Vale Frank Devine, a conservative with wit

When Grumpy Old Journo was a schoolboy in Perth, his newspaper reading was brightened by the work of a young journalist with a flair for colour stories from the busy Perth Police Court.

Frank Devine (pictured), whose death at 77 after a long illness was reported on The Australian's website today, wasn't the first journalist to trawl the magistrates' courts for Runyonesque yarns, but he may have been one of the best.

Some 55 years later, I can remember his stories were marked by their humanity – by the reporter's empathy with the losers and the spivs and the sad alcoholics in that daily parade before the beak.

Frank Devine went on to a stellar career as a foreign correspondent, a senior editor of Reader's Digest in Australia and the US, of US newspapers, and on returning to Australia, as editor of The Australian.

He was a staunch Catholic and clung to hard-line conservative views. He was a stalwart of Quadrant magazine.

Yet Frank Devine was one the few conservative columnists I could read without becoming angry (well, most of the time, anyway). I could seldom agree with him, but his weekly contribution to The Australian's Wry Side comment space was marked by intellectual verve and a devastating wit.

He mocked the pretentious, the groupthink lefties and the woolly minded greenies with all the intellectual force he could muster.

Unfortunately, I cannot recall his turning that force against his groupthink Quadrant colleagues, or those conservatives who made up their minds fifty years ago and they're not going to change now.

Still, Frank Devine was a great journalist. His contribution to Australian intellectual life will be missed.

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Grumpy Old Journo had planned a post rejoicing at Annabel Crabb's replacing Miranda Devine as a columnist in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday. Miranda is one of Frank Devine's three daughters, so I guess we can understand why she took leave, leaving Annabel to stand in.

I would have remarked that Annabel Crabb's piece, about the proliferation of saucy innuendo in food and beer advertising, was a delightful contrast with Miranda Devine's somewhat prudish, conservative views.

Annabel crammed just about every double entendre possible into her piece. The only one she seems to have missed is the Bondi Blonde beer slogan.

But we'd better not go down that path.

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At last, The Australian shows how education should be reported

Have my prayers been answered? The front page of today's Australian runs a long, detailed report by education writer Justine Ferrari about the national introduction of a grammar curriculum.

It's balanced, fair and comprehensive. It explains the different types of grammar.

Did you know that in addition to Traditional, there are other grammars: Transformational or Generative; and Systemic Functional. Like most people, I'm all for traditional grammar, but the others have their place in academic theory and understanding the way we use English.

If you go back a couple of posts to April 30 ("Time to say adieu to The Australian"), you will see criticism of the Oz's reporting of education issues. Some might call it bias, but as I said:

. . . when the Oz reports only one side of an argument, it's not because the editors are biased. The editors know children should learn to read by phonics alone – they know every other approach is
discredited. Me? I'd like to make up my own mind by evaluating the differing arguments. I'd like the news reports to lay out those arguments, even briefly.

Ms Ferrari's report today suggests my comment is out of date.

Note added Saturday, May 9:



Several letters in The Weekend Australian support the introduction of tradional grammar, but correct some points. Read them here.

This summary from yesterday's Australian wasn't published online, but is invaluable in explaining the various grammars. I hope the Oz will forgive my scanning it to assist understanding.

WHICH IS BEST? -- The different types of grammar
TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR: Classifies words based on the eight parts of speech: verb, noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection. This grammar also describes the function of words in a sentence, with the typical construction of subject verb object, as in: "The boy hit the ball".
TRANSFORMATIONAL OR GENERATIVE GRAMMAR: An analytical grammar used to look at the possibilities of a language within the constraints of its deep structure. No matter how complex the sentence, it can be reduced to subject verb object -"the boy hit the ball". It's not possible to say: "hit the ball the boy".
SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR: An analytical grammar that examines language on three levels: what is being represented (ideational); who is being affected by what is being said (interpersonal); and what is the intent of the sentence (textual)
An example of systemic functional grammar analysis:"Who's seen my screwdriver?"
Textual meaning: Who (theme or what it's about) 's seen my screwdriver (theme or the outcome)
Interpersonal meaning: Who (subject)'s (finite) seen (predicator) my screwdriver(complement)
Ideational meaning: Who (sensers)'s seen (mental process) my screwdriver(phenomenon).

Time to say adieu to The Australian

Perhaps it's a pity The Australian chose last Monday to run a column by Giles Auty, its former art critic. It was the last day of my cut-price subscription to the Oz, and I was still tossing up whether to renew for another six months.

I never really enjoyed Auty's art criticism – it sometimes seemed a touch supercilious – but I hadn't realised he also claimed economic expertise.

Well, actually, he doesn't. In the column titled, “Neo-liberal greed did not cause recession” [1] he jeered at Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and praised former conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

From there, he merely downloaded the groupthink conservative line that blames the recession on the US Democrats for having forced banks to lend to home-buyers who would not repay the loans [read, feckless blacks].

Nothing new in that claim – the Oz's hard-right columnist Janet Albrechtsen plucked the same claim from the internet and ran it in her column last October 8 [2] (and she was a bit slow – other right-wing commentators had run it a few weeks earlier).

Still, The Australian's editors decided to run all this stale old stuff again last Monday. Why – because they wanted to ram home, once again, the conservative point of view?

---oooOOOooo---

On March 4, in a piece titled, “Hold the presses . . . Janet Albrechtsen comes to my rescue” [3] , I noted the Oz's bias.

. . . I only wanted to suggest that the Oz – which is, I believe, already Australia's best newspaper – would be a better newspaper if it reported differing points of view in its news stories.

The Oz editors do not see themselves as biased. The first sentence of [their earlier anti-blogger editorial], “The measure of good journalism is objectivity and a fearless regard for truth”, would, I believe, describe the way those editors see their performance.

So when the Oz reports only one side of an argument, it's not because the editors are biased. The editors know children should learn to read by phonics alone – they know every other approach is discredited. Me? I'd like to make up my own mind by evaluating the differing arguments. I'd like the news reports to lay out those arguments, even briefly.

Similarly, the Oz's editors know Keynesian-style counter-cyclical government investment is wrong. They know fiscal stimulus will not help ease a recession. They know the Federal Government's stimulus package will not save jobs, so why waste money?

They know man-made climate change is bullshit . . .

Why read The Australian, then? Because its reporting remains strong. You won't find “churnalism” – the soft, unquestioning repetition of material, often supplied by self-interested sources, misrepresented as news. The Oz deserved the praise it won for its coverage of the Haneef affair, for example, and of the Northern Territory Intervention.

And as a conservative newspaper, it's entitled to present conservative points of view in its opinion pages. As a moderate but left-of-centre writer, I do check out conservative ideas – but not when they become tiresomely repetitious, or merely regurgitate groupthink. Such as Giles Auty's piece.

---oooOOOooo---

As it happened, I'd already signed up to Fairfax's subscription offer – a dollar a day for the Sydney Morning Herald six days a week and the Sun-Herald on Sundays. That's $28 debited against my credit card every 28 days.

The first SMH lobbed on my front lawn on Tuesday, the day after the Oz subscription ended. But right to the end, I still considered also continuing the Oz subscription. It's great value at $128.70 for the Oz and the Weekend Oz, home delivered six days a week for 26 weeks, although you do have to pay the $128.70 in one hit.

This week there's been a more harmonious mood at the breakfast table – Merry does prefer the SMH.

---oooOOOooo---

Giles Auty's column, along with the newspaper's general conservative bias, weren't the only reasons I turned against The Australian.

On March 30, in a post titled “New face delivers the Strewth!” [4], I noted the Oz's weekly Media section had failed to mention the brutal retrenchment of long-time Oz columnist D.D. McNicoll.

In my previous post [I wrote], I said that if Media did not publish something about McNicoll's sacking, it would damage the reputation of the newspaper and of the section.

I have no doubt that if McNicoll had worked for the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, and his employer “disappeared” him as The Australian did, the Oz would have reported it with relish.

With relish? Yes indeed. The Australian keeps up a regular sneering and jeering at its rivals, to a level which seems just plain childish. It does more to diminish its own standing than it does damage to the SMH and The Age.

Think about it. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Media's staff complied with an explicit, or an implied but clearly understood, direction from management or a senior editor not to publish anything about McNicoll.

News Limited, publisher of The Australian, also controls most of the nation's capital city newspapers, as well as many suburban and provincial titles. Does the McNicoll censorship mean News Limited management also censors Media's coverage of what's happening in more than half of Australia's press?

So I've let my Oz subscription lapse. But I must confess – I won't stop reading the Oz. The Australian has a well-laid-out online edition, while the SMH's website is a bit messy, and often it's dumbed down. So we're better off getting the printed SMH thrown into the flowerbed each morning.

---oooOOOooo---

This has become a long post, longer than I like. I'd assembled much more material, but it might be better to skip across the other points.

Giles Auty's column went on to praise an article, “George Bush and History's Croakers” [5] , by Claudio Veliz [6] in the April Quadrant. The article peddles an anti-Democrat line which has become biblical truth to US conservatives. However, it's disputed by moderate commentators and has been the subject of serious debate in the US press and among bloggers. Here's an Australian reply from Crikey.com [7] . And in the US, a commentator spreads the blame to Wall St [8] .

Auty said Veliz's article “should be made available to every household in Australia so that a gross distortion of history is prevented from forming.”

Giles, old chap, stick to art criticism. As a journalist, I can assure you it's not worth wasting trees to reprint Veliz's Quadrant article for distribution to the hoi polloi. Fewer than one in a thousand would read past the first few pars, where they'd still be bogged down in analysis of British attitudes to the future Lord Wellington in the Peninsular War, wondering where it's all leading to.

(Veliz is trying to say that all great leaders, such as George W. Bush, are howled down by “croakers” – the word Wellington used to describe "the despondent, defeatist grumbling, moaning, rumour-mongering enmity of too many of the island's intelligentsia.” Veliz likens Dubya to the Iron Duke!)

Still, if you really want to read his piece, click on link [5] above.
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News loses its heart, says journalists' union

Apropos of my recent posts about The Australian's summary retrenchment of its veteran columnist D.D. McNicoll, my union has led today's media e-bulletin to members with this item:

News loses its heart - The Alliance held national meetings with News Limited staff this week after the company made several long-serving journalists redundant. Staff called on the company to consult over any future redundancies, to first offer voluntary redundancies and to address the discriminatory nature of the redundancy formula for staff over 63 or working part-time. Staff also called for an end to individual contracts and for the company to consider flexible work options instead of redundancies. The Alliance will be taking these issues to management at first opportunity.

But times are tough, and newspapers have to cut costs. Here's what's happening on The West Australian, where I began my cadetship in 1957. It's the second item in the e-bulletin.

9-day fortnight at WAN - Staff at West Australian Newspapers are being asked to adopt a nine-day fortnight “to avoid more draconian methods of reducing labour costs”. Several other media organisations have adopted similar measures. If you feel you are being coerced into a pay cut or taking unwanted leave, please contact the Alliance.

As I note under my blog profile, I remain an honorary member of the Australian Journalists Association, now merged into the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.

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Let's hope the Oz practises what it preaches

Wishful thinking, perhaps. But The Australian's second editorial today appears to signal a shift from a hard-right ideological stance to a more balanced, middle-of-the-road assessment of economic policy, the causes of the global financial crisis, and the best measures to try for recovery.

When I saw the heading and subheading (above), my first thought was: “Good God! The Oz is dumping on its own commentators.”

Not quite. But if the Oz follows its own advice, it will start giving a more balanced, unbiased coverage of economic issues than we've seen in the past. The full editorial [1] is worth reading, but here are selected passages:

AMONG all the pontificating about the G20 meeting, Barack Obama called for calm coverage of the event. Everybody at the G20 understood the need to kick-start the world economy and better regulate financial systems, he said, adding "there's a great desire to inject some conflict and some drama into the occasion". He was referring to press and politicians, economists and instant experts, including Australians, who seize on statistics to create a sense of disaster about the global financial crisis every chance they get. And he's right.

It is far too early for anybody to understand whether tax cuts or cash payments are the best way to kick-start consumer spending or what amount of money governments around the world need to borrow, or print, to recapitalise banks and expand employment programs. There are cases for all these options, but in the absence of evidence it is puerile for commentators and politicians to denounce whatever governments do, just because they can. There is certainly more sound than sense in the Opposition's strident warnings that the Rudd Government is racking up a dangerously large deficit, when much of the money is being spent to stimulate the economy in the worst economic crisis in 80 years.

It's time for politicians seeking to score political points to calm down and for commentators to stop seizing on reports from international agencies as infallible evidence in support of their ideas about each economic indicator. This unprecedented crisis makes predictions pointless . . .

The electorate's economic literacy is one of Australia's strengths, ensuring people are not seduced by snake-oil solutions. But the fact the voters understand the crisis is the very reason why they neither need nor want instant analysis, every hour on the hour.

The Australian's new stance flows from the overnight G20 agreement. If the G20 achieve nothing else, they may have steered the Oz into more balanced coverage. The world's leaders meeting in London will have done something worthwhile.

---oooOOOooo---

You might call it bias. I call it intellectual rigidity. Economics editor Ross Gittins is far kinder. He calls it “priors”.


Gittins, in a piece in The Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age on March 16 [2] , “The GFC and secret economists' business – Your guide to the ideology behind the global financial crisis”, explained:

LET ME let you into a little secret that will help you make more sense of the never-ending debate over the global financial crisis, what caused it and what should be done about it.

As all the professional participants in these debates understand but rarely acknowledge, whatever theory or empirical evidence they quote, the position they take gets back to their "priors" — their previously formed beliefs and values.

A few weeks earlier, he had offered this "tutorial" [3] to incoming Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey, explaining the economic debate.

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A new face delivers the Strewth!

Perhaps I missed it, but I don't think so. I collected my Australian from the flower bed well before dawn this morning and pulled out the Media section. Scanned it quickly for any reference to the summary retrenchment of The Australian's veteran columnist, D.D. McNicoll. Nothing.

Turned back to the Strewth! column [1] . There's a new face in the logo (above). Instead of McNicoll, it's James Jeffrey, who normally writes the longer – to my mind, too long – Strewth! in The Weekend Australian. In this morning's column, there's still no mention of what happened to McNicoll.

In my previous post, I said that if Media did not publish something about McNicoll's sacking, it would damage the reputation of the newspaper and of the section.

I have no doubt that if McNicoll had worked for The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, and his employer “disappeared” him as The Australian did, the Oz would have reported it with relish.

With relish? Yes indeed. The Australian keeps up a regular sneering and jeering at its rivals, to a level which seems just plain childish. It does more to diminish its own standing than it does damage to the SMH and the Age.

Today's Media section did run a prominent inside page lead on the sacking of Lachlan Colquhoun as editor of The Adelaide Review [2] , a story which may have been of less interest to most of the Oz's national readership.

And Amanda Meade's Media Diary [3] did run a short piece about the exit of Age columnist Sharon Gray, but without answering the obvious question – did she go because she wanted to, or was she another victim of the cost-cutting now decimating Australian newsrooms?

Amanda Meade also ran an amusing par about the comic strip character Brenda Starr's being retrenched, because, as her cigar-chomping boss B. Babbitt Bottomline said, “I can't afford to pay you any more.”

But of the departure of The Australian's iconic D.D. McNicoll, not a word [forgive my misuse of “iconic”, but you'll all know what I mean].

Strewth! Has the Australian sacked its veteran columnist?

No hint in yesterday's [Friday, March 27]Australian – yet it appears that as this Strewth! column was being printed, editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell had sacked its author and told him to leave the building immediately without clearing out his desk.

The sacking ends a remarkable father-and-son involvement in column writing which began in 1946. More of that later.

First public hint of D.D. McNicoll's sacking appeared in the backpage Diary of yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald, in the paragraph below. Somebody at the Oz, probably outraged by the treatment of McNicoll, had wasted no time in calling the Fairfax rival.

This morning I did a Google search and found that Crikey.com's editor, veteran journalist Jonathan Green, had posted this at 4.46 pm yesterday.

D.D. McNicoll sacked at The Australian?
An anonymous tip just sent to Crikey:
From an informed source: D.D. McNicoll sacked yesterday from The Australian. Told to leave the building immediately not even given time to clear out his desk. Today is his 60th birthday. Redundancy at News Ltd capped at 1 year. McNicoll has been there 35 years. They did not even spell his name correctly on the form he was told to sign.
Nice people
Morale not good

I'm posting this before I look closely at this morning's newspapers. If I find more information when I do, I'll come back and revise the post.

I'll also look closely at the Media section in Monday's Australian – will it carry a full and honest account of McNicoll's sacking, and will the section's editor and columnists have had to resist management pressure if they do so? If Media does not publish such an account, it will damage the reputation of the newspaper and of the section.

Now back to the father-and-son connection. D.D's father, David McNicoll, wrote this in his autobiography, Luck's A Fortune (Wildcat Press, 1979):

THE TOWN TALK COLUMN in the Sydney Daily Telegraph was the first regular front page column to appear in an Australian paper. It's a sobering thought, but I probably made as much public impact, and caused more controversy with that column than with any of my other labors in journalism over the years.
The column was the brain child of Frank Packer and editor Brian
Penton. They had seen many columns of various sorts over the years — political, comment, humorous. But Packer wanted a column of news — part gossip, part political, part exposures, part insertion of the scimitar. My style of writing appealed to them as right for the new project.
On returning to New York from South America I found a cable from Packer telling me of the proposal, and suggesting I study a few American techniques.

And a little further into the autobiography:

Back in Sydney, Brian Penton put me through a few dummy runs inside the paper, and subbed specimen columns for a few weeks. He was a brilliant writer of the concise, short sentence, and he drilled it into me. He was also the father of the Active Voice in the Daily Telegraph. Anyone who ever worked on the Telegraph knew all about the active voice; the passive was never allowed . . .
On February 8, 1946, the first Town Talk column appeared. The previous day, a young, virtually unknown artist had been sent to do a caricature of me.
His name was Les Tanner. He is today, without dispute, peerless as a caricaturist, and in the top ranks as a cartoonist. His depiction of my features gave me all the attraction of a gigolo turned pawnbroker who has just received some devastating news. The worst part was that the drawing was apparently incredibly like me, and people recognised me with a shudder as they passed me in the street.

Tanner later drew this caricature of himself holding the McNicoll caricature:

Literature, literacy . . . The Weekend Australian knows it all

As the editorial writer suggested, I read it again, and yes, the passage (above, highlighted) did get muddier every time I did so.

But the sentence might have been a little less confusing if The Weekend Australian's editorial writer had quoted it correctly.

Flick back to education writer Justine Ferrari's Page One report (below), on which the editorial comment is based. If you look hard, you may spot the difference.

It might seem trivial, but one would expect an editorialist who pontificates to the nation about literacy would understand that omission of the hyphen changes the meaning of the sentence. “Meaning-making” does not say the same thing as “meaning making”.

And surely a professional journalist – and I presume the editorial writer to be one – knows he or she should not modify any part of a passage placed within quotation marks. The editorial writer has omitted two commas from the material he purports to quote. Trivial, perhaps, but careless too.

But then, the editorial writer may have taken his quote from copy sent to the artists (probably from a sub-editor) for the graphic reproduced below. The copy sent to the artists also omitted the hyphen and the commas.

I may look like just another blogger attacking The Australian. That would not be right. I believe the Oz to be Australia's best newspaper.

It's thrown over my front fence six days a week. Well, yes, on a discount deal. A call centre person rang me and offered me The Daily Telegraph for $4.95 a week. You'd be joking, I said. How about the Oz? Done!

It's not the perfect arrangement. The Australian has an excellent website, and I was happy to read it there. I'd rather read The Sydney Morning Herald in print. Although it has dumbed down its news website, the print newspaper remains readable and, on controversial issues, even-handed.

The Australian is good but should try to do better if it is to dominate as Australia's national newspaper. Too often, its editors' ideological positions show in its news coverage.

I'll return to this topic soon. In the meantime, you may choose to read Justine Ferrari's report, the editorial which fired me up, and the Oz readers' letters on Monday, March 3.

Federal politics, media beatups, and other circus acts

Merry picked it straight off. "That picture's been posed". I lean over the breakfast table. "Well, of course it's been posed" – I peer at the tiny credit line in The Australian – "and photographer David Crosling has done it quite nicely."

"No, not that. It's that they're not really bowling. Where's the mat?"

She's right, you know. But I hadn't spotted it because I was still bemused by a story about Matt. Or more specifically, by the third par of this story about Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's finding the time to launch an anthology of the late Matt Price's satirical political columns from The Australian.

Just in case you can't read the adjacent image, here what the third par said:

By attending the launch, Mr Rudd showed his affection for Price and The Australian despite the furore over reporting of details of his recent telephone conversation with US President George W. Bush.

". . . affection for . . . The Australian . . . " An interesting choice of word, affection. Is it some sort of coded message?

It's hard to believe the paragraph would have run without the approval of the Oz's editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell. Had Mitchell gone further, and "suggested" reporter Nicola Berkovic note Rudd's "affection" for his newspaper?

Unless you've been switched off for the past few weeks, you'll know "the furore" followed a report in The Australian four weeks ago which said Rudd had spoken by phone to soon-to-be-ex-President George W. Bush. Rudd had suggested a proposal for the G20 meeting, and Bush had asked, "What's that?"

What an opportunity! Malcolm Turnbull, exercising the prerogative of the opposition leader through the ages, went for the throat. An insult to our great friend. Putting the US alliance at risk. World leaders will never speak to Rudd again. Diplomatic blunder.

Okay, so your grumpy old blogger has taken some liberties here, and he certainly doesn't suggest Turnbull is a harlot. The phrase – "power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot through the ages" – was uttered by British Tory leader Stanley Baldwin, and back in 1931 he was speaking of Fleet Street newspaper proprietors, Lord Beaverbrook in particular. It's said Rudyard Kipling suggested the phrase to Baldwin, his cousin.

And for opposition leaders today, a more apt phrase might be impotence without responsibility. They can jeer, they can pontificate, they can offer bipartisan support – but the skilled media advisers in prime ministerial and state premiers' offices will plot to keep them on the sidelines and irrelevant.

Still, it was great while it lasted. When Rudd retorted that Turnbull should apologise for John Howard's remark that Osama bin Laden would be praying for a victory for Barack Obama, Turnbull seized the opportunity to distance himself from the former prime minister (read on for a little more on that theme).

Turnbull came close to disaster, however, when Family First Senator Steve Fielding said he would move for a Senate inquiry. What a dilemma for Turnbull! If his senators voted against an inquiry, he'd lose credibility. But if they set one up, look at the problems he would face:

• The Senate committee of inquiry could not compel Rudd or his staff to give evidence.
• Surely it would have to call Chris Mitchell, one of the guests at the dinner party in Kirribilli House in Sydney when Rudd spoke with Bush – and if Mitchell knew the source of the "leak" to his reporter, as one would expect, professional ethics would oblige him to refuse to answer. What then? Would the Liberal senators vote to throw the editor-in-chief of The Australian into jail?
• If the senators baulked at jailing Mitchell, how could they require other witnesses to answer?
• On top of that, could Turnbull rein in his more rabid senators – especially as they're from the hard right and don't want him as Opposition Leader anyway. It may be okay to call the Secretary of the Treasury, Dr Ken Henry, a liar. But to do it to the editor-in-chief of The Australian? Unthinkable.

Turnbull was lucky the Green senators refused to support an inquiry. When ABC radio's AM show reported their decision, it said the Greens had thrown Rudd a lifetime. But when you think about it, it must be Turnbull who was glad to receive the lifeline.

At this time, Turnbull seems to be ready to further dissociate himself from John Howard. I've already noted his repudiating Howard's criticism of Barack Obama.

Journalist and political commentator Christian Kerr wrote in The Australian on Friday that "this week Malcolm Turnbull irrevocably started to remake the Liberal Party in his own image."

Turnbull is thinking the same way [as Obama], Kerr wrote. Kerr quoted Turnbull's words and made a telling comment:

"There is no person who can look into the mirror and say 'That is an Australian face' or 'That is an American face'. The United States is a nation of choice, a nation of immigration – just as our nation is. It is in diversity that we find our strength."

You couldn't get much further from John Howard and the white picket fence.

Curiouser and curiouser. This note has been added to GOJ after reading the second editorial in The Weekend Australian , "Digging Up Old News", and subtitled "Media obsession with a mythical dinner party is peculiar".

First, your grumpy old blogger must acknowledge Chris Mitchell's insistence – one assumes he wrote or guided the editorial – that the Kirribilli guests were not at a dinner party. Kevin Rudd was entertaining guests (including Mitchell) in the lounge room, and Rudd was still in the dinner suit he had worn to a business dinner in the city. So we'll get that correction out of the way.

Beyond that, the editorial has one puzzling sub-text overlaid on another and then over another and another. If anyone can understand what it all means, please post a comment to GOJ.

Perhaps it explains Rudd's "affection" for The Australian, like, thanks for not dobbing me in.

In any event, did Chris Mitchell believe the conversation at Kirribilli House came under the Chatham House rule? As the Chatham House website explains (insisting there is only one rule, not rules as commonly written):

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

It's an interesting speculation. When Rudd joined his guests in the lounge room after talking with Bush, did he say Bush had asked "what's that" about the G20? Was it a serious comment (which would confirm most people's belief that the current Leader of the Free World is a simpleton). Or was the comment just some light-hearted banter?

And did Mitchell arrange to steer the story's author, chief political correspondent Matthew Franklin, in the right direction, making sure his newspaper got a great story while he complied with the Chatham House Rule?

Another note, added after reading commentary by political editor Dennis Shanahan in the Weekend Australian's Inquirer section. As Shanahan wrote:

. . . reporting on a political story that involves your boss, your colleague, the Prime Minister, the US President, the press gallery, the Opposition Leader, the Senate and the Australian Federal
Police can be a daunting task . . .

Undaunted, however, Shanahan presses on to deliver his trademark blend of well-informed conservative sources and visceral disdain for non-conservative views.

Rudd has said, and the White House backed him up, that Bush did not make the comment. One assumes that Mitchell, who was present but is not commenting, believes Rudd did make the comment to the guests in his lounge room. If everyone involved is to be trusted, it means Bush did not make the "what's that" comment, and Rudd spoke in jest.

It's all been a great circus act, but like all entertaining acts, there comes a time to wind it up.

Fairfax shows how to accelerate the decline of a great newspaper

I'm glad I went back to read Michael Duffy's piece more carefully. I'd been at risk of launching an intemperate attack on the “right-wing Philip Adams”.

Last Saturday when Merry came back with only half the Sydney Morning Herald, and said the newsagent told her Fairfax had failed to deliver the second section to the Central Coast, it was almost a relief. There's too much to read already. But we had paid full price despite not receiving the Spectrum and Good Weekend liftouts.

Could we blame Fairfax's current “business improvement program,” ie, slashing staff numbers? Along with such encumbrances to profitability as sub-editors and customer service staff, had the company also pushed distribution supervisers – the guys who knew which bundles went on which trucks – into accepting redundancy?

Yesterday, I was grumbling about it at the No 1 ladies book club (I'm the only bloke), when I found the others were also cranky with the SMH.

Fairfax had also failed to include a Writers Festival insert distributed to Sydney readers. Signs in newsagents' windows showed this was a Fairfax decision, not an accidental blunder.

Perhaps those Fairfax chiefs on multi-million-dollar remuneration know better, but it seems a strange way to push a daily newspaper in a competitive market.

Right now, I have The Australian home delivered, six times Monday to Saturday, for just $4.95 a week. It began when a call centre rang to offer the promotional deal on the Daily Telegraph. Well, no, I haven't felt the need to read the Terror since I retired from it – what about The Australian? No problem. So I signed up for the promotional offer, and when that ended, for a long-term subscription at the same price.

Oh dear! I was going to talk about Michael Duffy, wasn't I? That's because what I did get of the SMH on Saturday included his attack on global warming theories, but yesterday when I clicked on the website of a leading authority he quoted, I found he'd misquoted it significantly. Perhaps I'll make that the next post.

In Crikey today, contributor "Broadway Betty" suggests shareholders at tomorrow's AGM in Melbourne ask directors: "Was an executive share retention scheme – in addition to cash bonuses and salary increases – secretly announced at the end of 2007?" If "Broadway Betty" is a journo, perhaps she should put her hand up for that redundancy offer. Unless, that is, she can explain how one secretly announces something.

Well, what would you expect? Murdoch papers praise Murdoch.

You will not be surprised to learn that Rupert Murdoch's initial ABC Boyer Lecture received a good run in The Australian and its sister paper, The Daily Telegraph, and in all the other capital city daily newspapers in the Murdoch empire.

The Oz had a short writeoff on Page One, a longer piece, Challenges Ahead for Australia, on P2, and the full text in the Media section. Photos showed Australia's business and cultural elites mingling at the Opera House where they turned out to hear the speech. The Terror ran him on most of P2 and the full text further in.

Nor will you be surprised that the Oz's lead editorial, headed “Frontier spirit in an age of freedom,” carried a sub-heading, “Boyer lecture was rich in insights born of experience.”

But what may surprise you is that your grumpy, left-leaning old blogger, a former long-time hack in the Evil Empire, found himself nodding agreement much of the time as Murdoch explained the themes he will develop in the six lectures.

Murdoch agreed that many Australians would question his right, as a man who became a US citizen in 1985, to judge the country, but said: “The main reason I agreed to come to Australia to deliver these lectures is that the country I see before me simply is not prepared for the challenges ahead.”

Many people remain suspicious of Murdoch. They cannot forgive his chumming up to Margaret Thatcher and the brutal move of his London newspapers to Wapping, his support for right-wing politicians and causes in the US, his failure to speak up for human rights in China. They see bias in his newspapers, and in his giving too much space to hard-right conservative commentators like Janet, Piers and Andrew.

There is some truth in all that, but not as much as most lefties contend. And I believe Murdoch has moved to what I shall call, for the want of a better term, the conservative left.

He remains a supporter of those values which conservatives hold dear – a stable society, free markets, the rule of law, property rights, individual responsibility, and offering public welfare money only to those in need.

But he departs from the conservative right – what I call the group-think of the Quadrant mob – in ways we lefties should applaud. He praises Australia's open, democratic and multi-racial society, supports reconciliation with our indigenous people, and advocates liberal immigration policies.

He pleads for reform of a “19th century education system” that leaves too many children behind, a system which “effectively writes off whole segments of Australians”, quoting both the social injustice it perpetuates and also the damage it does to Australia's ability to meet the challenges of the future.

Although he doesn't accept the wilder claims of many greenies – who could? – he does accept the probability of man-made climate change, and supports action now. He has instructed his own business empire to improve its environmental impacts.

As Murdoch clarifies his thoughts and expands on these themes for the Boyer lectures, he seems likely to distance himself further from Australia's hidebound conservatives. However, we can hope that because of who he is, as well as the persuasiveness of his arguments, he manages to take some of them at least some of the way with him.

Is it too much to hope that at least some of our lefties will put aside their prejudices, give him a hearing, and make up their own minds?

Too hard to call?

Another update on The Australian's top-of-page strap heading across its news coverage of the economic crisis (see posts earlier this week).

Perhaps the Oz's editors have decided it's too hard to call between the "long slow crash of '08" and "the road to recovery". In today's Weekend Australia, the page of economic news reports carries no strap at all.

Perhaps Rupert Murdoch had a word with them. As Sydneysiders prepared their breakfasts this morning, their ABC news was carrying the first brief reports of his address to News Corporation's annual meeting in the US. Here are a few pars:

News Corporation chairman and chief executive Rupert Murdoch says the US could be heading into a prolonged economic downturn.

Mr Murdoch has told News Corporation's annual shareholder meeting the global financial crisis and a slowing US economy were already having an impact on the company. He said advertising revenue had fallen and the News Corporation share price had been beaten down.

Mr Murdoch expressed fears the US was about to enter a prolonged economic downturn, but stressed News Corporation was well positioned to weather the slowdown due to its $5 billion in cash reserves.

Meanwhile, Mr Murdoch continues to pour money into developing what is becoming the world's biggest integrated business and economic news empire. The big push began last year with his acquisition of The Wall Street Journal and its associated financial wire services.

Then he opened News Ltd's cheque book to poach the top financial journalists from The Australian Financial Review and other Fairfax papers. He didn't get them all, but enough came over to take his already talented team ahead of any competition. (Interesting to note that Fairfax management exempted the Fin from their "business improvement program", ie, staff redundancies and cost-cutting.)

Yesterday, the Oz launched the deal (note the trendy lower case), one of those glossy inserted business magazines designed for luxury goods advertisers, and it wasn't a bad effort at all.

The Business section of today's Weekend Australian launches a new business website which appears to be the equal of any I've seen. The site, www.theaustralian.com.au/business, is comprehensive, well organised and easily navigated.

The site is free, but one wonders whether the long-term aim is a service which will attract paid subscriptions. Mr Murdoch has been of two minds about charging for access to his online business newspapers.

When he bought The Wall Street Journal, he announced the highly regarded online edition at www.WSJ.com would become free, but soon changed his mind. Today, he told his shareholders that maintaining a "subscription wall" at WSJ.com was the best way to sustain revenue growth for the site. "Since it was acquired, WSJ.com's audience has surged 90 per cent," he said.

Access to much, but not all, of the Fin Review's online service, www.afr.com, requires a paid subscription. It's my guess Murdoch will keep his Australian business website free for as long as it gives a competitive advantage against the Fin, then will move to a paid subscription model with some limited free access.

In this article today, The Australian's editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell explains many of the features of the new website, and provides a link for even more details.

Oh, about top-of-page strap headings: The printed Australian newspaper's business section continues today with its own wording, "Global Financial Crisis".

Sorry folks, it's a Long Slow Crash after all

Has The Australian done a backflip? A few days ago, as noted in this blog, The Australian tried to mark the turning point for the economic and market crisis by switching the strap headline across its coverage from "The long slow crash of '08" to "The road to recovery".

Alas, share markets immediately nosedived again, United States data confirmed a recession, and signals firmed that one great hope for our economy, Chinese demand for our resources, appeared to be slowing.

So today, if you haven't noted it already, it's our solemn duty to inform you that the strap in today's Australian has reverted to the Long Slow Crash of 'o8.

Over on the Oz's high-powered Business section they just stayed with the more sober strap, "Global Financial Crisis".

When we're writing back-to-back, we're not saying it right

Is it only me – as pompous old gits say when they write Letters to the Editor – or do other readers find something irritating in the term “back-to-back”?

One expects it of sportswriters, of course. How often one sees a phrase like “the team won three premierships back-to-back”, conjuring up an image of the one in the middle spinning a pirouette to present a posterior to the next one along.

Usually it means successive. But whatever does it mean in the intro to this story in The Australian the other day? Probably the authors meant to say Obama and McCain took turns at answering questions from a hotshot evangelist. Or did they answer their interrogator by batting questions back at him?

It's only when you read the story to the eighth long, wordy paragraph you learn the Rev. Rick Warren conducted successive one-hour interviews, first with Obama while McCain and his staff blocked their ears, then with McCain, using the same set of questions. Why not just say so?

The Oz took the story from its new stablemate, The Wall Street Journal, acquired by Rupert Murdoch late last year. Like many quality newspapers in the US, the WSJ is so full of its own worthiness it bogs down in dreary writing.

That's one reason US newspaper readers are defecting to the internet at a far greater rate than those in Australia.

Newspaper bosses put aside their rivalry

Above: Sydney Morning Herald Media
section leads on an interview with
John Hartigan, chairman and chief
executive of News Limited.
Right: Harto returns the favour
as The Australian's Media section
runs with Fairfax boss David Kirk

Has it ever happened before? Usually rivals in Australia's fiercely competitive newspaper market, News Limited chief John Hartigan and Fairfax chief executive David Kird today gave one another the platform spots in their flagship newspapers.

They have stood together before, notably in their campaign for better freedom-of-information laws, but this seems to be the first time they have swapped prominant interviews for their respective papers.

They were saying the same thing, however – reports of the decline of Australian newspapers have been grossly exaggerated.

For Harto, this appeared to contradict his boss, News Corporation head Rupert Murdoch. But he made it clear Murdoch was talking about US newspapers. As the SMH report said:

At a digital conference in California this week, Mr Murdoch said that the financial pressures on US newspapers would see them "deteriorate tremendously" and profit margins would shrink from 30 per cent to 10 per cent. The circulation figures for the March quarter in the US support his
gloomy view.

Circulation of all but two of the top 25 flagship mastheads in the US fell over the quarter, including the Dallas Morning News, down 10.6 per cent, Boston Globe (-8.3 per cent), Los Angeles Times (-5.1 per cent), Chicago tribune (-4.4 per cent) and the New York Times (-3.9 per cent).

Mr Hartigan predicted the Australian sector would not follow suit and said that Australian investment analysts who said otherwise were wrong.

"By and large [US newspapers] are very, very different," he said. "There are some telltale things coming home to roost in that market. One is they have stopped investing in their brands.

"They have chopped their newsrooms to pieces and a lot of the papers are very old-fashioned – they don't have any real personality, depth or empathy with their readers. And they have not invested in plant to be able to do things that show the medium in a modern role."

Both Hartigan and Kirk were speaking about the release of the report Newspapers Today, put out by The Newspaper Works, the peak industry organisation created by Australia's main publishers 15 months ago. The report said people were still engaging with Australian newspapers because they are absorbing, dynamic and reputable.

Read Hartigan's words from the SMH and Kirk's words from The Australian. You might like to check out The Newspaper Works, with its links to the study released today.

Also of interest: In the SMH interview, Hartigan confirmed The Australian would move to a smaller format when it sorted out the problems of co-ordinating its production on News Limited's different presses around the nation.