It’s enough to make a genuine conspiracy theorist cry. The press gallery conspired to suppress Barnaby Joyce’s relationship with a staffer, according to social media and some mainstream media commentators. Either the conspiracy was because of the Machiavellian machinations of Malcolm Turnbull’s office (despite past form suggesting that they’d struggle to spell Machiavellian on a good day) and the complicity of journalists, or because of some Boys’ Club mentality that wilfully applies a double standard to male politicians.
Some of us, of course, were carefully preparing the groundwork for this conspiracy eight years ago just so we could look consistent last October. And even cunningly defended Julia Gillard from commentary about her personal life. All in a day’s work in the press gallery, where we regularly convene to identify what we’ll conspire to withhold from the public.
Meantime, an actual, real-life conspiracy between the government and media was being ignored. On Monday, Crikey had a crack at the ABC and Fairfax for handing back to the government documents that should have been published. The issue got little interest — even our News Corp friends, usually ready to seize on any excuse to bag their rivals, were silent. Then veteran journalist and editor Brian Toohey also got stuck into the ABC in Wednesday’s Financial Review (the Canberra Times, which acted similarly to the ABC, was missing from Toohey’s piece). That stirred a few journalists up, but that was it in terms of media criticism of the behaviour of those outlets (another veteran journalist, Alex Mitchell, had a go at the ABC on his blog yesterday). The only issue that elicited further coverage was the schadenfreude-laden reporting that the ABC had had to apologise to Kevin Rudd for how it covered one of the few stories it told from the trove of documents.
That most journalists and editors — and not merely at the ABC and Fairfax — thought collaborating with the government to hide documents because security agencies asserted they were a matter of “national security” was OK, is a perfect “boiling frog” moment. The boiling frog metaphor has been getting a workout lately in the US where people are reflecting on how democracies transition to authoritarian societies. It doesn’t just happen in a day, it happens bit by bit, with minor outrages becoming normalised, with people’s standards of what is acceptable and not acceptable, of journalists’ and editors’ standards of what is and isn’t worthy of coverage, progressively changing so that, after a time, what would have been a major scandal just a couple of years ago is now rationalised away, even by critics of a government, as something almost trivial.
It’s not just in the US, but here as well. In some ways, it’s worse. Here, the claims of security bureaucrats are not treated sceptically, as the self-interested assertions of the powerful that must be scrutinised and tested, but usually accepted at face value. After all, no media outlet wants to be accused of undermining “national security”. There are, of course, moments when the behaviour of the media really does threaten national security — such as when Seven gave a platform to a neo-Nazi to vilify other people in the community. But we know that such behaviour does indeed undermine community cohesion and make the job of security agencies to protect us harder. Publishing cabinet documents a few years earlier than permitted under our appalling cabinet secrecy laws isn’t even comparable.
Watch what happens with the government’s new push to criminalise journalism. As with its 2015 effort to pass laws enabling it to jail journalists, the government will throw the major media companies a bone by tweaking its bill to put some more hurdles in the way of prosecuting them. But as with the 2015 laws around reporting special intelligence operations, it will still amount to a significant extension of the government’s powers to silence whistleblowers and deter public interest journalism. The major media outlets will go away happy to have achieved a “win”. But the temperature would have increased a few more degrees.
If you want a conspiracy, you’re looking right at one. And it’s got nothing to do with the salacious details of the life of the Deputy Prime Minister.
Children Overboard; Iraq/Saddam/terrorist sponsor/WMDs; ‘Labor’s negative gearing will ruin the economy and flush the value of your family home down the toilet’; bugging East Timor :-
“Don’t worry, journalists have nothing to worry about in our next authoritarian foray into poli-speak policies – it’s just whistleblowers and anyone else that let’s on about how incompetent we are, that we’re out to silence”.
“Fair enough.”
It will be funny when Labor gains power and those avenues of embarrassment are closed off?
Absolutely correct Bernard. Failure of Australian Media to deliver even the most basic elements of their charge; further weakens our ailing democracy. SHAME!
The SMH failed in 2005 to carry details of the Customs case at Sydney airport because the Oz had begun it.
Both David Marr & Richard Ackland at the time queried, separately and then together, this omission.
As I understand the sequence of events with the ABC’s publication of some of the cabinet files as thru were in thrpublic interest. Well done ABC. The Dept of Prime Minister and Cabinet wanted all of the documents back, but the ABC witheld them until the PMC boss issued a public acceptance that the PMC was responsible for the breach of national security. Well done ABC.
Goverbnents need to explicity say that public needs investigative journalism to avoid boiling any more frogs.
crikey is as hypocritical as the Murdoch press on the Barnaby Joyce issue, they knew of this scandal well before the New England by election but chose to follow the Murdoch doctrine of whatever coalition politicians do must not be opened to the public gaze, but anything labor or the greens, or Pauline Hanson for that matter does should be investigated to the enth degree and on the front page of every newspaper, there is also the matter of the story from Tony Windsor regarding the woman’s complaint to him that a prominent, intoxicated senior politician followed her young daughter into the female toilets and harassed her , these are serious allegations that must be followed up and thoroughly investigated and not swept under the carpet by a compliant right wing controlled press.