Commentators prefer to shoot messenger

THERE is something well rotten in Victoria when examples of top-level wrongdoing by a discredited anti-corruption body, and cogent evidence of the possibly illegal actions of the Chief Commissioner of Police, are glossed over by elements of the local commentariat.

It was predictable that the Office of Police Integrity and Victoria Police would bunker down under serious scrutiny, agree on a strategy, spin it and try to stay on message. Shooting the messenger, The Australian, by raising doubts about its motives for a series of important stories is part of the strategy.

It has happened on cue, and goes with the territory.

But in a state crying out for a royal commission to cut the unhealthy tentacles currently binding the Brumby government, police hierarchy and OPI in a cosy bundle of indistinguishable parts, some in the media are being played. Instead of investigating the evidence, they are doing the bidding of those who should be under tough scrutiny for actions that many senior lawyers believe were probably illegal.

Some commentators may have been rendered comfortably numb on a drip-feed of officially sanctioned information in a genteel environment of easy access and sound-bites from the top brass.

It's easier to swallow than it is to dig.

They are not easily stirred from the torpor, but when they are, it is to throw rocks at the outsider, The Australian.

ABC radio's morning broadcaster Jon Faine, whose starting point seems to be that he just does not like the newspaper, stirred while interviewing The Australian's Victorian bureau chief Chip Le Grand.

Has Faine actually weighed any of the evidence? He seems determined to ignore it, instead questioning the "motives"of those presenting it.

He has not asked me on to his program, yet he infers that I am leading a bent journalistic conspiracy borne out of a now-resolved legal battle (with which I have had no connection) between this newspaper and the OPI.

Faine was joined yesterday by Crikey's Margaret Simons, someone for whom I have deep respect but whose basic errors of fact in an anti-The Australian essay were embarrassing.

Faine must have been aware of the ABC 7.30 Report's balanced program featuring several lawyers adamant that Simon Overland had possibly broken the law, triggering the collapse of a covert murder probe, over which others were criminally prosecuted.

Judging by Faine's emphasis, he sees these matters as trivial compared with the newspaper's "motives" for raising the evidence. Maybe he suspects The Australian's "motives" caused Overland to do what he did.

Victorians are fortunate that 3AW's Neil Mitchell, who has focused on the evidence during firm and fair questioning of Overland, appreciates the seriousness of these matters.

For the record, The Australian 's motives are simple. Follow the evidence.

In Queensland, journalists have bitter memories of what happens when the media baulks at legitimate questioning of powerful figures, or when journalists get too close to the flame and fail to scrutinise gross abuses of power and the justice system. The state became mired in corruption.