“The left are biased. The right have opinions.” This phrase, sure to live on, appears in long standing media curmudgeon David Salter’s new book (The Media We Deserve, (Melbourne University Press), which has arrived at the Crikey bunker. It is full of such acid observations.

“Journalism is a perfectly reputable craft. The problem is the disreputable things journalists do,” says Salter, which pretty much sums up his view.

A declaration. I also have a book on the media out soon and in the weeks ahead Salter and I will both be on the promotional trail. It therefore doesn’t behove me to attempt to review Salter’s volume, other than to quote his own description of the book.

It is “not a primer or a sequentially argued case, more a collection of essays. If the whole then offers some vaguely consistent framework or approach, that would be no more than an expression of my personal standpoint.” Salter adds: “Leading with my chin has been a lifetime professional weakness.”

There are no earth shattering revelations, but a string of nicely turned phrases and observations.

On the issue of ABC bias, Salter says that ABC critics have a point in their allegation that it tends towards mono-culture.

“The long march of young liberal/humanist progressives through the ABC’s many portals is as much a self perpetuating cycle as the daughters of doctors choosing a medical career.”

Salter journeys through talk back radio, recounting the various Alan Jones controversies, and giving another run to the theory that Jones is motivated partly by self loathing to do with his homos-xuality.

There are some nice descriptions of speaking styles. Jones has “that slightly prissy, impatient, semi-sour way of speaking” contrasted with “the sleeves rolled up journalistic directness of Neil Mitchell in Melbourne” and the “deep mahogany oiliness of super salesman John Laws”.

Former ABC Managing Directors Hill and Johns, and the incumbent Mark Scott all come in for various degrees of shellacking.

So too journalists’ various methods of self regulation and self congratulation. On the Walkley Awards, Salter observes that the judging panels have worked hard to overcome the domination by “middle class notions of social worthiness” that saw all awards go to ABC and the Fairfax press.

But instead there has been a “retreat into fragmentation” with so many awards they have lost their meaning. Meanwhile both the ABC and News Limited have launched their own awards in annual rituals of corporate self congratulation.

Salter is mostly sour about the media, and doesn’t offer much hope for the future. He is sceptical about the power of the internet to offer solutions. His view is perhaps best summed up by one image, of particular interest to Crikey. Describing last year’s Walkleys he says:

…a drunken gallery hack whose unsourced, second hand revelations prompted a NSW Opposition leader (who later attempted suicide) to resign called another journalist ‘a disgrace’ and knocked him off the stage. We’re a lovely lot, we journalists.

And there you have it.