Greatest enemy of truth is those who conspire to lie
NOTE: The Press Council has partially upheld a complaint about this article. Read the full adjudication here.
The best journalists often operate on the edge, are a little bit different. Obsessive even. Aside from the rare few who are lucky enough to find themselves in possession of a document that has metaphorically fallen off the back of a truck, the work of a reporter is tedious, time-consuming and often fruitless. Think of All the President’s Men.
Yes, of course there was Deep Throat, but Bob Woodward couldn’t rely on history’s most famous well-placed source to do the hard work. Along with his pal Carl Bernstein, Woodward, day after day, month after month, worked the old shoe leather into the ground. Knocking on door after door and making phone call after phone call. Deep Throat might have given them direction, but he didn’t do the work. It was the greatest takedown of our time, but it sure wasn’t pretty.
The essential work of journalism at its very best, and its most important, is to expose wrongdoing in public life. The targets of all good journalism tend to be those in power; politicians, public servants dispensing taxpayer funds, business leaders, union bosses, and those running big institutions, such as churches and universities.
We live in an age where, ironically, there has never been more information in the public domain, yet less transparency. The truth runs a distant last these days when the race is on by public and private institutions to spend millions of dollars to block information reaching the public. Lying, disseminating and dissuading inquiring minds from extracting fact is a massive industry. And as a society we suffer as a result. Power is more than ever about power to protect. Politicians lie without a glimmer of guilt. Business leaders twist and turn to trick and torment.
Yet getting to the truth in public life has never been more difficult.
Rumours, innuendo and gossip are wilder now than ever, fuelled by anonymous social media scoundrels and half-witted hopefuls, desperate to destroy, through nefarious and any other means possible, anyone who disagrees with them. It is a modern tragedy. And, despite freedom of information laws, suppression, legal and otherwise, and censorship have never been more pronounced.
Many at the ABC express their displeasure at being held to account by The Australian. Forget that their own Media Watch has a leery obsession with News Corporation, some less thoughtful ABC journalists, and their flacks, one-time reporters who seem to have forgotten where they came from, decry any form of scrutiny.
Whether they like it or not, the ABC is one of the most powerful institutions in Australia. Not only does the national broadcaster pocket $1bn a year from our pay packets to produce great local radio, at times intoxicating drama and clever, original television, but much of that federal money is spent on journalism. In fact, the ABC, a wholly taxpayer-funded institution, is the biggest media outlet in Australia. The No.1 player in digital text and broadcast news, and awash on the airwaves of radio and television. The ABC is a behemoth. It is both the game and the gamekeeper.
Many senior people at The Australian know well the work, the habits and the hubris of Sally Neighbour and Louise Milligan.
To be good you often need to be brash, and brave. But to be really good, you need to be beyond reproach. Your loyalty to the truth must be without question. Fairness and balance is your currency. It has to be. Think of the opposite qualities to answer why. The subjects of good journalism, of important journalism, lie and dissemble. Good journalists do not. They rely on the truth. They yearn for it. But they understand the limits. In many respects the natural enemy of a journalist, aside from a public relations hack, or a political flack, is the defamation lawyer. The most dangerous enemy of the journalist is bad, lazy, deceitful journalism.
