Coulthart bemoans end of era of investigative reporting

Why does investigative journalist Ross Coulthart tell whistleblowers who phone him up to “go away” | LISTEN

Celebrated reporter Ross Coulthart. Picture: Hollie Adams

The advice investigative journalist Ross Coulthart has for whistleblowers who phone him up is short, sharp and shocking.

“Go away. I actually say that to people as soon as somebody contacts me directly on my mobile phone,” says Coulthart, now freelance following his recent departure after three years from the Nine newsmagazine 60 Minutes.

Why send the source away?

“They’ve left a fingerprint,” he says. “When my story is run they will be crucified and they will be excoriated.

“They will be criminally charged for leaking information, and I’ve seen it happen,” he tells this week’s Behind the Media podcast, available online.

Every single electronic communication leaves metadata footprints that authorities can legally request without a warrant under the Federal Crimes Act, explains Coulthart.

“I don’t think people realise how dangerous it is to communicate directly on electronic media with journalists. Don’t do it. Write me a letter.”

For Coulthart, who talks in compelling sentences worthy of a 60 Minutes piece to camera, metadata laws are just one variable making his job harder and harder, along with defamation laws (“I have been sued 20 or 30 times”) and budget cuts.

“The era of big-budget long-form investigative journalism in mainstream media, especially in commercial TV, it really is coming to an end,” he pronounces.

He is a man definite about everything, even about his lack of certainty about what comes next. “I truly have no idea.” He is thinking about returning to his former career in the law, but you get the feeling he can’t escape the lure of the story. “I’ve never known a time before when there are so many stories begging to be told — so many things needing to be dug into, so many stinky issues needing to be turned over — when there’s such a paucity of resources to examine them.”

Coulthart explains his exit from Nine after three years. “They were looking for budget cuts, I was looking for something different.” But he admits to “probably a bit of a difference of view” about what stories to cover.

He sees potential in investigative sites such as Motherboard, Vice, Vocativ and “adversarial journalism” site The Intercept, co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden story in partnership with The Guardian.

But great news magazines where he has worked, Seven’s ­Sunday Night, the ABC’s Four ­Corners or Nine’s Sunday are going to become historical memory. “The thing that I despair about, I’ve got teenage and young-20s kids, they don’t engage with media in the way that my generation ­engages with media. They don’t read newspapers.” Did they watch him on 60 Minutes? “No.”

Born in Britain, Coulthart grew up in New Zealand, where his dad used to get the London Sunday Times airmailed to him each week. “Some boys had their Bay City Rollers up on the wall or David Bowie. I had the latest David Blundy article from Ouagadougou.”

Such an era of investigative journalism under Harold Evans is unlikely to be surpassed, he thinks, particularly as publishers and networks handled the digital transformation of the media so badly.

“I think that one of the catastrophes that TV networks did was going into alliances with, like, Microsoft for Channel Nine and for Yahoo for Channel 7, and it was because they weren’t confident about creating their own portals themselves.

“I doubt very much that free-to-air networks in Australia will exist in the form that we know them at the moment within five years because advertising revenue is drying up at a rate far faster than I think TV executives are prepared to acknowledge.

“I’m not pessimistic. I’m a ­realist. I don’t think newspapers like The Australian or even The Sydney Morning Herald will exist in a paper form within five to 10 years. They’ll probably last longer than free-to-air television. The terrible tragedy is that a decision was made out of neuroticism by TV and newspaper executives to give the stuff away rather than putting up a portal.”

Much was made of Coulthart exiting Nine just as Mark ­Llewellyn, his former boss at Seven’s Sunday Night, returned. The men were involved in an ­altercation in 2014. Llewellyn was stood down after getting physical with a producer, and Coulthart had intervened.

Contrary to rumour, the pair do not hate each other. Coulthart said he “loved working with” ­Llewellyn at Sunday Night and ­despite the “hiccup” there was never any ill will.

“I think that’s completely misinterpreted, and in a good old-fashioned media tradition it’s a beat-up.

“The commercial TV industry is full of eccentric personalities. most of whom are barking mad.”

The job is high stress and ­demanding. “It’s a volatile environment. Mistakes get made. But hell, let’s move on.”

But he loves it, from when he first joined Nine more than 30 years ago.

“Mike Willesee plonked a corporate card down in front of me and said ‘Don’t come back into the office until you’ve got an absolute ball-tearer story’.”

He decries the snobbery some demonstrate towards commercial media. “I’ll go to dinner parties and people will say to me I never watch commercial television since I only watch the ABC and I think to myself ‘Oh my god, you poor people. What a narrow, shallow world you live in.’ Because some of the best investigative journalism in the world is done by commercial media organisations.”

He cites Britain’s Channel 4 and US networks NBC, CBS and ABC. “I actually am incredibly grateful to organisations like Seven and Nine.”

And he was certainly able to tell difficult stories, such as exposing Graeme Reeves, the Butcher of Bega, who mutilated women on the operating table despite having been deregistered. Coulthart won a Gold Walkley for his story on Nine’s defunct Sunday program (he has five in total).

More recently Coulthart told the story about sexual abuse during the 1970s and 1980s at Daruk Boys Home on the outskirts of Sydney. The story recounted dreadful depravities.

“But I think people want to hear it. They do. People want ­expositive revelatory stories that tell them things, that take them into insights that they’ve never seen before.

“They’re not frightened. We patronise our audience. Sometimes people want to hear this stuff. They want to see stuff ­revealed.

“I think what our audience wants is to hear this stuff. They want institutions rattled. They want politicians’ noses tweaked. They want people held to account.

“What’s happening at the ­moment is a lot of media is increasingly becoming very anodyne because editors are getting frightened. They are frightened of risk, they’re frightened of cost and it’s much easier to interview a ­celebrity than to expose a wrong.”