V.J. Carroll in his prime …

The oldest rule of journalism – and the most forgotten – is to tell the customers what is really going on. – – Stanley Cecil (Sol) Chandler.

Monday 22 April 2013. To Macquarie University with Max Suich to observe the installation of Vic (The Sorcerer) Carroll, as Doctor of Letters (honoris causa).

In his address to graduates, Dr Carroll said: “That CV the vice chancellor just read to you in no way prepared me for how to respond to the letter I received from him last November telling me that the University Council had decided to confer on me a Doctor of Letters honoris causa in recognition of my contributions to journalism.

“I have been ever conscious of what journalism has done for me in providing me with a living wage for an important phase of my life and particularly for driving my continuing education for the last 60 years. But what I had done for journalism?

“That was a foreign country I had not risked exploring. Fortunately, help was at hand. I had been reading a review of a new book containing letters written around 1903 by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke [1875-1926].

“Rilke had gone to Paris to soak up the culture and write about the sculptor [Auguste] Rodin [1840-1917]. Rilke was shocked. Rodin didn’t wait around for inspiration. Rodin worked all the time. And he worked on the special thing that he saw in everything. Rilke got the message. Der Ding, the Thing, to be observed in everything, was paramount.”

I later asked Dr Carroll: “What is the essence of journalism?”

He said: “The essence? Der Ding? In journalism I think it’s basically curiosity. It’s what’s lacking in big institutions like ASIC [Australian Securities and Investment Commission – supposed to regulate companies ], APRA [Australian Prudential Regulation Authority – supposed to regulate banks, insurance etc.] It’s why journalists are basically outsiders.”

The Times noted a product of curiosity in 1852. “The duty of the journalist,” the organ thundered, “is the same as that of the historian – to seek out the truth above all things, and to present to his readers … the truth as near as he can attain it … The Press lives by disclosure.”

Dr Carroll’s remarks prompted further thoughts on journalism via his career and a bit of mine. He started as a stockbroker in Brisbane, but accepted an offer to join The Courier Mail in 1952.

The Curious was part of a Melbourne-based group of newspapers in every State except NSW. The paper was partly owned by John Wren (1871- 1953), an organised criminal and prominent Catholic. The group had been run by Sir Keith Murdoch (1885-1952), father of Rupert.

There are two forms of pre-publication censorship. One is corrupt libel law loaded with obviously false presumptions: all slurs are false, damaging and deliberate. Organs of the media thus suffer from a presumption of guilt, and the onus is reversed: the plaintiff does not have to prove anything.

Carroll soon found out about internal pre-publication censorship. As George Orwell said, the most powerful lie is the omission. A short list:

No opinions. By themselves, facts are often meaningless, but reporters may not be allowed explain what they mean. “Objective” journalism has made much US journalism useless.

No context. Justice Russell Fox said an understanding of facts depends heavily on context. Reporters may not be allowed to put facts into context.

Balance. Fairness means truth. “On the other hand” journalism can leave customers bewildered.

Prisoner of the source. Reporters who rely on particular sources for information – detectives or politicians for example – may neglect to report the sources’ corruption. This is akin to “regulatory capture”, where a regulator acts in the interests of an industry it is supposed to be regulating.

The proprietor’s view. Proprietors make their views known in various ways. Rupert Murdoch (b. 1931) now uses Twitter; reporters do not have to guess what line they should take.

The Melbourne Herald group did not allow opinion or context, but did support retailers, the Catholic Church and the politics of paranoia: Communists, all 3000 of them, would take over Australia unless people voted for an habitual liar and war criminal, Robert Menzies.

Carroll recalls: “I did a year’s condensed cadetship; wrote leaders telling people how to vote; and when the finance editor had a nervous breakdown filled in.” He became finance editor in 1954.

He said: “The finance page was a one-man job – getting the news, writing, subbing and seeing the page through the composing room. I expressed no opinions in my stories. Once, at a 6 pm meeting with the news editor, I said the main story was a drop in profits for Finney Isles.”

“Christ”, he said, “We can’t lead with that. What else is in their report?”

“Well”, I said, “their assets increased. They’re still expanding.”

“That’s the lead,” he said.

Carroll told me: “DJs took over Finneys soon afterwards. I learnt a lot.”

He let himself be talked into joining management, but found it a “dry gully”. He said: “I waited for the chance to get out, and early in 1960 came to Sydney as finance editor of The Sun-Herald and a contributor to The Australian Financial Review.”

Warwick Fairfax (1901-87), chairman of Fairfax from 1930, imposed the same pre-publication censorship as Keith Murdoch. His flagboat, The Sydney Morning Herald, boasted that “facts” were in the news columns and that the organ’s (or Warwick’s) opinions were in the editorials.

Bob Askin said: “We’re in the tart shop now, boys”, when he became Premier of NSW in 1965. He gave Warwick a knighthood in 1967. (Wokka took me to lunch in 1983 for the sole purpose of saying he did not then know Askin was corrupt. If so, Warwick would have been almost unique in Sydney.)

In 1964, Carroll was appointed editor of the Fin, and became known as The Sorcerer from the number of able apprentices he recruited. He contrived to break the in-house censorship, and so became the most important journalist of his generation. He spoke of being called up to the 14th floor and “getting the cuts” from Warwick.

I like to quote a few lines from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets on the effects of chance in our lives. They are:

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden.

After a period as a schoolteacher, I got a job on a bush newspaper, The Toowoomba Chronicle, in 1964, the same year that Rupert Murdoch started The Australian. The organ was a heavy drain on his finances; he sent a Fleet Street genius, Sol Chandler (1911-69), to Truth in late 1965 to make him some money.

I was lucky enough to get a job at Truth in January 1966. Sol’s formula was a hard spine of facts, all the insignificant details he could get, with an outer wrapping of sex. The circulation increased from 220,000 to 400,000 in eight months from July 1966. Asked by Gerald Lyons on ABC television if he wasn’t ashamed of the sex, Sol replied dryly: “I understand it’s here to stay.”

In January 1968, Sol ran a piece showing that the Prime Minister, John Gorton, was a thief. Murdoch sacked him. Eight months later, Murdoch used the profits of Truth and an Adelaide paper as collateral in negotiations to buy The News of the World. He rang Gorton and got permission to get the money out of Australia.

In 1969, Truth was running a two-track campaign on abortion: police extortion from doctors and the need to legalise it. Murdoch tried some pre-publication censorship: he told his editorial boss in Sydney, Neal Travis, to tell Truth to get off the abortion stuff. Travis did not pass on the message. Truth eventually forced an inquiry into police corruption. Murdoch took the credit.

In 1971, Carroll invented The National Times and became editor-in-chief of the Fin and the NT.

I was sent to Sydney that year to a short-lived Murdoch organ, The Sunday Australian, but ran into more pre-publication censorship. The editor, Bruce Rothwell, told me he had instructions from “higher up” not to print anything Noela and I collected in Adelaide confirming that in 1959 Max Stuart, an aboriginal, had been wrongly convicted of murdering a small girl. Noela’s piece in The [Dirty] Digger led to Stuart’s release. [http://netk.net.au/StuartHome.asp]

I sent Carroll a letter in 1973 saying he wouldn’t remember me, but in 1948 we were in opposing teams in a minor Rugby match at Queensland University; perhaps it was time for a Silver Anniversary drink. He gave me a job at The National Times.

Max Suich was the editor. Frank Williams wrote in his history of journalism, Dangerous Estate (1957): “The journalist is traditionally an entertainer; he must entertain or find another trade … one of the most profound of all journalistic truths [is] that whosoever would influence the public must first learn to entertain it.” Or, as Suich put it: “If you have to cut, leave in the jokes.” He meant anecdotes etc.

Suich asked me look into an old Russian spy story, the Petrov Affair, which Menzies, with the help of ASIO and judges, had used to win the 1954 election. One way to do it would be a “What happened?” ring-around, but I now know:

• Readers tire after about 1200 words of that sort of stuff.
• Readers may persist with a narrative (with jokes) of any length.
• People can lie; circumstances cannot.
• Sticking with material on the record helps with the libel problem.

As it happened, I had studied – if that’s the right word – History at Queensland University, where Charlie Grimshaw had taught me that a straight chronology of all the known facts can reveal a pattern, e.g. How did Canning’s foreign policy differ from Castlereagh’s? The chronology showed it didn’t.

I swallowed a little dust in the archives; came up with a narrative of 30,000 words on Petrov; and – writing is re-writing – cut it to 8000. This led to similar pieces on the Menzies-judicial cover-up of the 1964 Voyager-Melbourne disaster, and the Australia-US cover-up of the 1969 Frank E. Evans-Melbourne disaster. The Voyager-Evans pieces are in Can of Worms II (netk.net.au/whittonhome.asp)

Menzies of course lied his way into the Vietnam mess, which the SMH had supported since 1965. With Suich briefly on leave in 1974, Carroll fatally asked me to do something on the war, I eventually cranked out 26,000 re-written words. Suich’s splash in April 1975 was:

FOR THE FIRST TIME: THE TRUTH ABOUT VIETNAM

Affronted, Sir Warwick said we should all be sacked, but in the end only Carroll was penalised; he was sent into exile to run a Fairfax magazine shop. A shorter version of the Vietnam piece is in Amazing Scenes on the netk website.

In 1980, Suich became chief editorial executive of Fairfax’s five Sydney papers. He brought Carroll back as editor-in- chief of the SMH, with a direction to make it, for the first time since it began in 1831, a great metropolitan morning newspaper. I joined him there.

Carroll went a fair way to achieving his brief and retired in 1985. In a speech in the boardroom, he recalled my approach 12 years earlier. He said he had not remembered me because he spent much of his Rugby career resting on the ground, but one day saw me coming out of the surf at Newport and said: “I know those knees.”

In 1987, a Carroll apprentice, Chris Anderson, sent me to do the jokes at the Fitzgerald corruption inquiry in Queensland. An inquiry uses the European inquisitorial system. In 1991, I examined the transcript of the subsequent adversary trial of police chief Sir (as he then was) Terry Lewis. The difference between the two systems was astonishing; the curiosity curse kicked in; I morphed into a legal historian, a species almost as rare as the pig-footed bandicoot..

In his speech at Macquarie University, Dr Carroll said: “And writing about it [Der Ding] required an economy and precision of words to match the economy and precision of the sculptures Rodin made of the things he saw. You may have noticed an Australian example of this economy, precision and observation in the poetry of Les Murray and the prose of my friend Evan Whitton, a truly distinguished journalist.”

Vic was of course much too kind; it was all a matter of chance. However, The Night of the Hearse may at least have got within shouting distance of what Vic said, plus jokes and reporter as outsider. It ends:

The way of the reporter is hard. He’s out there, tireless feet crunching in the gravel, and never a kind word from anyone. But once in a blue moon even the worst of us gets the accolade, and I got mine from Inspector Ford the following Tuesday, when Truth hit the streets …

“What does it say?” Peggy asked innocently.

“WE PAID OFF THE COPS, Jack said, by Evan Whitton – f****ing mongrel bastard.”