The 2019-20 fire season was so destructive it became known as the Black Summer. The positioning became too much even for James Murdoch at the height of the 2020 bushfire crisis, when he and his wife, Kathryn, released a statement saying they were “particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary”.įirefighters struggling against strong winds in an effort to secure nearby houses from bushfires near Nowra in New South Wales.
It highlighted the views of climate sceptics long after the science was clear and those views were discredited, fomenting doubt and confusion to back an editorial position often in favour of Australia delaying effective domestic action, a goal that sadly, it helped to achieve. The organisation’s coverage of global heating is an obvious example. But, as has been extensively traversed over the years, including in Robert Manne’s 2011 Quarterly essay Bad News, the exercise of power did at times appear to override the truth. Then, as now, there were diligent reporters at the Australian working hard and breaking news, and then, as now, it took an editorial view on issues and politics, as it is entitled to. As successive governments approved mergers that steadily reduced the number of publishers and increased concentration in media ownership over the ensuing decades, urged on by the editorial columns of some of those same papers, concern that power was being exercised in a way that harmed Australia’s democracy eventually grew to the point that more than 1 million Australians signed a petition supported by two former prime ministers, from opposing parties, calling for a royal commission.
News could be angled to suit the commercial or ideological interests of owners or toned down to ensure no advertisers complained.Īll the big mastheads in Australia held that traditional gatekeeping power, but it was wielded most overtly by News Corporation, an organisation I had joined as a junior reporter in 1989. This manageable tempo made it easier to find and test information, but the gatekeeping role also conferred on publishers considerable power to shape public opinion and determine which ideas, and whose ideas, got to be heard, how the obtainable version of the truth was portrayed and framed. The exercise of power did at times appear to override the truth And as we all know, in those days, the media held a near monopoly on the attention of readers, a commodity that ensured those “rivers of gold” in advertising revenue kept flowing. There was more time to ask questions and talk to contacts. Papers dropped on the lawn in the morning and we had until the evening to file news for the following day.
In the late 1980s, the news cycle still moved with the sun. As the waves of financial and technological change battered and shifted how and what we did, when the very concept of truth as the foundation of public debate was challenged, achieving the best obtainable version of the truth became very complicated indeed. Over the next 36 years, I came to understand how slippery and difficult it could be. I absorbed that quote from Woodward and Bernstein: “All good reporting is the same thing – the best obtainable version of the truth.”įrom the starry-eyed perspective of an excited cadet, that idea seemed simple. It was more than a decade after Watergate, but like most reporters of my generation that investigation was an already mythologised touchstone for the power of journalism to effect change. Photograph: David James Bartho/Fairfax Media The final opening of parliament in the Old Parliament House building in September 1987.
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