News against the World

News Ltd are again taking the fight to its perceived enemies with extraordinary assaults against Larissa Behrendt and now Julie Posetti in recent days. Not for the first time both women are the victims of The Australian’s editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell’s attack dogs.

The attack against Posetti (online version not available) was disguised by a headline which read “academic warns of Twitter danger” in classic fearmongering fashion. But having quoted Posetti’s “warning” in the lead, the article suddenly switches to put in the boot in the second sentence and from there on they frame the story as a war between Posetti and Mitchell.

If there is a war, there is only one side fighting it and it’s not Posetti. The Canberra journalism academic first attracted Mitchell’s ire during the so-called Twitdef affair in December. Posetti was at an academic conference live-tweeting the speech of former News journalist Asa Wahlquist when Wahlquist told the conference her reporting of climate change issues was stymied by head office. Posetti duly posted this important admission on Twitter. Mitchell denied Walhquist said this but the audio backs up Posetti. Walhquist later backed away from the statement but the writ has never seen the light of day. Mitchell knows Posetti has a valid defence of fair report.

Nevertheless the Australian insists Posetti erred significantly in not mentioning the incident in a radio interview with Deb Cameron today about dangerous uses of Twitter. In one sense it is a shame Posetti didn’t talk about the issue. It would have shed light on some of the real dangers lurking in Twitter, such as threats from powerful people. But the fault she didn’t mention it, if fault is not too strong a word, belongs to the interviewer Cameron (herself a former News Ltd employee) who missed a golden opportunity to connect the wider story with personal experience.

Posetti was too busy answering the questions that were asked, to have time to talk about her own personal experience. That experience with Mitchell while memorable and bruising, has left her with nothing to be ashamed about. Bringing the subject up unasked in interview, if she had time to think of it at all, would have smacked of vindictiveness - a strong suit of the Australian. The Caroline Overington article makes no sense unless interpreted as a threat. "We are still out to get you so watch what you say in public", was the coded message.

Coded messages were aplenty in the hounding of Aboriginal academic Larissa Behrendt. The former Young Australian of the Year got up News Ltd’s nose recently by being one of the plaintiffs in the race discrimination case ongoing against star journalist Andrew Bolt. The Australian found a way to hit back when they found a tweet sent from Behrendt’s protected Twitter account addressed to friends which read “@rhiannaPatrick – I watched a show where a guy had sex with a horse and I’m sure it was less offensive than Bess Price @paddygibson”.

Behrendt was watching Price on Q&A at the time and unhappy with something Price said. But for News Ltd this was a slur typical of "leftist, ivory-tower thinking". It also had juicy overtones of bestiality which could be spread like muck without any heavy lifting. They launched a relentless campaign against Behrendt constantly reheating the horse sex issue. Their fake outrage was matched with fake concern for Aboriginal issues in daily airings of the “scandal”.

There have been two great skewerings of the affair. Tony Martin effortlessly used a bit of research and a lot of humour to expose the campaign as humbug. He unpacked the horse sex issue and forensically looked at the most well known proximate cause. Behrendts, said Martin, was “one of the nine people who, as Miranda [Devine] would say, ‘identify as’ Aboriginals, and who are currently dragging the Herald Sun’s biggest drawcard [Bolt] through the courts. So, of course, she has to be taken down, even if it’s on trumped-up charges.” Larissa Behrendt expressed a strong view in less than 140 characters that may have been read by as many as 400 people, Martin noted. “She really has to be stopped”.

Then Chris Graham weighed in today with a deeper cause of the problem. He said the campaign was not because of the Bolt connection but rather a successful defamation case she won with NITV CEO Pat Turner against Mitchell’s paper in 2007. The Australian settled for an “undisclosed amount”. Mitchell may appear to act unhinged, but his behaviour is cold and calculating. For him revenge is a dish best served cold – and continuously.


CORRECTION (7 May 2011). I was contacted by Larissa Behrendt who told me about one factual error in my account. Behrendt wasn't watching Q&A but Deadwood which was on at the same time.

Media140: Julie Posetti’s Revolution

ABC RN Breakfast presenter Fran Kelly kicked off the second session on Day 1 of Sydney Media140 on the provocative theme of “death or salvation of professional journalism”. Kelly’s panel included fellow Radio National presenter Robyn Williams, Fairfax Digital editor-in-chief Mike Van Niekerk, Crikey editor Jonathan Green and Crikey media writer Margaret Simons. But Kelly’s first guest, and the subject of this post, was the conference’s indefatigable editorial editor Julie Posetti. (photo by Derek Barry)

Posetti is a journalist and academic based in Canberra with over 20 years experience in the media industry in radio, print and online. Posetti is an avid Twitterer and has been engaged in eight months of active research into how journalists use the tool. Posetti’s theme was It’s a revolution not a war. The name took its cue from earlier speaker Mark Scott’s recent “end of empire” speech aimed at the legacy media barons such as Rupert Murdoch.

Posetti’s argument was there are three crises confronting journalism at the moment: dealing with the effects of new technology, the failure of the economical model and a loss of public trust. She said that the latter crisis is not getting the attention it deserves among all the clutter of the first two crises. Yet it is not difficult to see why the industry might not want to talk about it. News is becoming increasingly tabloid, trashy and truthier as it seeks ever wider audiences lured by the lowest common denominator. Editors and proprietors know that people love hearing about scandals and outrage, and they will bring it to them if it means having to manufacture them.

But as Posetti notes, there is a nasty side effect to the sensationalism used to sell such news: loss of reputation. Journalists pay the price as much as the media they serve in this interest. The professional consistently ranks low in most trust surveys of occupations. They gradually transform from guardians of the fourth estate into lackeys of corporate media giants prepared to stop at nothing to get their grubby story. Meanwhile the major issues of the day are either incorrectly reported or under-reported or both.

Posetti says that journalists should wake up to this danger. Social media is enabling many new practictioners and many more who fact-check others. If journalists didn’t engage with these new players, they would lack credibility in online communities. Posetti said such credibility was crucial to sustaining what ever model exists when the first two crises are solved.

This means that we need to pay as much attention to the public good function, if not more, than either to the death of newspapers or the lack of profits online. To do this, argues Posetti, journalists must endure with their most sacred functions: “shining a light in dark places; speaking truth to power and doing so without fear or favour, but with a commitment to accuracy, truth & fairness.”

This means having a wider definition what constitutes news reporting and the ditching of the over-blown notion of objectivity. The social age has blurred the line between journalists and citizens. This is particularly true in Twitter with its open discussions and crowd-sourcing of information between all manner of professional and amateur media players. Some of this will be serious, some will be playful (witness how tonight’s #pwnednudierun played out across television, Twitter and Youtube). But whatever it is, it is something to embrace not fear or resist. “It’s vital to accept that this is a revolution, not a war,” said Posetti. “A time for transformation, revitalisation [and] reinvention.”