News is what someone somewhere doesn’t want published

Wayne Crawford

It averaged a libel writ a week. The editor, Harold Evans, was unhappy if a libel writ had not arrived by Tuesday, because he felt that the paper had not been doing its job — defending people without power from those who wielded it unfairly. Here was a paper that believed in something, which took enormous pains to get things right, and which fought for its editorial integrity.

I asked Evans how important investigative journalism was and I’ll always remember his reply: All journalism is investigative, he said. If it doesn’t involve investigation, then it’s not journalism — it’s merely disguised advertising and PR puff.

WRITING on what he describd the “death of investigative journalism” the eminent Australian journalist Phillip Knightley reflected on how in the early 1950s he “set off for Fleet Street and eventually wriggled my way on to the Sunday Times in its heyday.”

The Sunday Times then had 350 editorial staff to reproduce a two-section quality broadsheet every Sunday. It was so overstaffed that some journalists went weeks without getting anything published in the paper. In fact, some of them were not even seen for weeks. It spent money like water on investigative journalism, reflected Knightley — two million pounds on legal costs alone fighting for its right to publish the story about the thalidomide scandal.

It averaged a libel writ a week. The editor, Harold Evans, was unhappy if a libel writ had not arrived by Tuesday, because he felt that the paper had not been doing its job — defending people without power from those who wielded it unfairly. Here was a paper that believed in something, which took enormous pains to get things right, and which fought for its editorial integrity.

Perhaps when speaking of the sort of investigative journalism that Knightley helped pioneer — when money is no object and journalists can spend months delving into a single story, without the day to day pressure to file for the next edition — perhaps that sort of investigative journalism is dead or at least not as healthy as in the days when Knightley and the Sunday Times team were breaking stories such as thalidomide and the Profumo spy scandal.

Deep Throat sources

But not all investigative journalism involves “Deep Throat” sources handing over secret Watergate information in secluded carparks at midnight. Just consider some of the stories which have been broken in Tasmania just in contemporary times: There have been issues such as the reasons behind the Tasmanian devil’s facial tumor, the scandalous and tragic loss of millions of dollars by investors in a legal firm, questions about the financial practices by the Hydro, the health concerns and death of men who spent years spreading asphalt on the roads of Tasmania, the abuse of wards of the state in the care of mainly church organisations, the behaviour of a Tasmanian Governor who couldn’t get used to being a big fish in a small pond after a career on the national and world stage, a premier accepting extravagant hospitality from a company with which he was negotiating a multi-million dollar gambling deal, a secret pre-election deal between a senior government minister and the Tasmanian Compliance Corporation, the actual extent of planned woodchipping of Tasmanian forests … The list is by no means exhaustive.

They are all stories which have been broken by my Tasmanian colleagues as a result of long and intensive investigations. Investigative journalism is alive and well in Tasmania despite the best efforts of the Government spin doctors.

Back in the early 70s when I was a young wide-eyed reporter, I had the privilege in London of meeting Harold Evans, then the editor who was Phillip Knightley’s pioneering boss.

I asked Evans how important investigative journalism was and I’ll always remember his reply: All journalism is investigative, he said. If it doesn’t involve investigation, then it’s not journalism — it’s merely disguised advertising and PR puff.

And there’s the rub. Stephen Mayne, founder of crikey.com.au the website which scandalizes, amuses and delights in equal measure by outrageously publishing what the mainstream media won’t touch, commented in one of his pieces the other day that in the 2001 Census there were about twice as many Australians who confessed to working in public relations as those who said they were good old fashioned journalists. Twice as many spin-doctors as journalists and the ratio will probably be even more five years later when this week’s Census results come out.

With the 24 hour news cycle desperate for content, the PR machines pump out puff pieces on anything from real estate to prescription drugs, and the hungry media laps it up.

But when we simply regurgitate the handouts — whether they are from a government pushing a particular line, or a book publisher trying to promote their latest big name author — when we publish this material without delving further into the detail and background to find the real story, then we are no more than an extension of the PR machine — we are not behaving as journalists.

Someone once defined, news, it’s what someone somewhere doesn’t want published.

In that sense, investigative journalism is a tautology. If it’s not investigative, it’s not journalism, as Harold Evans said to me 35 years ago.

Wayne Crawford was Convenor of the Investigative Journalism panel of the Writers’ Festival. Panellists were: Airlie Ward (ABC), Richard Herr (Uni of Tas), Margaretta Pos (Freelance, Crikey), Lindsay Tuffin (Tasmanian Times).

Two contributions:
Investigative Journalism: A Consumer’s Perspective
The Great Spin Machine