The following is an edited transcript of Jonathan Holmes launching, in trademark erudite fashion, Denis Muller’s new book, Journalism Ethics for the Digital Age.
A warning. The following speech is classified as suitable for mature audiences. It contains coarse language.
Andy Coulson, erstwhile editor of The News of the World, now serving some 18 months at Her Majesty's pleasure, was born and brought up in Wickford, Essex.
He began his career at the Basildon Evening Echo. Basildon is also in Essex.
Essex, of course, is a county that stretches from the eastern fringes of London along the north bank of the Thames to the dismal, marshy shores of the North Sea.
South-East Queensland is famous for its white shoes. Essex, for some reason, has always been famous for white socks, worn by its inhabitants with dark business suits. Put 'Essex white socks' into Google, and one of the entries that comes high in the responses is a blog called Raedwald, whose author posted this as recently as 2011:
'In the days when I used to commute from Suffolk to London, our table of regulars used to carry out a white-sock count as the train drew into the intermediate stations. Manningtree, the first Essex stop, would have a WSC of some 10%, Colchester 25% and Chelmsford 40%.'
Where is all this leading, I hear you ask? Well, it's leading to Kelvin McKenzie. Unlike Andy Coulson, who never quite made it to Rupert Murdoch's redtop daily, but like Coulson's boss, friend and lover, Rebekah Brooks, Mr MacKenzie was the editor of The Sun. In fact, until recently overtaken by Ms Brooks, he was probably the most notorious of that newspaper's editors. He held the job for 13 years, from 1981 to 1994; it was his genius that put flesh on the bones of Rupert Murdoch's instinct: that there was money to be made by appealing to the Alf Garnett, the secret inner fascist, in the British working-class reader.
One of Kelvin's most famous bon mots was uttered when some poor sap on The Sun chose to include the word 'ethics' in a story.
'Wot's this?' MacKenzie is said to have roared. 'Efficks? Efficks? In't that the place east o' London where they all wear white fuckin socks?'
What he would have made of a book about journalism efficks which re-introduces us to Hobbes, and Locke, and Rousseau, Kant and Bentham and John Stuart Mill, I shudder to think. 'Nasty, brutish and short?', I hear him cry. 'That's not the life of man prior to the social contract. That's description of the ideal Sun headline!'
We do know what Kelvin thought of Lord Justice Leveson's Inquiry into the Essex -- I'm sorry, that should read 'ethics' -- of the press, because he gave his lordship the benefit of his wisdom in a notorious statement to the inquiry.
It began: 'So where is David Cameron today? Where is our great Prime Minister who ordered this ludicrous enquiry?'
MacKenzie continued as he had begun, pouring scorn on the questions he had been requested to answer. No, he didn't check the sources of the stories in his paper, he said. 'Basically my view was that if it sounded right, it probably was right and therefore we should lob it in,' he said.
There were plenty of laws already, he said, to deal with wrongdoing at the News of the World. The only relevant activity that wasn't already illegal, but should be made so, was arse-kissing of newspaper proprietors by politicians. 'Do that and you will have my blessing' he told Lord Justice Leveson, 'and I suspect the blessing from Rupert Murdoch, too.'
Well, do that in Australia and we would make a felon of every prime minister since Gough Whitlam.
But the point is this: around the water-coolers of Fleet Street and Canary Wharf, ethics are not much discussed. British journalists, even more than Australian, are well aware of the constraints imposed by the law -- especially the law of defamation. But the idea that a reporter should exercise his or her individual conscience in deciding how, or indeed whether, to put a story in the paper is entirely foreign to the way most papers are run.
And with that cavalier attitude to ethics goes -- or used to go -- an equally insouciant attitude to reader's complaints. Denis Muller records in the preface to his book that discovering, on becoming news editor of the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1980s, that there were people out there who considered that he and the newspaper were publicly accountable was, and I quote, 'a searing experience'. Most complainants, he made clear, got short shrift.
As it happens, I became executive producer of Four Corners in 1982 -- about the same time as Denis got his job as news editor at the Herald. I arrived straight from England to take over what we used to grandly call 'Australia's premier current affairs program'.
Being a public broadcaster, we took complaints a mite more seriously than most commercial media did. But, when we received a rabid letter accusing Four Corners of being staffed by reds, dedicated to the overthrow of a free Australia, I'm afraid I assumed it was a joke. To someone who knew the country better, the North Queensland postmark might have warned me to be careful.
Instead, I blithely wrote back a jokey letter than began 'Dear Comrade'. I acknowledged that of course he was right, though not many viewers had the acumen to penetrate our admittedly thin cover. We had been working for Moscow for years, I admitted, and fervently believed that the revolution was nigh. And I signed it, 'Jonathan Holmes, Ãommissar, the Four Corners Socialist Collective'.
A couple of weeks later -- this was in the days of snail mail -- my boss called me up to his office, and handed me a letter. It was addressed to the general manager of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, as it then was. It included photocopies of the original complaint, and of my reply. And it was copied to the chairman of the ABC, to each member of the commission, to the prime minister, the minister for communications, the governor-general, and the premier of every state in the Commonwealth.
My boss explained to me that my little joke had not struck the ABC's senior management as especially hilarious.
Of course, the worst excesses revealed by the phone-hacking scandal are not commonplace here in Australia. But, as its reaction to the Finkelstein Inquiry made clear, the Australian mainstream media is as loath as ever to acknowledge that it owes much to the Australian public in the way of accountability.
When I was at Media Watch, I was frequently invited to give talks and lectures on this topic. I was much given to quoting a passage written by a former editor-in-chief of The Age, and the founding director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism, Michael Gawenda:
It is my experience that editors and journalists are more interested in burying complaints from readers than addressing them ⦠and that most media organisations have wholly inadequate mechanisms for dealing with complaints by readers, viewers and listeners.
I would bet that most journalists on most newspapers -- and indeed in most commercial television and radio organisations -- could not outline their organisation's code of conduct and hardly ever refer to it.
That wasn't written back in the 1980s. It was written in 2012 in response to the Finkelstein Report.
If they did refer to their code of conduct, journalists would frequently come across the phrase: 'the public interest'.
For example, News Corporation Australia's admirable code of professional conduct (which doesn't appear in Denis's appendices but can be found on Media Watch's website under the 'Resources' tag) contains this injunction about privacy:
'Journalists have no general right to report the private behaviour of public figures unless public interest issues arise.'
Denis deals with the issue of public interest extensively in his book. 'The public interest', he writes, 'is not the same as public curiosity, nor is it assessed by whether a story increases newspaper circulation or generates high levels of online clicks'.
Well duh! Everyone knows that, Denis, surely.
Well, no. In March 2009, Sydney's Sunday Telegraph and four other News Ltd Sunday tabloids chose to publish pictures on their front pages of a semi-naked young woman who they claimed was an 18-year-old Pauline Hanson. That same day, before it became clear that the pictures were fakes, Media Watch asked the Sunday Telegraph what public interest was served by their publication.
We got a swift response to our question from Helen McCabe, the Sunday Telegraph's deputy editor:
'That's for our readers to tell. That will be determined by the number of people that buy the paper.'
This was from the deputy editor of Australia's second best-selling Sunday newspaper, and now the editor of Australia's top-selling magazine, the Australian Women's Weekly.
It makes you realise that for many practising journalists, the ethics of their own profession is -- to coin that famous Churchillian phrase -- a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. They really don't understand the notion at all. Which is why -- if they could be induced to read it -- Denis Muller's book would prove so useful to them.
Not that that's especially likely. You have far more experience than I, Denis, of the editorial process in a daily newspaper. But the idea that any editor or reporter â especially when facing the deadlines imposed by the digital age â would apply your amended Potter's Box in an attempt to resolve a pressing ethical issue strikes me, I have to say, as a bit fanciful.
As Denis recalls himself from his days at the Herald and the Age, daily journalism is a hard-bitten, rough-and-tumble business. You don't get the feeling that Fleet Street news editors have ever encouraged moral scruples when there was a story to be got and the competition was tough. I have never believed that the executive producers of our own most competitive journalistic endeavours â not the tabloid newspapers, but the tabloid television programs This Day Tonight and A Current Affair, which went head to head across the nation every evening for decades -- ever troubled themselves deeply about privacy, or accuracy, or the public interest. What dominated their thoughts, morning till night, was ratings.
Indeed, competition, and the lack of it, is the chief determinant, in my view, of the ethical standard of journalism in any particular market.
If Australia's tabloid newspapers are, on the whole, more responsible, less cavalier about truth and reputation, than their British equivalents, it is not because our defamation laws are tougher -- they are demonstrably not. It's not because our proprietors are more caring: most Australian newspapers belong to the same global behemoth as the News of the World and the Sun. It's because the London tabloids compete with each other each morning to sell newspapers across the length and breadth of England and Wales -- most of those sales coming not from subscriptions but from direct purchases from newsagents. Australian tabloids, by contrast, have a monopoly, or near-monopoly, in their own city. They can afford to be a little more restrained.
Or that was the case, until very recently. But now every tabloid newspaper in the country is in a cut-throat competition for online readers, not just with the erstwhile quality broadsheets' websites, which are every bit as tabloid as they are, but with global providers of tits and tattle like the Mail Online.
Working at the latter organ is, by the sound of it, a searing experience, to use Denis Muller's phrase. The pressure to produce huge numbers of stories each day is intense. Usually they are thinly adapted from other news sources â including, to its continuing fury, from News Corp Australia websites. Some reporters have already left the Mail Online, complaining that there is never time to leave their desks to follow up leads or break genuinely new stories.
I would be very surprised indeed if new recruits to the Mail Online were offered training in the efficks of journalism.
But at least, these days, young reporters are likely to recognise an ethical dilemma when they meet one. Because so many study journalism at universities, where they are introduced to the notion that there are ethical rules, before they confront the brute reality of the newsroom.
It's as a teaching tool that Denis's book is likely to be used most. I don't agree with everything in it. But in a comparatively short space it does traverse pretty much all the important ethical questions that confront our profession. Not only that, but it teases out the philosophical and moral principles that will help us to decide how to resolve them.
And it's at its strongest, in my view, when it deals with the issues that confront journalists reporting on traumatic events like the Victorian bushfires. The first-hand research that Denis and Michael Gawenda conducted with bushfire survivors lends a real credibility to the parts of the book that deal with notions such as consent and privacy. They remind us that good journalism can be of real benefit to its subjects as well as to its consumers, just as bad or thoughtless journalism can be damaging far beyond the understanding, often, of its perpetrators.
I haven't talked to Denis Muller about his view of the Finkelstein report. I know that Meg Simons, the current director of the ACAJ, feels very much as I do -- that Finkelstein, with his proposed Media Council, with its potentially draconian powers, enforceable, ultimately, by the courts, wanted to go further than either of us would have gone in trying to force the media to behave ethically.
Even though Denis did a considerable amount of consulting work for the Finkelstein Inquiry -- after a recommendation by Meg, which, according to The Australian, constituted an 'interest' that should have been declared every time she commented on the report -- I suspect he shares our view.
That might surprise The Australian, which has rather odd views about media academics, and for that matter about media ethics.
But there's not much in this book about media law -- about what it compels journalists to do -- and nothing at all about whether the media should be subject to heavier regulation. What it is about is the need for journalists to take it on themselves to behave ethically, and how they can work out what that means in the infinitely varied scenarios that our jobs throw at us.
Which is terrific, so long as they work for employers who will give them the leeway to act ethically.
I'm one of those who has been extraordinarily fortunate: because I've worked for public broadcasters for most of the past 40 years, I've been able to make a good living doing journalism that was, in my own estimation at least, important, and responsible, and as true as I could make it. I have very seldom felt that I was acting unethically, and certainly have seldom felt any pressure from my bosses or employers to do so.
But my five years in the Media Watch chair taught me how lucky I was. For every sloppy, or deceptive, or bullying reporter we pinged, there would have been two or three who were simply behaving as their editors would have expected them to behave.
That's the tough truth, and I'm afraid; and as the struggle to make a buck grows fiercer, it will get tougher still.
Denis offers us the Potter Box, but he doesn't suggest how young reporters should deal with the dilemma they are all too likely to face: what my editor wants me to do is wrong. I know it is. It's unfair, or exploitative, or a beat-up, or a rip-off of someone else's work. But if I refuse to do it, my career will suffer, and it's tough enough these days to make a living as it is.
In the end, I believe, it is consumers, not regulators, who will force editors to think more carefully about how they are expecting their journos to behave. As Denis notes, the days of mainstream media immunity are over. Consumers can hit back, through massive social-media pressure on advertisers, for example, when an issue goes viral. It's a rough-and-ready sanction, but unlike the ponderous proceedings of the ACMA or the Press Council, it's astonishingly swift and can be brutally effective.
But that's a thought for another time. Kelvin MacKenzie may think that journalism efficks is all about donning white socks and boarding the train at Colchester. Denis Muller reckons it's about each of us applying the categorical imperative to our messy and exhilarating profession, and doing, as best we can figure it out, the right thing.
It gives me great pleasure to launch Denis Muller's Journalism Ethics for the Digital Age. Don't go home without a copy.