Smirk on my face at the news that Derryn Hinch was to be removed from Channel 10 quickly turned to a frown.
I naively thought that Hinch was being fired for being appalling. Alas, we find he was fired because he was not appalling enough. His replacement is to be Alan Jones, a man denounced as a plagiarist in 1990 and denounced for making racist comments on radio. Hinch may have been a sanctimonious prig, but at least he was an honest sanctimonious prig.
Channel Ten is to take the time slot from the sidewalk into the debris trap of the stormwater drain. Will the other two commercial channels resist the temptation to join it?
The phenomenon of the competing television market is the nearest thing Australia has to the English tabloid market _ the sort of market that resulted in last week’s keyhole journalism by the Mirror group which published pictures taken by a hidden camera of Princess Diana in a gymnasium.
You will not find these sort of excesses in Australian papers, or at least not as frequently. But before I, too, am accused of being a sanctimonious prig, let me explain that the reason is not because Australian journalists are any more ethical or decent than British ones. Rather, it is because of the forces of geography and commerce.
Geoffrey Blainey has complained of the tyranny of distance, but it has at least saved us from the tyranny of the British tabloid. From London, the tabloids can easily circulate to a market of tens of millions throughout the whole of Britain. Distances are small and the train system can deliver quickly. Not so in Australia. Nationally circulating newspapers were impossible until air freight became efficient. Now they are possible with fax. But it is too late; the market patterns have been set.
It has meant we have strong regional papers, each catering to a wide range of social and economic strata in its region _ a vertical market. In Britain, several papers compete for each horizontal market across the nation. At the top, the Time, Guardian and Independent compete. At the bottom, the tabloids go for the masses.
The tabloids compete fiercely. No excess is ruled out in the quest for circulation. Moreover, the papers are thin because there are few classifieds in a nationwide market, so great profits can be made with extra sales. And the extra sales are available each day because a higher proportion are sold from newsstands than in Australia where home delivery is higher. In Australia, tomorrow’s paper is already sold so there is less need for Diana’s body.
On the British newsstand Diana’s body will divert many buyers from one paper to another at great profit. The risk of defamation actions or actions under a new privacy law are of little deterrence. In Australia, a Diana front page will have little impact. There is no serious competition. Even where there are two newspapers in one city, one pitches high and the other low. There is no competition in the Australia gutter.
Thus we have to turn to television in Australia to find something similar to the British tabloid market. Both have easy nationwide delivery. Both have huge economic advantages in getting extra market share. The advertising rate goes up with the number of viewers, even though costs-to-air are identical. For the tabloids the big cost is getting the first paper off the press, all subsequent extra sales are almost pure profit because the newsprint costs of such small papers is trivial _ typically 16 broadsheet-page equivalents compared to say 64 to 200 for a Saturday paper in Australia.
This intersection of geography and commerce is a great incentive for keyhole journalism, chequebook journalism and indifference to defamation and invasions of privacy.
Fortunately, in Australia television cannot go as low as the tabloids because broadcasting authorities impose at least some standards with the over-riding threat of licence suspension or cancellation _ the ultimate response to excesses caused by over-zealous pursuit of profit.
Mr Jones’s history, however, shows a predilection to push those standards to the limit, so it is difficult to see regulation or privacy laws being the answer. A better answer perhaps lies in sensible people acknowledging commercial “”current-affairs” shows for what they are: entertainment, and ignoring them and the advertisements that go with them. But I cannot see Stuart Littlemore easily abandoning the very nourishment of his show.