What just happened in Australian politics? Suddenly, an Australian story, one without crocodiles or boxing kangaroos, has broken out as world news. Huh? Yet here we are, with the Morrison cabinet-of-one story, two years old and weird enough to become the quirky story of the week for international media.
Was it because the two journalists from The Australian had caught that very American virus of holding a good story to sell a book after the event? Or was it just the all-too-Australian practice of missing the story that’s right in front of you?
There’s been plenty of online angst: how could journalists sit on a story this big for so long? Is this a News Corp conspiracy? Not this time, no. There’s a bigger story: how did traditional media miss the story’s significance even when it landed right in front of them — in 2020 and again this past weekend?
The story was slow to boil. It started with a book extract from Plagued by Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers about the politics of the pandemic based on, among other things, interviews carried out at the time. It popped up safely sequestered behind The Australian’s paywall buried inside Saturday’s Inquirer supplement under the heading “Inside COVID HQ”. It’s the sort of heading that just screams “nothing to read here”.
It came with a below-the-fold pointer on page one to a page two story under the anodyne headline “Morrison’s secret COVID moves to protect power”. The next morning, the gallery journalists on the ABC’s flagship political program Insiders similarly yawned their way past the story.
It was not until Albanese called it out as “just weird” that, by Tuesday, the story elbowed its way on to the front page with the “Albanese to pursue papers on Morrison” headline in The Sydney Morning Herald and “PM probes Morrison secrets” in The Australian.
Seems Morrison as a multi-function pollie simply wasn’t an interesting enough yarn for close to three days — until suddenly he was. Give social media some of the credit. Rather than dying in Saturday’s Oz, it kept the story alive over the weekend.
In a complaint out of Trump-era USA, the authors were accused of sitting on the bombshell for two years to pump book sales with shocking insider anecdotes.
The Washington Post’s non-fiction critic Carlos Lozada in his “brief intellectual history of the Trump era” What Were We Thinking calls these books the chaos chronicles — “a contest for the most explosive, chyron-ready anecdotes”.
Throughout the Donald Trump years, as these chaos chronicles of journalistic deep-dives and political memoir landed with new evidence of White House mayhem, social media would cry out: surely we needed to know this at the time! This would have changed everything!
Maybe. It’s a tricky ethical area for journalists. The Australian journalists’ code opens: “Respect for truth and the public’s right to information are fundamental principles of journalism.”
So that’s that then. Publish away!
Not so fast. Point three of the code muddies the water: “Where confidences are accepted, respect them in all circumstances.”
If the interviews were agreed to on the basis that the information would be used for the post-election book, then the journalists were, ethically, stuck. They could have sought a waiver for a contemporaneous news report, but absent that waiver they were ethically obligated to respect the undertakings they had given.
Why didn’t they? Perhaps for the same reason that the traditional media muffed the story last weekend. When Benson and Chambers interviewed Morrison, the early 2020 narrative of a Morrison doing what needed to be done was stuck fast.
In that context, any reporting of the obscure ministerial arrangements would have been mixed up in all the Team Australia meeting-of-the-moment, summed up in Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington’s 2021 book How Good is Scott Morrison?
Although Plagued is an attempt to recapture that Morrisonian competence, since the election result we’re in our own chaos chronicles moment. But not all the Canberra gallery has caught up. The result: when the story broke on the weekend it shaped as pro-Morrison; it took social media to shake out the inner truth to fit the current narrative of Morrison as all-politics-all-the-time.
Now, through that lens, we can see it for what it was: a tactic to empower the prime minister to bring the crudest of electoral politics back into the ministerial decisions that are supposed to made on the merits of the facts. It took a few days, but the media got there in the end.
