7

NEUTRALISE HOSTILE MEDIA AND BEFRIEND UNBIASED JOURNALISTS

On your way back to the cave a couple of joggers come into view, heading your way: two journalists, the last people you want to see. One waves and slows down, planning to stop and talk. You power past them, raising a hand in token acknowledgment. You would have had to stop and talk before the election. You don’t have to now. On arrival you tell your spouse about them. A mutually satisfying tirade escalates as you both recall the outrageous treatment meted out by the media jackals. They were out to get you and they did. You won’t forget it for a very long time – ever, in fact. They never cut you an even break. The most negative construction was put on every story. They proliferated your opponents’ misinformation on key policies you designed for the wider good – or at least the media outlets they work for did. They gave your internal leadership rival, lying in wait if you stumbled badly enough, just enough oxygen to keep you on edge and stop you performing at your best. They went on and on about your unpopularity, your advocacy of ‘brave’ (code for risky) policies, your ‘have it both ways’ position on Adani, how there were things even your best friends couldn’t tell you because you stopped talking to your best friends when they tried to tell you things you didn’t want to hear … You pause. Wait. Okay. Maybe there’s something to think about there. No! Journalists. Media proprietors. Running dogs, all!

The shattered leader writing off the ‘media jackals’ is human and understandable in the context of a shock election loss. The pain, the hurt, leads to the dehumanisation of journalists as a group. Assume for a moment it is true: that all journalists are sub-human demonisers of opposition leaders. That doesn’t mean their attacks about what leaders and their parties need to do to win are baseless. Many media reports between the 2016 and 2019 elections interpreted by the Shorten opposition as negative and destructive – and which often were negative and destructive – contained seeds of truth that, ignored by Labor, helped the Morrison Government to its surprise two-seat victory while simultaneously constructing the conditions for that defeat.

Recall the argument of Max Weber in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ that those with their ‘hand on the wheel of history’ need ‘passion, a feeling of responsibility and a sense of proportion,’ joined up in the one person, along with a sense of ‘detachment’, especially towards themself.¹ Passion? That’s the easy bit. A feeling of responsibility? Unless you’re one of politics’ bottom feeders, you likely have a sense of responsibility. A sense of detachment – that’s the hard one. Really hard.

Negative media coverage, day in day out, month after month, year after year, inflames politics and politicians. I recall being unable to have a normal conversation with a cabinet minister several years ago – an old friend – because profound rage over years of grotesquely unfair media treatment had so completely pervaded them. This reaction was mostly justified. There were nevertheless some pretty basic flaws in this minister’s political craft, about which even their most senior advisors could not get through to them. These validated the thrust, if not the hostile framing, of many of the critical media stories. Given the person’s barely contained rage there was no point discussing it; any offering would only have been met with a verbal flamethrower.

Australian political history is short on examples of angry leaders winning elections. Exactly the same words can be said by a politician who is angry and a politician who is – or at least sounds like – a reasonable person, and voters will be deaf to the former yet hear the latter. John Howard, whose dog-whistling ushered in the most recent era of divisive politics in Australia, never publicly sounded less than reasonable. Howard left it to the Murdoch-controlled News Corp media outlets like The Australian and Daily Telegraph, and ranting radio right-wingers like 2GB’s Alan Jones, to more explicitly stoke the hatreds his dog-whistles unleashed.

The detachment Weber encouraged in politicians is crucial, not least to help douse the fury that can otherwise engulf you in response to repeated media outrages, undermining your voter appeal, your ability to persuade and, therefore, your chances of winning the election. It has been going on a long time. The slanted reporting of News Corp media outlets under the current patriarch Rupert Murdoch reflects the practices before him of his father Keith (1885–1952), chair of the Herald and Weekly Times group.

Tom DC Roberts’ biography of Keith Murdoch, Before Rupert: Keith Murdoch and the birth of a dynasty, is crucial political history showing Murdoch conservative media manipulations going back a century, not mere decades.² Political scientist Sally Young’s Paper Emperors reinforces this point, detailing the history of Australian media proprietors’ routine alignment of their outlets’ political coverage with their corporate interest.³ At the time of Keith Murdoch’s death, his own staff highlighted his conservative politics and penchant for power plays in their published celebration of him. ‘Great affairs magnetised Murdoch,’ anonymous Herald and Weekly Times scribes wrote in the Keith Murdoch ‘tribute book’ upon his death in 1952, noting their late employer possessed the ‘ability to make his influence felt in decisive places.’⁴ He is described variously as ‘mildly conservative’ and ‘a revolutionary conservative’. The ‘tribute book’ may have been written by committee, differing estimations like these reflecting differing viewpoints from different contributors. However, the encomium itself suggests Murdoch muted in public a ‘revolutionary’ conservatism ‘evident in his published writings, but even more so in the confidential commentaries he wrote about his own newspapers’.⁵ He was also a founding director of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), whose recent ‘contributions’ to public discourse include the misleading ‘Labor wants to tax your Nana’ line on the franking credit policy in the run-up to the 2019 election.⁶

Keith’s grandson, Rupert’s son Lachlan (1971– ), is the family’s right-wing standard bearer. He has allowed Fox News to continue with the untrammelled remit, originally conferred by Rupert, to showcase the white nationalism, crony capitalism and ecocidal policies of Donald Trump. Trump’s Republican candidacy and presidency were, in media terms, underwritten by the network.

If Rupert Murdoch dies at the same age as did his mother Elisabeth, whom he looks uncannily like, he will be around until 2033. Lachlan today is only 48 years old. There is a lot of Murdoch influence to come. Putting the noxious values it propagates aside, News Corp is Australia’s biggest business success story. The national and, for half a century now, global media empire built by the Murdochs since Keith got his first job as a reporter in 1907 ought to be a source of immense national pride. However, shame is the emotion decent people feel contemplating its moral nadir in the Trumpism propagated by Fox News. Keith’s grandson, and Lachlan’s brother, James Murdoch broke ranks with the rest of the family in his recent criticism of the way News Corp programs and publications platform climate denialist views.⁷ The criticism disappeared like water into sand, however, and the usual cast of rabid right-wing commentators continues without restraint.

News Corp’s skewed political reporting and manipulative commentary mattered less in previous eras, when it was less absolutely dominant in terms of media asset ownership. As recently as 2011 Sally Young, surveying bias in Australian newspapers in the previous decade, noted widespread perceptions among journalists of News Corp as a biased media organisation, coexisting with positive perceptions of most News Corp journalists – and it is true that most News Corp journalists and a lot of its media remain very good.⁸ Young pointed out that when ‘running a political agenda’ its outlets ‘still provided space for alternative and oppositional views – perhaps not enough to dilute its overall presentation or an ideological or partisan case, but enough to prevent characterisation of it as a one-sided propaganda machine’.⁹ She also argued the rapid expansion of internet access that decade widened media choices for citizens if not contributing much to ‘active well-informed citizenship’.¹⁰

Things have regressed in the decade since Young’s survey as some centrally important quality media outlets have been run down or disappeared. The mostly centrist Fairfax Media, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Australian Financial Review, was historically a bulwark of quality political reporting. This weakened as Fairfax was hollowed out over the past decade during Greg Hywood’s tenure as chief executive officer. Ultimately it was sold off on his watch, with the venerable 167-year-old company folded into the tellingly named Nine Entertainment Co, chaired by former long-standing Liberal politician Peter Costello. The Nine Network had long been the source of significant political journalism, notably through its political editor, Canberra Press Gallery doyen Laurie Oakes, though this faded after Oakes’ retirement in 2017.

An insidious aspect of political journalism’s relative decline has been the relentless pressure on, and partial gutting of, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) by conservative governments encouraged and reinforced by the Murdoch-controlled News Corp media outlets. This is a major story in itself, and an international one since the Murdoch family, and its organs, have waged a similar campaign against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

The decline of ABC-TV current affairs tells the story. Most nights, and every night during parliamentary sitting periods, one used to be able to tune into its flagship program 7.30 (previously The 7.30 Report) assured of a strong package story recounting and contextualising the major political events of the day from its political editor, as well as a cracking interview by the program’s compere with a key figure involved in those events.

While the comperes and political editors continue to be quality appointments, political coverage is now scant and major political interviews occasional. Resourcing is so diminished that strong, daily political packages are rare, with political coverage from 7.30’s Canberra bureau mostly reduced to occasional ‘reads to camera’ by the political editor – a much weakened operation with only intermittent impact on public debate.

Most nights now 7.30 is a fairly average quality half hour of television magazine journalism with the occasional outbreak of substantial political journalism – and keeping it this way or, better still weakening it further, suits the Liberals’ and the Murdochs’ interests just fine. Until relatively recently one could tune into Lateline later in the evening for further and deeper exploration of current political developments: it was axed in 2017.

Some might point to ABC News 24 as evidence the ABC’s commitment to current affairs has increased rather than diminished, and it does fulfil a useful purpose with many fine ABC journalists working for it. It was not designed, however, to be much more than the television-equivalent of a 24/7 newswire. It has notably not been commissioned or resourced to meet and match, with high quality factual and impactful prime-time political journalism, the Vesuvius of political fiction and bile that spews from Sky News Australia’s ‘Sky after dark’ programs. This is News Corp’s local manifestation of its US Fox News, which, despite tiny audiences, disproportionately influences local opinion as its anti-Labor script lines are diffused nationally through other News Corp media outlets.¹¹

So you are operating in a seriously degraded media environment. Is The Australian or the Daily Telegraph producing its ten-thousandth ridiculous news story sledging you and your party, or spinning good news for you into bad? Objectify it. Laugh it off. Pin it to a board and throw darts at it furiously until it falls to the floor in shreds. Make up a song about the Murdochs being arse hats and sing it raucously with your staff and spouse every time a News Corp shocker runs in one of its multitudinous newspapers or on ‘Sky after dark’. Ritualistic expurgation of stress has a lot going for it. It works. It’s pretty much the only thing that works.¹²

After achieving something like detachment, break the story into pieces and look at it like an intelligence analyst looks at enemy data. Does it contain clues about whether you are getting something wrong in substance, process or, in a literal sense, performance?

This is not to say, work out how to change tack to satisfy News Corp media outlets like The Australian, the Daily Telegraph and ‘Sky after dark’. The point of politics is to acquire power to do what needs to be done, not what News Corp thinks ought to be done. Satisfying it is, in any case, impossible since News Corp outlets are permanently aligned with, and push at all costs, the plutocratic values and self-interest of its billionaire owners.

It is to say, because the story is in a News Corp outlet does not automatically mean it is wrong or has no value in informing a smarter approach on your part politically, if only to flag the need to cover one’s flank in relation to the kind of attack launched in the story, and sometimes more. It is also to say, if you allow those kinds of media attacks to inflame and enrage you repeatedly, your attackers have already won. Enraged politicians are less effective and less electable than ones who are, or who at least appear, reasonable and likable.

Of course, rage is not the only response to sustained media hostility. Another is submission. At the outset of this book empathy was expressed for those who have done the terrible but important job of opposition leader. The government has the power and currency, literally and metaphorically; you have little to none.

You can be like the sensitive child in the playground who gets psychologically, if not physically, pounded by the other kids. If there is something objective that can be grabbed onto to intensify your misery – you are plain or overweight, for example – it is latched onto and exploited mercilessly. (Cheers to the cartoonists out there!) If you have no obvious flaw, no matter: they will invent one. That’s how bullying works.

It is vividly evident in the treatment of opposition leaders by governments and by the media. For needy and greedy reasons, some colleagues may even join in either because they want your job or are associated with someone who wants your job, or because they want a piece of the bullies’ temporarily inflated sense of self-worth more than they want to win government.

Little wonder leaders surround themselves with ‘believers’: it is a rational act of self-defence, one which paradoxically makes them less likely to succeed because, while insulating them from the ego destruction wrought by bullying, it also shields them from the accurate feedback needed to hone their operation and win elections.

Bullying is destructive and despicable and even good people who spend enough time in a toxic environment can start doing it. The next thing you know it’s a habit. Think twice before you bag someone. (Memo to self: Why am I doing it?) Find a better way to make your point or achieve your goal. Call bullying out when you see it. Report it if you experience it. Expose and explain its dynamics to undercut its power. You cannot credibly purport to support human rights, for example, and at the same time be a bully or collaborate with bullying in your ranks. This is true at individual, party and public policy levels. Hardened political operators may scoff, but parties that rely on bullying fail in the end. The Corbyn-era Labour Party in Britain is a recent example.

If your response has been to submit to the bullies, acquire the habit of Weberian ‘detachment’. Get help to learn this skill so your membrane is not continuously pierced by the barbs of the bastards out to get you – journalists, colleagues or others. If you’re one of politics’ grandiose narcissists or sociopaths this will not be a worry. However, if you are one of the decent people trying to make a difference to the world, it can and must be learned.

If you’re getting pounded it’s natural to depersonalise journalists and conflate them with their proprietors. But it’s a missed opportunity if you’re a leader who wants to win. You have to be able to distinguish between journalists and their employers. Just like politicians, journalists are individuals. Journalists can be bullies, but they can also be bullied, including by their proprietors.

Just as principled politicians exist, so do principled journalists; they remain steadfast despite unprincipled behaviour occurring around them. Some journalists battle as hard inside their news organisations for fairness in political coverage as do the politicians under siege from those organisations: it’s just that you don’t know about it or don’t believe it if you do hear about it. Identify them. Befriend them. Help them.

Don’t expect them to stop being journalists any more than they can expect you to refrain from being a politician but, within those professional boundaries, build relationships. You will learn a lot. They will too and it makes for better journalism – and better journalism makes for healthier democracies.

Though there are many examples, I will mention just a few: Laurie Oakes, Patricia Karvelas, David Speers, Ellen Whinnett, and Lenore Taylor.

Oakes worked at Kerry Packer’s Nine Network. Packer liked a political favour as much as the next monopoly rent-seeker but could never make the resolutely independent Oakes his political tool despite the odd attempt to do so. Yet Oakes remained on the payroll because of his immense value to the Nine Network as the Canberra Press Gallery’s premier news-breaking journalist. When Packer decided to apply pressure to the Keating Government over media ownership policy, for example, a different journalist was employed to do his dirty work knowing Oakes would not.

An example from the current generation is Patricia Karvelas who had many good years as a journalist at The Australian where, despite its News Corp ownership, she thrived first as a roundsperson specialising in Indigenous affairs, then as political correspondent. Karvelas eventually moved to the ABC where she hosts radio and television shows without fear or favour, staunchly resisting political pressure coming from multiple directions.

Long-time Sky News political editor David Speers, who recently joined the ABC, is another example, not letting News Corp’s ownership of the network he spent 20 years working for skew his professionalism or undermine his impartiality. Ditto Ellen Whinnett, national politics editor of the top-selling News Corp–owned Herald Sun newspaper: straight as a die. Likewise Lenore Taylor, whose long career at the News Corp–owned Australian newspaper segued into the successful editorship of the Guardian Australia. It can be and is done. These are just a few cases.

It is wearing but, when you are an ethical, professional, independent journalist like Oakes, Karvelas, Speers, Whinnett and Taylor, resisting pressure is just who you are and what you do. Seek out professionally resolute journalists like these and build relationships with them. Democracy, not just your chance of winning elections, will be better for it. When you do win an election, do as Julianne Schultz argues is necessary to ‘invigorate a robust political system’: strengthen public broadcasting and secure legislative, or even Constitutional, recognition of the democratic value of media freedom.¹³

Against the massive structural decline in the quantity of quality political journalism in Australia over recent decades are a few, proportionate to what has been lost, modestly sized but nevertheless bright initiatives. The establishment of Guardian Australia by Britain’s Guardian Media Group in 2013 created a fresh beacon of quality political reporting and opinion which has partly filled the void created by Fairfax’s hollowing out and sale to Nine Entertainment and the weakening of the ABC.¹⁴ However, Guardian Australia remains an online publication only and, while influential, lacks the extra punch that a hard-copy newspaper sitting on a politician’s desk indefinably possesses.

This is where the Murdochs’ continued production of hard-copy editions of their Australian newspaper titles, despite some being loss-making, is critically important. The Australian, the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the Melbourne Herald Sun (Australia’s top-selling daily newspaper), the Brisbane Courier-Mail, the Adelaide Advertiser and the Hobart Mercury all are on politicians’ desks next to their morning coffees. Digital media may rule in the 21st century but hard-copy newspapers retain their visceral impact on political animals – irrational but true.

The Murdochs’ ability to keep publishing print editions of their newspapers rests on their continuing control of News Corp. Though they have not owned a majority of News Corp shares for some time, they maintain control. This is achieved through a shareholding structure that gives Murdoch family members shares with more powerful voting rights than those owned by others. Organising other News Corp shareholders to vote to end the Murdoch gerrymander and equalise shareholder voting rights would benefit democracy here and abroad. It would likely lead to News Corp media assets being viewed and managed through more commercial and less ideological eyes, and the extreme right branches among them being pruned into better shape or sold.

Another positive development is the niche but important Schwartz Media stable of publications developed by Morry Schwartz: The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, Quarterly Essay and Australian Foreign Affairs. Schwartz has almost singlehandedly kept the ‘indie’ end of progressive print journalism alive in Australia through these initiatives, which have something of a symbiotic relationship with his book publishing arm, Black Inc. Schwartz’s optimism, persistence and, yes, success in initiatives others consider commercially impossible is inspiring. The eventual newspaper empires of John Fairfax and David Syme had similarly modest beginnings.¹⁵ Australia needs more public good risk-takers like Schwartz to help restore some diversity to Australia’s dangerously skewed and depleted media ecosystem.

The third bright development is The Conversation, an independent source of news and commentary from the academic and research community delivered direct to the public for free. The Conversation turns high-integrity academic research and ideas on current issues into stories that can be understood and relied on to be factual. It leverages the brains trust that is the Australian university community, turning inward-looking academic conversations into outward-facing community contributions – a mighty achievement. You can proliferate facts and spread truth by harnessing and sharing media like that produced by The Conversation, the Guardian Australia and Schwartz Media’s publications. In spreading truth you dilute lies. Without diluting the lies currently polluting Australian politics, what hope for the future?

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