Don’t turn crime into entertainment: Dan Box

Dan Box is worried about the “massive harm” that could occur if crime reporting becomes entertainment | PODCAST

Award-winning reporter Dan Box: ‘One bloke said to me, “true crime is so hot right now’’. And I just wanted to slap him’.

Dan Box, whose Bowraville podcast helped to set in motion events that will take the murder cases all the way to High Court, is worried about true crime journalism.

“There’s almost that sense of ‘come back next week for the next revelation’,” says the British-Australian journalist, who left his post as crime reporter for The Australian last year to move to Britain.

“We shouldn’t do that, because these are people’s lives. It’s not entertainment. Short of war reporting, it’s probably the most emotional kind of reporting you can do in terms of the damage you can do to the people you’re reporting on,” he tells The Australian’s Behind The Media podcast.

He worries about the “massive harm” that could occur if crime reporting becomes entertainment. The signs were there two years ago when The Australian launched the Bowraville podcast and it had a massive impact, winning two Walkley Awards. TV producers came calling. “One bloke said to me, which really stuck in the mind, ‘true crime is so hot right now’. And I just wanted to slap him. Because it’s not entertainment, it’s not something you watch for fun.

“These are actual people’s lives, these are people’s children who’ve been murdered, these are families that will never recover from that harm.”

Between September 1990 and February 1991, three Aboriginal children, 16-year-old Colleen Walker, four-year-old Evelyn Greenup and Clinton Speedy-Duroux, 16, all disappeared while staying at houses on the same road in Bowraville, northern NSW. Police bungled the case. Two murder trials ended with the accused man acquitted.

Before the podcast, Box’s stories on the case were relegated to page two of the paper, a journalistic dead zone. But the human voices on the podcast were impossible to ignore. Recently the court of appeal ruled out a landmark retrial; now the case is going to the high court.

Barriers are vital for crime reporters. Box spent five years covering the child sexual abuse royal commission.

“You are seeing grown men weep, because of something that happened when they were three years old,” he said.

After a brutal hearing into abuse at Salvation Army orphanages ended, The Australian asked him to cover the gang rape of a child in western Sydney. He couldn’t face it and took the day off, only to get a text during the day reminding him to get on to the story tomorrow.

“And I remember it physically, the whole room started to shake. Of course, it didn’t physically. Mentally, it started to shake and I realised it wasn’t that I was sick — I mentally couldn’t cope with the idea of going from two weeks of child abuse to covering it again.”

Box is working back in Britain, where he started his career on the business desk of The Sunday Times.

He admits initially he was completely out of his depth, covering the oil and gas round. Business editor Will Lewis came to the rescue with mentoring.

Lewis had lists of contacts that he would call once a week, every few days and every day. “He had little tips on how to chase a story, what was acceptable in terms of chasing a story: is it OK to beg, to demand, to bully, to pay, not that we ever did on The Sunday Times.

Lewis is now chief executive of Dow Jones, a subsidiary of News Corp, which publishes The Australian and Box now works for the BBC in Manchester.