The subject matter of this paper is media misconduct - fundamentally concerned with journalists and quasi journalists misleading and deceiving their audience and readers. Us. The Consumers.
I'm a lawyer, so let me start with a law that prohibits such misconduct, and punishes it where it occurs: the Trade Practices Act, section 52:

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has provided me with the following summary of some of the successful prosecutions conducted over the past year under Section 52:

What you will notice is that none of those successful prosecutions had as its defendant an Australian mass media corporation. I'll tell you the reason for that shortly.

But first: the 1997 Media Watch rundown of the guilty among our mass media - guilty of misleading or deceptive conduct in the information trade.

These are just some of the serious transgressions we have picked up and used in our programme so far this year - in just ten months:

Next: They'll never know the difference ... for which you need to understand that the television networks all maintain overseas offices, not to cover overseas stories, but to have a programme-buyer on the spot and - even more importantly - a plausible justification for senior executives' junkets. But those offices are made colourably necessary by posting a journalist there, whose job is to repackage what has already been pulled off the wok (that’s insider-talk for satellite transmitted material) unless, of course, it's a really big story ... in which case, the satellite footage goes straight to air in its original package. It's in the repackaging that the problems arise (but only if someone knows the difference).

But the princes, the nonpareils, the very quintessences of this kind of sleight of hand - the professionals who put those dissemblers in the shade - work (yes, they still do) for the Seven Network's 'Today Tonight'.

The perennial Chase-for-Skase is but one epitome of the wholly unAustralian (or so we would like to believe) but time-honoured journalistic tradition of kicking a man when he's down, but make sure you've got steel tips on your boots…

PHOTOGRAPHER FELLED IN SCUFFLES AT THE RATHOLE

It becomes a matter of record: when Colston junior declared he would stand against Cheryl Kermot last weekend, even ABC TV News replayed pictures of his confrontation - out of context, unfair, but definitive.

And another who didn't quite get away with it is the long lunch analyst for the Sunday Age and the Financial Review, Stephen Downes.

What he didn't get away with was a conflict of interests (one that needs to be explained to more than one Melbourne journalist, truth to tell: there are a number to whom it has been my melancholy duty to point out that being a paid publicist for people flogging certain brands of cheese and wine while at the same time holding themselves out as impartial experts on those subjects in the editorial columns of the Herald Sun, and endorsing with enthusiasm the selfsame brands of cheese and wine, is not on).

And it's no answer to say that Downes, paid publicist for Crown Casino restaurants and, later, allegedly dispassionate reviewer of those same restaurants, was "only writing about food, for God's sake". Certainly it's a trivial occupation (the title 'food critic' always suggests to me a man shouting at a sausage), but then - so is most journalism as it is presently practised.

Next, some instances of what I might term sleight of hand.

There has long been a Murdoch culture, born of necessity. In a one-newspaper town (and most capital cities in Australia are just that), it's a brave journalist who won't go along with the Murdoch-first, ethics a poor second, philosophy.

A further instance from the Advertiser:

The culture's not materially different in the Packer colossus. The English-speaking world's finest television interviewer, Ray Martin, is pitchforked into the studio with James Packer, probing him deeply with such questions as "Would you like to propose to Kate Fisher now - live on television?" (I gather that one wasn't in the script and young Packer was a tad unhappy about it), but more importantly reading out the Dorothy Dixers so that Packer Mark 3 can assure anyone who's listening (the whole of Australia, in other words) that his father's corporation has every right to take over Fairfax, and would never interfere in the editorial judgment of the journalists.

If it's a crime for life to imitate art, they ought to lock up Packer's 'A Current Affair' and Barcelona Tonight on Seven, and throw away the key.

Not that the ABC escapes our gentle correction. As we have had cause to note:

Elsewhere, the Age labelled a boy on a motorbike as the person who lit the Dandenong bushfires and - when that turned into a fireball likely to consume most of their defamation verdict allocation - how did they handle it?

Editors of some Fairfax newspapers, unwilling to give offence to a man they were sure would become their boss - sooner or later - excised from news stories about companies with poor records in corporate governance any reference to Kerry Packer's PBL.

Rupert Murdoch flew into Sydney on one of his awe-inspiring visits and, suddenly, his tabloid - which had John Howard as a fatally gutless 90-pound weakling - saw the light, and Mr Wishy Washy became Mr Tough.

And a couple of notable exercises in intolerance:

In Canberra, when an anonymous government hatchetperson was assigned to neutralise the Stolen Generation story by smearing the character of Sir Ronald Wilson, what did the press gallery do?

Did they expose the dirty-tricks practitioner? Did they tell him (or her) they wouldn't have a bar of such cowardly and unethical scandalising?

Did they what! They ran it.

And then there's Pauline Hanson - the woman they don't want to ignore. She's good copy. When I dared to suggest at the Adelaide Press Club that journalists ought to hold their hands, and deny Ms Hanson the front page for her non-news non-events, the response of one member of the audience was that journalists had a duty to report the rantings of bigots.

Now that's a fair old litany of misconduct by people who represent themselves as guardians of the truth; people whose professional code has this preamble:

People whose ethics forbid the suppression of relevant facts from their stories, prohibit them from being influence in their professional duties by commercial considerations including their employer's commercial considerations, insist that they shall use only fair and honest means to obtain their stories and pictures, and require that they do their utmost to correct anything they've published or broadcast that is found to be harmfully inaccurate.

And my overview has had to leave out journalistic hypocrisy (exemplified by the tabloid populist attacks on politicians' overseas junkets, but not on the emptying-out of every Australian newsroom to join in the celebrations in Hong Kong - a set piece that wasn't so much a story as a Royal Visit outside broadcast in reverse);

as it has omitted proprietorial hypocrisy whenever the Press Council (and it isn't often) produces an adjudication with some potential for embarrassment;

and the shameful performance of the entire Australian mass media in its treatment of the Pauline Hanson story. But there isn't time to go into that.

What I have just reviewed were merely some of the ethical breaches that are the stock-in-trade of Australian journalists ... not just a handful of the disreputable ones, but the highest-profile, award-winning leaders of the game.

The important point I wish to make is that those are all quotidian examples of Australian media purporting to do its job. Each one is, to a greater or lesser degree, a disgrace. Each one represents a betrayal of the trust that the community reposes in its journalists, because it has no choice. We don't trust them because they deserve our trust - we trust them because we have no other means of obtaining the information they claim to provide, honestly and professionally.

Journalists form a particular group of unquestionable significance in the community - a group entrusted with the exercise of considerable power. What they write and construct has profound influences on how the community votes, how it perceives itself, its level of tolerance and decency ... and in many other areas of perceptions that inform its daily life.

The community would not wish such power to be reposed in people whose honesty, ability and personal standards are questionable. It is thus necessary that there be standards of conduct for journalists, and that they be enforceable in a system that includes public participation and appropriately coercive powers.

There is far too much cheating and dishonesty in Australian journalism, too many subtle and not-so-subtle conflicts of interest, there is racism and there is deliberate exclusion of contrary points of view - yet nothing happens to those who are guilty of it. That's because the community, we consumers of the mass media, have no right to bring the media to account for the way it exercises its power and exerts its influence. When it cheats, there is nothing we can do about it ... and there is no law, no independent body with any responsibility to represent the public interest. We have no right to insist on being told the truth.

The examples of Trade Practices actions that I gave at the beginning offer no comfort; while advertisers (to whose blandishments we are all naturally resistant) can be and will be brought to account for misleading us, successive Federal governments have chosen to protect media owners from the operation of that law - as they have with the law of privacy. The media have, in relation to their non-advertising activities, been made exempt from a system of public-interest regulation that applies to all other corporations.

Is it not the worst kind of humbug that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission can (and does) prosecute mass media corporations for dishonesty in their promotional activities, but is prevented by law from prosecuting media dishonesty in their informational activities?

As a result of this government-granted protection for the media as information-providers, and directly affected by the ever tightening concentration of ownership of our print and electronic media, public confidence in media standards is probably at its lowest level in living memory. With the creation of new media, ownership concentration is certain to increase, meaning that it is not only the journalists' conduct we need to scrutinise - it is also that of their employers.

The latter is an area that has received no attention at all, and that's probably because the politicians were at dinner with the tycoons at the time. Actually, the politiciary were waiting on their tables. They know their place.

Yet the public-interest issues of new media, multimedia, cross-media ownership, monopolies, conflicts of interest and false and misleading conduct in trade all scream out for a cogent set of enforceable rules. That there are no such rules is, in itself, the clearest evidence of their necessity: it proves the power of the tycoons.

The Press Council (concerned only with print), a body with coercive powers and a stated unwillingness to assume any such powers, a body which cannot even secure the participation of the journalists in its deliberations, a body with a pitiful record of dealing with public complaints, a lapdog which has solemnly decreed that journalists certainly do not need facts (a belief will be good enough) to justify the destruction of reputations is a body with which I shall trouble no further.

Hard as you may find this to believe, one of the reasons given by the chairman of the Press Council to justify the present situation of the Australian mass media being unaccountable is that Media Watch exists.

Whatever we may do at Media Watch, we certainly do not accept the role of media policeman.

The Australian Broadcasting Authority, which has proved a statutory enactment of laissez-faire, is - I note - soon to be headed by none other than the present Chairman of the Press Council.

The journalists' own ethical tribunal is another entity of little credibility. It boasts the doubtful achievement of having one of its members plead guilty to criminal offences concerned with forgery of bail documents in order to secure an exclusive interview with a murderer.

At the same time he was forging the documents and lying to police about what he'd done, his employer was putting up $50,000 to secure the prisoner's bail. The journalist has been dealt with by the criminal court, but his employer will never be called to account.

So it can be seen that the formulation of an enforceable code for media proprietors is no less urgent than one for the practitioners.

There's something indecent about unaccountable journalists and unaccountable owners demanding more power against the community. They seek what they are pleased to call shield laws (to shield them from us, no less) and reform of the only protection the community has - the law of libel. To a degree, they are getting what they demand. State by state, the public is being dragged out of the system.

Juries have either been abolished, or denied any real role in the process. The public, the tycoons have shouted at receptive politicians (there's no need to shout, just whisper what you want), the public is too stupid to understand the complexity of free speech; it awards too much in damages. Governments, buckling to their own conflicts of interests, listen - and do their bidding. The attempts to agree on a uniform defamation code are dominated by proposals to remove any privacy protection from the law.

Yet even in Britain, the journalists and their proprietors are starting to face up to the inevitable. The editor of the Guardian (certainly a great newspaper in the nonconformist liberal tradition) has pointed out that 76% of people do not trust journalists to tell the truth, and consumers of the mass media simply do not accept that it acts in the public interest.

As he says, the difficulty is in balancing three competing rights: privacy, free speech, and the right to know. Only by considering all three rights together is anyone likely to get it right - in the form of a single law of privacy, which protects the concurrent freedoms. That will inevitably be the shape of media regulation in the future.

The shame of it is that only through the exercise of what the mass media claim to be their business - free speech - will we have change.

And that free speech will not take place in Australia's mass media. When did you ever see them devoting time and space to voices calling for their accountability?

 Stuart Littlemore QC

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