Epic journalism fails on asylum seeker policy

Journalists need to ask uncomfortable questions and try to report the truth.

Journalists need to ask uncomfortable questions and try to report the truth. Picture: Supplied

Journalism can be difficult. Many young reporters find it hard to stand face-to-face with powerful politicians, business leaders, crooks and police and ask them prickly questions.

Resisting group-think can be difficult. But the job is not to win applause on social media. Journalists need to ask uncomfortable questions and try to report the truth.

There were some epic journalism fails last week: why so much group-think on independent MP for Wentworth Kerryn Phelps and her plan to let two doctors decide the fate of asylum-seekers with medical issues? Why did Q&A host Tony Jones, who knows more about this subject than most, not ask the tough questions of his ­assorted independents last Monday night?

Why did so few journalists challenge the focus by climate ­activists on local temperatures and the Great Barrier Reef? Journalists should ask scientists and advocates if anything done here could change the temperature of the water around the reef. Australia accounts for only 1.4 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions and the world’s biggest emitter, China, does not plan to start ­reducing its emissions until 2030 under a deal done at the APEC meeting in Brisbane in November 2014.

Why did some reporters let federal Tasmanian Greens senator Nick McKim get away with ­demanding Prime Minister Scott Morrison beg firefighters to forgive him for the present spate of fires in Tasmania. Fires have been cyclical since white settlement and the evidence suggests long before that too.

Reporters should know that even the world’s peak climate ­advocacy group, the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) says no single weather-related event can ever be directly linked with a high probability to climate change. While there is an increasing propensity towards ­extreme events, such events have always been a feature of life. And nothing done in Australia could offset increasing carbon dioxide emissions around the planet.

Climate blinded many journalists to another big story last week. SkyNews host and News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt asked on Thursday morning why so few journalists were prepared to call out the role of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in supporting so-called conservative indep­endents challenging sitting Liberals at the forthcoming May general election. Bolt had hinted at this on his program the previous week and this newspaper’s Janet Albrechtsen made the allegation directly in her column last Wednesday.

The answer for much of the ABC-Fairfax-Guardian media is that too many journalists privately support what Turnbull is doing in the name of climate action, even though it looks like pure revenge.

But so what if a reporter’s ­private views align with Turnbull’s. Reporters who feel strongly about the need for action on climate change should still be able to prosecute a great story: and is there a better one than a former Liberal PM trying to sink his former cabinet ministers?

Some of these journalism failures are linked to the deskilling of the profession as the business model comes under pressure from digital media. Fewer strong news editors are employed today and more young reporters’ work is published without the checking that once applied. More journalists are employed in lobbying for companies, governments and activist groups as universities train more graduates than the media industry can use. Working journalists are increasingly spoon fed by their contacts in PR.

University media courses are not helping. Many devote too much time to the role of journalism in social advocacy and young graduates can arrive in news rooms eager to change the world before they have even learned to report it accurately.

Because media courses have become more popular, entry standards have risen. This has pushed course entrants into higher demographics so that many young ­reporters now identify with middle-class concerns and are less able to understand the financial worries of poorer Australians in outer suburbs, rural towns and farms.

For many young reporters ­renewable energy is a moral issue, while for poorer Australians who subsidise wealthy renewables users through higher power charges, climate action is a financial burden.

And then there is the ABC, where no one takes editorial ­responsibility to make sure reporters do chase stories, even ones that make them uncomfortable.

Back to Q&A and Jones’s soft handling of independents Phelps, Julia Banks, Rebekha Sharkie, ­Andrew Wilkie and the Greens’ Adam Bandt on Phelps’s proposed legislation.

The last time Australia’s border protection rules were eased under the Rudd government, Australia faced the worst public policy failure since Federation; 50,000 came by boat, 1200 drowned at sea and billions had to be spent opening detention centres that had largely become unnecessary under John Howard’s “Pacific solution”.

Australia cannot simply leave the remaining 1020 asylum-seekers on Manus and Nauru forever, but, conversely, journalists should know no one is actually in detention under our present system and all are able to move about freely as local residents do. Journalists should also understand why simply transferring these last asylum-seekers to Australia would be dangerous. This newspaper’s Chris Kenny is right when he says people-smugglers in Indonesia are waiting to test a new Shorten government.

Anything the parliament does that looks like a loss of resolve risks restarting the trade. How quickly would compliant doctors get the remaining asylum-seekers here for treatment and how quickly would legal advocates take court action to prevent their return to Manus and Nauru?

The Australian on Thursday splashed on a leaked security briefing warning of the dangers of undermining offshore detention.

“ … the briefing … based on ­advice from ASIO and Australian Border Force, specifically referred to the ‘third pillar” of border control (offshore detention), which operates alongside turnbacks and temporary protection visas,” ­National Affairs Editor Simon Benson wrote.

Phelps, Banks, Sharkie and Wilkie had all disputed on Monday that Phelps’s proposal would do anything to water down Operation Sovereign Borders.

Jones let questioner Colin Segal raise his doubts but did nothing to challenge the evidence-free assumptions of his panel. He let Bandt get away with blaming this government for keeping children in detention.

Every journalist knows the truth about this by now and the Human Rights Commission and its former head Gillian Triggs should never be let off the hook.

It was Labor that opened Manus and Nauru and Labor that presided over the detention of 2000 children. It was the Coalition that had reduced those numbers to 200 when Triggs released her ­report, The Forgotten Children, in November 2014 after launching her inquiry on February 2 that year. She had waited until Labor was out of office to launch the ­inquiry.

Editors and journalists need to resist social media bullying on climate change action, renewables and asylum-seekers and be prepared to ask tough questions and report truthfully, whatever their personal views. That is the way to return trust to mainstream media.