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'The Age' and 'On Line Opinion'

By Graham Young - posted Wednesday, 29 July 2009


When The Age decided to run a piece insinuating that On Line Opinion had shown bias in not running a piece by Greens MLC Lee Rhiannon it was not a charge that I could let pass.

It is unfair and damaging to our journal, and to the many people who make it work. As well it damages our unique place in Australian publishing as a place where all political points of view are equally welcome.

The whole affair is also an indictment of The Age’s journalistic standards and arrogant editorial staff.

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The paper is prepared to pass-off work done by a political party as their own “investigative” journalism and then quote the source of the work as though they were an independent entity. Their fact-checking appears to be non-existent, and their reportage in breach of the journalists’ code of ethics.

They are prepared to sully the reputation of a competitor on the eve of the launch of their own rival Internet publication, and then can’t even show that competitor the courtesy of acknowledging correspondence from them.

With standards like these no wonder that anyone who had bought Fairfax Media shares 10 years ago would have lost almost four-fifths of their investment if they still held them today. This is no way to run a fish and chip shop, let alone a major media franchise.

About the only positive side of the affair is that The Age implicitly treats an online media organisation as being on an equal footing with the mainstream media.

To those who have missed the controversy, you can read The Age’s story claiming we “canned” the article here. The article was actually published by New Matilda, so you can read it here. And if you want to get a much deeper understanding of the whole affair, a number of open interviews and some analysis are posted on Ambit Gambit starting here.

The brief outline of events is that Rhiannon’s co-author Norman Thompson approached our editor Susan Prior with the prospect of us running an article on Malcolm Turnbull’s fundraising in Wentworth.

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The hook was that excerpts from the article would also run in The Age. Susan “penciled” it in for Wednesday sight unseen.

This all seemed a little odd. Why wasn’t The Age publishing the piece? Why would they want the material on a third-party website and just point to parts of it?

The article arrived at 3:33pm on Monday. Susan did some initial work on it, but was sufficiently concerned to forward it to me for a second opinion on Tuesday morning. My immediate reaction was that this was not a piece that we would want to publish.

There were a number of reasons for that.

On Line Opinion is an opinion site, and opinion in this case is a specific genre. It excludes reportage and investigation and concentrates on analysis of generally public facts.

We made this decision right from the outset for practical reasons because we do not have the resources to do news. To do news properly you need to have a network of writers who can report as close to instantaneously as possible. You also need fact checkers to ensure that what is reported is accurate, and lawyers who can advise on the legal aspects. None of these comes free of charge.

In addition you need to be financially equipped to defend yourself against legal action even when it is only of the “stopper writ” variety.

We also had practical marketing reasons. The news market is crowded, but the considered opinion market isn’t.

We have had experiences in the past that reinforce the wisdom of sticking to that strategy.

When I looked at the Rhiannon piece it was obvious that it was news and not opinion, and that checking for its accuracy was well beyond our resources. There also appeared to be a possibility that Rhiannon was trying to involve Lucy Turnbull in her husband’s affairs and that we had been chosen because she has an honorary role on our editorial advisory board. Subsequent events tend to confirm this was the case.

There is no law in publishing that says you have to publish anything, or be used by your contributors, and as The Age was apparently going to carry the story, the Greens would lose very little if we didn’t.

They also assured us that The Age would check the facts and the legal situation. In which case it would be appropriate for The Age to get the benefit and carry the risk, particularly as they were unlikely to tell us which parts of the article their lawyers advised against.

While our contributors indemnify us against liability arising from what we publish an indemnity is only as good as the indemnifier. It is only very recently that Bob Brown, the Greens federal leader, said he was facing bankruptcy because of legal bills he had incurred and couldn’t pay.

Given everything it also seemed prudent to double-check my view by referring the matter to our board of directors, which has two members who are lawyers, and a spread of political views. None of the directors wanted to publish, which was relayed via email to the Greens at 1:45pm on Tuesday. It was never discussed with the Editorial Advisory Board whose role is strategic, not tactical.

In the event some of the allegations in the article ran in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. They were presented as “investigative journalism” under the byline of Richard Baker and there was no acknowledgement that all but a small proportion of the article was sourced from the Greens.

The same day I received a phone call from Baker. He asked me a few questions about why the article had not run and who was on the company board and the editorial advisory board. I gave him full details, including the roles that various individuals played.

He didn’t ring back to put allegations to me that the decision was politically motivated, but that was the purport of the article that he ran the following day.

The AJA Code of Ethics says that a journalist must “Report and interpret honestly, striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts … not suppress relevant available facts, or give distorting emphasis. Do [their] utmost to give a fair opportunity for reply.”

The article Baker wrote gave the clear impression that our refusal to publish was the result of political influence.

He did that by:

  • quoting Rhiannon with her allegations, but never putting them to me so they could be answered;
  • mentioning that Greg Barns and I are board members and have in the past played roles in the Liberal Party, without mentioning that I had been expelled and Barns had resigned from the party;
  • claiming that I was chair of the board when it had been made clear to him that Nicholas Gruen, who heads the federal government’s inquiry into Web 2.0, is the chair;
  • failing to mention the other board members until the end of the article, and then making no statements about their political leanings;
  • only mentioning the three members of the Editorial Advisory Board who have some non-Labor affiliations, including Lucy Turnbull, and omitting all of the others, such as former ABC Managing Director Brian Johns, whose political affiliations are quite different; and
  • claiming that the board was concerned about legal threats from Malcolm Turnbull when no such threats had been made.

If you read the article without any contextual knowledge you could easily get the impression that On Line Opinion is run by some sort of Liberal Party cabal headed by me and that we bowed to either legal pressure from Malcolm Turnbull or personal pressure from Lucy Turnbull to stop information reaching the public.

Instead of that OLO is a journal where for 10 years we have been at pains to provide political balance through our choice of articles and our choice of management. Fairfax Media might be chaired by a former Liberal Party Federal Treasurer, but the paper’s staff apparently believes that if the management of any other organisation has former Liberal Party attachments that is evidence of bias.

To some readers this may appear to be a storm in a teacup. On Line Opinion has a strong audience base because it does provide a broad range of articles from a broad range of perspectives. We are also remarkably open and transparent with our critics. Charges of bias ring hollow.

Which is exactly the point - why would The Age take a swipe at a journal like ours? I can think of a number of reasons, none of which are to the credit of The Age, and some of which point to problems across the newspaper industry.

Criticising us was an easy story. With the loss of classified advertising revenue and the migration of increasing amounts of advertising to the Internet, journalists are under pressure to be more productive, which means produce more copy in the same time. Little work went into the first story which was passed-off as investigative journalism. The Greens’ bias claim against us stretched the story into two for very little additional effort.

Newspapers are stuck in a financial paradigm where their cover price doesn’t cover their production costs and so they are reliant on advertisers to make a profit. Their strategy has been to try to grow readership. The only way you can do this when you already have the upper socio-demographic audience is to go down market and make your “news” more tabloid.

This makes the news less valuable, and newspapers more reliant on advertising, because fewer people are prepared to pay the cover price. At the same time the market becomes less attractive to advertisers, damaging their other source of revenue.

The advent of the Internet, where there is no cover-price, has exacerbated this trend.

Neither of the stories should have been news, but in this desperate downwards spiral today’s fish and chip wrapping is starting to resemble tomorrow’s news.

Added to that The Age is in competition with us, even if their unique browsers dwarf ours. This issue was raised on Crikey. I don’t think it would have represented a strong financial incentive for publication, but it’s possible it was a consideration in the back of someone’s mind.

It is just as likely that as the publication shifts more and more towards the Internet that blogging habits are taking hold. It’s common for bloggers to ignore the ethical niceties, pass off others’ work as their own, and scream out loud accusations of bias and incompetence against their rivals and the MSM.

All of which paints a dire picture for serious political analysis in this country which is almost entirely conducted in print. Unless newspapers work out how to produce nourishment rather than caffeine hits, news is going to become less valuable to readers, less valuable to advertisers, and therefore less valuable to shareholders.

Perhaps someone in Fairfax could give me a ring? Not about the article but about their business model. I’ve got some ideas for how they can reverse their slide. Or email will do. 

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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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