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4 July 2009
The print media and journalism have to change according to News Ltd's John Hartigan. He has set high standards. Will he also review and redress the injustice his newspapers have done either through ideological vendettas or by cowardly turning a blind eye to crucial elements in a story?
Last Wednesday, John Hartigan, chairman and chief executive of News Ltd, gave an energetic wide-ranging speech at the National Press Club on the future of newspapers and journalism . Say what you like about Rupert Murdoch's chief in Australia, you could never say "Harto" was, on the evidence of this performance, not committed to his task or that he lacked the energy to see the job through. Perhaps the critical circumstances of newspapers worldwide has fired him up? I do not know. When all is said and done, John Hartigan is just a name at the top of a news organisation whose newspapers (mainly The Australian) have provoked in me on occasions unbounded fits of rage. My two non-fiction titles (The Media of the Republic, 1997, and The Telecard Affair, 2001) resulted directly from two such fits.
In fairness, I should add that there has been a noticeable change in attitudes in The Australian and The Daily Telegraph since then. The Australian, for example, gave Pope Benedict's visit to Australia for World Youth Day a surprisingly fair coverage - in contrast to the usual bigoted and inflammatory reporting by Fairfax's Age and Sydney Morning Herald as they played up to the fantasies of their anti-Catholic constituency. Perhaps Hartigan's speech on the necessity of reviewing and changing journalistic attitudes is a continuation of a spirit that broke the rigid mindset at The Australian during those years, years he presided over. I wouldn't mind betting that Murdoch himself, keenly feeling the changing winds, blew them onto Australia. The success of his Fox News in the US has a loud message for Australian news organisations, as I have pointed out a number of times. It is undeniable that amoral Rupert Murdoch has a news nose with exquisite olfactory nerves.
Hartigan opened his speech with a fiery declaration that despite the "we'll all be rooned" mood of many news colleagues there was a brilliant future for newspapers - if only their people would strapped themselves to the mast to pass by the sirens dashing so many media vessels on the rocks of self-indulgence and self-deception, and to go on to new horizons. Harto bravely stood before his cynical audience staring down the cataclysmic events in the newspaper world. Among those events he quoted:
The LA Times, Chicago’s Tribune and both dailies in
Philadelphia are bankrupt.
The New York Times is close to bankruptcy. Losses in the first
quarter were more than 70 million dollars.
The Washington Post lost 54 million.
It could not happen to better bunch, was my first thought. It is my fervent wish that Melbourne's Age become a member of that club at the earliest opportunity.
Hartigan would know that these newspapers are prominent voices of the liberal/left, standard-bearers of the dogma of the West's dominant political class. But he did not mention it. Why? Why omit such a crucial common denominator? He went on to outline what qualities news reporting should embrace in order to thrive - and presumably escape the fate of those unreconstructable rags dying around the world.
We have never been challenged as we are now, to justify why someone
should pay for our content.
I believe people will pay for content if it is:
- Original...
- Exclusive...
- Has the authority
- and is relevant to our audiences.
Journalism that doesn’t help people live their lives is going to be a
low-value commodity.
Media companies and journalists willing to embrace these challenges will
thrive...
Fair enough. Presumably these qualities been missing from news reporting. But why? Again, evasion of a key question. What has been in reporting that has turned masses of people off? Could this one fact among many be relevant: in every federal election around half of the population - sometimes more, sometimes less - vote for the conservative parties? A pretty significant statistic, you would say. On that constant evidence alone, half Australia's population has been having the unrelenting feminist and homosexualist agendas shoved down their throats. In the end people won't eat food that makes them gag.
Half the population, though? I think at least three-thirds of Australia's population is socially conservative. These are the silent people Hartigan mentioned once. Just once. These are the people who are being oppressed by the PC agitators embedded in government departments, unelected legislative advice committees, the media and education. These are the people who have little or no public voice and little or no power to resist the ideologues. Why have they been ignored and why does Hartigan appear now to wake up to it?
Hartigan, continuing to skirt around a central issue, turned his attention to the bloggers. He obviously sees the internet with its thousands of bloggers as a real threat to newspapers, although he was at pains to say they were not. He spent some time airing his contempt and telling his audience that bloggers were crass, ignorant, illiterate, parasitic, incompetent, and in no way could satisfy the urgent task of providing original balanced news for the public. This has the smell of self-pleading and self-justification. Admittedly there are a lot of crass, ignorant people shooting their unintelligible and often abusive scribblings into cyberspace, but it is clearly wrong to dismiss all websites of political and social commentary as ignorant and worthless. That is simply the evidence of observation.
And simple observation will tell anyone who wants to think seriously about it that the reason many literate people with specialist knowledge have set up websites is that the media in general have failed in their duty to provide impartial balanced reporting. Without the political agendas. Who can doubt on the written evidence that most women in the media are pushing the radical feminist agenda? These women obviously think that the words "feminist" and "woman" are synonymous, and those women deviating from the doctrine are incomplete.
Hartigan is really setting up an enemy of straw here - perhaps for tactical reasons. Leaving aside the abusive illiterate morons who represent village malice and slander, serious commentators on internet websites do not fancy themselves replacing the mainstream media, or that newspapers are their competitors. Such fancifulness is to be found among journalists in the big media organisations. They are reacting to the deficiencies in the media: the bias, the prejudice, the misrepresentation, the distortion, the falsehoods, the ignorance, the character assassination, the persecution, the political agendas and so on. Theirs is an attempt to set the record straight, and to tell the situation as it really is. This is the critical function.
Explanation is the second function - an educative one. It is to point out and explain the ideological background and inevitable consequences of public campaigns that seem on the surface innocent and harmless. It is to place social issues in their historical and cultural context. It is to correct the unjust caricatures of people and organisations lazy prejudiced reporters fall back on. Such internet sites have a policing and correcting function, which the irresponsibility of media groups has made indispensable. I know for a fact that correctly argued cases against media abuse and irresponsibility can bring results.
On the fond thought that bloggers cannot be original, how many News Ltd journalists have looked seriously at the significance of the rise of political groups in Europe like Geert Wilders' Freedom Party (Partij Voor Vrijheid), and related it to local circumstances? How many have thought it important to actually examine the written political platform of Wilders' party, and have the competence to do so? It's likely I am the only one in the world to have done this. How many of them have been content to run the usual "far right" smear, which only turns off the people supporting Wilders types? I don't think Wilders has the answers to the problems common to all liberal democracies, but the problems will not be solved by the media stamping on the heads of people daring to mention them. In fact, the refusal to examine the reasons that many people feel oppressed merely lays the grounds for rebellion.
Hartigan ploughed on ignoring the possibility that a particular sort of content and orientation of news reporting might be a reason people are turning off newspapers. The solution is general. It's adjusting to the digital age and updating skills and professionalism that will deal with the problems. Or perhaps I'm being unfair and he did not want to brutally dissolve the fantasies of many of his audience by confronting them so abruptly with the harsh reality of reader desertion.
The future of journalism won’t depend on bloggers, comment sites, Google or
Yahoo.
It will depend on how well newspapers...
adapt to the digital age.
Absolutely central to this will be:
- the skills and integrity of the journalists;
- their passion and curiosity;
- their capacity to understand their readers;
- and their willingness to serve them.
Which brings me finally to the future of journalism being the journalism
itself....
People will pay for it if it is good enough. By good enough I mean that it
will have to be:
- well researched;
- brilliantly written
- perceptive and intelligent;
- professionally edited;
- accurate and reliable.
This is not the territory in which aggregator
sites or amateur bloggers will do well.
This is the natural terrain of the well-trained, professional, experienced,
clever journalist. Knowing a little about a lot used to be OK in
journalism. Not any more.
I think we are going to see an upsurge in recruitment of highly educated
people with specialist knowledge to fill our newsrooms...
Great journalism will:
- tell the reader something they didn’t know;
- tell them something they need to know;
- listen to the reader and answer their questions;
- inspire and entertain them;
- give them what they need to make decisions;
- and equip them to act on those decisions.
And, at the same time, great journalism will continue to
- protect the readers' interests and defend their rights;
- and hold those with power and authority to account.
This is all very noble and inspiring. If Hartigan can achieve these aims, then he will have made a real difference in Australian society. He could rest on his laurels. But forgive me if I greet this with a dose of cynicism.
Can I really see News Ltd journalists making an effort to understand how the Catholic Church is structured, brush up on its history and the impact it has had on Western Civilisation, understand what the faith means to an orthodox Catholic, that when issues about the Church arise an orthodox Catholic will be consulted instead of the furious dissenters who have long ceased to be Catholic and seek every opportunity to undermine the Church and the Pope? Will there be an effort to correctly assess the issues at play in a controversy like the lifting of the excommunication decree on the four traditional SSPX bishops?
While the mainstream media went to town worldwide on Pope Benedict, implying or openly claiming that the Pope and the Church were anti-Semitic, it was internet websites that were accurately reporting and elucidating the Pope's real purposes. I made several comments, one of which quoted the words of a prominent Jewish Rabbi who understood exactly what the Pope's motivations were. And they were not anti-Semitic, he said. What an irony that a prominent Jewish Rabbi felt obliged to defend the Pope.
To take a present issue, are News Ltd journalists going to take a hard look at the Victorian government's review of the exceptions and exemptions to the Equal Opportunity Act? Will they submit the Options paper to an exhaustive analysis, and assess the motives of the hardline academic feminist who authored it and will oversee the submissions? Will that analysis be "well researched...accurate and reliable"?
The Options paper shows that its author has an ignorant and warped idea of what religious belief entails and the rational processes that leads one to accept Revelation, that the aim is to alter fundamentally or collapse Church organizations by forcing them to take on people inimical to their purposes. Let's be clear: the thrust of this attempt to manipulate current legislation is to put homosexuals in Christian schools. It's equivalent to Nazis forcing Jewish schools to employ SS officers. Indeed, Jewish schools in Australia should be worried. They may be forced to employ an Islamic extremist.
There is a fascistic spirit driving this review, a spirit infecting the whole governmental process in Victoria.
One cannot help wondering whether the presence of feminists and homosexualists in the News Ltd organisation will block accurate and fearless reporting on the attempt to deny three basic rights: the right to follow one's religious belief, the right to organise or associate, and the right of parents to direct the education of their children? It will be a real test of Hartigan's noble intentions. But there is a related issue here.
Will News Ltd journalists make no bones about the fact when they report on clerical sexual abuse that the overwhelming majority of cases concerns homosexual clergy molesting pubescent males, that on the hard evidence clerical sexual abuse is really about homosexuals and not about priests or other religious? The incidence of sexual abuse is no higher among clergy than in comparable groups. Will they submit the attitudes of and influences on homosexual clergy to close analysis to understand why they give into behaviour that is diametrically opposed to Church teaching? I'd like to see that.
Here we have the related issue. I am wondering whether News Ltd journalists will realise that if the campaign to lift the exemptions on religious organisations is successful, the risk to children in religious schools will be dramatically heightened. It stands to reason on the empirical evidence: the more homosexuals in religious schools, the greater the risk to male students.
Finally, with this new noble undertaking so clearly outlined above, will News Ltd make moral and financial restitution for the media assassination of Dr Peter Hollingworth, for the cruel and merciless destruction of a good man, in which The Australian shamelessly took a leading role? In time history will make note of this terrible injustice, one of the most shocking episodes in Australian history.
John Hartigan has stirred the pot with this speech. I for one will be testing News Ltd reporting against the standards he has set his newspapers.
Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com
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