An Open Letter to Journalists at News Ltd

Guest Author Uncategorized

Victoria Rollison is a legend in her own lifetime in Australia’s (and undoubtedly beyond’s) Fifth Estate. We are most grateful to Ms Rollison for permission to republish her work.

Dear News Ltd Journalists,

I’m writing you this letter on behalf of all Australians. That includes everyone who can vote in the upcoming election, as well as those too young to have a say in their own future. I wanted to let you know that your behaviour throughout the election campaign has been appalling. I know you know as well as I do that it’s not the role of a journalist to campaign for a political party. Journalists often justify their bias by saying that opinion pieces can be whatever they want them to be – whether or not they’re biased, unbalanced, untrue, or part of a conspiracy on behalf of your boss to get rid of the NBN, which threatens his business interests. But you’re not just contributing opinion pieces and amateur PhotoShopped front page images, denigrating the target of your smear campaign. You’re also contributing news articles, designed to bring about a certain result, a result you’ve allegedly been instructed to manufacture to help your boss make money. Doesn’t this make you feel dirty? Doesn’t the 17 year old aspiring journalist in you feel even a little bit sad about finding their middle-aged-self behaving in this unethical way? Don’t you care about the impact your work has on the country you live in?

I’m sure many of you justify your blind obedience in the ‘get Rudd’ campaign to the fact that you need a job. You have to do what you’re told so you can keep working as a journalist. I know there’s not many jobs out there for journalists, but this doesn’t justify you doing the wrong thing. There are hundreds of examples throughout history of ‘employees’ doing the wrong thing on behalf of their bosses, and justifying this wrongness by saying they were instructed to do it. That doesn’t make it ok. If Murdoch told you to hit your wife, would you do that too? Where exactly is the line that you wouldn’t cross, no matter what your boss wanted? Is there a line? When you write puff pieces about Tony Abbott, when you do glamorous photo shoots of Tony Abbott’s daughters but don’t actually ask them a question, when you choose not to scrutinise Abbott, and omit news that is damaging to him, when you support Mal Brough’s campaign to destroy Slipper and then ignore the news that you were part of the Ashbygate conspiracy which a Federal Court Judge has revealed, when you cover your front page with blatant propaganda to help Abbott win government, but don’t tell your readers what his real plans are, when you give a candidate a free run and create the misleading impression that the Labor government is unsuccessful, you are failing Australia. Your job is not more important than your responsibility as a journalist. How are you ever going to get another job with this sort of behaviour in your background?

I actually think it’s an absolute outrage that not one of you has resigned in protest during this election campaign. Not one of you has stood up for journalistic integrity and said ‘enough’. Not one of you has said your pay cheque isn’t more important to you than your ethics. And what about all the jobs your readers will lose because of your campaign? You know Tony Abbott has proudly announced that he’ll sack 12,000 public servants. These are people doing important work in our communities. They help people. They support the disadvantaged in society. How is your job more important than their jobs?

No doubt many of you are Liberals yourself, having been hand-picked by your boss to make sure you’re on his side. But even if you think Tony Abbott deserves to win the election, and even if you like his policies and are completely in favour of his plans for this country (assuming you know what these are), don’t you think the Australian people have a right to hear both sides of the story before making up their own minds? Don’t you think it sounds a little bit like Fascism for your boss to decide that he wants an Abbott win, and then for you, his minions, to do his dirty work in the most blatantly dishonourable and immoral media campaign this country has ever seen?

Perhaps you read letters like this, and you are so hardened to the world that you let it roll over you, like water off a duck’s back. But I just hope that somewhere, deep down inside you, there’s a little voice reminding you that you’re doing the wrong thing. If you even have the ability to feel guilty, to feel ashamed, even if it’s just at 3:00am in the morning when you can’t sleep, I hope you feel awful.

It’s also important for you to know that we won’t forget what you’ve done. If your boss gets his way, and you do manage to deliver Australia the most conservative, austerity obsessed, downright mean and selfish government we’ve ever had, it’s very likely most of your readers, especially those in areas like western Sydney who’ve you’ve conned most successfully, will not be very impressed with you. They might ask why on earth Abbott is cutting spending on services they need, like health and education, when they didn’t hear about it before the election. They might be disappointed to hear their work rights are being undermined by the same front bench who came up with Work Choices. And they might be really pissed off when the surplus they’ve been promised is actually a gigantic $30 billion dollar black hole. No doubt you’ll do your best to blame all these woes on Labor, as this is your unthinking knee-jerk reaction to everything. But how long can this work? I know you like your readers dumb, but don’t underestimate how quickly people work out that they’ve been screwed over. I hope your precious job is worth it then. I would have thought your entire industry was in enough trouble without you putting another dozen nails in its coffin through your own arrogance and incompetence.

481 thoughts on “An Open Letter to Journalists at News Ltd”

  1. Essential looks like joining the rest in being dire for the ALP.

    Rudd was re-installed to save the furniture. Looks like all he has done is pour petrol all over it.

    Rather than Gillard being able to wage a campaign with some internal consistency, we have Rudd who can only make it into a popularity contest. And now he is more unpopular than Abbott.

    Six years was not enough to bed the ALP program into the Australian psyche like Medicare. Now it will be totally trashed – Abbott will leave no trace of them in his rush to please his real masters – the Oligarchs who will now run the country.

    For those that expect Abbott to be a short term proposition, I have my doubts. With the truly powerful behind him, he has the potential to be our very own Putin.

    By the time he is through, Australia will probably be unrecognisable.

  2. gd,

    Abbott will get a free pass today and a tickle on the tummy by the OM.

    The OM have spoken. The coalition will win and that is the way this last week will be reported.

    Rudd said some good things yesterday.

    However it just makes me wonder if Rudd really just broke the emergency glass and grabbed some ” labor values ” for the day as a last resort.

    He has been lacking in said values for the whole campaign and I do not think Rudd would know a real labor value even if it came up and bit him on the bum..

    Why yesterday ?

    A last resort perhaps ?

    I now believe the campaign was shot from the start and lost last week with the costings noise.

  3. Turnbull is going to give us all free email addresses. How kind! Honestly, what planet has this twit been living on for the past eleventy years?

    “All Australians, individuals and businesses, will have, if they wish, access to a completely free digital mail box, a electronic pigeon hole, … where all government correspondence for you will be sent – it can never be lost, it will always be there, you can configure, forward it on to your accountant, your other email account… for free.”
    http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/it-pro/government-it/digital-mailbox-for-a-digital-economy-malcolm-turnbull-20130902-hv1lu.html

    I’ve been doing all this with ‘government correspondence’ going to my free gmail address for yonks. So has half the planet, with an array of free email addresses. Someone should tell Malcolm…..

  4. dunny – I was just joking, I’m going to watch it for a laugh as that’s about all you can do at the moment.

  5. I think a lot of Labor MPs forgot one little fact – whiteants don’t save furniture, they destroy it.

  7. Just tuned in and missed his preliminaries but the summary I’m hearing now is still taking it no further than platitudes. Back to bashing Labor “scares”. Denying what will be cut, and of course labor’s done all the cuts. Ah, back to the old favourite, “…there will be no carbon tax…” trying to claim this was a breach of trust. Scores a littel point by highlighting Rudd’s backtracking.

    Now a few porkies and scares about it going up to $38 a tonne, and that it does nothing to reduce emissions. on shaky ground here, but I doubt if a journo will take him up. Claiming carbon credit purchases is the only reason the emission figures are down. Really onto crap here.

  10. :monkey: kicks off with hyperbowl in bullshit. Carbon tax to cost gdp $1 trillion by……..2050 . Oh and China doesn’t have a carbon tax.

  11. Wow, Abbott is even worse than your wildest imaginings. All carbon tax, someone should remind him it’s a levy. Justifying his rape the environment program.

  12. Leone – best concise fact of life I’ve read in ages! Trouble is, it was so clear to anyone with half a brain…. One has to wonder what planet Caucus inhabits!

  13. Simple question – Mr Abbott you once that a simple tax on carbon was probably the best method for CO2 reductions.

  14. I can definitely see Abbott acting like Putin.

    Rather than going about solving solutions, he’ll probably go on his own program of implementing his ‘guided democracy’ dreams by going around electoral reform favouring the Liberals. Probably something like introducing optional preferential voting federally to make it harder for Labor to win off Green preferences, or raising the voting age to 21 or some other rubbish like that to get less young people out voting.

    And while distracting the dull public with publicity stunts, he’ll be ruthless with opponents and after a few years might start oppressing the same people he despised and bullied in his youth.

    But then again, I don’t know if Abbott has the mental capability of being as dominant in politics as Putin, since there are a lot of powerful men propping him up and he’ll have to act as their puppet. Whether he is capable of being loose from their strings would remain to be seen.

  15. Still pretending that the carbon tax has lowered the GDP. He really weaves a web of deceit with this. I’m surprised he’s gone on with this. All the objective measures suggest that clean energy is working and the economy is doing well. I wish he’d gone on with this on the campaign trail. I can’t imagine the public seeing this as a reason for changing their vote.

    Now venturing into fantasy land by saying Gonskl would be more affordable without a carbon tax. Still claiming that Gillard shouldn’t have sold out to the Greens. Libs will boost jobs, growth and wages. Apparently it all depends on abolishing the carbon tax. Productivity will rise by 10%. This beats Hockey’s made-up stuff.

  21. All that stuff on carbon tax and no reference to climate change. Apparently this will guarantee investment to go ahead. (Record growth in investment doesn’t count presumably). Now on “bad government” an old favourite, neglected a little in recent times.

    Not interested in being personally wealthy. But wants everyone else to be. Budget will be on track to a surplus. Boats will have stopped (might’ve missed that one with my late arrival). Still talking about roads. Even giving a plug for how good Fraudband is! (At least he hasn’t made a reference to the real one costing $90 Billion.) Now his PPL, which really is all about helping those out in the western suburbs.

    Tax white paper promised. will lead to “lower, fairer” tax system. Will be part of the next term agenda. All affordable. Only with LNP!

  24. Listening to Abbott’s NPC address he seems to base all his numbers on the world up to 2050 doing NOTHING to manage carbon. Talk about dodgy!

  26. Still nothing more than slogans and platitudes. Doesn’t promise miracles. Nothing specific here but faith to go on.

  27. This little black duck

    That comment sounded quite bizarre and random. Could be a little whistle to the 2GB set that went off over former PMJG daring to get a better house.

  31. Mark Kenny has first shot. Ask about tobacco. And coistings, when he’s going to release any.

    Abbott boasts by ending his tobacco support as a sign of leadership. Didn’t say whether he’d move against plain paper packets. Claims all his costs have been more throughly done than ever and scrupulous.

  33. Any one listening to NPC with Abbott. Speech unbelievable. First half made up of the words “carbon tax” repeated in every sentence.

    Fact finder is going to have fun with this speech.

  34. I notice, that in spite of Abbott getting into his speech “carbon tax” which must be hundreds of times. no question on the matter.

  36. The looks on the faces of the audience, are revealing indeed. Next question, the squabbling on between the Coalition in WA.

  39. Right, so Rudd won the spill on the basis that he was what the ‘Australian people wanted’. As a result we’ve had a rather large outflux of talent at the top end of the ALP. And now the figures are trending somewhere back to where they were when he took over from Gillard.

    I just want to make it clear that we here saw the sleight-of-hand trick Murdoch was pulling there. Rudd’s ‘popularity’ while he was on the backbenches was largely a media construction. As expected, Rudd was hammered almost as hard as Gillard had been, and all those positive figures sunk accordingly. So all those ALP backbench nervous nellies have achieved is to dilute the talent pool in the ALP, and it’s likely they’ll lose their seats anyway. They fell for it.

    So, a word to them – if you believe in your party, back it. If you believe in the polls, maybe you should be working as a journalist instead.

    I shelved my anger at the change of leader at the time. I really don’t care about the ‘narrative’ all that much. What I do care about is good policy, and those good ALP ministers – especially the PM – that we lost in the name of ‘expediency’. We won’t get them back again. That’s the real shame.

  40. Wonder Woman with one about relentless opposing. Abbott rather misses the point of how he’d feel about the same to him. Claims there was much to oppose, and if the same happened, he’d expect it.
    Now Probyn about Truss being airbrushed out of Liberal ad in WA. (Abbott correects to “taken out” rather than “airbrushed”). Abbott answers on regions of disadvantage and says it will be jointly owned (Truss has been very cross about what was his scheme) – – says it is just a “vigorous” exchange between them. In Canberrra, however, coalition is “rock solid”.

  44. What’s all this about adult behaviour? Abbott would have to be one of the more juvenile MP’s.

  47. mikehilliard

    [What’s all this about adult behaviour?]
    It’s a riff plagiarised from the fugly US Repugs. When G.W. Shrub took office there was much trumpeting that “The adults were back in charge of the White House”. Hmm how did that work out for them ?

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