Advertise your own irrelevance

Dear Mr Hywood,

My name's Geoff Strong*. I'm employed as a journalist with The Age, which is a newspaper in Melbourne. I'm redundant, so please sack me. You can see from my latest offering that I have no idea about reporting in the twenty-first century, so please, do us both a favour.

You take take out the subbies too. I'm a bit ambivalent as to whether Julian Assange is a journalist or not, in my capacity as Gatekeeper of the Profession, but the subbies have decided that it's my job - no, our job - to take pot-shots at the most valuable source the news media has ever had.

IN ABOUT April last year, just before his name became a byword for, depending on your viewpoint, either transparency or treason, I attempted to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Armed with a mobile phone number passed on to me by a colleague from an unknown source, I found myself talking to Assange himself. His response to the call was understandable and hypocritical.

His first words were: "Where did you get my number?" When I offered a vague explanation, he expressed displeasure that it had been passed on to me. It was a natural response given his organisation was in the process of severely embarrassing the almighty US government by releasing the video from an American attack helicopter showing non-combatants, including two Reuters newsagency staff, being shot dead. Assange had reason to cover his tracks, but missed the irony in being contacted via leaked information.

We conducted a stilted discussion in which he said he had already been interviewed by Good Weekend (published subsequently), said he might talk to me if I had some information to trade, and required that I text my phone details. Apart from acknowledging that he received my SMS, I never heard from him again.

Here's a guy who trades on information, so what I did was dodge a direct question and offer him nothing. That shows you what a smart operator I am.

If irony is what's defined in that song by that Canadian lass just recently, then you can see it was pretty ironic for Assange not to talk to me. While it's true that every press sec and PR type in town fobs me off, I'm buggered if I'm going to cop that from Julian No-Mates! I'll rubbish him in The Age - and when you've been done over by The Age, there's no coming back. Assange will come crawling any day now, any day. Nobody can survive a going-over from The Age. Thanks for letting me use the paper for this purpose, Mr Hywood.

The US government is in the news, Julian Assange is in the news, I just assumed that they had equal standing, y'know? Apparently there is this belief that individuals have a right to privacy but corporations and government don't, but as an old-school journalist if I want a story I just go out and get it - and when I don't have a story, I'll beat it up until it looks like one.

Many would dispute Assange's claim that he is a journalist, but I agree that in a loose sense he probably does qualify.

Yes, if the Journalists' Club hadn't closed down, I might let him buy me a drink. As the Gatekeeper of the Profession of Journalism, I have standards you know. This is a guy who's released more stories than The Age ever has, so maybe possibly I just might, y'know, begrudgingly consider him a journalist, I suppose, if I had to. If he asked nicely. Which he didn't, the bastard.

Journalism is changing as traditional news organisations contract. A couple of years ago I calculated there were probably three or four former journalists who had crossed to what we still in the business consider "the dark side", for every one left working for the mainstream media.

By the dark side I mean spin doctoring, public relating or otherwise manipulating information fed back to their former colleagues. Incidentally, I can't blame people taking this path given the contraction of media jobs; people have to earn a living.

When I say "calculated", what I really mean is "pulled a number out of my arse". I assume that's what you mean when you talk about "the value proposition of journalism". I can't blame PR people for doing what they do, because like a good journalist I depend on them absolutely for anything I write. I tried interviewing a guy once, gee it was hard work!

Another change is the proliferation of dissemination outlets from organisations like ours, either online, a digital copy of the printed paper or an exclusive edition pitched to the disciples of Steve Jobs.

I know that people who drive Fords aren't "disciples" of Henry, nor necessarily subscribe to his views about workers, Jews etc. See, Mr Hywood? I just don't get it.

We call these things platforms, a recently appropriated word which in the past was associated with railways stations, the manifestos of political parties or the type of shoes worn by people who favoured bell-bottomed trousers.

I don't mean "we" in the first-person-plural sense of the word, or even in the royal sense-of-entitlement sense. Me and the boys down the pub tried to think of a word other than "platform" and we couldn't. Seeing as political parties don't have platforms any more, you may say: why can't media have them? But I'm old-fashioned, me. Don't get it, never will.

Ha ha! Used to work, Mr Hywood! Not at all like The Age, where our critical faculties are absolutely everything! No, I meant the other place.

Bearing a name almost as challenging as an Icelandic volcano is Kristinn Hrafnsson. His last name pronounced a bit like "Frobson", except that the beginning sounds like a sort of guttural Nordic throat clearing.

Xenophobia is an essential quality in any journalist, particularly in an increasingly globalised world - and especially in a multicultural city like Melbourne, where Age readers fancy themselves as part of a vibrant community, I thought it would be in the paper's best interests if I carried on like some mindless gibberer. Yes, even though he gave me the time of day and answered my inane questions, even though he is more of a journalist than I'll ever be, I thought it best to frame Mr Hrafnsson up-front like that.

Hrafnsson does have traditional journalist credentials - he has even recently been made redundant ...

C'mon, redundancy is the new black. I want some!

He says he is not sure about the future role of journalism and can't see where the business is going.

Believe it or not, a personal encounter with Geoff Strong of The Age failed to convince him. There's no pleasing some people.

Privatisation of things previously run by governments has been a factor; journalists have not been able to overcome that.

Because when a PR person says "no", that's it really. You may as well just give up.

And we see previously strong media organisations, like The New York Times, sitting on stories because they have been asked to do so by governments. This would not have happened in the 1970s."

Having spent all that time sucking up to government to regulate in favour of media organisations, we at mainstream media now find ourselves in a Faustian bargain with government. Teetering on the precipice of irrelevance, the last thing we want is for government to start fiddling with the corsetry of regulations that keep us solvent, let alone extending some of those "controversial measures" that have snuffed out the rights of others.

Hrafnsson's views were a little depressing. The upside was that he had no problem with how I obtained his phone number.

That's what the punters pay for: thorough reporting and insightful analysis. It's just a pity I can't do it. Fancy getting the chance to interview Kristinn Hrafnsson and Julian Assange, and having only this excrescence to show for it! The twenty-first century can only get more confusing, Mr Hywood. Please, all I want is to eat a cold pie and drink a flat weak beer and cheer for a footy team that doesn't love me back.

Please, sack me now. It's the only vindication as a journalist that I could possibly hope for.


* No it isn't! I'm Andrew Elder, writing a satirical blog piece as though I were Geoff Strong. I'm not "an anonymous blogger" just because you haven't met me.

The proud man's contumely

Background: Alan Stokes from The Australian Financial Review wrote a column printed on page 31 of the 8-9 January edition about how Julian Assange doesn't get the media. What follows refers to this article, and forms the content of an email sent to Stokes (thus the second-person voice).

In your piece you assumed two things. First, that Assange's relationship with the media is important and that damaging that relationship is to Assange's detriment. Second, that a damaged relationship with the media means that it will be harder to change government policies. I think you're wrong on both counts, and that by being wrong you're showing the limits of the groupthink that dooms conventional journalism.

It's interesting that you only noticed Wikileaks last November: four months earlier, the site published video from a US attack helicopter in Afghanistan. This was rightly reported by the mainstream media as a breach of security but wrongly they ignored Wikileaks' warnings at the time that there was more to come.

What's genuinely sad is the start of your seventh paragraph:

"Here's a sample of the recent news issues flying around cyberspace but yet to splash down in anything like a major way across the global mainstream media ..."

All of them, and more besides, are substantive issues. If ADHD-afflicted scoophounds can't focus on one for more than 600 words, that's their problem. It doesn't mean the rest of us are similarly afflicted. All of those cables alert us to further developments and provide grounds for further research, by journalists and specialists in the various fields they cover, and this is the real value of these leaks.

"Are you sick of it yet?"

No. Am I hankering for a return to a situation where newshounds churn out trivia and bulldust until they are good and ready to do some investigative journalism? No, definitely not.

It reminds me of the period in 2001 after September 11: yeah, it was the same event in article after article, but what else are you going to write about?

"Most of these stories, if unearthed by solid investigative journalism at any other time by any other outlet than Wikileaks, and released one at a time, would hit the front page.

Truth is, though, we're probably sick to death of Wikileaks ... Assange is partly to blame"

This reflects badly on those who decide what goes onto the front pages of newspapers. It doesn't necessarily reflect badly on those of us who have to read more broadly than the mainstream media because said organisations have so little clue about what really matters. We need to know about this stuff. If you're sick of it, what else are you going to talk about: Julia Gillard's earlobes? Nick Riewoldt's penis?

I disagree that there is marginal utility about major issues. Cricket and ice cream is not like, say, the possibility of destabilisation and armed conflict in Korea, where more Australians have died than in Afghanistan and where further unrest would have a real impact on this country. There's more to these issues than "a global conspiracy", and it's the job of journalists to show us what that is. True, information on the 'net is not always kosher, but Wikileaks has built a presence that is more significant than others.

Wikileaks did its partner organisations a favour when it agreed to supply them with information. Without Wikileaks, all they would have been left with were the sort of trivia that is the bread-and-butter of journalism: splicing together press releases to form a "story" that doesn't offer either background nor assistance with there it might go.

It is patronising to assume that your fellow humans can't laugh one minute and think seriously the next. By that logic, try telling your editor that the Alex cartoon or Peter Ruehl imperils the credibility of everything in the AFR.

You also don't justify your strange leap that a problem for media is a problem for government: a media that is overwhelmed or jaded by Wikileaks is discredited as a news source. Every time the media get hold of a domestic news story in a way that government doesn't like, government can claim that it has been misrepresented by a jaded and overwhelmed media; you for one won't be able to refute such a claim.

There are few issues for the Australian government to deal with from what has so far been Wikileaked. The idea that they can fob off popular objections to those policies because the media has worked itself into a stupor is to misunderstand the role of the media in modern society. Julia Gillard doesn't owe her position to the media; she came to office despite the media. She held it in a campaign where she was constantly teased: "Do you find it hard to get your message out?", and beat a man who can best be described as a media darling. She needn't worry that the Australian media will focus on her government in any substantive way. There is obviously some sort of rift between your image of the media - a prophylactic between a government and its people - and the reality that people ignore the mainstream media and politicians search for ways to connect with people (and vice versa) that don't involved the jaded, overwhelmed media. Someone’s going to have to heal that rift, Alan, and it isn’t my job to prop up your journosphere fantasies.

Wikileaks doesn't need those media outlets any more: their days of enterprises of great pith and moment has passed and will not return despite Mr Assange's arrangement of convenience. Given that investigative journalism is more talked about than done, those outlets sure as hell need Wikileaks. A small fraction of cables have been released from the Manning supply, and if there are more leaks to come then everyone knows you go straight to Wikileaks: never mind journalists, and the politicians can smirk all they like. A politician who only reads the mainstream media has a far darker future than Julian Assange does. A journalist who believes that major policy issues are like food or entertainment doesn't have much of a future in his own 'profession', and can't help us make sense of major issues (thus reinforcing the lack of future).

And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

- from Alan Stokes' favourite soliloquy

Update: Here's the text of Alan Stokes' reply to me on Tuesday:

Thanks Andrew.
Appreciate the feedback.
Let me attempt to address some of your thoughts.
- If you'd read my other columns you'd probably know my view is almost 100% counter to conventional and, certainly, afr widsom.
- in this case i am all for assange and very sad about how he's probably going to end up less important than he should be . that's the shaekspearean tragedy, with his personal fault either overkill and/or the interent.

- I noticed wikileaks way before november, the mainstream media didn;t until november and went mad about it then.
- i think it's sad that having a bad relationship with the media will hurt assange, and i stand by my view that it will.
- my point in the seventh par was meant to be that, sadly, it seems issues only matter when they appear in mainstream media.
- assange has contributed to editors not putting him on ther front page, and I believe this is a bad thing. surely the whole idea of my column is to say how tragic it is that he's been hoist with his own petard.
- i maintain that, sadly, there is diminishing marginal utility about major issues because the news cycle demands either bigger or better or newer, not more of the same, thus you have some media outlets reporting triva just to look new. again, assange is a tragic victim of this.
- i believe the internet's and TV's mix of quick news dressed as infotainment makes it hard for people to get a clerar signal when things are IMPORTANT. sadly, they are left thinking anything as overwhelmingly worrying as the wikileaks cables must be some nutcase copnspiracy.
- you misunderstand my government idea . i think the govt is happy at the prospect of wikileaks succumbing to citizen cynicism or apathy, when in fact, as i write, he is one of the most important pro-democracy forces we have.
- i hope you are right that mainstream media doesnt dictate how people react any more - but i fear you are incorrect.
- and as for this par:

A journalist who believes that major policy issues are like food or entertainment doesn't have much of a future in his own 'profession', and can't help us make sense of major issues (thus reinforcing the lack of future).

You can choose to play the man not the issue if you wish, but at least don't misrepresent my views.

i strongly believe, as the column clearly shows, that it is tragic that people have come to treat important issues as they woudl food or entertainment.
the true test of course will be whether assange's contribution forces policy or behavioural change among those who treat their voters with contempt.
i hope we get change and you are right.
may i suggest you have a look at some of my other columns/essays as proof of where im coming from.
regards
alan stokes

And here's my response:

I've read your pieces for some time now. You haven't made the link that journalistic apathy = citizen apathy, in any piece I've read nor in your email. You need to make that link to sustain your idea about the government being pleased about journo apathy, otherwise you haven't made sense. You maintain "it seems issues only matter when they appear in mainstream media", but the opposite is in fact the case unless you're in the politico-media vortex. Constantly the media are surprised by slow-burning issues, issues that journalists don't understand or regard as passé until it's too late.

Stand by your opinion about Assange and the media if you will, but consider what proof you'd accept that your idea hasn't worked, and then assess reality against the proof. Assange doesn't need the media any more, they need him. Now that you've bucked AFR management you may wish to examine the grip of journalistic groupthink on how you see things, a much harder task and one that may lose you friends (and make it easier for AFR management to pick you off). You may have a leather jacket but it doesn't make you a rebel.

Luke Walladge thinks you're irrelevant

Luke Walladge wrote this about Wikileaks. Mostly, his attitude is that if there's any government information that you need to know about, Luke and people like him will give it to you.

But first: let's identify where Luke does have a point and get it out of the way, it won't take long:

Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have joined the Pentagon in criticizing WikiLeaks for risking people’s lives by publishing war logs identifying Afghans working for the Americans or acting as informers.

Fair enough too. The very people so named could have been the people to lead a post-Taliban Afghanistan, similar to the way that the Adenauer generation saw off the Nazis and rebuilt Germany after World War II. Those people are targets thanks to Wikileaks. Assange lost more than he gained by that, and has clearly learned his lesson given the often trite nature of much of the material released so far.

Now, back to Mr Information Control:

Whatever your thoughts about the war in Afghanistan, whatever your feeling about the war in Iraq. Whatever you think about the United States, about the diplomatic protocols, Julian Assange is not your friend.

Someone doesn't have to be your 'friend' for you to agree with them, or even to have some degree of sympathy for him and what he's trying to do. Walladge has started his piece with that expression of ambivalence, what-ev-errrr, and he doesn't get the idea that people have opinions and need information to build (or rebuild) them. The history of secret intelligence shows that too much information tends to be denied wrongly to people rather than too little, which has passed Walladge by.

The information disclosed over the last week, with plenty more to come, is not heroic or devoted to people power or full of promise for the Brave New World.

Most of it is tittle-tattle. It does show, however, how vulnerable systems can be and how better security is an urgent need rather than something to get 'round to once you have time. I don't know what Walladge means by "people power" or "the Brave New World" (I've read The Tempest and the Huxley book too: the challenge stands), and I suspect he doesn't either. He's trying, in PR-style, to sneer away an argument he can't defeat.

Rather, it has the potential to disrupt the diplomatic processes that help humanity to avoid conflicts by promoting effective communication between nations with different social, political and economic systems, needs, and interests.

It does nothing of the sort. Russia is run by crooks: to be caught saying so changes nothing. Sarkozy is vain, Kevin Rudd overestimates his abilities in foreign affairs, Desperate Housewives has more influence in the Middle East than a Voice of America-style media outlet - spare us such high-minded pompous rubbish.

If leaks such this as can’t be prevented, then open and frank diplomatic communication must be severely constrained. Lives are threatened. And for what? For who? I know one thing, it’s not for you.

Probably not you either Luke, but let's leave that aside. Open and frank diplomatic communication will continue to take place. The US has a tradition of investigative journalism that has smoked out bigger secrets than this, leaving government powerless to stop its release. Countries other than the US still have their cover intact - for now.

Julian Assange has a worldview that includes demolishing what he sees as "authoritarian, militaristic and corporation-friendly Western systems of government". Assange is a dangerous anarcho-Marxist with paranoid tendencies and enough conspiracy theories to keep the Grassy Knoll Society busy for a month. He views the US as "essentially an authoritarian conspiracy".

Whatever. The thing is, Wikileaks and its current revelations is bigger than Assange and his "paranoid tendencies" (interesting bit of amateur psychology there Luke). Personal slurs are part of the PR armoury and Luke gives it his best shot. The grassy knoll thing is pretty funny. He follows this with another dissection of military secrets and their impact on people who ought not have been targets, which I've dealt with. If Assange was just a wacko, why is he so 'dangerous'?

Dangerous to whom, exactly? To use a Walladgism, "For who [sic]? I know one thing, it’s not for you". Leaving aside the Afghan people identified earlier, and in the example that takes up the middle third of Walladge's piece, my suspicion is that Walladge protests too much. My name won't be in any of those documents. My interests won't be damaged in any way, and neither will those of our country.

It is entirely possible, and indeed probable, that the latest disclosure of information has the potential to disrupt the diplomatic processes that help humanity to avoid conflicts. How is this a good thing?

Great bit of framing there Luke. Is the only role of diplomacy to help avoid conflict? What about the creepy initiatives to get DNA samples and credit-card details from leading UN officials, good luck framing that as essential to securing world peace. Can we still have conflict avoidance without bullshit like that?

We don't need to know the details of confidential diplomatic cables.

Speak for yourself. Somewhere there's a cable that needs to be exposed. For mine, it was the Chinese attitude toward North Korea, but if I find a cable that's equally better out than in I'll let you know, Luke.

There is a reason why the US president has a national security briefing every Monday morning, and you and I don't. There is a reason why Cabinet proceedings in Australia are in confidence, and you and I are not a party to it. In a representative democracy, we invest trust in individuals to make decisions on our behalf, with the knowledge some decisions will never be known to the public.

I'm a fan of representative democracy too, but bad decisions should be exposed. Tim Dunlop's piece in my previous post detailed the role of the Iraq War in showing people that the great and good can't always be trusted. For others, it's Watergate; this assertion by Walladge that people in powerful positions should be left to get on with the job is nonsense. Assange is not the first person to leak government secrets and the idea that leaks represent a structural threat to the country is garbage.

Do not confuse Assange and his henchmen with crusaders for free information everywhere. They are not. Transparency is, in general, a good thing. Ideologically-driven information dumps are not.

By "transparency", Luke means PR people like him crafting information in a way that makes whoever's paying him look better than they might otherwise. This is an ideology in itself, which is why it's bullshit for Walladge to blast Assange for having an ideology. It's also why you laugh out loud when Walladge says this:

It’s all very well to talk about governmental processes and democracy. Let’s not cheer someone who undermines those things.

Julian Assange has done nothing to undermine democracy, whatever his motivations. Luke Walladge, however, would starve citizens of a democracy of the information they - we - need to participate in debates that shape government policy.

Yes, debates that shape government policy. In a democracy it is necessary to have debates with differing viewpoints, but it is not sufficient. Among an educated populace like Australia, the US and many other countries, we need detailed information about the workings of our government: including information that makes people in power look foolish or even venal.

PR people like Luke Walladge encourage public debates that proceed in an orderly manner toward the ends to which they have been paid to direct such debate. Public debates with multiple viewpoints and access to hard data are a nightmare for PR professionals: journalists and others may be divided over Wikileaks but PR people are unequivocally opposed.

The parallel here is with the links between tobacco consumption and cancer: hard data was released to the public domain establishing such links unequivocally, while tobacco companies employed quality and quantities of PR professionals to pooh-pooh the hard data without being able to refute it scientifically. The facts have given the momentum to anti-tobacco measures in public policy and private lifestyle. Likewise, the facts presented on Wikileaks have the potential to produce public policy outcomes that PR people can't control. That's why PR people hate it: show me a journalist who hates Wikileaks and I'll show you someone with too much PR jizz on their face.

I agree wholeheartedly about protecting people from violent reprisals where they're doing the right thing. Where I depart from Walladge is that I lack the blanket trust that he has that we have full access to all the information we need - thanks to PR pros like himself. I have to doubt Walladge's commitment to representative democracy when he comes out with this:

Would you like the entire contents of every SMS and email you ever sent anyone, your bank details, your private medical records and the like to be made publicly available? Of course not.

My private details are not equivalent to expenditures by the Commonwealth Treasury on matters which go against what I would wish my country to be. What sort of person conflates private matters with public ones? Public officials whose egos are invested in their positions to the point where they can no longer be trusted to execute their responsibilities in the public interest - and suckholes like Luke Walladge who act for them.

There are many who opposed the US ‘Patriot Act’, or the supposed terrorism legislation of the UK, or even the abuses and power of the Crime and Corruption Commission in Western Australia.

The defenders of these Kafka-esque impositions have long argued diminished privacy is worth the supposed benefits of security and safety.

Luke, mate, this is the very case that you've made all along - and now you're undermining it by calling it "Kafka-esque"? We do enjoy great security and safety in Australia, and partly this is due to covert operations. You can overdo the whole cloak-and-dagger thing, and this is where your piece fails because you hadn't realised this until just before the end. So you accept that some official secrecy is bad - so much for the blanket condemnation of Assange, but then PR dollies have a greater need for their story to be clear than true.

Assange is not presenting “facts”.

Oh yes he is. Actual cables with real impressions and actual policy positions. If he'd forged them all this would be a different scenario altogether.

He is not a whistleblower. A whistleblower, by their very name and nature, involves a particular incident or incidents of corruption, ineptitude or wrongdoing - not the ad hoc disclosure of confidential information.

As a PR person, Walladge can deal with whistleblowers: smears, assertion that black is in fact white, the whole armoury of that 'profession' to muddy the waters and say that it's the whistleblower's word against everyone else. What he can't deal with is having people's words flung back in their faces, which is what happened with Wikileaks' release of the SIPRnet cables. That's why Assange is 'dangerous': he's beyond the capacities of PR professionals to deal with.

He doesn't have an agenda against anything for which you can prepare an 'Information Pack'. Calling him a "Marxist" in this day and age is quaint rather than genuinely menacing: talking about the 'proletariat' is a bit like calling for horse-drawn vehicles to replace those powered by internal combustion. Assange presents information in its raw form: PR professionals, mate, don't worry about the raw stuff and spin it to get you to view it in a certain way that makes you (not) act the way the people who pay PR professionals want you (not) to act.

Imagine a PR campaign against Assange: it would be long on untested assertions and short on addressing the issues raised by Wikileaks about US foreign policy. It would be laughed away by the sort of people who make Luke Walladge's life hard - people who take the time to gather information, think and act to secure better public policy outcomes.

Assange and his co-conspirators at WikiLeaks talk about democracy and freedom of speech, all the while seeking to give succour and comfort to the enemies of that philosophy.

Free speech in a democracy inevitably gives comfort to enemies of free speech and democracy; again, this is not new to the Wikileaks phenomenon. Where these principles differ from other methodologies of government is that those who hold to those beliefs know that free speech and democracy are worth having and are strong enough to withstand the challenge. Autocracies can't cope with free speech and democracy because they aren't strong enough in themselves, not because they lack the PR services of Luke Walladge. You can condemn anybody for giving succour to the enemy if you speak out against any government policy really, but it's so absurd that few people other than Luke Walladge really try to advance this ideology (and oh yes, it is an ideology).

I don't agree with Julian Assange on everything, just as I don't disagree with Luke Walladge on everything. I agree with the general idea that we should have access to more information about public policy than we currently do: but if I was a PR professional like Luke Walladge I'd probably be less encouraging of the idea of an informed populace challenging government decisions with freely available facts and logic.