QUALITY newspapers offer their readers an implicit assurance with every story they publish: that their selection and presentation of news does not reflect the personal or corporate agendas of journalists, editors or proprietors. It is easy to be cynical about the assumption that this is how The Age and other serious newspapers work, but if it were not so the exchange of reliable information, and of informed opinion, on which democracy depends could not happen. And if a major news organisation does behave in a way that suggests its reportage reflects something other than concern for the public interest, it risks eroding public trust – in the organisation itself, and in the wider media industry.
Today The Age reports that senior executives of News Limited, which owns the majority of Australia’s metropolitan daily newspapers, threatened to use the group’s resources to campaign against law-enforcement agencies in Victoria and New South Wales. In a letter sent to Victoria’s Office of Police Integrity (OPI) in March, Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of News Limited’s national broadsheet, The Australian, warned that the paper would use all its resources, both ”journalistic” and ”legal”, against the OPI. The agency had investigated whether a Victoria Police officer leaked information to the paper that was used in a report about anti-terrorism raids in Melbourne. In the same month, News Limited chairman John Hartigan, addressing senior NSW police officers, said they could choose to co-operate with the group’s newspapers or take the path followed by Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland and face the consequences. Some of the officers present believed this to be a threat.
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If this tangled web amounted only to The Australian disputing accounts in other media – based on Mr Linnell’s own evidence – about the chain of conversations leading to the collapse of Operation Briars, it would not raise doubts about the paper’s motives in pursuing Mr Overland and the OPI. However, Mr Mitchell’s letter to the OPI and Mr Hartigan’s comments to the senior NSW officers provide a disturbing context for The Australian’s campaign. Readers trust quality newspapers to seek the truth; but they are entitled to expect that the search will not be swayed by other agendas.
News Ltd appears to be developing quite a record, Newsmen behaving badly:
National | Tom Hyland | Sun May 09 03:00:01 EST 2010
SOMETIME in late 2008, Bruce Guthrie became a non-person. The man who had been one of the most influential people in Melbourne was erased from the record.
Guthrie had already been summarily sacked as editor-in-chief of The Herald Sun and had cleared his office in Southbank, the Melbourne outpost of the Australian colony of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, the world’s most powerful media group.
But there was still the inconvenient evidence celebrating his role as editor of Australia’s most widely read newspaper, one that boasts, and apparently believes, that it is ”the voice of Victoria”.
Removing the traces was left to Peter Blunden, who first backed Guthrie’s appointment and then worked tirelessly and secretly to have him sacked, even as he called him ”mate”.
Six weeks before he was sacked, Guthrie had proposed a group photo of Herald Sun staff to promote an award the paper had won under his editorship. Blunden backed the idea and a TV commercial was made showing staff, including Guthrie and Blunden, side-by-side.
Guthrie was knifed in November 2008, but the ad kept running, until Blunden decided ”common sense” dictated Guthrie should be digitally erased from the record. The doctored image then went back on air.
While Blunden was able to dispatch Guthrie, he wasn’t able to bury him. Guthrie is alive and kicking and determined to get justice, or maybe revenge, from the organisation that sacked him, he says, unfairly. He’s suing his former employer for $2.7 million in the Victorian Supreme Court which, during six days of hearings over the past two weeks, has raked over the muck of the muckrakers.
