Read all about it . . . but not in our leading newspapers

It's an old tradition in newspapers, and I guess none of us would expect anything different. I'm speaking of articles on the news pages which boast of the paper's success in winning awards.

But now I'm on the other side of the fence – someone who pays for his newspapers, rather than being paid to help produce them – I'm beginning to wonder whether editors owe their readers something better.

"Eleven journalists writing for The Australian are finalists in this year's Walkley awards, including two vying for the Scoop of the Year." That was the Oz's intro to its Page 2 lead story (above) on the success of its people  in Australia's major journalism awards.

The Oz ran colour headshots of all 11 finalists over eight long pars. And it added one final sentence naming two journalists from the rival Melbourne Age and The Sydney Morning Herald who were also finalists for the Scoop of the Year.

At least the Oz was more gracious than the SMH, which reported that "A large number of Herald journalists have been recognised . . . " and named them, but failed to mention any finalist from its rival.

To see the full list of finalists, go to this Walkley Foundation web page (which did not seem right up to date today) and scroll down till you see a link to a PDF file and click on it.

Interesting, isn't it? At a time when media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch are claiming the moral high ground against internet companies like Google, anyone wanting an unbiased report on the Walkley finalists found they'd wasted their money buying his flagship Australian newspaper. Or, for that matter, its rivals.

To get the facts, it was necessary to turn to the internet. And to find the information there, most would have used Google.

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While we're arguing about blackface . . .

Most Australians couldn't see what the fuss was about when a nostalgic revival of the Hey Hey, It's Saturday television variety show ended in a bitter debate.

So what's wrong with five performers wearing fuzzy-wuzzy wigs and vaudeville blackface in a skit where the sixth performer wore whiteface to sing and shuffle a Michael Jackson number? And those bloody Yanks – what right have they got to be so angry at a bit of good old fashioned humour on television?

Political correctness gone mad? Well, not really.

Imagine an Australian shirtmaker advertising its products by putting them on an Aboriginal man who's saying, “Mine tinkit they fit.” Even the letters page of The Australian would be full of angry protests (I'd hope).

The long-running “Mine tinkit they fit” campaign began with a depiction of two indigenous Australians wearing what may be mission hand-me-downs, but later ads depicted the black Australian as a more satorially elegant.

I've taken the images of the Pelaco shirt ads from this history web page. The page is worth a look – historian Richard Broome describes how he tracked down these images, which were familiar to my generation of Australians in our younger days, and also how he discovered the identity of the indigenous Australian, "Mulga Fred",  who was the model for the ads.

As a young man, Fred was a successful buckjumper – a rodeo competitor who tries to stay on an angry, bucking horse – and he must have been a dashing and athletic figure. This photo, and the information on the history web page, suggest he became a fringe dweller in white-dominated country towns.

Today, any journalist would be wary of jokes based on racial or ethnic stereotypes – Abo jokes, Ikey jokes or Paddy jokes, or, if you're Indian, Sardarji jokes. I do, however, regret the disappearance of this hard-drinking layabout from our newspaper comic strips:

Today, it seems few would run Reg Smythe's Andy Capp cartoon strip, drawn for the London Daily Mirror since 1957 and syndicated in newspapers around the world. (Although political correctness did get to Andy – the cigarette stub perpetually on his lower lip disappeared in 1983 and he became a non-smoker.)

The image is from here and you'll find a brief history of the cartoon strip here.

Perhaps I read a better class of newspaper, so I felt most journalists had a good understanding of why blackface skits are offensive to Americans and should be to Australians too.

But if the letters and blogs I read were a fair sample, the journalists didn't carry their readers with them. Most Australians appear to have a limited contact with world opinion and still cling to some resentment of Americans from World War II – “two things wrong with them, over-paid and over here”.

Use an American expression, such as Kokoda “trail” instead of “track”, or “railroad” instead of “railway”, and someone will disapprove.

So we tend to overreact to criticism from Americans. But surely we can understand why blackface skits are offensive to Americans. The best explanation I saw was posted by intern Melanie Mahony on Crikey.com yesterday. Mahony also ran a Q and A interview with Kamahl in which the well-liked black Australian entertainer explained  why the skit was offensive. The Australian's media diarist Amanda Meade posted this, and in this morning's Sydney Morning Herald David Dale posted this in which he called Hey Hey host Daryl Somers an idiot.

Also on Crikey, Red Symons – the "nasty" judge on Hey Hey's Red Faces segment – had this to say: "As one who is guilty by association . . . I’m now in the odd position of seeing the segment defended by people that I don’t want in my corner."

Back to the future for Grumpy Old Journo

Two years ago, your Grumpy Old Journo abandoned his associated blog, What, Me Grumpy. Now I plan to resurrect it.

Three things changed my mind (although I'm still wary of making my blogging life more complex). They are:

• Last week in Sydney, Google and the Walkley Foundation hosted an exclusive presentation for journalist members of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance on new Google search tools and tricks – some still in development – to gather, sort and analyse news and data. I learned it's still an exciting world out there, and I want to remain part of it. 
• Before I walked over to the Google offices, I had several coffees with a friend and mentor who has long urged me to make Grumpy Old Journo better focused. I've finally accepted her advice. I still want to write the occasional self-indulgent post about my family, my motor-cycle trips, or my mulberry tree – but now they'll go into What, Me Grumpy? 
• While checking the settings and presentation of my blogs, I tried Google Blogger's new editor. It makes the insertion and editing of images much simpler, and in general allows more tweaking without having to switch to HTML editing. That should make life easier. 

Check out What, Me Grumpy as it was (along with what was then meant to be its final post). When I post again to it, I'll put a write-off and link on Grumpy Old Journo. PS: I'll still try to find excuses to run Tony Rafty's caricature of me (right), just now and again.

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Now to flick through some topics from the past week:

Fairfax's conservative Catholic columnist Miranda Devine seems to dislike the moderates of Australia's Liberal Party almost as much as she loathes pedophiles or people who believe in man-made global warming.

Last week she turned on Liberal MP Alex Hawke, once a member of the party's hard right but now associated with the moderates.

Hawke, 32, was once a protege of the upper house Liberal MP David Clarke, the putative leader of the traditional right faction. Clarke is unfairly maligned as a sinister religious extremist because he is socially conservative, a fan of John Howard, goes to Mass on Sundays and is married to a member of the Catholic organisation, Opus Dei. He and Hawke had surfed the wave of Howard conservatism, sweeping away two decades of control by the soft left wing of the party, and in 2007 he helped Hawke win the safe north-west Sydney seat of Mitchell.

But with Clarke and his supporters unpalatable to the federal and state Liberal leadership, Hawke must have seen his political future as brighter without the baggage of his former boss. So he has embarked since October on a systematic power grab to oust Clarke at his next pre-selection, say Clarke's allies.

Thanks, Miranda. You've just reinforced my views on David Clarke.

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One can understand newspapers urging readers to go to their online sites – the more clicks the better. That's why print stories often end with the lines, “Have your say on . . .” (Does anyone really care what the readers of, say, Sydney's Daily Telegraph think?)

But it's a bit rough when the Sydney Sun-Herald sets out a quiz for readers, then tells them they'll have to go online to get the answers.

What about the readers who've paid for the newspaper, and who are not connected to the internet​?

Check out David Dale's article on his Sun-Herald blog – just read down to his October 5 post about the questions in the new citizenship test. I must admit I didn't waste too much time on it, but at first I couldn't find the answers there anyway. However, if you click on “more” at the end of the post, it comes up all over again – but this time with answers.

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What was the biggest story of the past week – the death and devastation of flooding, earthquakes and tsunamis in the Philippines, Samoa and Sumatra, Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull's ultimatum to his party members, or the quirky naming of a blend of cream cheese and Vegemite?

At times it was hard to tell. The blogosphere exploded into fully fledged inanity as its denizens vented their anger at the name iSnack 2.0.

Was it a stunt by the Kraft marketing people – after all, is there now anyone in Australia who doesn't know about the new product? By that measure it was a successful stunt.

Or was it a humiliating miscalculation by the Kraft marketing people. That seems more likely, but we'll never know for sure unless someone confesses.

But as the marketing writers debated this question, few reporters told us what the product was.

It's a matter of interest to your Grumpy Old Journo. After trying to extend a misspent youth well into his sixties, GOJ is now required to read food labels very carefully indeed.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Helen Greenwood had a go at describing iSnack, but she still didn't tell GOJ what he needed to know. You see, I'd already discovered Vegemite and Philadelphia cream cheese go well together. A favourite snack is a low-fat crispbread biscuit spread with cream cheese with some Vegemite smeared across the top.

But it wasn't until consumer affairs writer Kelly Burke, also in the SMH, rounded up a posse of outraged nutritionists that I learned iSnack had more than 17 per cent fat. That included 11 per cent saturated fat. For me, that's a no-no.

The Philly cream cheese variety I use has under 5 per cent fat (it's actually a blend of cream cheese and cottage cheese to achieve that low fat level). And that's what I'll be sticking to, rather than iSnack or whatever it's to be called.

The point of this item is that if newspapers are to survive, they must provide usable information to people who need it. Journalists should ask, have I included all the information readers need to know?

Screening for prostate cancer – an old argument revisited

Links to material quoted are given fully at the end of this post.

Gee! It's almost two years since your Grumpy Old Journo – also known as a Happy Prostate Cancer Survivor – put up some posts disagreeing with Simon Chapman, a strong opponent of screening for prostate cancer. On November 6, 2007, I said:

Gee! Me against the Professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney. This should be a one-sided debate. But here goes.

If you've dipped into this blog over the past year or so, you'll know I'm passionate in urging mature men to ask their doctor for a prostate cancer check.

And although I've read Professor Chapman's article in Monday's Sydney Morning Herald [November 5, 2007, headed “Prostate screening not worth it”] – and was already familiar with the arguments he has put – I will not change my advocacy.

I went on to explain:

The reason is simple. Early detection of prostate cancer, before any symptoms became apparent, may have saved my life. At the very least, it saved me from having to make decisions about more risky treatment of an aggressive cancer after it had spread further. I hope you'll bear with me.

I'm trying to explain that screening is worthwhile for most mature men, provided the guy (and his wife and friends) understand its limitations.

All treatment options – including non-treatment, ranging from "watchful waiting" to "no point
worrying about it at your age" – have risks and shortcomings. What's the right treatment for one guy might be ill-advised for the next.

So now, almost two years later, Professor Chapman, in an article jointly authored by a colleague, Associate Professor Alexandra Barratt, has returned to the SMH's pages to reiterate opposition to screening.

Under the heading, “Irresponsible prostate proposal ignores risk of harm to men”, the professors attacked last Wednesday's call by the Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand for men to have prostate cancer tests at age 40 instead of the previously recommended age of 50.

The professors' argument, basically, is that studies show screening fails to save many more lives despite higher costs to the public health budget. They ask:

What are the costs of close monitoring of half the nation's men aged in their 40s? What health-care services are going to be cut to cover the additional costs? Or must the health care budget be increased?

Cost-effectiveness? The Urological Society's recommendation means that men should ask their family doctor to order a blood test for PSA – prostate specific antigen – and to do a digital rectal examination at age 40.

Most guys should have a general medical check-up around that age, involving heart, blood pressure and blood testing of cholesterol, so why shouldn't they also ask for a prostate cancer check?

Apart from the pathologist's charge for the PSA test, where's the significant extra cost? And close monitoring? That will only happen if your doctor believes your PSA or DRE results are a cause for concern – and brother, if your doctor thinks that, won't you be glad you asked for the test?

“Risk of harm to men” are the words in the heading. This refers both to the risks involved in a biopsy, and to possible over-aggressive surgery or radiation treatment when cancer is found.

But my experience is that despite the risk of infection from a biopsy, it's worth that risk because it will allow your urologist to avoid aggressive treatment if it's not needed. For some men the biopsy may show there's no need to begin treatment, but to accept "watchful waiting" with PSA tests from time to time.

It would be unproductive to run a longer post arguing my position. The following links should help anyone seeking more understanding of the debate.

My November 2007 post outlined my arguments at length – indeed, it was so long I followed with an “executive summary”.

Last Wednesday, the Urological Society published its new policy here and also issued this media release.

The next day, professors Chapman and Barratt had their article published in the SMH. And here's Professor Chapman's SMH article published in November '07.

Last week, the SMH published letters contesting the professors' views on Friday (including a letter from Urological Society president Dr David Malouf denying the society advocated a screening program, instead saying it recommended 40-year-old men "should be offered a prostate cancer test to assess their risk") and another letter yesterday (on each of these letters pages you'll need to read down a way to find the relevant letters).

You'll also find a good explanation of prostate cancer and its treatment options in Wikipedia.

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The National Times – reborn as a sickly child, stranded out of its time

You have to have lived the times to understand what The National Times meant to many of us. And to understand why we're so disappointed with the National Times reborn this week as an online member of the Fairfax Digital Media stable.

Each Thursday, we'd stop in to a newsagent to pick up the new edition of this remarkably bold – radical even – newspaper produced within the staid halls of the Sydney Morning Herald establishment. Usually, we also bought the weekly Nation Review, grubstaked by the left-supporting millionaire Gordon Barton.

The NT launched its first issue on February 8, 1971. That, my generation will remember, was a time of profound social change in Australia and most of the western world. A growing women's rights movement. The Pill. Flower power and the Age of Aquarius. Hippies. Vietnam war and anti-conscription moratoriums. Some men even dared to let their hair grow long.

In hotel bars, long the domain of blokey men, young women in rainbow garb would tell you they'd studied iridology, stare deeply into your eyes, and pronounce: “No, you're not an alcoholic.” Then you'd have another half a dozen beers with them.

Some 22 months after the NT's launch, came “It's Time” – the slogan which helped Labor's Gough Whitlam become Australia's Prime Minister, winning government after years of conservative rule. Three years later, he was gone, dismissed by Governor-General John Kerr – the former Labor lawyer Whitlam had thought would be his man.

Today, many of us remember Whitlam for fiscal irresponsibility and his failure to rein in the wild antics of his Cabinet ministers.

But we should also remember he legislated to give women equal pay for equal work, to recognise indigenous land rights, to provide for no-fault divorce in place of the shameful and often fraudulent proving of adultery or habitual drunkenness against a “guilty party”. He provided allowances for single mothers, and appointed a special adviser on women's affairs.

He saw Australia's future lay in its relationships with Asian nations, and gave recognition to communist China – a move which will underwrite Australia's prosperity for decades to come.

He also helped Australia see itself as a proudly independent nation, and not an outpost of the declining British Empire (or Commonwealth of Nations, whatever that name was meant to signify).

Before Whitlam, Australians had to carry a British passport when they ventured overseas. His government provided Australian passports.

They were exciting times to be alive. And The National Times was part of that excitement. As Fairfax journalist David Marr (editor from 1980 to 1982) said the other day:

The paper's beat was spies, politics, prisons, rape, defence, politics, the US alliance, motoring, business, sex, politics, tax scams, education, health, the women's movement, the arts, crime and politics. The National Times pioneered a strange alliance between lifestyle and the gutter, between wine and crime. This was mocked and imitated . . .

We weren't planning the overthrow of capitalism. We weren't hell-bent on radical change. The National Times was giving voice to a brand of scepticism growing in Australia for decades. The
revolutionary thing was doing so from behind the conservative walls of fortress Fairfax.

The old National Times lasted until August 1, 1986. It never made a profit, and its circulation rarely reached 100,000. Fairfax changed its publishing day, and it battled on for five months as The National Times on Sunday, and until March 13, 1988, as The Times on Sunday.

When Fairfax began signalling the relaunch of The National Times as a website devoted to intelligent reviews and commentary, your Grumpy Old Journo was sceptical. The times have changed – the youthful irreverence of the 1970s and early 1980s, the optimism and the excitement, are little more than a memory in our materialistic society.

But also, I hadn't realised just how cheapskate Fairfax Digital Media could be.

The Sydney Morning Herald bounces on to my front porch about 3.30 each morning. I usually read it back in bed. For the last three mornings, I've gone on to check the National Times website – and what's this? I've already read most of the featured stories when I perused the morning newspaper. What's the point of that?

Not only that, for all the promotion of The National Times reborn, the website displays with a design and typography which positions it as just another page on the SMH website. So far, the verdict of other commentators agrees with mine, as shown here and here.

Washing away the cobwebs

Nothing blows away the cobwebs like a run on the motor-cycle. Yesterday, however, it was more like washing away the cobwebs.

I rolled out the motor-cycle and pointed it over the hills through Kulnura and later north along the old alignment of the Great North Road – you can still see the convict-built masonry walls and culverts along the way – before I pulled up in Wollombi.

Wollombi shops

It's a charming heritage township, and well worth a visit. As usual, my bike came to rest in front of the tavern best known for a fortified wine labelled Dr Jurd's Jungle Juice.

Me? I kept under the limit with two beers and a hamburger while I chatted with some of the other bikers along the veranda. Rode off at 1.45pm – just as the rain started. And it rained all the way home, through Cessnock and down the F3 freeway.

It wasn't heavy rain, but steady. Soon my wet-weather gear was sodden. – and I was experiencing dread as I mixed it with the freeway traffic.

That gives me a subject for this post. But after building up the revs. I'll then speed through a few other topics I'd been looking at.

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Hey guys, give me more room in the wet

We didn't have much rain, less than 6mm in the gauge back home. But that was more than had fallen in all of the month of August.

Steady light rain after a long dry spell means one thing to a biker –a treacherously slippery mix of dust, oil and water may be coating the tarmac. Often, you can feel it as you turn, accelerate or brake.

It's OK for you guys strapped in your metal boxes. If you slam into the car in front because you're travelling too fast or too close, and then someone slams into the rear of your car, you're still likely to walk away from the pile-up.

I know many of you dislike bikers for the way we zip past on sunny days, but surely not so much you'd not care if I slid under someone's tyres.

If I ride a prudent distance from the car in front, don't drop into it. I have to throttle back to restore the safe distance, and then the driver behind gets upset and tailgates me.

And please turn your lights on. I'm peering through a rain-spattered visor, using my mirrors to see what's coming up behind, and in the poor light and through the misty spray I can make out only the grey, blurry outlines of the semis and B-doubles about to pass me.

Let's be nice to one another in wet weather, and I'll promise to give you a cheery wave next time I zip past you on a sunny day.

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And another thing about anti-smoking campaigns

Tougher measures against smoking moved closer this week with the Federal Government likely to accept the recommendation of its Preventative Health Task Force to push the price of a packet of 30 cigarettes up from around $13.50 to $20 – or from 45c to 67c per cigarette.

Grumpy Old Journo still has reservations about this. As this blog pointed out on July 13 (“Clearing away the smoke” [1] ), it may cause many to quit, but there will be some families from lower socio-economic groups who will just buy less food for their children.

And in newspaper reports, I see no support for two measures I suggested in the July post. First, that the government try to push down the price of nicotine lozenges, patches and chewing gum – for many heavily addicted smokers, the most effective way to quit.

Second, that we encourage people to treat directors, executives and PR staff of tobacco companies as scum. After all, they promote an industry which, in the ordinary course of its business, kills many Australians. And as Australian parliaments make it harder for them here, they just turn to killing many of our Asian neighbours to keep the profits rolling in.

Another point has occurred to me. As I walk near the local high school before classes begin, I see students in school uniform in groups around nearby corners – and many of them are smoking.

Most anti-tobacco advertising is aimed at persuading smokers to quit. Surely we can commission the best minds in the advertising industry to produce convincing campaigns which persuade teenagers not to start.

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Appalling gun-lovers blackmail NSW

So it's happening, as forecast in mid-August (in “Appalling politicians”, posted on Aug 17 [2] ). The two members of the Shooters Party in the NSW State Legislative Council are refusing to vote for any government legislation unless the government agrees to let their gun-happy members hunt feral animals in the state's national parks [3] .

They hold the balance of power in the Upper House. Because of the preferential voting system by which members are elected, they got in with minuscule public support [4] .

It's a dreadful choice for the NSW Government – cave in to appalling people who kill animals for pleasure, or see vital legislation stalled.

And if it does cave in, what will these appalling people demand next? The Shooters Party policy includes a US-style right for all citizens to own and use firearms [5] .

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John Della Bosca? What's left to say?

My sympathy is with the former NSW Labor Health Minister, who resigned from his ministerial post after a tawdry tabloid, Rupert Murdoch's top-selling Sydney Daily Telegraph, broke the story of his sexual affair with a woman aged 26 – half his age.

But I'm not putting my hand up to say so. It could lead to speculation, unwarranted of course, about some of my past.

However, you might find two feature articles in this morning's Sydney Morning Herald both informative and enjoyable.

In the first, legal affairs commentator Richard Ackland gives some interesting information about the affair and the Murdoch press's actions. He says the Daily Telegraph has damaged the media's case against tighter privacy laws [6].

In the second, Professor Rodney Tiffen offers a seven-point guide to ministers on how to survive sex scandals [7] .

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We're a more civilised society

Take a look at this graph – it shows that Australians now oppose the death penalty by an overwhelming margin.

In a recent Roy Morgan poll, only 23 per cent supported the death penalty for those found guilty of murder, while 64 per cent supported imprisonment. When the question was asked in 1947, some 67 per cent supported the death penalty and 24 per cent imprisonment.

The poll also showed that those who believed in a mandatory life sentence for murder are now outnumbered by those who believe judges should have some discretion in sentencing.

It's cheering data for those of us who believe no society can execute criminals and still call itself civilised.

Back on November 9, 2008, worried by my lack of emotion about Indonesia's executing three of the Bali bombers, I put up a long Grumpy Old Journo post examining my opposition to the death penalty. I've just re-read it, and my views are as firm as ever.

First, the post enumerated rational arguments – for example, that now and again innocent people are judicially murdered in countries which carry out executions – but also the more difficult examination of how we form our moral attitudes.

So it's good to learn that two-thirds of Australians would now agree with me. Last November, I wasn't so sure. I wrote:

I'd assumed the fight against the death penalty had long been won in civilised societies like Australia.
But a bit over a year ago, I was at the monthly meeting of a club for retired business and professional men. Our speaker was a retired police inspector, and when he said he still believed in the death penalty, a murmur of assent went around the room. Out there, support for the death penalty remains, although it's hard to assess how strong it is.

So I thank Scott Steel (Possum Comitatus) for cheering me up by outlining the Roy Morgan data in this Crikey blog post (from which I've lifted the graph). You can read Roy Morgan's own report here.

Those interested in the development of anti-death penalty policies in a civilised nation – Australia – will find this NSW Council of Civil Liberties timeline useful.

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