With bums on every seat and a few tucked into the corners of the TAS Hoskins Centre on Friday night, August 31, the Friends of the ABC hosted respected ABC broadcaster Kerry O’Brien.
Not one to mince his words, Kerry got right to the point about the state of media and how he has seen firsthand the way technology has changed the media landscape over the last thirty years.
“Trying to find a journalistic depth to an innately superficial medium has always been a struggle,” said Mr O’Brien.
“The advent of 24-hour television and the obsession with personality driven journalism and the endless hunt for melodrama by reporters who sometimes give the impression that their wardrobe and their performance in the often unnecessary live cross is at least as important as the story itself.
“It has meant that much of today’s news is more superficial than ever.”
Kerry spoke about a visit to CNN’s Atlanta headquarters in America some 10 years ago where he noticed a chart on the wall titled ‘CNN’s Chart of Human History’. On closer inspection, it was a ratings chart and, according to this chart, the biggest event in human history up to that point was OJ Simpson’s bizarre attempt to flee police, broadcast live from helicopters.
“I don’t think much has changed in the CNN culture since then,” said Kerry.
Kerry O’Brien spoke of respected American broadcaster Daniel Schorr whose television career took off as part of Ed Murrow’s CBS news team in the fifties.
“He recalled in a retirement speech decades later how, as a new boy, he had sought advice from a CBS producer on how to come to grips with this new medium called television,” said Kerry.
“Tell me, says Schorr, I can write a story OK but what is the secret to success of a journalist in television?
“The producer said to Schorr that the secret of success in television is sincerity and if you can fake that you have got it made.
“Watching sincerity faked today would be amusing if it wasn’t such a sad comment on the state of the industry.
“This is an age where a nightly send-up of news in America rates higher than the real thing.
“What America is doing today in news programming you can expect commercial television in Australia and sometimes public broadcasting as well to be doing tomorrow.”
Kerry also spoke about politicians who have also mastered the art of projecting sincerity and filling 10 minutes of an interview without really answering the question.
“This is the age of media management of a variable public relations army of news makers, spin doctors and lobbyists.
“Bob Menzies never had to worry about his famous eyebrows; television came later in his political life. In ’72 Gough became all fluffy around the hair in Australia’s first American style election campaign. The accident prone Billy McMahon, whose image was beyond rescue, carried a crude mobile auto cue around the country-side trying to make his speeches with authority, with disastrous results. Malcolm Fraser found the whole image thing undignified, looking down on journalists from afar. By the eighties, John Howard was grooming his eyebrows and carrying makeup, Andrew Peacock specialised in hair tints and a slim double breasted Paul Keating carried his own mobile shaver to reduce the five o’clock shadow during the impromptu door stop. Bob Hawke didn’t need advice on how to look the part as he had been working on it his whole life, Mark Latham did his best to qualify as the Frankenstein’s monster of politics, Kevin 07 developed the public persona of the vaguely likeable nerd who became Prime Minister and Julia Gillard still struggles with her image.
“Media management has never been more tightly controlled, with PR people now outnumbering journalists.
“It is not the existence of the PR industry that I have a problem with, it is the fact that the strength of that industry is now unhealthily disproportionate to the number of journalists dealing with it.
“As PR numbers have exploded, journalist numbers have either remained static or diminished.”
Kerry went on to further say that media organisations are now producing more, but with less; journalists are getting younger and cheaper and experience is less valued.
“There are fewer journalistic mentors carrying that invaluable bank of history and memories and an appropriate degree of skepticism and knowledge of how the world works and the scars that go with it.
“Often the stories are more complex, the pitfalls are many and journalists are swamped with an avalanche of spin.”
A vigorous, healthy media is at the core of democracy, said Kerry, with politicians and journalists currently in a race to the bottom.
“I hope I haven’t been too pessimistic tonight, I have tried to signpost a few warnings of the ways in which our system of democracy has become a little less robust than it might be.”
