'The Age' and 'On Line Opinion'

The same day I received a phone call from Baker. He asked me a few questions about why the article had not run and who was on the company board and the editorial advisory board. I gave him full details, including the roles that various individuals played.

He didn’t ring back to put allegations to me that the decision was politically motivated, but that was the purport of the article that he ran the following day.

The AJA Code of Ethics says that a journalist must “Report and interpret honestly, striving for accuracy, fairness and disclosure of all essential facts … not suppress relevant available facts, or give distorting emphasis. Do [their] utmost to give a fair opportunity for reply.”

The article Baker wrote gave the clear impression that our refusal to publish was the result of political influence.

He did that by:

• quoting Rhiannon with her allegations, but never putting them to me so they could be answered;
• mentioning that Greg Barns and I are board members and have in the past played roles in the Liberal Party, without mentioning that I had been expelled and Barns had resigned from the party;
• claiming that I was chair of the board when it had been made clear to him that Nicholas Gruen, who heads the federal government’s inquiry into Web 2.0, is the chair;
• failing to mention the other board members until the end of the article, and then making no statements about their political leanings;
• only mentioning the three members of the Editorial Advisory Board who have some non-Labor affiliations, including Lucy Turnbull, and omitting all of the others, such as former ABC Managing Director Brian Johns, whose political affiliations are quite different; and
• claiming that the board was concerned about legal threats from Malcolm Turnbull when no such threats had been made.

If you read the article without any contextual knowledge you could easily get the impression that On Line Opinion is run by some sort of Liberal Party cabal headed by me and that we bowed to either legal pressure from Malcolm Turnbull or personal pressure from Lucy Turnbull to stop information reaching the public.

Instead of that OLO is a journal where for 10 years we have been at pains to provide political balance through our choice of articles and our choice of management. Fairfax Media might be chaired by a former Liberal Party Federal Treasurer, but the paper’s staff apparently believes that if the management of any other organisation has former Liberal Party attachments that is evidence of bias.

To some readers this may appear to be a storm in a teacup. On Line Opinion has a strong audience base because it does provide a broad range of articles from a broad range of perspectives. We are also remarkably open and transparent with our critics. Charges of bias ring hollow.

Which is exactly the point - why would The Age take a swipe at a journal like ours? I can think of a number of reasons, none of which are to the credit of The Age, and some of which point to problems across the newspaper industry.

Criticising us was an easy story. With the loss of classified advertising revenue and the migration of increasing amounts of advertising to the Internet, journalists are under pressure to be more productive, which means produce more copy in the same time. Little work went into the first story which was passed-off as investigative journalism. The Greens’ bias claim against us stretched the story into two for very little additional effort.

Newspapers are stuck in a financial paradigm where their cover price doesn’t cover their production costs and so they are reliant on advertisers to make a profit. Their strategy has been to try to grow readership. The only way you can do this when you already have the upper socio-demographic audience is to go down market and make your “news” more tabloid.