Colin James: Digging for dirt on political candidates from journalists is not how investigation works

HE’S has had his share of clandestine meetings as an investigative journalist, but never as a source of damaging information. If you are going to go around town trying to dig up dirt on candidates, expect to be caught out, Colin James writes.

Lawyer Ash Bidhendi leaves the meeting. Picture: Colin James

• For your eyes only, James — The secret meeting
• Hartley rivals argue over dirty tactics and stolen posters

IT’S been quite normal, in my 35-plus years of investigative journalism, to have clandestine meetings where confidential information has been supplied by someone who wishes to forever remain anonymous.

Never, though, have I attended a meeting with someone who wants me to privately provide them with information in the midst of an election campaign which could be damaging to its most high-profile candidate. In other words, dirt.

But, as my colleagues from Off the Record reported in The Advertiser on Saturday, this is what happened last Monday when I met with a dapperly-dressed Adelaide lawyer in a popular cafe near Waymouth St following a rather surreptitious phone call and a series of unusual texts.

Thinking I was going to be a handed a political bombshell which could change the course of the South Australian election, I was a little taken aback when it turned out I was being quizzed about what I knew about SA Best leader Nick Xenophon and former Adelaide lawyer and now political rival, Peter Humphries.

My inquisitor was a fellow called “Ash” who was not there to provide an exclusive for The Advertiser but to gather information for a “friend” he was “helping”, sitting Liberal MP Vincent Tarzia — the man who stands between Nick Xenophon and his widely-predicted role as SA’s future kingmaker. I told “Ash” that I could not think of anything incriminating about Mr Xenophon or Mr Humphries and the meeting ended. Off “Ash” wandered with his fancy satchel and I returned to the newsroom and made a couple of phone calls.

I asked those I called if they had heard of “Ash” and why would anyone be so silly or naive to ask a journalist for damaging information about a political candidate.

After establishing it was an Adelaide lawyer Ash Bidhendi, The Advertiser publicised the encounter as a warning that such tactics were at play in our election campaign.

Someone with a brand new Twitter account with the pseudonym, SAProud, used it to attack me on Sunday, saying the item in Off the Record was a “complete act of bastardry”, the “last gasp of a copy boy with political ambition” who “in one act of betrayal effectively silenced every journo’s confidential sources by making the story about a source”. What’s more, apparently I had “crossed the line” to become an impending SA Best candidate. Yep, seriously.

So one wonders when @ColinJamesTiser is going to announce his candidacy for SA_Best. Can be the only reason he announced the end of his career as a Journalist by exposing sources in such a blatant act of support for his new Leader!

— SA Proud (@SAProud74) February 17, 2018

Can we a clear up a couple of things here SAProud, whoever you are. “Ash” wasn’t a source who needed protecting. I was. I didn’t betray anyone. I never have. I was the one being asked for damaging information, not the other way around. This is when journalistic confidentiality usually applies under our code of ethics.

My advice to “Ash” and others. If you are going to go around town trying to dig up dirt, don’t ask journalists. As for me running for SA Best, fat chance. I’m far too busy exposing stuff like this. It’s what journos do. And always have.

Colin James is opinion editor of The Advertiser