The Australian‘s marketing department have been running a curious sortie lately with their “ideological battleground” pitch.
But one ad in particular caught our eye — the suggestion on page 15 of Friday’s Oz that the paper’s political editor, Dennis Shanahan, was the first person to tell the nation Kevin Rudd was about to be knifed.
It makes a good starting point for Crikey‘s semi-regular feature on the anatomy of a news story.
Alongside an action pic of Shanahan wearing his Parly House lanyard, was this claim: “As political editor of The Australian, based in the Canberra press gallery, Dennis Shanahan not only broke the news of the Rudd government’s planned super profits tax, he exclusively revealed that Labor mutineers were preparing to move against Kevin Rudd.”
That suggestion rests on a dual-bylined piece (with Patricia Karvelas) that ran on the front-page of The Weekend Oz on June 19 last year — four days before the coup went down — under the headline ‘Poll key as mutineers circle Kevin Rudd’. The story stated that if the polls continued to head south, Rudd would be toast.
Two days later on the Monday, Shanahan dutifully continued the narrative when the poll in question was actually released. Despite Labor recording an improved two-party-preferred result of 52-48, Dennis buried the lede, declaring that “Tony Abbott has narrowed the gap on Rudd as the preferred national leader”.
In the text of that story, Shanahan failed to mention that Labor had actually improved on its 2PP vote — by three points in the past three Newspolls — and despite a 1 point fall in the Greens’ primary vote. The clear implication was the knives were still out and that regime change couldn’t be far away. So far so good.
But compare and contrast that story with Shanahan’s effort on the morning of the coup, June 23, which ran under the pretty unambiguous headline ‘PM’s position is secure, party’s is not’. The yarn contained the memorable line: “…the big challenges for Labor are all there but the school of thought that it would be suicide to engineer a leadership change has prevailed.”
And this: “As well, Julia Gillard would not move against the Prime Minister…Rudd seems safe to lead Labor through to the election, whether parliament resumes in August or not and whether the election is in September or October.”
If Shanahan was indeed the “journalist that knew first” about “the demise of a PM”, he didn’t seem to have any idea on the day the demise actually occurred (later that night the ABC famously broke the spill on its 7pm bulletin).
Of far more prominence on June 23 was Peter Hartcher and Phil Coorey’s SMH scoop that revealed Rudd was using Alister Jordan to case caucus for dissenters — which, coming when it did, gave a rampaging Julia Gillard severe conniptions.
The next day, Shanahan still didn’t want to totally give up on the Member for Griffith, despite his fate being well and truly sealed: “Kevin Rudd is on the rack, his leadership in tatters but he’s dug in and determined to fight against Julia Gillard and the ‘factional bosses” of Labor.”
The other claim in the ad is that Shanahan had broken the news of the Rudd Government’s super profit tax, presumably based on this yarn, co-authored with David Uren, on May 1, 2010. That’s on more solid ground, although Fairfax’s Peter Martin had also written about the existence of the tax 13 weeks prior on January 22.
There are plenty of other examples of a story’s genesis being forgotten, usually because of the dominance of the Sydney-Canberra axis on the news cycle. Even in the Internet age, radio and TV producers, mostly based in Sydney, get hard copies of The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald at the start of their shifts and prioritise accordingly.
Journos on The Age know that if their story isn’t picked up by 9 or 10am on the day it runs it’ll die a manky death. Two weeks ago on July 5, The Age broke the story of the government’s clean energy fund being run by an independent statutory body. But the broadcast media didn’t properly twig until July 8 — when the paper was forced to splash again with more details on its front page to remind the rest of the media whose yarn it was.
And it’s not just the Melbourne press getting cut out of the national loop. The West Australian‘s impressive duo Andrew Probyn and Shane Wright regularly break stories that don’t get picked up — a situation not helped by their paper’s crappy website (The West recently had details of the $23 carbon price on the same day The Age did).
The point, aggrieved journos say, is that their non-Oz/SMH colleagues are snaffling cracking stories all the time. Unfortunately, for most observers, the north-of-the-Murray broadsheet duumvirate remains the only game in town.
Got any other examples of stories that emanated from the outside Sydney, but didn’t receive their due? Email boss@crikey.com.au and we’ll it follow up.
That’s “the good thing” about owning so much of the media – you and your mates can edit, even rewrite, history – and who’d be any the wiser – except for those people who “access other areas”.
Of course, one must now wonder of all the Oz’s scoops – whether they were hacked or leaked?
It’s hard to imagine anyone on the Labor side leaking to Shanahan of all people.
I’ve got one of those “scoops” too – I use it to clean up after the dog.
David, I can imagine them leaking on him – they’d just have to take a number.
Shanahan wouldn’t know a leak, unless he saw a damp patch on his trousers. Shanahan hasn’t got a friend to call his own in the Labor caucus, he is loathed.
Is it just my imagination or is Shanahan beginning to physically transmogrify into Bob Ellis? Power pics never fail to crack me up.