The ABC’s chair Kim Williams has come out firing in his first week in the role, telling journalists they must acknowledge the broadcaster’s statutory requirement to be impartial or walk out the door.
Often it’s not that simple. It’s always been one of the most difficult things to teach young people, but if they want to be a journalist they need to be impartial, park their views at the door, and embrace a sceptical mindset.
As an associate professor in journalism, I’ve always told my students that, as a 17-year-old cadet at a country newspaper, I was schooled by my editors not to join any kind of group (except the union), not to sign a petition no matter how innocuous or worthy the cause, and certainly not to discuss with anyone my politics or religious beliefs.
I remember one editor bellowing at a class of young cadets to heed the trial of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, in which the impartiality of the judge was challenged as he was a member of Amnesty International. We couldn’t even join Amnesty.
When I worked at the ABC from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, I knew the statutory requirement for ABC journalists was to be impartial and that our mission was to provide accurate, fair and unbiased information with a wide range of perspectives. The editorial standards required staff to “ensure that editorial decisions are not improperly influenced by political, sectional, commercial or personal interests”.
But in 2024, our journalism tutorial rooms are filled with young hopefuls who scoff at the idea they should not bring their whole selves to a story. They are often encouraged in this view by younger academics, some of whom did not receive the same newsroom indoctrination as me and, thanks to the broken news business model, may have had a career that never included time in a mainstream newsroom.
As a result, you can expect new journalism graduates to bring to their storytelling youthful idealism, support for diversity and intersectionality. They know the value of their unique perspectives to news-telling. They argue, and to some extent they are right, that a reporter can bring much more to a story by acknowledging their association with it, rather than pretending that it doesn’t exist.
However, that freshness of ideas and acknowledgement of a journalist’s views is exactly why there is now such a visible age and culture gap at the ABC. The national broadcaster has been trying to fulfil its traditional public service broadcasting objective without a shared vision with its increasingly diverse staff — reporters who simply do not believe that impartiality can exist, at least not in the way older generations of journalists supported.
In our classrooms today, we teach journalism’s history so everyone who graduates understands that impartiality is a recent idea that arose from commercial imperatives, not truth-seeking ones. More than 100 years ago, it was easier for a newspaper to sell more copies if it was seen to be providing balanced coverage and not favouring one side. At the turn of the last century, impartiality was an exciting new commercially successful way of doing journalism — taken on with gusto by public service broadcasters in the BBC Reithian tradition.
But even those older and more experienced journalists who continue to espouse impartiality secretly acknowledge it is a flawed ideal. We know our very decision to do a story, to choose interviewees, to use particular words and pictures, to select one quote or soundbite over another — each helps slant or point the story in a particular direction.
We also know that with the guidance of an editor, a reporter can turn a story into a better piece of work by acknowledging any personal bias, seeking to balance that fairly and including where appropriate opposing views and presenting the story in a way that allows audiences to come to their own view. It doesn’t mean creating a false balance or inviting factually incorrect views; it means being fair and transparent to all.
In my classes, I spend far less time on impartiality and much more on fairness, timeliness and transparency. I tell my students to acknowledge (to themselves and their audiences) who they are and where their ideas might have come from. I urge them to read and include all views, particularly those they disagree with, to ensure they are interrogated by the public.
In my mind, if we want better journalists, and journalism at the ABC and elsewhere, we need less false impartiality and more transparency and fairness. It’s what another old journo used to yell at me: the job of the journalist is to be truthful, not neutral.
How about truth rather than impartiality as a starting point?
As an example, the development and expansion of new gas projects in this country is undoubtedly going to add significantly to global warming, so why the hell do we have to have “impartial” nonsense that takes the sparring between our two party duopoly as something worthy of respect?
“Impartiality” has given us some of the least critical, worst informed reporting possible over the last 40 years or so, with the ABC front and center of this weakness.
Adding to the above. While “impartiality” has no doubt been a part of the ABC charter forever, it was weaponized during the Howard era as part of that government’s efforts to crush the ABC.
Alexandra W might argue that older journalists espouse impartiality but the reality has always been that younger journalists have always been idealistic and that has shown in their work. The ABC reporters from the Whitlam era were quite willing to show their idealism [and views] indirectly in their work and it’s a trap to think that some sort of middle of the road nothingness does anything for political debate or an informed public.
If Kim Williams is going to run under the banner of impartiality, he’s have fallen into the trap of taking his leadership from Howard era politics designed to create a subservient ABC in the interests of those other media titans.
This is worth reading about the state of journalism. By Greg Jericho, a couple of years ago –
https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-trouble-with-journalism/
Thanks for the link.
What amazes me is that people supporting 1% of the population view, get the same weight and air time as those that support 98%.
As for giving airtime to the Nuclear Argument, as if there really is a valid one………….
….. Especially after they canned Mad As?
‘As an example, the development and expansion of new gas projects in this country is undoubtedly going to add significantly to global warming…’
The big problem for this claimed ‘truth’ is that…it’s not any such thing. Without situating that statement in a meaningful global energy profile context, a net emissions/energy cost-benefit metric, and future-dynamic systemic cause-and-effect consequences, claiming it is a ‘truth’ is precisely the kind of loaded ‘story telling’ that journalism routinely misidentifies as its vocational remit, but is actually self-destructive epistemic over reach.
It takes about thirty seconds of ‘alternative story telling’ to debunk it;
* gas is a critical transitional component in any serious attempt to reduce the world’s overall reliance on carbon fuels and so reduce the world’s net emissions;
* Australian gas exports are significantly more net global emissions beneficial and better regulated towards improvement than most of the world’s gas industry, and certainly most other carbon fuel sectors;
* new Australian gas exports would arguably represent significant net emissions reduction factors in export destinations that would otherwise use dirtier carbon based fuels;
* at best, it is simply impossible to know whether the ‘expansion of new Australian gas projects’ will enable a net reduction or cause a net increase in global emissions, because there are simply too many global systemic ‘moving parts’ in play.
That last point is the only real ‘story’ that can be extracted from the observable material fact ‘flow’ above it, which rrpresents an approximation of the proper (sceptical) vocational response a true journalist ought to instinctively make as a habit of craft: is this statement true? What parts of this statement are empirically checkable? What can I ‘find out/know’ about this statement and what parts of it are epistemically ‘uncheckable’?
That kind of banal and unglamorous information ‘pedantry’ is the epistemic limit of ‘journalism’. Anything more posh or self-important than that is not journalism. Do you see the problem when journalists fall into the trap of thinking their job is to do ‘more’? To ‘tell a story’ to us idiots? They end up ‘story telling’ us all into the realm of contentious assertion and loaded, unexamined presumption, if not outright creative speculation. None of those things are inherently epistemically ‘bad’ – human beings would become paralysed in a nihilistic funk without us making decisions every second based on just those things (because we too can’t ‘know’ the ‘story telling truth’…we’re not G_d either). But it’s critical to our non-journalistic institutions’ and we non-journalists’ capacity to do these latter ‘subjective’ things with empirical information that the journalists whose role is to furnish us with it do NOT do so.
Give us the facts you can find out/know, journalism, and have the ruthless discipline to leave the ‘story-telling’ part to those in the tribe we democratically elect, and/or publicly employ, and/or seek/need the expertise of, and/or are inspired by…to do that job.
PS: It will probably turn out to be true that ‘… the development and expansion of new gas projects in this country…add[ed] significantly to global warming…’. And activists, experts and policy makers etc might well be very wise to argue that now. But it’s still not ‘true’ in any journalistic sense.
You can and should apply this epistemic scepticism to just about all public debates and everything you see in the media today. It’s essentially the scientific method for the humanities. Depressing that J-Schools are teaching the opposite as a vocational virtue.
Before we mine a new resource that will release billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere we need to know that it won’t increase overall global emissions. In your words we can’t. Hardly a good case for taking a chance on it.
That is indeed so. We simply can’t ‘know’ what new gas projects will do to net emissions. We can make a good case that it will likely increase them. But a fair to good case can also be made that it will likely decrease them – so why ‘take a chance’ on missing out on that reduction? It’s no less a legitimate argument – a plausible ‘story’ – just because you might disagree with it/not buy it. Taking the notuion to silly extremes, a terrible, but never-the-less unfalsifiable, case can also be made that, if we would only approve new gas projects, it would unleash the sort of amplified economic prosperity that would lead to much more public investment in medical research, and thus would help us find a cure for baldness and erectile dysfunction in middle aged men like me. It’s not a falsifiable proposition, so it ought to be of no great ‘story telling’ relevance to journalism.
By all means activists, political partisans, experts, industry and environmental groups, MRAs, cranks, nutters, conspiracists and grifters etc etc are all entitled and should argue their preferred case/view/policy position on the new gas fields/global net emissions metrics. But no serious journalist, who is serious about being useful to that subjective/values debate, can do anything more than report that, regarding the impact on global net emissions of new Australian gas projects, we simply do not know what it would be.
I take it Jack that you either work for a gas company or have another involvement.
Methane escapes from fracking operations and these emissions are not added to the total.
This is the only reason why “Gas” is supposed to be cleaner than coal.
This “gas is cleaner” furphy is just as much a piece of nonsense, as is, Vapes for 10year olds to stop them taking up smoking.
We need to transition faster away from gas as well as coal.
The rubs is, most of these companies don’t even pay tax and we haven’t required them to lodge a bond for the clean up after this rush is over.
‘Impartial’ sounds objective or neutral, but in fact would be subjective by our local MSM’s non standards on facts and analysis vs. fair and balanced.
OK, so you’ve nailed it. Just not in a good way. But in a very helpful and illuminating one.
Journalists are NOT ‘story tellers’. That’s a contrived, middle class delusion, usually embraced by over-ambitious, under-talented wannabe literary/broadcast celebrities with an outsized regard for their own dazzling creative originality and insight. ‘Story telling’ demands coherent (IOW ‘contrived’) narrative shaping, a self-appointed authorial authority, a thematic pulse (IOW ‘bias’) and a relentless solipsism: the entitlement to seize the tribal talking stick, hog it, and deign to use it to ‘explain’ everyone else’s experiences of material life and Humanity to us. All these epistemic characteristics are the stuff of fiction: antithetical to good journalism and especially disciplined reportage.
Journalists are NOT ‘story tellers’. You are seekers, collectors, triagers, summarisers and redistributors of empirical material information. That’s it. ‘Story telling’ doesn’t get a look in. Or shouldn’t. The self-ordained, self-flattering delusion on journalism’s part that it exists to ‘Journsplain’ the world and its events and its people to us mere stupid non-journalists is exactly what makes us disdain and eventually ignore journalism and journalists. It is, to use admittedly arcane academic/philosophical technical jargon: Journalists Being Colossal Wankers.
Without question this is the biggest b/s hustle and self-destructive vocational flaw of journalism as an epistemology: the ludicrous, pompous fantasy that journalists are in the business of ‘story telling’ – that there is a professional cohort of specially trained and uniquely talented information artisans, whose vital civic role is to have replaced priests, rabbis, imams and seers as those whose tribal role is ‘to be truthful, not neutral’.
You are not the new messiahs, much less G_d. Stop with ‘the story telling’. Or you’ll all keep going blinder, which won’t do anyone any good.
If you DO want to be ‘a story teller’, then write a bloody novel or a bloody play. But get off the bloody taxpayer-funded ‘public interest journalism’ titty first. Trying to be both fiction and non-fiction information professional at the same time is a) epistemically ruinous, and b) taking the tribal fiscal p*ss.
Anywhere between Woodward and Bernstein, and Hunter S, is fine by me as long as they’re not some billionaire’s condom.
“ You are seekers, collectors, triagers, summarisers and redistributors of empirical material information.”
Who gets to decide what empirical material information is chosen and how it is summarised for (re)distribution?
If it looks like a story teller and quacks like a story teller then maybe …
Yes, well exactly that is the rub, isn’t it. One would like to think senior journalists and editors have all developed a broad-ranging, pluralist, robustly self-interrogating set of ‘triaging’ criteria grounded in a balanced combination of theoretical learning and life experience, as the tool by which these unavoidably subjective editorial decisions are made. And that a wider ‘news industry’ is collectively of sufficiently diverse and varying ‘Masthead World Views’ so as to give a democratic system a healthy pluralism of multiple such ‘editorial call’ weightings and thus, ensure a full set of perspectives. One would like to think that.
In Australia, one rather simply waits patiently for journalism’s death throes to ebb at last to naught, in anticipation of shouting:
‘Journalism is dead! Hooray, hooray, O hooray – let the epistemic bells ring out freedom once more…!’
I doubt that journalism is dead, unless you are speaking of SKY at night?
Yes but the ABC has moved strongly to the right because of the importation of so many ex-Murdoch hacks, and this requirement to give equal time to both major parties.
This means so often eq=uating the reporting from a cabinet minister trying to make Australia a better place with mis-information and dis-information spread by their opposition.
These days the ABC seems to give the LNP shills greater airtime than the Labor people, even though the latter the ones trying to manage the country. And when do the Greens and Independents get a go?
And don’t forget the import of the message by the then Shadow Minister for Communications Turnbull’s threats from the Floor “When we get into power we are going to cut you funding”.
That’ll be the same MBT who, when he became minister, gave us the bloody terrible, and terribly expensive, NBN.
And who pressured the ABC to get rid of Emma Alberici.
A decidedly cowardly act.
Yep, possibly Turnbull’s bullying low point. The report that got EA into terminal strife was excellent, epistemically-disciplined journalism.
Oh, you mean that fwit who made world headlines by asserting that Australian law could trump mathematical law, because he really really wanted an encryption backdoor?
Why can’t we legislate to guarantee the funding to the ABC, Integrity commissions, Audit offices and the like?
Yes being impartial is difficult. But a start is to show the facts without adornment. That will often suggest a position that a thinking person might arrive at. Personal opinion as a base for a story quickly leads into cherry picking the facts/events/actions to fit the line being taken. The next step is to ignore facts and just vent empty opinions as happens with the News corp stable of propaganda opinion ‘columnists’.
As a reader/viewer I really don’t care what the writer/reporter personally thinks unless they are an expert in the area or have significant first hand experience.
And get Jeremy and ilk to cease the “eye brow and forehead” inflections on air.
Ignoring inconvenient facts is called Confirmation Bias.
I want to see how Mr Williams defines an “impartial” viewpoint on the genocide in Gaza.
My guess is that his “impartial” viewpoint is that Hamas are indeed terrorists, while Zionists are innocent victims.
Anybody with knowledge of what is happening, and the history that led there, will know that the exact opposite is the truth of the matter.
Any media not reporting the truth is not fit for purpose.
Israel and Palestine is a good example of using impartiality and truth to arrive at a clear understanding, from which people will draw their own conclusions. If you start from the origins of Zionism in the late 19th century, then the increasing immigration and conflict in the 1920s and 30s, then the the violence leading to partition in in 1948, followed by a history of violence from intermittent attacks to full scale wars initiated by both sides you get the background. Both sides have engaged in terrorism of various kinds. Then lay out the 3 solutions that are (vaguely) possible – two state solution, one state solution, Greater Israel – it becomes pretty clear what the big picture is. Specific violence and atrocities are just part of the context. A thoughtful observer will see pretty clearly where things are going.
Barracking for one side and calling it truth is speaking to the converted and achieving nothing.
Yep, it’s Australia all over again.
I suspect that Mr Williams will thoroughly vet journalists expressing personal views.
As he has described the current ABC as bland, we might actually end up with an un-sanitized version of what is really happening in Gaza.