*Pic: of the venerable Evan …
Never write down to your readers; anyone stupider than you can’t read. – American editor to cub reporter
Journalism has obligations to interest/amuse the customer and to defend democracy against those who subvert it by corruption, but there should be no place for the worthy but dull; Addison and Steele knew in 1711 that ‘whosoever would influence the public must first learn to entertain it’.
A distinguished Sydney reporter, Tony Stephens, observes that there is no money in journalism (except for the proprietor), but it may be the last of the fun industries. It should be fun for customer as well as reporter.
The reporter as poet
Sol Chandler, editor of Melbourne Truth, said: ‘Wordsworth is the patron saint of journalists: the words, my dear boy, must sing’.
He meant simple, strong words. Wordsworth’s acolytes are mostly found in the sports pages. An American sports writer, Grantland Rice (1880-1953), in fact wrote poetry, or at any rate doggerel:
For when the One Great Scorer
Comes to write against your name,
He marks – not that you won or lost –
But how you played the Game.
Rice’s apocalyptic opening paragraph for his New York Herald Tribune report on the 1924 football match between Notre Dame and Army is much quoted:
‘Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.’
Yardley unkindly observes that the ingredients of that paragraph are ‘approximately 10 percent meat and 90 percent corn’ and that the content cannot survive critical scrutiny. That is so, but Yardley also says that ‘even now, seven decades later it still has an undeniable appeal’.
That appeal, I think, comes from the power of the central image of the Four Horsemen, and that was probably all anyone noticed. Wordsworth himself was of course not incapable of writing tosh.
Sol Chandler said an American’s description of the effect of lysergic acid diethylamide on the brain in Truth was pure poetry:
‘It came to us that the thing to do would be to run the half mile down the mountain. Our clothes were encumbering us so we took them off except for our shoes and made a bundle of them. We tied the bundles around our bodies with the large part at the back in case we slipped. We were taking big steps and sort of floating down through the dry blond grass.
‘Half way down were some myrtlewood trees; laughing, we swung in the branches like monkeys. We came to a little creek with a ten-foot waterfall. We took off our shoes and paddled. We sat there and played the pipes and talked for three hours about how ideas come to you.’
Magazine Journalism
A technique of magazine journalism is to apply four techniques of fiction to non-fiction. At pages 46 and 47 of The New Journalism, Tom Wolfe says those techniques are scene-by-scene construction, lots of dialogue, a lot of description in the style of Balzac to give what he calls the subject’s status-life, and the third person point of view.
The last is obtained by asking people what they were thinking at the time of the event. The piece of nonfiction is then written like a novel in which the author knows what some of his characters are thinking. Wolfe’s techniques can be used either for a piece about events in which the reporter was an observer, or for a reconstruction of events from the ground up.
Clarity
If clarity is the hallmark of the intellectual, it is a sine qua non for a reporter. Williams (1957) says the great founder of modern journalism, Defoe, had ‘an unexampled genius for plain writing’, and that Defoe himself said: ‘lf any man was to ask me what I would suppose to be a perfect style of language, I would answer: that in which a man speaking to 500 people of all common and various capacities, idiots or lunatics excepted, should be understood by them all.’
Sol Chandler, in whom the commercial instinct was properly strong, said: ‘If a person comes on one word he does not understand, he may turn the page, and close the paper, and never buy it again’.
However, at the quality end of the market it may occasionally, if rarely, be permissible to use a ten-dollar word; it may flatter the customer. And in any event American editors are said to advise cub reporters: ‘Never write down to your readers; anyone stupider than you can’t read.’
The Corkscrew Mind
According to Chandler, ‘a journalist should have a mind like a corkscrew’, i.e. a capacity to think at a tangent to the obvious. This is useful for editors who seek to commission reports that will give the customer a frisson of surprise, and for sub-editors who have to project reports in a way that will interest the potential customer.
A New Zealand reporter, Neville Penton, observed Chandler deal with a minor court report. A woman put on weight; her husband became disenchanted. Seeking to recapture his affections, she stole to buy him gifts and expensive foods, and was convicted of embezzlement. The Chandlerian projection:
TRAGEDY OF A
WOMAN WHO
GOT FAT
The corkscrew mind may also be useful to reporters who have to ponder the meaning of facts, e.g. the Badge 80 affair.
General Tom Blamey, a lecher and braggart who claimed to have won World War I, was appointed Police Commissioner of Victoria in September 1925. Seven weeks later, Licensing Squad detectives raided a Fitzroy brothel and found a man in a bedroom with a woman. He said: ‘That is all right boys; I am a plain-clothes constable. Here is my badge’, and showed them Badge 80, which was Blamey’s badge.
The detectives reported this to the Metropolitan Superintendent, but Blamey took effective control of an investigation. He gave three different versions of what happened to his badge that night, but was formally exonerated. He was drummed out of the force in 1936 after giving false evidence at a Royal Commission.
Historians sifting the evidence on the Badge 80 affair ask the question: ‘Was Blamey the man in the brothel?’ and do not come to a firm conclusion. A corkscrew mind might ask a different question:
‘Why did police raid the brothel that particular night?’ Answer: Because Blamey was there.
The Joke Approach
The joke approach to journalism can be understood in a narrow and a wide sense. Strictly speaking, jokes are anecdotes. Journalism is said to be the first rough draft of history; foreign correspondents George Seldes (1891- ) and Edward Behr (1926- ) were aware of the virtue of anecdotes.
Seldes (1987) used two epigraphs for his memoirs: ‘An anecdote of a man is worth a volume of biography.’ (Edward Charming, historian, 1856-1931.) And: ‘Very often an action of small note, a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person’s real character more than the greatest sieges or the most important battles.’ (Plutarch, biographer, c. 46-c.120AD.)
An anecdote by Cumming (1991) about John Patrick (Mother) Ducker (b. Hull, England 1932), gauleiter of the right wing of the Labor Party in New South Wales 1970-79, seemed to convey more about the power wielded by Ducker and his political machine than anything previously reported.
It derived from Ducker’s successor, Graham Frederick Richardson (b. Sydney 1949). A Labor Premier, Neville Kenneth Wran QC, who had a majority of one, campaigned in 1978 on a slogan that Ducker and his machine may have seen as ambiguous: ‘Wran’s Our Man!’
Wran retained office by a landslide and may have thought he was now firmly in the saddle. He shortly learned otherwise. Labor members of Parliament’s upper house, the Legislative Council, were appointed by the machine and hence were largely of Ducker’s faction but they were not then in Labor’s parliamentary Caucus; if they were, it would increase the machine’s power and diminish Wran’s.
The machine announced in May 1979 that it would support admission of Legislative Council members to the Caucus at a forthcoming conference of the party faithful. Richardson told Cumming: ‘The facts are we all said: “We’ll grab this extra bit of power”.’ By ‘all’, he meant Ducker, Paul Keating (Prime Minister of Australia 1991- ), Barry Unsworth (New South Wales Premier 1986-88), and Richardson himself.
Wran issued a statement saying he would not support a joint Caucus. ‘So,’ Richardson said, ‘Ducker and I went up to meet Wran one Sunday morning in Wran’s office.
‘Ducker said: “Okay, what’s your problem?”
‘[Wran] said: ‘This is going to create too much upheaval; I just won’t wear it.”
‘Ducker said: “You won’t wear it, eh? I’ll tell you what you’ll f … ing wear!”
‘And he gave Wran a five-minute serve that was just devastating, about what he’d do to him if he wouldn’t wear it. And at the end of that, he said: “Not only are you going to wear it, you’re going to f … ing move it [at the conference]!” And Wran did.’
In Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? Edward Behr (1978) says that ‘even the most trivial, nonsensical anecdote can … illustrate a general truth and sometimes more aptly reveals an “ambience”, a climate, than any careful marshalling of facts.’
But there is often a technical problem in journalism; Behr’s was that American organs tend to err on the side of dullness. He complained: ‘… most journalism is of an almost mechanical kind … because of pressures of space, of the constant need to compress, … what really happened is not always what we wrote about … because we are compelled to deal in essentials.’ He was much ‘struck by the fact that reporters, relaxing and drinking together, are always swapping’ stories about what happened, and that these stories are funnier, truer and more revealing than anything they write for their media’.
This may tend to explain an assertion attributed to reporter Walter Winchell in response to a banal question by the golfer, soldier and United States President, D.D.Eisenhower (1890-1969).
‘You must meet a lot of interesting people?’ Eisenhower said.
‘Yes’, Winchell replied, ‘and they were all reporters.’
That may or may not be, but reporters who save, or are obliged to save, their most illuminating anecdotes for the Saloon Bar are of little help to readers, historians or biographers.
In a wider sense, the joke approach includes anecdotes plus description, detail, a turn of phrase, dialogue, tone, rhythm, drollery, comment, analysis. Anything, in short, that might interest and / or amuse readers while adding to the sum of their knowledge.
The editor’s question, ‘Who’s doing the jokes?’ for a major, and possibly boring, event that has to get blanket coverage, e.g. an economic summit, may thus refer narrowly to a diary of anecdotes or more widely to some or all of those other elements.
I have earlier noted Williams’s remark that Addison and Steele were ‘concerned not with one particular sort of man, but with mankind, and they knew – it is the one essential piece of knowledge a journalist must never forget – that in such a study no triviality is so small as to be unimportant’.
Hence Chandler’s: ‘I must have every detail.’ Including Mrs G’s rabbit. An Australian Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Harold Edward Holt, b. 1908, swam out to sea off Portsea in December 1967 and was either eaten by sea lice or spirited away to China, for whom according to one theory he had for many years been a secret agent.
Mrs Ann Gillespie, Holt’s staggeringly attractive Portsea neighbour and friend, was a witness to his last piscine performance. She consented to a Truth interview on condition that she had the last run at the copy, presumably to forestall any undesirable nuance concerning her connexion with the late statesman.
During the interview the reporters (N. and E. Whitton) noted a tame white rabbit sitting on the grass outside her window, and included it in their report. Chandler said: ‘I don’t care what she takes out, but I must have that rabbit.’
Some see the joke approach as inappropriate in short reports in the inverted pyramid mode, and there are times when the material is so inherently interesting that all that is required is to let the facts do the work.
Even so, the reporter should have a care for the reader; the aim is to achieve absolute clarity and euphony. Christiansen, onetime editor of The Daily Express, said: ‘A good story flows like honey’. Another definition is that a good story is one that is read to the last full stop.
The joke approach is most easily accommodated in features of one sort or another, but, most reports now carry a byline; the approach can be used, with discretion, in a nominally straight news story. John Huxley, onetime Fleet Street reporter, recalls a London business editor ticking off finance copy with the words: ‘That’s a joke; that’s not a joke; that’s a joke’, etc.
At bottom, the joke approach to journalism represents an attitude, caring for the reader; as Maxwell Victor Suich (b. 1938, editor The National Times 1972-78, Chief Editorial Executive John Fairfax & Sons Ltd 1980-88) observed, if you have to cut, keep in the jokes.
The Form of Words
Faced with powerful institutions implacably opposed, in effect, to democracy and holding all the aces, should journalism despair of its capacity to discharge its obligation?
Certainly not. The libel laws may, centuries ago, have been designed, as Reyner Heppenstall asserts, to protect rogues in high places, but Chandler (whose London nickname was Solomon) says:
‘There is always a form of words. Sometimes they come to me straightaway; sometimes it takes as long as 10 minutes.’ It may take longer for lesser mortals.
Disclosure Journalism
In Henningham. (1991), I note two techniques of disclosure journalism: disclosure of a new fact, which requires the patient accretion of honest and reliable sources, and disclosure of a new pattern, which requires patient accretion of facts already in the public domain. The key to both techniques is stamina, as in Chandler’s: ‘My dear boy, we must never get tired.’
The requirement is a capacity to go on chipping away; it may take several years to get a result.
Murray’s Rule
The golden rule of disclosure journalism, as enunciated by Bill Murray, a protege of Sol Chandler, is: if your report ended up in court, could you prove every word of it? A contempt case noted elsewhere, R. v Sun Newspapers and the same William Murray, turned on a one-in-a-million chance: one of Murray’s reporters, who reported on the result of one trial, was not aware that a judge in another trial had excluded evidence that the judge in the first case had allowed.
The Cameron Effect
Part of the process is the Cameron Effect, which is akin to building an atom bomb: the mass is bombarded with particles (facts) until it becomes critical; one more noisy fact and the balloon goes up.
In Point of Departure, James Cameron (1911-85) put it like this: ‘Opinion is made, even created, by the continual pressure of a wide variety of facts, or semi-facts, which vary between the banal and the cosmic, all of which bear in some way on the human situation.
‘How this charivaria of information is transmuted into public opinion is a most mysterious thing, since every newspaper accepts that while many of its subscribers never read the sports pages, for instance, great numbers never look at anything else.
‘It can only be explained in terms of certain atomic experiments in physical laboratories, where effects are wrought by the effect on the mass of a constant exposure to particles, in this case facts. I have rarely heard a more elaborate and pompous definition of journalism than this, but for some reason it seems to work.’
After more than 20 years of work by such exceptional reporters as R.G.Bottom and Christopher Masters, the mass in Australia was more or less permanently at the critical level.
New Facts
The technique involves building up in the trade of authority a network of honest sources who accept their responsibility to democracy. This may take time. The great R.G.Bottom began building his network among honest police in New South Wales, at a time when corruption in the State had been institutionalised from the top down.
As Bottom demonstrated his credentials by publishing disclosures, other honest police got in touch with him and supplied further information of wrongdoing in and out of the force. He eventually established a record unparalleled in the history of journalism anywhere: his disclosures forced more than a dozen major Royal Commissions and other inquiries into corruption.
On the other hand, once in a while people may tell you something if you simply ask them. In 1983, a television reporter, Four Corners’ Christopher Masters, was doing a report on Rugby League football in Sydney and stumbled over a rumour that had been apparently around since 1977: that the Labor Premier, Neville Wran QC, had instructed a member of the judiciary, magistrate Murray Farquhar, to fix a case in which the President (as he now was) of the Australian Rugby League, Kevin Humphreys, had fraudulently misappropriated, i.e. stolen, $50,000 from the Balmain Leagues Club.
Masters asked other magistrates about it and they told him. A Royal Commission found that Farquhar had fixed the case (but not at Wran’s instructions) and Farquhar went to prison.
Dependence on human sources can have drawbacks; their agenda may not primarily concern the exposure of wrongdoing. There are suggestions that The Washington Post’s Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein may have been used by their Watergate source, who presumably was in the trade of authority, to remove President Richard Nixon from office for a reason other than that he sought to pervert the course of justice concerning a minor attempted burglary, i.e. because he had sought détente with godless regimes in Moscow and Peking.
The latter reason would amount to treason, although it would be justified on the ground of a belief that it was Nixon who engaged in treason by dealing with the dread Communists. The second scenario has a certain plausibility; people in the trade of authority have no problem with perverting justice by cover-up; they contrive it themselves on a daily basis. Nor do they blink at treason, as Prime Minister Harold Wilson found.
Bottom refused to deal with sources he believed were dubious, but some police may only be apparently honest because of the exigency of the moment; he admits to being burned a couple of times. His advice is not to get too close to the animals in the zoo. Certainly, if you call a source by his first name, it is almost impossible to write anything nasty about him when you learn he is dubious.
Documents
Journalism and the law probably agree on one thing: an ounce of documents is worth a ton of oral assertion. For reporters, documents save argument and tend to forestall writs for libel; the proper response to a source’s allegation is: ‘You may say that, but where are the doccoes?’
New Patterns
Pattern journalism reveals no new facts (although some will be new to many readers), but reveals something that can be as important, a new pattern. Dubious people, such as police or politicians, may brazen out one new fact; they find it harder to brazen out a hundred old facts.
Downie (1976, p. 99) records the great master of pattern journalism, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jim Steele, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, on the technique: ‘The challenge is to gather, marshal, and organize vast amounts of data already in the public domain and see what it adds up to.’
Everything stated as a fact has to be correct The only way that can be ensured to check and recheck every fact; to rely on memory in even one case is to invite disaster; rigour is the fundamental requirement. The more facts that are privileged, i.e. deriving from the Parliament or the courts, the better.
The data should be assembled where possible as a narrative in a strict chronology. It is proper to be wary of falling into the post hoc fallacy; it may be prudent to add a rider stating that because an event came after another event it was not necessarily caused by the first event.
That said, the chronology, as Len Deighton’s KGB agent, Erich Stinnes, observed, is always the first element of deduction, or as V.J.Carroll noted, once you get the chronology right, everything falls (or may fall) into place.
A narrative is a kindness to the reader; in the sense that an anecdote is a joke, pattern journalism is a large number of jokes strung together.
Since there are no new facts in the piece, it tends to be relatively safe in terms of libel. Apart from the facts to be dug out of public records, there is a goldmine of forgotten facts in the cutting files in the library of any organ of the media. The facts are pieces of a jigsaw; each makes the pattern a little clearer. The technique can be applied to any facet of journalism: business, sport, politics, the law. If organs of the media do not regularly engage in pattern journalism, their customers are deprived of the opportunity to assess for themselves whether certain people or institutions are dubious.
By definition, pattern journalism is most significant in terms of the Cameron Effect. Corruption was endemic in Queensland; in 1986, Quentin Dempster produced for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation a television documentary called The Sunshine System that pulled together indications of corruption over several decades; early in 1987, Philip Dickie wrote a number of pieces in The Courier-Mail indicating that prostitution was being protected by police, presumably for some benefit in cash or kind or both. With the mass at the critical stage in May 1987, Christopher Masters and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners delivered the last particle that caused fission, the Fitzgerald inquiry, and the incarceration of a number of corrupt persons.
Sol Chandler was inclined to have the material written deadpan, without comment or drawing any inferences or conclusions, i.e. to let the facts do the work. However, and leaving on one side the unfortunate result in Meskenas v Capon noted above, a comment is reasonably safe legally so long as:
1) the fact on which the comment is based is true;
2) the comment is a reasonable inference from the fact;
3) the comment is the honest opinion of the person making it;
4) it is clearly stated to be a comment and not a fact.
It is the fourth condition that causes the most trouble; the comment might come out looking like a fact. If reporters are going to comment at all, they have to ring the changes on elegant or not so elegant variations of ‘I think’. The page will thus unfortunately be littered with such usages as:
In my view
In my opinion
Some may think
Some may take the view
It seems
It appears
It may seem
It may appear
It strikes me
The possibility thus arises
In my judgment etc etc
A piece in the pattern mode may thus cover both obligations of journalism: to interest and / or amuse the customers, and to defend democracy against the corrupt, or at least the dubious. It is a fairly safe and interesting way of carrying out Sol Chandler’s rule about telling the customers what is really going on, and it often reveals the difference between appearance and reality.
There are variations. Some is all legwork and interrogation; some is none; some is a mixture of both. In journalism, anyone can play, and a useful book of pattern journalism can be produced with virtually no weapons other than a pair of scissors and a computer.
R.G.Bottom’s day-to-day journalism involved the disclosure of new facts; his books are mostly pattern journalism, but he also slips in new facts. In the variant called contextual journalism, the reporter puts one recently disclosed fact into the context of other facts already in the public domain.
The above is Appendix 2 of Trial by Voodoo (Random House 1994)
