Asia online

Global media is at a tipping point. The western news establishment is reeling as profits collapse and revenue moves to the internet. Only today, Canwest, Canada's largest newspaper publisher, with twelve daily newspapers, sought bankruptcy protection for its entire newspaper division. Canwest is not the first big newspaper chain to go bust. It won't be the last. The old international news order, which has been dominated by the west since the invention of the telegraph, is undergoing radical and widespread change, driven by the internet.
But what many people maybe don't realise is that while there's a crisis in the west, its boom time in Asian media.
Already, there may be almost three times as many internet users in Asia as in north America. As literacy grows and fast broadband spreads to even the most remote communities, the gap will grow even wider. Cheap new technology will mean that this new majority will not only be media consumers but also be increasingly sophisticated producers.
Which is why I've spent the last few days in Singapore.
I've been attending the Board meeting of AMIC, the Asian centred media research group, which has been investigating and charting these changes. Based in Singapore, AMIC is a truly international organisation with Board members from Malaysia, India, Japan, the Philippines and yours truly from Australia.
It was set up with German assistance more than thirty years ago to promote and educate socially responsible media in the interests of development and democracy. Today it runs websites, published scholarly books, organises training workshops and holds an annual conference which bring together academics, practitioners and activists from all over the Asia Pacific. This year, they will be discussing the new wave sweeping through "Technology and Culture: Communication Connectors and Dividers”.
AMIC might not have all the answers to what's going on. But Asia is where the real questions will be asked.

If you research journalism in Australia, you need to attend this conference!

When I moved from being a journalist to become a journalism educator twenty years ago, I found that universities did not regard journalism as research. Instead, they recognised academics who wrote about journalism, even if their knowledge of the industry was scanty, misguided, or in some cases, just hostile.

I realised that I had to put my experience as a reporter for a prestigious broadcaster behind me and concentrate on publishing stylised articles for small circulation academic journals. I learned to play a new game. I completed a PhD, spoke at academic conferences and established an online journal. I became a Chair Professor and started supervising PhD students of my own.

In the meantime, my colleagues established and developed the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism to critique the industry and provide training. The Australian Journalism Review was refined and expanded to become a first rate academic journal.

Subtle discrimination against journalism educators persisted. They found it difficult to win Australian Research Council (ARC) grants, discovering that previous success was a key criteria for winning.

But people were asking what's the value of spending all this government money (apart from pleasing the research bureaucracy) if outcomes didn't contribute to more informed teaching or better industry practices?

Politicians were asking similar questions. In 2008, the Australian government approved the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative to establish a new research quality and evaluation system.

ERA will recogise journalism as research. But journalism educators will still have to play the game, by ensuring their material is presented in ARC accepted forms and demanding that their universities include it in the portfolios presented to the ARC.


The future of journalism research in Australia;
Addressing the 2010 ERA round.

If you are an academic, a researcher or a staffer involved in
journalism (1903) research, you need to attend this one day
conference. It will provide a detailed briefing by the Australian
Research Council on how ERA will impact on you and your university.
There will be opportunities to ask questions, consider how other
researchers are faring and discuss an agreed research strategy.

Date: Friday 19.2.10
Location: Sydney
Conference manager: Australian Centre for Independent Journalism

Fee: $100
Registration http://www.acij.uts.edu.au/news/events.html.

Draft Program

0900/0930 Welcome. The journalism discipline in the academy
0930/1000 Coffee
1000/1200 What ERA means for journalism research. A briefing and
information session presented by Australian Research Council ERA
staff.
1200/1300 Lunch
1300/1400 Successful research models (panel)
1400/1500 Defining a research strategy (workshop)


This conference has been endorsed by:

Professor Emeritus Alan Knight
Professor Wendy Bacon, ACIJ Director
Associate Professor Anne Dunn, President, Journalism Education Association
Professor Ian Richards, Editor, Australian Journalism Review

Buzzy bees, paedophiles and lynch mobs.

The press reporting of convicted paedophile, Dennis Ferguson, seems to be going from partisan to hysterical.
Ferguson, who served 14 years for abusing children, has been repeatedly forced to change residences since his release. Mobs of angry neighbours have attracted wide media coverage which has in turn generated more angry pickets.

Today's report in the Couriermail.com.au goes one step further.

Ferguson sold toys to kids
Adam Walters, Amy Dale and Xanthe Kleinig
September 16, 2009 12:00am
AUSTRALIA's most notorious pedophile Dennis Ferguson has plunged to a new low, conning a charity into letting him sell children's toys on Sydney streets. Ferguson has reportedly been illegally selling merchandise ordered from Diabetes Australia in Kings Cross. Without a mandatory permit and police approval to collect donations in public spaces, the 61-year-old pariah used his middle name of "Ray" to secure box loads of flashing pens, fridge magnets, key rings and a small toy known as a "Buzzy Bee", the charity's mascot.

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/comments/0,23836,26079056-952,00.html

You have to ask the following questions about this story.
Did Ferguson actually sell toys to kids as the header suggests? Or did he sell kids' toys?
If so, how many toys did he sell and what were they? Was the "buzzy bee" a toy or a mascot? Did he actually sell any "buzzy bees" or were they part of a job lot of items to be sold to make money for charity?
The lead sentence is the story is emotionally charged, using the words, "plunged to a new low". Was Ferguson's behaviour in this instance really worse then than the crimes for which he was convicted, including the abduction and molestation of children?
And all of these questions hang on the word, "reportedly", which means we don't have any proof, but someone else has made the claim.
This may seem like nit picking but journalists have a responsibility to report the facts. There might even be those that thought Ferguson's attempt to raise money for charity might even be an attempt to do something positive, rather than proof of even more depraved behaviour.
Inaccurate or hysterical reporting can only exacerbate a vexed issue which has already generated threats of vigilantism.

Upfront and close with Chinese journalism

Learning at Australian universities can be pretty boring. Most of the extra curricular activities I enjoyed have been shorn away as contemporary students struggle to make a living and pay their way. "Full Time" students now complain about going to lectures which can conflict with their jobs.

When I was a visiting Professor at Hong Kong University, they reckoned that only about a third of what students learned at university came from classes. Hong Kong University, unlike its Australian competitors, has a student social life enriched by active clubs and colleges. That's how HKU students learn about team work, democracy, running budgets and social responsibility.

How can we make the learning experience not only more authentic, but more fun?

We can create special projects.

Six QUT journalism students (five pictured) are about to go to China for a month to explore Chinese journalism practices. They will be meeting Australian foreign correspondents, visiting China Daily, Global Times and CCTV. They will give seminars at Chinese Communications University.
The trip is being heavily subsidised by QUT as an Outward Mobility grant aimed at getting students to Asia.

The visit has been structured as part of their studies and will include research, work experience and reflective learning.

Combat vests and macho men (and women)

Writing about foreign correspondents has got me into a fair bit of trouble at times. A couple of years ago, I was foolish enough to suggest that in the age of the internet, many of them were just blow ins, decked out in safari suits, delivering rehashed locals' stories, as they were videoed in front of exotic locations.
Obviously, I was wrong.
Safari suits are rarely worn these days.
In fact the favoured attire more recently, was the combat photographer's vest, which had lots of little pockets where one could stash passports, hangover cures, condoms and other paraphernalia required to explore the Orient.
I saw a lot of such gear when Hong Kong went back to China in 1997. I was there to write a book, Reporting Hong Kong, which considered how the foreign press covered the handover. I spent a fair amount of time, as you would, in the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC), where combat jacket attired visitors could be seen recording breathless voice to camera pieces in the main bar.

One bleary Sunday morning, I went in to the club for breakfast to find it filled with correspondents who were younger, better dressed and a good deal better looking than the regulars. A film crew was working under lights in a corner. Things seemed normal but somewhere, some how reality had slipped a cog. I felt I had entered a slightly altered but recognisable universe. In fact, the people at my table were actors, playing correspondents, making a movie about correspondents reporting on correspondents. It was called the Chinese Box; a reference to realities hidden within realities.

Chinese Box


I had done field work myself at the club some years before, recording interviews with resident correspondents and writing much of my PhD thesis in the downstairs bar. I learned that hardly any of the regulars wore combat vests.
Except Hugh van Es.
He was entitled to.
You could impress your friends from Australia by bringing them into the Club. "Do you remember the photo of people being evacuated from a roof at the fall of Saigon in 1975?" If they were old or historically literate enough, they would remember this, one of the iconic images of the Vietnam war.
Then with a flourish, I could say," See that bloke in the vest at the bar? That's Hugh van Es. He took the photograph!"
I heard that Hugh van Es died this year at the age of 67. His wake was held at the FCC last week.
In a media world of made up macho men, van Es was the real thing.
Wherever he may be now, I hope he gets to share a beer with departed friends and colleagues whose photos and portraits grace the walls of the FCC.
Good bye Hugh.
Keep your camera with you.

State of Play

State of Play, the movie, depicts journalism as journalists might like to see it. A fearless press (and here we mean a newspaper) exposed corporate corruption, defied the police and conducted investigations which resulted in a politician being charged with murder.

What's there not to like about that?

I saw State of Play at a preview staged by the Journalists' union, the Media Alliance. The theatre was stacked with journos who groaned and laughed knowingly as an initially vacuous gossip blogger was confronted with the inconvenient need to find the "facts" required by "real" journalism. They were delighted when a Corporate PR type was exposed as a cowardly, Cadillac loving shill, obsessed with money and concerned only with self preservation.
They could identifty with a suitably unkempt Russell Crowe, the street wise reporter, Cal McCaffrey, who a cultivated a world of low life sources, slugged "Irish wine" (whiskey) and kept an old photo of Woodward and Bernstein pinned to his wall. I think I might have seen him myself at the end of a bar somewhere, some time ago.

Appealing it was.
But original it wasn't.

The movie was based on a six part BBC series where McCaffery was played by John Simm whose Life on Mars was similarly homogenised for the American market. In the movie, the series' elegant and cynical editor, Bill Nighy was replaced by the blunt and bluff Helen Mirren who, as editors do, swore appropriately and with great dexterity. The distinctly wobbly and compromising British newspaper management became an off screen corporation with its eye on the bottom line. The new corporate villain, Pointcom, was naturally intent on destroying democracy as we know it while taking over the bits of the world that mattered (Washington). No understatement here.

The American version was quicker, tighter, shed more blood, had more guns and was a good deal more obvious than the original. I guess you had to expect that, British and American cultural sensitivities being what they are.

However, State of Play explored the moral dilemmas faced by reporters investigating complex stories. McCaffery relentlessly unravelled the stories' threads, invading privacy, bribing police, bullying witnesses and withholding evidence. He did so while confronted by the larger evils of corporate fraud, political corruption, betrayal and murder.
All in a day's work.
"This is not a story! It's a case!", said one of the befuddled and frustrated Washington coppers.
It was neither really.
It's a movie.

Two QUT undergrads win Bloomberg postings

Two of QUT's best and brightest, Phoebe Sedgman and Joanna Cooney have won ten week, paid postings at Bloomberg's Sydney office.
They are both completing Bachelor of Journalism/Bachelor of Business degrees, which Bloombergs reckon suit them for their international business news.
They flew to Sydney to complete the test at the office overlooking Circular Quay in Sydney. The newsroom which is stacked with computers, audio gear and which features a small TV studio, has panoramic views of the harbour. The last time I was there, there was also a huge fish tank with small marine animals that eerily resembled some leading Australian CEOs.
"We were in the newsroom," Phoebe aid later,"So we got the vibe of excitement. They were ringing people up in London and swearing at them for not giving them the right information."
"I'm very excited and nervous about it," she said.

Fiji calls censorship "the journalism of hope"

The Fiji military has put a censor in every local newsroom, according to Sean Dorney.
Dorney who was expelled from Fiji last week, was speaking to QUT journalism students and staff.

Brandishing a copy of the military order, Dorney said that Fiji media were being forced "to buckle under". The military had the power to close any Fiji news organisation which did not do what they were told.

He cited the Fiji Times which tried publishing blank spaces where stories had been censored. They were told,"Do that again and your are shut down forever". The Fiji Post tried humour. They reported on what they had for breakfast as a front page story. "It was breakfast as usual for staff of this newspaper.'I had left over roti last night a senior reporter... told his colleagues!" They were told any more of that funny business and they would also be shut down.

Journalists were instructed to refrain from publishing any news item which was negative in nature, Dorney said. This was called "the journalism of hope".

Sean Dorney won a Walkley Award in 1998 for his coverage of the Aitape Tsunami disaster and in the same year the Pacific Islands News Association honoured him with PINA's Pacific Media Freedom Award. In 1999, the Queensland Branch of the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance (MEAA) honoured Sean with its "Most Outstanding Contribution of Journalism Award". The PNG Government awarded Sean an MBE 1991 and he received an AM in 2000 in recognition for his service to Australia as a foreign correspondent.
Dorney's expulsion prompted more than forty journalists and educators to sign off on a public statement condemning " attempts to control our colleagues by threats, intimidation and censorship.

QUTNEWS Video report
Dorney Speech 1
Dorney Speech 2

Alan Knight

Journalists and educators condemn Fiji censorship!

Soldiers and police have no place in any newsroom.
We oppose the Fiji dictatorship's attempts to control our Fiji colleagues by threats, intimidation and censorship. We call on our governments to seek to protect all Fiji journalists striving to perform their duties in these difficult circumstances.
As journalists and educators we affirm Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
We strongly support our esteemed Australian colleague, Sean Dorney and other foreign journalists who have been expelled from Fiji because they sought the truth in the public interest.

Professor Alan Knight
Associate Professor David Robie
Professor John Henningham
Professor John Herbert
Associate Professor Michael Meadows
Joseph M Fernandez
Professor Wendy Bacon
Lawrie Zion
Associate Professor Roger Patching
Alexandra Wake
Professor Kerry Green
Associate Professor Anne Dunn
Professor Mark Pearson
Professor Chris Nash
Dr John Cokley
Dr Cathy Jenkins
Margaret Van Heekeren
Associate Professor Gail Phillips
Jenna Price
Marcus O'Donnell
Tony Maniaty
John Moseley
Erin O'Dwyer
Dr Trevor Cullen
Bonita Mason
Colleen Murrell
Eurydice Aroney
Dr Janine Little
Maree Curtis
David Lawrence
Susie Eisenhuth
Dr An Nguyen
Kim Lockwood
Professor Lynette Sheridan Burns
Professor Ian Richards
Mignon Shardlow
Nicola Goc
Amanda Watson
Julie Posetti
Kathryn Bowd
Dianne Jones
Dr Lee Duffield
Dr Angela Romano
Associate Professor Stephen Lamble
Jolyon Sykes
Jane Johnston
Desley Bartlett
Associate Professor Leo Bowman
Kay Nankervis
Dr Willa McDonald
Dr Molly Kasinger
Dr Richard Phillipps

Testing the limits of technology

I started the week by putting my iPhone through the washing machine. I ended it by giving a lecture on "Journalists and new technology" to several hundred IT students. I said journalists had always been early adopters of new communications technologies, but they were tough and testing customers.

I told them about Ed Murrow who pioneered live , international radio broadcasts by taing his microphone lead up on to his London roof so he could give a running commentary of the blitz by German bombers. I referred to the first television war in Vietnam, where film shot by Walter Cronkite's team was shipped back to Hong Kong to be processed and cut before being air freighted to television stations in the States. I talked about my own experience in Hong Kong in 97, when Britain staged its handover of the embryonic democracy to Beijing, as a live, global television event.

The Internet was starting to have an impact on journalism in 97, distributing Government Information Service information and images. I even established a crude proto blog, Dateline Hong Kong, to experiment with the new medium and record and transmit stories about how journalists saw the changes.

Since then, new technologies have swept through the industry, shaking not only its assumptions about itself but also its very financial foundations. The changes started with small and what now seem simple things. A Scandinavian photographer on the China border found he could send his images home via his lap top and modem. Reporters began to not only access media releases but also archive material by Internet. They could contact their editors from almost everywhere (which meant editors could contact them almost anywhere, bringing an unexpected end to the tradition of the long, boozy lunch!)

It certainly wasn't all good for industry traditionalists. Advertising for cars, jobs and real estate shifted rapidly to the web, slashing the newspaper classified ad revenue which under pinned much quality journalism. Meanwhile anyone with a computer could call themselves a journalist and publish globally. Some Americans even started talking about the end of journalism, the announcement of whose death is still a little premature.

But this week, I had my chance to get these young IT people thinking about good gear we might use in the future. I asked for durable software which wouldn't crash at critical moments. I wanted useable programs and web sites which even rum crazed journos could easily navigate. I asked for learnable IT which could lead people to become sophisticated users. I pleaded for cross platform solutions, so that ideas could move freely across the web.

Then I asked them should I dry out my iPhone by putting it in the microwave. They said, "No".

Alan Knight

An online academic niche

The online academic journal I edit, eJournalist has been rated as a "b" grade journal by the Australian Research Council. Does that mean that it is second rate? Not at all.

eJournalist has always aimed to be a "b" grade journal.

We started the eJournal eight years ago when we were working at a regional university which had a limited library and worked out of more than a dozen different campuses. Academic staff needed to be able to read and publish research papers relevant to their teaching. Many of the stuffy, printed journals about communications or journalism, rated their excellence on the number of articles they rejected, not to mention their restricted and expensive publications. Some of these "elite" publications were being bought up by publishers who then deployed copyright to sell academics' work back to the universities which employed them.

However, I reckon academia should be informed by accessible information and the open exchange of ideas. I thought that the internet provided an easy and cheap opportunity to publish globally. eJournalist is an open access journal, and ownership of its articles resides with its authors. If you look at the site meter at the bottom of the eJournalist main page, you can see hits from the United States, India, the Netherlands, Germany and South Africa...and that was just in one week! Some people stay no time at all, while others linger.

As expected, the response from conventional academics was at best, sniffy. At one stage, one Australian sandstone University rated all online journals, irrespective of quality, at the bottom of the range. It seemed they thought that anything that appeared on paper was intellectually superior.

However, prejudices about the web are eroding, even in academia. The Australian Research Council's (ARC) rating of eJournalist places in the top half of all journals, everywhere. "b" grade really isn't all that shabby. According to the ARC "Tier B covers journals with a solid, though not outstanding, reputation. Generally, in a Tier B journal, one would expect only a few papers of very high quality. They are often important outlets for the work of PhD students and early career researchers. Typical examples would be regional journals with high acceptance rates, and editorial boards that have few leading researchers from top international institutions."

That is exactly what eJournalist is about; accessibility, not exclusivity.

Alan Knight

QUT awards top journo

We’ve become a little too much in awe of the technology and not protective enough of fundamental journalistic values, according to Kerry OBrien.
OBrien, Australia's leading political interviewer, presents the 730 Report on Australian Broadcasting Corporation Television
He was speaking to Queensland University of Technology students, after being presented with an honorary Doctorate.

Trying to bring any kind of journalistic depth to an innately superficial medium such as television, had always been a struggle, he said. "...the advent of 24-hour television, the obsession with personality-driven journalism, the endless hunt for breathless melodrama by reporters dreaming of their first or next award, has meant that much of today’s television news is more superficial than ever."

During the invasion of Iraq, "...even the best in the business seemed like actors on a stage, rather than journalists". "It felt disturbingly like war as entertainment. For the networks, and probably at least some of the journalists, it was technology delivering ratings. For the military it was about controlling the media while prosecuting a controversial war."

Dr OBrien said the jury was still out, as to whether the depth and quality of content would be maintained, let alone enhanced, by the new technology. "Never ... forget that technology is supposed to exist to serve humanity; to enhance lives and community, not to help some at the expense of others." he said.

Transcript of Speech
Further Reading: The Hollywoodisation of war: The media handling of the Iraq war
Alan Knight

International media coverage of student opinions on newspapers.

It all began with a simple news release. I had surveyed about two hundred of my journalism students and found that while 95% said they enjoyed keeping up with the news, more than sixty percent said they read a newspaper once a week or less."If the journalists of the future don't want to read newspapers, who will?" I asked in the media release.

Australia's Radio National Breakfast show followed it up with an interview. That sparked a series of interviews and talk backs with local radio stations, as well as Radio Australia. The story moved onto the web with the Brisbane Times.com.au and ABC online. It rapidly spread across the globe, getting a particularly good run in India in outlets like the Deccan Post (India), the Hindu and the Sentinel. I was interviewed by a young blogger called Ben Grubb for his blog Techwired.com.au. Other bloggers picked up the story, including Woolly Days, who corrected a mistake made by other correspondents in interpreting the data, which had been repeated elsewhere.

Conventional newspapers seemed uninterested in the story. This was odd because the survey had been prompted by by a conversation I had with the editor of the local daily, who said he wanted to know what journalism students thought about the future of newspapers. I did get an email from the Washington Post. However, the reporter was interested in whether it had been me who made the mistake with the data. When I was able to show it wasn't me, he seemed to lose interest.

However, the international responses continue. Today, I am reviewing the survey questions to produce a "vanilla" version which can be completed by communications and journalism students across Asia.
It will work like this. Academics in Jakarta, Manila, Singapore, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur have agreed to be involved.
I will send them a pdf of the vanilla questions. They can amend these questions to suit local conditions. EG One of the Australian questions refers to "community radio"; a form of broadcasting which does not exist in some Asian countries. This reference can be edited out, while the core of the survey remains common.
The collaborating academics will send me an edited version of the survey, which I will then place online for their students.
The results will be compiled centrally and presented in an academic paper I will give at the international AMIC conference in New Delhi in July.

Alan Knight

Curbing Australia's "free" press

Imagine that your nation's press was controlled by a foreign corporation, led by a ruthless businessman who traded political support for government handouts to his businesses. Then consider how you would feel if the electronic media alternative was being simultaneously muzzled!
That's the prospect Australia faced this week, as a direct result of media restructuring approved by by the radical right wing Howard government. In true Orwellian style, Australian government ministers praised the new media deal as offering the Australian public more media choices, even as media control narrowed. In practice, the new media legisation sparked a frenzy of de-regulated share trading as the really big media players moved to digest their smaller competitors.
The US based News Corporation already owned two thirds of Australia's major newspapers. Thanks to Rupert Murdoch's management, they sing from the same hymnbooks praising globalisation, privatisation, de-unionisation, and you may have guessed it, de-regulation. News Corporation took a share of the more liberal Fairfax newspaper group, which offers News competition in Sydney and Melbourne.
In spite of the internet, newspapers continue to provide most of Australia's informed reporting. They do so because they continue to employ the largest assemblies of journalists who still do most of the media's fact checking.
In Australia, the papers' only serious competition comes from the state owned, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). ABC broadcasters have been struggling to maintain their independence as the Australian government progressively stacked the ABC Board with its partisans. These include Ron Brunton, a former employee of the mining company front group, the Institute of Public Affairs and Keith Windschuttle, a fringe historian who made his name by denying colonial massacres of aboriginal people.

But perhaps the most extreme of these appointments was News Corporation columnist, Janet Albrechtsen. Albrechtsen had previously attacked the ABC for what she called “left wing bias”, even claiming that the staff elected member of the Board was “a remnant of the Soviet-style workers' collective”. (Australian 26.5.2004)

Bias is in the sight of the beholder, and Albrechtsen is stridently and unashamedly one-eyed. Analysis of her newspaper columns showed that she was anti union, anti feminist, anti homosexual, pro-George Bush who she called "a man of action", and devotedly pro-Australian Prime Minister, John Howard. She saw international media coverage of torture at Iraq's Abu Graib prison as examples of media bias. “With photos in hand and under the seductive theme of the public’s right to know, many of the media showed the images again and again. …it is less enthused about addressing its own culpability for the violence that publishing these images may generate”. (Australian 19.5.2004) Albrechtsen said that eliminating what she percieved as bias at the ABC, would be her main priority on the ABC Board.
This week the ABC's new managing Director, Mark Scott, announced new Editorial policies which for the first time allowed the Board to intervene against general programs. "The revised editorial policies are the most significant statement of values the ABC has made in over twenty years, giving greater emphasis to the need for impartiality in the ABC’s coverage of contentious matters.", he said in a media release.
The new policies were announced to a cheering crowd at a dinner organised by the Sydney Institute, a right wing think tank run by veteran cold war warrior, Gerard Henderson. ABC staff subsequently went on strike, protesting against political interference.

Is News Corporation thinking of introducing similar editorial policies, to ensure that its columnists like Albrechtsen write impartially and fairly?
Strangely such an attempt at balance does not seem to be on the agenda.

One Flick and you're gone

After recently having spilled a rather fine Australian Shiraz into my laptop, I have come to realise why journalists don't drink as much as they once did. In my youth, journalists used to file their copy from booze proof analogue telephones or pound their stories out on almost indestructible manual typewriters. A fraternal interest in booze was a hallowed foundation for creating and maintaining contacts.
I started out as a reporter in Sydney, covering unions whose operations seemed to float on a sea of beer and spirits; whose currents, I quickly learned to navigate.
To avoid unpleasantness and resulting fisticuffs, different union factions used to favour different pubs in the seventies. Members of the Australian Communist Party drank at the Criterion, an otherwise undistinguished bar just across the road from Australian Associated Press. Off Duty overnight subs (sub-editors) mingled with communists, environmentalists, the occasional giant drag queen and ageing members of the anarchist "push". People had heated arguments over ideas; a concept many computer literate whippersnappers might find novel. Reporters would learn of scoops which would be tragically forgotten after the sixth or eighth Bundaberg Rum and Coke. It was the sort of place where you went in with a fairly loving relationship and came out with a force nine hangover.

One block south, on the edge of Chinatown, right wing unionists drank at the old Trades Hall Hotel. They belonged to the Centre Unity faction, which was neither Centrist nor unified, but it didn't seem to matter as long as they had the numbers at the weekly Labor Council meetings. They seldom spoke to journalists and drank and plotted in the back bar, deciding Labor candidates' careers, rigging union elections and writing the policies of the state Labor government itself. Only one journalist, Jack Simpson from the Telegraph, cracked their system. The back bar was connected to the public bar by a service window which the Centre Unity officials had to open to get their beers. Jack sat on the public bar side, running a small but lucrative betting shop. Jack would trade tips on the horse races for inside information on the Labor Party. The system worked well, until Jack a former bare-knuckle boxer; fell off his stool under the influence of one beers or three. His stories were a bit scrambled after that, although it seemed that editors of the Telegraph, who didn't much like unions anyway, didn't seem to notice. As Jack succinctly put it, "They were so low, they could walk under a snake's belly with their umbrellas up!" I still don't know whether he was talking about the Telegraph staff or the rightwing union officials.
Across the street, what was left of the unions drank at the Star Hotel. I went there one hot Sydney Summer afternoon, after a long unwooded Chardonnay sodden long lunch with two hackettes. The bitchumen pavements may have been melting outside, but the bar was cool and dark. A solitary drinker was downing beers with the sort of intensity with which lawyers pursue money. One of the hackettes, now a sage and respected columnist, sidled up to him.
"What's your name," she asked with a giggle.
"I'm the Flick man," he replied.
It was at that moment that two things dawned on me.
The first thing was that I recognised this fellow with the deep tan and the tattoos as a member of the Painters and Dockers Union. They worked the waterfront, which in those free and easy days before containerised cargo, was a lucrative venue for organised and disorganised crime. The Painters and Dockers were the toughest blokes on the wharves.
At this point, I remembered I had a pal belonging to the Actors Union which had been trying to sign up the strippers at Kings Cross. One club's bouncers protested against organised labour by throwing a union organiser down a flight of stairs and giving him a kicking which resulted in the loss of his spleen. But the Painters and Dockers owed the Actors a favour.
I read two weeks later that the club in question had burned down, with the manager still inside. Interviewed in hospital, the club manager told the Sydney Morning Herald that he had been depressed when he set the club alight and had locked himself in. He said that when he recovered from his injuries, he planned to leave town and get out of clubbing which had lost its attractions for him.
And the girls were talking to a Painter and Docker who called himself the Flick man. He was of course referring to the Flick company, which applied pesticides. Their radio and televisions ads claimed that if you had problems with insects, cockroaches, rodents or indeed pests of any sort, all you had to do was "Call the Flick man".
"Just one flick and their gone," was their slogan.
I made myself absent.

Getting rat faced in Cambodia

I confess that over the years I have got drunk in some strange and somewhat seedy places. When I was in Cambodia, journos like myself used to hang out at the Gecko bar in USSR Boulevard. It was easy enough to find, if only because of the two metre tall concrete Gecko standing outside the bar. It had red unblinking eyes, which were not unlike my own, after a serious session there. In those days, we used to get around town on cyclos; three wheeled pushbikes with a cane armchair attached to the front, so that the passenger could travel in comfort.
The Gecko was set up on the footpath, so the cyclos could push right up to the tables. You could sit in your cyclo armchairs; drink steadily in the steaming heat, until enough was too much. You could then give the driver US$1 and be cycled seamlessly and safely home.
Or mostly safely. I remember an incident one night when we were heading back to the Cathay, a local one star much favoured by Australian freelancers, SAS hit men and the occasional drug merchant. (Intrepid Japanese and American journalists stayed at the Cambodiana, Phnom Penh's only five star which not only had a swimming pool but which also sold bacteria free bottled water!)
We were with the other cyclists streaming down the main street, passing our bottle of Quantro from cyclo to cyclo, and savouring the scent of the Frangipanis, when a fellow got popped in the street in front of us. He was lying with his shattered head in a spreading pool of blood with his nemesis standing over him, AK 47 in hand. A Japanese TV crew emerged from a restaurant, camera running, lights flicked on. Our pal with the AK 47 just turned his head towards them. They got the message. They genuflected and retreated back to their sumptuous dinner.
Our drivers wheeled about the blood pool and pedaled us home. The incident definitely took the gloss off the evening. At the Cathay, I asked the night manager, "What does the Cathay do about security?" He was a young man who appeared to have been much scarred by shrapnel at an even more tender age. He was wearing shorts and watching American wrestling on satellite TV.
"Security?" the night manager said as he pulled a cut down AK from under his desk. On the screen a wrestler with golden curls howled as a fat man in a mask pretended to jump on his stomach. I thought of the Cambodian war veterans who would gently tap their stumps on the restaurant windows, as they held out their palms

I must not have looked reassured. The night manager reached down again and produced a rocket grenade. I thought about what a weapon like that would do in the confined space of the Cathay foyer.
It didn't bear thinking about. Sometimes its better to stay drunk.

A chip off the old blockhead

The Chinese woman on my television appeared to be screaming abuse at the warm and fuzzy face of Stalinism, China's Premier Hu. Hu Jintao plodded on regardless, delivering his official speech in the brilliant spring sunshine on the White House lawn. Next to him stood President George Bush, looking like he had suddenly realised he was mistakenly wearing Laura Bush's underwear again. The CNN commentary droned on. "The Chinese won't like this but they won't know about it because it won't be shown in China!" the Washington journalist said.

Wrong on two counts. Firstly, I was watching the live broadcast in China, about four hundred kilometers north west of Hong Kong. Secondly, the Chinese people don't speak with one voice, and it certainly isn't that of the senior bureaucrat of the capitalist, Communist Party. Chinese people have many different opinions just like Americans do. Even the Communist Party of China recognises this individuality, actively recruiting billionaire businessmen as well as the occasional worker to join its ideology challenged ranks.

But the party is still fighting a rearguard to censor international news. I couldn't publish this blog on the mainland because blogger.com sites are usually censored there. So I am inside China writing this report on my lap top, fact checking with the BBC which streams in on broadband. Censorship isn't stopping the flow of information to Chinese citizens. Even jailing the odd blogger hasn't intimidated Chinese web users. Meanwhile the Chinese government is disrupting legitimate web traffic, hampering the modernisation Mr Hu says he wants.

The US Secret Service dragged the protester away. Mr Hu went off to have a nice lunch with Mr Bush. Did they talk about freedom of speech, do you think?

Morrison of Peking

Book Review


The Man Who Died Twice
The life and adventures of Morrison of Peking
By Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin
Allen and Unwin, 380 pp, $32.95

Morrison of Peking became a model for Australian correspondents abroad. He was brave, handsome, resourceful and ultimately a celebrity. But there was more to Morrison than media hype. Like many other heroes of Victorian era journalism, he was also a racist, an agent of colonialism and quite possibly a British spy.

Through his influential reporting, George Morrison helped shape British and Australian views of what he described as an exotic and dangerous "Orient". Morrison was the first eminent Australian journalist in Asia, whose personality sometimes seemed bigger news than the stories he covered. If he lived today, he might be offered a job on Sixty Minutes.

The most recent biography about Morrison, The Man Who Died Twice (Allen&Unwin) has rather a lot about his admirable qualities. But it finds precious little to criticise or even to identify his darker side. This new book is not unique here. The Man Who Died Twice joins a string of boys own accounts of Morrison, ranging back through Australian literature, penned by writers as diverse as Banjo Paterson and Frank Clune.

In many ways Morrison was a stereotypical journalist. Contemporary correspondents might recognise Morrison's sometimes prickly relations with editors who changed his copy, his concern with expenses and his "complex and varied relations" with government officials. (Tiffin, 1978, 11/15) More significantly, Morrison shared many contemporary Australian journalists' ambivalent attitude to Asia, admiring Western constructs of "Oriental" culture, while sternly critical of perceived failings, such as corruption and violence.

Morrison the adventurer

Trained as a medical doctor, Morrison was without doubt a courageous and pioneering journalist. His 5,000 kilometre journey across China in 1894 and his resulting catalogue of impressions and experiences, An Australian in China, established his international reputation as an eyewitness reporter. He subsequently served for 17 years as The Times correspondent in China.

He was not a great writer but rather a competent reporter and an excellent analyst. The editor of his letters, Lo Hui-Min, said that while Morrison lacked confidence in his own writing style, he had virtues which it was said other foreign correspondents failed to achieve:

If he lacked any stylistic power, it was more than compensated for by the conviction which his plain and lucid narrative inspired in his readers; his style was the more masterful because it was apparently flat. However, this impression came less from his style than from his whole attitude. His adventures prove his courage, but even there he was not reckless, and he was not an adventurer in journalism; he was keen to have a 'scoop', but was never sensational. (Lo Hui Minh, pp 3/4)

Morrison was regarded by many of his contemporaries as the leading authority on the Orient. A.B. (Banjo) Paterson met him "by great good luck" in 1901 when on a visit to Hong Kong. "It was an education to listen to him, for he spoke with the self confidence of genius," Paterson later wrote. "With Morrison, it was not a matter of 'I think'; it was a case of 'I know'". (Paterson 1992 pp 122/123) Paterson admired Morrison's system of contacts which delivered exclusive reports on international treaties days before they were even signed by the nations involved:

Dr Morrison lives for the most part in Peking, where he is in touch with the best informed Chinese circles. But he moves constantly about, travelling in men-of-war, on tramp steamers, on mule litters, on pony back, or on his feet, as occasion demands. He is a powerful, wiry man, of solid and imposing appearance, and those who know him best in China, say that he has mastered the secret of all Chinese diplomacy - bluff. In China, you must save your face, e.g., preserve your dignity at all hazards. He never allows any Chinaman to assume for a moment that he (the Chinaman) is in any way the equal of the Times correspondent in China.
(IBID p129)

Paterson clearly approved of Morrison assuming superiority over "the Chinaman". But viewed a century later, Morrison's work can be seen as written unashamedly from the perspective of a British imperialist. Morrison, it might be remembered, was an Australian by birth who called himself an Englishman. Indeed, according to Philip Knightley, at times Dr Morrison was little better than an agent of the British government. Knightley claimed that while presenting himself as a private individual, Dr Morrison "had gone off on a special mission for the Foreign Office through the still independent Asian nations of Burma, China, and Siam, pretending he had nothing to do with either the newspaper or the British government". (Knightley 1975 p 61)

Morrison corresponded privately with senior British officials, and identified passionately with British interests "We all feel very grateful to The Times for the way it has championed British interests out here." he wrote from Peking to Ethel Bell ( the wife of the proprietor) on 14.3.1899. (Lo Hui-Min , p 116)

Morrison was a man of contradictions. He an imperialist who advocated Britains’s civilising role. Yet he was aware of European ignorance about the "Orient" and contemptuous of the resulting failure of many Western missionaries. He openly admired the achievements of the millenniums-old Chinese civilisation.

Morrison as myth

Morrison the man was becoming a myth. Author and correspondent, Frank Clune claimed that Morrison's "sentiment of sympathy for non-Europeans was at variance with the hates, fears, phobias, complexes and dislikes of his fellow Australians, which culminated in the White Australia policy". Clune even said that Morrison was "without prejudice of race or colour":

Earnest by name and earnest by nature, he [Morrison] had discovered the great truth that colour is only skin deep; that pigmentation of the hide of a kanaka, a Moor, a Jamaican negro, or an Aryan is only a surface disguise for the character of the man beneath.(Clune 1941, 1941)

During the 1940’s Clune had himself been Australia’s best selling non-fiction writer. A former Anzac digger, Clune set himself squarely in the forefront of a series of books about adventurous travel in the Orient. In preparing his book on "Chinese" Morrison, Clune appeared at the Tokyo office of the Society for International Cultural Relations and demanded "everything [the society] had on Morrison". In characteristically high handed dealings with Orientals, Clune further ordered that the books be sent to his Sydney home . Yet in spite of this research, Clune appeared to be rather selective in what he reported. Contrary to what Clune wrote, Morrison, was most definitely not invulnerable to 19th century Australian prejudices about Asians. To be precise, he had a xenophobic fear of Chinese immigration:

We cannot compete with Chinese; we cannot intermix or marry with them; they are aliens in language, thought and customs; they are working animals of low grade but great vitality. The Chinese is temperate, frugal, hardworking, and law evading, if not law abiding - we all acknowledge that. He can outwork an Englishman and starve him out of the country - no one can deny that. To compete successfully with a Chinaman, the artisan or labourer of our own flesh and blood would require to be downgraded to a mere mechanical beast of labour, unable to support wife or family, toiling seven days in the week, with no amusements, enjoyments, or comforts of any kind, no interest in the country, contributing no share to the expense of government, living on food that he would now reject with loathing, crowded with his fellows ten or fifteen in a room that he would not now live in alone, except with repugnance. Admitted freely into Australia, the Chinese would starve out the Englishman, in accordance with the law of currency - that of two currencies in a country, the baser will always supplant the better. (Morrison p224/225)

Morrison was a racist who saw Asian males as potential sexual predators. To Morrison, Asians were "animals" and "beasts", with whom there must be no miscegenation. "Our own flesh and blood", in this case, the British race, must be protected from the "baser" currency who would starve out the white man. Morrison may have been subsequently portrayed as a dispassionate observer of Asian events. But he saw himself as an outsider in Asia; a spokesman for Western ideas and intentions. Ultimately. to Morrison, Asians were "working animals of low grade" fit only to be servants to the intellectually superior white man.

Morrison as imperial icon

The Man who died twice, by journalists Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin, is described in its cover notes as “a powerful and gripping biography of an Australian journalist and adventurer who paused only to tell his stories and plan his next foray among the great events and leading figures of his day.”

The title refers to Morrison’s prematurely reported death during the Boxer uprising. In 1900, Morrison distinguished himself by fighting on the side of colonial powers at the outbreak of the uprising; an indigenous rebellion against the dismemberment of China, the introduction of foreign culture and the imposition of foreign economic control. Times correspondents did not have journalistic immunity in colonial wars. Morrison would have been aware of the fate of an earlier Times Special correspondent to China, Thomas Bowlby, who was seized, tortured and killed by Chinese forces near the end of the Second Opium War in 1860. (Beeching, ,1975, p 299)

On 16 July 1900, the London Daily Mail carried a story datelined Shanghai, which claimed that Dr Morrison had died in a desperate last stand at the besieged British legation at Beijing. In a report resonant of Kipling and the 19th century adventure novel, the defenders were said to have hurled back wave after wave of Chinese assault troops until their ammunition ran out. The legation guards were allegedly wiped out to the last man and everyone else, Morrison included, was "put to the sword in the most atrocious manner". It should be noted that the report while filed by a special correspondent in China, came from Shanghai: isolated from Beijing by almost a thousand kilometres of Chinese countryside populated by largely hostile peasants, roving bands of fanatical Boxers and several well trained Chinese Imperial armies. (O’Connor p 177/178)

The story was entirely false.

Nevertheless, the massacre report was picked up and reprinted by many other newspapers. As a result, the next day The London Times carried a glowing obituary for Morrison, claiming that it would be foolish or unmanly to doubt the awful "truth". According to the Times, no newspaper had "a more devoted, a more fearless and more able servant than Dr Morrison". In the editorial the Times said:

His last message was dated June 14 th, just before the legations were finally cut off from the outside world. It was an ominous message. One shudders to think of the awful days and nights that were to follow, waiting for the help that never came, before the tragedy was finally consummated and the last heroic remnants of Western civilisation in the doomed city were engulfed beneath the overwhelming flood of Asiatic barbarism. (Cited by Clune 1939 p 296)

Such press reports, while generating enormous public sympathy for Morrison as a British hero, also mobilised support for European military intervention in China. The report was part of the self justifying mythology of Empire, setting Morrison among Imperial icons like the British women murdered by rebellious Indian sepoys at Cawnpore during what the British called the Indian Mutiny. The Forbidden City in Beijing was indeed "doomed"; it was shortly after sacked by the avenging forces of "Western civilisation". Morrison disapproved of the excesses of the occupying Europeans, particularly the Germans. But this didn’t stop him from benefiting from the looting, a fact glossed over by The Man who died Twice. (Thompson/Macklin p 200) who described it as souveniring.

While alarmist stories of Asiatic violence and savagery might fuel the fires of imperialism, the embarrassingly wrong report of Morrison’s death offended the notions of accuracy held by the great metropolitan newspapers. As an apology, the Manager of the Times, C.F. Moberley Bell wrote to Morrison:
The extent to which we have been bamboozled both as to your safety and as to your danger, by the lying Chinese would I think surprise even you. . . . I am sorry to say however, that the English press has been as bad or worse. That they should be deceived - as we ourselves were - is natural but I am afraid that half of the telegrams were deliberately faked in Fleet Street. (Lo Hui-Min pp141/142)



Getting bamboozled about the truth


The authors of The Man who died Twice saw Morrison as “a noble professional” who might serve as beacon for the rising generations in journalism. They lamented that, “ the struggle for truth against vested interests has never been more desperate”. Morrison not only made history, they wrote. He also made it.

But for whom?

Morrison was neither the first, nor the last Victorian journalist to act in the narrative of Empire.

In the 19th century, it was not unusual for feted reporters to be regaled for the best sellers they wrote about their scrapes in the colonial wars they supported. One of the then best known, but now largely forgotten of Morrison’s predecessors, “Bokhara” Burnes wrote a book about his journey to Afghanistan , which made him too the toast of British society. He secretly wrote political and military reports for which he received a Knighthood. Like Morrison, Burnes later found himself trapped by an indigenous uprising, in this case Kabul at the beginning of the first Afghan war. Burnes was less lucky than Morrison however, being hacked to pieces by the mob and having his severed parts hung up in the Kabul market, thus prematurely ending a promising career in journalism, espionage and diplomacy. There were many others. Winston Churchill was a Boer war correspondent who was rather more successful in mixing writing, politics and Empire.

Morrison’s record, as the authors admit, was not perfect. But neither should be seen as “an icon of inspiration”; a role model for contemporary journalists. Morrison was a man of many parts, not all of them recommended to modern society. Cyril Pearl, the author of Morrison of Peking (Penguin 1967) was closer to the money when he described Morrison as “a latter day Elizabethan who never grew up”. “He was infected with the raging Imperialism of the nineties [1890s] , that curious conspiracy of rogues and idealists, poets and entrepreneurs, prophets and profit seekers, which he saw romantically as a crusade,” Pearl wrote. (Pearl 1967)







Selected Bibliography

Clune, Frank. 1939. Sky High to Shanghai. Sydney. Angus and Robertson.

Clune, Frank. 1941. Chinese Morrison. Melbourne. The Bread and Cheese Club

Beeching, Jack. 1975 The Chinese Opium Wars , London: Hutchinson.

Lo Hui-Min. 1976. The Correspondence of G.E. Morrison. London : Cambridge University Press.

Morrison, G.E..1985 An Australian in China : Being the narrative of a quiet journey across China to Burma. London. Oxford University Press.

O'Connor, Richard.1973.The Spirit Soldiers : A Historical Narrative of the Boxer Rebellion. New York. G.P. Puttnam's Sons.

Paterson, Banjo. 1992 "Happy Dispatches". Clement Semmler (Ed.) A.B. 'Banjo' Paterson; Bush Ballads, poems, stories and journalism, , 122/123.

Pearl, Cyril. 1970. Morrison of Peking. Middlesex. Penguin Books.

Thompson, Peter, Macklin, Robert 2004. The Man Who Died Twice Allen and Unwin. Crows Nest.

Tiffen, Rodney. 1978. The News from South East Asia: The Sociology of Newsmaking. Singapore. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.