Tag Archive for: journalism

Rebuilding Australia’s media voice in the South Pacific

Australia’s polity grapples with the need to remake and rebuild our media voice in the South Pacific.

One of the missing bits of our Pacific step-up is the lack of much vision—or understanding—of Australia’s role in the regional conversation.

Domestic political battles and budget cuts have degraded the central role Australia played in islands journalism in the 20th century. Our media voice in the South Pacific is at its weakest since Robert Menzies launched the shortwave radio service in 1939.

Now we must reimagine that role and empower that voice for the 21st century—a new model of talking with, not to, the South Pacific.

The policy failure that has so weakened our voice in the past decade had one deeply familiar element—recurring Oz amnesia about our interests, influence and values in the islands.

See the amnesia lament offered by a Canberra wise owl, Nick Warner, in his Financial Review op-ed about ‘Australia’s long Pacific stupor’: ‘For two generations, since the end of World War II, Australia has squandered the chance to build deep and enduring relations with our neighbours in the South Pacific. And now it’s almost too late.’

This is a candid view from the heart of the Canberra system. You don’t get much more plugged in and powerful than Warner, who served as our top diplomat in Papua New Guinea, led the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, and then headed the Department of Defence, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and the Office of National Assessments.

Warner’s ‘stupor’ history frames his diagnosis of how China could clinch a security treaty with Solomon Islands:

China is now seemingly entrenched in Solomons and will also be looking for other opportunities for a base elsewhere in the Pacific. But, for better or worse, Pacific politics seldom provide certainty. It’s not too late for Australia to shore up its place in the South Pacific and to protect its strategic interests.

The need to ‘shore up our place’ that Warner points to brings us back to a specific example of the stupor/amnesia—the degrading of our media voice in the islands and the role of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

In the South Pacific, Radio Australia and the international television service, ABC Australia, still do great work. But they have only a third of the budget they enjoyed a decade ago. Underline that stupor/amnesia fact: spending on the ABC as our Indo-Pacific media voice has been cut by two-thirds.

In 2014, the Abbott government hacked into the ABC by killing funding for international television, a sad, bad and dumb decision that also decimated Radio Australia.

Political payback in Canberra produced a gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight tragedy in the South Pacific. The Abbott aim was to scratch the anti-Aunty itch, but he badly wounded a major instrument of Australian foreign policy. The damage was compounded when the ABC turned off shortwave in 2017; here again was a domestic focus that damaged our regional interests.

For an account of all this, see ASPI’s Hard news and free media as the sharp edge of Australia’s soft power.

In this long-running melodrama with elements of dark comedy, a valiant ABC is also a victim—with foes instead seeing Aunty as villain. What a long run the drama has had: three generations of Murdochs have warred with Aunty, starting in the 1930s with Keith Murdoch’s bitter fight against the creation of an independent ABC news service.

A re-run of the domestic battle devaluing our international voice happened with Labor’s election campaign launch last month of its Indo-Pacific broadcasting strategy, promising the ABC an extra $8 million a year for international programs, plus a review of whether shortwave should be restored.

Labor’s idea is a good first step to restart Australia’s conversation with the islands, Jemima Garrett writes, but it ‘seems to be simply pushing out more “Australian content” and crowding the regional airwaves with “Australian voices”. This is “soft power” in a crude form—a one-way monologue when what is needed is a dialogue—a 21st century conversation in which Australia and Australians talk “with” and not “to” our Pacific neighbours.’

Preferring hard power to soft power, Prime Minister Scott Morrison called Labor’s policy ‘farcical’, saying that in the South Pacific, ‘I sent in the AFP [Australian Federal Police]. The Labor Party wants to send in the ABC, when it comes to their Pacific solution.’

Australia, of course, needs it all—the AFP and the Australian Defence Force, but also the ABC.

In this argument, I declare my love of Aunty. I worked as a journalist for Radio Australia and the ABC (1975–2008) and had the huge privilege of spending much time as a correspondent in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. I did break the habit of a lifetime by putting the boot into Aunty when it switched off shortwave. The ABC had damaged its international role, set by parliamentary charter, in favour of its domestic responsibilities.

Labor’s soft-power thinking is work in the minor key compared to the recent effort of parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade.

In the final sitting week before the start of the election campaign, the committee issued its report Strengthening Australia’s relationships in the Pacific. The media recommendations were the most ambitious to come out of Canberra in many a day:

The Committee notes the media environment within the Pacific is becoming more contested, and recognises Australia has a national interest in maintaining a visible and active media and broadcasting presence there. The Committee recommends the Australian Government considers steps necessary to expand Australia’s media footprint in the Pacific, including through:

– expanding the provision of Australian public and commercial television and digital content across the Pacific, noting existing efforts by the PacificAus TV initiative and Pacific Australia;

– reinvigorating Radio Australia, which is well regarded in the region, to boost its digital appeal; and

– consider[ing] governance arrangements for an Australian International Media Corporation to formulate and oversee the strategic direction of Australia’s international media presence in the Pacific.

I own up to the idea for the creation of an Australian international media corporation, contained in my submission to the inquiry. The committee’s findings and the idea of a new international body, to build on the ABC foundations, will be the next column in these musings on the Oz media voice in the South Pacific.

Hate and broadcasting, media and power

A killer walks into mosques in Christchurch and broadcasts a message of hate around the world.

The 50 murders reveal again the disrupted landscape of our digital world.

In an age of information chaos, a lone wolf can speak loudly. Murder was done for a media purpose. This column, then, is about media purposes, not the hateful message of a despicable man.

The modern nature of power is recast by the digital realm. Broadcasting and journalism morph as media convergence brings them together.

Take the terms ‘broadcasting’, ‘publishing’ and ‘media’, which have become almost interchangeable. Convergence means that the act of publishing is a merged stream of text, audio and vision.

The murderer published and broadcast as he acted.

Editors have lost their traditional power as information gatekeepers. For a couple of centuries, editors controlled information. The gatekeeper rule was that newspapers, radio and TV couldn’t tell you what to think, but they could tell you what to think about.

Journalism still matters greatly, but the agenda-setting role of news has gone forever.

The gatekeeper role was crumbling as the twin towers crashed in 2001 on September 11th. The pictures were the message—no journalism needed. In the way we measure eras, that’s symbolically appropriate. At the start of a new century, 9/11 announced a remaking of the media rules. The message can surge over the gatekeepers.

The broadcast streams live and many can instantly see, hear and read.

The old editorial gatekeepers ponder the ethics of the new age. What should be reported and how should it be reported? What can be said and what must be cut out?

The new platform gatekeepers pitch their algorithms against the digital torrent. The digital wizards soar and drown simultaneously. Old editing dilemmas confront new media.

Facebook, Twitter and message groups struggled to contain the Christchurch hate broadcast with limited and late success. Emily Bell, director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, observes that platforms are now as accountable as the press:

Individuals, trained by the platforms to understand how to influence and publish, are now well versed in creating material the platforms find difficult to purge. Information, it seems, will get out. This raises a question for the press about how journalists ought to treat newsworthy but highly sensitive events. While the ambition is always to have the best possible reporting in difficult situations, there is inevitably debate about where the line should be drawn in terms of coverage and focus—now, that balance must also take into account the fact that the press no longer controls what information is available.

Pity the editors, new or old. Not only must they do the facts and do ’em fast, now they must ponder contagion effects.

As Bell comments: ‘Responsible reporters ought to have the basics imprinted on their subconscious: Do not report facts until they are verified, do not focus on the perpetrator over the victims, do not use sensational language that might glamorize the terrorist.’

Fair enough. For journalists, this is good but old stuff. It’s pretty much what I had drummed into me when I entered the craft five decades ago. The facts, please. Balance. Context. Get it fast, but get it right. If you’re accurate, you get believed, even trusted. Some basics don’t change, even if methods and means are in turmoil.

The people who do politics and policy confront a similar set of dilemmas that reach to basic truths.

A striking element of the era of information chaos is the understanding that good journalism is a public good. And, further, in the digital age, that the market can’t always be relied on to produce good journalism as a public good. Don’t take the word of a mere hack for all this. It’s vouched for by the econocrats of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission as it examines the impact of Google and Facebook on Oz media.

Looking at the digital disruption, ACCC chair Rod Sims says there’s ‘a problem with the commercial model for the funding of news and journalism’ and ‘we cannot simply leave the production of news and journalism entirely to market forces’. Sims lays out a set of judgements to establish that journalism is a public good: ‘News and journalism are different to many other commercial activities in that they benefit both the individual and also society as a whole.’

Sims gives an economist’s version of the reality journalists have been grappling to understand—‘with a mixture of impotence, incomprehension and dread’—as we rocket deeper into the 21st century. The mixture quote is from a former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, who argues that journalism faces an existential threat.

In one of the best books written on what the tumult is doing to hack world, Breaking news: the remaking of journalism and why it matters now, Rusbridger explains how the old model of news is broken while half-truths blast around the planet’s information ecosystem. Fake attacks fact.

As Rusbridger laments, ‘news is broken’, and that’s bad for people and their societies.

A lone Australian terrorist in Christchurch creates problems for Australia in its relations with two significant Muslim nations, Turkey and Indonesia. That’s a powerful broadcast by one bad man.

For journalists as much as for those who do politics and policy, Christchurch poses—yet again—agonising questions.

Give the final word to Rusbridger: ‘Once, to do journalism, all you needed was knowledge of shorthand and to read a couple of books on law and local government. Now the best journalists had to be moral philosophers and students of ethics. The speed of change was both dizzying and relentless.’

The public service: passion, evidence, bring out the dead

The ecosystem that is the Canberra public service is wonderfully complicated. Journalists always have problems getting a handle on the public service, not least because of the diversity of its purposes. Then there’s the secrecy and the professional reticence. And those politicians who sit up top and—in theory—make all the decisions and the noise.

The Canberra rules work differently for the public service and the pols. For the politicians, the unholy trinity of power, politics and policy are rendered:

  1. It’s always personal
  2. There’s always a deal
  3. Follow the money

For the public service, the first two rules shift dramatically

  1. It’s never personal
  2. Evidence should always drive the decision
  3. Follow the money

For a journalist to go deep into the public service—adding anthropology and zoology to usual hack skills—requires one big leap. They have to leave the press gallery in the big house under the flag. Most never try.

In my time in Canberra, two journalists have done outstanding anthropology/zoology work: Bruce Juddery and Verona Burgess, both wonderful hacks at The Canberra Times with completely different styles.

Juddery, in the 1960s and 1970s especially, broke open the public service as something a journo could actually cover. His 1974 book, At the Centre: the Australian Bureaucracy in the 1970s, was a revelation of how the Canberra secret society of policy pedants worked.

Juddery thrived in the time of permanent secretaries with knighthoods, when the public service ruled itself and often its political master. Then he charted the shift, started by Whitlam, to assert greater political control and impose the minders.

An old-school journo—glass in one hand, cigar in the other—Juddery warred with everyone, especially the sub editors. He strove to create intricate sentences so tautly strung no sub could touch a word. His ornate questions at Press Club luncheons were legend.

In his obituary of Juddery, Jack Waterford recalled: ‘At the National Press Club, Bruce was famous for his long and involved questions, barbed with asides. After one such question to the then visiting US president, Bill Clinton, Mr Clinton suddenly smiled and said, ‘I was briefed about you’.’

Where Juddery used a broadsword, Verona Burgess wields a lighter, finer blade. Her aim is true and the wounds are precise. For 26 years—first with The Canberra Times, the last dozen with The Financial Review—she’s marched through the jungle as the mandarins perished, marking the coming of managerialism and minders galore.

Verona’s ‘Government Business’ column in The Fin has been a Canberra must. So it was a shock last Thursday to read her announce that after 550 columns, she’s pulling stumps.

The Fin has developed a habit of heaving its heavies overboard. I’m getting exasperated that by-lines I rely on (Tony Walker on international affairs, Greg Earl on the Asia–Pacific) are doing their Fin farewell pieces.

The manager who did as much as anyone to flummox Fairfax, Fred Hilmer, proved his strangeness by calling his journalists ‘content providers’. The new stage of Fairfax’s bizarre experiment is to do content without providers. Sigh.

Over the years, I’ve often lifted thoughts from Verona Burgess (always steal from the best). In that tradition, here are four thoughts she offered in her farewell Fin column on the Canberra public service:

Passion for Policy: Public servants often feel they must hide their policy passion ‘lest anyone, particularly their ministers, judge them driven by emotion and ideology rather than by cool, impartial and balanced reason.’ Verona quoted a 2005 speech by the Public Service Commissioner, Lynelle Briggs on what that policy passion should mean:

‘It is an intellectual passion for new thinking, for challenging the status quo—a passion for resolving national problems, problems that are said to be unsolvable. It is a passion for working together, and for working differently.’

Evidence-based policy: The Burgess judgement is that recent years of political turmoil have torn at Canberra’s capacity to deliver high-quality, evidence-based policy advice. Whatever the pain, the top public service animals have to keep delivering evidence-based briefs:

‘You don’t have to love it—but you’ll respect them in the morning. It is easier and often more appropriate for independent statutory authorities rather than mainstream departments to speak up on policy, especially in public.’

Bring out the dead: The public service must drag its mistakes out of the closet and learn from what went wrong: ‘In practice, that’s far easier in hindsight—let’s say after a change of government or prime minister and long after headlines have stopped screaming.’

The Burgess creed: A deep commitment to the public service, to its all-important and legally enshrined ethical values and that abiding policy drive:

‘Public service is the foundation of good government, but is always a work in progress that needs the disinfectant of sunlight to keep it healthy and accountable. It is a human institution, a social ecosystem of its own and endlessly fascinating to those who take the trouble to look closely at it.’