An open letter to Mark Scott

Dear Mark Scott,
I’m sure you’re aware of what “Liberal strategist” Grahame Morris said to Linda Mottram on ABC702 this morning. But in case you missed it, here it is:

Linda Mottram: We saw Tony Abbott in this past week do that interview with Leigh Sales about the Roxby Downs mine issue and stumbled, and that was really quite poor. I was very struck, Grahame. Were you surprised that he didn’t handle that well?

Grahame Morris: Well, Leigh can be a real cow sometimes when she’s doing her interviews.

So, instead of answering the question about Abbott’s dud performance, Morris called a female journalist who was just doing her job, a cow.

He was back on the air shortly afterwards:

LM: Grahame, we’ve had a lot of sms’s and calls offended at your comments. Your response?

GM: [In a condescending tone] Poor little sensitive souls.

LM: You think that calling Leigh a cow is appropriate?

GM: No, no, I probably should have said ‘can be a tough interviewer when she wants to be’.

Wait. Probably?

LM: That’s what you would have said if it was a male interviewer, isn’t it?

GM: That’s silly. No, no, no, no, it’s a phrase that I have used a million times, you know, that somebody can be a real cow when they want to be.

Ah, I see. Because he’s called women cows “a million times” it means he’s not sexist. It’s good that someone who makes such an important contribution to public discussion is a regular guest on ABC radio and television.

GM: But [sighs] look, look, I apologise, it really should be something like, um, ‘having known most of the senior journalists, particularly the political journalists, over the last 30 years, there is a mixture there of people who can be tough, they can be straight up and down, they can be a mixture, they can be soft, and there’s no doubt Leigh at times can be tough’. That would have been a much better expression than being a cow at times.

I don’t know about you, Mark, but I’m not convinced that is an apology. (I’m also not convinced that Grahame Morris understands that radio isn’t print. When you tell a journalist to change your quote, everyone can hear it.)

I’m sure you remember that in April, Morris said people should be “kicking [Julia Gillard] to death”.

In case you missed it, Grahame Morris said people should kill the Prime Minister. In a violent way. Yet he’s a regular guest on the ABC. Why is that? And, since I’ve got you here, why wasn’t it reported by your newsroom? Telling people they should attack and kill a Prime Minister seems pretty newsworthy to me.

Anyhoo, you’ll notice from this tweet from SkyNews journalist David Speers that it’s the second time Morris has used this “oh, I always say that, it’s fine” excuse:

@David_Speers Grahame says it’s a phrase he has used in the past on different issues, but shouldn’t have on this occasion

Oh, well, since he says that lots of people should be kicked to death, that’s ok then.

Morris has also called Gillard “bitchy“. It’s not an insult he would use against a man. Shouldn’t the national broadcaster be looking for guests who are able to talk about politics in an intelligent manner, without using childish insults?

Now Mark, I’m willing to overlook the fact that the vast majority of guests on QandA and The Drum are current and current-until-recently-politicians whose only contribution to public discussion is to push the party line that we’ve already heard over and over again in the news.

I’m also willing to overlook the misogynist and racist comments that are regularly published on The Drum website. (We can talk about those later.)

But what I am not willing to overlook is the national platform given to a man who thinks that calling for violence against women, and calling women names, is an acceptable part of public discussion. Because when you continue to get Grahame Morris on as a guest, what you are telling Australian women and men is that you have no problem with what he says.

Four days ago, Julia Gillard said there were “misogynists and nutjobs on the internet“. She’s right. There’s loads of ’em on here. They’re also, very clearly, on the ABC.

I look forward to your public statement saying that because of his misogynist, sexist and violent attitudes and language, Grahame Morris is no longer welcome on the ABC.

Yours sincerely,
Kim Powell
ABC watcher.

Gerard Henderson’s ‘diverse’ views

Oh, this is really just too funny. Gerard Henderson has dressed up his public ASIO blow-job as a call for Mark Scott to “exert editorial control” over the ABC and ensure it “portrays a diversity of views”: Scott needs to take control to ensure ABC represents diverse views.

By “diversity”, I’m assuming Henderson means the ABC must contain more of the views of conservative, middle-to-upper-class, old white men. Because, as we all know, the views of this group are scandalously under-represented in Australia’s media.

Henderson’s opinion piece is really about how wonderful ASIO is, and how lefty-pinko the ABC is for showing I, Spry, a documentary about Sir Charles Spry, ASIO’s director-general from 1950-1969, that shows him to be a drunk with anti-democratic views. I thought that second part was a job requirement for the head of ASIO, an organisation that exists to “gather information and produce intelligence that will enable it to warn the government about activities or situations that might endanger Australia’s national security” (that’s from the ASIO website).

Anyway, Henderson goes on to talk about how ASIO saved us from the evil communists in the 1950s who would have “executed people if they had come to power”. Considering the death penalty wasn’t abolished until 1973, Australia had a lot of people in power who wanted to execute people, but I guess Henderson is ok with that because they’re not, you know, dirty commies.

But, back to the issue of diversity of views on the ABC. As Gans & Leigh (2009) found, ABC TV was the only news outlet that was significantly pro-Coalition during the 2004 election campaign. I imagine the 2010 election would reveal the same thing, what with all the media carry-on about the BER program being a complete failure (complaints from 2.7 per cent of all schools involved), and the home insulation scheme being a death-trap (207 fires, compared to the 1000 caused by insulation before the scheme – ABS data). Still, if we’re talking about diversity of views during the election, there was Labor and the Coalition. Two viewpoints. Which is why the Greens got the shits that the ABC didn’t give them any sugar.

And what about diversity of faces? The ABC is the whitest channel among all the white Australian channels: Media Watch, Q&A, QI, The 7.30 Report, Lateline, The Gruen Transfer, Insiders, Offsiders, Last Chance to See, Agatha Christie’s Poirot (yes, I am flicking through the tv guide). White, white, white. And the news isn’t any better. As Gail Phillips found in her study of Australian news in 2005 and 2007:

“…instead of a range of peoples and cultures, we see mainly Anglo faces, projecting an archetypal image of a “white Australia” that is more applicable to the 1950s than it is today. More disturbingly, when we do encounter people from manifestly different racial, cultural or religious backgrounds, they tend to be featured as victims, or as social deviants, or as in some way “unAustralian”,” (Phillips, 2009, p. 19).

In his call for more diversity of views on the ABC, Henderson doesn’t want any more of that “angry leftist” Hungry Beast – which can be hit and miss because it’s really two shows in one, but when it hits, it is very good – and, presumably, he wants more repeats of The Great Global Warming Swindle and Dick Smith’s Population Puzzle, in which footage of Asian cities was used to stoke xenophobia. And more period dramas (because back then women knew their place) and shows that prove that Muslims/immigrants/Hugo Chavez are truly evil and out to destroy our way of life.

Or is that being too mean? Perhaps Henderson really is calling for more foreign-language films on the ABC to cater for the 21 per cent of Australians who speak a language other than English at home. Maybe he wants more Buddhist programs, since Buddhism is the largest non-Christian religion in Australia. Nah, I doubt it.

More diversity of views on the ABC? That would be great.

References:
Gans, J., & Leigh, A. (2009), How Partisan is the Press? Multiple Measures of Media Slant.

Phillips, G. (2009), ‘Ethnic minorities on Australia’s television news: a second snapshot’, Australian Journalism Review, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 19-32.

Paul Sheehan’s bodice ripper

Paul Sheehan’s piece in the Sydney Morning Herald – The ABC of seduction: how Mr Darcy depends on damsels – made me feel dirty. And not in the good way. He compares the “seduction of Annabel Crabb” to a Jane Austen heroine, as though she was defenceless against Mark Scott’s advances, and makes her move from Fairfax to the ABC rather tawdry, as though maybe they were even shagging and it’s his baby she’s about to have:

At first Crabb ignored the advances of this would-be tempter, this modern Mr Darcy. She was non-responsive to offers of greater wealth. She pointed out she was pregnant, and that she loved to write for a living. None of this dissuaded Mr Darcy, who offered still greater blandishments. The pressure began to build.

I’ve never been a fan of Paul Sheehan’s opinion pieces. He has a way of writing about women that he thinks will put us in our place without us even noticing. That’s how smart he thinks he is.

One can only imagine the amount of profligate and shocking sitting down together by Ms Crabb and Mr Darcy. So the slow and expensive seduction took place, leaving Mr Darcy, also known as Mark Scott, managing director of the ABC, to rejoice in extracting Crabb from her Fairfax family. Victory came at a price: about $250,000 a year, all underwritten by the Australian taxpayer.

Sounds like Sheehan is just pissed off that he wasn’t wooed by the ABC. And how’s this for offensive:

Now we know why he wanted her so badly. He needed her to opine, report, interview, quip, tweet, blog and otherwise flog the new 24-hour ABC news channel he announced last week. He already had an appealing woman of consequence to help launch this new network, Leigh Sales, but he knew that two cerebral bombshells is so much more than one.

He then goes on to get an erection over Fox News in the US, sticks the boot into all left-wing media, and says the ABC will become a ratings failure. Or something.

Mark Scott’s falling empires

As a journo I spend a bit of time wondering if my job will exist in two years’ time. Sometimes I’m so over putting together yet another bikini gallery for work that I wish my job would vanish. But other times I have a sense of hope that it will get better.

So I’m reading ABC MD Mark Scott’s speech, delivered last night, on the fall of media empires. It’s a response to Murdoch’s push to charge for content and James Murdoch’s attack on the BBC in August.

But now, the man who just four years ago said he wanted to “make the necessary cultural changes to meet the new demands of the digital native” says he’s not going to respond to the demands of these digital natives. Instead, they – who have never in their lives paid for news online – will be asked to respond instead to his demands and start paying.

The argument seems to be that people once didn’t pay to watch television but now many do. We fought against timed local calls but now make them every day on our mobiles. Some of us might pay for recorded music we might once have illegally downloaded. And because we want to read and see this great content so badly, now we will pay for that.

My gut feeling is that the empires are going about it the wrong way. Earlier in the year, Nicolas Sarkozy said 18-year-olds could get a free daily newspaper of their choice. Get ’em hooked when they’re young, and get ’em interested in the news. Nine months later, little news babies have been born:

And 65 percent of the young subscribers continue to read Ouest France at least once a week after their free subscriptions end.

Obviously they had to think about content teens would want to read, and balance that with the news desires of their existing audience. But why isn’t this happening here? Rather than lament the decline in newspaper sales and then dumb them down further in a failed effort to appeal to more people, why not be more aggressive? Give teens free papers (no doubt their parents will also read them), pump money into investigations rather than just media release-generated news, and bring back the quality. After all, The Economist is doing really well.

As Mark Scott said: I suspect too much attention is being given to
finding a pay model rather than addressing the content questions in terms of quality and distinctiveness that will really drive audience commitment.

I don’t think bloggers pose a real threat to news organisations. A few really successful bloggers (oh, to dream) may attract some of the news audience, but someone who’s interested in a news-related blog is also going to be interested in the news. And Twitter won’t replace a news organisation because what are users going to link to when they discuss the news in 140 characters?

Besides, newspapers have always been propped up by the classifieds, so now that this has changed, why do we expect them to suddenly earn their keep?