Media's best defence is self-policing
Graham Perkin
IN RECENT years, this lecture has been very much concerned with the legal aspects of modern journalism. I have no quarrel with this; there are some aspects of our work as it effects the law and Parliament which deserve discussion.
I thought I would come closer to home and speak about a problem that, if we are honest with ourselves, plagues us all. The problem of belief in newspapers, the state of our public reputation.
In a few days' time, the Australian Journalists Association is meeting the proprietors of Australia to discuss formation of a press council. I have only a slight idea of what the AJA has in its mind, but, quite clearly, the AJA would not have advanced the idea and pursued the meeting if it felt that all was well with the press in Australia.
The most frequent explanation is that we have forsaken our time-honoured pretensions to objectivity, that public confidence is being eroded by a wave of political and social activism sweeping through the reporters rooms and across the editorial desks of the country.
I disagree … but I think we have a case to answer and, if we search hard enough, effective answers to provide.
So what I am proposing to do today is to advocate a paradox - the paradox that the press of Australia is both worthy of defence as it is and capable of improvement. It is worth defending as it is because the press we have is infinitely better than the press we might get if the critics of the right and the left were ever permitted to impose their paraphernalia of councils and committee and laws and controls upon us.
The press is capable of improvement because we daily commit subtle, and sometimes glaring, examples of contextual untruth, because we allow many examples of bias and selective reporting, because we sometimes permit our headlines to be captured by propagandists, charlatans and quacks.
We rely too much on certain stereotypes as to what makes a news story and too rarely bother to ask ourselves what really is happening here.
We consistently devote about 80 per cent of our news space to stories which fit the stereotypes. Worse than that, we insist that events are only news if they fit the stereotypes.
There is no news in a speech or a press conference or anything else unless it involves surprise, conflict, scandal.
We of the press so often allow ourselves to be manipulated by various interests, some for change and some against it, some powerfully in support of the established system, some setting out to destroy it.
We have prided ourselves on our reputation for fairness, for giving everyone a voice in our columns. It is easier to run a public relations campaign in this country, without spending a cent, than anywhere else on earth. And all shades of political opinion have exploited this ready access to our pages. And, as they exploit us … how often have we given our ordinary readers the information and understanding which might equip them to make an educated assessment of the forces at work in their society?
I am not writing off Australian journalism here. These are offences of degree, failures in part. But nonetheless serious. We have to find better answers than the reflex that news is the sensational, the anomalous, the misdeed.
If a man biting a dog guarantees page-one space, the one certain thing in life is that some idiot will start biting dogs. If we persist in letting the idiot fringe on both sides make the news, then we are giving our readers an utterly false view of society.
We must try for a more serious perspective, a more sophisticated context, to our work. We are not just spectators. We do not exist just to move words from a mouth to an eye.
We are constantly responsible for selecting news, for analysing views, for applying a form of disinterested censorship to the events of life. Our responsibility is serious. How do we improve our performance?
I would like someone with both academic and professional journalistic skill to measure relative merit in reporting Parliament; to tell us whether emphasis on violence encourages or purges those who are latently hostile; to guide us in our treatment of news associated with migrant groups; to tell the public whether opposition parties are getting a fair deal from the media at election time; to apply some tests to television documentary programs so that we might have something more than mere hunch to help us when This Day Tonight is accused of political bias.
In short, I want - and I think the press badly needs - some reputable professional body to defend our strengths and expose our failures. We do NOT need bodies which act like press councils and merely censure us when complaints of bad taste or lack of ethics or accuracy are brought before them.
My great fear is that unless the newspaper industry establishes some form of self-surveillance, unless it gives its readers a channel through which to make complaints and to test the press' performance, then we will one day, perhaps soon, have surveillance forced upon us by government.
This is an edited text of the Wilkie-Deamer Lecture, delivered by the editor of The Age, the late Graham Perkin, in February 1972.
Neil Mitchell, 2011 Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year, says this Perkin speech still resonates. Photo: Simon Schluter
In a few days' time, the Australian Journalists Association is meeting the proprietors of Australia to discuss formation of a press council. I have only a slight idea of what the AJA has in its mind, but, quite clearly, the AJA would not have advanced the idea and pursued the meeting if it felt that all was well with the press in Australia.
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We must have noticed that our readers' confidence in their newspapers is at a low ebb these days. All sorts of amateur critics are having a field day at our expense, detecting real and imagined faults in our ethics and performance.The most frequent explanation is that we have forsaken our time-honoured pretensions to objectivity, that public confidence is being eroded by a wave of political and social activism sweeping through the reporters rooms and across the editorial desks of the country.
I disagree … but I think we have a case to answer and, if we search hard enough, effective answers to provide.
So what I am proposing to do today is to advocate a paradox - the paradox that the press of Australia is both worthy of defence as it is and capable of improvement. It is worth defending as it is because the press we have is infinitely better than the press we might get if the critics of the right and the left were ever permitted to impose their paraphernalia of councils and committee and laws and controls upon us.
The press is capable of improvement because we daily commit subtle, and sometimes glaring, examples of contextual untruth, because we allow many examples of bias and selective reporting, because we sometimes permit our headlines to be captured by propagandists, charlatans and quacks.
We rely too much on certain stereotypes as to what makes a news story and too rarely bother to ask ourselves what really is happening here.
We consistently devote about 80 per cent of our news space to stories which fit the stereotypes. Worse than that, we insist that events are only news if they fit the stereotypes.
There is no news in a speech or a press conference or anything else unless it involves surprise, conflict, scandal.
We of the press so often allow ourselves to be manipulated by various interests, some for change and some against it, some powerfully in support of the established system, some setting out to destroy it.
We have prided ourselves on our reputation for fairness, for giving everyone a voice in our columns. It is easier to run a public relations campaign in this country, without spending a cent, than anywhere else on earth. And all shades of political opinion have exploited this ready access to our pages. And, as they exploit us … how often have we given our ordinary readers the information and understanding which might equip them to make an educated assessment of the forces at work in their society?
I am not writing off Australian journalism here. These are offences of degree, failures in part. But nonetheless serious. We have to find better answers than the reflex that news is the sensational, the anomalous, the misdeed.
If a man biting a dog guarantees page-one space, the one certain thing in life is that some idiot will start biting dogs. If we persist in letting the idiot fringe on both sides make the news, then we are giving our readers an utterly false view of society.
We must try for a more serious perspective, a more sophisticated context, to our work. We are not just spectators. We do not exist just to move words from a mouth to an eye.
We are constantly responsible for selecting news, for analysing views, for applying a form of disinterested censorship to the events of life. Our responsibility is serious. How do we improve our performance?
I would like someone with both academic and professional journalistic skill to measure relative merit in reporting Parliament; to tell us whether emphasis on violence encourages or purges those who are latently hostile; to guide us in our treatment of news associated with migrant groups; to tell the public whether opposition parties are getting a fair deal from the media at election time; to apply some tests to television documentary programs so that we might have something more than mere hunch to help us when This Day Tonight is accused of political bias.
In short, I want - and I think the press badly needs - some reputable professional body to defend our strengths and expose our failures. We do NOT need bodies which act like press councils and merely censure us when complaints of bad taste or lack of ethics or accuracy are brought before them.
My great fear is that unless the newspaper industry establishes some form of self-surveillance, unless it gives its readers a channel through which to make complaints and to test the press' performance, then we will one day, perhaps soon, have surveillance forced upon us by government.
This is an edited text of the Wilkie-Deamer Lecture, delivered by the editor of The Age, the late Graham Perkin, in February 1972.
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