Might we have more pressing concerns than hookers-and-coke scandals?
What the story that refuses to die tells us about those who work in and consume the media
Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
Janet Malcolm
Journalism is a highly competitive, take-no-prisoners, often ruthless business. That’s the nature of the beast. But I can see no excuse for the kind of abhorrent behaviour we’ve heard about at Channel 7 over recent days. There are, of course, ethical rules that are sometimes stretched but must never be breached in obtaining such exclusive stories.
Ray Martin, SMH, 5/4/24
I was planning on steering the well clear of the Higgins-Lehrmann story. It’s now an inextinguishable stink bomb that leaves everyone who ventures near it smelling putrid. But some things cannot stand. Media muckety-mucks claiming the moral high ground being one of them.
How the media works
Laypeople often seem to assume ‘the meedja’ get together in a smoke-filled back room and collectively decide what stories will be covered and how they will be framed. Given the groupthink journalists are prey to, I can understand why non-journalists might imagine something like this occurs.
But that is not how it works.
It’s a rare media outlet – Left, Right, Centrist, highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow, print, television, radio, digital – that hasn’t devoted a great deal of coverage to the Brittany Higgins rape allegation.
That’s because individual journalists, of all class backgrounds and political persuasions, and the broader media industry, respond to incentives. In this respect at least, hacks behave like normal humans.
If the public is obsessively interested in a story, the media will obsessively cover it. Many less salacious but more substantial stories – for instance, about the urgent need for Australia to reform its tax system – are under-reported precisely because the public finds them tiresome.
There are various analogies that spring to mind when it comes to the relationship between media producers and consumers. But the unavoidable one in this instance is that between prostitutes/sex workers (I’m using both terms to avoid triggering readers on either side of the political divide) and their clients.
Prostitution wouldn’t exist – and it has a habit of springing up in some form in almost every society – if there wasn’t a massive demand for the services prostitutes/sex workers provide. Likewise, tabloid journalism wouldn’t be so popular unless a sizeable proportion of the general public was interested in learning all the juicy details of tawdry tales.
As media decision-makers understand, the general public is especially interested in sensational stories involving attractive, young Caucasian women. Ask yourself if you’d have been quite so interested if Brittany Higgins had been 20 years older or 20 kilos heavier. If you answered in the affirmative, I’ll pose a follow-up query: can you call to mind the name of a single Australian arrested for drug trafficking other than Schapelle Corby?
As we’ll get to shortly, the media is far from blameless. But I’d argue this is a situation – to use another apropos analogy – where the drug purchaser can’t simply lay all the moral responsibility at the feet of the drug supplier.
As an aside, I’m sure all those commercial media organisations that have declared themselves sickened by the behaviour of Llewellyn and his lieutenants in recent days will be conducting a thorough audit to ensure they haven’t contributed, directly or otherwise, to the coffers of A Touch of Class at any point. Possibly shortly before landing a big advertising client.
The higher-ups doth protest too much
I hold no brief for Mark Llewellyn. I’ve never met him. But I’ve encountered his sometimes-charming-but-always-ruthlessly-ambitious chancer type. As anybody who has spent any time working in the media will have.
Judging by reports, Llewellyn is a classic example of the ‘hard-charging’ aka ‘old-school’ genius who always seems to land on their feet, no matter how many staff they burn through or how many ethical/HR lines they cross. That’s because they reliably deliver results.
(In completely unrelated news, many sociopaths who aren’t quite intelligent and/or sociopathic enough to pursue corporate or legal careers end up working in the media.)
But what has intrigued me in recent days is not so much the revelations about Llewellyn and Auerbach’s actions but the willingness of the others in the media to pile on. A narrative now seems to be developing that Llewellyn is an inexplicable outlier and that no other journalist has ever, or would ever, sully themselves in the manner he and his colleagues did. Even with the intense pressure those still working in dying industries, such as free-to-air television, are under to keep delivering the results of the past with the meagre resources of the present.
It seems unlikely Llewellyn went rogue, Colonel Kurtz-style. While Mahogany Row occupants are careful to always maintain plausible deniability in their dealings with ‘boundary-pushing’ geniuses, it stretches credibility to imagine Seven didn’t know exactly what it was getting when it hired Llewellyn.
That being the case, it’s worth considering if he and his team deserve all the blame. Is it only those who dive into the muck to scrap for the nugget of ratings’ gold who should shoulder the responsibility when things go south? What about their immediate supervisors? What about the CEO? What about the proprietor?
It’s a shame about Ray
Of all the eminent media figures who’ve chosen to wade into this moral morass, I would have thought the long-time host of A Current Affair (ACA) would have been the most likely to maintain a circumspect silence.
But, no.
It’s part of Australian television folklore that Jana Wendt, one of Martin’s A Current Affair (ACA) predecessors, stormed off the set and refused to return for several days after she found herself introducing a story about a hardware store with topless shop assistants.
Five years later, while Martin was host of the show (to be fair, it was fill-in host Mike Munro rather than Martin who did the dirty work), ACA went to town on the Paxton family.
One of the Paxtons later joined forces with John Safran to give Martin a taste of the foot-in-door journalism that was the stock-in-trade of ACA and its bitter rival Today Tonight. Martin was apoplectic and, in stark contrast to the Paxtons, in a position to fight back. Memory and online research suggest Martin got the pilot TV program Safran was working on cancelled. Martin himself claims the ABC chairman sent his wife a bunch of flowers and apologised.
The year after the Martin-Paxton-Safran incident, something far less amusing happened – a repairman committed suicide after being entrapped by ACA. As Stuart Littlemore noted at the time:
One sordid little entrapment too many and another unremarkable example of “A Current Affair’s” mindless succession of bullying righteousness, yields a result they will say they never foresaw. A little man, caught by a cheap deception far worse than anything he was accused of doing, despairs of ever living down the shame and takes his own life.
That same year, Jana Wendt delivered the Andrew Olle lecture and noted:
[Tabloid television] at its worst… is deceptive in the claims it makes to sell itself. At rock bottom, it is no better than the small-time conmen it often smites with phony outrage. Principles like objectivity and fair-mindedness have been replaced by cheap opinion and popular prejudices.
Granted, all the above occurred around the end of the last Millennium. But as our Gallic friends often heavily sigh, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The opportunity cost
I now hope to neither write nor read another word about the interminable Higgins-Lehrmann-Reynolds-Wilkinson-FitzSimmons-Drumgold-Llewellyn-Jackson-Auerbach-Albrechtsen-Arndt saga.
Not because it’s uninteresting – the one indisputable fact of this case is that both media workers and media consumers find it fascinating – but because it’s unimportant.
After eight decades of relative peace and prosperity, things seem to be headed in a worrying direction. Both in terms of geopolitics and the domestic politics of (increasingly divided and fractious) Anglosphere nations.
The Fourth Estate is up to its neck in elite failures
In yet another of his attempts to explain Biden’s political woes, my fellow Substacker
A disastrous war in Iraq; a ruinous financial crisis followed by a decade of anemic growth when most of the new wealth went to those who were already well off; a shambolic response to the deadliest pandemic in a century; a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan; rising prices and interest rates; skyrocketing levels of public and private debt; surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities; undocumented migrants streaming over the southern border; spiking rates of gun violence, mental illness, depression, addiction, suicide, chronic illness and obesity, coupled with a decline in life expectancy.
That’s an awful lot of failure over the past 20-odd years. Yet for the most part, the people who run our institutions have done very little to acknowledge or take responsibility for any of it, let alone undertake reforms that aim to fix what’s broken. That’s no doubt why angry anti-establishment populism has become so prominent in our politics over the past decade.
Let’s run through some of that list and see if the Fourth Estate shares any complicity in elite missteps.
A disastrous war in Iraq: They don’t like to talk about it nowadays, but as those of a certain age will recall many reporters and commentators were pathetically eager to spruik the WMD narrative. Even though plenty of credible experts were calling bullshit at the time.
The media, by and large, also went on cheerleading for the Iraq War until it was abundantly clear public opinion had turned against it. I can comfortably count the number of prominent journalists who’ve subsequently apologised for their role in promoting America’s ill-fated neocon adventurism on one hand.
A decade of anemic growth when most of the new wealth went to those who were already well off: Do you remember the legacy media taking much of an interest in the downsides of neoliberalism – for instance, blue-collar workers being thrown under the bus, an increasingly squeezed middle class, unaffordable housing and collapsing birth rates – during the last four decades?
Me neither.
Editorial priorities are belatedly shifting, but rather slowly. If you presently have access to a business paper, or even just the business section of a standard newspaper, it shouldn’t take you more than a few seconds to locate an article arguing the path to economic nirvana lies in redistributing even more wealth (and hence political clout) from low-income and middle-income workers to the well-heeled.
A shambolic response to the deadliest pandemic in a century: We all seem to have tacitly and collectively agreed to memory hole the years 2020-2022, so I’m hesitant to claw at bandaged wounds. But I must note some argue the media didn’t cover itself in glory during Covidtide.
I could keep going down the list. But the point is trust in the mainstream media has collapsed for understandable reasons.
Journalists like to flatter themselves they’re comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. All too often in recent times – and this must be linked to the now near-complete embourgeoisement of the profession (it’s now so bourgeois it’s morphed from being a trade to a profession) – the legacy media defaults to further comforting the already comfortable and afflicting the already afflicted.
(Mentally tally how many media reports you’ve seen about an admirably industrious and frugal 14-year-old purchasing a home, or indeed a string of investment properties, simply by getting a part-time job at McDonald’s and foreswearing avocado-and-toast café breakfasts. Now add up how many media reports you can remember mentioning the Boomers typically bought their homes for 4X annual household income rather than 10X-plus.)
There’s plenty of excellent content around that addresses critically important issues: the pros and cons of open-border policies; the likely consequences of widening generational, class and partisan divides; the rise of China, and so on. However, the bulk of this content now comes from the independent media ecosystem and not the likes of Channel Seven.
I suspect both the independent media's spectacular growth and legacy media's continuing collapse relate to how thoroughly upper-middle-class types have taken over the latter. (While those with prestigious degrees from top-tier universities are endlessly fascinated with identity politics cause célèbres, that’s rarely the case with the rest of the population.)
As a final aside, it’s almost as if culturally – if not necessarily economically – upper-middle-class journalists are trying extremely hard not to think about class and distributional issues.
Putting away childish things
I don’t have a sniffy disdain for the tabloid media. For all their sins, our tabloid journalists do at least still engage with, create content for, and advocate on behalf of non-elite Australians.
But a nation facing serious issues can only afford so much escapist entertainment.
And a nation confronting existential threats – a seemingly imminent confrontation between its sugar daddy and its security daddy, for instance – certainly doesn’t have the luxury of spending months obsessing over fifth-order issues.
If I’m correct and shit is about to get real, we’re soon going to need many more Australians who are willing to produce and consume serious journalism.
Here’s hoping they will soon materialise.