see a mainstream media frenzy on the subject of the fact that we effectively have a single party state in most western “democracies” today, the two party system having been refined by the (concentrated) owners of the media into a single policy platform with competing administrators in the form of a Labor/Liberal coalition.
MARK TAZEWELL
I’ve not had the chance to read every entry in this debate, but it seems that here, just as in news reporting in general, the “game” of politicians versus journalists has moved the focus away from the actual reasons why both groups are there. Scoring points, establishing and disputing “credibility” and scrapping over the “high moral ground” appears more important than the democratic process and the helpful reporting and analysis of it.
I know this point of view comes straight from the land of theory and principles rather than the muddy trenches in Canberra, but the principles which lie at the bottom of our system can’t be allowed to disappear or nobody will be bothered with it any more. This is already happening. How many people bother engaging themselves in political activity at any level?
The very fact that we are talking about this in an adversarial manner (“versus”) is a bad sign. Nobody says that these groups need to love each other personally, but when was democracy last made healthier by a clash of egos? Ideologies and even concrete issues are more important than who gets the last word.
It is of course important that public representatives be held accountable on a number of levels, and that those who keep them honest are themselves kept honest, but these are side issues to the real business of running a country and making a future for it. They seem to have taken over from the big picture. Have we gone too far down that road to go back?
PETER MARESCH
What really gets my back up are the members of the press who refer to themselves as “journalists”, yet are nothing but commentators. Most people buy a broadsheet to read an unsullied version of the news, yet many, such as yourself, Michelle Grattan, Michael Seccombe and Alan Ramsay seem to take the self-indulgent approach of feeding us your opinions.
We don’t want your opinions. We want the news. Unbiased, uncensored and without embellishment or variance from the whole truth. Leave the narcissism to the News Ltd papers.
MARGO: Your idea that journos can just pick up “the whole truth” and report it is incorrect. “The whole truth” is invariably hidden. The press releases announcing policy change are spun almost out of existence, use statistics selectively, and clothe the decisions in political rhetoric which often bears no relationship to the forces at work which produce them. The role of the journalist is to get behind the facade to get as close as possible to the reality.
On opinion, Alan and Michelle had that most valuable of intangible assets – a long political memory. They have been around for decades, and can compare, contrast, and explain day to day stories, and longer term trends. To me, this is value adding, not self indulgent floss.
PETER BEST
I started off in advertising then moved into journalism.
I was with the ABC, then Fairfax. Now I write film music, where my manipulation is recognisable by all.
I long ago realised that advertising is far more honest than journalism. People – especially the writers responsible – know that advertising is bullshit but nobody – especially the journos – acknowledges that journalism is bullshit.
In advertising, one’s chance of individual fame (notoriety) is very very slim. In journalism, one’s chances are quite good. So we see a film review, with a retouched or at least carefully chosen photograph above, that describes an American movie as despicable crap and, in the same edition of the newspaper, a piece by ******* (insert any name here) with a retouched or at least carefully chosen photograph above, gushing about the film and suggesting that it is significant or at least worth seeing. The writer, **** (insert any name here), is fascinated by some callow American youth who he or she’s never met and is happy to devote a whole page to the breathtaking story of the making of this piece of excrement.
Why is this so? Is the Herald saving thousands of dollars by running a hand-out provided by major advertisers instead of paying a real journalist to write the story based on its news value? Is the Herald doing deals in order to get advertising from the people who make these buckets of offal or is it selling what’s left of its soul in order to increase its readership among the people who move their lips when they say “Daily Telegraph“?
I know what motivates a politician and I know that he or she can be restrained by the public/party reaction to his or her behaviour. Journalists with by-lines and snappy photographs have fewer restrictions. On a scale out of 10, I trust politicians about 1 and journalists not at all. The Herald has become nothing more than a marketing tool. I wish there was an alternative. I now read about 10 per cent of the paper and the proportion grows smaller every year.
Have you read the Metropolitan section? Is there ever anything in there that isn’t a billboard for somebody? Sorry to rave but it’s very, very depressing (literally and figuratively) these days.
ANDREA BARRETT
As usual, your spot is the only one with any action these days. Wonder what your secret ingredient is? Maybe, to paraphrase the theorists, its the diversity of gatekeepers. Online has that tendency, I’ve noticed.
However, all this talk of trust and credibility has stirred my curiosity. You’ve been a journo for a long time and you’ve probably seen more pollies than than your average cracker. I’ve experienced seasoned gallery hacks getting quite hot under the collar when Joe Blow reckons that all pollies are liars, crooks and cheats. Sure, it’s poetic license and a little bit of sweeping generalisation … however, you can’t deny that election promises have deservedly acquired an unsavory reputation of being rotten to the core – or do I mean non-core?
So, for absolutely no steak knives at all, can you answer the $64 question: How do politicians justify their “lies” and broken promises????
The reason I’m asking is that there’s a little issue known as “psychological contract” doing the rounds out there and it would appear that many Australians simply do not expect their elected representatives to deliver. I don’t think I’m the only person who wants to know the answer to this.
MARGO: Oh dear. The really big lie I’ve seen first hand was the metaphorical handshake between Labor in Liberal in 1996 regarding the state of the budget. Keating swore black and blue that the budget was fine and Howard predicated his spending promises on the basis of that assurance. Both sides were lying and political journalists knew they were lying. Yet when we tackled either side we got nowhere. Indeed, Howard and Costello knocked down questions at an election press conference by suggesting that journalist questioners were biased.
I’ve never bothered asking them why they lied because the answer was obvious. Both sides wanted to win.
Another big lie came from Keating, this time in the 1993 election. He claimed the tax cuts were “L.A.W. law” then cancelled some of them once he got elected and raised wholesale sales taxes all over the place. He wanted to win and the Hewson challenge led him to prevaricate to the Australian people. And who can forget Labor’s cast iron promise not to privatise the Commonwealth Bank, before selling it anyway to balance the books.
To their credit, the Liberals have at least partly cleared up this mess by requiring details of the budget position to be announced before the election. This is a good way to ensure an honest level fiscal playing field between the combatants come election time.
This measure was absolutely necessary, because without it, public trust had sunk to such a level that neither side would be believed on spending promises.
Politicians are caught in a bind. They want to promise that they can deliver, yet know that, in an era of globalisation, there is little they can do to meet their promises. The electorate is beginning to understand this lack of power, due to the efforts of both political parties. This partly explains the trend overseas for the leader to bear almost the entire burden of winning office. The person the electorate trusts to do the right thing by Australia, with as little cowtowing to their core backers – big business or trade unions – as possible is the person who will win the prize.
Neither major party is happy to let the people into their confidence on the difficulties Australia faces and the choices we should make. I think more intellectual grunt in communications with the public could work – but this is too dangerous for most politicians to risk, not least because powerful elements of the media would react in a way which would torpedo honesty with the people.
Politicians believe that the vast majority of Australians vote on the hip pocket nerve. their job is to attract the support of the hip pocketers through promises they often cannot deliver, and then to look at the big picture in driving Australia forward and find a way to justify broken promises. This won’t work for much longer, and both parties know it.
MARKUS ZELLNER takes up Andrea’s theme:
ODILLE ESMONDE-MORGAN writes: “What are we trusting politicians to do when we elect them ? Hopefully, to represent the voters of their constituency fairly”‘ (Webdiary November 7).
I have always been puzzled that people expect a politician to be nothing more than a collector and determiner of voter opinion. This seems to me to be the absolute worst way to be a representative. You end up with poll driven sycophantic automata. And I am afraid that I agree with Sir Humphry (on occasions) that public opinion is often fickle, inconsistent and actually injurious to their own interests.
If the poll driven automata model is what people wanted, then get rid of the expensive human infrastructure. Go straight to citizen initiated referenda (or direct voting) on important issues using lower cost infrastructure like telephone or Internet voting. Let the administration handle the minutiae (they do and will anyway).
The way I see the current representative system is that people delegate their decision making to someone else. They have effectively outsourced (some of) their responsibility for being a citizen (to state it in rational economic terms). Their vote should be for the person who does the job most effectively. The question brought into focus by things like the Telecard affair is “do they get value for their money”?
I expect politicians to be honest and straightforward. Honesty should be a given. It’s a pity that we have to list it as a requirement. Straightforward would be nice. I would vote for a politician that admitted to making a mistake, as long as the mistake wasn’t admitted for the purpose of gaining my vote (apologies through crocodile tears).
The standard of debate and the clarity of argument frighten me. I am in severe danger of having to exercise brain cells that have long been dormant. More power to you for having the courage to start something that may be hard to stop.
GREG WEILO
OK Margo, I’ll take the bait. Most politicians are a bunch of arrogant, egotistical, power hungry control freaks who think that their opinions are far more important than anybody else’s. They earn their living by distorting the truth. The same is true of most journalists. So why is it that journalists are held in even lower regard by the general public than politicians?
At least the politicians are usually prepared to show their colours. We all know what side they are on, and what their motivations are. Like journalists, politicians selectively quote the facts, they only tell one side of the story, and they give unbalanced and biased opinions. The difference is that everybody with an iota of intelligence understands and recognises political diatribe when it comes from politicians. We expect it from them. We set a lower social standard for them, and they can expect some returning fire.
Journalists are the spies and snipers in our midst, shooting at the unarmed and easy targets. Unlike politicians, they are unelected and protected from serious criticism. They falsely pretend to be impartial and independent, or patronisingly portray themselves to be the same as ordinary people. Some of them even attempt to maintain an ethical pretence, as they generously bestow their wisdom and moral guidance to the peasants. Any opposing opinion is emotively classified as some form of hate.
The arrogance of journalists is endless. Remember the outrage when the peasants were so ignorant as to send Paul Keating packing or had the audacity to reject the inevitable republic? Witness the hypocrisy as anti-government demonstrations in Serbia are described as civil disobedience or even people power (as in the Philippines) but similar unrest in Fiji or Israel is described as unruly mobs or terrorism.
The use of the bipartisan euphemism to conceal the development of a totalitarian one party state gives another example of journalistic complicity with their masters. The resultant disenfranchisement of its citizens is disguised by the meaningless elections, where people are offered an alternative but not a choice. Journalists are the wordmongers that amplify the political spin.
I could give many other examples to illustrate journalistic hypocrisy. Compare the treatment given to left wing political dissidents (a.k.a. human rights activists) with that given to right-wing dissidents such as Pauline Hanson or David Irving. Compare the international support given to Kosovars with that given to Palestinians.
Journalists are intellectual prostitutes. Their reluctance to criticise the right-wing economic rationalism and globalisation favoured by their media mogul masters is rewarded by an almost unrestricted right to publicise left wing social agendas. Journalists have the delegated power to pull politicians strings and make them dance, and they think that this provides defacto membership to the elite. Their own strings which lead to Packer & Murdoch are not discussed if you close your eyes you can pretend that they dont really exist.
Of course, accusations of conspiracy theories are already brewing. Sneering jokes about black UN helicopters coming in the middle of the night are taking form. Serious journalists discount all conspiracy theories, unless they are the vast right-wing variety that concocted the story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Remember that one, or has it already disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole?
Journalists are beginning to wake up to their true position in the social hierarchy, but they still can’t understand the depth and extent of this opinion. Even pedophiles are starting to look good in comparison.
Have a nice day.
MARGO: I assert my independence. I cannot pretend to be impartial – no-one is. But I can disclose the belief system which drives my work to people who read me, and I do. Yes, journalists are part of the society they report on, and general trends in ideas are reflected in our work. Part of our job is to genuinely engage with those trends. If we are coopted by them, as we often are, we must take a step back and rethink. Journalists, like politicians, must take steps to restore our credibility. We must admit we are a part of the system, and partly to blame for the contempt in which the system is held by many Australians.
DENIS DONOHOE in Brisbane
My long held judgment is that adversarial journalism serves Australia poorly with its superficial attacking of both sides of politics in contradictory ways
We need more intellectual & more useful contributions involving independent evaluation of options and ideas including those possibly not yet espoused by either party – so that ideas are evaluated, instead of adopting the rebuttal/avoidance skills of the politician.
Nevertheless, it is hard to regard journo efforts as worse than the parliamentary mud-slinging broadcast to the public – so childish and so far away from the needs of this country which desperately needs some useful leadership.
I know the “let the market run Australia” argument – but I contrast the results of this (the Australian economy continually in decline) with achievements/ protection/ development in Singapore, Japan, USA, Sth Korea, Malaysia.
CAROLYN HART
The various responses from your readers to Jack Robertson’s contribution seem only to prove his point. Mr Robertson merely pointed out the fact that journalists only report on a very narrow range of topics, and the perspective barely moves by more than a few degrees, and that, yes, journalists are a biased lot. Hadn’t anyone one noticed this before? It’s hardly a recent or new occurrence.
Yet, when someone such as Mr Robertson articulates the reality (his second piece, Webdiary November 6), your readers respond by either objecting or calling him “cheeky” or “misdirected” etc. This in itself tends to prove his over-arching points.
What really disturbs and depresses me is that numerous of your readers have actually congratulated you for publishing Mr Robertson’s views (even though they then go on to disagree). Publishing a well written piece which airs numerous much ignored but obvious truths deserves congratulations??? Only in the world of journalism, where an entirely homogenised view of the world prevails, would someone actually be congratulated for “allowing” Mr Robertson to air his non-radical views, albeit not in hardcopy & to a very narrow audience.
JEREMY HURLEY
I was driving from Melbourne to Adelaide last night listening to you talking to Philip Adams about how there has to be a paradigm shift in Australian politics and political comment. Radio National must have kept multitudes awake and alive on the country’s roads – an overlooked advantage of a national network.
I’ve thought about this need for a political paradigm shift for years now. My youth was spent in South Africa and in the Catholic church, and I saw the damage any kind of ideology can do. By their very nature an ideology is destructive because it becomes more important, inevitably, than the people it is supposed to benefit.
Even the Afrikaners were being destroyed by apartheid (have you read Country of my Skull by Anjie Krog who seems to be very much a South African Margo Kingston?) It seems to me that unless ideas are open to change they cause things to wither or rot – like a season that lasts too long.
I’ve called what I think is the way to go Pragmatic Humanism – the PH factor – not an ideology but a guiding philosophy, where political decisions are based on reaching a balance about whether they will actually work (the pragmatism) and whether they will cause the most benefit (or in some cases the least harm) to both individuals and the community (the humanism). It seems so simple.I’m sure with work you could even come up with benchmarks whereby any decisions could be judged and reviewed.