Toe The Line!

LEADING journalism academic and trainee court reporter Margaret Simons is auctioning her sandals for charity, a noble gesture and potential boon to poor unfortunates in two different varieties of sheltered workshop. The first, your more conventional kind of lunatic, may soon benefit from additions to their institution’s supplies of basket-weaving materials. And the second, well that would be any Fairfax reporter or editor sufficiently astute to recognise the career-boosting benefits such footwear might bestow.

They could, for example, be worn proudly in either the Silly or Phage newsroom, where open toes would be taken as firm evidence of the new owner’s belief in rising global temperatures. With Fairfax reporters attempting daily to outdo each other in demonstrating their faith in the catastropharian creed, those pre-worn Birkenstocks would leave all but Melissa Fyfe’s jogging shoes in their dust.

Or – and this might be the better career strategy -- they might be used for paddling office heretics. If some undiplomatic soul strays from the groupthink that characterizes all the Fairfax papers, whack!, six of the best, followed by an open invitation for ideologically sound colleagues to examine the welts.  Administer that sort of punishment and the office disciplinarian will be put on the first plane and sent off to cover any number of international events.

And no need, either, to fret over consequences. In the unlikely event of the police being summoned, the office windows at both the Phage and Silly are sealed shut.

Steering The New Journalism

AS the Centre for Advanced Journalism’s new director, Margaret Simons will be required to report at least once every two months to the steering committee, whose job it is to examine “activities and resources”. They could be very interesting meetings, given the presence of the Parkville Asylum’s Professor Barbara Creed, whose interests are at some remove from what the man on the Clayton omnibus might regard as the normal concerns of work-a-day journalism education – straight-bat accountings of the day’s events, commentary and opinion clearly labeled as such and, if time permits, perhaps a few pointers on the reporting of what transpires in courtrooms.

Professor Creed may well take a passionate interest in those practical topics, and let us hope that is the case, as the temptation for the steering committee to veer into po-mo cultural criticism from a feminist perspective, her stock in trade, might produce quite a few distractions.

Picture the possible scene. There is Margaret Simons, earnestly making the case for instructing students in the art of placing fraudulent stories in conservative magazines, when some chance remark prompts Professor Creed to digress. It might be no more than an innocuous reference to the wolfish Rupert Murdoch’s ravaging of the Australian sheeple, and how the low standing of the Gillard government is all that jackbooted propagandist’s doing.

“Wolf? Wolf?”one can almost hear Professor Creed cry. “Why, that settles it! Before we send our graduates into the world they simply must be immersed in Phallic Panic, my study of horror films and the transgressive erosion of patriarchal penis reverence.”

A work of fearless insight, Professor Creed won the praise of cineaste Anneke Smelik, a reviewer particularly taken with the book’s revelations about Freddy Kruger. The uneducated may see that the villain of Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels as no more than an example of Hollywood schlock, perhaps absorbing the series’ one and only message as a reminder that it is unwise for the nubile to shower, as the hacking generally begins not long after the hot water has begun to flow. Professor Creed goes much, much deeper: 

Creed “claims that [Kruger] ‘reveals the dysfunctional nature of the patriarchal family unit’. Freddy is a male spectre, but his most uncanny characteristic is that he keeps the souls of his victims trapped inside his body; he is, as it were, pregnant with his victims. This makes him also a womb monster and not only the image of the bad, castrating father. 

If Margaret Simons has a jot of sense, and her progress through academia suggests that to be the case, she will secure the steering committee’s support by announcing her admiration for another of Creed’s breakthrough analyses -- “Freud’s Wolf Man, or the Tale of Granny’s Furry Phallus”, which explains cinema’s many werewolves as metaphors for the animalistic savagery that surges just below the skin of your typical man.

You can get a preview of the book here, including the chapters on Dracula as “menstrual monster” and Professor Creed’s thoughts on bestiality in Fear of Fur.

None of this will be of much interest to members of the public who have given up on mainstream journalism in general and newspapers in particular. But for soon-to-be graduates whose hope it is to secure positions at Fairfax or the ABC, it might be a good idea to swot up on the topics and perspectives that so fascinate their teachers

UPDATE: If discussions about the education of journalists do get waylaid by too much talk of monstrous male pregnancies, Margaret Simons can look to the second of the steering committee's three members, Associate Professor Adrian Little, to get the chatter back to basics In addition to heading the University's school of Social & Political Science, he is, without a doubt, the go-to man for clear, uncluttered writing -- one of those skills some journalists must still find quite useful.

Here is the abstract of a paper, co-written by Little and Michael Crozier, "Disagreeable democracy: Deliberation, conflict and communication in contemporary democratic practice".

In recent decades Western democracies have been tested by diverse and competing societal demands, generating a range of legitimacy issues, often described as the democratic deficit. Prominent among the scholarly diagnoses of this situation is the idea of deliberative democracy—an appeal to rational procedures of deliberation based on the normative horizons of inclusiveness and consensus. This paper considers the general assumptions of the deliberative democracy model and asks whether certain grammars of political expression are foreclosed by these assumptions. For instance, does the emphasis on rational deliberation too easily discount the role of expressive and embodied modes of communication in current democratic practice? Does the norm of rational consensus miscast ‘conflict’ as simply communicative failure without considering the constitutive role it may play? The paper investigates these types of questions, critically unpacking the theoretical manoeuvres involved and their implications for political analysis. The argument of the paper is that in order to provide a more adequate account of the political for contemporary conditions, both on analytical and normative levels, there needs to be greater attention paid to the ongoing role of conflict transformation, expressive modes and disagreement in modern democratic polities.

 If you enjoyed that, the 5,000-or-so words that follow are even more enlightening.

All Thumbs

CRIKEY! contributor Margaret Simons, once a gleeful party to the planting of a fraudulent essay in Quadrant, is moving up in the world, switching from Swinburne to the Parkville Asylum, where she will fill Michael Gawenda’s shoes as director of the Centre for Advanced Journalism. This is a plum post, what some might regard as the apogee of a righteous career. “At this crucial time for journalism,” notes her predecessor, “I am confident Margaret will ensure that the Centre plays a vital role in journalism education and in improving and supporting the practice of good journalism.”

Journalism education? Like being able to give the kiddies some pointers on mobile phones in court, for example, the ban on whose use every lawyer, attendant and visiting school teacher knows about? It is, however, a topic the tweet-prone exemplar of modern reporting appears not to have grasped, as the Australian reports today, and certainly not to the satisfaction of Magistrate Peter Mealy, who has banned the press paragon from covering in bursts of 140 characters or less the committal of a police officer accused of leaking details of a pending anti-terror raid.

Poor Margaret is a bit miffed about this, variously offering to engage in dialogue with Mealy, posting a broken link to court guidelines and getting all huffy about The Australian’s report of her tweeting travails:

I dispute penultimate two paras. My coverage fair and accurate summary, which is all journalistic court reports in any medium are

As an ever-rising academic, not to mention someone wreathed in the aura of decency, accuracy and probity that an association with Crikey! imparts, Margaret surely would not mind if the news-consuming public took a quick look at those penultimate paragraphs. Here they are: 

“Her coverage of the testimony given by Australian Federal Police Commissioner Tony Negus also challenged traditional standards of fair and accurate court reporting.

Due to the space restriction on tweets, Simons in some instances published questions put by counsel separately to Mr Negus's responses, included few direct quotes and made no distinction between evidence given from the stand and testimony taken from previous statements.”

Here is one of the tweets from the Center for Advanced Journalism new director. It would seem to confirm the first of The Australian’s assertions:

Q. Was Neath significant op? A. Yes. Q. What aspects raised level of seriousness of leak?

Her next tweet quotes Negus indirectly, but she gives not the slightest indication he is responding to the question left hanging at the end of the tweet she “disputes” having sent, at least as The Australian summarised it. After that, many questions are tweeted with what may, or may not, be responses relayed separately.

Then there is the second of The Australian’s assertions, that Margaret’s flying thumbs produced “few direct quotes and made no distinction between evidence given from the stand and testimony taken from previous statements”. Simons “disputes” this as well, despite this message from her mobile:

Key doc. is account of talk between Oz editor Whittaker and Negus. Described in court as considerably embarrassing to Whittaker

Followed by … nothing after that to indicate what was said on the witness stand and what was quoted from the document, whose eventual release Margaret celebrates with a jubilant “we won”.

When Margaret takes up her new post and the pro forma lessons in the wretchedness of Rupert Murdoch are done, there might be a little time for a quick lesson on court reporting. To that end, the Supreme Court’s  guide, Media Policies and Practices, might prove most informative --  especially the section below (underline added at the Billabong): 

Use of electronic equipment in Court:
Journalists may use personal laptop computers, digital assistants, and mobile phones capable of transmitting emails, for electronic note-taking, messaging by text, and filing stories, so long as that use does not interfere with the proceeding.

Journalists should not use such equipment for recording or for the contemporaneous publication of material on the internet (blogging, twittering and similar), without the express permission of the presiding Judge.

Journalists should desist from use of such equipment, if requested to do so by the Judge

As Gawenda sees it, his successor’s appointment is a step toward “improving and supporting the practice of good journalism”. In the light of the new director’s eagerness to dispute the indisputable, one can guess she will be introducing some fresh electives.

Amongst them, perhaps, Denying You Screwed Up 101.

UPDATE: Unconstrained by any limit on the number of characters she can publish, the Pending Parkville Poobah has taken to Crikey!, where she expands on the topic of her courtroom tweeting. Trouble is, she doesn't expand on her charge that The Australian is being unfair in describing her torrent of thumb-typing  as challenging "traditional standards of fair and accurate court reporting."

In the interest of full disclosure -- a prime concern, one would think, for a journalism educator -- she might have taken those two "penultimate paragraphs", reproduced them, and defended herself against the specific criticisms that questions were tweeted without answers and that the nature of evidence was no specified as either documenatary or verbal.


But there was none of that, not at all. Instead, just a blind link to The Australian story and a blanket assurance that her reporting was "fair and accurate."

So perhaps there is yet another elective on the horizon: The public has a right to know, sort of

A Little Lesson In Journalism

IN MELBOURNE this weekend, Australia’s “media leaders” are all atwitter, mostly about each others’ brilliance -- the staple theme at every Melbourne Writers Festival, of which this year’s NewNews program is a ballyhooed multi-part sideshow. There are certainly some prize exhibits on display. Crikey’s Margaret Simons, for instance, who has been going at it all a’frenzy with her thumb, tweeting a golly-gee, lucky-me delight at being seated in “brain fizzing” proximity to her very special friend, Jay Rosen of New York University’s prestigious journalism school. Simons is a journalism professor herself, albeit at Swinburne Tech University Academy College of Knowledge, which does not command much attention on the world stage but is certainly a power along Glenferrie Road  (at least from Methodist Ladies College to the Kooyong Courts, where George & Con’s barbershop asserts its place as the local leading seat of media analysis).

Some years ago, after abetting with her silence a rather limp hoax against Quadrant magazine and editor Keith Windschuttle, Simons wrote several windy pieces about what it all meant and the questions it posed and how it was time for another of those “conversations” about the outrageous prejudices that confine the conservative mind. This resonated with the Age, which sought comment from Robert Manne, his cheeks awash with tears of joy, and Crikey’s then-editor Jonathan Green, who avowed that, while he knew of the hoax beforehand, he felt under no “ethical, journalistic or moral responsibility to save Keith from himself.”

Earlier this year a rather more elaborate hoax – an extraordinarily transparent one, it must be noted – gulled Simon’s friend and former boss, who is now at The Drum, as well as other bright lights in the firmament of Australian leftism. Crikey, which linked to and promoted the late Alene Composta’s inane expose of moose organs and right-wing misogyny, subsequently deep-sixed that endorsement without explanation or apology. Unlike the Quadrant episode, Simons wrote not a word about the jape and what the eagerness to wallow in such drivel says about the progressive mind. Nor did she note Crikey’s deep-sixing of the link or her site’s disinclination to make even passing mention of its short-lived admiration for Composta’s insights.

Simons is a journalism academic. She is spending this weekend with more of the same. They are discussing, amongst other things, how to restore public faith in journalism.

Just to repeat, Simons is a journalism academic.

A NOTE: For some reason, and it is a genuine mystery, the links to Simon's tweets are no longer working. It is inconceivable a journalism professor would delete her record of a public event, especially as they were part of a media critique being referenced by other scholars and observers.


Nevertheless, they have vanished -- a terrible pity in the case of the tweet that announced Margaret's brain had been "frazzled" by Rosen's searing insights.


Must be a technical problem. Must be.