Sometime late on 19 February, The Age discovered it had a problem. It was a few hundred words short of filling up its leader section.
“Shit what do we do,” said someone in one of those quaint offices where leader writers gather to save the world on a daily basis.
“Easy,” said another voice, “just get Caro to bury Essendon again, she can just hit the rehash key on her computer.” And, so, the problem was solved.
Words like disgrace come easy to M/s Wilson – everything that she doesn’t like, and everyone that she doesn’t like, is a disgrace, is bringing the game into disrepute and must immediately step aside.
Thankfully for the game of Australian football, not too many people take much notice of M/s Wilson anymore. I say thankfully because if everyone that M/s Wilson demanded stood aside was stood aside, we wouldn’t have anyone to run the game, from folk holding water bottles to folk holding high office. She never seems to get around to those who should be sacked, the commissioners who sat back and allowed their senior executives to produce one of the most calamitous breaches of the Victorian Occupational Health and Safety Act, a breach that led to the creation of the ASADA saga which in return has seen the once omnipotent AFL reduced to a laughing stock.
That is the editorial that should have been written – a collection of facts, yes facts, I know that is hard for the Age to get its collective head around that notion. And those facts should be properly sourced, people, places and events named so that their veracity can be tested. The Age has besmirched its reputation and the reputation of journalists generally through its reliance on anonymous sources.
The editorial referred to one source, the greatly discredited Switkowski Report. Discredited you say, by whom? Well, how about the author himself who declared that performance enhancing and image enhancing drugs, their delivery processes, and legitimacy for elite sportspeople, fall well outside my expertise.
Basically, Switkowski really had no idea what he was doing. Switkowski also revealed he didn’t speak to Dank and that he only interviewed three players. Having said that, he then produced the florid lines about exotic programmes. Given revelations in the Federal Court and events in Zurich, it is pretty obvious to whom Switkowski was speaking.
There is very little you can do to hold the modern media to account. To paraphrase Sir Frank Packer, complaining to the press council is like complaining to your mother-in-law about your wife. On an almost daily basis, journalists inflict huge damage on people’s reputations and their well-being. Even with the money to pay the best PR people and lawyers in the world it is very hard to undo that damage. Even Sarah Lukin can’t save the AFL.
The Age editorial that appeared on 20 February is one of the worst pieces of journalism I have encountered. It was obviously written in haste, short on facts, short on just about everything that is necessary in good leader writing. That the Age chose to run it says much about the current state of its journalistic stocks.
Perhaps, I am wrong when I say there is nothing that can be done about bad journalism. The release last week of figures in relation to Fairfax Media confirm that people are voting with their feet. I cancelled my subscription to the Age. I got a ‘find call’ to find out why and I had great pleasure in informing the salesperson that it was because of the coverage of the Essendon saga. I could sense the salesperson slumping in her seat because she had heard the same reason thousands of times before.
So, you might ask, how do I know what is still being written in the Age. Mainly from people who are getting around the firewall, or as they say, reading it in coffee houses. Other kind folk put the stories up on the web site BomberTalk, asking for my response, which I am always glad to supply.
My response to this editorial is summed up pretty easily – one of the blackest days in leader writing in the history of newspapers. People like Harold Evans, William Deedes, Graham Perkin, John Wheeldon, Frank Devine and Les Hollings who made leader writing an art and insisted on nothing but the finest of topics and the most carefully chosen of words from their fellow leader writers will be turning in their graves.