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The Australian Press Council: making newspapers accountable?

By Russell Grenning - posted Thursday, 1 March 2018


Finding the right person to run an outfit like a national press council requires infinite patience, a forensic analysis of all likely candidates' CVs, an exhaustive cross-checking of referees, friends and enemies, an informed assessment of their real or likely political loyalties and, above all, deciding if he or she is actually up for the job and all it entails.

In Nigeria, all of this was done – well, nearly all of this was done – by President Muhammadu Buhari before he settled on Senator Francis Okpozo last December to be the Chair of their Press Council. Senator Okpozo had all of the right qualities it seemed, the principal one being that he was a senior member of the President's ruling party.

But there was one small problem – Senator Okpozo was dead. In fact, he died in December 2016 and President Buhari had obviously forgotten that he had issued a heart-felt statement at the time praising his dead colleague and extending condolences to the grieving family. The dead Senator's widow was remarkably forgiving saying that the President couldn't be expected to know everything that was going on, could he?

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Happily, the new Chair of the Australian Press Council (APC) Neville Stevens is very much alive and he started his job on 22 January. Mr Neville is a former Secretary of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.

The job had been vacant since the resignation in June last year of the previous Chair, Professor David Weisbrot who quit in a bit of a huff after becoming embroiled in a bitter stoush over the appointment of Carla McGrath to the Council that month. Ms McGrath was, and still is, deputy chair of the left-leaning activist group GetUp.

Perhaps rather oddly, Ms McGrath's biography on the APC website makes no mention of this senior activist role although her GetUp profile proudly states, "In 2017 she became a public member of the Australian Press Council."

Announcing his resignation only days after the appointment of Ms McGrath had generated such fury, Professor Weisbrot said "my heart is simply no longer in the job, and it's a difficult enough job at the best of times." He said the attacks on the appointment of Ms McGrath were "thoroughly misconceived" and that she had been appointed after a "fair and open process". Indeed, Ms McGrath had "shone" as a candidate.

The denunciations of Ms McGrath's appointment included a perhaps surprising attack from the journalists' union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance as their own Press Council representative Matthew Ricketson had voted in favour of the appointment. But the Union reacted swiftly when it learned of the appointment with its Chief Executive Paul Murphy saying that her concurrent positions on the Council and GetUp were "incompatible". He added, "...we don't believe that it is appropriate for someone to sit on the Press Council who also holds a senior position in such a politically active organisation"

The Australian and News Limited generally also heavily criticised the appointment saying that they would not co-operate with Press Council inquires involving Ms McGrath. The Editor of the Fairfax paper, The Sydney Morning Herald, tweeted that it seemed "weird that political activists would be appointed to oversee and potentially police the press. Not good." Even the National Affairs Correspondent of the left-leaning New Matilda described the appointment as a "disastrous decision".

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The Press Council has continued to defend Ms McGrath's appointment saying that it is aware of its duties to disclose potential conflicts of evidence. But there is no doubt that this appointment has done the Press Council serious harm.

The Press Council was established in 1976 and is responsible for promoting good standards of media practice and handling complaints against Australian newspapers, magazines and associated digital outlets. Its birth was an attempt by the industry to head off the move by the Whitlam Labor Government the previous year to create a government authority to police it. With the dismissal of that government, the proposal lapsed.

It has had a chequered history.

In 1979, during the run-up to the South Australian State Election the Murdoch-owned Adelaide paper "The News" campaigned against the ALP and there was a successful complaint heard by the Council. News Limited, which claimed irregular procedures, withdrew from the Council in 1980 and didn't rejoin until 1987. The journalists' union withdrew in 1986 and didn't rejoin until 2015. In 2012, The West Australian newspaper withdrew from the Council and set up its own complaints body.

In 2015/16 financial year, the Council's total income was $2.08 million with News Limited by far the highest contributor with their "contribution band" anywhere between 31% to 60%.

Clearly, if News Limited got really upset with the Council and withdrew again, the Council's fragile finances would simply collapse. The organisation would very largely cease to exist in its current form. And News Limited is already upset over the McGrath appointment. In 2015, then Editor-in-Chief of The Australian – News Limited's flagship newspaper – Chris Mitchell vowed to remove the paper from what he described as the "activism" of the Council.

Over the years there have been attempts to change the Press Council be either expanding or restricting its Council membership or by fiddling about with the complaints handling and adjudication processes.

The most recent was the inquiry set up by then Labor Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. Roy Finkelstein QC led the Independent Inquiry into Media and Media Regulation which reported in February, 2012. Before the then government actually got around to doing anything with the highly controversial recommendations it was defeated the following year.

With regard to the APC, Mr Finkelstein wrote in his report, "...the APC suffers from serious structural complaints...it does not have the necessary powers or the required funds to carry out its designated functions. Publishers can withdraw when they wish and alter their funding as they see fit."

No doubt about it, he was spot-on with those observations.

He proposed that a new body, the News Media Council, be established which would police all news and current affairs coverage in print, online, radio and television and that this new body "should have secure funding from the government and its decisions made binding."

That harked back to the failed 1975 attempt by the Whitlam Government to establish a similar body. Predictably, this caused great consternation among media outlets so it died a lonely death.

As Mr Stevens takes over his chairmanship duties with the APC he will be very conscious that he will be walking across eggshells trying to negotiate a path through the controversy caused by Ms McGrath's appointment.

Of course, he could always apply for the job in Nigeria if things don't work out well.

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About the Author

Russell Grenning is a retired political adviser and journalist who began his career at the ABC in 1968 and subsequently worked for the then Brisbane afternoon daily, The Telegraph and later as a columnist for The Courier Mail and The Australian.

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