Simply waltzing on? Reflections on the performance of the Canberra Press Gallery in an era of prime-ministerial instability

Abstract

This article draws on interviews with members of the Canberra Press Gallery to reflect on the performance of journalists in reporting recent national leadership instability. This is in the context of claims that reporters assisted in fomenting the instability and were ethically compromised. The increased pace of the news media cycle and the role of social media has caused a ‘cacophonous’ environment which journalist believe contributes to instability. The journalistic convention of background briefings is both central to the gallery’s performance in reporting leadership tensions and the major impediment to an informed assessment of whether journalists have assisted in fanning instability. We find that despite the centrality of the background briefing to the Gallery’s work, there is complexity and disagreement about the practice and the ethical standards that apply. This, we suggest, will be of increasing importance, yet the gallery’s willingness and ability to reflect on the issues is limited.

Keywords

Canberra Press Gallery journalism journalism ethics leadership instability media political reporting

In the past decade, Australia has experienced a period of remarkable turbulence in the highest political office in the land. Beginning with the termination of John Howard’s Coalition Government in the 2007 federal election, there have been five changes of prime minister (Howard to Kevin Rudd, December 2007; Rudd to Julia Gillard, June 2010; Gillard to Rudd, June 2013; Rudd to Tony Abbott, September 2013; and Abbott to Malcolm Turnbull, September 2015). This is a rate of turnover in the office unprecedented since the first decade of the Commonwealth when the party system was still to settle. Perhaps most extraordinary is that three prime ministers lost office because of party room coups in little more than 5 years (Rudd, June 2010; Gillard, June 2013; and Abbott, September 2015). To put this into historical perspective, only three prime ministers had previously been deposed by their party (Robert Menzies, August 1941; John Gorton, March 1971; and Bob Hawke, December 1991), those regicides spaced out over half a century. Moreover, the rash of political leadership coups in Australia has no parallel in comparable parliamentary democracies and this unenviable national ‘exceptionalism’ is even more pronounced if one factors in the high number of opposition leaders removed by party room challenges (Tiffen, 2017: 225). Indeed, the most recent prime-ministerial deposition, Abbott’s in September 2015, piqued international curiosity and bemusement. The BBC reported his downfall under the headline, ‘Australia: Coup capital of the democratic world’ (Bryant, 2015).

The revolving door nature of the Australian prime ministership has precipitated a (limited) debate about causal factors (see Walsh, 2016). On one side of that debate are those who regard the turbulence as symptomatic of a serious malaise in the political system (e.g. Kelly, 2014). On the other side are those who adopt a more sanguine position by suggesting that instability is a coincidence of a run of poor leaders. Those identifying larger forces at play in the recent leadership churn generally include changes to the media landscape in their explanatory framework by highlighting such phenomena as the accelerated news cycle, the rise of the Internet and advent of social media and the attendant fragmentation of news platforms and audiences, and individual-focussed trends in media coverage of politics (e.g. Strangio et al., 2017: 300–302; Tiffen, 2017: 230–232). Their arguments dovetail with literature contending that increased mediatisation of politics and its leader-centric focus has heightened the prominence and potential authority of leaders, yet simultaneously rendered office holding more onerous and precarious (e.g. Helms, 2012).

This article has a related but more specific brief. It focuses upon the Canberra Press Gallery’s performance in reporting on the recent national leadership instability in the context of claims that reporting played a part in fomenting the instability. This enquiry is timely and significant at several levels. It is almost a truism to say that the media, and Press Gallery in particular, exercise a ‘pivotal role … in how these [leadership] conflicts develop’ (Tiffen, 2017: 3) and how they are represented to and understood by the public. It follows that, given the pitched leadership battles of the past decade, the importance of the Press Gallery’s function in reporting on those struggles has been correspondingly amplified. Moreover, the intensity of the leadership conflict has necessarily made this a fraught period for Press Gallery journalists to navigate. How do they believe they have acquitted themselves in these testing circumstances and what lessons, if any, have they garnered from the experience? Second, as already alluded to, these leadership upheavals coincided with a period of disruption to the media landscape in Australia that has impacted the size, composition and practices of the press. Has this unsettled environment heightened the difficulties of reporting on the leadership contests and impinged on the nature and quality of the coverage?

Before proceeding, we acknowledge that disruption to journalism ought not be construed as an exclusively negative phenomenon for politics. There is an extensive literature on the media’s gatekeeping function, and the potential democratising impact of the means of publication being in many more hands (Bruns, 2012; Dunlop, 2013; Dutton, 2008; Jericho, 2012). In this context, we record below how at least one new entrant to the Canberra Press Gallery has challenged the unspoken ‘rules’ of what gets reported and what does not, resulting in more information being available to the public and upsetting what traditionally has been a sometimes clubby and collusive relationship between media and political elites. Social and digital media have also enhanced the capacity for journalists and their audiences to engage directly with each other, which is recognised by journalists as including a new kind of accountability. It also offers journalists’ access to additional information, making news articles a relatively unbounded dialogic form (Bruns, 2012; Holcomb et al., 2011). Nor are these developments superficial. A significant body of research has addressed how changes in media environments produced by social and digital media have altered the nature of journalistic expertise and practice and reshaped political discourse among publics (Anderson et al., 2014; Lewis et al., 2012; Simons, 2013; Wright, 2012). However, considering these larger transformations is not our purpose here.

While controversy has accompanied the performance of the Press Gallery during previous intraparty fighting over the prime ministership, criticisms of journalists during the recent instability have been trenchant in relation to their reporting of leadership tensions throughout Julia Gillard’s 2010–2013 prime ministership. In 2013, a former long-time member of the Canberra Press Gallery, Kerry-Anne Walsh, published a book-length critique charging the media with complicity in the destabilisation campaign orchestrated against Gillard by her predecessor Kevin Rudd, and alleged failings in journalistic ethics particularly with regard to the use of off-the-record and background briefings. Gillard (2014) similarly protested about Press Gallery behaviour in her account of her prime ministership. Hitherto, with minor exceptions (Horan, 2013; Knott, 2013), these criticisms have gone unanswered by Press Gallery members. This invites the impression that, as Walsh (2013) suggests, the fourth estate’s habit is to remain aloof from scrutiny and accountability: to ‘simply waltz on to the next project without acknowledging our errors’ (p. 287). This article remedies this omission by drawing on interviews with six journalists who were members of the Press Gallery during the recent leadership upheavals.

It emerges that, as well as the increased pace of the news media cycle, the journalistic conventions of off-the-record and background briefings are both central to the Press Gallery’s performance in reporting leadership tensions, and also the major impediment to an informed assessment of whether journalists have in fact abetted leadership instability. When queried about quality and accuracy of their reports, journalists invoke background briefings as a justification and alibi. They also contend that these briefings mean that outsiders cannot judge their work because, as Phillip Coorey of the Australian Financial Review put it, ‘they can’t know what I know’. We conclude with some reflections on the implications for journalistic practice and future reporting.

Reporting on prime-ministerial leadership showdowns past and present

The Canberra Press Gallery, formally called the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery, is an association of journalists devoted to covering federal politics and the proceedings of parliament. Like much of the institutional arrangements and practices of Australian parliamentary democracy, while fashioned on Westminster precedent, the gallery developed its own distinctive local inflections (Lloyd, 1988). In particular, the Canberra Press Gallery diverges from the Westminster model and is indeed unique in western democracies in being housed under the same parliamentary roof as the politicians and staffers on whom they report (Lloyd, 1988; Middleton, 2008; Simons, 1999). The journalists and media workers occupy offices on the same corridors, using the same lifts and cafes and, of course, reporting on the same political milieu. In the cramped surroundings of the ‘old’ or provisional Parliament House (1927–1988), the gallery offices were split between the House of Representatives and Senate sides of the building, but with the move to the ‘new’ or permanent Parliament House in 1988, the gallery offices were consolidated on the second floor of the Senate side of the building. Accreditation is managed by an elected committee of Press Gallery members. Those accredited then receive a pass that allows access to all but a few areas of Parliament House.

The performance of the Canberra Press Gallery, or least some members of it, in reporting on prime-ministerial leadership conflicts has long been a source of contention. The extent to which Alan Reid, gallery doyen and political correspondent of Sir Frank Packer’s Daily Telegraph, connived with Liberal Party opponents of Prime Minister John Gorton to engineer Gorton’s overthrow in March 1971 has been thoroughly documented (e.g. Fitzgerald and Holt, 2010; Hancock, 2002). It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Reid crossed the line between reporter and ‘player’ or, as a later senior member of the Press Gallery noted with grudging admiration, ‘Reid was in a class by himself as a political agent provocateur’ (cited in Richardson, 1998: 16).

Although Reid remains sui generis, according to the historian of the 20th century Canberra Press Gallery, C. J. Lloyd (1988), the circumstances of Gorton’s demise:

illustrated the increasing dynamism of the Gallery. Freed from the inertia and inhibitions of Menzies’ long rule, the Gallery was increasingly tough in dealing with his successors … Political journalists were prepared to be more assertive, to challenge and criticise, to intervene and try directly to influence political events. (pp. 248–249)

Lloyd’s study coincided with a time of escalating leadership tension in the incumbent Labor government between Prime Minister Bob Hawke and his ambitious treasurer, Paul Keating. Their rivalry culminated in Keating twice challenging Hawke (June and December 1991). Following his survival of the first challenge, Hawke rebuked Gallery journalists about the standard of their reporting: ‘You were participants … You were unobjective’ (cited in Fitzgerald, 2008: 91). In the aftermath of Hawke’s fall later that year, one of his loyalists, Robert Ray, offered a still more unflattering portrayal of the Press Gallery’s performance:

What sort of adjectives could describe the role of the media from June to December 1991? Craven? Blood lusting? Incompetent? Biased? Bigoted? None of them adequately describes the way Hawke was treated by the Gallery’. (cited in Tiffen, 2017: 181)

Even those on the winning side of the contest conceded that the Press Gallery’s role was ‘critical’ and that elements within it assisted the campaign to dethrone Hawke. Keating’s numbers man, Graham Richardson (1994: 310), referred to a ‘pro-Keating pack’ headed by Gallery luminaries, Michelle Grattan, Paul Kelly and Laurie Oakes – a group later described by Simons (1999: 23–26) as ‘the God correspondents’.

It is to be expected that deposed leaders complain about unfair treatment by the media. Those same leaders will have invariably profited from collusion with journalists in ascending the political greasy pole. Prime Minister Gillard, haunted by the circumstances surrounding Rudd’s deposition, offered to release journalists from any ‘obligations’ of confidentiality in challenging them to disclose any instances of her having plotted against Rudd’s leadership (Hooper, 2013). No disclosures were forthcoming, seeming to corroborate what Gillard had insisted, that she did not work through the media to undermine Rudd. Yet, as the Age’s former chief political columnist Shaun Carney (2016: 149–153) reveals in his memoir, Gillard backgrounded against the then Labor opposition leader Kim Beazley in late 2006 at a time when she had formed an alliance with Rudd with the aim of wresting the leadership from Beazley. In other words, no aspirant can truly claim to be an innocent. Cultivation of the media is integral to leadership manoeuvring, which itself reflects the ‘mutual dependence, even symbiosis’ of politicians and journalists (Lloyd, 1988: 267–268).

Yet, while leadership conflict reports informed by background briefings have long been the stock and trade of political journalism, it is reasonable to say that in the past decade they were elevated to a dominant narrative. In Gillard’s (2014) view, leadership stories became ‘akin to Christmas stocking fillers – you can always pop in another one with little expense or effort’ (p. 80). Leadership speculation in the media was at its most febrile and persistent during her prime ministership. It was a focus grounded in the political reality of a relentless destabilisation campaign by Rudd to exact revenge upon Gillard and reclaim the Labor leadership from her. Gillard comprehensively defeated a challenge by Rudd in February 2012, while another was stillborn in March 2013, but came with collateral damage to her government in the form of several ministerial resignations. Then, in June 2013, in a dramatic final showdown, Gillard called on another leadership ballot and was narrowly beaten by Rudd.

The preoccupation with the leadership conflict narrative during those 3 years should be seen in the context of other factors. Our interviewees identified a number of causes, other than their own reporting. First, the influence and ubiquity of opinion polls – most delivering dire numbers for the Gillard government – consistently piqued leadership speculation. There has been a proliferation of opinion polls over the past decade, partly due to the availability of cheap robopolling software, and partly because those polls make for a cheap ‘breaking news’ story for media outlets (Brent, 2016). Newspoll – published in News Corp’s Australian – in particular attained an ‘omnipotence in political reporting’ from 2007 (Megalogenis, 2010: 29), with its capacity to break a leader illustrated most vividly by it being invoked by Malcolm Turnbull when justifying his decision to challenge Tony Abbott in September 2015 (Errington and Van Onselen, 2015: 198). Second, wicked policy problems, notably climate change and energy security, and the policy flux in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis have been disabling for all leaders over the past decade. Third, the increased importance of online media and particularly social media use by politicians, journalists and others disrupted conventional reporting practices, diminished politicians’ and journalists’ ability to manage the agenda, and sharply accelerated the news media cycle.

The background to all this was the more general upheaval in the media industry. Although the collapse of the traditional business model of the press had been in train for a number of years, Gillard’s prime ministership coincided with major waves of redundancies of journalists. Media scholars Sally Young and Matthew Ricketson (2014) sum up the result as follows: ‘fewer journalists covering more stories, in less time, contributed to a shallower, more frenetic, tweet first, check later, news reporting culture’ (p. 287).

In sum, the destructive leadership rivalry between Gillard and Rudd was no media confection and there were circumstances at play that help explain why journalists were so mesmerised by it. Questions remain, however, about whether the coverage of the leadership tensions was proportionate, discriminating and sufficiently balanced. Kerry-Anne Walsh (2013) asserts that there were ‘serious reporting mistakes, gross errors of judgement, biased commentary and empowering of Team Rudd’s agenda’ (p. 287). Gillard (2014: 79) complains of a recurring pattern of exaggeration and inaccuracy, noting that during her 3 years in office there were 150 claims that her leadership would be ‘brought to an end very soon or by a specific date or event’. Both Walsh (2013: 286) and Gillard (2014: 79) single out Sydney Morning Herald political editor Peter Hartcher for having acted as a mouthpiece for the Rudd camp.

A specific charge levelled at the Press Gallery by Walsh and Gillard regards the alleged abuse of off-the-record briefings and unattributed quotes. Walsh (2013) writes that ‘the anonymous quote – once used only to protect legitimate deep throats or to give nuance to a story – became the most popular bedrock for Gillard–Rudd leadership stories that dominated news headlines’ (pp. 285–286). She points to several instances in that period of non-gallery members of the media airing concerns about the ethics of journalists authoring stories denying that Rudd was campaigning for the leadership when those same journalists were privy to contrary information from the Rudd camp. Gillard (2014) elaborates on that charge:

I understand the burning need for quick content and way it drives leadership stories. I even understand the hypersensitivity to leadership stories after 2010. But I will never understand the inherent dishonesty in many pieces written by journalists on the leadership. Journalists who were briefed by Kevin himself on his plans to regain the leadership or who knew a journalist who had been – in other words, individuals who possessed direct knowledge that Kevin was duchessing newspaper editors and caucus members – wrote stories asserting Kevin was not doing anything to try and take the leadership. It misled readers and was written to mislead them. It was unethical. (p. 82)

What has been the response to these claims? Before completion of her book, Walsh (2013) approached Hartcher with ‘questions about the ethics of his reportage and his commentary on the leadership issues’ (p. 286). He replied that ‘he ‘utterly’ rejected my premise that he had advocated for Rudd ‘and, therefore, the questions predicated on it’. Hartcher was pressed further about Walsh’s account upon its publication (Knott, 2013). While noting he had not read the book, Hartcher compared it to a ‘conspiracy theory’ and flatly denied the idea he had been ‘a Rudd supporter’. Despite hitting the bestselling lists, Walsh’s book was mostly either ignored or dismissed out of hand in the media. Perhaps the most thoughtful response was an online review by a former Press Gallery journalist, Matthew Horan (2013). He badged the book ‘a polemic’ rather than ‘history’, but conceded Walsh was ‘correct, as least in regard to the Gallery’. One of the book’s serious deficiencies, however, according to Horan, was the absence of ‘substantive interviews with the journalists in question’.

Our interviews

We requested interviews with 10 current or recently serving members of the Canberra Press Gallery. The journalists were offered the opportunity to speak to us either ‘on the record’ meaning that they could be identified by name, or ‘on background’ meaning they would not be identified. We sought a mix of young and more senior, and of those representing long-standing and established media organisations and those working for recently arrived web and social-media-based outlets. Journalists who have been the subject of explicit criticism by Gillard and Walsh were approached. Peter Hartcher failed to respond to our emails or phone calls. Six current and recently serving gallery members agreed to participate. Those who declined cited, variously, pressure of other work, a reluctance to become a commentator rather than a reporter and a suspicion that this article would be ‘another example of beating up on the Press Gallery’. The semi-structured interviews lasted an average of about 50 minutes each and were conducted by either telephone or Skype in October 2017 (Table 1).

Table 1.

Interview subjects.

	Media Organisation	Notes
Phillip Coorey	Australian Financial Review
Matthew Knott	Fairfax Media (Age and Sydney Morning Herald)	At time of writing on leave
Mark Di Stefano	Buzzfeed	Since June 2017, with Buzzfeed UK based in London
Bernard Keane	Crikey
Journalist A	Web-based media outlet	Journalist A spoke on background. A senior reporter with decades of experience in print and web-based journalism
Katharine Murphy	Guardian Australia	Formerly Fairfax Media (Age and Sydney Morning Herald)

Our questions explored the journalists’ perceptions of the causes of leadership instability and the impact of disruption in the media industry, as well as asking them to reflect on criticisms of the gallery, both of their own work and that of the gallery as a whole.

From ‘stage management’ to ‘cacophony’: change in the Canberra Press Gallery

According to the Press Gallery’s website, at the time of writing there were 250 accredited media representatives, consisting mainly of journalists but including camera operators, editors, photographers, technicians and administrative and support staff (Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery, 2017). This is a drop in numbers from 10 years ago, when the gallery comprised 300 members (Middleton, 2008). Reflecting transformations in the media industry, today’s gallery makes provision for ‘freelancers, bloggers and new organisations’. Crikey, Buzzfeed, Business Spectator, The Conversation, The Guardian Australia, Huffington Post, The Mandarin and The Saturday Paper are among the new organisations that have joined the gallery at the same time as mainstream and legacy media organisations have merged bureaus and cut staff.

Social media arrived in the Gallery as a reporting instrument in 2009, with Annabel Crabb of Fairfax¹ and Latika Bourke of Radio 2UE² establishing Twitter accounts for live reporting, including of question time. Almost all high-profile gallery members now have a social media presence and Twitter accounts (Haggarty, 2017). As witnessed in other contexts, today’s media workers engage in continuous dialogue with sources, peers and policymakers, on Twitter in particular. Social media networks have become everyday work tools for journalists (Broersma and Graham, 2012; Graham and Wright, 2015). On social media, Canberra Press Gallery journalists are key players in an ecology that includes politicians, sources and the interested general public who increasingly use the medium to interact with professional journalists, and sometimes influence hour-by-hour news agendas in a phenomenon described in other contexts as a ‘fifth estate’ matching, critiquing and complementing the activities of traditional media (Dutton, 2008).

Journalists interviewed for Simons’ late 20th-century participant-observer account of the Canberra Press Gallery (Fit to Print, 1999) described the gallery as then being in a ‘theatrical’ or ‘stage managed’ phase of its existence. This was attributed to the impact of television, radio and the rising role of the professional media manager in ministers’ offices. The typical Canberra Press Gallery day in 1998 revolved around carefully planned ‘pressers’ and stand-up interviews at the doors of Parliament House, timed for the 6.00 p.m. television news bulletin deadlines.

According to our interviewees, stage management has now been superseded by a new phase styled by Katharine Murphy as ‘cacophony’:

Politicians can determine that today we’re going to be talking about terrorism, or today we’re going to be talking about energy prices. But this operating plan for any given 24 hours can be blown off course because a news story about a completely different issue inserts itself into the news cycle … And often you know I’ve seen politicians switch course entirely from their game plan for the day that then becomes about containing that story or pushing that story ahead. It’s sort of like there’s a kind of a mad orchestra conductor appearing up the front, and then another conductor pushes them off and takes over.

For journalists, deadlines are now constant. A related factor is the advent of two 24-hour news channels – the Australian Public Affairs Channel (A-PAC) on SkyNews, launched in 2009, and ABC News24, launched in 2010. These live broadcast media conferences, including the so-called ‘doors’ convention in which politicians with something to say will greet the media at the doors to Parliament House, and other political events. Their broadcasts are fodder for Twitter debates. In this environment, reporters are frequently writing about events that are already being dissected by citizens on social media. Our interviewees, for example, vividly remembered the Abbott Government’s first budget being ‘pulled apart’ on social media before the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, had finished his budget address. Phillip Coorey:

I first noticed this a few years ago. I went to a press conference and I came back from it and I wrote up a report … and I put it on line and they got to me on Twitter and said ‘that’s not what he said’… So people now have access to the primary information … they can watch it all live and make their own judgment on what the news is. So I think in that case there’s a lot more interaction and I think that’s not a bad thing because it forces you to be you know more rigorous or rigorous on what you do and not misreport.

All these developments had, in the opinions of our interviewees, ripened the conditions for leadership instability. According to Coorey, the ‘demand to feed the furnace’ of the news cycle meant that what once would have been seen as a trivial event, quite possibly not worth reporting, could now ambush the news cycle and add to volatility:

some donkey [backbencher] rocks up on the doors on the morning of a sitting week and says something mildly disloyal and by the time I get into work … it’s all over the place as if it’s World War Three. So everything has a greater import now and that can just feed the whole cycle … the whole hysteria … everything’s far more hypersensitive now than it used to be.

Instead of an orderly progression through each day to the 6.00 p.m. news and the newspaper deadlines, the concern of the political class and the new breed of media managers was largely with who was winning each day on social media. Digital publication also meant that news media publishers knew immediately what was drawing audiences. Stories that were not attracting followers were quickly withdrawn from the websites. Reports about leadership tensions enjoyed a particular cache. Matthew Knott of Fairfax Media said that the pressure not to miss a leadership story was intense:

It’s more interesting than a policy story … It’s got personalities involved. It’s got intrigue and drama. There would definitely be a lot of pressure from editors not to miss what’s going on in terms of leadership … if there is a hint of something going on with leadership there will be a lot of resources put on to it. For senior reporters there is an expectation that you really had better find out what’s going on here, because if we get beaten that’s going to be very bad for us.

A number of interviewees referred to the perception that senior gallery members were late to detect the Gillard challenge to Rudd in 2010. That incident was still spoken about as a collective failure and professional embarrassment. It was also symptomatic of the ‘cacophonous’ nature of the modern gallery. Knott remembered:

That story was broken by Mark Simkin on the [ABC] 7 o’clock news … He comes on the telly and says there are moves tonight to replace the prime minister … that sort of kicked off this really crazy, you know, social media furore where everyone was trying to find information and put out any information that they could from any sources that they could … A real panic among those who missed it, which was most of them. And I think a lot of senior people were embarrassed that their sources hadn’t told them, that they didn’t see it coming. So maybe they were a bit more willing to publish stuff later when Rudd went for Gillard.

Truth-telling, lies and the background briefing

In an age where anyone can publish, the professional journalist has fewer privileges than in the days when access to a printing press or a broadcasting licence was a prerequisite to disseminating news and views. One of the remaining distinguishing features of the professional journalist, so far relatively uncompromised by the advent of social media, is privileged access to news makers and news events. Accreditation as a member of the Canberra Press Gallery brings with it a very particular kind of entree to an internecine workplace in which a central part of the job is to develop contacts among politicians and their staffs. The gallery runs largely on what our interviewees described as a culture of background briefings. The expectation is that these briefings result in better informed reporting. Indeed, in the most recent comprehensive review of the journalists’ code of ethics, it was clearly envisaged that agreeing to keep a source confidential was justifiable only in cases where this resulted in the public getting more, or superior quality information (Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), 1997). Yet, the very nature of the information exchange between confidential source and journalist means that it is almost impossible for an outsider to determine whether the promise of better information for the public is being met. Necessarily, what is reported and how it is reported relies on judgement calls by journalists, with the elements of the key decisions opaque.

A recurring dispute within the Canberra Press Gallery has been whether journalists are released from their ethical obligations to protect a source if that source has told a lie in public. In the case of the leadership instability of 2010–2013, such a release from obligation might, for example, have meant that journalists who knew Rudd or his supporters were briefing them against Gillard would have revealed this after he publicly denied it.

Interestingly, at the time of writing Buzzfeed was embroiled in such a controversy, having broken the news that a staff member of the Turnbull Government’s Employment Minister Michaelia Cash tipped off reporters about Australian Federal Police raids on union offices. This was after Cash had explicitly denied to a Senate Committee that this had happened. Buzzfeed was not included among those tipped off by Cash’s staff, but broke the news through conversations with other reporters (Taylor, 2017). In the ensuing controversy, the gallery was split over whether the reporters should have revealed their source to Buzzfeed, and whether Buzzfeed should have published the story. Laura Tingle of The Australian Financial Review and Sharri Markson of the Daily Telegraph thought the behaviour problematic. Yet, other former gallery reporters defended Buzzfeed on the basis that Cash’s apparent misleading of Parliament justified the breach of confidence (Meade, 2017). Michelle Grattan (2017) argued ‘it’s fine to report what happened if you didn’t get the tip off … It’s not ok to reveal your source if you get a tip-off and it’s on a confidential basis’.

The most considered examination of the ethical issues involved in background briefings and off-the-record conversations is in a 2007 report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Editorial Policies Director, written in the wake of a controversy surrounding the reporting of previously off-the-record comments made by Treasurer Peter Costello during John Howard’s prime ministership. In a dinner conversation, Costello had told four senior Press Gallery journalists that he intended to challenge Howard for the leadership – a challenge that never eventuated. When he later denied that he had said this, the four journalists, including the ABC’s Michael Brissenden, controversially disclosed the earlier conversation.

The ABC report commented that the journalistic obligation to sources existed in tension with the journalistic ethical obligation to the truth. The identity of the source was itself ‘a relevant and available fact’ that could be crucial to a fair assessment of the news report. Yet, this fact was withheld (Chadwick, 2008: 11). Nor was the issue of breaching a confidence to correct a public lie ethically simple. A clearly understood reason for a source desiring anonymity was plausible deniability if asked whether they had leaked. It was therefore implicit in the agreement between journalist and source that the source might lie if asked about the exchange (Chadwick, 2008: 14).

The report led to the ABC defining in its Editorial Policies what to our knowledge is the only available clearly written definition in Australian journalism practice of the following terms:

On the record, meaning both parties agree that the information conveyed may be disclosed and attributed to the source by name.

On background, meaning both parties agree that the information.

Conveyed may be disclosed but not attributed in a way that would be likely to identify the source.

Off the record, meaning both parties agree that the information conveyed is not to be disclosed, with or without attribution (ABC, 2011).

However, the report did not arrive at a firm conclusion on whether Brissenden and the other journalists had acted properly in breaking a confidence to expose Costello’s lie. As we have seen, these dilemmas persist in the criticisms of the gallery’s reporting of Rudd’s destabilisation of Gillard.

The journalists interviewed for this article described the culture of background briefing as fundamental to their jobs. Central to the justification for having a Canberra Press Gallery, they said, was the relationships of trust they developed with sources for the purpose of giving a fuller account of politics to the public than would otherwise be possible. Bernard Keane of Crikey was alone among our interviewees in holding that there was a ‘strong argument’ that journalists should refuse to take information on background when the clear agenda was to undermine a leader. The campaign of destabilisation against Gillard, he said, would have played out very differently if journalists had declined to publish information unless it was attributed. Keane professed to a quandary about off-the-record material: ‘Is there a responsibility for journalists to actually say, “well unless you are prepared to put your name to it I don’t want to have anything to do with it?” … I’m not sure there’s a clear answer on that’.

Other journalists were more confident in the worth of the background briefing, and their own ability to make judicious decisions on when and how to use them. Murphy rejected the idea that the gallery engaged in groupthink, or deliberate fomentation. ‘It might look like that but it’s not the reality. I’ve worked here for many years and I can tell you that it’s not … What the critics don’t see is all the conversations we have, the things we know’.

Coorey also attributed the increased criticism of the gallery to the gap between the visible and invisible parts of their job:

People can now read the source material or see a press conference on Sky and then judge whether you’ve reported it wrongly or rightly. The trouble with that is it’s only giving them part of the picture. I mean this goes to the leadership thing. They see someone saying that they are loyal. And we might report that differently, and they say we are just stirring things up. But we work in this building. We’re here all year, whether the parliament is sitting or not, you know. Probably 10 or 12 hours a day, you walk around and … you’ll have dozens of conversations in a day with people. And all that stuff feeds into your reporting … So you know someone might say something at a press conference and you know exactly what they’re saying isn’t right, or isn’t the full picture, or they’re dropping a hint about something, and then you go write a report using all the information, not just what they’ve said, and then the public take you down for you know misreporting it … And it’s really frustrating because you can’t explain to people, you know, the reason I’m actually taking that lead because I know what you don’t know. And you are just going to have to trust me.

Coorey was proud of the stories he had broken on leadership tensions sourced from background briefings, which he insisted had been consistently vindicated by subsequent events. He bridled at the criticisms of his journalism in Walsh’s account of Gillard’s prime ministership: ‘just the most horrific book I’ve read. And I know, and I like Kerry-Anne … But she had retired and she wasn’t here for any of that. She wasn’t in the Press Gallery’. At the same time, Coorey acknowledged the difficulties involved in drawing a line between reporting leadership instability and fanning it. He said it would be possible to write a leadership speculation story at almost any time, depending on who you talked to. There were no objective criteria by which it could be said to be incorrect. The protection from poorly based stories relied on individual journalists’ experience and judgement calls on how to use information. Ultimately, the public had to decide which journalists to trust.

Despite the centrality of background briefings to the work of the Canberra Press Gallery, and their importance to reporting leadership instability, it was evident that the rules by which the game is conducted were not always clear, that they operated differently for different reporters and were not always mutually agreed upon. Mark Di Stefano, a relatively recently arrived member of the Gallery working for Buzzfeed, recalled a conversation with a colleague in which the meaning of ‘off the record’ was disputed. Di Stefano understood it to mean that information conveyed was not to be used in any way. His colleague, working for a mainstream media outlet, thought it meant that the journalist could use the information to check facts or obtain on-the-record confirmation from other sources.

Di Stefano also provided a potent example of what happened to those who transgressed the unwritten, unclear rules. In August 2015, he heard from a source that on one of Prime Minister Abbott’s trips to a remote Indigenous community with strict alcohol restrictions, political staffers and journalists had become drunk together. A photograph of the drinking session had been posted to social media with a caption referring to ‘having a bender with the locals’. It took Di Stefano months to track down the photograph, and he then published the story, which quickly spread via social media (Di Stefano, 2016). The reaction was instant:

That afternoon I went to the Press Gallery…. And literally people wouldn’t look me in the eye … And I tried to shake the hand of one of the press secretaries of Turnbull and he literally turned his back on me … So there was this sort of weird thing there for a couple of weeks where people said they don’t trust me because I was willing to report on what happened on this trip, because it was an off-the-record event … But the only the reason why I published that story was because there was clear public interest. It exposed a whole bunch of stuff.

Di Stefano regarded himself as not being bound by any off-the-record understanding, because he had not been on the trip and had made no agreement. It was a principle that other senior journalists had used in the past, including ‘God correspondent’ Laurie Oakes who had reported events at ‘off-the-record’ social occasions to which he had not been a party. As Di Stefano saw it, Oakes could take that liberty because of his status, but there were risks to a new media outlet like Buzzfeed and a junior reporter pushing the limits.

In summary, despite off-the-record and background briefings being central and consequential to political reporting, key elements of the practices are not agreed upon and do not operate uniformly. Furthermore, while the judgements journalists exercise about the balance between obligations to sources and obligations to the truth are crucial to the form and content of their reporting those decisions are by necessity opaque to outsiders. In turn, this means that the media’s role in reporting leadership instability is inherently resistant to external scrutiny. This makes it all the more pertinent to ask, as we suggest in our introduction, whether journalists themselves reflect on their role and how they have acquitted themselves during these leadership dramas, and what lessons for the future, if any, they have drawn from the experience of the last decade.

Waltzing on? Accountability and reflection

The senior journalists we interviewed were largely defensive about their reporting of the leadership instability of the past decade. Although referring in passing to concerns about other reporters being too ready to use background briefings and confidential sources of dubious credibility or little significance, when asked directly to rate the gallery’s performance as a whole, they responded positively. They acknowledged the complexities of the judgement calls they made, but were also ready to assert that they had made the correct decisions. As can be seen from the above discussion, they tended to dismiss or discount criticism from outside the gallery as necessarily either ill-informed or partially informed.

Murphy, alone among the senior journalists, admitted that in the environment of disruption it was inevitable that reporting might have been less than perfect, also giving an eloquent description of the impact of the upheaval in the industry that has coincided with leadership instability in Canberra. She reflected that at the time Rudd was briefing against Gillard, journalists were still learning to deal with the fragmenting, cacophonous media environment:

It’s sort of like … you’re a car factory worker and overnight your employer says to you, okay, you have been a car assembler for the last 20 years but we’ve put in overnight all this different equipment which requires you to do the same task in quite different ways. And could you also do it in front of a live audience which is commenting constantly about how you could do it better? And could you produce a car that in essence no one wants to pay for …That’s sort of analogous to what practicing journalists have gone through in the last decade or so … So in that environment are you going to get it right all the time when you’re being asked to report in a wholly different news cycle, a much more fragmented news cycle? You too are learning the increased tempo and operating requirements of your audience. There’s fewer of you doing it. Are you going to be perfect? Are you going to land everything perfectly through that transition? Well no. Obviously not.

She acknowledged that her own reporting at the beginning of the cycle of leadership conflict was probably ‘less good’. Now, after 10 years of experience, she had learned that a priority is to: ‘maintain your clarity … and I think now because this environment has repeated and repeated I’m more confident in exercising judgments about whether or not I share information or whether I don’t’.

Nor were the journalists willing to criticise each other. They alluded to concerns that anonymous sources were over-used by colleagues, but demurred when asked directly of instances of problematic or unethical behaviour. The interviewees were aware of the criticisms of Hartcher, in particular the accusation that he had acted as an agent of the Rudd camp. They said they could not judge because ‘I don’t know who he talks to’. The only legitimate arbiter of Hartcher’s conduct, in other words, was him because nobody else was privy to who his sources were or to other factors informing his reporting. Coorey nominated other journalists’ work that he viewed as ‘breathless’ or ‘over cooked’, but regarded this as neither an ethical problem nor of substantial concern.

Asked what accountability mechanisms operated within the gallery, the interviewees nominated peer pressure, fear of ‘being a dill’ by being too ready to report, and against this the ultimate professional embarrassment of missing a major story. In making his own judgement calls, Coorey relied on his colleague, the political editor for the Australian Financial Review, Laura Tingle, as an informal but valuable means of self-checking:

Laura’s fantastic. And I’ll say ‘Look I’ve just heard this. What do you reckon?’ And she might cross match with something maybe she’s picked up. And I think it’s a good way to do it. You’re saying sort of how hard do you think we should run? Do you think I’m being done over here or have you picked this up yourself? …I think that’s a healthy thing to do with people you trust and know … I don’t ask Laura who she talks to and she doesn’t ask who I talk to but I know she’s very reliable.

Interestingly, the younger journalists we interviewed were more critical of the culture of Canberra, and more likely to believe that the gallery had over-reacted to Rudd’s destabilisation of Gillard because of being caught out by the 2010 challenge to Rudd. They suggested that since 2013 there has been a swing to a more prudent, less trigger-fingered approach to reporting leadership tensions. These calibrations, however, were not the result of any internal conversations or formal assessments.

All the interviewees indicated there was little reflection within the gallery about the issues we have canvassed here. There were informal conversations in the coffee queues about particular stories, or particular reporters, but this was along the lines of ‘workplace gossip’. There were no forums or mechanisms by which the gallery could collectively review its conduct or the efficacy of its relationships with those on whom it was reporting.

It was notable that in the interviews the journalists made frequent references to ‘people here’ and ‘people out there’ and ‘the way this place works’ – in effect, a semi-conscious delineation of an insider’s world not fully comprehensible to those outside the circle, even as journalists emphasised they were in fierce competition with other Gallery members. While citizen commentators on social media were seen as being often poorly informed, the journalists acknowledged that social media had heightened their awareness of being scrutinised and held accountable. They felt that this had some positive effect, albeit wearing. Yet, to a large extent they characterised the criticisms that had been made of the conduct of the Canberra Press Gallery as occurring ‘out there’, ill-informed and impinging little on practice ‘in this place’.

Conclusions

The members of Canberra Press Gallery did not concoct and were not responsible for the leadership instability that has plagued Australian politics over recent years. They were reporting real events and conversations: as is their responsibility. As one journalist said, ‘it’s not our job to stand in its way, to say this shouldn’t be happening so I won’t report it’. Yet, they were making constant judgement calls about the credibility of their sources and the importance of what they were saying. In the case of Rudd’s insurgency against Gillard, those judgements were shadowed by the searing experience of the Gallery having been late to the scene of Gillard’s usurping of Rudd. It is likely that this did encourage what Gillard describes as a ‘hypersensitivity’ to reporting leadership tensions during her prime ministership and that this created its own momentum. In other words, while the journalists did not invent the destabilisation, their work lent it greater potency.

At the same time, the accusations of unethical conduct levelled at the gallery for its reporting of the Gillard–Rudd leadership war of 2010–2013 makes insufficient allowance for the complex and competing ethical considerations faced by journalists. It is not simple for a journalist to breach confidentiality in the interests of exposing a lie. Although views are divided, many of the gallery’s most senior members accept that their source may lie in public, and believe that this does not free them from their obligations of confidence.

Not to be underestimated in this mix is the whirlwind pace of contemporary politics. Events that not long ago would have taken at least a day and a newspaper publication cycle to play out are now compressed into hours or even minutes. Gillard has commented on the debilitating effects of this speed:

Never before in human history has the urgent been so privileged for our attention. It beeps and buzzes and pings at you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, always grasping for your attention. So it’s harder than it’s ever been to carve out the thinking time, the quiet time, the unplugged time, to work out what is important, rather than just attending to the urgent. (cited in Lane, 2016)

This predicament is equally present for journalists. It is harder for them to think, harder to work out what is important.

As detailed above, there is a suggestion that the Gallery has swung to a more sceptical, circumspect approach to reporting leadership conflict since 2013. Curiously, however, this is not a result of any explicitly expressed admission of error or considered collective reflection within the gallery’s ranks. Simply waltzing on does appear to be the prevailing mindset. Meanwhile, the ethical and professional dilemmas involved in background briefings are unresolved, despite having long been central to political reporting. Nor is there any probability of those dilemmas receding. To the contrary, in the new media world journalists are likely to lean more heavily than ever on their privileged access to sources as the currency of their work, precisely because they have largely lost a monopoly on the means of publication and broadcast. Therefore, the issues at stake may potentially grow more acute, rather than less, and the practice of background briefing a more important determinant of professionalism in journalism.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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