JUDY Tierney is spot on with her comments. Flanagan: Media seethes
But the Tasmanian Government’s Spin Unit does a lot more than just hire former journalists to spin its message to the current crop of journos.
More than spinning the message, the Spin Unit tries its damndest to control the actual medium, by feeding some journalists and punishing others, rewarding some media outlets and continually complaining about others. Eventually, if they can’t corral a journalist who is continually critical, they pull out all stops to hire them.
A good example of this attempt to control the medium is the Premier’s Chief of Staff. It is my undertsanding that he is close to being listed as a vexatious complainant by a number of media outlets, particularly the ABC which has very formal complaint channels, due to the enormous number of complaints made about journalists’ work. No other person or organisation in Tasmania has come anywhere near this number of complaints, not by a factor of about 10.
Other unknown Spin Unit behaviour includes:
• constant whining by minders about the journalists “failing to appreciate the access they get to Ministers”;
• calling journalists “cunts” behind their backs when they use this “access” to Ministers to ask questions, instead of just reporting the spinner’s line of the day;
• spying on the journalists before and especially after press conferences held in the media unit’s conference room, via the video camera and microphones that are permanently set up in that room; and,
• secretly feeding partisan information to a certain opinion writer who models himself as an iconoclast, but who also happily prints Spin Unit information as if it were his own opinion.
Then there’s the techniques that the pollies use to intimidate the journalists and put them off:
• journalists being physically manhandled until they are standing exactly where the politician wants them to stand;
• calling entire press conferences under false pretences in order to berate the journalists for not acting like the ALP’s personal messengers;
• ignoring hard questions and subsequentlty refusing to acknowledge the journalist prepared to ask those questions, effectively freezing them out;
• calling out individual journalists at press conferences and interrogating them in front of their peers (this practice is often combined with the refusal to acknowledge the journalist (discussed above) … but only after the public interrogation has taken place);
• the politician saying “Pardon” to a hard question and then interrupting and talking over the journalist when s/he attempts to repeat that question (which the politician obviously heard just fine the first time around); and my personal favourite:
• politicians rolling out various members of their own family, including very young children, for political gain and then criticising the media for “bringing my family into it” when they query conflict of interest allegations. This one is particularly egregious — I mean, just because the Premier says something does not make it automatically true. In fact, I would suggest it often means the opposite.
I’m not writing about all this to criticise the media — they are up against millions of dollars annually in the form of the Spin Unit and the minders, so it is to be expected that they will often find themselves manoeuvered into uncomfortable positions by those with more time, money and brainpower at their disposal. This is what millions of dollars buys a Government — the ability to create and manipulate image.
But I do hope that in the future the pack takes Nick Clark’s example to heart and starts to defend those journos who do ask the hard questions. I know Alyssa appreciated it when you did that Nick AND you managed to get her question answered.
So how about the rest of you consider doing the same … even when the ignored/unacknowledged journo works for, say, The Australian and is not a local. Please don’t just move on to your own question, please … ask the hard question, the question the politician is trying to avoid, the question s/he hopes you will forget in your rush to ask your own. Do your own job by all means, but don’t do the politician’s work for them too, eh? Please.
More than anything else, I hope the journalists get a feel for the utter contempt they are held in by those who work for the Spin Unit, as well as their political masters. Make no mistake, that friendly little chit-chat at the start of every press conference is evidence of nothing but the minder’s desire to have you swallow their line of the day.
They may have held your job once upon a time, but in private and especially in front of their Ministers, they hate you with a passion.
Yours,
Jason Lovell
