Why the Grog’s Gamut outing harms The Australian
Fair to say The Australian – and its journalist James Massola – are not winning popularity contests on Twitter this morning for its outing of Grog’s Gamut.
As I search Twitter, the first messages to Massola read:
“You happy this morning you fucking pussy?”
“Seeing as your an arsehole why dont you write some thing about the Phone tapping by NEWS LTD in the UK ,coward & bastard”
“So james care to tweet your phone number so we can carefully keep you up to date on our views about things?”
“@jamesmassola is a coward and an affront to decency”“Appreciate the dishonourable @jamesmassola might have been under pressure re @grogsgamut. So i’ll allow a teaspoon of pity with my contempt.”
“#groggate is NOT about public interest it’s about envy and relevance deprivation. @grogsgamut? Good work. @jamesmassola? You fuckwit.”
“You used to be cool, @jamesmassola. I hate being wrong about people.”
“Who is this @jamesmassola? I want to know all about him and his family. And I want to see some work from his uni days.”
“I just followed @jamesmassola so i could unfollow him over #groggate”
“My take – @jamesmassola and the Oz have taken a giant dump in own nest outing @GrogsGamut. Good luck getting public sector stories now.”
“Shame your grubby snitching isn’t already behind a paywall”
This is, I think the biggest Twitter backlash to a journalist I’ve seen in Australia. (I’m not counting the teasing of Andrew Bolt as that was somewhat more lighthearted in tone.)
It reminds me of the horrible shock for the Daily Mail in the UK earlier this year when its columnist Jan Moir wrote a tasteless and homophobic column about the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately and the title discovered that social media can provide an effective countervoice as loud as the newspaper.
That seems to be going on here. The Australian has outed the author of the Grog’s Gamut politics blog, and the Twitter community is rallying around one of its own.
As a result, the journalist unfortunate enough to have his byline on the story is catching what is from some quarters something of an overreaction. He is probably also a tad unfairly the focus of what was a decision by the newspaper.
So was the behaviour of the newspaper unethical?
I’m not sure it was, but it was certainly unwise, and not just because of this unfolding backlash.
Part of the problem is that the Media Alliance’s code of ethics is vague on the issue of privacy. All it says is “Respect private grief and personal privacy. Journalists have the right to resist compulsion to intrude.”
To justify its coverage, The Oz is leaning heavily on the argument that nobody has the right to anonymity if their comments can influence public policy. I’m not sure that necessarily holds where the person commenting is not doing so from an insider standpoint, and works in something unrelated to what they are writing about.
But there’s a nother reason why this seems unwise. This year the Australian has fought a fierce (and admirable even if it has got carried away at times) legal battle to protect the source of its stories about police terror raids.
This behaviour sends out a confusing message to potential future sources. Exactly when will the Australian protect your anonymity? The paper would argue that it’s clear that it will protect you so long as you are its source. But for somebody weighing up whether they can trust it with the potentially career damaging move of leaking it info, it adds doubt. Why risk talking to the Oz when it outs bloggers?
Clearly there are times when it is justifiable to identify somebody who is posting anonymously. The obvious case would be where they are engaged in some kind of misleading or hypocritical behaviour. None of that applies here.
But this case looks like one of those times where just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.
Tim Burrowes
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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From Grog’s post, “[…] he had known my name for 10 months, I was not concerned that he would out me.”
If it’s in the public interest, why did Massola sit on the story for 10 months?
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This is part of the ongoing tension between traditional media and online.
When anyone can publish opinion, news and analysis directly to the public there is less need for ‘anonymous sources’ to go to news outlets.
Clearly traditional media – which today is almost entirely profit, not news, driven – has an interest in protecting sources who come to them and exposing those who do not.
In other words, most traditional media (excluding public broadcasters) have an intrinsic financial interest in discouraging anyone providing insights or quality analysis to the public who doesn’t work for them. They could draw away audiences and advertising dollars.
Traditional media will ‘discourage’ by using all of the tools in their considerable journalistic arsenal – such as discrediting and outing bloggers publicly, using their mass media distribution platforms to steal quality news and rereporting it without compensation or attribution.
None of this is about news – it’s about money and ego.
Challenge the income and identity of any professional group and the challengers will face a backlash.
When the professional group happens to be ‘journalists’ (anyone who gets paid to write for traditional media – regardless of their skills or training) the backlash is going to become public sooner rather than later.
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They are a news organisation which relies on inbound traffic. Bet they are winning on that this morning.
Other than that, what Leslie and Tim said
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Ditto on the traffic thing. Outing Grog’s Gamut was guaranteed to deliver a storm of traffic and part of me thinks that has more to do with this than anything else. Of course they knew all the GG fans would be i uproar. They knew his Twitter profile would spread this far and wide. After Media 140 helped GG achieve critical mass, the time was right to steal all that exposure, reach and eyeballs by creating this whole controversy.
After all, what is the outcome for the Oz? Massola will still be there. The Oz will be unapologetic and will weather the storm for a few days and then count the ad impressions afterwards. No one expects there to be any kind of penalty and the Oz is used to having Media Watch lead with them. So it’s all gravy for them.
The whole thing is merely a cynical grab for traffic through controversy, piggybacking on the massive audience GG managed to build. And it worked.
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I can’t help but think this entire narrative around the outing is more than a little disingenuous.
There’s a legitimate debate around the right to anonymity online, and one can argue a reasonable expectation when one at least attempts to maintain anonymity. But this isn’t the case here.
Greg Jericho outed himself by
1: including his name and a bio for Media140 that included “He (Jericho) writes under a pen-name because his day job doesn’t allow him to comment about political parties.”
2: making it well known that “grogsgamut” was attending the Media140 conference
Never a more clear case of 2+2=4.
I’d feel far more sympathetic if he was serious about remaining anonymous, but he clearly wasn’t.
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I think the heart of this story is the uneasy relationship between journalism and social media. The only difference between a blogger and someone like Watergate’s “Deep Throat” is that the person inside no longer needs to support the career of a journalist to reach their audience.
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I think there’s a few crossed wires here. It’s not as if Grog’s Gamut is a whistle-blower or a source, in which case the ethical guidelines are clear. He’s a partisan blogger who hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to remain secret as far as it looks.
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This sounds similar to the case last year when The Australian’s UK stablemate, The Times, outed a police blogger.
NIghtJack (http://nightjack2.wordpress.com/) had won a major blogging prize for political writing. Some background here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/medi.....ger-horton
http://www.guardian.co.uk/medi.....s-silenced
And from the Times:
http://technology.timesonline......509677.ece
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How very odd that I write this after seeing that Leslie Nassar has just added his own 2 c into this whole debate when I consider him to be one of the first to introduce these notions of professional twitter responsibility (twitequette?)..if anything, more people hate telstra now, even on twitter.and to think being outed simply meant once that you were possibly gay..
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“the title discovered that social media can provide an effective countervoice as loud as the newspaper.” are you kidding? 11 twits an effective countervoice? that’s barely a dinner party conversation
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