Twitter had no better practitioner in this country than the late Mark Colvin, who for 20 years was the peerless presenter of the ABC’s PM program.
Colvin epitomised the collegiate and curious qualities of early Twitter. A voracious reader, not just because he spent much of his life killing time while on a dialysis machine, Colvin was both a giant of journalism and a big-hearted guy who turned his own news consumption into everyone else’s joy.
Following @Colvinius was the cheapest and most effective self-improvement exercise. Just as newspapers will never be as funny nor as gentle as when Matt Price was still alive, and radio will never be as engaging or intelligent as when Colvin was with us, the once-agreeable world of Twitter has completely lost any spirit of shared illumination, a spirit which Colvin personified.
In Australia right now, it is old male journalists who are doing more than anyone to kill that spirit.
Aside from his hatred of exclamation marks, Colvin abhorred stridency and posturing. He also oozed humility, despite his intellect and achievements giving him every right to be completely up himself. I wonder what he would make of Twitter today, inhabited as it now is by retired and soon-to-be-retired journos harrumphing like the Muppet Show judges, taking potshots at their former colleagues, all of it in a manner suggesting a conviction that nobody in journalism is as good as they were, and never will be.
These are people who have worked with words their entire life but now use them in such a fashion to make themselves both insufferably boorish and insufferably boring.
And for a profession that prides itself on loving argument, what these people actually prefer is agreement, with membership of their clique predicated on certain bedrock convictions — Scomo is an idiot, Dutton is a fascist, News Corp is evil, Albo’s not getting a fair go.
All that’s fine, of course. Good luck to them if that’s how they choose to spend their autumn years. The thing that rankles with me is their utterly disloyal enthusiasm for offering a running critique of what a slovenly and moronic job their former colleagues are doing covering the news.
The most prolific of the ex-gallery grizzlers is Barrie Cassidy, the former Insiders host who has devoted much of his retirement thus far to bemoaning how the ABC has fallen apart since he left. Cassidy was in trademark curmudgeonly form last week when just three days after the Queen died he started firing off tweets saying the ABC was spending too much time covering the death of the second longest-serving leader in all of world history, amid the biggest display of public mourning the planet has seen.
At least his gripes were with management this time, unlike on federal election night in May, where he engaged in the cruel, real-time shit-canning of hardworking journos who had probably made the mistake of regarding him as a friend.
Inadvertently emboldening those critics who regard him as a Labor stooge on account of his five years as Bob Hawke’s press secretary, Cassidy’s first tweet took aim at the panel, which included Leigh Sales and David Speers, for the apparent journalistic crime of not being excited enough about the fact that Labor had won.
“Disappointed the ABC could not even congratulate Tanya Plibersek for Labor’s win but instead they should be embarrassed about the Greens winning a couple of seats. Reset guys. You don’t have to be cowed anymore.”
An hour later Cassidy was stroppier still. “This ABC coverage is really quite bizarre,” he wrote. “There’s barely any mention that we have a new government.”
Then this: “The discussions around how the Liberals will cope is nauseating. Guys. We have a new government. Discuss.”
It is worth contrasting Cassidy’s bon mots about his former co-workers with the graceful silence of someone like Kerry O’Brien, who would never embarrass himself or his old colleagues the way Cassidy has with his free appraisals of the work of others. It’s also worth nothing that not a single female journalist engages in this kind of posturing, either.
As a former editor of The Daily Telegraph, I could honestly not give a rat’s arse what people think about me. Mother Teresa could edit that newspaper and around one-third of people would regard her as evil.
But there are plenty of people in the media who are not equipped with the hide of a rhino. I wonder how ABC TV breakfast host Lisa Millar copes with the endless daily abuse she faces? At midday last Tuesday her name was trending nationally on Twitter, where she was the subject of 2304 individual tweets, pretty much all of them accusing her of being a useless, partisan hack who was ideologically beholden to her late father, the genial low-profile Nationals MP Clarrie Millar.
Do people like Cassidy stop and think about their role in creating the Twitter ammo that ends up getting fired at the likes of Millar?
The long-suffering Millar ranks in the same category of journalist as Leigh Sales and the Australian Financial Review’s political editor Phil Coorey who frequently find themselves vilified into the number-one spot on Twitter’s hate figures du jour, their chief crime being a commitment to being nuanced and balanced and even-handed.
Twitter isn’t the place for that kind of thing. You’re either with us or you’re against us.
And it’s for this reason that I marvel at how many journos sign up for this garbage. It’s not about the exchange of ideas. It’s about the exchange of the same ideas.
The best recent example of that was the all-in smash-up on Aboriginal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, where everyone from Mike Carlton to Paul Bongiorno to Paul Barry were whipping themselves into a Twitter frenzy demanding the release of the Peter FitzSimons’ interview which caused her distress.
Imagine an inverted world where a bunch of old white guys devoted a full couple of days on Twitter to bagging a left-wing Aboriginal woman. You would probably get kicked off the platform; you would definitely face calls for your removal, but not so in the very non-journalistic world of Twitter, where even the journos are all too busy agreeing with each other.
A special mention should be made, too, to the handful of ex-News Corp types who have thrown in their lot with the Twitter brigade. I personally find this sad, as I know and love some of these guys, but now find myself marvelling at their late-onset purity after multiple decades letting Rupert Murdoch pay off their houses. If this company is evil, their conduct is a case of the penny finally dropping after their millions were earned.
With commendable bluntness my colleague John Ferguson put it best: “If they all filed from the altar of perfection then good luck. I just never heard the screams of revulsion when they were putting the next round on expenses.”
They have all become addicted to the dopamine hit of likes and retweets. It’s one way to spend your retirement I suppose. I hope to see you instead at the Willunga Golf Club.
David Penberthy is The Australian’s South Australian correspondent.
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