We can’t let ourselves off the hook
At the Walkley Fund for Journalism Dinner, Foundation chair Kerry O’Brien called for journalists to reflect on our failures as we celebrate our achievements.
Forty-three years ago I went to the Philippines for the ABC’s Four Corners, to cover a disaster story — a tsunami that hit the island of Mindanao, killing 8,000 people. After witnessing close up the nature of President Ferdinand Marcos’s brutal despotism, I stayed on to tell another story, of how Marcos had used martial law, which he’d introduced ostensibly to deal with the threat of communist insurrection, to establish a dictatorship under which a powerful oligarchy of obscenely wealthy families — the so-called Marcos cronies — dominated the country. Marcos was well on the way to becoming the richest of them all.
In the four years since he had declared the state of emergency, 50,000 people had been arrested, 6,000 of them were still imprisoned across 13 detention centres under the very broadly defined charge of subversion. Others simply disappeared without trace. The judicial system’s credibility was gone. The Congress, devoid of debate, was being converted into a museum. Once critical newspapers were now propaganda sheets for a corrupt President.
Given that we’d been warned about the President’s army of nondescript spies and informers through the streets, cafes and hotels of Manila and driving its taxis, I felt exposed as I stood in front of our camera in the square of the city’s Catholic cathedral, reading a litany of torture techniques from the only remaining news publication in the country that still called the government to account, a weekly Catholic journal called Signs of the Times. That litany included:
‘Application of lighted cigarettes to various parts of the body including the ear and the genital area. Electric shocks on different parts of the body including the genital area. Stripping and sexual abuse and sometimes rape of female detainees. Beating with fists and/or gun butts and rubber hoses. Forcing the head into faeces-contaminated toilet bowls. Holding the victim’s head under water until he inhales water or loses consciousness. Squeezing fingers with bullets inserted between them. Pressing hot irons against the sole of the foot.’ I spoke with some of those who were tortured.
Ten years later I was back with another Four Corners crew to record the army coup that finally deposed Marcos and paved the way for a democratically elected government. With cameraman Chris Doig and sound recordist Tim Parrot, I stood in the dark side street running alongside Malacanang Palace, listening to Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos take off on the other side of the palace wall, in a US-supplied helicopter for exile in America and access to his billions in looted gold held in Swiss accounts. As he flew off, and the rebel forces marched on the palace, a pathetically deluded rag tag bunch of Marcos loyalists stood at the palace gates armed with bricks and knives, thinking they were still defending their president. The Marcoses of the world — some of them cloaked in the trappings of democracy — are very good at enlisting the ignorant, the fearful and the prejudiced — as we know.
Those two experiences were an important part of the understanding I’ve built up over decades of how power corrupts, and how absolute power really does corrupt absolutely. I also came to understand the fundamental importance of journalism. That arguably, strong and well-resourced journalism is the primary bulwark against abuse of power, and without being melodramatic about it, the primary bulwark against authoritarianism that can so easily lead to fascism.
I saw the corruption within the Askin government in New South Wales close up in the sixties and early 70s, the corruption of police in NSW, Victoria and Queensland in that same period, the institutionalised corruption that flourished in Queensland in the Bjelke-Petersen era.
The press in Queensland, with a few notable exceptions, was largely ineffectual in the face of Bjelke-Petersen’s abuses — he’d introduced an outrageous gerrymander — and it wasn’t until his 18th year that Chris Masters’ “Moonlight State” program on the ABC’s Four Corners comprehensively exposed the rot within, leading to the Fitzgerald Royal Commission, and the whole house of cards came tumbling down.
There are four fundamental pillars that provide the foundation of democracy. A strong, genuinely representative parliamentary system, an independent judiciary, an apolitical police force upholding the law with integrity, and a strong media.
In Queensland in the Joh era, the parliament was reduced to a rubber stamp, the independence of the judiciary was sadly weakened in the way judges were appointed, the police became a willing partner in the corrupting process, and only the media, belatedly, stood up.
There’s nothing perfect about a democracy. And its imperfections are not only a reflection of the politicians we elect. They’re a reflection of all of us and as every person in this room knows, we humans are all imperfect — we’re imperfect in the way we run our big corporations and our small businesses, our trade unions and our regulators, even our churches. Certainly our churches. The institutions we’ve trusted the most. And of course, we’re imperfect in the way we practice our journalism.
In 2011, the year I rejoined Four Corners as anchor after stepping down from 7.30, the program celebrated its 50th anniversary and the new ABC Chairman, Jim Spigelman was there. He looked on as we reflected on our own glory, and liberally congratulated ourselves, then he gently suggested that we might also reflect on our failures.
I was stung by that in the moment, as were others, but whatever had provoked him to say so, he was right. Four Corners had an enormous legacy to be proud of, half a century in the making; even more so now as royal commission after royal commission is forced on largely reluctant governments, in an age where that brand of journalism is becoming increasingly difficult to practice. But, without whipping ourselves, we should never lose sight of our inadequacies at the same time we celebrate our successes.
Every year at the Walkley Awards, we honour a craft that holds power in its various manifestations big and small, to account. We should also, all be prepared to reflect on our own failures.
The Walkley Foundation, as part of its brief to promote quality journalism, seeks to highlight the immense importance of public interest journalism, as practised by quite a long honour roll of investigative reporters and researchers. But that form of journalism is still only one strand of the craft.
The journalism that is most commonly practised in this country today, as it is in all genuinely liberal democracies, is arguably failing at least as often as it’s succeeding. In every under-staffed newsroom where media releases are published with little or no basic fact-checking, it’s failing.
In every doorstop where camera operators are sent to record the shallow and self-serving lines of politicians without a proper, strong journalistic presence, it’s failing. In every regional centre where the presence of well-trained local journalists is too thinly spread, it’s failing. Every time we’re on the phone when we need to be on the beat to see a situation first hand, we’re failing.
Every time we devalue or disrespect the critical skill of sub-editing — in whatever the medium — we are failing our craft.
Every time media organisations reduce the ratio of wise older hands in the newsrooms of Australia to the younger journeymen and women, and the novices, because experience is more expensive, robbing the young of their mentors — the kinds of mentors that journalists of my era took for granted and flourished from — we’re failing.
Has journalism faced a bigger test of its effectiveness in the past 25 years than in its reporting of climate change — an issue arguably bigger than terrorism, bigger than the rise and hopefully (speaking personally) the fall of Donald Trump, bigger than so many other challenges that preoccupy so much of our waking hours and fill up so much of our journalistic space and time — because ultimately, it actually goes to how our planet survives.
Hold our political leaders to account for their failures on this front? Certainly. But we can’t let ourselves off the hook either. Tough subject to cover. Complex to explain to our readers, our viewers and our listeners. Very tough to hold their interest and keep them accurately informed and engaged over years of obfuscation and manipulation, and the fake information fed by vested interests, and the deniers or so-called agnostics, shrieking from their self-constructed pulpits.
But on any honest reflection, by any yardstick, we have to acknowledge our part in a failed democratic process with regard to climate change. I’m not urging hair shirts and self-flagellation (that’s the Catholic coming out in me) — but we should always be about seeing the whole picture of what we do, not just the bits we like about ourselves and our work.
I was a correspondent in the US for the Seven Network as the age of 24-hour news began to dawn. Because we had the Australian rights to CNN at the time, I saw their operation from the inside. I was struck by the amount of time their journalists spent spruiking in front of camera positions around the country as the live cross became increasingly ubiquitous. I was struck by the amount of time that was sucked up by journalists and other commentators filling the airwaves with cheap talk. Much cheaper than boots on the ground, in filling the big black hole of 24-hour news.
Twenty years ago, I returned to CNN in Atlanta as part of a study for the ABC on how news was being gathered in major television newsrooms in Britain and America. And I noticed a large graph on the wall framing the main stairs in the news centre, and the sign above it that read “CNN’s Chart of Human History”. When I took a closer look I realised it was actually a ratings chart. And the biggest event in human history according to CNN up to that point, was the day the police chased O. J. Simpson through the streets of Los Angeles after his wife had been murdered.
I’m not just talking about CNN here. I’m talking about the nature of modern news-gathering that’s under more severe pressure than ever before. I’m talking about the age of satellites in television, which while it introduced a greater and more immediate sweep of news coverage, also heightened the shallowness and the promotion of news — even serious news — as entertainment, or infotainment, as it quickly came to be called.
This coincided with another phase of the revolution — the arrival of technology that delivered colour to daily newspapers, followed closely by the marketers who began more and more to dictate what stories should be run to reach this demographic or that demographic — so newspapers could withstand the onslaught of instant television news.
And now we’re all struggling in the internet age; the age of digital disruption — well, traditional media outlets are. The new giants of this media age are doing very nicely indeed. And there’s another huge debate being had about all that.
At one level this is all very exciting. We’re seeing the Crikeys, the Buzzfeeds, the Huffington Posts, the Junkees and all the rest — although even those models are having their troubles evolving into more mature, long-term manifestations of reliable news coverage.
This is the age of the podcast — all those people around the world in their Gucci fitness uniforms listening to in-depth news and analysis as they power walk, or sit in traffic snarls on their way to work, or even as they go to sleep.
We’re actually awash with information — and on this front there are no borders. We can access just about anything we want if we know how, or have the resources to do it. Including fake news — and misinformation of the most toxic kind, feeding the prejudices of the naïve, the ignorant and the fearful. We’ve watched the deeply worrying rise of Donald Trump. We’re watching the rebirth of illiberal democracies in Europe. But we can’t be too derisive from the safety of distance because we’re all only too aware of our own endemic vacuum of leadership in this country.
With all this noise around us, The Walkley Foundation, a small but growing institution, is endeavouring to keep its eye on the ball. The protection and promotion of quality in journalism is our game — at the most basic level as well as at the pinnacle.
We’re not just about acknowledging the best and the brightest through an awards process that had small beginnings more than 60 years ago and now more than ever provides the gold standard that anchors arguably the single most important cornerstone of democracy — we are endeavouring to underwrite that gold standard in a very foundational way, to promote mentoring where it’s in short supply, to assist regional journalism to lift its horizons again, to provide a leg up to quality freelance journalism whose income base has all but collapsed.
That’s one reason we’ve established the Walkley grants to assist freelance journalists with worthwhile projects that might otherwise never see the light of day. And it’s my pleasure tonight to announce the winners of the inaugural grants. When we opened these up to applicants in February, we offered $50,000 from the Walkley Public Fund. 117 journalists pitched for grants of up to $10,000 to fund public interest reporting.
Well, we can now give even more than we’d hoped. I am delighted to announce that the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas has provided an additional $25,000 to support the Walkley Grants for Freelance Journalism, making a total pool of $75,000.
The aim of the Judith Neilson Institute is also to celebrate and encourage quality journalism. The Institute’s contribution to the Walkley Grants is an early, modest step in its longer term program. This is an enormous boost; that there are people out there who really do understand the importance of journalism. I understand the Institute will be announcing further grants and initiatives to support quality journalism in coming months. We thank them for their support and wish them well in their endeavours.
And now let’s hear which journalists will be funded. The judging committee chose 11 projects, which will span topics including the environment, health policy, big banks, sport, development, school funding inequality, migrant food workers, refugees and the impact of border policies, and more. In alphabetical order, they are:
- Carol Altmann
- Jessica Cockerill
- Michael Cruickshank
- Nicole Curby
- André Dao, Michael Green & Tia Kass
- Erin Delahunty
- Nina Funnell
- Vivienne Pearson and Margaret Paton
- Kylie Stevenson and Tamara Howie
- Dale Webster
- Brian Wilson
Some of you are here with us tonight and I hope this turns out to be a big step up for you. Would you all join me now in congratulating all of our grant winners.
Although I’ve attempted to put the successful practice of strong journalism in this country into proper context tonight, I’m still looking forward to enjoying the stories of soaring journalism we’ll shortly hear from some of this country’s finest exponents of the craft.
Thank you for joining with The Walkley Foundation in its pursuit of excellence. Thank you for your ongoing support.
Kerry O’Brien is Chair of the Walkley Foundation. He is former editor and host of the 7.30 Report and former host of Four Corners and Lateline, all on the ABC.
This is an edited version of the speech delivered by Kerry O’Brien at the Walkley Fund for Journalism Dinner in Sydney on Friday April 5, 2019.
