Crikey editorial meetings are always pretty fierce. Our afternoon conference on Monday particularly so.
Our journalists — who care more about this publication, and take more responsibility for its unique position in Australian media, than you might even imagine — took turns expressing their hurt and disappointment to their colleague, a writer of rare talent, Guy Rundle. They didn’t hold back.
On Friday, in a piece on the federal election battle, he made references to Labor MP David Feeney and his wife Liberty Sanger that were tasteless, certainly offensive and did real damage to our reputation. We should never have published them.
On Monday we removed the comments. We apologised and published a bunch of letters rightly slapping us around. Yesterday we reached David and Liberty and apologised to them personally. We’ve talked a lot over the last few days about our checks and balances, why they failed on this occasion and how we can make them even tougher.
We’ve read all the feedback on every platform. I’ve responded to some of it; I have more to get through. In some of the correspondence there’s been some suggestion we didn’t go far enough. So let me be really clear today.
We screwed up. Royally. We breached our own standards and, more importantly, we breached an uncommon level of trust we’ve long enjoyed from readers. We must bear the consequences of that.
Our apology, personal and public, to those involved and to you, is unreserved.
Good apology. Much better. I’m reassured. GR is a writer of rare talent but… obviously needs those checks and balances on occasion.
Well that’s all very nice and you might think now it’s all ok. None of this is ok until the apology directly comes from Rundle himself. And if won’t personally apologise, he should go!
This is a well done albeit somewhat belated apology. However, only marginally less appalling than what was published is that Rundle, presumably operating with some pretensions to reportage, saw fit to behave that way in the first place. One hopes he has apologised for what he apparently did as much as for what he wrote about it afterwards.
Now *that* is a proper apology.
Well said Jason and thanks for introducing some real oxygen into what was a pretty sad stuff up.
Sorry, it’s not an acceptable apology until it comes from Rundle himself. Hiding behind the sentiment of the publisher who has been embarrassed isn’t enough.
‘…we breached an uncommon level of trust we’ve long enjoyed from readers.’
Trust? This Crikey subscriber (circa 2002) trusted that Guy Rundle would be permitted to be the legit Guy Rundle – not a diluted version. Rundle’s schtick relies on not being restrained on an editor’s leash.
Crikey’s publisher would be wise not to geld their main attraction. I’m tempted to write ‘geld their stallion’ but fear Rundle may blush.
Yes. This is over the top. More than a few of us are Rundle subscribers first and Crikey subscribers because that’s how we get to read Rundle.