Making Headlines

Chris Mitchell retired at the end of 2015 after more than 12 years as editor-in-chief of The Australian and 24 years as a daily newspaper editor at The Australian, The Courier Mail and Sunday Mail. As editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell ran the largest stable of journalists with the largest editorial budget in the country. In his newly released memoir, Making Headlines, Chris Mitchell has revealed closely held secret conversations with top people throughout his career. To discuss all of this and reflect on some of his career’s highlights, Chris Mitchell addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 10 October 2016.

MAKING HEADLINES

CHRIS MITCHELL

Hello ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming here tonight to hear me speak about my book Making Headlines. And thank you to my friends Gerard and Anne Henderson for inviting me.

I will start with a little anecdote which tells me a lot about what is wrong with modern media.

During my speech at the launch of Making Headlines last Friday week I thanked the Prime Minister, Mr Turnbull, for taking the time to read my book, for giving me feedback weeks before its release and for agreeing to launch it.

Immediately the media warriors on the Left and the Right swung into action. Conservatives saw mention that Turnbull had read the book before its physical publication as a sign I was doing his dirty work against former Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Lefties on Twitter and the usual news sites saw it as a sign that, yes, the former editor-in-chief of The Australian was still in the pockets of the Tories.

But no single reporter asked me about the comment. If they had I would have explained that in early August, long after the book had been through final proofing and long after I could make any changes to it, I rang Mark Simkin in the Prime Minister’s Office and asked if he could talk to Mr Turnbull about the possibility of launching the book. Just as I would have asked Mr Abbott had he still been PM.

Simkin got back to me and asked if I had a soft copy I could email so the PM could be sure there was nothing in the book that would pose a danger should he agree to do the launch. No conspiracy, no vetting of the text and most importantly not a single reporter thought to ask before penning their particular brand of conspiracy.

While the book has been making headlines, especially in rival left wing media such as Fairfax, the Conversation and the Guardian, I have often felt people writing about it cannot even have read it.

Because, if I had wanted to write a bitter and angry book that blew up politicians and media figures I most certainly would have had plenty of ammunition, but I would most certainly not have written this book, which is neither bitter nor angry.

So how to describe Making Headlines, a book my friends have allowed to be framed by my enemies? I think Caroline Overington did it best on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. She wrote: “It’s pervy, it’s amusing; above all else it’s a passionate love letter to journalism.”

That tweet captured exactly what I wanted it to be. And I am really pleased to say many in the media business who have read it since then have responded to me directly in similar terms.

I am not by nature a bitter man. Neither is the book bitter. But, in my retirement, my memories of my career are my own to retell as I see fit. And for all the mushrooms in modern journalism who seem to misunderstand the nature of insider reporting I recommend the ultimate insider’s book, Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker, about his time in the markets.

In politics and journalism, how about memoirs by former Sunday Times editor Harry Evans, his wife, former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil and former Herald-Sun editor Bruce Guthrie. In politics, how about the diaries of Bob Carr and Mark Latham? Or the memoirs of Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and even Tony Blair? As my friend Peter Fray said in The Australian last month, there is a long history of kiss and tell books in the media, many serialised by the company I used to edit papers for.

Now if someone wants to make a big deal about a funny tale of a former PM pushing his way into my house on a Sunday afternoon just before Christmas, guzzling copious wine without bringing a drop and then blurting out a story about seconds rugby and Joe Hockey which he then sees as an intimate betrayal when it is retold after Hockey has left politics and the former PM has lost the job I can only say two things in my defence as a journalist. I hacked no phones. I received no money from match fixing brothel owners.

What I did try to do was well summarised by Niki Savva. I have tried – after leaving journalism – to show readers what their political leaders are really like and how relations between government and the media really work.

I remind people the subjects of my hopefully entertaining tittle tattle were not Amanda Meade or David Marr or Andrew Bolt. They were five prime ministers and Rupert Murdoch. They were the strong, not the weak. I did not kick down or kiss up.

It should be clear to anyone with a modicum of historical understanding that three of the PMs I discuss wasted too much time on media spin and two succeeded because they managed to achieve big reforms in the national interest and resisted an overly intense focus on the daily news cycle.

If I had wanted to breach confidences I could have written some doozies. In this phone sit all the texts I received from Julia Gillard’s enemies in her own Cabinet about the AWU slush fund affair. I kept them private because they were indeed confidential sources for stories that were published. As were the many, many texts I received from Abbott frontbenchers about events leading up to the failed spill motion in February 2015. But they were confidential too because they were given to produce stories.

One of the most ridiculous things about modern media conversation is the way so many in the left and the right seem to exist in a vacuum. I am always amazed Abbott supporters now portray me as a lefty. Me, the most conservative mainstream newspaper editor the country has produced in half a century and the man who turned The Australian newspaper from a soft-left imitation of the SMH into the muscular centre right publication that today stands astride the media scene nationally as the one organisation capable of challenging the progressive dominance of the ABC.

This is what the book is really about, as Nicholas Rothwell pointed out at length and with great insight in the Review section of The Weekend Australian last Saturday week.

The book has a little tittle tattle. None of it is damaging apart from my final revelations about the 2008 Bush phone call story which I have had to wear like a hair shirt for eight years bound by confidential obligations to former prime minister Kevin Rudd.

But when I question whether the business of journalism needs to adjust its methodologies to compensate for the manipulative, lying ways of the latest generation of politicians, with their hundreds of spin doctors all twisting the message, readers should rest assured because these thoughts are coming from someone who has edited metropolitan daily newspapers at the highest level for 24 years.

Why, for example, should Rudd be able to bind journalists through their confidential obligations to something such as the truth about his ambitions for the UN Secretary General’s job. Why the 18 month conspiracy between government, journalists and editors to hide that truth from the voters who were told over and over in the media that Rudd was not interested when we now know he was discussing the role with the PM and the Foreign Minister as long ago as September last year? I do not feel bad at all for revealing he discussed it with me last November. The person who should be feeling bad is Rudd for deceiving the public for over a year.

But it is not just the rise of the politician who will say and do anything to get attention. Think Donald Trump.

It is the rise of social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook. More Australians now get their news from Facebook than from a mainstream media outlet including radio and television. This creates a self reinforcing circularity of views over facts.

Last week social media was in uproar over two pieces of analysis on the ABC website by the corporation’s best reporter, Chris Uhlmann, who proved to my mind that wind power did create frequency harmonisation differences between the interconnector with Victoria and the South Australian grid. Twitter went into meltdown with demands the ABC silence Uhlmann and Media Watch tick him off.

There was no consideration of any of his facts. Just a feelgood support for renewables that did not extend to trying to understand the physics of the engineering problems renewables can create.

This privileging of feelings over facts is finding its way into the mainstream media. If you follow news on the Fairfax websites during the day they are often led by trivial stories about social media outrage.

Similarly the rise of 24 hour television news has given credence during the daylight hours of the news cycle to very junior politicians who are interviewed mornings and afternoons and whose words then lead hourly bulletins and often the Fairfax and News Corp websites. These items overwhelmingly do not make the morning newspapers because they concern the opinions of uninformed and unimportant backbenchers. Their only qualification was that they were politicians who were prepared to drive out to SkyNews for the extra media profile.

At some level this would not matter much if we were sure the mainstream media would survive in something like the form we have known it for the past 50 years. But it may not.

Advertising is fleeing mainstream media for Facebook and Google, which now account for 70 per cent of new ad spending annually in the West. Classified ads, and especially recruitment in the national papers and cars and houses in the local papers, have migrated to specialist websites such as Seek.com, RealEsate.com and CarSales.com.

Even traditional display advertising is leaving print, radio and television as ad agencies look to develop products that follow the eyeballs. And this really is the core of the issue for the media business case. People are spending more time on the internet than they are with mainstream media, so advertising is moving to where the consumers are spending their time.

In Making Headlines I argue consumer revenue – old fashioned cover prices for print and digital products – is helping to save The Australian. But to succeed in consumer revenue you need news people will pay for and, increasingly, the News Corp tabloids are publishing nationally harmonised stories available for free on the company’s News.com.au website and Fairfax is breaking fewer unique stories in its core progressive AB demographic because its CEO Greg Hywood has been at the forefront of stripping costs – that is code for journalism in too many cases – from its businesses.

Back in 2010 and 2011, this seemed like a good idea at Fairfax and News, but it wasn’t. In advertising terms we used to say print dollars become digital dimes. Now those dimes have become pennies.

On The Australian my website CPMs (that is, cost per thousand clicks) were $50 in 2010 and less than $10 last year and falling fast. Much digital ad inventory on the network is selling for one dollar per thousand clicks.

Now if you are in the same pond as every other news company producing ubiquitous content no different from the free news on Nine MSN or Yahoo News it is highly unlikely you will be able to generate enough revenue through the paywall to sustain your journalism. People will pay, but only those who need premium news and know they cannot get what they want elsewhere. So The Oz and the AFR, for now at least, are safe, but most papers are in mortal danger.

This really matters. Even if you are a rusted on fan of, say, Andrew Bolt’s blog, that blog in itself is just a running series of commentaries on stories broken by newspapers, and mostly by The Australian. In fact, without newspapers and their websites it is hard to imagine anything of substance at all on morning television and radio.

And in the BAPH states, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart, the main city monopoly newspaper is likely still to have as many as 150 full time journalists. This will be a larger complement of journalistic firepower than all the other news media, electronic included, in the city concerned. This is very important because the newspapers in those states drive public accountability journalism because those states’ main issues seldom attract interest from the major Sydney and Melbourne papers. Without their papers these cities will be left to the vagaries of the balance between local and national news at the ABC, with its relentless focus on boutique issues such as Same Sex Marriage, animal rights and climate change.

So it seems to me that in both the national interest and the business self-interest of the bottom lines of the publishers themselves the industry has charged off in exactly the wrong direction. It has pro-cyclically driven down its journalistic capacity by getting rid of its highest paid, and therefore best, journalists to save money as circulations and ad revenue have fallen. But this has only succeeded in making them less relevant to readers and therefore less able to maintain circulations, which has then made them less attractive to advertisers.

In Making Headlines, I argue the real reason The Australian has lost fewer sales than any other paper and has been most successful at building a very strong paywall with 80,000 subscribers is because it has maintained a relentless focus on breaking exclusive news important to readers and unlikely to be found elsewhere.

So that is the problem for the business case for journalism. But Making Headlines makes a strong case that there are other problems to do with the practice of journalism itself.

Many critics have pointed to problems with polling that did not predict the Tory win in Britain last year, the UK Brexit vote or the rise of Donald Trump. Part of the analysis of why polling has failed is the realisation that many voters are not revealing their true intentions to pollsters because they believe their intentions are unfashionable. That is, they intend to vote for Brexit but the media has told them only uneducated voters would do so. So they do it anyway but do not disclose their intention to do so.

I believe a similar thing is happening in media and it is closely related to the move of journalism, and more specifically journalism education, to the left. In Making Headlines I argue at some length that advocacy groups have gained control of the agenda of journalism. This is not necessarily sinister and may just reflect the declining resources of the industry.

It is much easier for a well funded NGO to get its message across today via press releases than it was a decade ago. Even an organisation as well funded as the ABC is now easy pray for gay activist groups, animal rights groups, conservation lobbies etc.

Once a news editor, hard bitten and sceptical but in touch with the views of the audience, would ask: Why is this a story? It would need to pass his sniff test and then be followed up with balancing quotes from individuals and organisations taking the opposing point of view. Now listen to ABC radio any day of the week and you will find such press release journalism run as submitted to the news editor’s email inbox.

And young journalists are being given a diet of post modernism with lashings of social activism and released into the media world without the one quality we were once schooled in during our cadetships: skepticism. Your average middle aged news consumer might not have the same tertiary qualifications as the newly minted journalism degree holder but they sure have good bullshit detectors.

They know when they are being spun a line by a wide-eyed kid who has no experience of the world. This is why journalism has fallen down the ladder of trust. News consumers can tell the difference between news and advocacy and they hate being preached at by journos just out of nappies.

But guess what news employers trying to save a buck have been doing. They have been hiring exactly these youngsters on the cheap to populate newsrooms left sparcely staffed by many rounds of redundancy targeting the most experienced people.

This is the real problem with allowing young journalists to engage in ideological and political warfare on Twitter. Readers are meant to be able to trust the byline of the person writing a story. But if, for example, that reporter is writing about Mike Baird’s greyhound racing ban and, at the same time, has produced hundreds of tweets in favor of animal rights campaigns, will readers trust the work of that journalist? I think not.

And if you think I am kidding check the tweets of Bernard Keane and his advocacy for animals and then ponder whether his political commentaries on the issue are fair and balanced. He has been tweeting about dogs and more lately donkeys for several years and literally hundreds of times a month. Why should we trust his analysis of Baird’s ban? Well we should not because the ban has proved unpopular in the real world. The Twitter world is not the real world.

Not only does this social media activism raise issues of trust, it pollutes judgement inside the political process.

Baird announced his ban on Facebook and the government has actually been paying its media advisers for Facebook “likes” ($70 for each one by some media accounts). That is, rather than attempt to learn how the voters actually view the greyhound racing ban, it has relied on social media to take the pulse of the electorate. This completely fails to understand that the centre of gravity of social media is a long way to the left of the wider electorate.

This brings me to another point: The effect of the young, social media activist staffer on politics on both sides.

I believe this is the nub of the failures of prime ministers since the fall of the Howard Government.

Once upon a time prime ministers had their own personal rapport with the electorate. Good PMs met real voters and engaged with them. They had real plans for the country and knew that getting two or three big things done each term was the best that could be achieved within the confines of the three yearly election cycle.

If a government explained tough decisions to the voters and sold the benefits of those decisions to the electorate it could achieve difficult reforms. Think the seven versions of the Accord with the trade union movement to restrict wages growth and improve productivity in the 1980s. Or the GST or the guns buyback in the 1990s.

But in today’s politics, as Marshall McLuhan foresaw in the 1960s, the medium is the message.

While it sounds like a television comedy the truth is the public service has been relegated behind the interests of the political staffer, the fastest rising job category in modern government. And for today’s modern staffer, a person likely to be in their late 20s or early 30s, the daily messaging, winning the nightly television news message and now winning on social media, are the pre-eminent tasks of government. KPIs are so short term that the idea of a three year plan to finesse an economic reform is unimaginable.

We saw this in 2010. The only thing of note Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan were prepared to take from the Henry tax review was the mining tax, which Swan hoped to turn into some sort of class war election strategy. While Swan was meant to be carrying negotiations with the miners, Rudd was pursuing a national listening tour of hospitals designed to dominate the news cycle in every city from Cairns to Melbourne for a month.

Meanwhile his government was falling apart.

Think Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech. That was no more than an attempt by her imported Scottish UK Labor spin doctor John McTernan to distract the parliament from the scandal over her appointment of Peter Slipper as Speaker and to imply pursuit of the AWU slush fund story by The Australian was an act of misogyny. And to the eternal shame of many in the media the speech actually worked on journalists on the left.

In the first year of the Abbott government former Treasurer Joe Hockey spoke about “lifters and leaners”, but after his budget blew up went for a long family rest in Fiji. The electorate was never prepared for such a tough budget and the only media organisation that backed Hockey’s measure was actually The Australian. How different the first Costello budget, which set up the Howard years and for which the electorate was well prepared.

And of course last year and early this year we saw the Turnbull government destroy its economic credibility with a series of public thought bubbles about increasing the GST, refusing to change the rules on taxation of superannuation and then doing exactly that and pushing for PAYE tax cuts.

As an Australian patriot, I can only say I hope Mr Turnbull, who in my experience did not play the media game in the way of his three predecessors, can reach back to the great reform era of Hawke, Keating and Howard, and put an end to the nonsense of the past nine years. If more people read Paul Kelly than Twitter that might be possible. But I fear modern media is losing its mission.

I said at the start of this talk that Making Headlines had to some extend been framed by my enemies. This is a pity because many people who have read it have found the book both amusing and prescient in terms of its discussion of modern media.

Without breaking any confidences I will quote from some feedback by daily editors and senior industry figures.

From one of the longest serving editors in the country: “I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed it. Your observations on newspaper editing were spot on and a great reminder of the things that really count. I think the parts about the future of journalism and the future of our profession should be compulsory reading for all in the industry.”

From an ad industry icon: “I read it from cover to cover in two sittings. Great stuff.”

From another on the innovations side of media: “Read the book. Loved it. First book read front to back in one sitting in 40 years.”

From a senior News Corp editor: “Love the book Chris. Absolutely ripping read. Brave too.”

I had fun writing Making Headlines and reflecting on what a privilege quarter of a century editing newspapers was. I thank News Corp for that privilege. Most of all I thank my friends in journalism, which I regard as one of the most important professions of all, along with politics and the law, in any right functioning democracy.

Yet journalism remains a slightly Pythonesque business. The son of a widowed refugee who ditched his dentistry scholarship, I got a job where I could have lunch with billionaires (and not just Murdochs) and Prime Ministers. I have drunk too many beers with Yitzhak Rabin and too many teas with Faisal Husseini. I have been to the Hotel Europa in Belfast with Jerry Adams for dinner and had lunch with Ian Paisley the next day.

On the day I was hired, I was interviewed by a legendary and laconic chief of staff who received a phone call in the middle of the interview. When it was clear it was a complaint he opened the drawer of his desk and put the entire phone and receiver in the drawer, the caller still speaking. He closed the drawer and looked up at me without even the hint of a smile. He lit a cigarette and said he would go and talk to the editor about me and to stay right where I was. A full 40 minutes later he came back and looked at me puzzled. “You still here? You had better have a job then,” he said and shook my hand. That is journalism in a nutshell.

For me there is an element of that slight madness throughout the industry and a flavour of it in the book. I hope you enjoy it if you try it.

And I thank you all for coming along tonight.