Disclosure: Jack Robertson is the co-convener of the Balmain branch of Amnesty International. These are his personal views.

In ‘Regime Change for Saddam’ (Take a risk for human rights: Back Bush, webdiary17Jan), almost none of Jim Nolan’s arguments supporting a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq in the name of Human Rights really do anything of the sort.

His piece simply summarises what invasion proponents (for the last few months) and Human Rights NGOs (for over twenty years) have been telling the world: Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator whose HR behaviour is unacceptable. It’s a compelling read if you still need to be convinced of that; as a justification for invasion, it doesn’t get far.

What we’re now supposed to be arguing about is not whether ‘intervention’ in Iraq is morally requisite, but whether a pre-emptive invasion is the form of ‘intervention’ that can best achieve a HR net gain there. Far from being soft left appeasers, as Jim implies, HR activists have in fact been ‘intervening’ in Iraq since at least 1983 – as has Donald Rumsfeld, incidentally, who back then was busy kissing Saddam’s HR-abusing butt.

This is now largely moot, to be sure, but such historical fellow-travelling should at least inure even the soppiest lefty against accusations of ‘appeasement’ today; if anyone has been Saddam’s Chamberlain stooge, it’s Rumsfeld, not Chomsky. As a wussy activist myself, obviously I welcome Rummers’ belated discovery of his ‘bleeding heart’ on Iraq, but let’s not be blinded to the core matters by the zealous light beaming from all these HR Born-Agains’ eyes.

In a sense, US ‘calls to HR arms’ in Iraq now are more akin to those diehard isolationists who popped up post-Pearl Harbour to inform ‘everyone’ grandiloquently that Hitler was a mad tyrant who must be stopped, when ‘everyone’ had long been trying to figure out the best to go about doing it.

In this latter, deeper sense, Jim doesn’t move beyond the unsupported assertion that a full-on ‘second front’ is now the way to go, simply because: “(Not invading) cannot be tolerated when the realistic alternative is a short sharp military intervention which can now confidently be predicted to topple the much hated Saddam in a matter of weeks if not days.” His earlier detailed cataloguing of Saddam’s HR bastardry being irrelevant (because on this all HR activists heartily agree), my bold highlighting effectively gives us the unique essence of his pro-invasion argument: It would be quick, relatively cost-free and successful.

Now if this claim was backed up by the same quality of evidence and reasoning Jim uses to (redundantly) damn Saddam’s HR record, I’d be all for a ‘HR invasion’, too, but as it is not, his article is basically pointless, since the key HR question here isn’t, ‘Is Saddam a HR abuser?’, but rather, ‘Will a pre-emptive invasion right now do net HR harm, or net HR good?’.

Jim’s only evidential basis for asserting the latter – pre-emptive invasion as largely ‘painless’ HR new broom – are references to the Iraqi military’s quick collapse in the first Gulf War, a dangerously misleading comparison. It fails to consider the profound motivational difference in a soldier fighting to defend foreign invasion gains (Kuwait), and one fighting at home against an invader, especially a hated enemy who has vowed to radically restructure the conquered country in its own Imperialistic image.

To my mind, an inexplicable assumption is currently running riot in the warhawk camp; that the Iraqis will jump at the chance to surrender their ancestral lands with barely a fight, solely to trade Saddam’s familiar brand of oppression for what is surely still, to them, the scarifying unknown of ‘Americanism’.

This seems to me like a monumentally-haphazard presumption to make about the contemporary Iraqi soldier’s feelings on America and ‘Human Rights’. Against his corporate memory of Basra Road slaughter and homeland aerial bombardment by America in 1990; against his propaganda-distorted fear of Bush’s ‘evil’ intentions in Iraq; in the context of his likely religious conviction that the US ‘War on Terror’ (nb: Islamic ‘terror’ only, apparently, cf. North Korean ‘appeasement’) is in reality a new Judeo-Christian Crusade; having suffered under what he doubtless regards as American bombings, sanctions and trade blockades for over a decade; and with the knowledge that he is all that stands between the invading force and his wives and kids behind him, most Iraqi soldiers will still, the way Jim Nolan (and the White House) tells it, be easily ‘won over’. Despite everything, Bush & Co are counting on GI Joe from Idaho being able to convince Mushtiq Ali from Al-Hillah – in the chaotic heat of combat to boot – that the American Way is his best hope, and he should thus throw down his rifle rather than fire it.

I’m not saying another Iraqi military collapse is not possible, I’m suggesting the chances are (literally) immeasurably slimmer. Also, unlike in Kuwait, early ‘bloodbath’ tactical engagements are as likely to strengthen as weaken Iraqi resolve (at least up to a certain point), for each dead Iraqi is one more extended group of other Iraqis whose hearts and minds the ‘liberators’ can no longer quickly ‘win’. (Shoot a man dead, and his wife, kids, friends and comrades won’t care that you only did so in the greater cause of their Human Rights.)

Thus, the opening military engagements will be critical. If they go badly and a lot of Iraqis are killed, don’t expect many women and children to be tossing daisies in HR gratitude at the M-1s rolling into Baghdad later. He who scoffs at Iraq’s fighting commitment before asking himself how he would react to Saddam’s Armies appearing on his country’s borders is being at best foolish, at worse recklessly cavalier with the lives of his own invading soldiers who, for all anyone really knows, just might be in for a very nasty shock. Think Somalia in ’93, when all the poor old Yankee ‘liberators’ were trying to do was toss around a few sacks of free food and then bugger off home.

This – the manifest assumption among warhawks that the toughest remaining fight regarding a ‘regime change invasion’ is the battle to mobilise public support for it – is the main reason for my enduring scepticism. My chief beef about the scarcity of personal combat experience in the Bush Administration has little to do with hypocrisy (much less supposed ‘cowardice’); the real worry is that apart from Colin Powell and Richard Armitage, few of the top Bushies have direct experience of what happens to a nice theoretical plan once battle is joined.

Consequently, few seem terribly interested in addressing the many practical complexities that might turn out to lie behind the glib aim of ‘regime change’. Like every malleable motherhood statement uttered, this linguistic cure-all is a means of avoiding, rather than pro-actively grappling with, the operational realities to which it will give rise.

Jim’s piece illustrates well the skewing effect on this debate of this unwillingness – the unwillingness to think in advance about every conceivable awkward turn of events. As have too many others thus far, he wastes much intellectual energy and space telling us wussy HR activist appeasers dated monster tales about Saddam, apparently expecting us to coo and sigh and then accept without question his macho claims about the inevitable quick success of an invasion.

Yet it’s on this ground, not the universally-agreed hatefulness of Saddam, that media debate now needs to focus. Obviously I don’t know any more than Jim how an invasion will actually pan out, but – in the spirit ofScott Burchill’s ‘Counterspin: Pro-War Mythology’ (New year resolutions, 13Jan) I suggest that tackling questions of the following kind will better serve the pro-invasion lobby’s HR credibility than yet more waxing unlyrical on the Butcher of Baghdad:

1. Roughly how many total casualties – enemy and friendly, military (regular, conscript, militia) and civilian – could an invasion to remove Saddam in the name of Human Rights be reasonably allowed to ‘cost’ before the HR ‘net balance sheet’ moves into negative territory? If this is an unreasonable mode of assessment, define a ‘successful’ invasion outcome.

2. In describing the invasion’s primary aim as ‘regime change’, what exactly is meant by Saddam’s ‘regime’, and how will the invading forces delineate it? No totalitarian tyrant rules alone; the Iraqi political, social and military system is a network of mini-Saddams, each with commensurate degrees of HR blood on their hands. How will frontline invading forces simultaneously optimise the opportunities for a majority of Iraqi forces to surrender quickly, while applying maximum combat power to those Iraqis, at all command levels, who decide that their historical complicity in the ‘regime that must be changed’ affords them no option but to fight to the death? What worst case percentage of the Iraq population might regard themselves as irredeemably complicit in this way?

3. Much of the Iraqi civilian population, including women and children, has now been armed and primed for defensive jihad. Will the ROE of the invading forces make any formal distinction between an Iraqi soldier filling a military defensive role and an armed Iraqi civilian who considers herself to be defending her home and her children from a rapacious foreign invader, or will any such distinction be a matter of individual tactical judgement?

4. What will the ROE be? On what legal basis will this ROE rest? In the case of a non-UN authorised invasion, can the invasion authority indemnify all invading combatants from any subsequent HR-based legal action arising from errors of operational judgement?

5. Will the invading force categorically rule out any use of its own weapons of mass destruction, regardless of how the invasion unfolds?

6. Which members – at what level – of ‘Saddam’s regime’ suspected of HR abuses will be investigated (and charged, tried and sentenced, etc), and by whom, and how, and when, and within what legal framework? Which members of it will be granted indemnity, and by whom, and within what legal framework?

7. Is there any time or outcome-based limitation on the presence of the invading/occupying force in a post-Saddam Iraq? Against what HR criteria will eventual military withdrawal be assessed?

8. Are we now absolutely sure we can only change Saddam’s regime/HR behaviour with a full-scale military invasion?

If, as it seems, our country is going to participate in a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq in at least the partial – if perhaps nominal – name of ‘Human Rights’, then the very least those soppy HR activists among us who remain sceptical can demand is that the pro-invasion lobby try to answer these and many other similar Human Rights queries with something a little more sophisticated than ‘But Saddam is evil!’

Dear Sir

 

by Jack Robertson

14 December 2002

Jack Robertson

BALMAIN NSW 2041

The Honourable John Howard, MP

Dear Mr Howard,

I write to you as a former Army officer and Aide-de-Camp to Governor-General Bill Hayden, and also as the brother of a current serving member of the Australian SAS, to express my growing unease at international Human Rights organization accusations made against our serving personnel, in particular the ugly suggestions that your government’s ‘Border Protection’ policies of recent times may have placed them in difficult non-military situations which resulted in Human Rights violations on their parts.

Prime Minister, I am of course only making a shrewd guess, but I am fairly sure that my brother was a member of the SAS party your government ordered to board the Tampa in late 2001, and I certainly know that he was also among the first contingent of Australian troops who later fought so courageously to help liberate Afghanistan.

I of course have not spoken to him in detail about his unit’s activities in these two markedly different ‘operational’ environments, nor he to me – as is only right and proper from a unit and national security point of view.

I am, however, growing anxious at the apparent fact that your government, and in particular former Minister for Defence Peter Reith and current incumbent Robert Hill, seems at best ambivalent, and at worst wilfully dismissive, towards what I regard as an increasingly urgent need for it take a pro-active interest in protecting the reputation, morale and perhaps even exposure to future prosecution, of our armed services. This is especially so given the real possibility that your government may soon be asking those men and women to embark on dangerous military service in Iraq next year.

Prime Minister, I refer you in particular to the recent study of Australia by the internationally-respected organization ‘Human Rights Watch’, an independent Human Rights NGO whose reports the United States has often referred to in the past – for example, when seeking moral justification for military action in such countries as Afghanistan and Iraq.

The following frightening quote is taken from the Press Release advising of this Report’s release, on 10 December 2002, under the heading: “By Invitation Only: Australian Asylum Policy”:

“Human Rights Watch’s evidence shows that the Australian Defence Forces violated the rights of asylum seekers on board boats intercepted in October 2001. They detained the single men under inhumane conditions, beat several of them with batons and used other unnecessary force against vulnerable refugee families. These findings contradict the report of the Australian Senate Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident [issued on October 23, 2002] that praised the humanitarian conduct of the naval operations. Unlike the Senate Committee, which could not collect refugee testimony, Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of refugees present during the naval operations.”

Prime Minister, as I said, my brother has naturally never discussed in any detail what exactly your government’s policy and orders required him (and/or his colleagues) to do on the Tampa, as is only proper for matters of ‘national security’. However, it unsettles me deeply that such an influential organization feels it is justified in making such ugly and unambiguous public accusations, and yet your government apparently feels no need to respond publicly to them, in order to defend our soldiers’ honour.

I refer you also to your government’s repeated ‘ducking and weaving’ on similar related matters, like the ‘children overboard’ affair (especially your personal refusal to pressure Mr Reith to appear before Senate committees); the government’s failure (in my view) to adequately defend our senior RAN and Defence Department civilians there; and your government’s continued silence over the growing calls – from such people as former diplomat Tony Kevin – for full disclosure of your government’s and our navy’s knowledge, if any, of events leading up to the tragic sinking of SIEV-X.

Prime Minister, my family are strong supporters of Australia’s firm stance against international terrorism. I have admired your national leadership in the immediate aftermath of both the S11 attacks and the Bali bombings. Furthermore, it may well be that these HRW Report accusations, and others from such people as Mr Kevin, are ill-judged and unfounded. However, as an ordinary Australian with a family member who has been thrust by you onto the ‘front line’ of both this country’s approach to asylum seekers and the war on terror, I feel justified in asking that you personally, your Ministers, and your government extend the full and proper public support in these matters that my, and other ADF families, surely deserve.

To that end, I now respectfully request you to a) publicly respond on behalf of my brother and his ADF colleagues to the HR abuse accusations in the HRW Report, and do your best to ensure that the mainstream press gives that response the fullest coverage; b) publicly state for the record – ‘before the fact’, so to speak – that responsibility for any such accusations against any member of our ADF that are subsequently proven correct lies ultimately not with them, but with you, your Ministers and your government for placing them in such difficult, non-military situations in the first place; and c) re-affirm that all past, present and future activities relating to ‘border protection’, on the part of our soldiers, sailors and airman, along with our AFP and ASIO, have been, are, and will continue to be, carried out with your government’s full authorisation, support, supervision and acknowledgment.

Prime Minister, thank you.

Jack Robertson

Via email, hard copy to Electoral Office (Bennelong), and hand-delivery to Kirribilli House Information copies: all Federal MPs and Senators (via PH email); Canberra Press Gallery

PS: I tried to deliver my PM’s letter to the Security Office at Kiribilli on Sunday arv, but they won’t accept anything there at all. Sigh. I’m getting sick of humiliating myself like this!

This article was first published in ‘Christmas letter to our leader’ at webdiary20Dec2002.

Webdiary’s prodigal son has returned to Webdiary as ‘Meeja Watch’ columnist. Jack Robertson begins his second tour of duty with the announcement of the winner of MW’s ‘Most memorable person of the year’ award.

Most memorable person of 2002

 

by Jack Robertson

“Yester-year upon the screen,

I saw a man who’s never been,

He’ll never be again next year,

I wish to God he wasn’t here.”

The Webdiary Meeja Watch ‘Most Memorable Person of the Year’ for 2002 is the ‘Ordinary Australian’. Particularly impressive was his natural ability to hold two deeply contradictory positions on any given issue, and strictly according to opportunistic political imperative. Highlights in 2002 which contributed to the Ordinary Australian’s overwhelming win (a victory naturally ratified via a national-wide opinion poll), included:

1. Victims of Taliban Oppression. His capacity to cheer loudly while our brave soldiers liberated the victims of extreme political and economic oppression in Afghanistan – and simultaneously cheer loudly while our brave politicians locked up the escapees of that same extreme political and economic oppression here at home.

2. A helping hand. His extraordinary ability to get stuck in and lend the less fortunate a voluntary helping hand in times of bushfire, drought, terrorist atrocity and national emergency – and his resolute unwillingness to allow desperate men, women and children huddling in small, leaky boats even to alight on our mainland shores.

3. A Love of Australian History. His capacity to bask proudly in the warm glow of historical triumphs in which he played no personal part – Gallipoli, Tobruk, Kokoda, Long Tan – and his refusal even to reflect properly upon historical failures in which he played no personal part – White Australia, the 1975 East Timor invasion, the Stolen Generations.

4. Honesty, responsibility, mutual obligation. His tough but fair insistence that a man should work for his dole, follow the rules, take personal responsibility for his situation, pull his weight and not expect a free ride – and his tough but fair acceptance that staggering share bonus options, multi-million-dollar executive payouts from collapsing companies, inflated salaries and outright corporate fraud are ‘natural’ elements of our competitive economic system and must be left for the ‘market’ to eradicate in its own good time, if ever.

5. Sound global citizenship. His shrewd ‘Everyman’ rejection of flawed, corrupt and elitist international organizations, covenants and laws on refugees, the environment, arms control and human rights – and his shrewd ‘Everyman’ championing of fine, idealistic yet commonsensical international organizations, covenants and laws on economics, trade, Robert Mugabe, Iraq and the extradition of terrorist suspects.

6. Religion, the State, and the Separation of Powers. His avowed opposition to Islamic fundamentalist encroachments into the mechanisms of overseas governments, and to political interference with their judiciary by foreign dictators – and his firm support for religious ‘conscience’ votes in Australian Parliaments, a cleric as our Head of State, and increasing political undermining of the Australian Courts.

7. Our fine soldiers. His respect and support for our soldiers’ courage, grit and professionalism – and his bored indifference to our turning of them into political pawns, and their subsequent exposure, undefended by their civilian masters, to darkening Senate committee and human rights organisation accusations.

8. Elitism. His grounded, egalitarian contempt for contemporary academic, literary, intellectual, artistic, media and political ‘progressive elites’ – and his pride in claiming Manning Clark, Patrick White, Doc Evatt, Sid Nolan, Keith Murdoch and Gough Whitlam as Great Australians of yesterday.

9. Mateship. His deep love of the principle of Australian mateship – and his growing hatred of anyone who lives within five miles of the CBD.

10. Poor fellow, my country. Above all things, his deep, instinctive, and unfailing sense of what exactly this slippery thing called ‘Ordinary Australian-ness’ actually is: ‘Me’ but not ‘you’. ‘Us’ but not ‘them’. Yesterday’s reffo – but not today’s. The Last Anzac – but not Tom Uren. Peter Allen – but not Bob Brown. John Howard the PM – but not John Howard the actor. Noel Pearson – but not Eddie Mabo. Working class kids like Bill Hayden and Mark Latham who support mandatory detention – but not working class kids like Bill Kelty and Neville Wran, who don’t. Middle class kids like Piers Akerman and Miranda Devine who think Reconciliation is just another soppy left soapbox – but not middle class kids like David Marr and Robert Manne, who don’t. Toffs like Alexander Downer who scoff at the UN as unrepresentative – but not toffs like Malcolm Fraser, who don’t.

And so the lying, anonymous, manipulative poll results just keep rolling in, and the Parliamentary division bell rings and rings, and goes on splitting the ‘elites’ and the ‘non-elites’ apart, whatever the hell ‘elite’ even means, anymore.

And the only voter in the country for whom that bell is really tolling is the only one who never even existed at all: this curiously-contrary ‘Ordinary Australian’, AKA a condescending and cynical political fiction, AKA The Man Who Wasn’t There Today, and doubtless won’t be again, tomorrow.

The Most Memorable, Forgettable, Miserable Un-Person of the Shithouse Year of 2002.

Recently Ms Margo Kingston, the best journalist in this country, kindly allowed me some space on her Canberra Inside Out website, where I made some observations about the media. I realised, with deepening shame as I watched the debate unfold, that I was guilty of the very thing of which I’d accused the Press – hypocritically criticising others without offering any constructive, practical suggestions.

So what follows are my fifty two ideas to help foster a more robust Australian News Media. Some of them are tongue-in-cheek, some are manifestly naive and impractical, some are probably deeply baffling, some are possibly offensively patronising. Many, however, are deadly serious. And absolutely all of them are offered in a spirit of genuine high regard for what the Free Press means to a Democracy.

I am not a journalist. I have only a vague theoretical understanding of the pressures, practical realities and professional conflicts you face on a daily basis. I don’t envy any of you one bit.

We blamed you for hounding Diana to death even as we lined up to buy the Commemorative Car Crash snapshots in the next days tabloids. We casually demand that you present us with soap-opera simple explanations of even the most complex stories in thirty seconds of satellite time, or a thousand-odd words. Most of us would rather watch Friends than you. We generally underpay you, invariably overwork you, and still dismiss you as lazy, cynical, arrogant and invasive, anyway. Yet we all know that without you we’d be stuffed.

Right now, News Reportage is at something of a cross-roads. Your potential to do your jobs – to uncover the truth on our behalf – is under threat. From the Free (sic) Market, from reality TV programs, from the convergence of news and info-tainment, from public cynicism, and from questioning of even the notion of truth itself. As Ms Kingston has stated, it’s time for a massive, pro-active and strategically aggressive shift of the Meeja Paradigm. I invite all journalists to share these ideas (however nutty), to argue like buggery about them over a beer; praps have a chuckle at my naivety and then re-open the Poison Kitchen for business.

1. Cease all reference to ‘Journalists’ and ‘Journalism’. Start calling yourselves ‘Reporters’ again. Anyone can call themselves a ‘Journalist’ these days, apparently. Even Sam Newman. And ‘Reportage’ is a trade, not a profession. Prostitution and politics are professions.

2. Put a sign on your word processor that says something along these lines: I am the proxy eyes, ears, nose, and touch of ‘The People’ who (being busy) can’t go out and discover what’s going on for themselves.

3. Remind yourself daily, however, that you are NOT the ‘People’s Voice.’ We have other proxies for that job. If they’re doing it badly, we vote them out.

4. Identify a Reporter colleague who you dislike, and who dislikes you. Then, prior to investigating or reporting on any contentious public issue, ask them for a pithy summary of what they assess as your personal biases on that issue.

5. Pick a specific, non-Meeja person in your personal life whom you respect enormously. Then Report all facts to us as you would (in private) to them.

6. Do not spend more than a few hours a week reading/watching/listening to the Reports of other Reporters. Instead, read history, watch the world, and listen to your own in-built bullshit detector. If you haven’t got one, get one.

7. If one, two, ten, or a hundred of us tell you something, then it means no more (or less) than that one, two, ten or a hundred of us have told you something. What matters is less what people say, and more what people DO.

8. There is no such thing as ‘after hours’ or ‘off duty’ for a Reporter. See 44.

9. Interview questions should be interrogative, not speculative, ending unambiguously with a question mark. Mary Kostakidas is the benchmark, here. Never put words in people’s mouths. Ask a question, and then shut up and listen. An interview is NOT a conversation.

10. Thus questions should be presented in one (perhaps two) sentences only. Long pre-ambles are distracting, wasteful, and suggestive of the dreaded ‘Meeja hidden agenda’.

11. Don’t ‘fill in’ long silences that greet a question. An awkward silence says a lot.

12. All interviewees should be referred to by title and surname. This includes sports people, ‘good blokes’ (especially the ‘Geez-mate-just-call-me-Bob’ type – some of the biggest pricks in Public Life hide behind a matey Australian egalitarian exterior), and even fellow Reporters (otherwise ‘The Meeja’ starts to look like a ‘chummy’ private club to us).

13. In fact, can you cut down on the interviews of fellow Reporters a bit? If there’s no-one else around to interview, don’t do an interview. The more pointless interviews you do, the more pointless all interviews become.

14. Tone, speed and selection of language should be formal and polite. Don’t equate aggressive style with aggressive Reporting. Bad manners simply allow subjects to become indignant, and avoid your questions. Rightly so. It’s what WE would do, too.

15. Never use the Passive Voice. Lead-ins like: ‘It has been said…’, and ‘It could be interpreted as…’, ‘As I’ve been led to understand’ damage a Reporter’s credibility, and should be left strictly to blatherers sniffing around the parish pump for a bit of goss.

16. Don’t play insider games with information. Nothing patronises us more than a Reporter and a public figure playing the wink-and-nod game, yet refusing to enlighten us fully. It’s like being sent to bed while the grown-ups talk late into the night. The ‘my Throat is Deeper than yours’ thing cuts us out of the loop, belittling us.

17. And just by the way – I think it’s time Bob Woodward owned up that this bloody Deep Throat bastard never even existed. The notion of the all-knowing ‘shadowy inside informer’ has caught on, hurting your Trade immensely. It’s kids stuff, best left to Mulder and Scully.

18. If we DO grow ignorant, simplistic, cynical or apathetic about politics, tell yourselves that it is YOUR fault, NOT that of the politicians. Most politicians don’t make these assumptions about us. If they did, they’d have become politics pundits, not Reps.

19. You CANNOT be friends with, married to, lovers of, or regular socialisers among those public figures about whom you Report. It’s a matter not merely of being disinterested, but also being seen (by us) to be so. So if you’re having a fling with a PM (!!!), you can’t report on Canberra politics. I know this is a toughie, but it just has to be non-negotiable.

20. De-personalise TV/Radio Reporter’s Reports. Instead of crossing live to ‘Joe Bloggs in East Timor’, cross live to ‘Our Reporter in East Timor’ and then make NO reference to the Reporter’s name during the interview. (Tricky, but think about the subtle shift in our attention this would induce.)

21. De-personalise Press Reporters’ Reports. No Reporter with less than five years’ experience (say) should get a by-line, and none with less than ten a photo above their by-line. Make these something to earn. I think you overstate the weight that recognised by-lines carry with the public, anyway. To those outside The Game, its more likely to be anonymity which enhances credibility. It subtly elevates a Reporter above all that celebrity crap and keeps the story centre-stage. (We think: hey, this dude is not trying to big-note themselves at all, so this MUST be true). ‘Celebrity Reporter’ is an oxymoron (usually a moron, too.) Your colleagues will know – or soon find out – who broke the hot exclusive.

22. De-personalise the language of Reporting. Editors – ban your Reporters from using the first person personal pronoun (unless directly quoting), along with any self-referential phrases, eg. Say: ‘The Minister said…’, NOT: ‘I asked the Minister, who told me…’ But no passive voice. Not easy, but that’s why not just anyone can be a good Reporter. It’s a trade, and trades are supposed to be hard to master. (Were all media-savvy now; we can all stand in front of a camera and babble convincingly. Slickness is meaningless, now.)

23. Eradicate value-added verbs from your Reporting vocabulary. As far as a Reporter should be concerned, people don’t ‘hint at’, ‘canvas’, ‘rant’, ‘attack’, ‘whine about’, ‘signal’, ‘flag’, ‘back-pedal’, ‘dismiss’ or ‘sneer at’ – they just SAY things.

24. Similarly, lose interpretive abstract nouns. We will form our own opinions of the ‘feeling’, the ‘general impression’, the ‘speculation’, the ‘mood’, the ‘likelihood’, the ‘motivation’ and the ‘prevailing current’. We can only do so if you have told us WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHO, HOW, and (perhaps) WHY. And we only want to know how you ‘feel’ if it’s truly profound. No offence intended, but we can get tossed-off empathy bullshit from Oprah.

25. Get a bit aggro about protecting your News Reporting turf. Establish a clearer delineation between columnists and Reporters. Columnists are essentially professional shit-stirrers (like those kids who start the class-room stoush and then sit back to watch the fun.) News Reporters should be the quiet nerd in the back row who just watches. And takes notes.

26. Likewise, reclaim concise, precise English as YOUR PROPERTY. When English is hijacked by agenda-setters, only Reporters lose. We will try to get away with any slippery wording we can (collateral damage, rationalised jobs, spin). You should all be pedantic old farts about unambiguity in words, because no-one else is going to stop them from becoming completely malleable (or, put another way – completely meaningless.) If this happens, you’ll be the very first ones out of a job.

27. So to start with, look up ‘great’, ‘tragedy’, ‘perfect’, ‘genius’, ‘ironic’, ‘fantastic’, ‘superlative’ and ‘hopefully’ in the dictionary. And if this outrageously patronising suggestion pisses you off, then…good. Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah.

28. Stick a Little Aussie Battler/Fair Go/The People’s jar on the News Room fridge. One dollar has to go in per (non-quote) usage by a Reporter. Ironic or not.

29. Academic Communications Theory not-with-standing, there IS such a thing as truth, and it’s a Reporter’s job to find it/help define it. Let our philosophers subvert the dominant paradigm. Jesus, if there’s no truth, that leaves us all free to go out and rape, pillage and plunder to our hearts content. Ask a Bosnian if there’s no truth, and they’ll deck you.

30. To Report a nasty view is not to advertise or validate it. TRUST US. We don’t need to be protected from hateful ideas. We’re not as easy to manipulate as you seem to fear, and paradoxically, propaganda only becomes possible precisely WHEN Reporters get involved in a subjective dialogue with a story. Just Report the nasty view, and we will respond with lots of nice ones. Report these too, and said nasty view will be mightily smote a-sunder by the Power of Public Human Righteousness. Then we can all be morally smug together.

31. And remember that the Reporter who basks in the glory of any morally good outcome of their Reporting is inviting us to blame them for the morally bad outcomes of their Reporting. And we will. Far safer to keep out of the ‘credit’ game altogether.)

32. Editors and subs – don’t waste time and space with pointless (ie superficial) corrections in an effort to convince us of your commitment to accuracy. Simply getting the essential facts right will do this far more effectively.

33. For edited television interviews – place a clock in shot next to the interviewee, so that we can SEE how the editing has been applied. We know that editing is a pragmatic necessity, but also that it can be exploited to twist an interview. If you are transparent about the process it can only ease our suspicions about hidden ‘Meeja Agendas’.

34. Similarly, banish all cut-away shots to TV interviewers filmed separately after the interview. This is subtly unfair – Reporters invariably appear calm, cool, collected and commanding as they ask questions and nod seriously at answers. We rarely see Reporters lost for words, floundering, dozing off, picking noses, blushing, stammering, appearing thick, etc – and so we’re starting to suspect that the edit is designed solely to make the Reporter look superior. Surely even Kerry has a shocker now and then?

35. Inform us (somehow) of the total footage shot/time spent/warning given etc for a story. It takes craftsmanship to set up and conduct a two hour interview, then whittle it down to a thousand words, all in one day. How about a few more docos on how you guys work?

36. Banish the autocue. Newsreaders will appear human and real again, and thus so might the news that they are reading (from a good old sheet of A4 in their hands.)

37. Do more live interviews. An edited interview is more Show Biz than Reportage.

38. Overall, remember that we (think we) know the tricks of your trade, now. We de-construct your craft instinctively, reluctant to take you at face value even when we should. So the more you can render the way you present news manifestly transparent, the better.

39. Don’t dissipate your idealistic energy moaning about Mr Packer and Mr Murdoch in the pub. And stop expecting governments to rectify the shortcomings – if that’s what you think they are – of narrow Meeja ownership. If you don’t like what those blokes are doing, get together and do something about it. They’re businessmen, after all, not social workers.

40. Newspapers – run a weekly column on the Opinion Page in which a subscriber gets to assess your Reportage of the major running story of the preceding week.

41. TV – run a weekly ‘Press Meets Public’ show – three Joe Publics grill a nominated Reporter about ‘the Meeja’, using clips, cuttings and the major story of the week. Cheap, easy, entertaining, educational – like a ‘People’s Media Watch’. Reporters could fight their corner, too; point out some harsh home truths about our own moronic media consumption habits.

42. Ethics. Your Trade Association should establish an internet site on which ten senior Australian Reporters lodge unambiguous personal opinions on specific ethical cases as they arise. (Call it the ‘Council of Grand Ethical Poobahs’, or something.) Reporters could then check the site during high-profile debates (such as the Current Affair hostage one), and draw guidance (or not) from the judgements presented. These should only be as brief as ‘I think that such-and-such Trade behaviour from such-and-such Reporter was ethically unacceptable/acceptable’. Not a jot more no deconstruction, no lengthy dissection, no dissembling. Leave the empathy stuff for pub discussions. The judgements would carry ABSOLUTELY NO weight beyond simple peer group pressure. Passwords would be issued with Association membership, and the site would NOT be for public consumption. Finally, ‘Ethical Poobah-hood’ wouldn’t be optional, but obligatory. Every Reporter with over twenty years’ experience (say) would be required to eventually serve a one year ‘Ethical Tour of Duty’ on the ‘Poobah Council’ site. It would be an obligation of Association membership. Look, we all know that Reporters are individualistic and competitive, but ultimately it comes down to which is more important to you all: your individuality or your Trade’s long-term, collective credibility. And we don’t make distinctions between Reporters – we blame ALL of you for any INDIVIDUAL ethical cock-up. (Grossly unfair, but true.) Reporters are the only people who can influence other Reporters’ ethics. Not only is external regulation undesirable, it can simply never work. It’s up to you, and you know it. An internet site will remind a young Reporter, working out in the sticks for a prick of a proprietor and faced with an awful ethical dilemma, who the good guys are. They’ll be able to draw strength from the fact that the O’Briens, the Oakes, the Grattans and McKews to whom they are aspiring are on their side.

43. Each new Reporter should be partnered with another (more senior) Reporter at his/her outlet. Editorial bollockings resulting from serious errors made by either of the pair would be delivered to both Reporters. (This might already happen. If it does, TELL US.)

44. There can be no such thing as ‘off-the-record’ now. The person who will only speak ‘off-the-record’ is subtly snaring you in a self-censorship web, and the whole notion is now hopelessly blurred. The only option left is to make everything ‘on-the-record’. If the fair dinkum News Reporters stuck together on this, it could work.

45. Likewise, the ‘unattributed source’ is now dead. ‘A senior figure inside the government…’ is now no more plausible than ‘John, 29, a friend of mine…’

46. Remember that in the average Australian’s vocabulary, ‘taking a leak’ means producing a trickle of luke-warm wee. (And even if we do make a BIG SPLASH!, it usually dries up quickly.) If you run leaked documents, you become some agenda-setter’s puppet. And puppets invariably find there’s a string attached to their writing arm, sooner or later.

47. A tenured Reporter should be banned from writing a book about a story/subject/region he/she has covered, for at least two years. The prospect of a book encourages Reporters to hoard real-time information they should be passing on to us.

48. The commodification of ‘news’ is the single greatest threat to the future of serious News Reportage. Thus: ALL COPYRIGHTING AND ON-SELLING OF NEWS MATERIAL AND PRODUCT MUST BE ERADICATED IMMEDIATELY. Obviously impossible, but let me put it this way – if my legs get bitten off by a crocodile tomorrow and some Yank tourist happens to video it, and Channel Nine then buys his footage and syndicates it around the world, I GUARANTEE I will stump all the way to the UN High Court in order to get my share of the proceeds. (And where do you think public sympathy will lie – with Stumpy the Little Aussie Battler or the billionaire Mr P and his TV journalists?) It’s abundantly clear already – the public is not going to allow commercial News Services to make money from ‘their’ experiences (‘news’) for much longer, unless you stop buying and selling ‘news’ (somehow!?) yourselves. Better make a strategic decision on this soon, otherwise the whole system is bound to grind to a halt in court. We all know Harry M. Miller’s mobile number now, after all.

49. To all Camera Crews, go on strike until your producers agree to ban Dramatic Re-constructions. These are LYING VISUAL FICTIONS which merely dilute the power of genuine footage. Shit-a-brick, it’s in your interests to protect what’s left of the sanctity of the visual image, isn’t it? Why risk a bullet up the arse in Bosnia obtaining REAL footage if we might dismiss it as staged anyway? And computer-generated re-creations are now scarily good, too. You dudes and dudettes are doing yourselves out of a bloody job!

50. If there’s a court order to blank out someone’s face, then do it PROPERLY. It makes us LIVID if we can ID someone who we know we’re not supposed to ID. (We all put ourselves in the poor bugger’s shoes.) Don’t alienate us for trivial reasons.

51. Finally, I will donate all my body parts to the editor who leads with the following story, one fine, slow news day: ‘NEWS SHOCK!!! FUCK-ALL HAPPENED TODAY!!!’

Above all else, get back some genuine confidence, some swagger, some real belief in the power and centrality of your Trade. Some vocational arrogance – not the dismissive ‘go-to-buggery-then-you-apathetic-swine’ type which seems to be slowly poisoning your relationship with us. Don’t be scared to call US bloody apathetic morons, either, because that’s what we are becoming.

No-one is talking to us honestly and bluntly not the pollies, the pollsters, the Free (sic) Marketeers, not the celebrities or the spin doctors or the academics. Theyre all too chickenshit to tell us a few harsh home truths about ourselves. So it looks like it’s going to have to be you guys. (Lets face it, it’s not as if you’ve got a lot of popularity to lose.)

But everyone else is sucking relentlessly up to Public Opinion, and we are sitting out here on our freckles, getting fatter, dumber, smugger, more ignorant and more complacent. We are being patronised into oblivion. WAKE US UP!!!!!

Now is the time to re-define where and how the News Reporter is going to fit in, in an Informationally-Overloaded and Technologically-saturated Age. My own personal opinion is that – in this bizarre info-tainment environment of flies-on-walls and staged ‘real-life’ set-ups – a weird sort of ‘Inverse Communications Theory’ will soon apply. Maybe a bad poet would summarise it like this:

* The slicker the surface, the shallower the waters,

* Today’s Info Gush is a meaningless dribble,

* They who look dumb are the smartest Reporters,

* The future belongs to James Dibble.

These are my ideas, anyway. You might agree, disagree, be utterly bemused or think Im a complete tosser. All I ask is that you don’t dismiss me as arrogant. I’m not being arrogant, it just sounds that way. Nobody makes unambiguous statements any more. Everyone modifies and softens and qualifies what they say in public these days, because everyone is scared shitless about being lit up by the media like a pinball machine – ridiculed, torn apart, taken down. So reasonable people all say Some people would argue that, and One approach is that, and Its a difficult issue, but perhaps. It makes public debate POINTLESS. Meanwhile, the world’s nasty types the greedy, the vicious, the self-serving, the nutters go on their merry way, as murderously unambiguous as ever.

And while we’ve all comfortably embraced ironic detachment, there never has been and never will be anything remotely ironic or detached about a bullet up the clacker, or an arm hacked off by a machete.

So this is where I stand. Just a few thoughts. Penned – as is probably obvious to those in the Trade – in precious, blissful ignorance of the harsher Reportage Trade realities. But then, the Reporter Trade realities are only as harsh as you Reporters allow them to become, aren’t they? Nothing – after all – has to be a fait accompli. You all have Free Will.

Thank you again for your time. I urge you all to think about Greg Shackletons last report from Balibo at least once every day of your increasingly-complex working lives. My heart swells with pride at being a Human Being every time I watch it. As a Reporter, where do you stand in relation to it?

This article was first published in ‘Journalism: The debate continues’, webdiary17Nov2000

I hope the point I was trying to make – the hypocrisy of journalists – was clear. I agree I have no right (nor wish) to know about such private matters as salaries and personal relationships, although a quick flip through the tabloids these days reveals that journalists are apparently the one group of employees in society, private or public, who still have a right to keep that sort of information quiet. Most curious. (MARGO: Stan and Tracey killed that off.)

However, the major point you implicitly raise concerns the delineation between the public and the non-public sphere. You have illuminated a fundamental self-delusion lingering among modern journalists, a professional blind-spot which is mostly responsible for the public’s growing disillusionment with your profession. And it is growing. The latest poll I saw placed journalists beneath even politicians on the credibility scale. If alarm bells aren’t going off, then they should be. (MARGO: My self-delusion must be chronic – my memory of that poll was that even we rated above pollies!)

Any delineation between the nominally public and non-public spheres is now a hair-splitting irrelevancy. Perhaps in strictly philosophical terms, you may have a point. Perhaps in a society in which the Public Polity still dominated most peoples lives, it would be valid to cite Laurie Oakes’ obligation to balance his commitment to the public with his duty to his commercial proprietor. (Incidentally, I was having a cheap crack at neither Mr Oakes nor Mr Packer. Mr Oakes’ professionalism speaks for itself, and Mr Packer is a tough businessman who has at least never pretended to be anything else.)

But herein lies the very real problem that journalists cannot ignore any longer. If, as you claim, you are there on behalf of the People, then your major target for scrutiny MUST now be the private (read commercial) sphere, rather than the public one, because it is the former which affects the lives of The People far more than the latter. Sorry, but this is the natural consequence of the relentless surrender of control over our lives to the Private Sector. (MARGO: Spot on. I sometimes feel I’m reporting the second rate in Canberra these days – that the talent and the ideas have moved on.)

For all the noise over Reith’s phone card, his stupidity/dishonesty only really matters indirectly to the average person. To give you an example: My part-time job got rationalised two weeks ago; I can assure you all that neither Mr Howard nor Mr Beasley had much to do with it happening, nor could they have stopped it (even if they’d wanted to).

Whether you like or not, it is now the Free (sic) Market which most requires scrutiny by the Free Press, not politicians, public servants or Pauline Hansons. Yet while you all zone in on relatively trivial matters like Presidential penises and Fools phone cards, McNikeSoft is cantering all the way to a New Improved World Order. Private issues? Public issues? Is Bill Gates a good bloke? Is Rupert a bastard? Who the hell cares?

What matters is that large Corporations are increasingly powerful, increasingly unaccountable, and most scary – increasingly uncontrollable (because they are hostage only to Market Forces ie nobody really runs them at all.). They are becoming all-consuming, and their activities need to be scrutinised relentlessly by the Press most of all. To date, you’re not doing it.

This is the fundamental problem that a Laurie Oakes, a Paul Kelly and even a Margo Kingston must soon grapple with. (Ms Kingston’s journo-friendly editor has just been replaced with a Bottom Line-friendly one.) The buggers who truly need to be kept honest these days are not the elected officials nor the Public Servants (though them, too), but whichever individuals still retain a modicum of influence within the Free (sic) Market.

And if, as is the case for many journalists, you are in the employ of those same larger Corporations yourselves, then no matter how much any given journalist might impress his or her colleagues with their professional and ethical approach, we the public will increasingly tend to be suspicious of you, your motives, and your independence.

If we distrust you on these basic grounds fairly or unfairly – then it just won’t matter how professional your colleagues know you to be. The fact is, Ms Kingston, it doesn’t matter if you regard Mr Oakes as one of the most ethical journalists around. What matters is what WE think of Mr Oakes, and while I’m sure any reasonable Australian would share your high regard for him, at the back of everyone’s mind is the problematic matter of for whom he works.

Once again, I’m not simply having a cheap crack at Mr Packer. I’m simply pointing out that the dominant paradigm these days is no longer the Public Sphere but the Private/Corporate one, and thus anyone who operates from within it is bound to have their credibility, fairly or not, queried. It’s not enough to be professional and independent. You have to be seen to be professional and independent, too.

I realise that this is the age old paradox that all journos have grappled with. But now, with the Public Sphere growing increasingly irrelevant, it is reaching a critical pitch. Any journalist who fails to see that pretty soon they will have to make some fairly profound professional choices is kidding themselves. Most younger journalists will be familiar with Authorial Deconstruction. I put it to you all that the time has arrived for you to turn your methodological tools upon yourselves. If you truly aspire to being a People’s Reporter, can you really get away with working for any major Corporation with significant interests beyond journalism, any longer?

You’re asking the Public to keep faith with you no matter how many jobs get rationalised or how many Rugby League clubs get axed. Maybe you can keep such regrettable yet inevitable Private consequences of a rampant Free (sic) Market compartmentalised safely away from your own daily Public toil on our behalf. The South Sydney Fan Clubs contempt for News Limited journalists these days (even the good ones) suggests that The People cannot, and/or will not. It’s not Paul Kelly’s fault that Mr Murdoch made a bit of a hash of things there, but ultimately, Paul Kelly’s effectiveness as a People’s Journalist has been damaged, hasn’t it? Certainly among The People who are Rabbitohs fans, anyway. I know that for a fact, because I’m one myself.

So why exactly should I continue to overlook who he chooses to work for? No-one else in our society gets the luxury of that professional benefit-of-the-doubt, after all.

MARGO: Dear Jack. You’re right, right, right. My brother, who’s an anarchist turned taxi driver, used to berate me every Christmas for working within the establishment and not outside it. (He changed his mind when David Oldfield publicly called me an anarchist – he said I must be doing something right.)

Journalists are ordinary people too, with the ordinary pressures of self-interest and feeding the family. But we also have the individual ethical and practical responsibility to uphold the standards and pursue the ideals of our “profession”. This is not just words – if we breach ethics and are caught, we are on the line individually, even when we’ve just done what the bosses told us to. In this way, principles of agency, where the employer is vicariously liable for the sins of an employee, don’t apply to us, just as they don’t with other professionals, like doctors, lawyers and accountants.

But the values of “professionalism” are also under attack by competition policy and the free market. Just another value system the pointy heads don’t value, often because they haven’t even thought about it.

To me, this tension is at the centre of journalism today. I’ve been thinking for the last two years – since the revelation of covering Pauline Hanson’s 1998 election campaign – about how we can separate in the public’s mind the journalist as individual from the corporation we work for.

One small way is through the Press Council’s complaints process. The reader complains, the Press Council, if the complaint has legs, calls the newspaper company and the complainant to a meeting. Invariably, the newspaper is represented by an executive. I’d like the journo to turn up, and speak directly with the complainant. That way, the journo gets across to the complainant and the Council members the context of the story, the compromises made for space reasons, and so on. The journalist thus becomes human, like the complainant. I did this once and at the end, the complainant felt the hearing had been fair and that we’d had a genuine conversation. We shook hands, and I reckon he believed he had power as a reader. (I won by the skin of my teeth.)

An interesting departure from trend for the major proprietors is the Australian’s media section in Thursday’s paper, which has built a solid reputation for fairness through critiquing News Limited as well as other media. I know not how the media section editor has managed it – I do know there have been tensions – but the result is enhanced credibility for the Australian, just as the South Sydney Rugby League club produced the opposite effect.

I’ve written an essay on the topic of media accountability in the context of the Hanson phenomenon, to be published this month in an annual book of Australian essays. I’ll put it on the site upon publication.

This article was first published in ‘Ink v Inc: Of hacks, bean-counters and the bottom line’, webdiary6Nov2000

Questions to you journos

 

by Jack Robertson

Dear Ms Kingston,

May I make the following observations, and issue the Canberra Press community with a challenge?

Firstly, it might be salutary for all political correspondents to keep a couple of things in mind when it comes to grandstand bagging of the political system and individual members of Parliament (whichever side they represent). Ultimately, it and they are at least slightly accountable to the public. We vote pollies in (more fool us), but we can also vote them out, too.

Contrary to what many journos seem to think, I believe that this notion is uppermost in even the most arrogant Rep’s mind ninety nine percent of the time. Now, I don’t wish to be overly facetious, but I think a dash of personal humility from the heavyweight journos in Canberra wouldn’t go astray on occasion, because I certainly can’t remember ever voting for Laurie Oakes, Jim Middleton, Michelle Grattan, Christine Wallace, or yourself, yet you all have very influential forums when it comes to public debate, too.

I hasten to add that I don’t make this point because I don’t like journos (although plenty of Australians evidently don’t). I am concerned for your own collective long-term credibility, and if you start to set yourselves up as (unelected) ‘moralisers-on-our-behalf’, ultimately we are going to get tired of you. And if you can’t hold our attention, we as a community might as well not have you there at all. Then the pollies would really be free to run amok.

Secondly, any fair-minded journo will have seen enough of the average politician’s lifestyle to at least acknowledge that politicians enter politics (at least in the beginning) for more or less the right reasons. For all the growing hoo-ha over perks and allowances, the truth is that only an idiot would become a Rep if it was money alone that got them all hot and sweaty. (You only have to look at the real cash ex-politicians go on to make on retirement or being dumped to know that politics is – relatively – not exactly a lucrative game.) Nor is there really much in the way of adulation or recognition, either. We rightly distrust (and generally dislike) our politicians in this country.

But let me turn the tables again – how much rorting and expense-fiddling goes on in the average Newsroom? For that matter, how much does a top draw political correspondent earn? What is a Laurie Oakes or a Kerry O’Brien pulling in? (Much more than a Prime Minister, I bet. What’s more, at least we know what a politician earns.) Again, I am not having a go at anyone who has worked hard to reap the commensurate rewards, I am simply pointing out – from a credibility of journalism perspective – that it becomes dangerous when journalists start to assume that they automatically represent the moral high ground on such matters.

Just why – to give you just one current example – should we take seriously any Channel Nine reporter’s sanctimonious huffing and puffing over Reith’s phone card, when we all know that Kerry Packer hasn’t paid a fair amount of tax for decades? Fine, maybe he doesn’t break the law, but then neither did Reith, strictly speaking. We’re not stupid out here, and we’ll vote him out when we get the chance. But we can’t vote Big Kezza out, can we? I think that journalists ought to take care when throwing stones. Yes – Reith absolutely deserves to be attacked, but it’s useless attacking anyone on any grounds on which you yourself may well – even indirectly – be hopelessly compromised. All it achieves is to make the public cynical about journalism.

My challenge to the Canberra Press community – if you indeed believe that the ‘System’ is rotten – is this: get your own house in order first. You are part of the ‘System’, after all. And a central one. Getting your house in order requires media transparency; tough, honest and on-going self-criticism; cutting the cosy ties that have developed (between various journos, with both sides of politics), and above all else, developing a professional disregard (perhaps almost contempt) for any of your own number who get swept up by the ‘high’ that can come from being ‘close to the action’ for a long time. While most of you would no doubt consider yourselves rather ‘detached’ and ‘cynical’ about the whole Canberra game, I put it to you that in fact the opposite is the case. I reckon you all just love it to bits. Far too much for anyone’s good…especially good journalism.

Now all this might be a bit wishy-washy, so perhaps, Ms Kingston, I can put my challenge to you all in the form of some specific questions for the Canberra Rat Pack. I hope that you – and other journos – will see the method behind what might seem to be cheap Meeja-bashing. I am in fact a huge fan of an effective free press, but the key word is effective. (Personally – contrary to most people, who probably see the press as too invasive and arrogant already – I happen to think exactly that the opposite is the case, at least when it comes to content. Too many journalists are mistaking aggressive styles for truly aggressive reporting.)

So, this is my cheeky little attempt to stir the possum a bit. I wonder if any of you have the guts to answer these on this site?

1. Please place on the public record the salaries and conditions for the following high profile journalists: Laurie Oakes, Michelle Grattan, Christine Wallace, Alan Ramsay, Kerry O’Brien, Margo Kingston. If you decline – and I could understand that – then please don’t bother to mention Reith’s phone card (or any other political rort) ever again.

Margo: I don’t know what the journos mentioned, apart from myself, get paid. I don’t think you have the ‘right’ to know what I am paid because you don’t pay my salary, whereas we, as taxpayers, pay the salaries of MPs. By the way, we are often more accountable than politicians – through defamation laws (unlike pollies with their parliamentary privilege), and through our reliance on the reputation of our only asset, our bylines. Pollies of mediocre and even seedy quality can hide behind their brandname – Labor or Liberal Party – to get elected. Let’s disclose anyway: my net pay for this month is $4,880.33. I work about 45 hours a week officially, and most of my waking life unofficially. I get 6 and a half weeks leave a year. I participate in the Fairfax employee share ownership plan, and have no other fringe benefits.

2. Please provide a full list of personal relationships that exist or have existed between Canberra journalists and members of the Canberra political fraternity. If you decline – and I could understand that – don’t bother to make reference to Bill Clinton’s (or any other politician’s) personal life again.

Margo: I have no right or wish to disclose the private lives of other journalists. I have never slept with a politician or a political staffer.

3. For Laurie Oakes – in your next Bulletin column, please give a full and frank summary of Kerry Packer’s communications strategy (particularly with regard to digital broadcasting), including the ‘inside dealing’ that has taken place over the years. If you decline – and I could understand that – don’t bother to mention any scurrilous links either the Labor or the Liberal Party has with ‘Big Business’ again.

Margo: I can’t answer this. You fail to separate the ethical responsibilities of the journalist from his duties to his owner. An ethical journalist will not allow proprietors’ interests and pressures to influence his professional behaviour. I agree this is an ideal, and is not, in many cases, the reality. That is why diversity of media ownership is vital, so competing publications can expose the newsworthy stories concerning competing proprietors. Without that diversity, a handshake between two powerful men can close down news on both of them. Laurie Oakes is one of the most rigorous and ethical journalists I know.

4. For Paul Kelly – ditto, for Rupert Murdoch and News Limited.

As above.

5. For you, Margo, and for Phillip Adams. On your next Radio National broadcast, please give a full account of how Phil made his personal fortune. If you decline – and I could understand that – please don’t bother to criticise Multi-nationals, corporate advertising, or the evils of ‘Globalism’ again.

Margo: Sorry mate, I just don’t get your point. Disclosure for politicians is about conflict of interest. In journalism, if our private financial affairs have the potential to impact on the news topic we are writing on, we have a duty to disclose. All good journalists do so. The Herald’s code of ethics requires it.

It’s all about establishing and maintaining credibility. Without it, even the Free-est Press is useless. To all Canberra Journos, I ask: what are you there for? To follow the Rat Pack and kiss fashionable arse, or keep us informed? Come on – get back a bit of personal humility, a bloody good dose of vocational aggro, and above all else, turn your bullshit detectors onto yourselves once in a while. Journalism is for grown-ups, not childish gossips and media wannabes.

Margo: We are here to uncover, inform, analyse and scrutinise. We are here, on behalf of the people, to keep our leaders accountable and to facilitate informed public debate on important issues affecting the nation and its people. We often fail. We are often compromised.

Ms Kingston, thank you for initiating this site. It is an excellent idea, and I hope that I have not abused it. I urge all journalists to remember that we need you to be good at your jobs. Now, more than ever.

Margo: I agree that journalism must be much more accountable that it is now, or face justified charges of rank hypocrisy. Self-regulation is an imperative since the last thing a free society needs is a State controlled press, but self-regulation must be strong, transparent, and fair. It isn’t now.

This article was first published in ‘Danger when journalists assume they represent the moral high ground’, webdiary4Nov2000