Weisbrot should have been pressed on McGrath counsel

“This is David Weisbrot’s Prince Philip knighthood moment,” said News Corp Press Council representative Glenn Stanaway.

“This is David Weisbrot’s Prince Philip knighthood moment,” said News Corp Australian Press Council representative Glenn Stanaway last Wednesday, talking about the furore over the appointment of GetUp! deputy chairwoman Carla McGrath to the council.

Indeed, it has seemed like a brain snap by Weisbrot, who has settled most of the contentious issues that arose under previous Press Council chairman Julian Disney, and is well regarded in the industry.

I lunched with Weisbrot before my retirement. He was keen to quieten relations between the council and this paper and with the publishers generally.

He also understood the council needed to be seen as an advocate for the media and for free speech rather than as a campaigner for censoring journalism.

He understood exactly why News and The Australian had bristled at the increasing number of third-party complaints by activist groups not even mentioned in stories complained about. Some of these were accepted under Disney, someone I told management at News I would be cautious of when he was first mooted for the job.

I had met Disney and attended some of his economic planning seminars when he was director of the Australian Council of Social Service in the early 1990s and I was editor of this paper the first time.

Disney was a typical modern activist lawyer. He was a Law Reform commissioner, co-ordinator of the Sydney Welfare Rights Centre and former world president of the International Council on Social Welfare.

In other words, he was not the type to be content with a Press Council adjudicating complaints by individuals about the fairness and accuracy of stories that affected them. He would want to change the whole way the media reported issues important to him.

And remember this was in the middle of the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking in the UK. Our then prime minister Julia Gillard and her communications minister Stephen Conroy had been keen to use concern about phone hacking to regulate the media. They had commissioned both the Finkelstein inquiry and the Convergence inquiry to try to nobble the ­nation’s free and independent newspapers.

To their eternal shame, all that had been supported by various mediocre journalists now working as journalism academics, one of whom, Matthew Ricketson, is today the journalists’ union representative on the Press Council.

In fact, so tin-eared were some of the former journalists on the council that, like Ricketson whose union overruled him on McGrath, they all supported the GetUp! ­appointment.

Only Stanaway dissented.

In a series of discussions and emails over more than a month he warned the council the appointment was dangerous. To his credit, Stanaway, News’s national executive editor, kept all that confidential.

It blew up last week when The Australian found out about ­McGrath and our editor-in-chief Paul Whittaker said his paper would not abide by Press Council rulings unless the appointment was overturned.

Quite right too. Imagine a board member from the Melbourne-based right wing Institute of Public Affairs being appointed to the Press Council. The ABC, the Guardian, Crikey and Fairfax would blow up deluxe. Hopefully so would the News Corp papers.

But what to make of former ­editors and now Press Council members such as Simon Mann (The Age) and David Fagan (The Courier-Mail) saying nothing, and Fairfax editorial director Sean Aylmer ticking off the appointment? Aylmer’s decision was met by howls of protest, especially on Twitter, by senior people such as Fairfax political editor James ­Massola, and The Australian ­Financial Review’s Rear Window column.

In many ways the whole episode shows again that, as David Marr once wrote, the culture of journalism is “vaguely left wing”, and, as I have written many times, journalists are so spoon fed these days by private and government public relations that most can’t think for themselves.

Still, that does not explain why Weisbrot, a man who seemed to have a deft touch in such matters, was digging in with public statements from the council that implied all would be well by the time McGrath actually started hearing complaints in a year’s time.

I began trawling through the internet and GetUp!’s website and lo and behold. One David Weisbrot was himself appointed to a GetUp! project, the Grata legal advisory committee, from his academic role at Sydney University.

I can say for certain that in an undated post calling on members to “be part of Australia’s first public interest fighting fund”, called Grata, and “donate now” to make it happen, GetUp! says funding ­decisions will be made by the board of the Grata Fund, including Tony Fitzgerald QC, barrister and University of Sydney professor of law Peter Cashman, lawyer ­Jennifer Robinson and emeritus ­professor of law at Sydney University, David Weisbrot.

The latest Grata Fund post lists Isabelle Reinecke, the daughter of journalism academic and former head of the left leaning Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, Julianne Schultz, as its director and a full board that no longer includes Weisbrot, but does include the other previous directors and others, with Fitzgerald as ­patron. Reinecke took the Grata role after being director of legal and governance and company secretary of GetUp! Australia. Grata’s own website says it was established in a two-year campaign by GetUp!.

After tracking all this down I rang a contact I trust at the Press Council and was told privately that Weisbrot had left the Grata board, presumably when he took up the Press Council job, but my contact was not certain of timing.

I think Weisbrot remains a good Press Council chair but surely this raises two obvious questions that all industry and public council members should see immediately.

1. Why has Weisbrot not mentioned his former Grata board role and its GetUp! connection since the McGrath controversy broke?

2. If Weisbrot could see a potential conflict of interest between his Press Council and Grata roles for himself, why is he apparently blind to the potential conflict of interest for McGrath?

And the potential conflicts of interest are real.

As many reporters pointed out on Twitter last week, those covering Adani’s proposed Carmichael coalmine in north Queensland could easily come before the Press Council one day. A check of the ­official GetUp! Twitter feed shows dozens of Tweets about Adani last week in the middle of the storm about its deputy chairwoman’s appointment to the Press Council and the Adani mine green light.

A quick read of the official GetUp! mission statement should ring alarm bells in the mind of ­serious journalists. “We campaign on issues that our members care about in the fields of environmental justice, human rights, economic fairness and democracy. Everything we do is guided by carefully crafted strategies designed to win.” All fair enough, but not on the Press Council surely.

But if such campaigning does seem fine to members of the council today, and many of the public members nowadays have had big legal and public-sector careers, it would not have a decade ago.

In the late 1980s and early 90s former News Corp CEO Ken Cowley used to host editors’ lunches so the public members could ask questions and see how editorial decisions were made.

They were people interested in the world and the media. They were older than today and not generally lawyers.

Of the eight public council members who originally sup­ported the McGrath appointment, four were lawyers and six were ­Julian Disney appointees. This is important I think.

For the council to work properly it must reflect the values of ­ordinary readers. Lawyers have little respect for the role of the media and many don’t even really support the role of the political establishment to make laws, preferring to leave ­society in the hands of the courts. People outraged by the parole ­system in the wake of recent terror attacks are likely to have a less positive view about judges and magistrates.

Today the council’s industry and public members are more ­likely to want to tell editors what decisions they should have made and what matters of taste they should police. They are not really concerned with hearing editors’ views on what their readers think about such matters.

In the UK the press regulator IPSO does not adjudicate on matters of taste, and concerns itself only with matters of fact. Even at The New York Times, a paper many on the left would like to see as the model for the Australian press, the role of monitoring ­complaints is changing in the face of a social media firestorm that passes judgment on every story thousands of times a day.

The paper sacked its readers editor Liz Spayd at the end of last month. The position will not be filled and there is no general press regulator in the US.

So, will the furore over the ­McGrath appointment shake off the confidence of publishers in the Press Council? I think it might.

The council is very expensive in an age of rapidly declining media profitability. Online media from all around the world provide almost limitless competition for ­dissatisfied readers.

Publishers have noted the success, lack of controversy and efficiency of the system set up in Western Australia when Kerry Stokes’s Seven West Media-­controlled West Australian Newspapers decided to pull out of the Press Council in the middle of the Finkelstein debacle in 2012.

Turnaround times for complaints to the West’s independent Media Council are rapid and controversy virtually non-existent. Meanwhile, the Press Council is costing News Corp $1 million a year and Fairfax $600,000 for a lot of unnecessary headaches.