No one to blame
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 5: Addicted to Celebrity
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Gideon Haigh
Download the complete article PDF
Gideon Haigh's biography and other articles by this writer
In the media, we do love a trend. If one doesn't exist, in fact, we'll make it up. Two observable instances will suffice for the ruling of the requisite connecting line. Two celebrities seen drinking tea – it's teamania! Two movies about deaf people – it's the deaf craze! Particularly popular are those that resonate with the wistful hankerings of baby boomer bosses. The miniskirt is back! T-shirts with slogans are hot! It's here, it's happening: it's the anti-war movement!
Consider, however, two parallel phenomena where the media themselves are concerned. Trend one: the public's growing contempt for journalists – as the choleric British cabinet minister Alan Clark called us recently "fellows with, in the main, squalid and unfulfilling private lives, insecure in their careers, and suffering a considerable degree of dependence on alcohol and narcotics". A striking aspect of last year's saga of The New York Times's Jayson Blair – on whom Clark's description fitted snugly – was how little his fabulations seemed to matter to its consumers. "The scariest part was that the people we lied about didn't bother to call," agreed the Times's venerable publisher Arthur Sulzberger jnr, "because they just assumed that's the way newspapers worked."
It was Blair's plagiarism that eventually brought him unstuck; plagiarism being journalism's incest – its great taboo. But a USA Today /CNN/Gallup poll soon after the Blair affair found that only 36 per cent of respondents thought the media generally "get the facts straight" – roughly the same proportion as in earlier surveys. For all the concern about the corrosion of public trust, it seemed, the scandal confirmed rather than altered prejudices. Likewise in Australia. Last year saw two books lambasting media practitioners: Paul Sheehan's The Electronic Whorehouse (Macmillan, 2003) and David Flint's The Twilight of the Elites (Freedom Publishing, 2003). To Sheehan, news has become "marbled with the saturated fat of policy agendas"; to Flint, journalists are out of touch with "the common-sense, pragmatic views of the vast majority of Australians". The public ho-hummed – tell us something we don't know, they seemed to say.
Observe also a second trend: the relentless advance, in profile and prestige, of the media as a career option, to be seen in the youths flocking to obtain journalism and communications degrees, the cult of the commentator and the salaries for top-line practitioners unthinkable as little as 15 years ago, the clamour for kudos culminating in a nationally televised ceremony where journalists pin awards on one another like members of a military junta, and the general dignification of the craft as a profession. In its own esteem, it is arguable, journalism has never rated so highly. We're even making a pitch, to use the argot of the therapist, to be "understood". Deep, complex, humane people that we are, we have Ellen Fanning acting as our own agony aunt on SBS's Fine Line.
These are not, of course, new trends so much as continuations of old. The public – let us be frank – has always been leery of us. Remember Humbert Wolfe's 1920s doggerel? "You cannot hope to bribe or twist/Thank God! The British journalist/But, seeing what the man will do/Unbribed, there's no occasion to." Nor is the idea that we simply make stuff up a wholly new development. Who can forget Scoop's Wenlock Jakes sending the phantoms of his imagination into battle?
Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn't know any different, got out, went straight to an hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine-guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window – you know.
As for that surging self-opinion, it recalls H.L. Mencken's famous essay "Journalism in America", where he described the strides in respectability taken by the American press during the first two decades of the 20th century, when "the liberated journalist, taking huge breaths of thrilling air, began to think of himself as a professional man".
Upon that cogitation he is still engaged, and all the weeklies that print the news of the craft are full of its fruits. He elects representatives and they meet in lugubrious conclave to draw up codes of ethics. He begins to read books dealing with professional questions of other sorts – even books not dealing with professional questions. He changes his old cynical view of schools of journalism, and is lured, now and then, into lecturing in them himself ... He no longer sees it as a craft to be mastered in four days, and abandoned at the first sign of a better job. He begins to talk darkly of the long apprenticeship necessary to master its technic, of the wide information and sagacity needed to adorn it, of the high rewards that it offers – or may offer later on – to the man of true talent and devotion. Once he thought of himself, whenever he thought at all, as what Beethoven called a free artist – a gay adventurer careening down the charming highways of the world, the gutter ahead of him but ecstacy in his heart. Now he thinks of himself as a fellow of weight and responsibility, a beginning publicist and public man, sworn to the service of born and unborn, heavy with duties to the Republic and to his profession.
IF MENCKEN WAS SCEPTICAL THEN, THE SCENE TODAY WOULD SURELY TAX his credulity, from the serried ranks of hopefuls studiously debating the question of objectivity as though they were the very first to consider it, to the photo-by-lined Fûhrers of the op-ed pages. And we might profitably ask ourselves whether the trends are related. Jeremiads about journalism divide broadly into two. The first kind, usually from the left, concentrates on proprietorship, conjuring the fearful spectre of interventionist owners serving the gods of Mammon, of Northcliffes selecting cabinets, of Hearsts staging their own wars; the second kind, generally from the right, fulminates about elite groupthink. Both have moments of clarity, but both also tend to confirm, as The Atlantic's James Fallows put it last year, the "one great truth of political life" – that "each side is absolutely convinced that the other has an unfair advantage in getting its views out". They tend to distract attention from what we might find if we investigated the quotidian reality of newsroom life.
I have some experience of this reality. I am also, in many of the senses explored by John Henningham in his research into the backgrounds of Australia's 4500 journalists during the 1990s, supremely average. I am white, middle-class, had some private-school education but lack a degree – all of which place me in majorities. I've spent most of my time in newspapers, where two-thirds of journalists still do. In 12 years of full-time employment, I worked with The Age, The Australian and the Independent Monthly; in almost nine years as a freelancer, I've contributed mainly to The Bulletin, the ABC and The Eye. And that in Australia, as they say, is your lot: Fairfax, Murdoch, Packer, Auntie, with a couple of independent failures chucked in. I am, I will cheerfully concede, a stranger to many areas of journalism. My knowledge extends no further than the print media: it is on newspapers, therefore, that I will concentrate the following remarks. My mobility, too, has only been lateral: having never coveted a column, title or executive responsibility, I have remained simply a producer of stories – or, to use the modern argot, content. But to journalism's elemental processes I have considerable exposure, and from them I have derived immense enjoyment. What follows is observational rather than prescriptive – the spirit in which journalism is undertaken has always seemed to me more important than the techniques applied. It is based, purely and simply, on the large proportion of my adult life spent among reporters and editors.
THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN ETHNOGRAPHICALLY STIMULATING. Among my first impressions when I joined The Age from school in February 1984 was how tirelessly journalists complained. The five of us in our cadet intake were delighted to have jobs, yet we seemed the only ones. A fortnight after our arrival, a well-meaning young deputy news editor thought to initiate us with a night at the pub, where we were introduced to one of the paper's better-known investigative journalists. This wise old newshound, drinking with both hands, proceeded to write himself off before our astonished eyes, pouring out his hatred of the editor and the news desk as he slumped lower and lower over the bar. He sounded like a man on the brink of resignation, perhaps even of suicide. Twenty years later, I need hardly say, he is still there, doing similar work, and probably venting similar views. Whenever I see anyone from The Age these days and they bemoan rock-bottom morale, I suppress a smile. Morale was always dreadful. The pub, incidentally, was called The Golden Age. A suitable location, I used to muse, for conversations about the same subject – it being in the nature of golden ages that they are always behind us.
Members of the public often complain that journalists are negative, that we harp on bad news and feast on people's suffering. You bet we do. "Traffic lights work and all travellers reach destinations safely" is not a story; "Traffic lights fail causing 50-car pile-up" is. What I always found far more interesting was how complaint became a pathology. It is not so much that repeated and prolonged exposure to the evils and injustices of the world gives one a jaundiced perspective – though reporting nothing but venality, cupidity and stupidity every day does eat away at one's immortal soul. It is that turning every event into an outcome of these forces for the sake of "sharpening up", "toughening up" or even "sexing up" one's story, looking for the injudicious and inflammatory quotation, the incriminating and incendiary fact, become all-pervading habits of mind. Grievance is grist to our mill. The fine powder that emerges ends up caked all over us.