Why the plight of journalism is bad for local news coverage
Tasmania’s Senator Jacqui Lambie doesn’t always please journalists, though she is often good for a headline, but in these darkest days of journalism she is suddenly popular.
Along with other crossbenchers, she has pushed for a select committee of inquiry into the future of journalism in Australia. With Fairfax papers The Sydney Morning
Herald and Melbourne’s The Age going broke and under the very real threat of no longer printing weekday editions, I feared there was no future. My favourite paper, The Australian, with which I don’t always agree, is fortunate it has such a passionate supporter in its 86-year-old founder Rupert Murdoch.
In television, the Ten Network is in trouble and profits are down at all other networks in the face of what is generally accepted as unequal competition from new media platforms including Amazon and Netflix.
Our politicians have never much loved the traditional news media, but belatedly it appears many are coming to see its social and political value. Without some general semblance of fair reporting and analysis, politics and society will be left to the illiterate mercies of the baying mob on Twitter and other social media. Newsprint is the thin black and white line between fact and falsehood, between a rational, tolerant, open democracy and the rising darkness of ignorance, fanaticism and bigotry.
I was in a bar in Belfast, in IRA territory, in the mid-’80s when I heard this: “Mustah Wooley. We’re not fookin’ eejits. We know where you’re stayin’ and we’ve got people in Australia. We’ll know exactly what you report and we’d better fookin’ like it.”
The paramilitary gentleman was giving me what was known as “the thousand-yard stare”. It was disconcerting because while he was threatening my life he was looking through me as if I weren’t there.
I started out to make a naive argument defending the importance of an impartial media in my country, but my Irish minder who had brought me to the pub came to my rescue. “Shut up, Wooley,” he hissed.
Conan was a Belfast freelance journalist. I had hired him to navigate me through the absurdities of what in Northern Ireland was euphemistically called The Troubles (3600 people died and thousands were injured). On the way to the pub, Conan had told me: “Remember, there’s no bloody point to arguing with either side in this country. Jesus Christ himself couldn’t save them. They’ve been fighting over the same thing since 1600 and they’re not about to change their mind for some daft Australian journalist.”
But I believed then, as journalists, we had to try. Informed coverage just might change the world. Well, maybe a little bit.
Ireland wasn’t a million miles from the troubles I had been covering in my own country only a couple of years earlier. That was on the West Coast of Tasmania over damming the Franklin River, and once again it was conflicting religions. Not Catholic versus Protestant but environmentalist versus developer. Or call it Greenie versus redneck and that’s a war not over yet. I don’t think anyone died in the battle of the Franklin, but there was violence, intolerance, lies and deceit and, whatever side you were on, a glorious cause. The whole Australian media descended on the tiny town of Strahan to try to make sense of what it was that was tearing Tasmania apart.
Journalists were asked, as they so often are, to explain the story, to uncover the truth and to tell it to the world. My memory is that conclusively they came down on the side of the river, which still runs untrammelled. Most people would consider the saving of the Franklin to be fundamental to the growth of Tasmania’s $2.5 billion tourist industry. Because we are a fractious and argumentative people, tourism, hotels and cable cars have created something new to fight about – and write about – for as long as we can.
I hope the select committee of inquiry into journalism considers the miserable performance of ABC-TV outside Sydney. Where once every state produced a nightly current affairs program, now there is only one and it comes from Sydney. In Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and Hobart, getting a current affairs program from Sydney is like getting your news from Mars.
When I worked on the local version of what’s now 7.30, localism was the meat and potatoes of broadcasting. Today, beyond the cursory news coverage of issues such as the cable car and the Fragrance Group tower project, where is in-depth television discussion of the future of our city? This is pursued every week in this newspaper, but over at the ABC it’s a case of “stay tuned for the news from Mars”.
When a local issue is covered (which is rarely), it has to be over-simplified for a national audience. I’m sure this is every bit as frustrating for the depleted ranks of Tasmanian ABC journalists as it is for local viewers. I trust Senator Lambie and others will be making it quite clear that token current affairs coverage is not acceptable in Tasmania or in any other Australian state.