Should former 60 Minutes executive producer Gerald Stone continue to oversee the Nine Network’s inquiry into the Beirut debacle? Stone has an independent mind, but he has form in this particular area.
According to Fairfax, former 60 Minutes reporter and Nine star Ray Martin ‘fessed up to being a part of a similar story back in 1980. That was in the second year of 60 Minutes’ life.
“Veteran Australian journalist Ray Martin has defended the actions of the 60 Minutes crew imprisoned in Lebanon, recalling how he was involved in filming a remarkably similar child recovery operation in Spain in 1980 while working for the same television program.
“In fact, Martin even drove the vehicle carrying the recovered one-year-old boy and his mother from Barcelona to the Spanish capital Madrid, before the mother and her son later boarded a boat to Gibraltar and fled the country.”
And who was EP of 60 Minutes at the time? Stone, of course. According to former staff members and Martin, Stone authorised Gordon Bick (producer and formerly of Four Corners) and Martin to pursue the Spanish abduction story. Stone told Good Weekend magazine in 1984 the story was “my finest hour”. Bick, by contrast, told the magazine:
“It meant being on the inside of a kidnap plot and siding with the mother against the father, something that worried me.
“It certainly made a good story for 60 Minutes, with a lot of promotion value. But should we have taken sides in a family dispute over a baby?”
Now Stone is set to decide whether 60 Minutes should have taken sides in a family dispute over two children, good television or not.
Stories this morning raise further questions, with documentary evidence Nine paid $69,000 into the account of the child recovery service involved in this story. News Corp is reporting Nine paid half a million dollars to the former husband of Sally Faulkner.
This story highlights a far more over-arching question, one that essentially stretches right back across the entire history of television as a ‘journalistic’ medium, which is still really only one generation old. That question is one that’s been hiding in plain sight all that time, and has never really been addressed, much less answered, so complete has been our societal surrender to TV’s self-serving epistemological assumptions.
Who are these a**eholes, and what is this Ar**hole Industry, this sad little self-referential coterie of self-important professional mannequins and auto-cue intoners, which for six decades has taken it upon itself to dominate and filter every last aspect of our public interactions through the crystal reverse toilet we all plonk casually in the corner of the room? What are Gerald Stone’s qualifications, exactly? What is Tara Brown’s skill set, exactly? Where are the criteria, the professional or vocational standards by which television images shape our public self-perceptions, in every last nook and cranny of human interaction now?
The answer is…there are none. Never have been. Not beyond TV’s own trite self-referential operational parameters – Gerald knows what tabloid sh*t will ‘rate’ (or rather knows how to convince advertisers that it has/will); Tara looks skinny and can project that certain pretty-mom-gravitas, can intone a 60 Minutes script with all the right house style cadences, lilts and pauses. That’s all TV is, its own self-defining set of run-sheet clichés and presentational conventions – even ‘ratings’ are, as alleged objective parameters, highly dubious and self-defining. The whole sector is an almighty in-joke, a charade, the single biggest epistemological con in human history. And it’s peopled by the very worst kind of human beings to be shaping and driving our public discussions, too: the arrogant, the narcissistic, the shallow, the bullying, the desperately ambitious, the vicious…collectively TV people are the self-obsessed shouters at the public meeting, who just won’t let anyone else get word in, or if they do, they have to be in control of it anyway. These people assume as their ‘professional’ desserts the right to break laws, intimidate, bully, harass, selectively edit, steal people’s stories, dumb down complexity, talk over everyone and get the last word, repeatedly rewriting and rewriting the narrative to flatter themselves and belittle anyone who challenges their hegemony. Just watch the legacy-defending Stoneian spin unspool on Channel 9…but on the other channels too, including the ABC and SBS, for
in the end it’s a huddle-in-and-pack-down collective, is TV, and it’ll defend its collective credibility as one.
What is the problem? The problem isn’t what’s on TV. The problem IS TV. Television people are individually (almost by definition) glamorised sociopaths, and the industry in its entirety an exercise in for-profit glamorised sociopathy: it is simply deeply unnatural, deeply destructive, deeply un-human…for human existence, in all its complexity and nuance and singular variety, to be chewed up and spat out daily as for-profit fodder, as ‘content’, as ‘us – but strictly in convenient ninety second, or 12 minute segment bites, with dramatic beats for ads, and only if visuals are available) – by a cynical, self-advancing bunch of damaged egotists who apparently can only find a sense of professional satisfaction and personal self-actualisation by thrusting themselves into everyone’s homes every modern version of voodoo soul-stealing.
day, part attention-seeking, part self-righteous chest-thumping, part
What these idiots don’t seem to grasp yet is that the ‘magic’ of TV has long, long gone for us non-TV types. We’re all TV stars now. We get it. We understand how the visual medium works. We know how shabby and tawdry and banal and counterfeit the industry reality, just out of shot, really is – has always been. We can all knock up our own 60 Minutes’ episodes in half a day, easy as pie. And broadcast it to the world, to, on our own YouTube channel. And we are. We are, Gerald. We are, Tara. You’re just not special anymore, guys. What you do is just not very hard to do.
TV is over. People like Gerald Stone and Tara Brown are delusional dinosaurs, who really have no idea just how much they, and the for-profit harassment-industry they made personal fortunes for and from, are regarded with increasing contempt by most of us. And there’s one last thing they should all think about, too: this team were amazingly lucky they weren’t shot dead – in self-defence, perhaps even justifiable – during this crime. And rightly or wrongly, I think it won’t be too long before some TV victim – maybe a terrified female celebrity, being chased at night down some sidestreet by a (all male) camera crew pack; maybe a father outside a court with his kids, who are being scared witless by the media crush closing in; maybe some grieving wife who just DOES NOT WANT a camera shoved in their face at that moment, with the subsequent stolen pictures used by society’s Gerald Stones and Tara Browns for making personal profit – gets fed up, and takes matters into their own hands.
What then? Are we as a society supposed to put that person in jail? Because Gerald and Tara claim to have been acting ‘in the public interest’? So what about if it’s me, with my hand-held phone and my self-styled ‘journalism’ blogsite, who gets shot while ‘on the story’?
At what point, in a world where everyone is a television ‘journalist’, do we stop accepting the self-serving assertions – the right to behavioural exceptionalism, because we are ‘media’ – from those whose only real differentiator now is…well, access to fancier electronic gear, and slightly posher broadcast platforms?
1) This is the best post written on this whole sorry, tawdry debacle, as well as being an excellent polemic on a dying medium/industry. Thanks for posting.
2) Gerald Stone: the fix is already in. (also, for someone who would be ~ 80 yrs. now, his ‘portrait’ above is in the Photoshop’UncannyValley’) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Stone
It seems a lot of people think this. The ethics of journalism has vanished. When what you do is only valued by the dollar then you have lost it. They never have had to make ethical decissions. Therefore they forget that under the profit they can generate there are peoples lives being toyed with. I have worked in a field where i am called many times in a day to make an ethical call of some weight. Mostly small but not always. Me and my coworkers are at all times close to this decision divide. The journalism juggernaught has no such practice. If the grieving parent does punch you so much the better because all that false innocence can be displayed. Appauling behavior
That’s a magnificent rant Jack.
Thoroughly refreshing after all the sanctimonious nonsense that’s been spouted over the last few days. Sincere thanks.
Bless you, Paddy, for that generous lifeline. I myself am on reflection particularly taken by the odd typo and occasional disjointed syntax, lobbed in for free. They give it that extra ‘bulge-eyed loony at the bar’ flavour, entirely aesthetically apt, I feel. Call it a performance piece, let’s?
I do find myself shouting at the keyboard and muttering at traffic lights more and more these days. Probably should take a Bex. Or get a TV gig as an outlet…
Is there anyone on this planet who hasn’t had their hands out to collect a handsome amount of Chanel Nine’s largesse? What a shonky lot are the people who prey on the electorate’s disregard for anything in the way of the celebrity worship circus.
JACK ROBERTSON: Have just finished reading your excellent comments. Than god there are people like you who explain themselves so articulately. Thank you.
Thanks Venise, always enjoy your comments hereabouts, too.
Great article from Glenn Dyer. It must be good because it was the stimulus for Jack Robertson to write the best commentary on this sorry saga that I have seen to date. Jack?…if you are reading this, you are a Ripper!!!and thankyou Glenn.
Cheers MM.