Why reason matters in journalism

As you move around the city this week, you may notice on billboards, bus stops and trams, a new advertising campaign from The Age with the catch cry “Here’s to Reason”.

You’ll also see it on our homepage, our newspapers and on your phones and televisions. Take a look at one of the ads here.

The Age’s Here’s to reason campaign speaks to a considered, mature approach to journalism.

For me, this campaign speaks to a considered, mature approach to journalism that is grounded in fact. We avoid shrillness and seek a range of viewpoints. We are not dogmatic and make editorial decisions based on the information in front of us. We know our readers come from different backgrounds and different places, and we celebrate that. We don’t talk down to people. We don’t pander. We do our best to give our readers the facts they need to make decisions for themselves.

None of these ideas are revolutionary, so it is somewhat alarming that this reason-centred approach has become a point of differentiation in the Australian media in 2025.

Mainstream media cops more than its fair share of criticism.

A cottage industry of critics has emerged, built by commentators with an ideological agenda and a string of hot takes about stories produced by hardworking reporters. The critics usually explain how they would have done things better than the journalist or publication, despite many of them not having made a worthwhile contribution to public discussion in eons. Invariably, their idea of “better” journalism follows the same recipe: take a story produced by a hardworking reporter, twist it to the left or right, add mayonnaise and serve with garnish.

It’s not only the media commentariat that does this. Many large outlets are happy to plunder stories from reputable publications, reproduce them and present them to their audience as their own work without attribution.

Without publications like The Age, without a voice of reason in our mainstream media, too many of these stories would never be told. Commentators would not have public interest news to criticise and other large outlets that should be producing their own journalism wouldn’t be able to fill their homepages, talk shows and news bulletins.

We’re proud of our critical role in fuelling the national discussion, but this is why your subscription is so important. It funds the difficult and expensive work we do and provides us with a layer of protection from the critics and thieves that feed on honest journalism, either for financial benefit or personal interest.

Your support allows us to keep prioritising the public interest, and to stay reasonable, while the rest of the media polarises to extremes and splinters into agenda-driven fragments. In this environment, reason is a quality increasingly worthy of celebration.

In the past 24 hours alone, you have helped fund reporting that exposed a fresh scandal within the troubled CFMEU, showing there are still huge problems in the union more than a year on from our gold Walkley winning reporting. We also brought you this uplifting story about a hospital that appears to have rid itself of the scourge of ambulance ramping, with solutions that could be applied widely across the state. And we brought you the insights of the legendary crime reporter John Silvester on the extraordinary case of drug trafficker Tony Mokbel. Tomorrow, we bring you troubling new revelations about the actions of a company in the increasingly embattled for-profit childcare sector.

So here’s to reason. Here’s to robust, fair and balanced public interest journalism. And here’s to your part in supporting it.

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