Every picture tells a story, ho ho, and what a story there is in that happy snap doing the rounds on social media of a quartet of Aussie media hacks gambolling in the Dead Sea mud on their junket to Israel.
Yes, it was 2015, absolute aeons ago, long before the current Gaza unpleasantness. But the memory lingers on and the frolicsome funsters of yore have since risen to greater things, to be grandees of power and influence in the media trade. Bevan Shields is now editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. David Lipson is the ABC’s Washington bureau chief. Ben English is editor of Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph. Sharri Markson is, well, whatever Murdochcracy handmaid role she is playing this week. Draw your own rolling-in-the-slime metaphors.
So, well done, talent scouts of the Israel lobby. Picked them perfectly. And as Crikey has reported, there are scores more like ‘em. It might be neater to list those “senior” Australian journalists who have not done one of these fun-runs.
But it’s not all play. These are study tours. When you’re not troughing at Tel Aviv’s more agreeable restaurants with the bubbly lass from the Information Ministry, there’s a lot that your ever-attentive escorts can help you study in a week. We’ll spend a morning at the kibbutz and then you’ll want to see the view from Temple Mount. After that, lunch and a snooze before drinks with the deputy foreign minister. So much to glean, so much to absorb when you’re a practitioner in that school of journalism that solemnly reports the thoughts of the taxi driver who brought you in from the airport.
The Frisky Four reached out to offer their learnings — I think I’ve got that correct — on their return home. Bevan assured the Australian Jewish News, “Israel’s story is more than just about conflict, there’s an incredible success story.”
Ben proclaimed that “if there was tension I didn’t sense it. Jerusalem’s shops and streets bustled with activity”. Who knew?
David, getting still deeper into the weeds, thought that the Palestinians were “too tribal … too self-defeating to be able to find a pathway forward”.
Sharri, meanwhile, is reported as having “discovered a deep emotional awakening”.
Back in the day I was offered a few of these trips myself — to Israel, certainly, in a friendly invitation from the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, I think it was, or perhaps the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council. Pik Botha’s apartheid regime in South Africa was also keen to host me back in the 1980s. The US State Department suggested a Washington junket (might be able to get you into the Oval Office), and a very insistent chap from the Soviet embassy in Jakarta promised that Moscow would roll out the red carpet, the best hotels and perhaps even some of our beautiful Russian girls to show you around, wink nudge. You could also meet intellectuals, Mikhail.
It was all there for the studying. Israel, the blooming flower of democracy in the arid deserts of the Middle East, Exodus again, starring blonde and blue-eyed Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan.
Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria — I can imagine the reception: unfortunately Mr Mandela is ill and is not seeing visitors, but I am sure you understand what a disaster it would be to turn South Africa over to the childish Black man who is content with his lot in life.
The Russians would have been the most fun, I think, rollicking nights swilling Sovetskoye Shampanskoye with obliging Svetlana at the Moscow Hilton, the KGB’s kompromat cameras in the light fittings silently capturing the romp. “The parade of missiles in Red Square was a powerful token of the Soviet Union’s enduring commitment to world peace,” Mr Carlton told Komsomolskaya Pravda.
If only. Foolishly, I turned them all down on whimsical notions of ethics and transparency. Journalism, like justice, “should not only be done but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done,” I thought in my guileless innocence. How quaintly old-fashioned.
The only junket I can recall was with the late Lang Hancock, an aerial tour to admire the enormous holes he was digging in Western Australia. The miserable prick made us pay for our own lunches.
We close with a down-home tweak to those lines from the now-forgotten English poet Humbert Wolfe:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God! the Aussie journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
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