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