STEPHEN Conroy and Malcolm Turnbull have something in common. The Communications Minister and his Opposition counterpart are each responsible for destroying worthwhile changes in Australian society by adopting the crash-or-crash through approach.
Both crashed. Turnbull as head of the Australian Republican Movement ended for a generation, perhaps two, the prospect of Australia shaking of its immature clinging to the British monarchy as its own.
Instead of waiting and compromising with direct-electionists he pushed for the 1999 referendum which went down in all states.
Conroy, utterly determined to bring the Murdoch press to heel, refused to delay, compromise, refine and explain his proposals for media regulation. As a result, the independents refused to back his plans and they went down. Most likely, any reasonable plan to impose any sort of decency, fairness and ethical standards on the media has been set back indefinitely.
No other industry has so little regulation as the print and internet media. And even broadcast media has a set of legislated standards more noted for the way they are flouted than adhered to.
Britain has already legislated along the lines Conroy suggested – to have some sort of independent oversight over the media with heavy sanctions for failure to meet standards.
So change could be possible if the government went about it the right way. True, the Australian media is nowhere near as bad as its British counterpart, but it is still sadly lacking.
One of the first steps in proposing change is to articulate a need for it.
Here are some of the things wrong with the Australian media – many of which are not peculiar to Australia.
Concentration of ownership heads the list. News Ltd’s ownership of 70 per cent of the print media circulation in Australia is corrosive of good journalism.
Yes, we have the broadcast media and a myriad of internet outlets. Nonetheless, newspaper newsrooms remain the powerhouse of news generation in Australia.
The stories they pursue and the angles and slant they put on them influence other media coverage.
This has been true even since large-scale cut-backs in journalistic staff, because the cut-backs have been concentrated at the production, rather than writing, end.
The concentration of ownership is more intolerable because the dominant owner, Rupert Murdoch, through his executives, engenders a political view that his newspapers should follow.
It does not take much more than a few offhand comments to come down as gospel from on high and for all the full-time journalists and paid regulars to follow it. And they do. Their jobs and gigs depend on it. No-one tells them what to write; no-one needs to.
News Ltd papers, particularly The Australian, pay lip service to balance by occasionally publishing pieces written by government ministers. This is no substitute for balance. A ministerial byline is an immediate turn-off for readers. They know it has been written by some flunkey and the writing style is no match against the professional journalist.
These Ministerial pieces are just slabs of grey to act as a buffer against accusations of bias. Moreover, they are no ballast against the party line followed in the news pages.
Campaigning journalism is another bad feature of Australian journalism. It is one thing for a newspaper to take up a worthy cause, quite another for it to seize on issue after issue against the Labor Government which News Ltd papers have.
Each individual story may be accurate – over-priced school halls, bad insulation, poor NBN contracting. But when each story is given maximum prominence and every tiny thing that goes wrong is reported emphasizing the quotes from the most critical, the overall impression is misleading: that each of these programs was an unmitigated shambles. When, in truth, in every human endeavour there will be a few mistakes.
Similarly, you could seize upon any day’s ABS statistics output and concentrate on the good, bad or ugly depending on your political agenda, if you have one, which News Ltd papers plainly do.
Worse, the agenda is financed by cross-subsidy. The Australian would not survive on its own financially. It is a political vehicle subsidised by the commercial success of other parts of the parent corporation. The astounding hypocrisy of its opinion writers who are forever lambasting the subsidised ABC and others on the government tit barely rates mention.
Even without an agenda, the Australian media often lacks the ability to stand back and give an overall picture.
The trivial and sensational get prominence, especially on television. Prime Minister Julia Gillard tripping over gets more coverage than the Indian-Australian relationship. Some twerp with a banner gets more air time than a serious policy. Perhaps media consumers are as much to blame as the media itself.
Obsession with timeliness is another problem. If a significant policy is published on the day a Pope happens to resign or die or there is some natural disaster, coverage of it gets truncated, even though the effect of the policy transcends the daily news cycle.
The lack of redress is perhaps the single most significant reason why the media is getting worse. The changes to defamation law made in 2006 were quite sound, particularly capping damages and preventing nearly all companies from suing.
But in the absence of some other blaming and shaming redress mechanism, the media has entrenched its cultures of self-righteousness (print) and defensiveness (broadcast). Corrections and apologies remain scarce, and it is not because media does no wrong.
Those cultures are further strengthened by the fact politicians rarely sue for defamation because of the constitutional defence that arose in the 1990s. The Daily Telegraph’s Photoshopped graphic depicting Conroy as Stalin and other dictators would have prompted a writ two decades ago.
Unnecessary breaches of privacy go unchecked, and are defended by media as being “in the public interest”.
Of course, a lot of media coverage is first rate and necessary to a free, functioning society. But that is true of virtually every other profession and trade, yet they all have some sort of legislated or self-regulatory complaints system which can discipline individual and corporate professional malfeasance.
Properly set up, such a system need not compromise free speech, indeed it should enhance it.
In any event, it would be less inimical to free speech than the present media set-up. But Stephen Conroy, the man would wanted it as much as Turnbull wanted a republic, has ensured it will not happen.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 6 April 2013.