Australian Financial Review editorial bosses have launched a full-throated defence of the paper’s ability to hold big business to account in response to a scathing critique from Fairfax business journalist Paddy Manning.
Manning was told to clean out his desk on Monday after penning a piece for Crikey blasting the merger of Fairfax’s business units into one division and criticising The Fin for being too close to corporate Australia. The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance is still negotiating with Fairfax management in a bid to have Manning reinstated.
In their email sent to staff yesterday — obtained by Crikey — AFR editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury, editor Paul Bailey and deputy editor James Chessell hit back at “unfounded and frankly naive criticism” of the creation of one business media division at Fairfax. They write:
“[F]or the great bulk of us, it will be business as usual. The existing mastheads and brands will continue to concentrate on serving their respective audiences.”
The editors also reminded troops of recent stories that have exposed wrongdoing at the big end of town:
“The Financial Review takes a starting position that business, competitive markets and individual enterprise are the fundamental drivers of a prosperous and good society. But this fundamental pre-condition necessarily also requires the accountability provided by the sort of vigorous and independent journalism pursued by all the mastheads under the Fairfax banner.
“Our tradition of independence and our hunger for news strengthens our credibility even though it brings us into robust discussions with many of those in the corporate world whom we write about, including in recent times Macquarie, NAB, Ten, Woolworths, Coles, QBE, Whitehaven, Fortescue, BHP Billiton, Mirvac and UBS. Financial Review stories prompted a Qantas director to resign last month, prompted the NSW government to appoint an independent panel to oversee Crown’s application for a new casino project in Sydney and did most to expose the regulatory gaps behind the Banksia failure.”
The editors go on to crow about blowing the whistle on Eddie Obeid, leading the coverage of Nathan Tinkler’s rise and fall and exposing the world of MONA founder David Walsh’s punters club.
In his article for Crikey on Monday, Manning wrote:
“The AFR‘s business journalism is built on a fundamental contract between company and reporter: high-level access in exchange for soft coverage. Too often — even for many of its own hard-pressed reporters’ liking — the result is PR-driven “churnalism” which shows up as ‘drops’ (the poor man’s exclusive, or as Verrender once wrote, the press release a day early), ‘herograms’ for business leaders, unreadable roundtables and conference-linked spreads featuring plenty of happy snaps of business leaders with a glass of champagne or mineral water in hand.”
Crikey has spoken to several journalists at Fairfax — some who believe Manning made some fair points and others highly critical of his approach. “God forbid we talk to people who work in business,” said one reporter in the Fin‘s Sydney newsroom. “God forbid newspapers run articles by people who have actually run businesses — like Harold Mitchell and Mark Bouris — rather than just journalists.”
At a union stopwork meeting yesterday, journalists at The Sydney Morning Herald expressed “support and respect” for Manning and said they hoped for a satisfactory outcome from negotiations with management.
Stutchbury knows he is in the deep end because he has indulged his 1980s passion for IR debate and more recent hobbies around bashing the ALP. He knows zip about business. Which is why he sounds so lame when he talks about it (or writes dopey memos). It’s amusing that Chessell added his name, since he is after Stutchbury’s job. He is also the Packer booster (check the byline count). It’s really Clegg that’s out there, doing weird deals for sponsored UBS forums and so on. It’s a circus and we readers know it.
Journalism, what an industry!
Same education requirements as a teacher ie. able to type your name on a word processor without more than 2 spelling errors and yet half the teachers salary. You wear your hard left ideology on your sleeves until retrenched and then spend the rest of your lives growing old, bitter & conservative. You never make any significant contribution to any worthy cause, just shoot you mouths of and your foot off with incredible precision.
You exhibit all the ugliest attributes of humanity – envy, intolerance, lynch mob mentality, hatred of nuclear family, hatred of religion, tolerance of brutality, etc.
And you call yourselves 4th Estate? 4th Graders more likely.
Oh come on One-Reporter-In-The-Fin’s-Sydney-Newsroom, it is not talking TO the likes of Mark Bouris about business, it is turning over page real estate to them to let them self-servingly TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES as they drum up business. This even goes beyond advertorial, it is wholesale prostitution of a masthead.
AFR has the highest cover price of any shred of dead tree, a tiny readership and now seemingly admits its irrelevance by merging with the Failfacts suburban throwaways.
Why am i reminded by these lofty messages from the top floor of the Kremlin’s Chief Ideologist flying to Poland to demonstrate why Solidarity was wrong. Utterly irrelevant to the real world.