Crikey

I have just been sent the following by the Chair of the Australian Press Council, Julian Disney. It is the detail of his agreement with News Limited CEO John Hartigan about the audit of editorial expenses to be conducted in Australia.

It allows for independent oversight, but on first glance seems to me to be the kind of inquiry that might alert management to any problems, rather than the kind that would lead to a confident public clean bill of health.

Here is Disney’s email.

Margaret,

As requested, I am sending you below the terms of the agreement with News Limited in relation to appointment of an assessor. They were agreed last Thursday. The agreement is in the public domain and has been sent to some other journalists on request.

Julian

“1. News Limited has invited the Chair of the Australian Press Council to nominate an independent assessor for the review which the company is conducting into third party payments.

2. The role of the independent assessor will be to examine and comment on
– the proposed methods and scope of the News Limited review, including any changes during the course of the review;
- the appropriateness of action by the company in response to the review.

3. The independent assessor will be available to brief the Chair of the Press Council and will report publicly at the conclusion of the review.

4. The independent assessor is being appointed to help provide public assurance that News Limited has initiated and acted upon the review in an appropriate manner. Of course, the assessor is not responsible for the conduct of the review itself.

The name of the independent assessor, and the proposed timeline for completion of the review, will be announced as soon as possible.”

I am in my hometown, Adelaide, at the moment. Last night I was given a strong martini by my old friend, Des Ryan, who edits that city’s InDaily website.

Then he told me that there were no free drinks, and I had to be interviewed for InDaily in return for the excellent martini.

Here is a link to an edited result. Ryan threatens to put the lot on YouTube, but I don’t think it’s there yet.

http://www.indaily.com.au

13 July, 2011

Dear Colleague,

As disturbing events continue to unfold in London I believe it is important to keep you up to date with our position in Australia.

Some media outlets, certain commentators and some politicians have attempted to connect the behaviour in the UK with News Limited’s conduct in Australia. This is offensive and wrong.

So far this week we have seen:

- a major television news bulletin report that News Limited executives were suspects in the phone hacking scandal – they apologised and corrected this the following night

- a federal senator call on the Government to investigate whether News Limited was engaging in phone hacking even as he admitted he had no evidence of any wrongdoing by News in Australia

- the ABC report that the former head of the National Crime Authority wanted the Government to establish a new regulatory body “to ensure that Mr Murdoch’s Australian media operation was behaving responsibly”. In fact, he said no such thing; he has proposed a new press council to govern all media

- accusations that we don’t disclose our code of conduct and that most of our journalists are unaware of it and that it isn’t available online – this is simply false

However erroneous the allegations, I believe it is important to deal with these perceptions constructively.

Our code of editorial conduct is available to all journalists; indeed all staff can access it. It is on our intranets and available in hard copy. The code is given to journalists who are required to read it and abide by it as a condition of their employment.

Yesterday I asked divisional managers to publish the editorial code on each of our masthead websites to neutralise even the most ludicrous assertions that we are somehow afraid to disclose it.

Yesterday, HWT released an updated and expanded version of its Editorial Code of Conduct and editor in chief Phil Gardner conducted briefings to staff. HWT’s new code has been 3 months in preparation and its release is unrelated to events overseas. The HWT code is the most current and comprehensive we have and is likely to become the model for a new national code for News.

In recent days I have had two lengthy conversations with Julian Disney, head of the Australian Press Council. Julian has brought fresh ideas, energy and conviction to the Council. He recently expanded the Council by appointing a senior person to devise a new set of National Standards. I welcome this and News will work with the Press Council and other media outlets to strengthen the Council’s ethical codes and guidelines and improve its complaints handling process.

Every worldwide employee of News Corp recently received a copy of the updated Standards of Business Conduct. These standards which are already on the News Corp website are being posted on all of our intranets.

We will be conducting a thorough review of all editorial expenditure over the past 3 years to confirm that payments to contributors and other third parties were for legitimate services.

Policies, codes and guidelines are important. But what matters is conduct.

I have absolutely no reason to suspect any wrongdoing at News Limited. However, I believe it is essential that we can all have absolute confidence that ethical work practices are a fundamental requirement of employment at News Limited.

I intend to keep you informed of relevant developments as appropriate and welcome any feedback.

John Hartigan
Chairman and Chief Executive

In an alternative universe, the little dust up I have been having with News Limited over the last few days would have taken a different course. Imagine if it had been this way. After I wrote this article in the Crikey email, News Limited’s spokespeople might have said something like this:

“We dispute your claim that our reporters are not sufficiently aware of our Code of Conduct. But we should publish the Code to the public, including on our webpages, so that our readers are more aware of it and can find it easily. We’ll do that.”

End of story.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, as readers of this blog will see from the previous posts carrying my correspondence with News Limited’s Greg Baxter, an acrimonious correspondence followed, full of fury and attack, culminating in an announcement that the Code would, after all, be published on the company’s masthead websites. It could have been achieved so much more quietly. How News Limited conducts its PR is up to it, of course. But I would have thought this week was hardly copybook methodology.

Today and tonight the Australian’s Media Diarist, Caroline Overington, has gone in to overdrive with vitriol and personal attacks against me and Crikey, all the while insisting that we are insignificant and that nobody cares about us.

Well, glad we got that straight.

I don’t intend to respond in kind. Had Overington’s posts been on this blog, they would have been in breach of its Editorial Policy.

But some of what Overington says needs a response.

She claims:

The point of Simons’ raving is, of course, to try to smear local reporters with the same brush as that of the UK journalists who stand accused of phone tapping, paying off cops, and all manner of other criminal behaviour.

That’s not true. I wrote in this piece that I thought such behaviour was unlikely to happen here, and if it did tabloid television, rather than newspapers, would be the first place to look. I wrote that while it was impossible to be completely confident on the point:

I think it is true that for the most part, Australian journalists would pull up short of bribery and illegal behaviour.

However I have also said, both during this controversy and before now, that awareness of ethical codes and ethical cultures in newsrooms is not nearly good enough. I stand by those comments. In particular I wrote in this piece last Friday that awareness of the Code of Professional Conduct within News Limited was low, and that many reporters employed by News Limited had never read the Code, and many did not even know it existed. I stand by those comments. I know them to be true.

It is true that I also wrote you could not find a copy of the code with a Google, when in fact it has been on the ABC Media Watch site for some time. So I was wrong to that extent. But how ironic that it took Media Watch, and the public broadcaster, to publish the News Limited code, rather than News Limited itself. How telling that Overington was forced to link to the site of a program she is fond of bagging, and on which she has featured, rather than to one run by her own employer.

The central point is that such codes should be freely available to the public, promoted by the media organisations  themselves, and published on mastheads’ websites. It is good that Baxter has now declared that News Limited will do this.

And if this little dust up has lifted awareness of the Code – surely never before so linked and referred to – then it has been a good thing.

Earlier today, I got a couple of emails from News Limited spin doctor Greg Baxter in response to this story in Crikey today. To read Baxter in full, see this earlier post. What follows below are my responses, interspersed with his comments

Margaret, you have misrepresented me badly in your item today for Crikey. I have previously sent you a copy of our professional conduct policy. I have also previously sent it to Media Watch and to any other media outlet that has asked for it. I have also sent it to academics and journalism students on a routine basis. I have never as far as I can recall refused to provide a copy to anyone that has asked for it.

Baxter may have sent me a copy of the policy previously, though I don’t remember him doing so.  In any case, it is irrelevant. I have had a copy of the various versions of the policy for years – ever since it was first issued in the 1990s. Baxter only joined News Limited in 2004, after leaving his previous job as spin doctor for James Hardie. I certainly had a copy of the policy long before that, and have also made a point of seeking out copies of the updates.

But whether or not Baxter has previously sent the policy to media outlets is not the point. What I was pointing out is that this vital document, proclaimed by CEO John Hartigan as central to the relationship of trust between media outlet and readers, is not published in a fashion that makes it easy for ordinary readers to find. The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance Code of Ethics for Journalists is easy to find. So too the Australian Press Council principles. So too the ABC Editorial Policies. The News Limited Code? Not so. Why isn’t if published on the web, and hotlinked from all the mastheads’ home pages?

If anyone wants a copy of Crikey’s code of conduct or your own can they get one? Meanwhile, please send me Crikey’s code and your own code as a professional journalist and blogger.

I will answer for myself first of all. My blog has, since its earliest days, carried this page on which I declare the codes I follow, and the editorial policy under which I operate this blog. Not so hard to find.

Since the beginning of my career, I have been a member of the Australian Journalists’ Association (now the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance) and have therefore been bound by that organisation’s code of ethics. In the past, I have served on the Victorian judiciary committee, which has a role in adjudicating complaints made under that code.

As for Crikey, its home page includes a Mission Statement. I regard it as woefully inadequate, and have said so internally and in previous publications. I am a retained contributor to Crikey, and have no power over editorial policies. However, I know that Crikey is presently considering a process to devise an ethical code for its staff journalists and contributors, and there will announcements about this soon. This is late in the day, I agree. And while not excusing Crikey’s tardiness, I will point out that it is a small, relatively young operator with an audience in the tens of thousands. News Limited is part of an international media conglomerate, and this country’s overwhelmingly dominant newspaper publisher. One would think that publishing its ethical code on a website should not be beyond its ability.

I have already responded to your erroneous points about whether there are any journalists at News that claim to have not seen it or received it. I am sure there are some. And as I said, there is no excuse for them not to have seen it or to have a copy. The fact that you have received all of 10 responses from a total staff of about 10,000 – including 3000 editorial staff – tells its own story.

The responses are still rolling in. They tell their own story. While some agree that they were given a copy of the code, the majority say they were not. See previous posts

I am also sending you a copy of the code of conduct for Nationwide News which publishes The Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph and tomorrow HWT will be issuing an updated policy that has been in the works for 3 months that deals with professional conduct, social media and external media appearances by our staff.

Regards, Greg

Margaret, as per my earlier email I have just discovered that the Nationwide policy was included in the News Limited policywhen it was last updated so there is no separate document. As far as I can tell the major metro divisions all now use the same policy. The HWT policy has been expanded to deal with social media in particular which has been rolled out across the divisions progressively from News Digital Media.

Greg Baxter| Director, Corporate Affairs

Baxter seems to be a bit confused about the policy, and how it applies and has applied in the past.

In fact, ever since it was first devised, and before the recent updates, it was intended to apply to all News Limited publications, including metro dailies and community and suburban newspapers. I am aware that the HWT policy has recently been expanded – a process that pre-dates the recent fuss over the News of the World, just in case anyone was wondering. Why the HWT has gone down its own road on some matters, and how this policy fits with the overarching News Limited policy, are questions I have asked but to which I have not yet received answers.

In the absence of more information, it all looks a bit messy, and far from the consistent process one would hope for from Australia’s dominant media organisation.

Not that there is anything wrong with the News Limited policy. I like it, and Crikey will publish it in full for all to see tomorrow.

Then the readers can judge how it governs journalists’ work.