Competition the only real antidote to Cash for Comment

Walter Cronkite once famously observed "If you get your news from me, you must be an idiot." This doesn’t mean that people who watch Television news are idiots, rather that they watch it for something other than straight news. As goes TV so goes radio talkback. In all of the analysis of the 2UE cash for comment scandal, this is a point that really only seems to have been picked up by John Laws, and then only in his own defence.

Before I proceed, let me first lay down a few personal positions. I find both Laws and Jones to be intellectually sleazy. This is a position that I held before the ABA inquiry, and which was not particularly heightened by its findings. Secondly, I believe that they both acted unethically. This essay seeks not to defend them, but to take a look at the landscape of the affair from a different view-point.

Many commentators have been puzzled that the ratings of the two men have held up, despite everything. They reason that Laws’ and Jones’ lack of ethics should have repelled audiences. These commentators have missed the point.

What do the listeners of 2UE (and its syndicated stations around the country) expect to get when its call sign appears in their LED displays? Both men are blowhards – the sort of bloke who on a lower income might wear a permanent crease into a corner of your local bar and lecture any who will listen on what "aorta" do here there and everywhere. You know that they don’t really know what they are talking about in any deep sense. But you are fascinated by how they fracture and rearrange reality, romanticising it, mythologising it, regularising and simplifying it. Making it appear at the one time more miraculous than it is and yet more mundane and safe.

What the 2UE audience is after is not just entertainment. They also seek large dollops of reassurance, relaxation, fantasy, and a community to which to belong. The integrity of the story-teller does not enter into the equation, except that one knows instinctively that as no one human, even with a team of producers, can be so all-knowing and prescient, then some elongation of the truth must be occurring.

There is something Falstaffian about the commercial radio talk-back presenter. Yet unlike Henry V, the audience will never outgrow him. They live lives relatively lacking in power, so they do not need the skill of sifting fact from fantasy required by the exercise of power. They can afford to indulge themselves in make believe.

Part of the thrill of consorting with a Falstaff is the knowledge that he is a scoundrel. You do not drive a fleet of rollers, only go to the kitchen to check on the caterers, and live in the sort of house that has his and hers helipads unless you are getting paid better than most. Listeners know why Laws is getting paid well – because he sells. Selling is what he does non-stop during his shows. More obviously, during live reads, and less obviously as they merge into his conversational patter. The woman caller rings up and tells him that she has bought his favourite car – a Toyota. She knows it is not his favourite car. That Ferraris, Benzes, Aston Martins and so on are much more up his driveway. That is part of her joke.

It is also part of being a member of the community. This is a community where all can participate, as long as you are prepared to buy the fantasy. The ABA inquiry assumes an almost fiduciary relationship between broadcaster and listener, but in the worlds of Laws and Jones we are all consenting adults, in on the same joke, with no-one owing a duty of care to anyone else.

No wonder then that most of the calls to 2UE support Laws and Jones. Their denizens must be wondering why the rest of us took so long to catch on. It is also no wonder that calls to other talk back shows are running against Jones and Laws. This is a tribal gig. ABC Radio talkback callers, for instance, have chosen not to listen to Laws and Jones. Criticising 2UE affirms this choice.

How is it that Jones and Laws are such good salesmen if their credibility is so severely circumscribed? This question only arises if you mistakenly believe that credibility is a large part of selling. It isn’t. Sometimes notoriety can be just as important. Laws and Jones are both high profile, and through their spots on 2UE and around the country, they have access to a large daily audience plus the ability to attract the attention of a much wider group. Their spruiking comes with integrated amplification. The first problem in selling is to get the customer’s attention. They can do that.

The second problem is to put the proposition in terms and language that the prospect will understand and to which they will react positively. This is a question of rhetoric, not character, and they are both great rhetoricians. In fact, if someone you trust and respect tells you something which you find hard to believe, you don’t change your mind about the proposition, you tend to think less of the person.

This is the most piquant irony in the banks' $1M sponsorship of Laws and 2UE. Nothing Laws could say would improve the image of the banks, unless it was something that the public could accept as being true in the first place. And if it were true in the first place, then a much less expensive campaign, using real people, would probably have worked just as well. In the 1990 Election, John Singleton’s "whinging Wendy" ads for Labor were devastatingly effective. Wendy was unknown, but she got a head nod, and that is all that is necessary. Contrast that with the "Yes" campaign for the 1999 Republic Referendum. It was all celebrity marketing, but without the right message, so it failed. Celebrity of itself is not a sufficient sales tool.

Why has the mainstream media pursued this story so hard? Well, scoundrels deserve to be exposed, and that is good, even if their mates don’t care one way or the other. I also think that at the back of our minds, most of us know that in our own ways we are guilty of the same sins. By punishing Laws and Jones we vicariously punish ourselves. That is not to say that most journalists take money to change their mind, but that money paid to others and other considerations do corrupt the process. There is a reason why journalists rate next to politicians for honesty.

In the first place we all touch up the chaos of events that is the raw material of news, and neatly tie it up into cause and effects, good guys and bad guys, tragedy and farce, when it is rarely clearly any of these. By so doing we produce not pure news, but "faction". It is what the majority of readers and listeners require, so our honesty is corrupted by the need to have an audience.

With the exception of the ABC and some community outlets, the news is produced for commercial gain. It is a filler between the advertisements. The public believes that these commercial considerations often dictate news content. Murdoch’s efforts to schmooze the Chinese government by trying to censor Chris Patten’s book underlines the truth of this.

Some years ago the Courier Mail launched a campaign against the importing of tinned pineapple from the Philippines. This was affecting pineapple growers. What the Courier Mail never revealed was that it had a financial interest in the Big Pineapple, a tourist attraction north of Brisbane involved in the pineapple industry. The only significant difference that I can detect between this and the 2UE position is that the conflict of interest was between the whole organisation and its readership, not just one or two of its journalists – surely a grosser violation of trust.

Laws and Jones are easy to target because cash changed hands, but there are other less tangible considerations that corrupt the process. All journalists carry a capital investment with them of the contacts that they have made through their career. Knowing where to go and how to get information is what puts food on the table. But sources always have a quid pro quo. I would be surprised if there is a journalist alive who could honestly say that they have unerringly adhered to the journalists’ code of ethics. Deadlines, exclusives, on-going relationships all put pressure on ethical obligations.

The source of conflict does not need to be external. We all have points of view. That is what makes writing interesting in the first place. Point of view can all too easily become bias. Even in not-for-profit news organisations individual journalists can still be corrupted because of loyalty to considerations other than presentation of news – ideology, promotional possibilities, group. These are conflicts of interest that cannot be exposed by any declaration of personal interest.

There are two ways of dealing with the problems dealt with by the inquiry. One is to regulate. There are limits here. Laws has already made fun of the rule that he must declare his interests before dealing with a news item concerning any of his sponsors saying (according to my notes) – "If the Optus building is burning, I have to declare that they are a sponsor? Really?" What about the situation of the Courier Mail and pineapples – should it also declare an interest? Probably. Newscorp, PBL, the ABC and Fairfax when writing on media regulations, broadcasting regulations, digital TV?

One also needs to ask whether declaration is enough. What the various codes of ethics and the inquiry are saying is that news gathering is a special activity which needs more than the defamation laws and the Trade Practices Act to regulate it. This being the case, shouldn’t journalists, and their employers, absent themselves from any area where they have a conflict of interest?

To do this absolutely would be impossible. Who would have been left to report the Government’s decision on digital TV, given that all of the major outlets were players? But it might be possible to circumscribe the commercial interests that a media outlet might have of a non-media nature - the Courier’s investment in The Big Pineapple for example or the Packer empire investments in casinos. This too would seem impractical. Particularly when anyone can start up a journal on the net for virtually nothing.

How do you decide what news outlets come within the ambit of such legislation? Do you need a certain circulation, or would it just be limited to broadcast media where a government licence is required? It would also require limits on maximum individual shareholdings right across the industry to ensure that owners did not simply park their conflicts of interest in different corporate vehicles.

Regulation alone is likely to give an unwieldy and unsatisfactory result. The real solution lies in choice. Faced with a number of points of view, the public is generally no less fallible than commissions of inquiry or regulators. The goings on at 2UE are only a major problem if there are no alternative sources of information.

That means that the Government should have used the extra bandwidth supplied by digital to increase the number of licences. It also means that it should look at government broadcasting. Both ABC and SBS tend to put a monochromal view of the world, yet they are the only two capable of putting a point of view that is almost empty of potential commercial taint. It also means that it should have encouraged the ACCC to take a harder look at towns like Brisbane where the dominant newspaper was allowed to put its competitor out of business and would undoubtedly do the same with any new competitor.

Perhaps that is why the ABA Inquiry was so apparently lenient on 2UE, Jones and Laws – in life some evils are ineradicable, and the attempt to eradicate them can distract from measures which will drain their potency more effectively by marginalising them.