Chequebook journalism: blurring the line between news and infotainment
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Version 0 of 1. The ratings for the two top television networks in Sydney at the start of 2015 tell the tale. Of the top 10 most popular shows on television, the Seven network had the two least popular, Nine had six of the 10 most popular and the ABC scored with the rest. Be assured. Having just scraped in ahead of Nine in 2014, Seven is ready for a fight. So the first rating day of 2015 – Sunday 1 February – will be a doozy. And preparations are well under way. The entire Nine reporting team is out visiting survivors of the Sydney siege offering money for exclusive interviews. Nine has gone for big numbers: they want their 60 Minutes studio full of victims, all talking to each other. Star recruit is slain barrister Katrina Dawson’s close barrister friend Julie Taylor, 31, now 23 weeks pregnant. An interview with Taylor has been secured by Nine veteran Mark Burrows who chatted to her immediately after her traumatic release from the Lindt café. Seven, on the other hand, has gone for key one-on-one interviews with former Sunrise host Melissa Doyle. One such recruit is Marcia Mikhail – the woman who was caught live on Seven cameras being carried out from the café with shrapnel wounds to her legs. She has reportedly signed up for $350,000. Her lawyer said she would not settle for anything less than “six figures”. Seven also has a large bank of exclusive video from the siege as its studios were literally across Martin Place from the Lindt café. Long-time media guru Steve Allen, now of Essence Media, told Daily Mail Australia last week: “The only way that this may be monetised is here – you got to produce the content”. It was a crude warning that if “talent” are paid big bucks, they gotta tell a bloody good story. Not long ago – before chequebooks went the way of letters with stamps – this used to be called “chequebook journalism”. The practice was condemned by just about everyone except Gerald Stone, who introduced it to Australia when he set up 60 Minutes on the American model in 1979. It is still condemned by the journalists’ union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), which bans entry to its Walkley Awards for Journalistic Excellence if interviewees have been paid. The main objection is, effectively, “who pays the piper calls the tune”. It puts the interviewee in a conflict of interest where they have to meet the expectations of the payer, whether that be through truth, exaggeration or lies. A good recent example was a Melbourne agent trawling a possible interview past several TV shows last April of someone (a convicted heroin smuggler) who would “disclose” that Schapelle Corby knew all along she was breaking Indonesian law. It was rejected by executive producer Mark Llewellyn at Seven and others at Nine but struck paydirt, at a quarter of the asking price, with the Ten Network. Once aired, its allegations were quickly proven false and withdrawn. The ABC’s Media Watch had a field day. The ABC has clear rules rejecting chequebook journalism. You can pay the expenses of someone to and from an interview (taxi or flight and accommodation) but that’s it. The BBC has a slightly less rigorous system where an “appearance fee” can be added but it is (very) small. Under these rules there are no “deserving” (the poor, victims) and “undeserving” (the rich, the famous) interviewees. But in real life, it’s not so simple. When I joined the Seven Network from the ABC in 1996 as a media executive I had a sobering experience. I rang my old sparring partner from 60 Minutes, Peter Meakin, and suggested a pub lunch to discuss this practice. Within minutes Peter said he too would like to see it go and would be prepared to join me in this campaign. It cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in handouts each year to people like weight-loss freaks, women with 200 cats and men with unheard-of diseases. I remained cautiously hopeful. We both took our virginal ideas to key bosses in our networks. Months later, hopes faded. New stories demanded action. Stuart Diver got trapped under a mountain of snow at Thredbo and Seven found a way to assist him long term without a public payment. Competition resumed its dominant position over principle. My purist position could barely be heard in the rush to lock up Diver before Nine did. It was the Beaconsfield Mine collapse in Tasmania in early 2006 that saw the peak of the competitive struggle between the commercial networks. Saving money went out the window. In fact, the mine collapse saw one of the trapped miners, Todd Russell, utter those immortal words on national television to the then chief executive of Nine, Eddie Maguire, who asked for an “exclusive interview”: “Tell us how big your chequebook is!” Nine went in to overdrive and offered bigger sums than had ever been seen before (or since). A $2.6m deal was struck, enabling A Current Affair host Tracy Grimshaw to do a two-hour special with Todd and his mate Brant Webb, advertisers to add $2m to the normal Nine income stream and the Packer magazines Women’s Weekly and Woman’s Day to share the exclusivity. This Beaconsfield moment “outed” chequebook journalism. It had become ubiquitous. It had become part of the celebrity culture which was blurring the line between journalism and infotainment. Indeed, it was the platform on which Bill Shorten first came to national attention as a union organiser. Ironically, it was also the moment in which one of Australia’s straightest arrows in journalism, Richard Carleton, had a fatal heart attack in the middle of an investigative interview about mine safety. How stark, sad, appropriate and simple. |