Guilty Of Offensive Accuracy

TUCKED AWAY in The Finko & Rickety Review is a list of recent adjudications by the Press Council as it currently exists. This is the body, remember, which the inquiry’s authors – a judge and a former Age reporter – wish to see greatly expanded, so it is interesting to note the attitudes any fresh body would almost certainly expand and promote. Its ruling in the matter of Case #1468 (page 409) rather suggests it currently views truth as a very subjective affair, the accuracy of any report needing to be judged not against fact but the ideologically sound views held by people like, well, left-leaning former judges and superannuated hacks from withering newspapers.

Case 1468 concerns complaints filed by third parties in regard to the West Australian’s front page picture of an Aboriginal man snapped in the filth of his own kitchen. This is how Finko & Rickety summarised the Press Council deliberations: 

Photo of Indigenous man in his kitchen with caption referring to his being ‘surrounded by squalor’, accompanying a story about a WA Government report on living conditions in Roebourne. The next day the newspaper published 16 letters accusing the man of not taking responsibility for keeping his kitchen clean and tidy. A smaller version of the photo was re-published with the letters.

At a risk of levity – quite likely an indictable offence if Finko & Rickety get their wish to see blogs regulated and supervised – it should be noted that the Billabong’s sink is at this very moment chocka with unwashed dishes, the floor splattered with the home-cooked marinara that went into last night’s eggplant parma, the cat’s litter tray needs changing and the dead, chewed-up lizards she insists on bringing home must be found and thrown out. Later today these deficiencies will be set to rights, as the visitor scheduled to stop by for dinner and a stroll to the mooring might otherwise be inclined to regard the Professor as a bit of a grub. Mind you, domestic standards are still a smidgin' higher than those of Cyril Munda, whose kitchen prompted the Press Council to action.

Ah, but Aborigines are different, according to the Press Council. If a blackfella suffers from Ajax aversion, it is to be mentioned at a news organ’s peril. Incredibly, even though the kitchen’s owner professed himself entirely happy with the West Australian’s coverage, the Press Council upheld the complaint! The full ruling is here, and it is the last two-and-a-bit paragraphs which telegraph what Finko & Rickety regard as the sacred mission of the muscled-up press regulator they seek to see established:

…the man and other Aboriginal people in his community and elsewhere were very happy with the article and the attention it had drawn to their problems.

The Council regards the article as a frank and balanced report of concerns about conditions in Roebourne. Unfortunately the picture and its caption allowed the apparent thrust of the article to be distorted by focusing on conditions in one man’s kitchen, thereby conveying a misleading impression of the article and the man’s concerns. This effect was exacerbated by publication on the following day of an excessively large number of letters focusing on the state of his kitchen and making criticisms of him in very similar terms.

The Council considers that the newspaper erred in allowing these cumulative effects to occur. To that extent the complaint is upheld. On the other hand, the newspaper is to be commended for its decision to publish the article itself, which was a valuable contribution on a matter of great public importance.

In other words, an accurate report endorsed by its subject will not protect news organisations from being found guilty if someone – anyone! – thinks it may encourage a point of view they would prefer not to see aired. Andrew Bolt has already been found guilty of giving subjective offence to the Mordy-Litijus tribe. Now the rest of the media, including those voices which celebrated the columnist’s lynching, are being prepared for the same treatment.

Trash a few inconvenient freedoms and pretty soon you don't have any left at all.

Disney's Brave New Tomorrowland

He would say that, wouldn’t he, Julian Disney of the Press Council, who is really, seriously demanding the power to punish writers and publishers because free speech is, you know, not the same thing as appropriate speech, and he and his fine-wielding mates are the arbiters best qualified to say which is which.

What else could such a man think after a working lifetime atop the caring-industrial complex? Decades of drafting protocols and frameworks, of building budgets and then identifying the threats to underwrite them – that has been his stock in trade throughout a rich and rewarding career. It is all there in the law professor’s biography: President of the Australian Council of Social Service Organisations, a turn as chief executive hand-wringer at its international counterpart, conspicuous friend to social workers and “stakeholder” advocates whose careers and mortgages hang on an assured supply of the downtrodden and oppressed, the vilified and generally wretched. As one potted CV puts it, the very busy Disney has been “a Law Reform Commissioner and chair or member of government advisory committees on economic planning, superannuation, education, employment and training, public administration, superannuation, housing and other matters.” It seems what people say, write and publish is to be the next of this apparatchik’s  “other matters”. 

You could laugh at Disney – you should laugh at Disney and all the other empire-building poverty pimps  – except his latest gambit to grab a bit more funding and influence is about as serious a threat as you might come across. Sure, it seems harmless enough now, even laughable, and who would object to press reports being bias-free and accurate? But Disney, he is the last person you would entrust with your right to express an unpopular or abrasive thought.

First, by any yardstick his record of success is deplorable. Ever notice how the number of “social justice” programmes and organisations continue to swell? Notice, too, how the ranks of the miserable always expand in lockstep. The greater the number of social workers and policy drones, the more they find syndromes and emerging ills to keep them occupied – and the harder Disney and his ilk campaign to secure and build their budgets.

But it is hypocrisy which is perhaps the most striking of Disney’s traits. Go back 40-odd years and he was a young student sharing a house in England with Geoffrey Roberston, whom he continues to rate as one of his best and closest friends. Roberston was making a name for himself as a gun hand in the legal team defending Richard Neville and the infamous Oz magazine against charges of publishing obscenity. It was a crusade that met with Disney’s approval, as he explained only recently to The Monthly:

Robertson offered up his services at a time in his life when he says he “knew all about the law and nothing about justice” and spent the trial “in the well of the court … as stagehand for the defence”.

Disney says this is a “huge understatement” of his role and that Robertson was the strategic brain and driving force behind the whole enterprise: “His performance, especially given his lack of experience, was a real tour de force.”

So, once upon a distant time, Disney backed the right to publish material that violated the then-Establishment’s standards. Now that he has become part of the New Establishment, well it is a different kettle of fish.