This is different from the old newspaper tradition of ignoring or shooting down scoops by other papers. The newsdesk once would assign reporters to speak to people who could pour cold water on a story – a tradition this column hates but which is as old as newspapers themselves.
Much worse is the modern tendency to “cancel” news that does not fit a media outlet’s narrative. The Hunter Biden laptop story The New York Post broke before the 2020 presidential election is a classic example. Only last week did The New York Times finally admit the story, and the laptop, were real.
A recent example in this country was Janet Albrechtsen’s scoop on page one of The Weekend Australian on March 5 publishing texts from Rachelle Miller, a one-time media adviser to former education minister Alan Tudge. Though only one side of a complicated and sad story, the texts clearly gave perspective to the Tudge issue. It was a side that had not been ventilated in the original Four Corners report, Inside The Canberra Bubble, in November 2020, that first revealed the minister’s affair with Miller.
The day after Albrechtsen’s story, when discussing the decision of Scott Morrison to force Tudge to stand down as a minister ahead of the election expected in May, no one on the ABC Insiders couch even mentioned the Miller texts. To the extent texts were mentioned at all, only those damaging to Tudge were discussed. This was straight out cancelling of a story that viewers should have been told about.
This column thought the ABC was about to take a similar approach to this paper’s “Mean Girls” story by investigations editor Sharri Markson, first published on page one on March 16. The ABC and Guardian Australia seemed keen to tut-tut the story into obscurity.
On RN Breakfast, host Patricia Karvelas described the reporting of the alleged bullying of Kitching by Labor’s Senate leadership team as “unseemly given Kimberley Kitching hasn’t even had her funeral yet”.
The Guardian’s political editor Katharine Murphy joined in: “This is, as you’ve said Patricia, a really deeply uncomfortable conversation. I can’t really believe it’s happening actually.”
Except it was already clear it was Kitching’s family and friends driving the story.
Attempts to ignore the story failed the next morning when news.com.au political editor Samantha Maiden broke the RN Breakfast mould. There really was something to see here, Maiden told Karvelas in her regular on-air Friday morning session.
Maiden said Morrison was of course seeking political advantage from Kitching’s untimely death a week earlier, but that was no different from Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese trying to make political mileage from Four Corners’ allegations on ABC online against Christian Porter in its 2021 follow-up to Inside The Canberra Bubble.
Maiden quickly got to the political heart of the Kitching issue: “Is there a culture problem within the Labor Party and what is Anthony Albanese doing about it?” Exactly right. Maiden said the people driving reporting of the Kitching bullying allegations were “the friends and family” Albanese claimed journalists and politicians should be respecting.
This exposed the fraud in initial media and political handling of the Kitching issue, Maiden said. “The same people who were calling for all sorts of … investigations in relation to the Christian Porter matter” thought the media should back off on Kitching.
“If Anthony Albanese was a CEO and there were serious allegations made about ostracisation … in a workplace and there was a person who had complained to a workplace trainer … and nothing was done … I would like to see that run at the Fair Work Commission,” Maiden said. Indeed, that would not be a good look for a party set up to represent the interests of workers.
It is hard not to see partisanship in the eagerness of some reporters to publish untested allegations against Coalition ministers, while attempting to ignore similar allegations against Labor and the Greens. This is a particular problem for a national public broadcaster funded by all taxpayers.
The Independent Review Into Commonwealth Parliamentary Workplaces that reported last November under sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins – largely spurred by the reporting of ABC journalist Louise Milligan and by Maiden’s Brittany Higgins scoop – makes it clear most bullying in parliament (61 per cent) comes from women.
The ABC should not have been so keen to defend Labor’s Senate leadership team of Penny Wong, Kristina Keneally and Katie Gallagher, given Kitching had spoken to several senior journalists, including Maiden, Nine’s Chris Uhlmann and Sky News’s Andrew Bolt about being bullied, and had reported her situation to a workplace counsellor.
Reporting of allegations Kitching had made before her death was clearly fair and in the public interest.
Morrison mishandled the Tudge issue. He should have stood by Tudge, whose relationship with Miller was clearly consensual. Tudge has been the best education minister in decades and his proposed curriculum reforms would have made a strong point of difference with Labor in an election campaign. We know the Republican Governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, last November won the strongly Democrat state on the back of a campaign for curriculum reform.
Labor will find it hard to shake the hypocrisy of its position on Kitching, given how quick Albanese has been to weaponise such claims against the Coalition. There are also difficulties for Morrison, given his former defence minister Linda Reynolds is alleged to have shown private Kitching texts to Wong, Keneally and Gallagher.
A report with more serious implications than Miller’s texts or Kitching’s bullying has fallen flat. This paper’s Brad Norington in The Weekend Australian on March 19 revealed the inside story of support for the so-called “Voices Of” independents challenging sitting Liberals at the upcoming election. Most of the media has failed to scrutinise these candidates, many of whom claim to be Liberals at heart.
These often female candidates, some backed by climate activist and renewables investor Simon Holmes a Court, are running to damage the Coalition, often in safe seats. At the 2019 election, GetUp took on so-called conservative Coalition figures, most prominently backing former Olympic skier and lawyer Zali Steggall against former prime minister Tony Abbott in the Sydney seat of Warringah.
Wrote Norington: “Up to four Sydney-based independent candidates, possibly more, are using the services of Populares Agency, a Sydney-based communications company formed by a trio of Labor and GetUp veterans.”
This issue should have been taken seriously by the media much earlier. The Voices Of movement is an attempt to mislead voters by running former Liberal Party members or people with strong Liberal Party ties against sitting Liberals. Some targets are now Liberal progressives, such as Trent Zimmerman in North Sydney and Dave Sharma in the eastern Sydney seat of Wentworth.
Readers can rule out bias in the apparent lack of media impact of Norington’s hard work. Journalistic laziness and the dumbing down of newsrooms look the more likely culprits.
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