What just happened in Australian politics? Suddenly, an Australian story, one without crocodiles or boxing kangaroos, has broken out as world news. Huh? Yet here we are, with the Morrison cabinet-of-one story, two years old and weird enough to become the quirky story of the week for international media.
Was it because the two journalists from The Australian had caught that very American virus of holding a good story to sell a book after the event? Or was it just the all-too-Australian practice of missing the story that’s right in front of you?
There’s been plenty of online angst: how could journalists sit on a story this big for so long? Is this a News Corp conspiracy? Not this time, no. There’s a bigger story: how did traditional media miss the story’s significance even when it landed right in front of them — in 2020 and again this past weekend?
The story was slow to boil. It started with a book extract from Plagued by Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers about the politics of the pandemic based on, among other things, interviews carried out at the time. It popped up safely sequestered behind The Australian’s paywall buried inside Saturday’s Inquirer supplement under the heading “Inside COVID HQ”. It’s the sort of heading that just screams “nothing to read here”.
It came with a below-the-fold pointer on page one to a page two story under the anodyne headline “Morrison’s secret COVID moves to protect power”. The next morning, the gallery journalists on the ABC’s flagship political program Insiders similarly yawned their way past the story.
It was not until Albanese called it out as “just weird” that, by Tuesday, the story elbowed its way on to the front page with the “Albanese to pursue papers on Morrison” headline in The Sydney Morning Herald and “PM probes Morrison secrets” in The Australian.
Seems Morrison as a multi-function pollie simply wasn’t an interesting enough yarn for close to three days — until suddenly he was. Give social media some of the credit. Rather than dying in Saturday’s Oz, it kept the story alive over the weekend.
In a complaint out of Trump-era USA, the authors were accused of sitting on the bombshell for two years to pump book sales with shocking insider anecdotes.
The Washington Post’s non-fiction critic Carlos Lozada in his “brief intellectual history of the Trump era” What Were We Thinking calls these books the chaos chronicles — “a contest for the most explosive, chyron-ready anecdotes”.
Throughout the Donald Trump years, as these chaos chronicles of journalistic deep-dives and political memoir landed with new evidence of White House mayhem, social media would cry out: surely we needed to know this at the time! This would have changed everything!
Maybe. It’s a tricky ethical area for journalists. The Australian journalists’ code opens: “Respect for truth and the public’s right to information are fundamental principles of journalism.”
So that’s that then. Publish away!
Not so fast. Point three of the code muddies the water: “Where confidences are accepted, respect them in all circumstances.”
If the interviews were agreed to on the basis that the information would be used for the post-election book, then the journalists were, ethically, stuck. They could have sought a waiver for a contemporaneous news report, but absent that waiver they were ethically obligated to respect the undertakings they had given.
Why didn’t they? Perhaps for the same reason that the traditional media muffed the story last weekend. When Benson and Chambers interviewed Morrison, the early 2020 narrative of a Morrison doing what needed to be done was stuck fast.
In that context, any reporting of the obscure ministerial arrangements would have been mixed up in all the Team Australia meeting-of-the-moment, summed up in Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington’s 2021 book How Good is Scott Morrison?
Although Plagued is an attempt to recapture that Morrisonian competence, since the election result we’re in our own chaos chronicles moment. But not all the Canberra gallery has caught up. The result: when the story broke on the weekend it shaped as pro-Morrison; it took social media to shake out the inner truth to fit the current narrative of Morrison as all-politics-all-the-time.
Now, through that lens, we can see it for what it was: a tactic to empower the prime minister to bring the crudest of electoral politics back into the ministerial decisions that are supposed to made on the merits of the facts. It took a few days, but the media got there in the end.
For the past nine years the media has been either asleep at the wheel, highly selective in their reporting (News Corp, Nine) or cautious of reporting (the ABC).
It was a pleasure to see pressure being applied to a Coalition politician at Morrison’s news conference, the media at last responded. Those moments have been rare over the nine years.
Media pressure on Morrison : Morrison is “The reason the(ir) Coalition lost power”.
I think it is up to journalists to be honest with their readers about where their personal disclosure line sits. How criminal, or dishonest, does a behaviour need to be before it is reported in real time? Absolutely this secret power grab should have been known prior to the election, as it relates to the effectivness and operation of the government of the day.
This is why people distrust journalists – the public suspect (quite rightly apparently) that they are sitting on information that we should absolutely know about. We should know what each journalist is not willing to share or report.
Especially journalists who are the partner of an MP.
The “I know/knew nothing” replies from Liberal and some NP members may or may not be true, but they certainly didn’t pass the sniff test for many of the public, Well done ex-Minister Karen Andrews also Julia Banks for calling it out. I found Andrew Bolt intriguing but as I never watch His ravings, I have no idea whether he has been shepherded back into the SAD fold.
Absolutely agree here. If these journalists didn’t know the import of what they were sitting on, then they were grievously ignorant to be writing about politics. If they did know what they were holding back, then they were either politically partisan or self-serving. Either way we lose.
A very long time ago when I was a new graduate and working in a area of the Federal bureaucracy where the news was often contentious, the media got a story but they always missed the really important and politically significant parts of the story even when they were there in plain sight. They couldn’t judge which issues would actually had important consequences.
Not unless those consequences actually affected them, the media.
I wonder how many of them actually share a similar sort of sheltered life that too much of our hot-house reared politicians do.
I agree. The problem has become worse in recent years as the Press Gallery has become increasingly focused on race calling, while presenters and reporters are mostly young with little knowledge or experience.
The members of the Canberra Press Gallery are a sick joke.
There would be a lot of tawdry things that have occurred in Parliament House over the last number of years, but have been kept under wraps by these “journalists”.
Occasionally there are some small snippets that see the light of day, such as what came out about our Attorney General at the time.
An example of institutional capture?
When they become so reliant on ‘drops’ to do their stenography what are the chances of churnalists biting the hand the feeds them?
Face the fact that the current mob of political journalists – despite being portrayed constantly “starring” on their own and other media outlets – are a pretty slow lot.
Just compare to Alan Reid, Alan Ramsey, Laurie Oakes etc., for breaking stories and digging deep
eg david Speers. Patricia (PK as she loves to be called) Karvelis.
So :- “Our viewsmedia wouldn’t know if their arse was on fire”?