Combines proliferating

Not content with staying up til dawn in the lead-up to Xmas I continued the trend and made dozens of works with similar qualities. I call these combines, one of the Pop artists used this word I can't remember which it was so long ago. I was a big fan of Pop art back in the day, but nowadays find inspiration in colours mostly. I still use culture references though.

'Proof II', 2024.

Having started to do works in this format naturally I studied the possibility of using poems as well. Well, having thought about it for a few hours I decided to take action.

'The election', 2024.

This poem was written on 16 February 2013; 12 November 2020; 15 and 23 September 2021. It referred to the 2013 poll but could apply to any election. I'm still interested in poppey things, 'Proof II' is based on a drama that aired in 2007 featuring a journalist. I was studying journalism at the time so naturally I took an interest. Making photos from the TV broadcast seemed natural but nothing at the time could have suggested to me that I'd use them 16 years later in an artwork. For 'The election' on the other hand I use photos from 2022 when Labor was elected (Liberal-National coalition won in 2013).

Media literacy revisited

I was surprised to learn yesterday that media literacy will be taught in NSW secondary schools, something that I asked for ten years ago. The proliferation of social media and websites makes this essential if we’re to preserve the integrity of our political system, under siege in many countries. 

Our media landscape in this country is a bit better than in many others because of the trusted position of the ABC but of course there’s nothing that forces people to use it, although it serves to some degree as an information clearing house, setting the tone for the day’s reporting. Because the ABC news program comes last in the evening it tends to have the last word on many issues although there are late bulletins on other major channels throughout the evening.

Today’s blogpost is however a reminder that stray thoughts can have long-lasting repercussions, little did I imagine in 2013 that the state government would take my casual words so much to heart, but inspired by fear perhaps they were impressed more by the rise of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin than by me.

Socmed companies push back against Aussie government’s revenue sharing scheme

Last year the federal Liberal Party announced a scheme whereby social media companies would pay part of their advertising revenues to media companies. In September, Facebook threatened to pull Australian mainstream media content from its platform. Now, the same company has said that the proposed laws are unprecedented and for that reason should be scrapped before they are introduced. Google, for its part, has made moves to exclude Australian media content from its search results. Both companies have said that Australian media companies benefit from the readers their sites bring to the sites of outfits like the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph, and the Australian.

Nip it in the bud, is the feeling that these tech giants are giving evidence of. Worried that news organisations in other countries might take the lead and push their own governments to try to redress the balance that has been lost since social media became a popular resort for billions of people.

What Facebook and Google have done is like China’s grab for a part of the South China Sea. By quarantining income away from general use, and from a beneficial purpose, the tech giants are saying that they like to benefit from the healthy news ecosystem – which enables liberal democracies to flourish, and enables the laws that give people the money to spend on advertisers’ products – but they don’t want to cultivate that ecosystem. 

They want to have their cake and eat it, too, in an essentially selfish ploy to smear a government that is – refreshingly – trying to do good. Almost despite itself, the Australian conservative administration has hit the nail upon the head. 

I’ve written before about monetising the news, for example in 2013 when I wrote a spoof that envisioned Google voluntarily surrendering part of its massive revenues to the news media. That didn’t happen, though I suggested in the same year that Google Wallet might help news media companies to monetise their products. 

Nothing came of that idea either but things change and people do unexpected things, as the Liberal Party has recently done Down Under. Surprising also – though, in a way, not – was the broader commentariat’s lack of enthusiasm for this issue as a source of outrage. There are many people who get incensed by one marginal idea or another who, in the present case, remain silent. Not totally unexpected, of course, due to that segment of the community being largely wedded to the idea that the mainstream media – which would benefit from the government’s scheme – is incompetent at least, if not criminally involved in a conspiracy.

Despite the rocky road travelled thus far let’s hope that sense prevails and that the stranglehold that the likes of Facebook and Google hold over advertising income is relaxed. If Covid-19 has shown us anything, it’s that we’re all in this together. If you want to enjoy freedom, you’re going to have to pay for it.

Book review: Aggregating the News: Secondhand Knowledge and the Erosion of Journalistic Authority, Mark Coddington (2019)

In April 2011 a story I had written about what was then the world’s hottest chilli, a story which had been published on the website of Australian Geographic, was plagiarised. They took the quotes, changed some text, rewrote the content, and published their version on their own website. I don’t remember if they put a link to the story I had written with my editor’s help. But this kind of thing happens all the time and journalists complain, particularly, about a media outlet that originated in the UK (which I shall not name here, but the name rhymes with “fail”). You see their gripes in comments on Twitter all the time.

So I was intrigued by Cottington’s idea of writing a book – which he seems to have started researching by at least 2015 – about aggregators. In fact it turns out to be a highly interesting and revealing book about journalism in the digital age more generally, so can be read profitably by many people. The point of the book is summed up as much by the second half of the subtitle as it is by the first half.

Even though aggregators – who assemble finished stories and videos mainly using material they source from the websites of other news outlets – are aware of the opprobrium that is aimed at them, their stories are read each week by hundreds of thousands, in fact by millions, of people. You wonder if perhaps (as I suggested in 2013) media literacy shouldn't be taught at secondary schools. In fact the reason that Coddington’s book is so interesting is precisely because of the profound changes that are happening in journalism, in politics, and in the public sphere more generally. This is a global phenomenon.

The matter of authority versus readability – who are all these people clicking on these secondhand stories? – presents us with something of a conundrum. Presumably people know that what they are clicking on is cobbled together from other sources, but it seems they cannot help themselves. They need the hit that news can provide if it is about something that is close to their hearts. The trivial is more compelling than the in-depth, and consumer behaviour confirms this fact.

But still people complain. I have written before, on this blog, about how people say the media is superficial. In my mind all news stories are proxies for larger debates, and aggregation in particular emphasises this point.

Yet while people know that aggregation is not based on actual reporting – in the traditional sense of the word – still they click, and companies that specialise in aggregation – plus branches of larger media companies involved in the practice as well – rake in the money that their overworked, often young, and inexperienced journalists make every day. Coddington takes time to examine how such people feel, and this is a good thing to do. It’s hard enough for regular journalists to avoid public criticism – everyone wants something from journalists then, at the drop of a hat, people turn around and criticise you – so how much harder is life for people doing aggregation?

I was a bit surprised by one fact the book unearths. An employee at one aggregator (at least one, I don’t remember the details precisely) said they don’t use sources on blogs. It seems rather restricting to limit yourself to only mainstream media outlets. Many good stories have come from blogs initially, such as the Theranos investigation. In fact, using blogs as sources could result in a higher-quality product from aggregators. There is a lot of repetition even among media outlets that do original reporting, but it seems that people in the community don’t mind.

When it comes down to it the public is in charge. They don’t have to click, but Coddington doesn’t analyse this aspect of the business in any detail, just as he doesn’t talk about how the news cycle is characterised by sharp peaks and troughs. People don’t stick with one issue for very long but when they do, they do so obsessively. A major issue, such as the US Democrats’ announcement recently of a presidential impeachment investigation, can die down within a few days.

Coddington also doesn’t talk about how people use narratives to create community, something which, since language is innate, is a species behaviour. I’ve written about these things on the blog many times over the past year or so. For example, on 2 July 2018, in the first in what would turn out to be a series of posts with theories of the act of narrative. A recent study has confirmed this intuition. It talks about “moral grandstanding” as an expression of “status-seeking personality traits”.

Coddington keeps his focus squarely on the aggregators themselves, and in doing so he goes into a lot of detail about a shadowy industry. Keeping in mind the reservations I express, I think that this is a very illuminating book. It forms a kind of corrective to the streams of criticism (and worse) that is aimed at journalists every day.

To finish off, just a small point for the publisher: the subtitle given on the book’s web page and on the graphic used for the cover of the Kindle edition is ‘Secondhand Knowledge and the Erosion of Journalistic Authority’, which is not what appears on the title page of the Kindle edition. Here you read ‘Secondhand Storytelling and the Changing World of Digital Journalism’ which, Coddington told me, was just a preliminary version. 

Karl Stefanovic stories on the SMH website

Channel Nine had just taken over Fairfax media’s brands, including the stately Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (of Melbourne). The SMH had been founded in 1831, so it predates Australian democracy by a generation. Since the 1970s the SMH had provided objective, unbiased coverage of national events. It is one of the top-five news websites in the country going by the metric of monthly visitors.

When Channel Nine finally got permission from the federal consumer watchdog to take over Fairfax, things moved quickly, going by reports in rival outlets. The Guardian runs reliable news about the media in this country, and reports there were that staff at the SMH were given a printed script to use when answering the phone from the day of the takeover, to make sure that all communication undertaken in a professional capacity were on-message. Some people lost their jobs. At least two mastheads were merged, at least on paper (practical separation might have taken a bit longer to achieve).

Then things carried on as normal until Wednesday 19 December when two stories about Channel Nine host Karl Stefanovic appeared on the websites of both the SMH and The Age (there were the same two stories on the website of the Brisbane Times, the Nine broadsheet outlet in that city, and one on the website of WA Today, the company’s Perth-based broadsheet). This man had been relieved of his position on the couch for a breakfast show that runs on Nine every morning. Stefanovic had been a popular presenter for Nine but he had recently divorced his wife and married a younger woman. According to the breathless coverage in the “news” stories on the two named websites, this move had damaged his brand. There were other details but it’s all just too tawdry and pointless to repeat them here. I can’t be bothered with the mindless little machinations of the TV studio that has now assumed control of the stable eminences of journalism, the two major broadsheets, the ones that are supposed to be the outlets of record and which, now, have been overrun like a sterling old family business might be overrun by a bunch of uneducated louts.

It’s sort of like the crazy drama unleashed by John Self in Martin Amis’ 1984 novel ‘Money’, a work that tore strips off the body of the crass commercialism of the era when neoliberalism emerged in the west to challenge the strong post-war counter-culture that had come out of WWII. Anti-meaning had come to challenge the creation of meaning. Cash had come to offer resistance to values. Commercial interests had come in to take away from government the responsibility for running essential services. (We have seen how privatising monopolies has worked to the detriment of the community in Australia, with rising energy prices.)

If this is how Nine intends to use the SMH and the Age – as parts of its PR effort, as vehicles to use to promote dull and useless TV shows – then my subscription will be at risk. I shall be watching the SMH closely to see if I can find signs of a deterioration in the quality of the journalism produced. So far I’d have to say that there has been. I am sure that the managers at the Guardian would be happy to receive my dollars every month.

A tale for the times: legacy media versus indie media

People on Twitter have put up comments that rage against the Walkley Foundation in the wake of the award of a Walkley Award to Sharri Markson of the Daily Telegraph for the Barnaby Joyce infidelity story. As usual there is the complaint about the "legacy" media which got the award and the "indie" media which broke the story. But what are the facts in the case?

I saw a page published by an outfit called True Crime News Weekly which contained a story by Serkan Ozturk that included a picture of Vikki Campion. The story was dated 13 February 2018 but someone online implied that the story appeared initially in October 2017. The outlet told me later that there were stories on this topic published on 24 and 25 October 2017, and they showed me the links and the pages. Then I saw a letter from a law firm addressed to the website dated 13 February 2018 complaining about the story of that date, that had been sent on behalf of Campion and that denied all of the imputations contained in it.

Apparently the story was then picked up by Independent Australia, which is an outlet run by a man named Dave Donovan. The True Crime News Weekly account told me, “They called us up while putting theirs together.” IA published a story on 19 November about Joyce and Campion and the DT put theirs up on their website on 6 February 2018. IA also put out a string of related stories (21 March, 28 May, 31 May) in early 2018. The New England by-election that Barnaby Joyce was contesting for the Liberal Party was held on 2 December 2017. Markson has said that she tried to verify the rumour behind the story in October 2017 but couldn't manage to do it. If she had been able to, Joyce might well have lost the poll.

Enthusiasts tend to rail against the machine in the name of freedom, but the outlets that they praise are not everyone’s cup of tea. I haven’t read anything on the TCW site but I have read some on IA’s website. It tends to publish stories that contain a strongly partisan (on the left of politics) viewpoint and there are often structural and grammatical problems with them that would have been fixed before publication by a legacy media outlet.

I mentioned to one person I was talking to about the award that many freelancers don’t belong to the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (the journalist’s union) because they can’t afford the fees. To put forward your story for a Walkley you have to be a member of the union. Donovan then said that he was a member but that he didn’t submit his story for the award. I don’t know if TCW’s Ozturk is a member and if he thought about entering his story for the award, but it seems unfair to blame the Walkleys for giving the story to the DT if the other media outlets involved never bothered to put themselves forward in the running for the prize.

On the other hand, the existence of the indie media stories mentioned in this post should have raised a rad flag for the Walkleys when they were deciding who to award their prize to. It’s not valid for Markson to deny their scoop on the basis that they are “blogs”. Can we please get away from these outdated categories that characterise bloggers as unemployed misfits sitting in their pyjamas in their mothers’ basements? Clearly, the DT did not get the scoop (which was the award Markson won). But if indie media outlets want to be in the running for such awards, they will have to pay their dues and submit the relevant paperwork.

As a footnote to this discussion, I think it’s worth looking for a moment at notions like “indie” media and “legacy” media. I first wrote about the idea of indie media back on 26 March 2013. In that post I talked about the way that the different outlets behaved in order to contextualise them outside of labels like “mainstream media” (or its contemporary form, “MSM”) and “indie media”.

From what I can see the basic difference between the two types of media outlet comes down to the fact that the legacy outlets have more people to do things like editing and subediting, making the text read smoothly, and ensuring that the ideas are both contextualised properly and embedded in language that is accessible and engaging. This costs money of course, and it is probably also a symptom of the fact that legacy media journalists have mostly been to university to study the craft and so have some sort of grounding in the kinds of principles that will lead to the production of good, solid, well-written content. Having all of your journalists go through the same process of acculturation is not necessarily the best way to organise your fourth estate, of course. Having some diversity in the sorts of viewpoints that you encourage, viewpoints that derive from different sets of experiences, in an objective sense must contribute to adding depth (and value) to the ecosystem.

But the economics of the business has changed so drastically with the appearance of the internet, and with social media the smaller players get almost as much exposure as the majors. So money is the sticking point. It doesn’t matter if you pay money to an indie outlet or to a mainstream outlet, but you should be paying something to someone in order to ensure the stability of our democracy. 

The conformity of the news media

In an 18 October podcast he did this year with Ezra Klein of Vox, Jay Rosen criticised the news media for conformity, identifying the tendency of different news rooms to report on the same stories and poking fun at their desire to get the scoop first rather than to cover something original and unique.

When I wrote for magazines I had this experience so I know it is true. The editor at a small outlet would email me asking if I could do 500 words for a story about something that had just been broken by one of the major outlets.

This kind of piggybacking however seems to me to be more normal now, in the era of social media. Since the emergence of the internet, news editors have always been able to see which stories got the most traction in the community. But now, with Twitter especially, they can see exactly what people are sharing and how they are sharing it: either with approval, criticism, irony or some other attitude layered over the original story. Editors know exactly what people want to read because they can see several different metrics measuring what links get clicked on.

Social media has not only changed the way that journalists see themselves, it has changed the way people use news, making them more likely to share and engage with stories that they are already familiar with because it is these stories that satisfy a deep human need for connection with others. I wrote a number of blogposts earlier this year about how stories are used on places such as Twitter. The first of these posts came on 2 July and it was titled ‘The articulation of stories and the dynamics of progress’. In it, I provided a theory of narratives, describing the way that people in the community use stories in order to create community: to bring them closer to allies and to distance themselves even more completely from enemies. I said that the way they do this is similar to the way that people barrack for sports teams in national leagues: the contest is a zero-sum game, where the prize is a scare resource and there can only be one winner.

But in fact there can be many winners, and on 21 July I continued the discussion with a post titled ‘The left-right tango is a dead end’ in which I talked about the need to find the best policies regardless of which side of politics introduces it. We need, if we want to move toward a sustainable future, to take the best policies from wherever they come, and use them to expand the pie for all members of the community.

Journalist Katharine Murphy talks about the dynamics of social media in her new book, ‘On Disruption’, which I reviewed on 9 July on the blog. In it, she identifies the election to the office of US president of Donald Trump as an artefact of the social media era. Others have pointed to the fact that no Australian prime minister has been able to serve out a full term at the head of a government since the invention of Twitter. Social media has changed the ways that we use the media, as it has changed the very nature of democracy. Our thinking about the media has to take that into account. Murphy herself works for the Guardian, a left-leaning outlet that operates on three continents and that has used its ideological position, as have other outlets, to build a community. Many people in it pay for the news they receive.

So the “view from nowhere” is gradually disappearing as people form communities around different news outlets that validate the positions they themselves hold about issues. In this new environment, of course, there will also be a place for a news organisation that takes a more objective view of the world, and which deals with issues in a dispassionate manner, such as the New York Times or the Sydney Morning Herald. But objectivity will gradually become the exception rather than the rule because of the economics of the news: people like to back their own team in the contest.

Google's Richard Gingras interviewed by the ABC's Gaven Morris

Richard Gingras, Google vice president of news, was interviewed last night at an event at Google’s HQ in Sydney by Gaven Morris, head of news at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Tori Maguire, who works for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, opened proceedings representing the Online News Association, which had organised the event. This is a partial recount of events as they took place, and any conversation that is provided here is as accurate as I was able to make it. Some words that were used have of course been left out because of system constraints. A video of the event was made and broadcast on the ONA’s Facebook page. That video might subsequently be able to be viewed on the association’s website.

Gaven Morris opened the conversation by saying, “You’re endlessly optimistic about the future of news.”  Gingras said that technology establishes the ground rules. The internet gives you distribution access that you might not have had before. The question to ask is, “Can I participate in public discourse?” He said the new paradigm was “extraordinary”. “We will get to that optimistic future through innovation. There is a great opportunity to evolve new journalistic models.” He also noted that the past wasn’t necessarily a perfect model.

GM: You think legacy media organisations have been lazy and haven’t adapted.

RG: No. I don’t criticise legacy media organisations for not seeing how dramatic the change was. Many legacy publishers looked at the internet as an interesting distribution means but didn’t see that the internet created a new marketplace for information and services. Google’s search ads do not correlate with the demise of the media’s business model. Behaviours in the community have changed and revenues went with it.

GM: The problem is not as simple as the duopoly (Google and Facebook) but the duopoly has had an impact by distorting markets.

RG: Online marketplaces have a combined market value of 25 billion US dollars. Taxes? We follow local law. It’s not fair to say Google should pay more taxes.

GM: How do you expect existing media companies to fund journalism when you have disruption?

RG: Embedded players are not necessarily the most successful in the new generation. There will be new players. None of it happens overnight. Village Media in eastern Canada is an example of a new player that is being successful. They operate in nine cities. There is now a lower cost of participation and entry.

GM: We see in five years all ad revenue coming to Google.

RG: We will continue to innovate in our own businesses.

GM: But your revenue will go up.

RG: We want it to go up, Nothing is forever. Our business is in search. Who says that will be there in five years? I used to work for a search engine named Excite and at the time we wanted to beat Yahoo, then Google came along.

RG: I’m less concerned about the sustainability of national news organisations than of the sustainability of local news organisations. Some people are looking at the news business in new ways. A subscription model is healthy. Bristol Cable for example does lots of audience engagement. They have a membership model not a paywall. We want to nurture local models to make it easy for others to follow.

GM: In Google News Initiative there is a plan to elevate and strengthen quality journalism. Why not build a model for local outlets to get a greater share of revenue?

RG: We have search ads. Also, display ads. The revenue share for display ads is 70 percent to participants.

GM: Why not reward good content directly?

RG: Who determines what is quality content?

GM: You have algorithms for that.

RG: Maybe. I’m loathe for Google to judge what is good journalism.

GM: We want Google to weed out the rubbish.

RG: Authoritative stuff goes to the top. We send billions of visits to news sites each month. Value is already associated with the search ranking. Through the division of traffic Google is already favouring quality content.

GM: It is an open web.

RG: We are a child of the open web. It’s important for us to be transparent about algorithms. We have a 160-page public document that guides Google on authoritativeness. Since the day we started people have been trying to game the algorithms. Fake news is evidence of people gaming the algorithms. But we get criticised for both sharing data and on account of privacy.

GM: How will AI come into play? Will it be involved in serving news to us?

RG: Personalised recommendations can be helpful. All publishers are looking to tune their service with personalisation. But you have to tell people when something is personalised. And why is it personalised, then give them some ability to control it.

GM: Another problem we see in the world today is governments controlling information that their citizens can see on the internet. It is impossible to get truth reported in places like Burma, for example. Journalists don’t know what to do about it,

RG: There is more populism in the world along with a demise of open societies. The internet is a positive thing but some regimes control it.

RG: There has been disruption in the past of course. TV created the modern American newspaper. It had a different ad model. In the 50s and 60s thousands of newspapers closed. We need to rethink everything about the model. How to take advantage of data journalism is one way. Also, there is little market research done by media entities. Usage data alone is not enough because it doesn’t tell you what people value.

GM: Can you (personally) win inside Google?

RG: There is no intrinsic understanding of media by engineers. Collaboration with industry is valuable. It helps executives and engineers at Google to understand the media. We have the open ecosystem of expression that Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat has talked about. The internet has enabled free expression more than any other technology. Fake news is however driving efforts to constrain free expression around the world. (Gingras recounted how he met with a European who wanted him to help him to clamp down on bloggers.)

There was one audience question about filter bubbles.

RG: Media literacy is important. The question of schools often comes up in this regard but this is not the only source of a response to the challenge.

Gingras is on the left in the photo.

Trump’s terror campaign against the media bears its bitter fruit

Perversely, there was something serene and perfect about scenes conjured in my mind by the idea that a man had started shooting journalists in their office in Maryland. The news, which emerged online in the early morning, Australian eastern standard time, had an ideal cast to it like the image of the snake eating its own tail – the ouroboros – that was used in Renaissance Italy to express something that would otherwise be inchoate, or lie outside the margins demarcated by language in the secular universe. Things like the ineffable that we all feel at different times in our lives.

The same serenity and perfection were of course present in September 2001 when the planes struck the Twin Towers. After decades of American military and intelligence meddling in the politics of Middle Eastern nations, people from there had converted commercial aircraft, symbolic of capitalism, into weapons, to return the favour with a vengeance. This kind of purity of vision was rendered explicit for me in 2014 when I saw an exhibition of the work of Aida Makoto at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. One of the works on exhibit, a drawing done in pencil in stripped-down black and white titled ‘Imagine’, shows the purported view out the front windows of the first jet as it approaches the two buildings in New York on that deadly morning. The word is written on the picture in a frail script that is meant to resemble handwriting. (It might be the home of the brave but if you are famous death dogs your footsteps on every street.)

All those guns. The 38-year-old Annapolis suspect shooter, Jarrod Warren Ramos, clearly had no trouble getting his hands on one. America has little to recommend it but it does encourage a tendency where people there find in it the inspiration to create the ideal expression of something, one stripped of any trace of ornament, like an action painting by the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock (the runs and drips of his paint can remind you of the blood of the slain), a piece of pop art by Robert Indiana (he would have gone to town with the epithet “fake news”), or one of Mark Rothko’s contemplative canvases. With Rothko, the divine is somehow present in the material world before you. God right there, hanging on the wall, an epiphany in canvas and oil and pigment. It just might be the everyday presence of death that focuses the mind thus on essentials. A word comes to mind that is used to describe the presence of the divine in the world: “immanent”. It means “dwelling within”.

(I had to wait for this word to manifest itself. Initially it eluded my grasp, like an eel in a tub of murky water. My poor ageing brain would not surrender it up. Then I went out and walked around the city and it came to me eventually but I had to first bribe it to emerge by offering the two letters at its beginning, as a hunter might try to coax an animal out of its burrow with a morsel of food, or a twitcher might get a bird to reveal where it sits hidden among the branches and leaves of the forest by mimicking its call. I had tried using the letters “in” in the morning before going out because they seemed right, and had even taken out the dictionary to look through the listing of words beginning with them. I also looked through words listed that start with “ex”. Then later when I was on York Street the word “imbricate” suddenly appeared in my mind. It is a word that I had used in a poem on 24 January 2014, and by proffering the “im” that sits at its beginning at the doorstep of my memory, the right word finally appeared.)

Five people with perfectly good brains yesterday met the end of their mortal spans, including four journalists, and at least two more people were wounded by bullets fired from Ramos’ gun, because of the sustained terror campaign that Donald Trump has waged against the mainstream media in the United States from before the time of his nomination as the candidate for the Republican Party for the 2016 presidential election. Those who died were Gerald Fischman, Robert Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith, and Wendi Winters. The sustained campaign stemming from the right side of politics is certainly the reason the shooter did what he did, and it’s starting to infect public discourse in Australia too through the Liberal Party’s campaign against the public broadcaster, the ABC.

In the wake of the Annapolis shooting, we will see more opportunities for Trump to cry “fake news!” and to lambast the media in the coarse and caustic style he has made his trademark, the way a man speaks when he feels threatened by people who are more talented, intelligent, or better educated. A tone of voice used in the street by local toughs more comfortable with applying their fists than their wits to get their way. More comfortable picking up a gun – don’t touch my second amendment! – and using it to make a point that someone unlike him could make with words alone. “Words, words, words,” mused Prince Hamlet contemplatively as he struggled with the truth his father’s ghost had revealed to the young man about his murder.

Words had failed Ramos in the past. Six years ago, he sued the newspaper, The Capital Gazette, whose offices he would later target, for defamation, and lost the case. Inspired by Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, he has now made a more uncompromising statement to suit the tenor of the times.

Really nothing should surprise us anymore about Trump’s America, a country so damaged from generations of neglect that it can only accurately be described as the sick man of the west. “’I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.’ Milo Yiannopoulos in a text to a reporter earlier this week.” This tweet from Ohio resident Kevin Honaker appeared on Twitter at 8.42am AEST yesterday. It referred to the British commentator who supports policies like Trump’s that demonise minorities. But in the US on the day after the shooting Trump gave some hollow words to the media about it:

"This attack shocked the conscience of the nation and filled our hearts with grief," he said at the White House. "Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their jobs."

"My government will not rest until we have done everything in our power to reduce violent crime and to protect innocent life.”

AJ English foists a lame “gotcha” moment on the world

A video produced by Zab Mustafa and presented on-camera by Tabish Talib appeared on the social graph yesterday and was gaining some support of people opposed to Australia’s offshore detention policy. This is a very emotive subject and people take extreme views without much concern about the truth of the information they deploy to support their positions.

This dishonest video provides the media company with what it thinks is a classic case of the “gotcha” moment, but ironically it also serves to underscore the strength of Australia’s claim to be a major mid-level global power. If you want to be taken seriously out there, you have to be prepared for some untruths being told about you. Americans no doubt find this to be true a lot of the time. With Australia it often comes down to the issue of racism.

The video aims to criticise the Coalition government, and especially Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, for extending a hand of welcome to white South African farmers who are apparently suffering persecution in their home country. In order to claim that Dutton is being motivated by racism, the AJ English team contrasts his offer with his treatment of refugees who have been locked up by Australia’s Border Force in prisons on Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea, and on the Pacific island of Nauru. (The PNG refugees have now been released into the general community.)

The producers found two refugees, including one on Manus Island, Behrouz Boochani, who has been vocal in the past addressing the Australian community through articles in newspapers there. He is a Kurdish journalist. The other person the producers found is living in captivity on Christmas Island, which is located in a remote sector of the Indian Ocean.

At no point did the producers mention the reason for the offshore detention facilities, and neither did they say that the policy that funds them is bipartisan, meaning that both of the major political parties in Australia, the Coalition (Liberal-National) and the Australian Labor Party, own it. This is a damning aspect of the story and represents serious journalistic failure. Once upon a time, I subscribed to the satellite channel that carried Al Jazeera English but I would never go to them for information these days. They have no editorial standard for truth, and merely rely on sensationalism to achieve their editorial goals.

Because the offshore detention policy is bipartisan (actually it was introduced by the Keating ALP government in 1992), it is certain that the majority of Australian citizens agree with interrupting the business of people smugglers, who sell their services to desperate people flying from the Middle East to Indonesia and neighbouring countries, and put their lives at risk in unsafe boats on the high seas. I have written about refugees on the blog before, most recently on 14 August last year, when I suggested establishing a refugee processing centre in Jakarta.

Australia is a welcoming nation and has immigration at levels now that its people have never seen before. From the Australian Bureau of Statistics website:

The Census shows that Australia has a higher proportion of overseas-born people (26%) than the United States (14%), Canada (22%) and New Zealand (23%). What about the United Kingdom, you say? Not even close (13%).

Forty-nine percent of Australians have at least one parent born overseas. The country welcomes over 200,000 every year people (with a total population of 25 million) through its immigration programs, including the refugee program that the AJ English video attempts to criticise.

In fact, immigration levels are so high that there are now debates in the community about their sustainability. What those debates rarely focus on, however, is race. The major independent party that includes racism in its policy platform, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, only got 13 percent of the vote in the 2017 Queensland state election. Queensland is Hanson’s home state. They got one seat in the Parliament there. The issues most people talk about when they think about immigration these days are overcrowding on roads and on trains, and the high cost of residential accommodation (both rented and purchased).

These are much bigger issues for average Australians because they have to cope with them every day, and they are things that Australian cities, particularly Melbourne and Sydney, where most immigrants end up living, will have to deal with.

They go there because that’s where the jobs are. Ironically, in Sydney, it is the “small city” policies of the former ALP premier, Bob Carr, that are making the current Berejiklian Coalition government look so good. In power from 1995 to 2005, Carr had plenty of chances to build new rail lines to serve the city’s growing suburbs but failed each time. Even after he had stepped down as party leader in NSW, the party did not change its policies with regard to public transport. Now, the Coalition, the party of private enterprise, is doing what the ALP should have done all those years ago: build more public transport.

If you want to vote for a party that wants to close down the detention camps, you can choose the Australian Greens, although their support has never got beyond about 15 percent. In the 2018 Tasmanian state election, the Greens won just over 10 percent of the popular vote, and that brought them two seats. The result was down from almost 14 percent in the 2015 election. In South Australia, the 2018 state election brought the Greens about 6.6 percent, again down a couple of percent on the previous election. In the 2017 Queensland state election, the Greens won a seat in the Parliament with 10 percent of the vote, which was up a percent-and-a-half on the previous state election. In the federal Parliament, the Greens have controlled the balance of power in the Senate and that is currently their point of greatest influence in federal politics, which is where immigration policy is decided.

As for South African farmers, if they want to come to Australia, we should welcome them. South Africans have been coming here for years, most notably immediately before and after the dismantling of Apartheid-era government. But they should have to join the queue just like everyone else who wants a better life in a pluralist democracy.

Claims of racism are often still aimed at Australia because of the historical settlement that dated from federation in 1901, when the originary British colonies finally decided to come together as a single country with a single name. One of the first laws passed in the new Parliament that year was the so-called “White Australia” policy, and it remained in force until it began to be dismantled by Coalition governments in the late 1960s. It was finally expunged from the statutes in 1973 by the ALP’s Gough Whitlam, who brought in multiculturalism to replace it as official government policy. The subsequent Fraser Coalition government decided to keep multiculturalism on the statutes, making the policy bipartisan from the very beginning. Australia was only the second country in the world to adopt multiculturalism as official policy.

Book review: The Court Reporter, Jamelle Wells (2018)

Having worked for almost two decades as the ABC’s court reporter, Jamelle Wells is well-placed to fulfil an important function as go-between between the public and the media. The law must not just perform its social, economic and political functions, it must also be seen to perform them. Open courts are a long-established part of the legal justice system in Australia (and other former British colonies such as the US and Canada), going back to eras long before the colonies were founded. This book is an artefact of open justice.

Court reporters continue to be necessary because of the stop-start nature of how justice works. The fluid narrative that you get in the evening newscast is nothing like the spasmodic drip of crucial information surrounding a case which might take literally years to emerge for big or complex cases. Careful attention by the court reporter is necessary at all times so that important information is not missed during a trial or a related hearing where details about a case are discussed in court between the prosecutors, the judge, and the defendants.

In her book, Wells touches on all levels of justice in the state of NSW, including the High Court when it sits in Sydney, the NSW Supreme Court and other, lower,  Sydney courts, local magistrates courts in the suburbs, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) as well as bespoke bodies such as the inquiry into the Sydney siege conducted by Man Haron Monis in 2014.

Dates are not always overt in the account, so it’s hard to know when Wells actually started working for the ABC; she was already working in the media before 2001 when the planes hit the Twin Towers, and she moved to the national broadcaster after that. But her wise, artful and interesting account of working on her chosen beat is something of a revelation. While she is tight-lipped about domestic arrangements – you never work out if she is married, has children or has a family of any sort – she is forthcoming in so many other ways.

Her discretion about personal lives comes into play in a topical fashion in 2015 when she breaks her hip outside the ICAC  court and is admitted by ambulance to St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, where nursing staff ask her about the domestic arrangements of colleagues including ABC News presenter Joe O’Brien, who visits her one day in the ward.

I mention family because it is true to say that working on this round would be stressful for anyone. You are repeatedly exposed to such harrowing accounts of abuse in the real sense of the word and you need to recalibrate from time to time in order to cope with the tireless onslaught of toxic information. Family would be one way to wind down. Wells talks at some limited length about such stresses of the job but you feel that more could have been said about how she personally deals with them on a daily basis. Juggling the cases she researches on the internet, looking for a variety of cases to cover in her round, might be one way to do this. But there might be other secrets of the trade that she could have reliably vouchsafed to her readership. Preserving mental health must be a priority for any worker in a large city. Or even in a country town (Wells hails from the remote NSW township of Cobar).

The range of cases she has covered is extraordinary but among the interesting things the book gives you access to are ancillary stories, such as that of Robin Gandevia and Denis Sullivan, two court watchers she came to know though her rounds. When Denis died, the elderly Robin wrote a letter to NSW Supreme Court Justice Lucy McCallum telling her how much the two of them had come to admire her in her courts. The judge took the time to respond to the letter, and the response is included in the book, along with the letter Robin had written.

Wells has a background in theatre, which has evidently been part of the way she stays sane outside of work, and one of the cases she elucidates is a trial involving songwriter Leonard Cohen, who was suing a former colleague in Los Angeles when Wells was visiting there one year. Wells went into the courthouse and made notes, which she subsequently turned into a story for the ABC – even though she was away on holidays at the time – but then she was approached by someone who asked her if she was a Buddhist. No, she replied, and asked him why he had asked her this question. He said it was because she had bowed before entering and leaving the court. In Australia bowing to the judge is conventional practice but it isn’t in America. Her training as a NSW court reporter had followed her to a foreign jurisdiction.

The voice in the book is knowing, wise, full of humour and sometimes incredulous at the lengths criminals will go to to mitigate the importance of their crimes in the face of the realities of the justice system. Wells also has a heightened sense of drama, and a nose for the right length a story should last before being terminated. She begins the account with the news of her mother’s terminal breast cancer, and the book ends with a small token her mother gave to her: a piece of jewellery shaped like a dragonfly.

It’s a fitting emblem for the book, because of the way this insect – which can go forward, backward, and stop in an instant, due to the fact that it has four wings that work independently of one another – can do remarkable things in flight.

The book is a welcome addition to the canon of books about journalism because it serves to humanise an often besieged cohort of the working population. Journalists are routinely attacked on social media by those whose expectations for other people far exceed the standards they would realistically apply to themselves.

SMH Live: 2017 Year in Review

Lisa Davies, editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, led discussions in front of the large and demonstrative audience of subscribers – who are mainly older Sydneysiders – at a function centre on the roof of the Star Casino yesterday evening. I had bought a ticket and queued and happened to wander into the auditorium at just the right time. I was standing outside with hundreds of others on the roof overlooking the city, but my beer was finished and I decided to get a change of air, so I went indoors. I joined a column of people walking into a hallway. Inside the room, there were hundreds of chairs set up in front of a stage, so I sat down in one.

First up with Davies were Peter Hartcher and Nick O’Malley. Notable in the discussion was Hartcher saying that Trump is the symptom, not the cause, of the disease. He pointed to the fact that the American middle class hasn’t seen an improvement in its standard of living for a generation. Next on the stage with Davies were Michael Bachelard and Kate Geraghty who told some gruesome and touching stories about covering the conflict in Iraq.

Then up with Davies were Ross Gittins and Jessica Irvine. Gittins said that a banking royal commission in Australia is inevitable. Irvine said that intergenerational disadvantage is unfinished business for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Davies was up next with Kate McClymont and Sean Nicholls. McClymont agreed that the best case for a federal ICAC is that the politicians in Canberra don’t want one. Davies then went up against Kate McClymont and Malcolm Knox to talk about sport, and lastly the whole lot took to the stage to finish up the evening with a unified front. McClymont won the gong for the evening by predicting that Salim Mehajer and Fadi Ibrahim would set up a botox clinic together.

A registered Republican who thinks trade unions are good

This talk by American investigative journalist David Cay Johnston was compered by Australian investigative journalist Michael West, who is an associate professor at the University of Sydney. The talk was part of the Sydney Ideas series. Before the talk started West introduced the Dark Money project that is being conducted by the Sydney Democracy Network, which is examining corporatocracy. West said that he and Cay Johnston had a common interest in multinational tax avoidance. But he also pointed out that revenues for journalism were falling by five or 10 percent a year.

This was Cay Johnston’s first time in Australia. He said the average income of the bottom half of Americans is $300 per week. He also said that the average income of the bottom half of the population is $40,000 per year. Why are 90 percent of Americans’ incomes flat? he asked. There has been 0.5 cents growth in wages per year since 1961. In 1961, he said, 400 people made $1 million per year. That figure has skyrocketed. Donald Trump is the symptom not the disease.

He said that he had found a major social trend affecting the world and he saw it in the rise of Narendra Modi in India and Christian fundamentalists in the US. People, he said, are unable to adapt to the explosion of knowledge in the modern age. Things are moving faster than they ever have before. This is leading to an attack on democracy. Putin, he noted, says that democracy is a joke, and is working to undermine the democracies of Europe and the US. He added that 24 percent of millennials in the US do not believe in democracy. There is, he went on, less participation in civic activity than there used to be. But there is also an attack from another sector.

Corporations are soulless, eternal and amoral. The Romans created corporations to hold communal property and manage it. But we need rules to govern them. Being a person, you need to share in supporting the needs and burdens of being a society. Corporations have figured out how to shirk their responsibility. They make a profit out of the income tax system. He also talked about the time value of money. You buy stock that don’t pay dividends, and bonds that don’t pay tax. Apple has a quarter of trillion dollars in interest free loans from the government, he said. Wealth is more concentrated now than it was 30 40 years ago. If you have a surplus, it snowballs.

We tax capital at a lower rate than labour, Cay Johnston went on. Andrew Mellon published a book about taxes in 1924 titled ‘Taxation: The People's Business’. Mellon wrote that capital should be taxed higher than labour. If you have capital it keeps earning. Cay Johnston said that taxes are not just the basis for civilisation, he went further and affirmed that taxes are civilisation, echoing historical conservative Edmund Burke who said the revenue of the state is the state. Cay Johnston recounted the story about mud in the Delaware River that led to the writing of the US Constitution.

Today, he said, US democracy is in deep trouble. Commercial sports, he said, consume the lives of ordinary people and they don’t want anything to do with politics. They say, “You can’t beat city hall.” He also aimed a finger at advertising. Advertising, he said, is designed to get us to think about things other than civics. Journalism, he went on, is the only business where you get paid to tell the truth. The problem, he said, is the rise of a set of values that favour capitalism. People thoughtlessly make a connection between wealth and character which, he said, is absurd. And we are constantly being barraged with this message, as advertising gets you to think about what the advertisers want you to think about. He said that money is distorting our human values.

Cay Johnston said that the founding fathers were concerned that extreme inequality would bring down the country. Without taxes you will see your liberties washed away. Rules are one step in the process, he went on, but you also need a culture of enforcement. Culture and norms matter. Pope Francis says there is no economic justice without trade unions. In responding to one question, he also pointed to “binary economics” and the ideas of Louis Kelso. He furthermore touched on a basic universal income when answering another question.

“Producing original journalism costs a lot of money”

These are the words of Emma Alberici, host of the ABC’s Lateline program, which yesterday the broadcaster said would not continue in 2018. Instead, the ABC will be setting up an investigative bureau with beats covered by some 30 journalists, including Alberici (who will take the economics beat) and Stan Grant (who will take the Asia beat).

Alberici went on the ABC’s Radio National to explain. This is some of what she said:

And management, I guess – and I understand this – had to make a decision about when audiences are defrayed as they are and splintered all over the place – you know, on-demand services, Netflix, Stan, Foxtel and everywhere else in-between – iTunes – we’re competing with all those players that are new for eyeballs, so you need to work out where your money’s best spent. And the ABC has made a decision that you need to protect our history of breaking stories, original journalism, and investigations, and put our money there.  

So, management has been very clear that there is no cost-cutting agenda here. We’ve been told no money will be saved by losing Lateline, and no net journalism jobs will be lost. So, the same number of journalists will be employed by the ABC next year as are now. So, that’s very comforting, and I’m very happy to hear that because I, like those who do what I do, care about quality journalism. And if what we’re doing is investing more money into that, and worrying less about the platforms through which that’s delivered – that is, you don’t have to be attached to a particular program – as long as you’re making a fantastic story that breaks news, is original, uncovers something that others didn’t want uncovered, then that will find an outlet these days. You put it online.  

You know, at the moment journalism can be a post on Facebook, as it can be a story on 4 Corners. Things have changed so dramatically in terms of how you define journalism and we need to be where our audiences are. And I think that’s the challenge for all media organisations.

The ABC’s position as a trusted source will hopefully be enhanced by this move toward a more investigative stance vis-à-vis the public sphere.

In the US, local news organisations are going to be supported, in another initiative, by ProPublica – the New York non-profit journalism organisation that was set up in 2007 with money from philanthropists Herbert and Marion Sandler. ProPublica will be funding journalists to work on investigative projects in local newsrooms (in cities with a population below 1 million).

Trust is a rare commodity – but one that is prized by all journalists – in the polarised public sphere that we are nowadays confronted with, which is why Google’s head of news Richard Gingras has been working on The Trust Project with Sally Lehrman, a senior scholar on journalism ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Santa Clara, in California, developing ethics policies. There are 90 news organisations involved. The project is, for example, encouraging the visibility of ethics policies on news websites.

For my own part, when I start publishing new stories when my new website has been launched, I will be following the code of ethics of the journalist’s union in Australia, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, which you can read here.

With Richard Gingras, Google's head of news

This morning at Google’s Sydney headquarters about 80 journalists came to hear from the source, the man who is spearheading the search company’s engagement with the media industry.

Gingras said at the outset that Google is working to foster a healthier, open environment. “Why does Google do this?”

He said that his career has been about the evolution of media. He worked for PBS under Hartford Gunn, and said that he had always wanted to be on the cutting edge of technology. "Technology enables things," he said.

Gingras said that Google is a child of the open web, and that 98 percent of the company’s business derives from that. “That drives a lot of our strategies.” He said that the world has changed radically in the past 20 years. “We've swapped out the central nervous system of our culture," he said, and attributed part of the credit for this change to his company. "We have indeed given free expression to everyone." Google, he said, has enabled many, many more voices to appear in the public sphere.

But he thinks there is more work to do. “How do we rearchitect the web for speed?” he asked, and mentioned AMP for ads.

Gingras said that we are now operating in a media environment that is quite levelling, and this has had casualties. One of these casualties has been a quantity of trust. “We see continued declines in trust in media,” he said. He then mentioned The Trust Project. Gingras is working with Sally Lehrman, a senior scholar on journalism ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Santa Clara, in California, on ethics policies. There are 90 news organisations involved. The project is, for example, encouraging the visibility of ethics policies on news websites. Also, media organisations should ask themselves how their journalists are made to appear credible. Can readers access their full body of work? “People talk today about the need for media literacy,” said Gingras. “It comes down to expertise and motivation.” What is the journalist’s background and what is their agenda?

“I believe that journalists should be advocates and be unbiased,” he said, encapsulating an apparently contradictory pair of priorities in one sentence. This, for me, was the most important thing that Gingras said during the morning’s proceedings, and it was almost the last thing he said.

On monetisation, Gingras said that advertising is not necessarily enough anymore, so subscriptions come into play. “We're seeing good growth there,” he said. The New York Times has 2.25 million digital subscribers, he said. “What can [Google] do to help drive subscription growth?” He said that the company is looking at “the full funnel from discovery to payment”. They are going to evolve the sampling program. He said Google is also looking for propensity to pay among the readership, and studying how to take the friction out of the purchasing process. It is necessary to eliminate abandonment, he said. Media companies need to tell Google who is a subscriber so that they can be served better during the search process. He said that it might be possible to highlight for the reader whether an article that appears in a search result is from a media outlet they already subscribe to, so that they can then click on it. But he said he is cautious about setting expectations.

Part of the burden in future must lie with media organisations themselves. “You have to be offering a product that people can immediately see the value of,” Gingras said. “What's the value proposition?” He added however that the internet is challenging the very foundations of democracy. “How to find consensus between conflicting points of view?” The media has the job, he said, of building a bridge of commonly understood facts that people can use to come to their own conclusions in any debate.

Anita Jacoby from the Australian Communications and Media Authority asked Gingras some questions, and conducted the Q and A with the audience.

“What does journalism mean in the world?” Jacoby asked Gingras. “How do you form an independent perspective and give people what they need to know?”

“We're seeing far more partisanship than ever before,” replied Gingras. “Also, a greater degree of opinion content.” Trust is based in getting mundane things right, and in the old days newspapers had various ways to do that, such as the weather page, the sports page, and stock market information. Back in 1980, he went on, opinion was about 3 percent of a newspaper’s content, but now a media website may be 60 to 70 percent editorial. “Our role in search is to give people the information they need to make their own decisions.”

Gingras also talked about the modern phenomenon of fake news. “I don't think we're ever going to see the end of it,” he said. “Fake news on social networks is a different thing,” he said. But: “It's one thing to not rank content, it's another thing to eliminate it. This is legal content.”

“What is Google doing about journalists losing their jobs?” asked Jacoby. “Google did not kill the news industry,” Gingras said. The internet has allowed virtually free distribution. “The news industry is going through a very, very challenging transition.” Gingras notes that the golden era of news was disrupted by TV because when TV entered the market a lot of newspapers went under but the ones that survived, thrived. “How are people consuming news? It's never too soon to start innovating.”

One question that came from the audience was from the ABC. “Are paywalls dangerous for democracy if people cannot afford to pay?”

Gingras pointed back in time to journalist I.F. Stone, who ran a small subscription paper and who Gingras called "the original blogger". Even though his paper was only distributed to about 10,000 people, it had a large impact in the public sphere. Stone is famous for reporting on the Vietnam War. 

“How do I succeed in this new marketplace?” Gingras asked the audience rhetorically. “We don't live in a world with a lot of gates.” A New York Times journalist once suggested to him establishing who was a legitimate news source, and filtering out those results that were not from such sources. “What the fuck!” he whispered.

Gingras (left) and Jacoby at Google's Sydney HQ.

ACCC will look into damage from Facebook, Google to media

Last night the government's media reform laws were finally tagged for implementation after securing the support of Nick Xenophon, the independent from South Australia. The government had earlier secured support from the far-right One Nation for the laws. Labor would not support them, which necessitated the support of the cross-benchers. In return for his support, Xenophon has got the government to agree to hold an enquiry through the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) into the effect that American internet giants are having on Australia's media ecosystem. Xenophon today on TV spoke of "the crisis that occurs because of Google and Facebook", and said that when these companies use content made by people working in the media in Australia "there needs to be fair recompense for that". As he pointed out, this will be the first time anywhere in the world that such an enquiry has been undertaken. The laws are expected to pass through the Senate today.

Fairfax corporate archives to go to State Library of NSW

About two weeks ago I sent an enquiry to Fairfax Media, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), about Archer Russell, a journalist and naturalist who died in 1960. Russell, I believed, was the editor of the ‘Outdoor Australia’ page of the Sydney Mail, a Fairfax publication that ran from 1860 to 1938. There are papers in the State library holdings under Russell’s name that suggest this was the case, including letters to the editor signed by people living around the state who wanted answers to questions they had.

That email wasn’t answered so on Monday I phoned the media liaison for the company and left a message. At the same time, I went to the SMH website and initiated a chat to ask for help. The SMH staffer on the chat function gave me the Readerlink email address, and I sent them an email with the same question I had asked earlier. This time there was a response, and I learned yesterday that the SMH corporate archives will be given to the State Library of NSW. “Next year you can look them up with the State Library,” they said.

This will be of interest to many people because Fairfax has been around since 1831. The company’s recent fortunes have led to it getting by without an on-staff archivist. A stark difference compared to the way things were in 1931, at the 100-year mark in the company’s corporate journey, when Fairfax published a big, fat book titled ‘A Century of Journalism: The Sydney Morning Herald and Its Record of Australian Life’. The foreword is signed “John Fairfax and Sons Limited, Proprietors [of] The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Mail”. It’s an enormous book, running to over 800 pages, with an index and black-and-white photographs with captions.

Above: Russell and Marion, his wife, make camp on Cooltong Reach along the Murray River, as shown in this photograph. From ‘Murray Walkabout,’ Melbourne University Press, 1953.

The following is the transcript of an article published in the Murray Pioneer, October 1920:

On Monday morning (says The Register) Mr G. E. Archer Russell, traveller and writer, left Adelaide on what he termed “a little wander trip”, along the back track to Sydney. He purposes journeying up the Murray to the Murrumbidgee, whence he will cross the Riverina to the mountains and Sydney. Among other places comprised in his itinerary are Blanchetown, Renmark, Mildura, Yanco, and Burrinjuck, and later when Sydney has been reached, Mount Kosciusko and Canberra. He expects to be away about three months. Mr. Russell, besides having published books and articles on travel and nature in other parts, is the author of the series of the River Murray sketches, entitled “Gumland and River,” now running through the Saturday Journal. Mr. Russell has travelled unbeaten tracks in many parts of the world, notably in Africa and the further East. He intends to write a further book on his wanderings for publication in England. 

Mr. Russell is a very attractive writer, and his “Gumland and River sketches” (inspired by a sojourn at Berri) are among the best of their kind anyone has done.

In conversation with Glenn Greenwald

"The journalist has an adversarial relationship to institutions of power," said Glenn Greenwald at the start of this afternoon's talk. Greenwald today shared the stage with compere John Keane, the author of an important book on democracy, ex-Greens senator Scott Ludlam, and journalism academic Benedetta Brevini. (I enjoyed today seeing Keane in action as much as I did seeing Greenwald talk, although the Brazil-based journalist was the main draw card for the afternoon, which was organised by the University of Sydney. Keane has a plummy accent and a shock of white hair and was assiduous in his attempts to keep questions taken from the audience short and to-the-point.)

Greenwald justified his position vis-a-vis the powerful by noting that the second half of the 20th century was peppered with "a series of significant and consequential lies", namely the debacle of Vietnam (which was a war started by an American administration that simply lied to the public about who first attacked whom), the war in Iraq under George W. Bush, and the appearance of James Clapper before a 2013 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing during which he denied that the National Security Agency collected data on "millions or hundreds of millions of Americans". Edward Snowden, the CIA whistleblower who leaked thousands of classified documents to Greenwald, told Greenwald that this statement had angered him and had helped him decide to leak information to the media. Journalists have to have a "willingness to challenge conventional pieties", Greenwald told the audience. "You can't want to be liked. If you're liked you're not doing your job."

Greenwald recalled the example of Scott McIntyre who, in 2015, criticised the Anzacs publicly in a series of Anzac Day tweets, which resulted in him losing his job with broadcaster SBS. What McIntyre did was "the essence of journalism", Greenwald said. It sounds like something that should be normal but it is actually something that is in fact polarising, he went on.

Brevini asked Greenwald how society should go about funding journalism, and whether there should be a levy imposed on internet companies by the government.

On privacy, Greenwald said that the goal of the NSA was the elimination of privacy in the digital age. And there was "no democratic accountability in this decision", he said. But he added that because of the way that Silicon Valley companies had been awakened to expressions of public anger at the loss of their privacy - something that had happened because of the Snowden leaks - they had started "providing a measure of privacy" in order to stop consumers going across to rivals in the digital space.

On the issue of public debate, Greenwald said that "In that clash of ideas I think truth is found," referring to the plurality of views that are available on the internet if you seek them out. It was put to him that many people spend their time online in a virtual echo chamber, because they surround themselves only with views that agree with what they already think. "I think our polity and our discussion will be improved" if we pay attention to what people who have opposing views are saying.

On the rise of extreme political players in the US and Europe, Greenwald was philosophical. He said that inequality is a "disease of spirituality", and that Americans feel that they have no future. He mentioned how he had spent time recently in Wisconsin - a state that Donald Trump won in 2016, and that Hillary Clinton had been so confident of winning that she never visited there - and he talked about rising rates of opioid addiction in America. "What causes addiction is a lack of hope," he said. But he added that, "If Hillary had won, the crisis would just have been delayed." Society needs "systemic change", he went on, rounding out his views on the issue of inequality.

With the threat of terrorism "we've allowed [it] to evoke all of our tribal fears", he opined.

On free speech, he takes a 'absolutist' approach and admitted to feeling wary of allowing the government to decide what people should or should not be allowed to say publicly. He doesn't trust governments to say what cannot be expressed by individuals.

ABC's Guthrie not keen on the limelight

Writing as usual for The Guardian, Amanda Meade interprets in print an interview the ABC's managing director Michelle Guthrie did with Jane Hutcheon, who runs the broadcaster's One Plus One program.

As Meade notes it's the first time Guthrie has appeared in the media in such a candid fashion and many people will take an interest in it. Meade highlights the way Guthrie seeks to distance herself from her past, especially those troubling (for some) years with Sky TV, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch. She also says she's not used to being notorious, and that she finds publicity that focuses on her person unsettling.

But being MD of the ABC is a very public role, so Guthrie is going to have to get used to attracting a bit of attention, especially since the media is so highly politicised in Australia. Polarisation occurs from the top down too, with politicians such as conservative Peter Dutton publicly complaining that they think the ABC is too left wing. Then there's the IPA and their friends in the Murdoch press always on the lookout for weak spots in the public broadcaster's armour that can be exploited for private reasons.

Perhaps Guthrie is not suited to the job. Her predecessor, Mark Scott, came from a media background too - he was an executive with Fairfax Media - and he was very visible in the community, running a Twitter account that was highly subscribed. It sounds callous to put it that way but you have to consider that the ABC sits at the centre of the public sphere in Australia, in fact it plays a unique role. You could say that it is a linchpin in the traffic of public messages of all kinds, from culture to science and from politics to the environment. In many ways it functions too to maintain a critical level of contact between the polarised halves of the community, as you see for example when shows such as Q and A gain attention. People who identify with both the left and the right side of politics can both participate in ABC-mediated discussions in a way that other platforms cannot enable. There is no mechanism in many countries that performs this role.

We can only hope that Guthrie comes to enjoy the public elements of her job. It might be a difficult ride for her if she cannot come to grips with being talked about in the media and by people in the community, many of whom have very strongly-held views about the viability of the public broadcaster.

The public sphere feedback loop and the internationalisation of media outlets

I was having a quiet beer with a friend yesterday at a bar overlooking Darling Harbour. We could hear the rain thundering on the metal roof of the building and see the water outside dimpled during the intermittent downpours. At one stage the conversation veered to a friend of his who is prone on similar occasions to repeating the tropes we are used to hearing from the mouths of radio shock jocks like Ray Hadley, right wing notions often coined in the offices of the IPA and volunteered for public consumption also by journalists working at The Australian. We had a bit of a laugh at his expense.

But of course those outlets are primed to produce such content because it is profitable for them to do so. There is a feedback loop in the public sphere whereby the public grants approval - by tuning in or clicking on links - to the media outlet(s) that give them material that conforms to their own views of the world. Rupert Murdoch has made a fortune out of catering to the idiot middle class, for example, through outlets such as Fox News in America. Whoever you are there is something for you nowadays, even if you are a neanderthal with pretensions to the status of homo sapiens.

Which makes me wonder how the internationalisation of news outlets might be working to homogenise and normalise public spheres around the world, bringing them into closer consonance with one another. We've seen in Australia for example The Guardian opening up offices in Sydney's Surry Hills. In fact the person tasked with orchestrating this advent - Kath Viner - is now in charge of the outlet's global operations. How has opening an Australian franchise affected the way of operating of the British masthead? The New York Times is mooted to be on the verge of opening up here as well. What will that mean for the American public sphere? How can the feedback loop work to make public spheres around the world more conscious of one another?

In the food industry, to look elsewhere, there is a lot of localisation going on. We see it with McDonald's, where you can buy local types of burgers - such as the Mega Teriyaki in Japan - only in local outlets. But Starbucks has apparently started selling flat whites in its US stores, showing how one country can influence another. (Flat whites were invented in either Australia or New Zealand, depending on who you believe.)

In the public sphere the currency in use is ideas, and ideas are more fluid and unpredictable than hamburgers can ever be. How might Australian ideas about gun ownership, to take one example, affect the way the New York newspaper covers the issue in America? Can the public sphere feedback loop operate across borders? Can what readers click on in Australia affect how subjects are written about and covered in the United States? What does that mean for citizens in each country?