The Australian’s editor vows to keep up pressure on Press Council despite warning campaign risks future of self regulation
Chris Mitchell
The editor-in-chief of The Australian has vowed to continue a “deliberate campaign” questioning the oversight of the Australian Press Council despite a claim by the watchdog that the situation may undermine press self regulation.
For the second week in a row, The Weekend Australian featured articles about confidential cases currently before the APC and carried editorials criticising the body. The move by the News Corp-owned paper has been critcised by the APC’s executive director John Pender.
In a statement this afternoon, Pender warned: “Both The Weekend Australian and The Australian concede they have breached agreed obligations to maintain confidentiality of aspects of the Council’s complaint processes.
“Repeated breaches of these obligations, and misrepresentations of the Council’s work, can severely compromise its credibility as a preferable alternative to a statutory regulator, which currently applies to radio and television.”
But The Australian’s editor Chris Mitchell this afternoon told Mumbrella: “I did not stumble upon this issue by accident. This is a deliberate campaign to force the council to recognise it is straying into areas in which it traditionally would never have strayed.”
Referring to chairman Julian Disney’s decision to step down as chair of the APC in January, Mitchell added: “We will be continuing, and indeed stepping up, this campaign and do not see Disney’s departure as a catalyst for change.
“Quite the reverse, we see it as a deadline by which he means to have brought down a whole series of precedent judgements, like last week’s against the SMH, that will set the tone for years to come. I do not intend to let that happen and many editors have privately offered support.”
Last week the APC partly upheld a complaint against he Sydney Morning Herald over its reporting on the death of Kate Malonyay and subsequently her partner Elliott Coulson. The APC ruled the paper had breached the family’s privacy by covering material gathered at the funeral, despite not having the permission of the family to do so.
Page 2 of The Weekend Australian
In The Weekend Australian on Saturday, the whole of page two was dedicated to coverage of the APC, including a complaint lodged by a murder suspect against News Corp’s Herald Sun newspaper in Melbourne and a complaint against The Australian over a front page photograph of a seven-year-old son of Islamic State terrorist Khaled Sharrouf, apparently holding a severed head of an Iraqi. There were also accompanying opinion pieces and an editorial criticising the APC and Disney.
This latest stoush between the two side comes just a week after The Australian first denounced the APC and Disney, claiming he has a conflict of interest in a complaint currently before the regulator because he once spoke at the same function as the subject of the complaint.
Disney has denied there is any conflict.
Asked to comment this morning about whether News Corp still supported the APC, a spokesman directed Mumbrella to its comment from last week where it said: “News Corp Australia has made commitments to its funding and membership of The Australian Press Council and those commitments remain in place.”
(Declaration of interest: Mumbrella is also a member of the APC.)
Nic Christensen
topics
APC
Chris Mitchell
confidentiality
coverage
Julian Disney
Media
media regulation
opinion
Press Council
self regulation
The Australian is carrying out this campaign with full confidence that its symbiotic relationship with the Coalition government means any type of forced regulation is not even a remote possibility. They can basically do whatever the heck they want.
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The readerships figures last week prove The Australian’s woefully small readership figures are in terminal decline. Once upon a time they had relevance – not anymore.
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Mitchell is flopping out his manliness as chief ego if News Corp in Australia. This is the hubris that presaged the blatant abuse privacy by Rupert’s bovver troupe in the UK and which led to illegality on an industrial scale.
We are beginning to see how News will behave when fairfax is gone.
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Unbelievable hubris. The Oz simply cannot ever admit that it is not entirely correct about everything, always, in perpetuity.
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Much like their readership – stuck a few decades behind the present day.
Sabre-rattling editors impressed a small percentage of the small-minded – in the 70’s. It was immature then but at least the tanty was being chucked by someone who’s editiorially slanted articles had a readership.
Now we’ve got a question to ask – If a tree falls over in the woods but no one is around to hear it – does it make a sound? Or – If a newspaper bullishly refuses to be regulated but no one reads it – will anybody notice?
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I used to read the Australian on Saturdays then decided to read every month to see what it is saying. This went to six monthly. No longer tempted to buy it at all. I’m its demographic but enough is enough. A lot of journalists there whose talent is wasted by its crap. The declining readership will see it will slip into irrelevance and it won’t be missed.
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It is a pity that all these comments did not discuss whether the Press Council should or shouldn’t be in the business of judging stories. As if Australian defamation laws were not strict enough. Everybody here seems to think, let’s add another layer of top down thinking for the masses, or better still, let’s not think at all.
As the last person wrote, if you don’t like The Australian don’t read it. Free will indeed.
Goebbels would be proud of this mission creep by the APC.
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Mitchell appears to have conflated his esteem in the eyes of Rupert with pretensions to intellectual superiority. I forecast disappointment.
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Changes to the APC regulations that demand factually based material for op-eds is the real reason behind this attack.
Maurice Newman’s unbelievable op-ed on a cooling globe last week is a case in point. It is a perfect example of why we need the APC – to prevent ideologically based journalism spouting flat-out misrepresentations over vital public issues.
This attack is to prevent the APC from curtailing The Australian’s ideologically driven campaign journalism that has warped serious policy discussions for years.
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@roger Colman: it is the purpose of the APC to judge stories. This is why they exist. Surely that is not a complex idea?
If you are done over by the oz the APC is supposed to judge whether that was fair. Nothing is solved by people buying another paper. As others point out this sort of bullying is what led to the phone tapping arrogance in the UK. They clearly thought news corp was the sole judge of propriety. And it turns out that was pretty crook.
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Roger Colman: the News Corporation culture is clearly seriously ill. The UK experience is totally clear on that. Mitchell is both obsessive and relentless in his pursuit of perceived opponents. This instance with Disney is over the top and indicates that Mitchell is beyond any usual notion of reasonable behaviour by those who own the pulpit.
Hopefully Disney will stand up to Mitchell and all of us will be alert to the possibility that serious misuse of power by Murdoch in Britain is not to become the case here.
This is not a trivial matter.
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Newspapers have influences as long as they have credibility. At The Australian they are running out of both.
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