Spare us the outrage of journalists willing to turn a blind eye to sins

It is not just Cricket Australia and the Test team that have a lot to learn from the ball tampering scandal in Cape Town.

Former Australian cricket captain Steve Smith speaks to the media. Picture: AP

It is not just Cricket Australia and the Test team that have a lot to learn from the ball tampering scandal in Cape Town last weekend. The nation’s elite cricket journalists, some of the best writers in the business, know they need to have a good hard think about the nature of their relationships with the Test team’s captain, leadership group and coaching staff. Australia has been accused of other forms of cheating on the subcontinent and elsewhere but our cricket media has largely fallen in behind the side in an uncritical way.

Yet this past week cricket writers have competed with Twitter’s smug moralising pile-on to ratchet up outrage against a young man, captain Steve Smith, and a team they have been lauding since he took the job and worked his way up to world No 1 Test batsman.

In their many comment and analysis pieces this past week, many have remarked on the winner-takes-all culture of Australian cricket and linked that culture all the way back to Greg Chappell’s 1981 decision to make his brother Trevor bowl an underarm ball along the ground against New Zealand to eliminate the possibility of a six to draw a match.

Readers were regaled with stories about how unpopular Australia’s cricketers were around the world for a culture these journalists now say just isn’t cricket. Why were they not making this case earlier if it has been clear all along?

Why were many journalists prepared to accept Smith’s assurances in India last year when he clearly was looking to the Australian box for advice on whether to challenge an umpire’s decision? Indian captain Virat Kohli said Australian players had been doing it all through the series but many of our best sports journalists gave Smith the benefit of the doubt.

It is entirely consistent with the nature of modern journalism that such rank hypocrisy will go largely unnoticed, as mainstream media journalists compete with Twitter to signal their moral outrage at what was certainly a shocking piece of outright cheating. Many of the best cricket writers are old enough to be Smith’s parents or grandparents and have been happy to turn a blind eye to flaws in the spirit of the game as played by Australia because they are on the cricket news flow drip.

Don’t get me wrong. I love cricket and good cricket writing. Nor are journalists who turn a blind eye to issues that could hurt their sources unique to cricket. Similar issues arise between journalists and political sources and between business leaders and ­finance journalists. Two continuing stories spring to mind.

How many of Tony Abbott’s strongest supporters in the media since he lost the prime ministership in 2015 were on the regular texting story drip from his former chief of staff, Peta Credlin? How many have been prepared to put up their hand and admit honestly — or at least as openly as Smith did — that they have been wrong for two years about their predictions of the imminent demise of Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister and are hopelessly conflicted by their relationships with Abbott and his former office?

In business journalism, how many senior editors and columnists who have supped at James Packer’s table and been squired into hotel suites at Melbourne’s Crown Casino or even stayed at his Aspen ski chalet have been honest about his financial and mental problems until Packer himself discussed them a fortnight ago? Packer, an honest and good man brutally upfront about his flaws, has been more ethical than many hangers-on who write about him.

There are honourable exceptions to such criticism of the methods of journalists. Many do think carefully about the way they protect sources and why sources use them. They are conscious that in an era of fake news they not be used to get out stories for political advantage that are ­untrue. Just not enough fall into this last category.

This newspaper’s Victorian business editor, Damon Kitney, wrote a brilliant profile of Packer interviewed at his Argentinian ranch Ellerstina for The Weekend Australian Magazine last October. Kitney asked all the tough questions and published the answers fairly. No running interference for the mogul or trying to hide the truth from readers as some in financial journalism have done.

The best journalists do reflect on the nature of their relationships with their sources. On this paper, political writers Dennis Shanahan and Paul Kelly have always been prepared to write tough things about people who give them great stories, and they have been brave enough to call those sources in ­advance and let their targets know to expect the worst when they ­decide to pull the trigger.

Veteran sport columnist Patrick Smith has never shied away from tackling the biggest names in Australian sport, and on March 24 wrote a column with several pars criticising the Test team and its winner-takes-all ethos. The ball tampering story was revealed the following morning.

The relationship between journalists and their sources is at the apex of the public’s right to know and the media’s role as the fourth estate in democracies. Whatever your political persuasion, stories such as the Washington Post’s Watergate break-in revelations, the Kirribilli House agreement between Paul Keating and Bob Hawke, the framing of Mohamed Haneef, misdeeds by bank subsidiaries revealed by Adele Ferguson, Kate McClymont’s revelations of corruption in public office by NSW minister Eddie Obeid and hundreds of others rely on confidential sources.

These are not stories citizen journalists or Twitter campaigners will ever get near. But there can be a downside in the public not knowing the truth about confidential sources. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd used confidentiality to advance his own cause and damage his rivals, many journalists allowing him to use their moral codes against them, effectively misleading the public.

Even the best journalists can slip into patterns of behaviour that involve turning a blind eye when it is their own sources who misstep. We have seen this recently yet again with Victoria Police and in NSW with the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s wrongful pursuit of Crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen.

I think The Australian’s senior sports writer, Peter Lalor, nailed the Smith situation last Wednesday when he said he feared for the brilliant 28-year-old who seemed bewildered by the firestorm around him. That morning Lalor and Robert Craddock ­revealed Smith was most likely covering for vice-captain David Warner and Cameron Bancroft.

Should Smith be punished? Of course. Is he beyond redemption? Of course not. Is a year out of the game too severe, as former Australian international cricketer Shane Warne argued in his column last Thursday? I don’t think so.

South African captain Faf Du Plessis is a twice-convicted ball tamperer. Former captain Hansie Cronje was a convicted match-fixer. Pakistan Test teams have thrown matches to win bets against their own country.

But Australians want their very well paid sports stars to be judged against higher ideals than what other nation’s cricketers can get way with. That does not mean young men cannot learn from their mistakes. Smith’s actions were immoral and definitely not in the spirit of Test cricket. But neither was present national selector and national talent manager Greg Chappell’s underarm ball decision when he was captain 37 years ago.