Media Watch, ABC’s long-running scourge of shoddy journalistic practices, is back for another year with Linton Besser as its eighth resident host. This was an opportunity for a revamp of the program format, but there are no signs of that. Same theme music, same shouty voices reading crass headlines, same withering commentary on gaffes and deceptions delivered by a presenter behind a desk.
The program has always juxtaposed the trivial with the consequential, and here too it remains true to form. Targets so far this season include the Trump media circus, sensationalised reporting of anti-Semitism, the fallout from Seven’s decision to run horoscopes in its nightly news bulletin, and a proclamation on Sunrise that the true identity of Jack the Ripper is at last revealed.
Also true to form is the bold critiquing of ABC management, with the Antoinette Lattouf court case described as “one of the worst self-inflicted wounds at the ABC in recent memory.” Readiness to turn the searchlight onto the ABC has been a core tenet of the program since Stuart Littlemore first took the chair in 1989.
It’s an important tradition to preserve. In one of the program’s most audacious episodes, aired in November 2000, Paul Barry read out fierce media criticism of that era’s managing director, Jonathan Shier, whose lumberjack approach to staffing threatened the ABC’s capacity to fulfill its public responsibilities in news and current affairs. Then, in a no-holds-barred interview with chair of the ABC board, Donald McDonald, Barry asserted that Shier’s main achievements were to have increased the number of top managers on inflated salaries and run up a $3 million redundancy bill.
At the end of that program, Barry thanked viewers and hoped he’d be back next year. He wasn’t. He was “let go” and Shier axed the program, though it was to return seventeen months later, with David Marr at the helm, and in 2013 Barry himself was back. Shier, his position untenable, left the ABC at the end of 2001.
His was not the only scalp Media Watch could claim. After outing commercial radio hosts John Laws and Alan Jones for taking secret “cash for comment” payments from banks and major corporations in 1999, the program turned the heat on David Flint, head of the Australian Broadcasting Authority, who had been responsible for the follow-up investigation in 2003. Sycophantic letters from Flint to Jones, sent during the course of the formal enquiry, were duly given the treatment by presenter Marr. Flint stood down from the inquiry a few months later.
No one could deny that these were matters of pith and moment, and if they collected detractors, it was because resolute presenters, backed by committed producers, were prepared to go into the fray against powerful adversaries. Some of the counter-attacks, though, hit home.
From the outset, Media Watch has had a problem with tone. Littlemore, equal parts journalist and barrister, fronted the camera much as he would a courtroom, with a straight face and clipped articulation, and chose his words from the kind of rhetorical treasury legal professionals have at their disposal. Over the nine years of his tenure he established a demeanour that effectively set off a class war.
Commercial broadcasters who were his prime targets gave as good as they got, losing no time in identifying their strategic opportunity. Here was the taxpayer-funded ABC, with its solid middle-class audience, sitting in lordly judgement over those who had to live and die by the ratings. “He hated my form of journalism,” recalled Derryn Hinch. “No tie, beard — personality based.”
Littlemore and his successors continued to dish out lofty contempt for “the pack of nasty bastards” at A Current Affair and their ilk, and the nasty bastards hit back at “a supercilious, holier-than-thou bunch of soy latte drinking poodle-owning skivvy wearers.” Presenters, chosen for the maverick streak they brought to the steely work of arbitration, featured the best of the counterattacks in montages.
When Daily Telegraph editor Campbell Reid sent in a dead fish by way of riposte to a Media Watch indictment, Marr held the exhibit up to the camera, pointing out that it was standard code for a death threat in mafia circles. Such stunts provided entertainment value otherwise lacking in the austere format of the program.
There was a macho element to all this, with its antithetical styles of combat — elegantly phrased contempt versus brass tacks insults — and it wasn’t until 2005 that Liz Jackson took the helm as the first female presenter. Jackson brought a warmer persona and greater concern with the social impact of journalists preying on easy targets who had no ability to mount any kind of defence or gain redress.
Barry has defined the program for the past decade, combining forensic critique with gleeful mockery. That’s the Littlemore heritage, and it has a rusted-on following among ABC viewers, but I’ve found myself reacting against it increasingly in recent years. It comes across as glib and — yes, Derryn Hinch — supercilious.
Besser, a more robust presence, brings a track record of tough investigative journalism on urgent contemporary matters — housing, the environment, corporate corruption, the prison system — and he doesn’t have the look of someone who has spent most of his life behind a desk. He’s promised to “bring a blow-torch” to the industry, assisted by a new executive producer, Mario Christodolou, who also has a strong background in investigative journalism.
They acknowledge that investigative work is not the brief on Media Watch, but what is the brief? Talk of blow torches has a ring of empty bluster about it. The media environment has changed out of all recognition over the past twenty-five years, and the problems of the industry have become vast and complex in ways not anticipated in 1989.
Although we still need the major exposés to which the program owes its enduring tenure, the sillier gotchas are an indulgent waste of time. This is not Private Eye, and the level of wit doesn’t match the level of relish with which it roasts minor targets. Does it really matter if Sunrise makes dizzy claims to a scoop on the identity of Jack the Ripper?
There’s real work to do, work that requires updated thinking, with a significant change of format, and this should be an ABC priority. We need a longer program, with a more ambitious brief: to provide substantive insights into what we’re up against in an environment saturated with disinformation.
Journalists, with their hardwired notions of bias and “both sides” balance, are not equipped for when these terms have been weaponised by heavily funded influencers. A news headline can be biased by the terminology used, the way emphasis is accorded, the relative levels of attention given to political agencies. Glaring examples of the problem are to be seen and heard on the ABC itself every day of the week, especially in its reporting of the spate of critical elections held around the world in the past twelve months.
Elections have become dangerous moments in the lives of nations and in geopolitical dynamics. Extremist minor parties gain disproportionate coverage because they promise more drama and stir people up. Thinking it is responsible to give them equal attention may be the most irresponsible assumption a broadcaster can make.
Journalists need to be able to understand and communicate what is at stake, and although the ABC still has experienced people with the capacity to do this, it has far too many staff in significant roles who patently do not. And the public needs to know more about how news is researched and edited. How are presenters trained? Who decides on all-important headlines and lead paragraphs? What is the cumulative effect of these decisions?
If Media Watch can at least start tackling those questions, it may evolve into the program we need at this critical time. •
