Expressions of Interest for two Board vacancies close on Friday (11 May) and although the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy have their fingers crossed that good Indigenous candidates will apply, there is no guarantee one will be selected.

Minister Stephen Conroy has inserted a special clause into the selection criteria that: “Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people are encouraged to apply”, but actually selecting a successful candidate will rely to some extent on the independent Nomination Panel getting the message that Senator Conroy really does want to see an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander director on the SBS Board this time round.

The careful balancing act he and the Nomination Panel must achieve is in getting an outcome the Government wants without compromising the arms-length independence of the panel the Government itself created. Chairman Ric Smith and his fellow panellists Prof Allan Fels, Leneen Forde and David Gonski are entitled to consider any special requirements of both the ABC and SBS in producing a shortlist of nominees for the Minister to consider, and Senator Conroy has the last-resort option of putting in his own choice from outside their list, but this Government would clearly prefer to avoid any taint of impropriety at the moment.

And Senator Conroy could be forgiven for being especially sensitive to the issue during the current round of SBS Board appointments as it will be a test of whether or not he can keep faith with Indigenous Australia following his decision to hand NITV to the multicultural broadcaster.

When he announced last year that SBS would take over the Indigenous channel and its $15 million annual budget there was deep disquiet in Indigenous Australia that yet another initiative empowering their own lives and cultures was being rolled back.

They had been used to the heavy-handed “new paternalism” of the Howard government, as The Age headlined the Coalition’s indigenous policies in 2006, so they expected better of the Labor government.

But faced with nagging criticism from both within and outside Aboriginal communities that NITV had “yet to fully meet the expectations of its stakeholders and to fulfil its potential” – as the Stevens Review in 2010 claimed and NITV repudiated – and mindful that even a Labor government could not sustain three national broadcasters, Senator Conroy’s decision, while hurtful to many, surprised few.

And it does what many in the Aboriginal communities wanted by providing national coverage on a free-to-air network, due to start broadcasting later this year. (Until then existing NITV cable and satellite transmission arrangements will continue.)

Secret talks

Following the Minister’s announcement, negotiations between SBS and NITV managements began almost immediately on how to carry out the integration in the most efficient and least destructive manner, a major concern for the NITV program makers and their viewers.

Although both sides have signed confidentiality agreements not to divulge the nature or outcomes of any arrangements before presenting the finished deal to the Minister, it is known that initial talks were not wholly cordial. There were deep suspicions, especially over the maintenance of a distinctive indigenous voice on the new channel, on how editorial control would be exercised and on whether there would be an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Director on the SBS Board to protect their interests.

And it was illuminating to observe that when negotiations started SBS publicly preferred to speak of providing an “indigenous service” despite the Minister’s insistence that it would be a distinct channel, albeit not necessarily packed wall-to-wall with Indigenous issues or programs.

The selection of Board members has never been in SBS’s hands, being the prerogative of the Government, but it is believed that negotiations in recent months on other matters have been more collegial and constructive.

This could in part be due to the replacement of some SBS executives under new Managing Director Michael Ebeid and the handing of responsibility for the project to Ken Shipp, an experienced SBS hand who made his bones during several years of managing SBS Sport with mercurial talent such as Les Murray. It probably did no harm that NITV’s main product is its football coverage.

While there are apparently still many issues to be addressed before transmission starts in less than two months, the appointment of an Indigenous board director is important for two main reasons.

One is that it will send a strong signal that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Australians are being included at the most senior level of decision-making over their channel.

The second is that an active, informed and energetic appointee will bring a rigour to the oversight of program-making for and about Indigenous Australians that is critically important if the channel is to have any credibility amongst Aboriginal viewers and among members of the wider community who think trust matters.

Two of the selection criteria state that preferred candidates should have “an understanding of the issues affecting Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people and/or an ability to communicate sensitively and effectively with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people”, but most people with any knowledge of how these processes work will recognise that such selection criteria could be applied to any number of good, well-credentialed non-Indigenous candidates.

Many in the Indigenous community believe only an Aboriginal person or Torres Strait Islander will truly be able to understand and represent their best interests.

Adding further impetus, if it is needed, is the fact that, unlike the ABC, SBS has had a long and generally successful history of Indigenous board members, despite its more multicultural Charter and the relatively small amount of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander programming on its radio and television services.

It is now six years since the last Indigenous director, North Queensland business and civic leader Joseph Elu, sat on the SBS Board. He was not replaced by the Howard government, a decision which some saw as another example of what critics said was as a policy of disempowerment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The Rudd and Gillard governments have managed to address some of the ideological remnants of the Howard years as far as multicultural Australia is concerned with the appointments to the SBS Board of Ebeid, Chairman Joseph Skrzynski, Deputy Chairman Bulent Hass Dellal and director Elleni Bereded-Samuel and the reappointment of Patricia Azarias, thereby reasserting a balance to the Board which at one time had only one “non-Anglo” member, Chairman Carla Zampatti.

Now the test is can they do the same for Indigenous Australians.

Meanwhile, running noiselessly alongside the SBS appointments is a similar process to fill two current vacancies on the ABC Board.

Considering that over the years the ABC has shared a lot of the heavy lifting on Indigenous programming on both its radio and television channels, the fact seems to have gone largely unnoticed in white Australia that the national broadcaster has had only one Indigenous Australian on its Board in 80 years, Neville Bonner who left in 1991.

An Aboriginal appointment this time round might also be timely, especially someone to hold the ABC to its stated aim of 2% Indigenous employment by December 2012, a target of which it is still woefully short, employing only 69 Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander staff in its 4,500 full-time equivalent workforce.[1]

Word has it there are several very strong Indigenous candidates thinking of throwing their hats into the rings for the ABC and SBS appointments this time round, so maybe the unthinkable might happen and both national broadcasters could end up with an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander board member.

That certainly would be a feather in Senator Conroy’s cap.

There has long been hostility between media academics and conservative journalists, but the Finkelstein review has opened up a new and bitter war of words between the two camps. Why has it come to this and can they both be wrong?

The story so far: Acting on growing complaints and spurred on by the News of the World phone hacking scandal in Britain, an Australian inquiry chaired by former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein recommends, among other things, greater external regulation of the local print media. The major newspapers oppose this and the most vociferous, The Australian, blasts the nation’s media academics for supporting Finkelstein. Thirty-five journalism educators sign an open letter condemning The Australian for shooting the messenger, one of the greatest indictments that can be levelled at a professional hack. Now read on.

Animosity between newsroom and classroom goes back at least as long as we have been teaching journalism in universities, probably longer.

Certainly when I graduated in 1972 with a degree in psychology and applied for a journalism apprenticeship (cadetship) on my hometown evening newspaper the editor warned me in no uncertain terms he had tried two god-awful graduates in two years and if I failed he would never employ another. Fortunately for all concerned, I worked out well, but crusty Frank Shelton’s animosity towards graduates was common throughout senior ranks in British newspapers and it was some years before journalism was taught as a discipline in that country’s universities.

Australia took up the university challenge earlier, initially mainly through Colleges of Advanced Education and Institutes of Technology, but the same deep suspicion of dilettante intellectualism polluting hard-nosed journalism existed at senior management level in print media here too. Despite almost all Australian universities today producing young journalists, there still lingers among hard news managers the view that the old hands usually need to purge those young minds of any fancy and useless ideas they may have picked up during three years at university and teach them real journalism skills “on the job”.

So who do today’s grumpy I-came-up-through-the-ranks editors and chiefs of staff blame for this parlous state of affairs? Their ancient enemies, the dilettante intellectuals of academia, people on alleged lifelong tenure protected from the harsh economic realities of the cut-throat newspaper world, often ex-journalists who, if they could, would and who, because they can’t, teach.

Professional journalism educators, for their part, resent what they see as philistine hacks degrading the noble calling of objective journalism by turning the profession’s moral high ground into a midden with sensationalism and shady practices masquerading as campaigning for truth. The fact that anyone in their right mind could think the News of the World was a great institution defending democracy proved to many media academics that those working in the grubby end of tabloid journalism have fallen for their own deceits.

In many ways, these ancient animosities are as much the cause of the latest round of name-calling as the issue of media regulation. The signatories of the open letter to The Australian – numbering some of this country’s most distinguished journalists – with some justification accuse the paper of shooting the messenger, of playing the man, not the ball.

The empire strikes back?

It hasn’t helped that both the now-defunct News of the World and its embattled sibling The Sun are News International imprints, direct cousins of The Australian and its kinfolk at the hillbilly end of the News Corp family, papers like Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Melbourne’s Herald Sun. However, while it would fit the script to see this scrap as only about the beleaguered News empire versus their traditional latte-sipping, bleeding heart pinko nemeses, such sober journals as the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age also oppose Finkelstein’s key recommendations, albeit with more grace.

Tellingly, the Australian article by Associate Editor Cameron Stewart quoted media academics like John Henningham who shared the newspaper industry’s concerns about the threat to freedom of speech posed by more stringent regulation than the current system of the industry-financed Australian Press Council.

Broadcasters, of course, have been subject to regulation and self-regulation for generations and seem to survive reasonably well, putting aside transgressions such as cash-for-comments or various scandals involving people like Kyle Sandilands.

But the print media have always resisted attempts at control beyond whatever is required by laws such as defamation and contempt. They argue, with some justification, that broadcasters use scarce publicly-owned radio spectrum and so should expect some civic oversight by bodies such as the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

You don’t need a licence to produce a newspaper in Australia, so theoretically anyone can start one, the marketplace is almost infinite and therefore regulation should be left to the free market, i.e. readers.

And all could be well if it was not for those pesky things called “journalistic ethics”, because those, in essence, are what underlie the almost constant internecine war between the newsrooms and the classrooms, the battle between “town and gown”.

Yes, there is disagreement about the quality of journalism education at universities. At the risk of oversimplification – a common journalist failing – many in the industry believe universities churn out too many journalism graduates more suited to marketing than to news reporting, with poor shorthand, little dedication and a general aversion to long hours of hard work for low pay. The universities conversely feel that employers take their well-crafted, enthusiastic and well-informed graduates and turn them into crass automatons, their questioning minds and evolving ethical sensibilities dulled, desensitised and compromised; they produce Ferraris that are used as garbage trucks. The newspaper editors say what they want are efficient, reliable Holdens.

But what gets older newspaper editors and senior executives fuming most is what they see as media academics constantly sniping over the ethics of journalism.

As Stewart suggests in his opinion piece, it is easy for academics in ivory towers to condemn journalists as unethical; they don’t have all the pressures of putting out a daily or weekly newspaper, of filling the pages, finding advertisers and – most important – attracting readers in an environment gorged with competition from television, radio, online journals and even the Twittersphere. Even the photo accompanying Stewarts article is captioned accusingly:  “Each day in a newsroom, working journalists race against the clock to try to cobble together coherent and accurate stories, a challenge that too few academics have experienced.”

Putting aside the qualifications of journalism academics who are frequently former hard-nosed hacks, there is envy in the accusations. Many working journalists would love to have the time to discuss the ethics of news coverage, but it just does not happen with any regularity in most newsrooms until a complaint comes in. University is often the last chance many journalists get to ask whether what they are about to do is right or morally defensible, the last opportunity to say no.

Once on the treadmill, pragmatism rules.

Whenever I find myself wondering what happened to many of those bright young journalists universities have graduated over the years, I cast my mind back to when I was starting out as a callow, know-it-all graduate cadet.

I recall the constant horror of being sent out on a death-knock assignment, to get an interview with the grieving family of someone newly and newsworthily dead. I always knew it was intrusive, an invasion of their privacy at the worst time in their lives. But I convinced myself I was recording the passing of their loved one for posterity. I even tried that muttered excuse a couple of times, to be met with uncomprehending stares. But I did it all the same. I justified it in a way I could never seriously defend in front of a class of journalism students.

If media educators and news executives remember their own first faltering steps in journalism, cast their minds back to when they knew more about what they should do than what they could do, there might be some kind of meeting of minds – even if only in memory.

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NOTE: Since The Australian newspaper now puts most of its material behind paywalls, some of the links above may not lead to full articles without subscription.

Sydney radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands shows all the signs of being a classic bully, but it is hard to argue he is an entirely self-made one.

For although he’s bright enough to be a successful bully – just bright enough to be dangerous, as the saying goes – he has had considerable help along the road to being a thoroughly unlikable tormentor.

One does not need to probe his childhood, ask whether he was picked on at school or discover deep feelings of inadequacy to see who the real culprits behind his arrogant, self-centred construct are.

The real guilty parties are – in no particular order – the radio station 2DAY FM who pay him a multi-million dollar salary, the million or so Sydney-listeners who allegedly tune in each week to his ‘Kyle and Jackie O Show’ and the advertisers who are now appearing so shocked by his latest outrage that they are withdrawing their financial support for the show.

Clearly they were quite happy to support and thereby encourage his constant petty bullying and frequent major transgression, childish on-air tantrums and bizarre prognostications when the going was good, when they were all making money from his self-styled “controversial” rants. And when he crossed the line yet again, this time with crass accusations that TV critic Alison Stephenson was “a fat slag”, a “fat bitter thing”, a “low life”, a “troll” and “a piece of shit”, they suddenly realised, according to car giant Holden: “Recent comments made on the Kyle and Jackie O breakfast show do not in any way reflect the views or opinions of Holden.”

Where, exactly, had Holden and the other 2DAY FM advertisers been for the past few years?

One did not need to be a media professional or even listen to Sandilands’ show to realise his “controversial” views were always simply a hair’s breadth away from revealing the true bully beneath the bull. His record of what Sydney Morning Herald columnist Deborah Snow called “the 40-year-old’s penchant for on-air thuggery” was there for all to see and hear.

As various members of the media have chronicled over the years, Sandilands was so abusive about magazine columnist Fiona Connolly he had to be banned from mentioning her on-air. He said comedian Magda Szubanski should go to a concentration camp to lose weight and that Tiger Woods was endowed “like a donkey”, with the black part of his mixed-race heritage “going on downstairs”.

Perhaps the lowest point in a career that could be measured with a depth-sounder was when he strapped a 14-year-old rape victim to a lie detector on air and quizzed her about her sex life.

This mind-boggling transgression did earn the station a slap on the wrist from the regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority but no-one – including the ACMA – seemed prepared to call a halt to Sandilands’ increasingly bizarre and offensive behaviour. Certainly the advertisers did not. The roll call of those now pulling their advertising from his show – in some cases just to move it to another slot on 2DAY FM – now reads increasingly like a roll of shame.

As well as Holden, so far the media have named Telstra, Vodafone, Medibank, Blackmores, Crazy John’s, Harvey Norman, The Good Guys, Goldmark Jewellers, Fantastic Furniture, Beaurepaires,  American Express, Ford, Lexus, BlackBerry, Olympus, Coles Online, GIO Australia Insurance, Qantas, Mitsubishi and Piazza Doro. They also include the Federal Government itself, through its buying agency Universal McCann, who only last month settled a sex discrimination case brought by a former female director.

While lauded as the right thing to do, the action of the major corporations in pulling their advertising dollars was perhaps best summarised by Girl PR’s owner Juliet Potter, who told Mumbrella that their client Goldmark’s decision to drop Sandilands was “too little too late.”

The fact that Sandilands’ most high profile transgressions seem to be aimed at women and minorities are classic symptoms of the bully. Critics might have more sympathy with Sandilands’ and his supporters’ contention that he is simply stirring things up if he actually picked on someone his own considerable size. As it is, he leaves his critics speechless and wondering exactly what it might take to silence this overgrown child. His latest tirade against Stephenson that “you haven’t got that much titty to be wearing that low cut a blouse” with the chilling threat “I will hunt you down” was made around White Ribbon Day, when people around Australia stand up against denigration and abuse of women and girls.

TV show host and White Ribbon Day Chairman Andrew O’Keefe said: “The way that we talk about people really defines the way we think about people” while writer Ben Eltham tweeted: “Austereo, you simply have to fire Kyle Sandilands. His behaviour is unacceptable in Australia in 2011.”

Sandilands himself, while apparently surprised he got into so much hot water over what was, for him, not such unusual behaviour, defended his outbursts as free speech.

The Herald Sun article quoted him as saying: “We live in a country of free speech, you’re allowed to say what you want – and so am I.”

Which would be fine if he was ranting and raving in the privacy of his own home.

But Sandilands and 2DAY FM are the beneficiaries of publicly-owned radio spectrum, a limited resource which can bestow great power and therefore demands from its licensees great responsibility. It is not enough for his supporters to suggest that people who object should “tune out”, and such a response does not address the problem of children “tuning in”. Without the kind of classification system applied to television, radio can still broadcast at any time of day or night material such as Sandilands’ latest foul-mouthed diatribe, which would require an M or even MA rating were it on TV.

And if Sandilands was not so self-obsessed he would know there is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech. Society places all kinds of cultural and legal constraints on what we can say, including about what people with power can say about those they pick on to victimise.

American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr famously said: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”

Neither should it protect bullies using publicly-owned airwaves to voice their vicious pathologies. 

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Photo Source: 2DAY FM

Sometimes it is because they’re bored or they want more money, they are not achieving or their job no longer excites them. And sometimes it is because they are utterly ashamed of the behaviour of others in their particular field of work.

In journalism, these moments come more often than in most professions.

In the annual Ipsos MORI survey of trustworthy professions in Britain, journalists have taken bottom spot for most of the past 27 years. A poll by Roy Morgan found fewer than one in five Australians found TV reporters ethical and honest while only one in ten trusted newspaper journalists.

Such an instant of collective shame happened for many journalists last week when the American cartoonist Robert Crumb announced he would not be attending the Graphic Festival at the Sydney Opera House because of intimidation by some in the Australian media.

Writing an open letter in the Sydney Morning Herald, Crumb accused The Sunday Telegraph of “looking for ways to discredit me and the City of Sydney by using people like Hetty Johnston”.

Most Australians have a fairly clear idea of the depths to which The Sunday Telegraph can plumb, though fewer may be able to place Hetty Johnston in this story.

Johnston founded an organisation called Bravehearts to campaign against the sexual abuse of children. She describes herself on the Bravehearts website as “a born lobbyist” and she and her tiny organisation are often regarded in the field of child protection as loose cannons. They seem to garner more attention in sections of the media than their numbers, arguments or practical deeds might seem to warrant.

However, in a democracy it is hard to argue against her right to speak out about an issue which so clearly occupies her thoughts. Whatever is driving Johnston and however damaging some of her calls for censorship might be for the general wellbeing of a democracy, she clearly cares and, besides, people on the extremes can serve a useful purpose in gingering the rest of the community into at least thinking about an issue as significant as child sexual assault.

And while she voices little obvious concern about the balance all Western societies must find between individual freedom and the protection of the most vulnerable, she articulates the simple fears of many in our community. She may be exasperating to civil libertarians, political leaders and even professionals in the field of child protection, but that does not mean she should be denied her opinions on children who are sexually abused.

But neither she nor they should be exploited.

But this, according to Crumb, is precisely what The Sunday Telegraph did. Crumb says a journalist he spoke to took it upon himself to talk to Johnston who said she was contacted by “the media”, sent links to some of Crumb’s more “offensive” images and asked to comment on the fact that the Sydney Opera House was exhibiting his work.

This, of course, is a trick as old as journalism itself, up there with “When did you stop beating your wife?” and many Australians now expect little better of The Sunday Telegraph. But their behaviour over the Crumb affair still causes many thoughtful commentators to cringe and many professional journalists to feel ashamed that – in the public mind at least – we inhabit the same profession.

Just because Johnston has strong, colourful and occasionally extreme views on what constitutes and causes child sexual abuse does not make her an expert on art or humour or in any way qualified to comment on Crumb’s work or mental state. If Crumb’s journalist contact was right, one wonders whether Johnston had ever heard of the cartoonist before The Sunday Telegraph contacted her.

The whole Sunday Telegraph story hangs on similarly tenuous threads. Although it quotes “a spokesman for the federal Attorney-General’s department” as saying Crumb’s work “would almost certainly be refused classification”, they offer no evidence and it is far from certain that the Classification Board would make such a finding. Whether a spokesman for the Attorney General is overstepping his or her authority in making such a comment about an independent statutory authority is a separate issue, as is the strange quote attributed to “a spokeswoman for the Sydney Opera House” that they “would not show anything that is not classified”. This will come as news to most of the arts and legal worlds who know anything about how Australia’s classification system actually works.

But inexcusable is The Sunday Telegraph exploiting the issue of child abuse to score a few points against the City of Sydney, the “arteratti” or bleeding heart liberals in general.

Newspapers that call for censorship are always playing with fire, but in this case using the issue of child abuse is unconscionable.

Authorities say more than 30,000 Australian children are abused or neglected each year. These are real children, suffering real cruelties at the hands of adults, sometimes strangers but more often members of their own family.

They deserve better than being used as pawns in a newspaper’s political, ideological or marketing campaign.

National Child Protection Week starts on 4 September. The organisers this year are focusing on all the great work organisations and ordinary Australians are doing to address the issue and make our communities safer for children.

Their job is not helped by newspapers such as The Sunday Telegraph confusing the issue of child abuse with weird cartoons, by attacking people who care for both children and freedom of expression or by creating a moral panic about areas of public life – including the arts – which have no more to do with child abuse than do consumerism, fashion or sexualised images of teenage girls in tabloids like The Sunday Telegraph.

Both Hetty Johnston and the children about whom she cares deserve better. They’ve been exploited enough.

Less than a week after Brown officially left the corporation’s Artarmon headquarters, the head of SBS television and online content, Matt Campbell, announced he is quitting to join Shine, the TV production company founded by Elisabeth Murdoch and then purchased from her by father Rupert’s News Corp.

After the acquisition was announced, News Corp shareholders filed a lawsuit.  The Amalgamated Bank of New York and the Central Laborers Pension Fund said there was no reason for the purchase other than to reward Elisabeth Murdoch and perpetuate the family’s involvement in senior management.

Shine has received commissions from SBS Television for programs such as Letters and Numbers and The Family, so they already know Campbell, who is quoted in an SBS media release as saying: “I look forward to continuing to work with SBS in my new role”.

Campbell is the first of Brown’s executives to leave since Michael Ebeid officially took over at SBS this month, and it is hardly worth speculating whether he jumped or was pushed. Campbell has been telling people for some months he was looking for a new job, perhaps in part because of the imminent departure of Brown, who was well known for his continued hands-on role in SBS TV after leaving the division to become MD. An article in a Murdoch paper The Australian by Michael Bodey – who has been remarkably well-disposed towards Brown and his executives during the transition to new leadership at SBS - claims Campbell did not apply for the top SBS job. If so, this would demonstrate a wisdom which might surprise some of Campbell’s detractors inside SBS.

Ebeid himself was giving nothing away publicly. The high-flown rhetoric of his eulogy at Campbell’s departure – which included praising Campbell for programs such as First Australians commissioned long before Campbell joined SBS - has an almost Shakespearean tone to it, worthy of Mark Antony himself. 

To place these events in context, the following is an article assessing Brown’s time at SBS, first published in New Matilda.

The departure of Shaun Brown as managing director of SBS brings closure on an era the national broadcaster and many of its supporters may wish to forget.

The collapse of the house of cards SBS had become began 18 months ago with the replacement of chairman Carla Zampatti by Joseph Skrzynki and is completed by the ascension of Brown’s successor Michael Ebeid, though as these two undertake the process of rebuilding the multicultural broadcaster, observers might care to remember that Brown’s tenure too began with fanfare and high hopes.

Admittedly, when Brown crossed the Tasman in 2003 to become Head of SBS TV he trailed behind him the whiff of controversy from his time at TVNZ, but as he stepped into the shoes of the affable but increasingly undermined Nigel Milan — also a British-born media man who’d served time in New Zealand — Brown was welcomed inside and outside the organisation as a hands-on journalist who seemed prepared to listen and learn.

That impression proved to be superficial, but in his first months as head of TV Brown brought a fresh breeze into the charged atmosphere of the corporation’s Artarmon headquarters, where his predecessor Peter Cavanagh had been fighting a rear-guard action against the board’s wishes to introduce advertising within programs, rather than between programs as had been the practice to-date.

Brown proved far more compatible to the commercially minded Zampatti board and within six months of his taking over the reins as managing director in 2006, the board approved in-program advertising. Though this was a commercially common-sense decision, the move lost the broadcaster many loyal viewers and much support. Recriminations continue to this day.

But in attempting to understand Brown and the damage he wrought on SBS, the Thoi Su controversy was probably just as significant.

When, within months of joining SBS as head of TV, he began broadcasting a program provided by the Vietnamese state broadcaster VTV, Brown was genuinely shocked by the virulent opposition from the Australian Vietnamese community. They protested in their thousands in Sydney and Melbourne that the Thoi Su program was pure Communist propaganda and they pulled out all the political and publicity stops to get it taken off air. Brown felt no-one should dictate what SBS broadcast and was deeply unhappy when the board decided to drop the program. The decision was made all the more unpalatable as Brown suspected behind-the-scenes manipulation by his executive rival Quang Luu, the Vietnamese-born head of SBS’s more community-based radio division.

Brown’s actions over the following years suggest he would never again place himself in a position where anyone inside or outside SBS — other than the board — would tell him what to do.

After Thoi Su

Brown never forgot the lesson of Thoi Su. One of his first actions on becoming managing director was to dismantle the radio division, ostensibly under a corporate restructuring but effectively placing the staff and budgets of radio news, operations and publicity into departments headed by his TV managers. Within six months, Luu retired after 17 years.

Despite Brown then assuring radio staff at a mass meeting that Luu’s successor would be someone with broadcasting experience, the board appointed Paula Masselos, someone with no significant broadcasting or senior management experience in a large organisation. In doing so, they passed over more suitable and better qualified internal candidates of non-English speaking backgrounds, senior managers who had worked with the departed Luu. Predictably, Masselos’s tenure was not a success and she spent the final six months of her contract at home. But by that time, the damage had been done, all the division’s senior managers had left and SBS radio was a shadow of its glory days under Luu.

It is impossible to know whether the Thoi Su incident also fatally coloured Brown’s opinions of Australian multiculturalism — of which he’d had little experience in New Zealand — but his actions over subsequent years did nothing to stem the criticism that he had moved the country’s second national broadcaster in a more populist mainstream direction, away from its multicultural charter.

Most tellingly, in a 2006 speech quoted in the book The SBS Story, he summed up his interpretation of the word “all” in the SBS Charter, stating: “By charging us with the responsibility to reach out to all Australians the Charter ensures that SBS must not and cannot be defined by its audience.”

Brown did briefly attempt to mend the rift this policy engendered between SBS and its multicultural stakeholders by appointing the charismatic and well-connected Ukrainian/Canadian/Australian radio division executive Olya Booyar as his link to the ethnic communities, but communications deteriorated again after she left to become deputy director of the Classification Board.

A time of lesser men

More public manifestations of internal and external disquiet came with the replacement of many experienced managers by lesser men — and Brown’s senior executives have been overwhelmingly Anglo males — and the loss of key on-air talent. While Brown said in a recent interview in The Australian that the loss of experienced broadcasters — such as newsreader Mary Kostakidis and the Movie Show’s David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz — had opened the door for younger people, it did nothing either to quell criticism that SBS was dumbing down or to boost its ratings by a significant degree.

While Brown and his executives claim to have grown audiences, the 20 per cent share increase of which they boast is off a small, single-digit base and represents capturing an extra one out of every hundred viewers watching free-to-air television in the five main capital city markets. And this during a decade when the taxpayer pumped almost $75-million into extending SBS’s hitherto notoriously poor signal. In 2004, SBS’s analogue programs could be received by only 80 per cent of homes. By 2009-10, this figure had increased to 97 per cent of homes, undermining the old excuse that the main impediment to viewing was poor reception.

Added to the relaxation of the advertising limits, extensive job shedding, outsourcing and other cuts and the offloading of much of the multicultural burden of the charter, SBS should have been able to do much better than it did. The board under Zampatti and Brown had turned a small but much admired national broadcaster into a commercial TV network massively subsidised by taxpayers — all for a few paltry points of audience growth.

To be fair, they were at the time mostly following the wishes of the Howard government to make SBS pay its way and downplay multiculturalism — a concept Howard publicly disparaged. But to suffer so much for so little benefit seemed to many knowledgeable observers a sign of poor governance.

All this is not so say SBS hasn’t managed to make some great programs under Brown, though it should be pointed out that while the excellent East-West 101 and Go Back to Where You Came From were commissioned under him, other programs trumpeted in the fawning Australian article such as Remote Area Nurse and First Australians were conceived under his predecessors. And there were many flops and thousands of hours of forgettable programs in between.

Its once-famous television news service — while still being more professional than the other commercial broadcasters and more stimulating than the ABC — has been badly compromised by the inability of SBS executives to recognise that the absolute and sometimes painful honesty admired in their on-air news programs had to be reflected by their own behaviour in other areas of corporate life if the whole was not to be tainted. But driven by commercial imperatives, protecting ‘the Brand’ at all costs became a way of life. Obfuscation, denial and spin became kings at SBS and everyone suffered as a consequence.

Only towards the end — with Skrzynski’s accession and the appointment of two new board directors of non-English speaking backgrounds — did Brown seem to rediscover the value of multiculturalism. But by then it was too late.

In the end, of course, the saddest thing about Brown’s tenure at SBS is that by making him managing director the SBS board kept the door closed on someone better who might have been able to successfully navigate the trials and turmoils of the Howard years, the global financial crisis and the apparently uncaring attitude of Labor without damaging the corporation.

Perhaps the best one can say of the Zampatti/Brown era is that at least SBS survives. Hopefully Skrzynski and Ebeid can now do the job their predecessors were charged with several years ago.

Admittedly, the arrest of journalist Ben Grubb by Queensland police and the confiscation of his iPad sent momentary frissons of outrage through parts the Australian media establishment, but almost all of them just as quickly doused their fury in favour of business as usual.

Yet in the New Information Age, the incident should have remained one of the most significant media issues of the year.

A young technology journalist in the everyday course of his duties covers an Internet security conference on the Gold Coast.

He had just written about a high-profile and contentious security breach of a Facebook user’s account.

The journalist is approached by police, who question him and ask for his iPad where, they assume, he has kept all his notes and other details of the story. He demures so they arrest him and take the iPad anyway. He is released about an hour later without charge but his iPad is not returned.

As any half-decent journalist should recognise, it was a classic police ploy to get his notes without going through the process of obtaining a court order.

And it raises a host of issues the media should be exercising itself with but isn’t.

The most important is, of course, the ongoing defence of the rights of a free media within a democratic society. Without the ability of journalists to speak to people and gather information freely without fear of intimidation, we might as well all be living in North Korea where the truth becomes anything the current Kim wants it to be and citizens live constrained lives wholly at the despot’s whim.

Journalists and the police have always had turbulent relationships, sometimes working together for the community’s good and sometimes at odds about what that good might be and how it might be achieved. That is why the media has been called the Fourth Estate – because it is not part of the establishment, the other three estates.

Most of the time journalists work very happily with authorities and within the law, but on occasions they must step outside it to do their job properly. Most of the great journalistic exposures of corruption in Western societies have involved people breaking or skirting the law in some way, whether it is handing over or receiving documents to which they are not entitled or revealing things they are legally bound to keep secret. The Watergate revelations which brought down an American president in 1974 would probably not have happened had Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post not agreed to hide the identity of Deep Throat, their principal source within the Nixon Government. (He was finally identified 20 years later as Mark Felt, Associate Director of the FBI during the Watergate years.)

Journalists are ethically bound to protect their sources when required and many have been threatened, prosecuted or jailed in Australia for refusing to name a source, among them Tony Barrass, Joe Budd, David Hellaby, Chris Nicholls, Deborah Cornwall, Michael Harvey, Gerard McManus and the late Peter Hastings. None of these was an anarchist or bomb-thrower. They were genuine family men and women, upright citizens trying to do a difficult job as ethically as they knew how.

The recent and belated introduction of “shield laws” in Australian now offers some protection to journalists wanting to protect confidential sources, though there are several hoops through which they must jump to avail themselves of legal protection.

It still remains a truism that for police the tracking down of a journalist’s sources by legal means and for journalists the legal processes to defend their freedom both remain long, convoluted and essentially hit-and-miss, so journalists continue to hide their information and police resort to short-cuts such as those they used to get their hands on Ben Grubb’s iPad.

Journalism “like receiving stolen TV”

Neither Detective Superintendent Errol Coultis who arrested then “un-arrested” Grubb at the AusCERT security conference nor Fraud Squad head Brian Hay who justified his colleague’s actions as in some way similar to investigating the theft of a stolen TV set are junior officers unfamiliar with the law. Both would have known the legal process for obtaining a journalist’s notes but they chose to either circumvent it or to justify their behaviour as some kind of standard police procedure when dealing with petty crime.

This is not to argue that journalists have a special right to operate outside the law, even if they sometimes have a moral duty to do just that. And it is likely someone who has had their TV set stolen might have more sympathy for DS Hay’s views than for Ben Grubb’s loss.

And there will be all sort of excuses as to why the police action was either justifiable or not worth worrying about, ranging from “that’s how Queensland police operate” through to “journalists should not get precious over a single, simple regrettable incident” – though it should have alarmed Australians to read on the same page as the Sydney Morning Herald’s report about the Grubb affair an article on how the country’s security agency ASIO is getting even greater legal powers to spy on its own citizens.

The real wake-up call is for members of the Australian media, especially editors and publishers.

It was instructive that the most immediate support for Grubb came via new media, with many of his 5,000 Twitter followers lighting up the Twitterverse with indignation. And although media like the ABC and Grubb’s own employer the Sydney Morning Herald tried to keep the controversy alive with follow-ups and expert comment, the old mainstream media has largely moved on, leaving the field to the online community, such as the iiNet Blog’s Matt Jones.

Where are the major newspaper groups and broadcasters, the editors and proprietors one might think would have a huge interest in issues such as this?

Australia’s Right to Know Coalition[i], comprising the nation’s “12 major media companies”, has been missing-in-inaction since an initial, much-trumpeted flurry of activity in 2007, an absence noted by Crikey’s Margaret Simons more than a year ago. At a time when their leadership would be most use, they have deserted the field.

Realistically, of course, getting concerted action from media companies who are at each other’s throats every day of the week was always going to be a big ask.

The generally moribund Australian Press Council, which represents the major print publishers and purports to be “a defender of press freedom”, has also been notably silent on the issue. The Council website claims it “scrutinises legislation, court decisions and any activities of politicians, courts, newspaper proprietors and others that might threaten press freedom. Where appropriate it issues press releases, and makes submissions …” A fortnight after Grubb’s brief arrest it had issued no public statement and a search of its website reveals no mention of the case.

Beyond reproducing a news item about the Grubb affair, the Newspaper Publishers’ Association has also been alarmingly absent from the debate to-date.

If the main media bodies won’t act, who will?

Some commentators argue that the police need to get up-to-date with the realities of social networking, although asking the police to play nice is not going to give reliable, long-lasting comfort to investigative journalists. An editorial in Fairfax newspapers concluded: “The police themselves have acknowledged the challenge the internet represents for them. It is a challenge to lawmakers too.”

But realistically, journalists and their editors must look to their own security and safety.

New technologies such as iPads have enormous benefits but also pose new challenges, not least of them security.

On the positive side, whereas old-fashioned notebooks or recorders contain physically-accessible content, even in shorthand or encrypted files, today’s mobile devices need not even house a physical copy of a reporter’s notes or interviews which authorities can confiscate.

While there is still debate about how safe Cloud computing actually is, properly encrypted data stored in the Cloud or on remote servers is probably more secure than keeping sensitive information on a laptop or iPad. And with the massive computing power available to today’s major media, it is an abrogation of their duty not to have secure remote means of storing their journalists’ work.

That will still not protect the material from a properly obtained and executed subpoena, but at least the police will have to engage with the company’s specialist lawyers before they can access confidential information.

For the rest of us in the informal media economy, necessity and innovation are the best drivers to protect our sources and information, coupled with agility and the ability to forget file names, server addresses and passwords under police pressure.

With the growing acceptance that the Internet and especially social media are moving beyond strict regulation, it is the old established media who have most to fear from inaction over cases such as Ben Grubb.

[i] It is worth noting that some members of the coalition have individually covered the case on their news and op-ed pages and in radio and TV programs and that the journalists’ union, the MEAA, has expressed concern.

Nothing surprising in that; it’s an important job in Australia’s media and cultural landscape, so anyone taking it on is bound to come under scrutiny, especially someone as relatively unknown as Ebeid.

[For more on Ebeid's appointment, see DogBitesMan or New Matilda]

And inevitably there will be some who see his qualities and qualifications – Egyptian heritage, no significant broadcasting or journalism experience, commercial focus, currently an executive at the ABC – with either relief or trepidation.

But compared to the relatively smooth induction the present incumbent Shaun Brown had to the job in 2006 – with barely a mention of his troubled time at TV New Zealand – Ebeid came under fire the moment SBS Chairman Joseph Skrzynski formally announced his appointment.

In fact, disaffected mutterings had already started leaking out of the corporation’s Artarmon headquarters in Sydney before the announcement, once it was suspected the gig might not go to an internal candidate and therefore drastic change might be afoot for the multicultural broadcaster.

The Australian media writer Michael Bodey led the charge in a story three days after the announcement with observations like “Michael Ebeid’s appointment …has been greeted with a mixture of shock and bemusement” and “Some of his former colleagues are incredulous at his appointment, with one describing it as ‘weird’.”

A week later he returned to the topic with a story headlined “Angst over Ebeid SBS appointment” in which he reported that “a number of internal candidates who failed to win the top job [were] considering their options.”

This especially obvious conclusion – a clear case of dog-bites-man journalism – came hard on the heels of an article in New Matilda in which I argued precisely that some of the current executive should be trembling in their shoes.

I wrote that Ebeid would inherit “a weak senior management team” and that “his first task — and the first indicator of how well he will perform — should be to drastically re-engineer management at the broadcaster.

“He is allegedly not a man inclined to slash-and-burn, but unless he asserts his presence immediately with dismissals, more rigorous performance management and some clever new appointments, hope for reform will be dashed.”

Bodey described some of the current SBS executive as “high profile and well-credentialled candidates”, which suggests that either he or they are out of touch with the level of expertise needed to reinvigorate the national broadcaster and which presumably – at least in the selection panel’s eyes – they don’t possess to Ebeid’s level..

Apart from the fact that Ebeid’s qualifications for the job can appear thin under some lights, it’s not difficult to guess why some at SBS will not welcome his appointment, apart from any individuals who might feel hurt at being passed over.

The current executive team was almost all appointed by Brown when he was Head of Television or managing director. They owe him a degree of loyalty and they have presumably felt comfortable enough under his vision and management to have stayed during SBS’s decline and its move away from its core multicultural Charter. Of the 12-member Executive Brown put in place after a major restructure of the corporation, only one had a discernibly non-English speaking background, the head of the multilingual radio division.

While some senior managers might be fearful of losing their well-paid jobs under the new broom, it is also possibly that certain cliques within SBS are fearful having a boss who is obviously and unquestionably “ethnic”, working to a Board which is increasingly culturally diverse and headed by a Chairman who has publicly committed to making SBS more responsive to its Charter responsibilities “to provide multilingual and multicultural radio and television services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society”.

Little wonder staff at all levels might be jittery. For many managers and staff appointed after the onset of the “mainstreaming” years of the Board under Brown and Chairman Carla Zampatti, multiculturalism is almost a foreign land.

To have a boss who not only knows the lie of that land – and which natives are friendly and which are not – but also publicly believes in the multicultural vision can be a very scary thing.

Of course, none of the decision-makers at SBS will admit to this lack of understanding because – to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld – they don’t know that they don’t know. For the past several years they have cocooned themselves in the SBS universe, protected from the realities of multicultural Australia by an active policy of disengagement from those in the ethnic communities – especially the so-called “ethnic lobby” – who might try to tell them what to do. Worse than this, many managers and staff at SBS have spent so much time telling each other they are unique that they no longer benchmark their performance in the real world to check how well they’re tracking against more universal standards.

So occasionally there is a need for someone new to bring a fresh perspective into an organisation. When Brown first took over SBS TV and then the whole corporation, he brought in so many outsiders to replace existing managers that long-time staff used to joke that the only thing they would not admit at an interview for a job within SBS was that they already worked there.

The irony, of course, is that those same newcomers are now moaning that the top job should have gone to an internal candidate. A case not of dog bites man, but dog bites self.

________

FOOTNOTE: Significantly, by the end of the week, the Sydney Morning Herald was running a story about a backlash against the white-anting – whatever the term for that is. Defenders of Ebeid and his appointment quoted in the article included Foxtel chief executive Kim Williams. The ABC’s managing director Mark Scott and SBS chairman Joseph Skrzynski both reiterated their support for Ebeid.

Egyptian-born, Australian-raised Michael Ebeid is such a cleanskin he’s almost translucent. Of course, many people rise to senior public jobs out of left field, but there’s usually a trail of some sort. With Ebeid there’s not much.

Even a well-connected former Board member of the ABC, where Ebeid is currently Director of Corporate Strategy and Marketing, admits to knowing “nothing about him”. According to this source, Ebeid hasn’t exactly left a trail of achievements in three years — but acknowledges that achievements in Ebeid’s area of responsibility often don’t have a public profile.

So who is Michael Ebeid and what does his appointment to the top job in Australia’s second national public broadcaster portend?

Most observers agree he seems a nice enough bloke. He is variously described as intelligent, smart, articulate, personable, consultative and approachable. In fact everything you’d want in a good friend or a boss. And he’s young, tech-savvy and the first MD to enter SBS with his own Twitter account.

But is all that enough to haul the once-admired SBS back from the brink of irrelevance? Is he sufficiently driven, tough and experienced for the task?

Certainly he is probably the least qualified managing director for many years in terms of professional journalism or program experience, two qualities by which SBS has always defined itself.

Although the first managing director, R.E. Fowell, came from commercial radio, his successor Ron Brown was a professional public servant — but both in their way suited the times. Between Fowell’s appointment in 1978 and Ron Brown’s departure in 1987, SBS functioned as a start-up public service broadcaster, beginning with a multilingual radio service then adding a fledgling television station.

But the next four MDs all had varying degrees of experience in broadcasting and/or journalism. Hawke appointee Brian Johns had been a journalist and book publisher. Malcolm Long was Deputy Managing Director of the ABC. Nigel Milan had a long and generally successful career in broadcasting including the Australian Radio Network and Radio New Zealand. The current MD Shaun Brown was a journalist and TV executive from New Zealand.

The fact that Ebeid has no practical experience in radio, television or news production — SBS Chairman Joseph Skrzynski had to argue that Ebeid had managed media-related functions at Optus and the ABC — has many people inside and outside SBS worried. But then again, Shaun Brown had oodles of experience and is leaving the national broadcaster in a perilous and parlous state.

Ebeid has going for him five important factors.

Number one, he is the first managing director in the multicultural broadcaster’s 33-year history with a bona fide non-English speaking background. He may not be any better known in multicultural Australia than in the world of broadcasting, but he will intuitively understand the complexities of cultural and linguistic diversity. This fact alone will let him honeymoon for at least six months safe from criticism that he’s another “Anglo” telling “ethnics” what to do and what to watch.

He will also have Skrzynski’s full support. Although Crikey commentator Margaret Simons says Sky News CEO Angelos Frangopolous was the Board’s first choice, Ebeid’s actually the kind of bright, articulate, second-generation NESB Australian Skrzynski and younger SBS supporters have been looking for.

Given Skrzynski’s apparent desire for SBS to return closer to its multicultural roots after straying under the Board headed by Carla Zampatti, and given the current attempt by the new Chairman of the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia (FECCA) Pino Migliorino — who is Ebeid’s generation — to kickstart a defence of multiculturalism, there might be enough chemistry to create a spark.

The second thing going for Ebeid is that he will have political support in Canberra. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy obviously backs Ebeid’s appointment and it has been suggested that Ebeid will be in sympathy with the Labor Government.

Thirdly, Ebeid claims a good track record in financial management, having increased the revenue of Optus’s Consumer and Multimedia division from $560 million to $1.8 billion in four years. Skrzynski is a financier by trade and SBS needs a boost in revenue.

Ebeid’s fourth positive is, perversely, that he doesn’t have a significant background in broadcasting or news. Not only can he distinguish himself from Shaun Brown as more qualified in other ways, he will actually need to attract talent to fill the gaps and to support him, especially in his role as editor-in-chief.

Brown is leaving behind him a weak senior management team, almost all of them his appointees as Head of Television and then as MD (not one of whom was considered worthy to replace him). Under Brown — who likes control and dislikes dissent — SBS lost decades of experienced professionals some of whom were replaced by managers on the edge of their competence. When the veteran Head of Radio, Quang Luu, left six months after Brown became MD, a Senate Estimates committee was told his replacement, Paula Masselos, was insufficiently experienced. She was allowed to run out the final months of her contract at home.

Ebeid’s first task — and the first indicator of how well he will perform — should be to drastically re-engineer management at the broadcaster. He is allegedly not a man inclined to slash-and-burn, but unless he asserts his presence immediately with dismissals, more rigorous performance management and some clever new appointments, hope for reform will be dashed.

For this is no ordinary succession, no simple passing of the baton. Despite management protestations otherwise and claims in 2009 that SBS TV had lifted its annual evening audience by 22 per cent, the fact remains its audience share still wallows in the single digits. That 22 per cent reflected a rise in audience share of just 1 per cent over five years — and left SBS still well behind the other networks. Until relatively recently it had not seen a significant increase in its base funding for several years and is now $3 million in debt. It has lost a swag of on-screen talent, advertising revenue is below target and its profile has seldom been lower.

In 2009 SBS management asked staff for feedback on their performance and got a resounding thumbs down in several areas. Brown put in place reforms and recently polled staff again. While the results have been kept under lock and key this time to prevent further negative publicity — always hypocritical in a news organisation — SBS management does not seem to have made much headway in major areas. When 180 radio staff were asked why only half of them had filled in the new questionnaires, managers were told in no uncertain terms that many people could not be bothered because they saw no signs of improvement.

Taken on their own, these might be seen as a measure of how difficult it is for a broadcaster such as SBS to thrive with specific public obligations and limited resources. But given that the Zampatti board removed almost all constraints on ratings and revenue raising by reinterpreting the Charter to make it almost as broad as the ABC’s, allowing in-program advertising, slashing costs and outsourcing major functions, the lack of significant success is damning.

And this is Ebeid’s fifth strength — he is not Shaun Brown.

Whatever Ebeid’s qualities and experience — or lack of it — he has the dubious freedom to try almost anything knowing he can’t do much more harm.

There is even renewed talk of a merger with the ABC, though for the SBS Board to appoint someone like Ebeid from the ABC would be a decidedly odd way of achieving that — or even of signalling an openness to the idea. If SBS were going to merge, they would presumably want someone other than a former ABC executive as MD in order to protect their interests during negotiations.

While we may see greater cooperation in back-office functions such as human resources, finance, studio operations and engineering beyond what is already being done or envisaged by people such as the ABC’s Mark Scott, any closer co-operation in areas of program production and commissioning, radio and news and current affairs would effectively be a merger anyway and Australia might not yet be ready for such a step.

Ironically, the more successful Ebeid is the further away that vision will recede.

One of the reasons SBS radio broadcasters are now generally in favour of a merger after opposing it for decades is they think that they will survive under the ABC — and that their managers will not. Whether the wider community — especially ethnic Australia — is ready for a merger is another issue that will probably not have to exercise Ebeid’s mind in his first few months.

His first job is to get the SBS train back on the tracks before he starts thinking about repainting the livery.

__________

A version of this article first appeared in New Matilda on 21 April 2011

There are plenty of other contenders; financial crises, international terror, religious fundamentalism/atheism, poverty, pandemics, overpopulation, nuclear disaster, moral decline, the list is long. But when push comes to shove, when Torquemada applies the thumbscrews for an answer, climate change is the one most experts choose.

With only a few exceptions, it is universally acknowledged by climatologists that global warming is essentially man-made, that left unchecked it will have a devastating effect on the planet but there are things we can do about it if we act quickly with will and fortitude.

So how come (a) it’s not keeping most citizens awake at night and (b) our political leaders find it so difficult to take effective action?

How come a recent Pew Center survey of Americans put it second last of their 22 top public policy concerns for 2011?

Admittedly, the survey focused on short-term issues and one could therefore blame a raft of more immediately pressing problems for Americans such as getting or keeping a job or trying to access a dysfunctional public healthcare system.

But there are more than 80 million children under the age of 20 in the US, so why aren’t their parents freaking out about the world they and their children’s children are likely to inherit – if there is to be one?

Slightly more reassuring were the results of an Ipsos MORI poll conducted in September 2010 which asked more than 7,000 people in eight countries what were the “two or three greatest challenges facing the world?” The framing of the question to allow multiple priorities tended to blur the issues, but global warming and climate change topped the poll on 46 percent, equal to war on terror.

Significantly, climate change was more important to the citizens of China (67%), Brazil (56%), South Africa (54%) and India (53%) than to the more prosperous denizens of Saudi Arabia (44%), Australia (37%), Britain (33%) and the US (22%). Bizarrely, Australians, who live on one of the most fragile continents on earth and who have been suffering a succession of climatic disasters, ranked terrorism as their number one bugaboo and overpopulation as a close third despite the fact that terrorism is practically unknown in their country and they have one of the least dense populations on the planet, perhaps confirming that Australians still find the rest of the world a very scary place.

The greatest moral challenge of our age

To be frank, they find their own country a quite frightening place too, if domestic politics is any barometer. Though they allegedly deserted Kevin Rudd’s Labor Government in droves when he abandoned real action on climate change after earlier calling it “the greatest moral challenge of our age”, they have recently been scurrying away from his successor, Julia Gillard, who is belatedly attempting to do something practical about it.

They are flocking to the Opposition led by putative climate change denier Tony Abbott partly because he is running an effective scare campaign that action will involve a “great big new tax”. It may be a lie and is certainly scaremongering, but it is a message even the dumbest of voter can understand, compared to the obfuscation and mixed messaging that has been tying the Gillard Government in nots – it’s not a tax and anyway it’s not going to hurt.

The tragedy for the ALP is, of course, that they have a strong product to sell – “the greatest moral challenge of our age” – but they don’t have the native wit or the boldness to sell it. 

Kevin Rudd has now had the common sense to admit he made a mistake in not going to the polls with a plan for pricing carbon while his popularity was at its peak and voters were most supportive of the idea.

Instead, his inner cabinet and advisors misjudged the mood and projected themselves forward to time when the electorate would be less supportive, i.e. now. They feared the worst, missed their opportunity and now the worst has come to pass anyway.

So why did they choke at such a crucial time?

Because they tried too hard to tap into so-called “indicators of the public mood” instead of listening to the mood itself. They placed too much reliance on artificial focus groups and faulty polling techniques, such as asking people whether they wanted to pay more taxes rather than whether they would pay to save humanity.

But most damagingly, they listened far too seriously to tabloid media run by people with a very personal stake in keeping their own taxes as low as possible.

There would be few shock jocks or tabloid editors not on six or seven figure salaries subject to the top marginal rate of income tax, driving imported cars worth more than the annual average wage and moving between homes subject to breathtakingly large bills for rates, utility charges, servants and stamp duties. Obviously such people oppose taxes, but because they too get only one vote every three years they need to convince their readers and listeners to be outraged too, even those such as Alan Jones whose average listener’s income is a mere fraction of his own.

The enduring mystery of Jones is still why countless Prime Ministers, ministers and opposition spokespersons continue to beat a path to his studio when he speaks to only a tiny clique of older Australians, less than 1-in-20 Sydneysiders.

But it is wrong to lay all the blame on the loopy end of the media spectrum. Even serious journals like the Sydney Morning Herald can run a front page story which out-scares the usual scaremongers with a 72-point bold headline proclaiming “Family carbon bill to hit $863”.

The article was based on a report by Treasury released under a Freedom of Information request by the Federal Opposition. Lenore Taylor’s piece presented the worst-case scenario of Treasury’s economic modelling by imagining a carbon price of $30 a tonne – the top of a range expected by most analysts – with no inclusion of the likely financial help any government of any political persuasion would offer to compensate low and middle-income families.

The truth buried deep in the article’s 8-point text admitted even this worst-case annual cost would be only an extra $16.60 a week on the average Australian family’s household bills, including petrol, but one cannot imagine a sub-editor writing the headline: “Family carbon bill less than a pack of smokes.”

Good news is not news

Since time immemorial journalists have been sensationalising unpleasant facts to obtain maximum attention. Canadian media theorist Marshall Mcluhan famously said: “The real news is bad news”, to which American journalist Gloria Borge added: “For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.”

But while true, such practices are not necessarily justifiable and in some circumstances – for example, the future of the human species – they are not helpful.

Journalists of all political persuasions have been keen to excoriate Rudd for backing away from “the greatest moral challenge of our age” without looking at our own role in the unfolding tragedy.

Now we need to make a stand on issues as important as climate change. As journalists, we don’t have to take sides or abandon the time-honoured principles of fairness and accuracy, the bedrock of objective journalism. And we must continue to represent all significant viewpoints in the debate and even, when necessary, report the ravings of the lunatic fringes, however unpalatable or destructive they might seem.

But we have to recognise we cannot continue to treat our readers, listeners or viewers as empty vessels waiting to be filled with our particular take on wisdom.

We have to stop covering the debate on carbon pricing as a bare-knuckle political punch-up and start treating it as a deadly serious scientific and economic issue. We must re-occupy the middle ground and develop a truly impartial style and a more honest relationship with our audiences.

If there is bad news to communicate, then we must report that fairly and clearly. After all, a carbon price is meant to hurt someone enough to change their behaviour, otherwise what’s the point. But if the sky is not actually falling – and a carbon price will not leave us paupers on the street – we must explain that too.

Every succeeding generation of Australian media consumers is getting more media savvy, more able to recognise the way the press, broadcasting and the Internet operate, more able to deconstruct the media message. It’s time media practitioners and other opinion leaders got up-to-date with the people we serve.

After all, the sign of a mature democratic society is when its leaders can tell bad news honestly, its media can communicate it effectively and its citizens can accept it knowingly.

___

Footnote: To be fair, the Herald redeemed itself somewhat four days later with an Opinion page article by economics reporter Jessica Irvine explaining why a carbon price could be a good thing economically.

Even when reporters try to stay in the background and not become part of the story, eventually the spotlight is turned back on them and in its glare they are often accused of being rude, insensitive, aggressive, self-centred, arrogant, incompetent or demanding.

Everyone’s work can be judged by the way is done rather than the outcome that is achieved – performers are perhaps the most extreme example – and almost all workers, tradespeople and professionals face criticism some time or another. But very few professions suffer as much opprobrium for so little praise as do journalists.

Surveys in Western democracies consistently show that journalists feature at the bottom of most professions measured against indices such as trustworthiness. We are often only slightly above criminals and used car salesman. In the annual Ipsos MORI survey of trustworthy professions in Britain, journalists have taken bottom spot for most of the past 27 years. A poll by Roy Morgan found fewer than one in five Australians found TV reporters ethical and honest while only one in ten trusted newspaper journalists.

A low opinion from our fellow citizens seems to come with the job, and nowhere is it more obvious than in the wake of media coverage of natural disasters.

The Australasian region has had enough of these recently for the behaviour of journalists to emerge as a common theme. From floods in Queensland and Victoria, bushfires in Western Australia and cyclones in Fiji and northern Australia to the recent devastating earthquake in New Zealand, critics have been out in force condemning the boorish antics of journalists – especially television reporters and news photographers – and their coverage of events in the media.

Disaster porn

It has been labelled – rightly or wrongly – disaster porn and recent public concern in Australasia reached a peak with the Christchurch earthquake. Few sectors of the media have been spared.

Whether it was camera crews chasing exhausted rescuers across rubble or newspapers emblazoning across their pages a photograph of a man and his two children in utter despair over the death of their mother, journalists were seen to have hit a new low in their behaviour.

ABC TV’s Media Watch program devoted several minutes to charges that Channel Seven used deceit to interview a traumatised survivor in her hospital bed and that Australian television networks repeatedly used footage of a woman being carried from the rubble despite her pleading with the camera operator shooting the initial live footage to “Go away!” Presenter Jonathan Holmes said: “Despite her plainly expressed reluctance to be filmed, that was one of the shots used again and again on Australian TV for days in news stories, in promos and just as a kind of wallpaper until the human anguish they represented became dulled by repetition.” [The image here from Media Watch has been masked by DogBitesMan.]

Of course, disasters bring out the best and the worst in many people, and they magnify both the good and the bad. But it now seems inevitable that journalists will be excoriated at some stage in the coverage of disasters, especially when the initial shock of victims and rescuers wears off and reality reasserts its grip.

Are journalists really as bad as they are painted?

Certainly Jonathan Green, editor of the ABC online site The Drum, thought the behaviour of some in Christchurch left much to be desired. He told a panel discussion on ABC Radio National that much of the coverage was voyeuristic and “stole from people a most massive amount of dignity and vastly intruded on their privacy”.

He blamed commercial considerations for driving the intrusiveness.

“There’s this sort of commercial imperative in this sort of coverage to get your people on the ground, to get the brekkie crew in place so that they can do the morning programs in situ,” he said.

Mark Calvert, Director of News and Current Affairs at Channel Nine agreed there was a line that shouldn’t be crossed and said his network had not used the image of the grieving father and his sons, but he denied journalists generally intruded on purpose. He reminded us that the media had a duty to attend disasters and to report what was happening. That was their role and what was expected from their viewers, readers and listeners.

Gavin Morris, Head of Continuous News at the ABC, said live coverage meant confronting events happened quickly and unpredictably and therefore TV networks in particular had to have mechanisms in place to break away when images became too confronting or invasive. He said several times during ABC TV coverage on the first day of the Christchurch earthquake decisions were made to switch away from images that were too troubling.

“But live news is, by its nature, confronting,” he said, “particularly when you’ve got a very dramatic event unfolding before your eyes.”

Green, however, still felt that sometimes rolling television news – which he said was a relatively recent phenomenon – could descend into “institutionalised voyeurism”.

And host Fran Kelly asked why Channel Nine had to put Karl Stefanovic, host of their breakfast show Today, on the ground. Were individual networks trying to put their stamp on the coverage, so that it became a product they were offering?

Celebritisation of news

Calvert defended Stefanovic’s qualities as a journalist and added significantly “our viewers expect to see him there”, in one short phrase highlighting one of the major causes of public and professional disquiet – the celebritisation of news.

It has been mentioned in these columns before, but the elevation of journalists and non-journalist TV presenters to the status of celebrities damages news reporting, production and presentation.

It harms reporting because celebrity presenters – even qualified anchors – are seldom the network’s best reporters. Even accepting the doubtful proposition that broadcasters necessarily attract great journalists, the qualities that make a good presenter – looks, voice, manner and personality – are not necessarily those which make a good reporter, such as doggedness, thoughtfulness, a sharp intellect and a general carelessness about how one appears as long as the story is told to the best of one’s ability.

Production suffers because producers and editors feel the need to present the event through the eyes of the principal narrator (the anchor) rather than through alternative techniques or talent.

And most of all, the telling of the story suffers because news presentation is a zero sum proposition. It requires both the story and people to tell it. Weight it too much on one side, such as the celebritisation of the presenters, and it detracts from the story. At the very least it is distracting but at worst it trivialises the event itself, reducing it to a vehicle for the celebrity journalist and a marketing tool for the network.

It is this which is most damaging to quality journalism and news and current affairs, not the difference between commercial media and public broadcasters. As Calvert pointed out, commercial networks do not run rolling coverage to make money; often it loses audiences. And public broadcasters have long played the celebritisation game. The ABC, for example, launched its revamped 7.30 current affairs program (formerly titled The 7.30 Report) with a strangely creepy focus on the two new presenters Leigh Sales and Chris Uhlmann. Both are competent journalists, but the ABC’s decision to promote the presenters above the news will inevitably prompt comparisons with celebrity breakfast hosts like Stefanovic or David Koch’s clowning on Channel Seven’s Sunrise program – and not to the credit of Sales, Uhlmann or the ABC.

Which brings us finally and neatly to the nub of the issue and the reason why the media will always be criticised at some stage in the coverage of disasters.

Because not all media are the same.

It sounds trite, but cannot be stressed often enough. In covering disasters some journalists behave well and some behave badly.

Just as it would be ridiculous to claim “all doctors are cold-hearted” or “the health service is inefficient”, so it is with journalists and the media.

It is a very broad industry employing a dizzying variety of practitioners and ranging all the way from deeply serious and worthy newspapers such as the Washington Post, whose reporters on the Watergate expose were required to get two or more independent sources for every major fact, to sections of the media which are purely and unapologetically entertainment driven, such as sitcoms and lifestyle shows.

The dangers are most real in the grey areas which have either intentionally or accidentally developed between the two extremes. Breakfast television is just the most obvious example, but television, radio, newspapers and the Internet are riddled with cases where infotainment is presented as news or where news is so packaged, branded and marketed that its core values disappear beneath the sheer weight of superfluous dross.

There is no right or wrong answer to the question: “Did the media behave badly during the Christchurch/Hurricane Katrina/Chilean mine disaster?”

Some behaved exceptionally well and some made us all cringe in shame.

The real question should be: “How do we, as a profession and as an industry lift our game and shame those who – through ignorance or selfishness – bring it down?”