Crikey publisher Eric Beecher writes:
What happens when the editor of an important newspaper loses the confidence of his journalists?
What happens when almost the entire editorial staff of a highly reputable newspaper concludes that the ethics, values, demeanor and professionalism of their editor is so incompatible with their own idea of their newspaper’s journalistic standards that they are prepared to confront the editor, en masse, and effectively demand his resignation?
Well, we are about the find out. And the answer to the dilemma at The Age will reveal whether the people who run Fairfax, which used to be Australia’s greatest editorial institution, care more about profits than they care about journalism.
Fairfax is in a bad way. It has no proprietor who understands media, its board works chiefly in the interests of its institutional investors, its share price is wallowing well below the levels of the sharemarket correction, its broadsheet business model has run out of growth and may be broken, its classified advertising base is eroding, it has been beaten by internet competitors in all key classified advertising categories, its editors have become marketeers, many of its journalists hold their owners and editors in contempt and its websites and in part its newspapers are being dumbed-down every day to reach a popular audience to replace a serious one.
The furore inside The Age over the performance of the editor, Andrew Jaspan, is actually about much more than a furore about poor Andrew Jaspan. It is a genuine furore about institutional conflict between journalists and management in a media company which plays a crucial role in Australian society.
If the management wins that conflict — and it is the management who will decide who wins — the message they will send to all their journalists and readers will be stark: at Fairfax, money matters more than journalism.
My problem with Jaspan and some of his journalists is that one of them made up interviews, lied about sources, invented stories about a refugee family and when I presented all of the evidence to Jaspan the journalist was not even chastised.
Even though the family were illegally deported to the wrong country without papers and dumped to die in the snow and even when a more senior journalist got to the truth of the Bakhtiyari family and even when the letter from the Afghan ambassador to Amanda Vanstone turned up showing that the government knew they were from Afghanistan all along and proving that the journalist lied.
He is still allowed to operate for the Fairfax papers and it sort of turns your stomach.
Eric’s chicken little routine would be more credible if he had, ever, done something himself (other than pile up cash through his small empire of glossy real estate blurbs). One could argue credibly that the rot at Fairfax began with their obsession with people like Eric and their passion for lifted ideas from the New York Times Lifestyle section. Not to menion vastly inflated designer sections. All of it at the expense of a commitment to and priority for the stuff that Eric has never done: writing and editing news journalism.
Talk it up Eric.