Extract from The Scandals We Deserve?* at Parliament House (Senate).


* This paper was presented as a lecture in the Department of the Senate Occasional Lecture Series at Parliament House on 19 November 1999. 



  
  
  Question  Regarding the power of the press, and the freedom of the press, who has the final say? The editor or the proprietor? It's keeping the people in the dark, in ignorance. How would you view that? 


Rod Tiffen  In the private media, on those issues that really count to them, you could argue that the proprietor has the final say. Certainly in theory, the proprietor always has the potential for the final say. Most of the time, that is a power that is not exercised. However, what is perhaps more important is that on the whole we have a middle management in these news organisations who are keen to please their superiorssometimes more keen to please their superiors than the superiors may want. 


A recent case that comes to mindand I don't know if I'm being too parochial hereis the Murdoch press' coverage of the decline and possible disappearance of the South Sydney Rabbitohs Rugby League Club. Essentially, for their corporate strategy, News Limited wanted them to disappear, and yet there was an uprising of popular sentiment against it. One would have thought that this was a perfect Daily Telegraph story. I think it was the second or third biggest demonstration in the last five or ten years in Sydney, with Ray Martin, Andrew Denton, a host of celebrities, Laurie Brereton and I think a Liberal MP as well, at the Town Hall. Yet it barely got covered in the Daily Telegraph. That, to me, was not a decision made on the intrinsic merits of the news story, but a decision made on the corporate interests of the Murdoch corporation. 


I think in stories like that, the proprietor's say rules. On the other hand, you could not run a good newspaper that maintains its credibility with its readers if you did not trust your reporters and editors to make professional news judgements most of the time. So proprietorial intervention is relatively rare. I think middle management's desire to please the proprietors is somewhat more common, and I think that together these things probably influence a fairly small proportion of all our news, most of which is done by the journalists and editors on what they consider are the intrinsic merits of the issue. That's probably too vague, but it is the best I can do. 


From   http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/pubs/pops/pop35/chapter7.htm