Summer sanity on Spencer Street

Standards slip during the summer break, the period known to newsroom habitues as the silly season. With parliaments in recess and politicians studying this, that and the other thing on their various overseas jaunts it can be hard for a stand-in editor (above) to find enough of the topical to fill the first few pages, let alone an entire edition. This pressure to smear ink on forest products can lead to some curious news judgments — saturation coverage of a handsome, rich and heterosexual cricketer’s amorous overtures to a TV reporter being the current example. If only batsman Chris Gayle were gay and had offered to administer a good spanking to an apple-cheeked lad, the praise would be deafening. Or if he had performed a traditional war dance of recent invention and flung an imaginary spear, any number of eager and approving maidens of the left would have been very keen to have themselves caught and bowled. Judge Mordecai Bromberg might even have declared Gayle an Aborigine. Stranger things have happened.

At The Age, where year-round standards could not be lower, summer’s doldrums have had a most peculiar effect: breaking with its norm, the paper has actually published several recent pieces that are not only readable but quite sensible.

The first silly-season break with standard operating procedure came on Tuesday, when forest ecologist Mark Adams, of Sydney University, was allowed space on the opinion page to observe that the more fuel one makes available to a bushfire, the bigger it will get. This is the same Mark Adams, mind you, who was slagged mercilessly in the same publication when, five years ago, he was approached by the government of Liberal then-Premier Ted Baillieu to head a scientific study of fuel reduction in Victoria’s High Country. Perhaps the charred ruin of editor Andrew Holden’s holiday shack at Wye River has led to a change of heart. Or perhaps not. The next day, a prominently displayed letter to the editor asserted that global warming makes fuel-reduction burns problematic and the only solution must be more regulation and town-planning laws. Written by a former tram driver, the same much-quoted source during the earlier assault on Adams, it served as a reminder that, despite the odd eruption of intelligence, silliness is firmly rooted on Spencer Street, as is The Age itself.

Today, however, comes the real jaw-dropper: an op-ed piece by Parnell Palme McGuinness that assails the ABC and calls for a sweeping review of the way in which, and on what, the national broadcaster spends its $1.1 billion annual budget. This is nothing less than astonishing, as The Age — and Fairfax generally — serves as a sort of retirement home and income supplement for superannuated ABCers. Having smugged himself into a state of geriatric exhaustion, Media Watch‘s Jonathan Holmes gets regular columns to report what members of his circle (and tram drivers as well, perhaps) assure him is the settled science of global warming, while Radio National’s former, current and future Musselman, Waleed Aly, enjoys free rein to wrangle cliches and opacity into assertions that Islamic terror has no connection to Islam and, even if it does, the odd bomb blast or beheading is no worse than “an irritant” — unless, of course, it can be erroneously attributed to white right-wingers, in which case it is a dreadful thing.

Given that Fairfax types move seamlessly into the ABC environment, especially if their partners are already on the payroll and available to demonstrate how the coffee machine works and where the expenses forms are kept, could there be a hidden motive for Fairfaxers tirelessly promoting a rival contender for the same audience of inner-city leftoids? That it might be a good idea to stay on the right side of a prospective employer is not a difficult concept to grasp, which implies at least a small handful of remaining Age staffers appreciate as much.

McGuinness’ article — available via the link below — deserves to be read. As an addled newspaper proceeds toward its appointment with the receivers, it may well be the very last rational and coherent thought to grace those doomed pages.

— roger franklin

Read More