=
= Print this article | = Close this window

The Electronic Who= rehouse
By Max Suich
November 8, 2003=

The Electronic Whorehouse
By Paul Sheehan
Macmillan, 294pp, $30

This is a better book than the beat-up = title and cover and the tone of the early pages would indicate.=

Early on the English media is denounced= as "The Beast", Eddie McGuire is described as "Australia's most prominent journalist", and Fleet Street photographers are chastis= ed for taking pictures of Cherie Blair when she collected the milk off the doorstep in her nightgown the morning after New Labour= had won its first election. (Assign her actions to euphoria, not media innocence.)

This is the sort of shrill hyperbole th= at makes the heart sink and which the book, later, critic= ises in the dozen or so prominent Australian opinion peddlers it targets.

Paul Sheehan is a staff correspondent a= nd columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald. He wrote for the Herald<= /i> this year a fine, understanding account of the mood and values of the people who live in the neighbourhood of the ranch of G= eorge Bush in Texas, and that reporting is the best writing in this book.

Sheehan is at his best when reporting. = He provides a detailed analysis of the partisan content and presentation of a = Four Corners program, documents how some media ran with the charge of genoci= de after the 1997 publication of the Bringing Them Home report, shows h= ow threadbare are the ethical rules of the journalists' union, and rebukes his= own paper for poorly reporting a significant Federal Court case at the centre of the genocide controversy.

He also gives a going over to Robert Manne, Gerard and Anne Henderson, the editors of T= he Age, David Marr, Peter McEvoy, producer of the ABC's= Media Watch program, Four Corners reporter Debbie Whitmont, Mike Carlton, Phillip Adams and Phil Noyce. So = the book should not lack for media attention.

Sheehan argues that opinion, commentary= and propaganda reign victorious (in the Australian press); "news is marbled with the saturated fat of policy agendas".

There are plenty of readers who would a= gree.

His fundamental point, however, is that= these are the excesses of a left and liberal media establishment and by implicati= on that the right and the conservative viewpoint is not fairly represented in = the Australian media.

This is unpersuasive, given the solid conservatism of some of the Fairfax papers' own columnists, the predominanc= e in Australia of the News Ltd press, where opinion and news reporting is genera= lly, though by no means totally, conservative in tone, and the huge audiences for conservative and populist radio voices.

Sheehan gives little attention to the M= urdoch group, except for some flag waving for the New York Post and the news channel Fox News - which he acknowledges is self-serving and hypocritical, = but that merely redresses the balance of the liberal hegemony in the US media, = so it's OK.

Precisely because Sheehan tries to fill= the dual and often conflicting roles of reporter and opinionated commentator, he seems to miss the larger point - that the shrill posturing in the culture w= ars of both left and right leaves thoughtful and sceptical= readers few places to find the ideas and information they seek. The major debates in Australia= provoke plenty of partisan howling in the media but very little disinterest= ed explanation. This belligerent approach now even pervades the letters pages, displacing the often amusing and generally civil, intelligent commentary of less than 10 years ago.

In fact the noise of all these opinions, including Sheehan's, may be the reason there is growing disillusion among readers with the quality press and an increasing reliance on the internet f= or alternative information sources - the internet's threat to the mainstream me= dia is a subsidiary theme of Sheehan's book and presumably justifies the book's title.

The Australian daily press has followed= the Fleet Street model - as has Sheehan's admired New York Post - and ma= de the opinion pages a place where spittle flies and indignation overflows.

The Op-Ed page too often is now a space= to park staff writers who cannot be denied a column, and provide a platform for allegedly provocative contributors.

Like many other journalists of his and younger generations, Sheehan is pessimistic about the future of the quality press - it has, he says, lost the battle with the spin doctors, the websites and the management cost squeezes. As mass information becomes cheaper, the relative cost of quality becomes higher. When an older generation looks at = the resources available for colour supplements and advertising features, the opportunity to assign reporters to tell the reader what's going on rather than what they ought to think still seems available.=

A friend referred me to the Oxford Dictionary when I was looking for the Op-Ed page's origins. The entry quotes American novelist George V. Higgins in his novel Dreamland: "If you don't get a regular fix of the stuff that goes on the front pa= ge, you're not going to have anything to be insightful about on the Op-Ed page."

Max Suich w= as founding editor of The Independent Monthly and chief editorial execu= tive of John Fairfax 1980-87.

This story was found at: http://w= ww.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/07/1068013375925.html

=