Kerry O'Brien: 'Freedom is usually eroded gradually', Walkley Awards - 2019

28 November 2019, Sydney, Australia

This year, for a brief moment in the history of Australian journalism, every significant news organisation in this country put its competitive instincts and its differences to one side and united as one voice to stand against an unacceptable step down the road to authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism unchecked can lead to fascism. Fortunately in this country we’re a long way from that yet, but a study of history amply demonstrates how fascism begins. Freedom is usually eroded gradually. It might happen over years, even decades. Its loss is not necessarily felt day by day, but we will certainly know when it’s gone.

So far the Morrison government has resisted the industry’s appeal for fundamental protections of a free and robust press to be enshrined in legislation at the very least—not placing journalists above the law—but enshrining in a practical and meaningful way their special place as a crucial pillar of democracy.

Perhaps the government is intending to wait us out, waiting for the issue to go away in the hope that most people in this country are so consumed by bread and butter issues, so consumed by their own lives and personal struggles and challenges, that they won’t care enough when the chips are down to support something as abstract as the spirit of democracy or the spirit of freedom—because you can’t cash in the spirit of something at the bank, as you might a tax cut.

That is why we have to remain resolved to keep this campaign going, and not let it go, even after a few months, because those of us who have witnessed and experienced and reported on repression in other countries, some of them not too far from our own shores, understand the solid reality of democracy as well as the strength or weakness of its spirit. Some of our colleagues have paid the ultimate price for exposing abuses of democracy, and lost their lives.

Australia’s Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, recently chastised China on its human rights record, observing that “countries that respect and promote their citizens’ rights at home tend also to be better international citizens.”

I would add to that: countries that don’t respect and promote their citizens’ rights at home are living in glass houses and have diminished their right to be taken seriously when they try to preach to neighbours from a high moral ground they have surrendered. .

There’s another inconsistency that needs to be called out. This Government is fond of saying, as it did in seeking to distance itself from the decisions by Australian Federal Police to raid the ABC and the home of News Corp journalist, Annika Smethurst, that it can’t interfere in police operational matters. Yet, in seeking to assuage the concerns of media companies and journalists after the raids, the Attorney-General, Christian Porter, promised that he would actually be prepared to become involved in the process to the extent of insisting on the Director of Public Prosecutions getting his personal consent before seeking to prosecute a journalist.

Sorry Mr Porter, that is not reassuring. The judgements you might bring to bear will not be independent of the government’s own self-interest, and we all know that self-interest of any stripe, political or otherwise, can be a powerful deterrent from doing the right thing. That is not understanding the spirit or the concept of free speech, nor materially guaranteeing free speech or a free press.

But we have to practice what we preach. Our work across the breadth of all media and all communities should speak for our integrity—from the smallest story to the biggest. Individually and collectively. And if it doesn’t that should make us uncomfortable, in the very least. Because if we are going to stand on our dignity and defend press freedom as a fundamental pillar of democracy, then we have to be sure that our actions are defensible, that we practice what we preach, that we do what we say we do. And at the heart of the Walkley Foundation’s work is the protection and promotion of integrity in journalism.

There is one other issue I want to acknowledge tonight. In 2011 Walkley judges awarded a Walkley to Wikileaks with Julian Assange as its editor, for its outstanding contribution to journalism. The judgement was not lightly made that Julian Assange was acting as a journalist, applying new technology to “penetrate the inner workings of government to reveal an avalanche of inconvenient truths in a global publishing coup”. Those inconvenient truths were published far and wide in the mainstream media. As we sit here tonight, Julian Assange is mouldering in a British prison awaiting extradition to the United States where he may pay for their severe embarrassment with a life in prison. Again, this government could demonstrate its commitment to a free press by using its significant influence with its closest ally to gain his return to Australia.

Another challenge our industry faces is the trend towards the polarisation of our craft—the attempts by some to paint us as either of the left or of the right—has to be resisted, because I firmly believe that for the vast bulk of us, that is not how we practice our trade. We do not arrive in the nurseries of journalism as budding ideologues of left or right, nor do the vast bulk of us become that way as we develop.

I absolutely reject the Roger Ailes view of the world, that if you’re not on the right then you must be on the left.

Adele Ferguson was not reflecting some personal ideological hatred of capitalism when she called out corrupt behaviour within our banking and financial sector, forcing a royal commission on a reluctant government. And nor were the whistleblowers who helped her, being ideological. They saw a wrong and followed their conscience with great courage to reveal it, paying a heavy personal price in the process.

There was nothing ideological about Chris Masters’ determination to bring into the light of day, serious and deeply disturbing allegations of war crimes by elite Australian military forces in Afghanistan, first in his book, and then with Nick McKenzie in further sustained investigative reporting. It was strong, compelling journalism of integrity.

When Hedley Thomas gripped the world with his Teacher’s Pet podcast, forced the re-opening of the Lynette Dawson case, leading to the arrest of her husband, was he driven by ideology? Of course not.

Or when Anne Connolly forced another royal commission, into aged care with her exposes of the sickening abuses within that industry?

Joanne McCarthy wasn’t under instruction from some secret socialist cell or driven by a hatred of Christianity when she exposed the pattern of endemic sexual abuse and attempted cover-ups perpetrated from within the Catholic Church in the Hunter region.

Kate McClymont wasn’t acting as a servant of either the conservative right or the Labor left when she doggedly and courageously exposed the entrenched corrupt practices of Eddie Obeid.

The Walkley Foundation grew from the creation of the awards themselves more than 60 years ago. And like the awards, the foundation is here to promote and help safeguard the integrity of quality journalism in all its forms, without fear or favour. And the judges of these awards, drawn from all corners of our craft and across the spectrum of our industry, deliver that same integrity in their judging. It couldn’t be otherwise, or these 60 years of awards could not have been sustained, and would have long since collapsed.

It has been a great privilege to chair the Foundation this year and see close up the super efforts of Louisa Graham and her small but dedicated team delivering the important and expanding Walkley program of grants, scholarships and mentorship, as the industry struggles. I would also like to acknowledge the voluntary efforts of my fellow directors, Marcus Strom, Marina Go, Karen Percy, Lenore Taylor and Michael Janda, all of whom give up significant time in busy lives to guide the foundation in its work.

This is a time of serious challenge for our craft across a broad front, at a time when democratic societies like ours are losing their trust in institutions pretty much across the board. The integrity reflected in the work we’re about to celebrate tonight is our bulwark against that erosion of trust and a reminder not only to the citizens of this country, but importantly to ourselves, of what we’re capable of, and of what we aspire to be. Thank you.

Sacha Baron Cohen: 'Just think what Goebbels might have done with Facebook', Anti Defamation League Leadership Award - 2019

22 November 2019,

Thank you, ADL, for this recognition and your work in fighting racism, hate and bigotry. And to be clear, when I say “racism, hate and bigotry” I’m not referring to the names of Stephen Miller’s Labradoodles.

Now, I realize that some of you may be thinking, what the hell is a comedian doing speaking at a conference like this! I certainly am. I’ve spent most of the past two decades in character. In fact, this is the first time that I have ever stood up and given a speech as my least popular character, Sacha Baron Cohen. And I have to confess, it is terrifying.

I realize that my presence here may also be unexpected for another reason. At times, some critics have said my comedy risks reinforcing old stereotypes.

The truth is, I’ve been passionate about challenging bigotry and intolerance throughout my life. As a teenager in the UK, I marched against the fascist National Front and to abolish apartheid. As an undergraduate, I traveled around America and wrote my thesis about the civil rights movement, with the help of the archives of the ADL. And as a comedian, I’ve tried to use my characters to get people to let down their guard and reveal what they actually believe, including their own prejudice.

Now, I’m not going to claim that everything I’ve done has been for a higher purpose. Yes, some of my comedy, OK probably half my comedy, has been absolutely juvenile and the other half completely puerile. I admit, there was nothing particularly enlightening about me – as Borat from Kazakhstan, the first fake news journalist – running through a conference of mortgage brokers when I was completely naked.

But when Borat was able to get an entire bar in Arizona to sing “Throw the Jew down the well,” it did reveal people’s indifference to antisemitism. When – as Bruno, the gay fashion reporter from Austria – I started kissing a man in a cage fight in Arkansas, nearly starting a riot, it showed the violent potential of homophobia. And when – disguised as an ultra-woke developer – I proposed building a mosque in one rural community, prompting a resident to proudly admit, “I am racist, against Muslims” – it showed the acceptance of Islamophobia.

That’s why I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you. Today around the world, demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It’s as if the Age of Reason – the era of evidential argument – is ending, and now knowledge is delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. Hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities.

What do all these dangerous trends have in common? I’m just a comedian and an actor, not a scholar. But one thing is pretty clear to me. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.

Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others – they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged – stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It’s why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it’s no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history – the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, “Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.”

On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.

When I, as the wannabe gangsta Ali G, asked the astronaut Buzz Aldrin “what woz it like to walk on de sun?” the joke worked, because we, the audience, shared the same facts. If you believe the moon landing was a hoax, the joke was not funny.

When Borat got that bar in Arizona to agree that “Jews control everybody’s money and never give it back,” the joke worked because the audience shared the fact that the depiction of Jews as miserly is a conspiracy theory originating in the Middle Ages.

But when, thanks to social media, conspiracies take hold, it’s easier for hate groups to recruit, easier for foreign intelligence agencies to interfere in our elections, and easier for a country like Myanmar to commit genocide against the Rohingya.

It’s actually quite shocking how easy it is to turn conspiracy thinking into violence. In my last show Who is America?, I found an educated, normal guy who had held down a good job, but who, on social media, repeated many of the conspiracy theories that President Trump, using Twitter, has spread more than 1,700 times to his 67 million followers. The president even tweeted that he was considering designating Antifa – anti-fascists who march against the far right – as a terror organization.

So, disguised as an Israel anti-terrorism expert, Colonel Erran Morad, I told my interviewee that, at the Women’s March in San Francisco, Antifa were plotting to put hormones into babies’ diapers in order to “make them transgender”. And he believed it.

I instructed him to plant small devices on three innocent people at the march and explained that when he pushed a button, he’d trigger an explosion that would kill them all. They weren’t real explosives, of course, but he thought they were. I wanted to see – would he actually do it?

The answer was yes. He pushed the button and thought he had actually killed three human beings. Voltaire was right: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to billions of people.

In their defense, these social media companies have taken some steps to reduce hate and conspiracies on their platforms, but these steps have been mostly superficial.

I’m speaking up today because I believe that our pluralistic democracies are on a precipice and that the next 12 months, and the role of social media, could be determinant. British voters will go to the polls while online conspiracists promote the despicable theory of “great replacement” that white Christians are being deliberately replaced by Muslim immigrants. Americans will vote for president while trolls and bots perpetuate the disgusting lie of a “Hispanic invasion”. And after years of YouTube videos calling climate change a “hoax”, the United States is on track, a year from now, to formally withdraw from the Paris accords. A sewer of bigotry and vile conspiracy theories that threatens democracy and our planet – this cannot possibly be what the creators of the internet had in mind.

I believe it’s time for a fundamental rethink of social media and how it spreads hate, conspiracies and lies. Last month, however, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook delivered a major speech that, not surprisingly, warned against new laws and regulations on companies like his. Well, some of these arguments are simply absurd. Let’s count the ways.

First, Zuckerberg tried to portray this whole issue as “choices … around free expression”. That is ludicrous. This is not about limiting anyone’s free speech. This is about giving people, including some of the most reprehensible people on earth, the biggest platform in history to reach a third of the planet. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly, there will always be racists, misogynists, antisemites and child abusers. But I think we could all agree that we should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

Second, Zuckerberg claimed that new limits on what’s posted on social media would be to “pull back on free expression”. This is utter nonsense. The first amendment says that “Congress shall make no law” abridging freedom of speech, however, this does not apply to private businesses like Facebook. We’re not asking these companies to determine the boundaries of free speech across society. We just want them to be responsible on their platforms.

If a neo-Nazi comes goose-stepping into a restaurant and starts threatening other customers and saying he wants kill Jews, would the owner of the restaurant be required to serve him an elegant eight-course meal? Of course not! The restaurant owner has every legal right and a moral obligation to kick the Nazi out, and so do these internet companies.

Third, Zuckerberg seemed to equate regulation of companies like his to the actions of “the most repressive societies”. Incredible. This, from one of the six people who decide what information so much of the world sees. Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sundar Pichai at Google, at its parent company Alphabet, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Brin’s ex-sister-in-law, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube and Jack Dorsey at Twitter.

The Silicon Six – all billionaires, all Americans – who care more about boosting their share price than about protecting democracy. This is ideological imperialism – six unelected individuals in Silicon Valley imposing their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government and acting like they’re above the reach of law. It’s like we’re living in the Roman Empire, and Mark Zuckerberg is Caesar. At least that would explain his haircut.

Here’s an idea. Instead of letting the Silicon Six decide the fate of the world, let our elected representatives, voted for by the people, of every democracy in the world, have at least some say.

Fourth, Zuckerberg speaks of welcoming a “diversity of ideas”, and last year he gave us an example. He said that he found posts denying the Holocaust “deeply offensive”, but he didn’t think Facebook should take them down “because I think there are things that different people get wrong”. At this very moment, there are still Holocaust deniers on Facebook, and Google still takes you to the most repulsive Holocaust denial sites with a simple click. One of the heads of Google once told me, incredibly, that these sites just show “both sides” of the issue. This is madness.

To quote Edward R Murrow, one “cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument”. We have millions of pieces of evidence for the Holocaust – it is an historical fact. And denying it is not some random opinion. Those who deny the Holocaust aim to encourage another one.

Still, Zuckerberg says that “people should decide what is credible, not tech companies.” But at a time when two-thirds of millennials say they haven’t even heard of Auschwitz, how are they supposed to know what’s “credible”? How are they supposed to know that the lie is a lie?

There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist. And if these internet companies really want to make a difference, they should hire enough monitors to actually monitor, work closely with groups like the ADL, insist on facts and purge these lies and conspiracies from their platforms.

Fifth, when discussing the difficulty of removing content, Zuckerberg asked “where do you draw the line?” Yes, drawing the line can be difficult. But here’s what he’s really saying: removing more of these lies and conspiracies is just too expensive.

These are the richest companies in the world, and they have the best engineers in the world. They could fix these problems if they wanted to. Twitter could deploy an algorithm to remove more white supremacist hate speech, but they reportedly haven’t because it would eject some very prominent politicians from their platform. Maybe that’s not a bad thing! The truth is, these companies won’t fundamentally change because their entire business model relies on generating more engagement, and nothing generates more engagement than lies, fear and outrage.

It’s time to finally call these companies what they really are – the largest publishers in history. And here’s an idea for them: abide by basic standards and practices just like newspapers, magazines and TV news do every day. We have standards and practices in television and the movies; there are certain things we cannot say or do. In England, I was told that Ali G could not curse when he appeared before 9pm. Here in the US, the Motion Picture Association of America regulates and rates what we see. I’ve had scenes in my movies cut or reduced to abide by those standards. If there are standards and practices for what cinemas and television channels can show, then surely companies that publish material to billions of people should have to abide by basic standards and practices too.

Take the issue of political ads. Fortunately, Twitter finally banned them, and Google is making changes, too. But if you pay them, Facebook will run any “political” ad you want, even if it’s a lie. And they’ll even help you micro-target those lies to their users for maximum effect. Under this twisted logic, if Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his “solution” to the “Jewish problem”. So here’s a good standard and practice: Facebook, start factchecking political ads before you run them, stop micro-targeted lies immediately, and when the ads are false, give back the money and don’t publish them.

Here’s another good practice: slow down. Every single post doesn’t need to be published immediately. Oscar Wilde once said that “we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.” But is having every thought or video posted instantly online, even if it is racist or criminal or murderous, really a necessity? Of course not!

The shooter who massacred Muslims in New Zealand live-streamed his atrocity on Facebook where it then spread across the internet and was viewed likely millions of times. It was a snuff film, brought to you by social media. Why can’t we have more of a delay so this trauma-inducing filth can be caught and stopped before it’s posted in the first place?

Finally, Zuckerberg said that social media companies should “live up to their responsibilities”, but he’s totally silent about what should happen when they don’t. By now it’s pretty clear, they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. As with the Industrial Revolution, it’s time for regulation and legislation to curb the greed of these hi-tech robber barons.

In every other industry, a company can be held liable when their product is defective. When engines explode or seatbelts malfunction, car companies recall tens of thousands of vehicles, at a cost of billions of dollars. It only seems fair to say to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter: your product is defective, you are obliged to fix it, no matter how much it costs and no matter how many moderators you need to employ.

In every other industry, you can be sued for the harm you cause. Publishers can be sued for libel, people can be sued for defamation. I’ve been sued many times! I’m being sued right now by someone whose name I won’t mention because he might sue me again! But social media companies are largely protected from liability for the content their users post – no matter how indecent it is – by Section 230 of, get ready for it, the Communications Decency Act. Absurd!

Fortunately, internet companies can now be held responsible for pedophiles who use their sites to target children. I say, let’s also hold these companies responsible for those who use their sites to advocate for the mass murder of children because of their race or religion. And maybe fines are not enough. Maybe it’s time to tell Mark Zuckerberg and the CEOs of these companies: you already allowed one foreign power to interfere in our elections, you already facilitated one genocide in Myanmar, do it again and you go to jail.

In the end, it all comes down to what kind of world we want. In his speech, Zuckerberg said that one of his main goals is to “uphold as wide a definition of freedom of expression as possible”. Yet our freedoms are not only an end in themselves, they’re also the means to another end – as you say here in the US, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But today these rights are threatened by hate, conspiracies and lies.

Allow me to leave you with a suggestion for a different aim for society. The ultimate aim of society should be to make sure that people are not targeted, not harassed and not murdered because of who they are, where they come from, who they love or how they pray.

If we make that our aim – if we prioritize truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference and experts over ignoramuses – then maybe, just maybe, we can stop the greatest propaganda machine in history, we can save democracy, we can still have a place for free speech and free expression, and, most importantly, my jokes will still work.

Thank you all very much.

Kerry O'Brien: 'Failures of politics, failures of journalism, failures of society', Logie Awards Hall of Fame - 2019

30 June 2019, The Star, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia

Thank you, Waleed. Thank you, everyone. And can I just say how pleased I am not to be receiving this award posthumously.

Television was only six years old when I discovered journalism in a tiny television newsroom, Channel Nine, upon Mount Coot-Tha, overlooking Brisbane. I worked for every commercial network, had some great shared moments and made lasting friendships.

The ABC has never been the sole bastion of good television journalism but I was always in my natural home at the ABC because the pursuit of excellence wasn’t just permitted, it was expected.

As the importance of journalism became more and more obvious to me, absolutely fundamental to a healthy democracy despite its many imperfections — that’s the many imperfections of journalism as well as democracy — it also added more meaning to my life. And being paid to satisfy your curiosity and feed your imagination and have fun along the way didn’t hurt either. But the joy of it, the joy of it has been fed largely by my wonderfully collegiate culture that I experienced at all those terrific programs.

This Day Tonight, Four Corners, Lateline and 7.30, we all competed with each other vigorously but from a bedrock of mutual respect — even love. Those friendships have been incredibly important in my life. The other joy has been to watch new talent emerge and to feel that in some way, I’ve helped to nurture it. There have been the tough times, the budget cuts to the ABC again and again and again, driven more by a desire to punish and by an ideological obsession than because the public broadcaster was inefficient.

In my view, the day Jonathan Shier was appointed to run the ABC in the Howard years was the beginning of a dark time in that place. So, some of the best and the brightest were shown the door in that time. 7.30 was in the eye of the storm. I was described in headlines, as you saw a little while ago, as “dead man talking”. But on that program, we walked a straight line and allowed our work to speak for us. The program could have died in that era, but it’s still there — still going strong, still driven by good people, still accused of bias, but still walking a straight line. And the ABC is still forging its way through strong headwinds, probably never threatened more than it is today by a combination of forces, cash-strapped in a totally disrupted, digitally driven industry, and still confronting the same sad ideological prejudice.

And now, even the Federal Police — some of whom have themselves leaked to us in the past — have seen fit to raid the place. And yet as I sat here tonight and watched nomination after nomination after nomination for the ABC, including for most popular categories which rely on a public vote, I felt so much better about the place.

My message, my message to every person working in Aunty’s embrace today is simple: keep your heads held high and your eye firmly fixed on delivering programs of relevance, quality and integrity for people in every corner of Australia and those same people will repay your loyalty with theirs as they always have.

And to the rest of the country: don’t ever again allow politicians to diminish the public broadcaster. It is one of the most precious institutions we have. Along with reporting the bad news, my colleagues and I have told many stories of hope and inspiration, and mostly I’ve been proud to call my self a journalist. Yet, we the journalists have to share the responsibility for the great failures of our time. A time of enormous ferment and challenge, failures of politics, failures of journalism, failures of society in the end.

For instance 40 years after powerful evidence first kicked in that human-caused climate change threatened the world with an existential disaster, we’re still stuck in the mire of drab, dishonest arguments that will come at great cost to future generations and we the journalists have not cut through the fake news effectively. We have not properly held politicians to account.

But there is one big glaring gap in this nation’s otherwise great story that I want to spend a brief minute on tonight: the failure to reconcile Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. When I started my career, First Australians were not even counted in the national census. On paper, they didn’t exist. I was first personally exposed to the awful racism this country is capable of when I visited Alice Springs more than 45 years ago, and sadly you don’t have to go too far to see it still today. A trip to any prison will do it.

We all have an opportunity together in this term of the federal parliament to understand and support what is embodied in the Uluru Statement From The Heart. A remarkable document, forged in unity by more than 250 Aboriginal and Torres-Strait Islander leaders, representing the oldest surviving culture on the face of the earth. [It’s] a culture that adds a richness that is unique to this continent and yet we other Australians are mostly ignorant of it.

The Uluru statement represents no threat to a single individual in any corner of this country, and certainly no threat to the integrity of parliament. And if you’re told that, don’t you believe it. On the contrary, it will add much to the integrity of our nation. We like to be seen as one nation made up of many parts. Now, it’s time to prove it.

The last and most important thing of all for me, personally tonight, is to acknowledge with gratitude and love the precious part family has played in my life and been so central to it. My children — and indulge me for 10 seconds here — Lara, Chris, Anthony, Jack, Ben and Meg; and my grandchildren, Joe, Gigi, Billy, Harrison, Tom and Mason have been at the centre of my life. Sue Javes, my wife and best friend for 40 years, warned me tonight not to say how much she’d helped me in my career — as Karl Stefanovic had said here at the Logies a few years ago, because it’d probably cost him a couple of million. Sorry darling, you’re going to have to lower your sights.

The truth is, I have been so lucky and so privileged to be able to call on Sue’s impeccable judgment, instinctive wisdom and good humour throughout our years together. She also told me to avoid using the word “journey” tonight. So I’ll close simply by saying: this has been a wonderful road to have been allowed to travel. Thanks to all of you, especially in the living rooms of Australia, who have travelled that road with me.

Len Spencer: 'I am the Edison phonograph ... I am always ready to entertain you!', Phonograph advertisement - 1906

1906, Edison Studios, West Orange, New Jersey, USA

I am the Edison phonograph, created by the great wizard of the New World to delight those who would have melody or be amused. I can sing you tender songs of love. I can give you merry tales and joyous laughter. I can transport you to the realms of music. I can cause you to join in the rhythmic dance. I can lull the babe to sweet repose, or waken in the aged heart soft memories of youthful days.

No matter what may be your mood, I am always ready to entertain you. When your day's work is done, I can bring the theater or the opera to your home. I can give you grand opera, comic opera or vaudeville. I can give you sacred or popular music, dance, orchestra or instrumental music. I can render solos, duets, trios, quartets. I can aid in entertaining your guests. When your wife is worried after the cares of the day, and the children are boisterous, I can rest the one and quiet the other. I never get tired and you will never tire of me, for I always have something new to offer.

I give pleasure to all, young and old. I will go wherever you want me, in the parlor, in the sickroom, on the porch, in the camp or to your summer home. If you sing or talk to me, I will retain your songs or words, and repeat them to you at your pleasure. I can enable you to always hear the voices of your loved ones, even though they are far away. I talk in every language. I can help you to learn other languages. I am made with the highest degree of mechanical skill. My voice is the clearest, smoothest and most natural of any talking machine. The name of my famous master is on my body, and tells you that I am a genuine Edison phonograph.

The more you become acquainted with me, the better you will like me. Ask the dealer.

Dorothy Byrne: 'Too many programmes are saying small or medium-sized things about society', McTaggart Lecture, Edinburgh Television Festival - 2019

21 August, Edinburgh, Scotland

Thank you very much indeed for the great honour of being the first old lady to be invited to deliver the MacTaggart lecture.

I was telephoned late on a Friday night a few weeks ago while dancing at the Hebridean Celtic Festival in Stornoway. So I realised at once I was your first choice.

But we old ladies – or even wee old ladies – are not proud. Decades of cervical smears destroy all pride.

Of course the first thing I did was check out my illustrious predecessors. A younger woman might have been intimidated.

Yes. Kevin Spacey. He proved to be a good choice.

Shane Smith of Vice, an organisation well-named as it turned out.

And by an extraordinary coincidence three people with the same surname – Murdoch. What are the chances of that eh? I especially enjoyed James Murdoch from 2009. He told the audience that it was important to: ‘encourage a world of trust’ and that newspaper readers were: ‘treated with great seriousness and respect.’

Let’s delight ourselves by remembering how Ofcom described him just three years later, in his role at News Group Newspapers during the hacking scandal. He ‘repeatedly fell short of the conduct to be expected of him as a chief executive and chairman’.

So much for trust and respect.

I met James Murdoch once and he patronised and dismissed me. Hey James, now I patronise and dismiss YOU.

Elsewhere on the list, I spotted one name among my predecessors who has not yet had the comeuppance he deserves for his assaults on women.

That’s one of the things about being an old lady, you gather a lot of information over the years. To men who have behaved badly in the past, I say this: you know who you are. And so do I.

Tonight, there’ll be no shortage of sexist bastards, possibly among you in the audience. But I have positive messages too about how we must find courage in this time of crisis and most of all how we must unite to use the power of television to protect democracy because it is being seriously undermined.

I am the Methuselah of TV, I’ve been in the industry nearly 40 years and at Channel Four for 20.

In the course of my work, I’ve thought I’d die a few times, I’ve been temporarily kidnapped, condemned as a terrorist whore, told by my own colleagues I should imprisoned for several years and hardest of all been a single parent.

I’m just about the oldest female TV executive working for a broadcaster and for many reasons being a woman working in news and current affairs has been a struggle.

But I would recommend television journalism to any young woman today embarking on a career.

In what other line of work when some bastard annoys you or you hear of some absolute disgrace, can you say to yourself, ‘I’m going to make a programme exposing that and I’ll put a stop to it!.’ And sometimes you even do.

But I begin with early man in TV. Surprisingly perhaps, I think we have much to learn from him. There’s a reason he has no clothes on in this picture. That was the downside of early TV man; a tendency to remove his clothing.

A quick tip for men. Don’t take your trousers off unless specifically invited to do so.

I started out in television at Granada and from my very first day the overwhelmingly male management made me feel at home. Or to be more accurate, they tried to come home with me.

My colleagues took me to the bar and we were joined by a senior manager. As I was standing on the pavement afterwards, this top bloke suddenly appeared beside me and suggested we get in a taxi together.

How kind was that? Supposing I hadn’t known the way to Chorlton-cum-Hardy and the taxi driver had just arrived from Kabul, that could have been really helpful.

As it happened, my mother had taught me to always memorise the way home, so I was able to tell him his services wouldn’t be needed. Services of any sort.

Try to picture this happening now at Channel Four. Let’s pretend Channel Four employs lots of working-class people from the North of England and imagine a young bloke called Bert from Accrington on his first day.

His new young colleagues take him out to the pub and then I turn up and join them even, although I don’t work directly with any of them. Bert gets up to leave. I follow him out.

Bert stands on Victoria Street to hail a taxi and I sidle up next to him and say, ‘Great news Bert, I’m coming home with you. ‘

That first day at Granada, a female boss had also told me that a director would take me out to teach me the basics of filming and he would sexually assault me, but I wasn’t to take it personally because he sexually assaulted all women he worked with.

Sure enough he did assault me – one of the few examples in my career of the promise of a TV boss coming true. His assault was a criminal offence but who could I complain to? I learned early on that as a woman I was on my own.

Not all approaches were offensive. Some were merely ludicrous.

When I joined World in Action, I was at that point the only woman on the programme, but I needn’t have worried about feeling lonely. Again, there was a man with a kind offer.

Even although I hardly knew him, one of the journalists suggested we have sex. I realised I would need to use all my diplomatic skills in order not to hurt his feelings, so I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Of course I won’t have sex with you. Do you just ask random women for sex?’

And guess what? He did. I asked him what his success rate was and he said, ‘One in a hundred which is pretty good for me.’ Looking at him, I thought it was surprisingly high.

Some, but by no means all, of those men then had terrible attitudes towards women. But, as a group, they also had great attributes which we have lost.

They believed that television was there to say and do big things. Many thought that it was their right and their role to change society. Those men at Granada were passionate believers in the power of television.

They were radical alternative thinkers who believed programmes could be used to make our country a better place. How many people in TV today would say out loud that they wanted to use TV to make Britain a better place?

Their achievements were immense – extraordinary investigations like The Birmingham Six, great documentaries like Seven Up and inside the Communist Party, landmark series and strands like Disappearing World or End of Empire, a new way of covering elections in the Granada 500 and the invention of new forms in television like the drama-doc.

And they challenged the authority not just of those who ran the institutions of the UK but also of their own TV bosses. Far too many people in TV now spend all day agreeing with their bosses. It’s simply ghastly to witness.

Our country is undergoing seismic changes. There is widespread disillusion and a loss of a sense of belonging as society fragments. Whatever happens about Brexit, we need big new ideas to take us forward. But I don’t see big ideas on TV now.

Too many programmes are saying small or medium-sized things about society. Where do we go for big ideas? Books, Tedtalks, podcasts, all really popular.

On the news, I’m hearing every day that the very fabric of our democratic system is being ripped to shreds.

But where is this crisis being analysed outside of the news. UK broadcasters still make some great investigations but where are the programmes which shake all our assumptions about society?

So often I’m told that documentary formats now deal with important subject matters but formats only describe society as it is, they don’t provide a vision for change.

If we are worried about becoming irrelevant, one of the best things we can do is to start making big controversial programmes about the UK which put us back at the heart of public debate as we used to be.

We are all desperate for young audiences. Millions of young people are now politically aware and active.

They’re prepared to spend hours listening to extraordinarily serious podcasts, often authored by some pretty heavy duty thinkers.

They’re searching for alternative ways of seeing the world and for answers to major issues like climate change and the viability of our current financial systems.

A great Ted Talk gets millions of views. We have to stop being afraid of serious analysis authored by big brainy people. We have the ability and we have the airtime. Let’s make some really clever and difficult programmes.

We are obsessed by the fall in audiences and forever looking over our shoulders at Netflix and other streaming services, hypnotised by their success.

But terrestrial TV still accounts for 69 per cent of all TV viewing, according to very recent Ofcom figures. That is three hours 12 minutes a day which is massive.

And we have something else too – very high levels of trust. The latest Ofcom figures show that 71 per cent of audiences think television news is accurate and trustworthy.

Take advice from an older woman – I’m about the same age as ITV – when you’re getting on a bit, reinvent yourself. I used to be a tall blonde woman.

And think what you have that makes you special. In the case of terrestrial TV – we are the only people who have any interest in saying big things about Britain. That’s not the role of Netflix or other streaming services, terrific as they are in many ways.

I counted 29 different programmes on Netflix about drugs. I wonder if there’s a drug cartel anywhere that’s not currently being followed by a streaming service.

There’s also a plethora of programmes about serial killers. Programmes about mass murdering drug lords will contribute nothing to the reinvention of the UK’s political landscape.

But when we do major investigations here in Britain, like Channel Four News’ investigation alongside that of Carol Cadwallader into Cambridge Analytica, they gain huge traction. The public appetite is there.

Now painful as it is to admit it, Rupert Murdoch made a very good point in his MacTaggart back in 1989, the very period when I was working on World in Action.

He said television was ‘controlled by like-minded people who knew what was good for us’ and criticised TV for reflecting the values of a ‘narrow elite’.

My vision of empowered and daring producers and commissioning editors who want to shape society for the better doesn’t work if all those empowered people are just a bunch of posh boys.

By what right do we showcase big ideas if we are such a small group? I looked at the two Directors UK reports which came out late last year.

OK the figures are not completely up-to-date but only 2.2 per cent of directors came from black and ethnic minority backgrounds and fewer than 25 per cent were women.

That matters because we can’t reflect society properly if we ourselves don’t reflect society.

When you change who is making TV, you change TV. I am proud that I was part of a group of women who changed current affairs by making regular programmes about issues affecting women.

The first programme I produced and directed for World in Action was about rape in marriage, then not a crime, and two very senior journalists told me it wasn’t a suitable subject for the programme and indeed not even a ‘story’.

They were right. It was more than a story. It was a scandal which besmirched our society. These women-focused programmes rated well but I could tell that quite a few of my colleagues didn’t rate them much.

My reputation was nearly destroyed when Mary Whitehouse rang up to say how good one of my films had been. By great good fortune, I took the call. I’m ashamed to say I told her Dorothy Byrne was out but I’d pass on the compliment. I never told me colleagues she’d rung.

The lack of people from ethnic minorities then was appalling. At Granada, I was the union equality officer when ACTT asked us to do a survey of the number of black people working there.

I didn’t need to do a survey, I personally knew all five black people– out of a workforce of around 1,600. When I reported this back to the joint union committee, one of the ‘brothers’ said, ‘That’s five too many.’

And another chipped in, a la Trump, that they should all go back home.

Of course, I pointed out this almost certainly WAS their home. While that would never happen now, the lack of progress in increasing ethnic diversity in television is the single most disappointing failure during my career.

I was asked quite recently by a Channel Four manager what I thought of our diversity initiative. I replied that I honestly couldn’t remember how it was any different to the last diversity initiative.

In fact, was he absolutely sure it WASN’T the last diversity initiative? Or maybe the one before? I have known so many in my time. Not so long ago I was sitting in a room of managers at Channel Four and one asked why we thought we were not achieving more on ethnic diversity.

Everyone looked puzzled and thoughtful – the way people in TV do when they’re pretending to be deep and meaningful – until I said, ‘I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but everyone in this room is white?

Could that be connected?’ So, Alex Mahon, Tony Hall, Caroline McCall and David Lynn, it’s time to achieve real change.

But we also need to resist the idea that we don’t need older white men anymore and that they should be crushed out of the way. I hate the term, ‘Pale, male and stale.’ As someone who sticks up for the rights of old ladies, I need to stick up for old gents too.

They are still overrepresented, but their voices are vital for our society.

Look at John Ware who just reported an excellent and important Panorama on anti-Semitism.

He is pale, he is male, but he is certainly not stale. Is he politically correct? Well fairly recently we were in an edit suite together and he called me ‘Sweetie.’ At once the room fell silent. Indeed, I would say time stood still.

And then in the low and vaguely threatening tone I have polished over years, I said, ‘I am not your sweetie.’ To which John replied, ‘Yes you are.’ Sisters, I regret, I just laughed.

The most important reason for us to get our houses in order on diversity is that our current failure undermines our role as the key mediators between politicians and the public.

How can we represent the people of the UK if we ourselves are unrepresentative of the population? Mind you, politicians are also unrepresentative.

Look at Dominic Cummings and Seumas Milne, the Svengalis of our two main parties. One went to Durham School and Exeter College, Oxford, the other to Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford. That’s what counts as diversity in British politics.

We have shortcomings but we mustn’t underestimate our importance to democracy. The majority of people in the UK still rely on TV as their main source of news – 75 percent of the public.

We play a vital role in democratic debate in this country. Viewing figures for election debates and interviews are high, as they were for the recent Tory leadership debate. In the debates Boris Johnson deigned to join, around five million viewers watched.

That’s way more than can be reached by any newspaper and certainly for the Tories’ alternative to us – the Prime Minister’s Q&A sessions with the public on Facebook Live

Don’t believe politicians when they say that the public doesn’t trust the so-called mainstream media in the UK. They trust TV. Remember, terrestrial television has huge levels of trust: 71 percent.

It’s politicians who are not trusted – they have a trust rate of 19 per cent. And news on the internet – the medium politicians are increasingly using to bypass us – has, according recent Reuters Institute figures, a trust level of only 22 percent with a mere 10 percent for news on social.

Our investigations and those of other news organisations have also exposed the ways in which news on social platforms is used by those outside the UK to attempt to influence voting.

It has never been more essential that politicians should use the most trusted medium of. In the past, our politicians accepted that they had to be held accountable on television.

But in recent years, there has been a dramatic fall in politicians holding themselves up to proper scrutiny on TV and in recent months and even weeks, that decline has, in my view, become critical for our democracy.

We have a new Prime Minister who hasn’t held one major press conference or given one major television interview since he came to power.

That cannot be right. And we have a leader of the opposition who similarly fails to give significant interviews on terrestrial TV. We may be heading for an election very soon.

What are they going to do then? I genuinely fear that in the next election campaign there will be too little proper democratic debate and scrutiny to enable voters to make informed decisions.

Many of you will have seen the excellent recent BBC series on Margaret Thatcher. One striking feature was the number of lengthy television interviews Thatcher did.

Leaders of the past subjected themselves to half hour or forty-five minute interviews with the likes of Brian Walden and Robin Day and held regular press conferences.

During the 1987 election, Thatcher and Kinnock chaired daily press conferences and gave several full-length interviews. Even more recently, Miliband and Cameron also did extensive interviews in election campaigns.

However, Theresa May, when she was leader, and Corbyn, failed to hold themselves to account in the same way. In the 2017 election, May and Corbyn did only one or two events a day.

Outside of election periods, and setting aside some interviews with Andrew Marr, Theresa May’s PR people generally said she would do interviews of only four minutes, maybe six if you were lucky.

Throughout her time as PM, May’s longest interview with Channel Four News was seven minutes. How do you delve into the complex problems of our times in a few minutes. Jeremy Corbyn sometimes permits only one question, and then doesn’t answer it!

At the 2018 Conservative Party Conference, Mrs May made history by refusing to do interviews with Channel Four or Channel Five. Other broadcasters were so appalled that they signed a letter of protest to Downing Street for which I thank them.

When we were trying to get that interview, Robbie Gibb, May’s press supremo, said to us, ‘What’s in it for us?’ As if interviews were purely for the benefit of politicians and not the public.

It is notable that Theresa May told Laura Kuenssberg that the one thing she regretted was refusing to take part in TV debates. And no offence meant but she has lots of things she could regret.

During the entirety of the most recent European election, neither May nor Corbyn did a major interview with a broadcaster, not even on the night of the results.

But what is happening now is far more serious. For weeks and weeks of the Conservative leadership election, Boris Johnson was virtually invisible on television.

The public was able to view him mainly on hustings organised by his own party. Our experience at Channel Four was typical. He kept promising to come on Channel Four News. He never did. He didn’t do an interview with ITV News or Channel Five News either.

And he failed to turn up to our leaders debate. There’s his empty podium in the middle. Throughout that campaign, Boris Johnson was castigated widely for failing to be held accountable on television.

He did the minimum he could – just two leaders’ debates, one interview with Laura Kuenssberg and just one real grilling by Andrew Neil.

And what about this man? The leader of the opposition is rarely to be heard in any significant television interview. It’s not so much, ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’ as No Jeremy Corbyn.

The other day John McDonnell said he was going to put Jeremy Corbyn in a taxi and send him off to see the Queen. That befuddled me as I’ve been able to get in taxis by myself since I was about twelve.

I had the wild idea of sending the queen – a fellow old lady after all – a camera so that if she was lucky enough to meet Mr Corbyn she could ask him some questions on behalf of the British people. Because few of us get to do that.

Jeremy Corbyn gave the alternative MacTaggart last year and some of you may remember that he said, ‘At their best, journalists challenge accountable power.‘

Yes, Jeremy but we need the chance to question accountable power. He also said that, ‘fearless journalists and those who support them and their work are some of the heroes of our time.’

Go on Jeremy, be a hero, come on Channel Four News, go on the Today programme or Newsnight. You can do it. You can even get in a taxi by yourself and do it. It’s easy. You just hail them on the street and they stop. Although, maybe not if your Jeremy Corbyn. Could that have been the problem?

Corbyn did do an interview on Channel Four News at the Labour Party Conference in 2017 but then didn’t do another until the same time in 2018. And he hasn’t done one since. So annual appearances. What does he think he is? My birthday?

Ironically, both Johnson and Corbyn used to be journalists. Corbyn began his career as a reporter on the Newport and Market Drayton Advertiser and is even a member of the National Union of Journalists. And when they were outsiders in their parties they both spoke to TV regularly.

Of course, Dominic Cummings, allegedly the most important political figure in this country at present, has never done a television interview as far as I know.

And indeed has such respect for our democratic system that he was held to be in contempt of it when he refused to appear in front of the parliamentary committee investigating fake news

Boris Johnson has been proclaimed by Downing Street as the first social media PM.

On taking office, he recorded a jolly statement – so much more fun than being grilled by Emily Maitlis or Jon Snow. It reminded me of something and at first I couldn’t think what it was.

And then it came to me. This great flagbearer for democracy Vladimir Putin who also likes to talk directly to the nation.

We’ve also seen a stream of paid adverts on Facebook. He says he wants us to join him. Great, can we bring Matt Frei and a camera crew?

Meanwhile, he’s roaming round the country doing photo opportunities with Kinder eggs full of drugs. Shouldn’t he be busy doing something else?

As for his Facebook Live Q&As. We were told it was ‘unpasteurised and unmediated.’ Of course, it was also unregulated and therefore under no duty to be duly impartial. We did not show that propaganda exercise. And we should not show this propaganda as a matter of course.

The questions were easy and there were no follow-ups. Here’s one – ‘How would he protect mental health services?’ Break your heart Cathy Newman, could you have come up with that? Call yourself a journalist Andrew Neil, could you thought of this toughie? ‘What’s going to be done to tackle knife crime?

But the most challenging question of all came last: Who is your favourite politician? He said Pericles. Oh you man of the people! You couldn’t resist showing off your lovely classical education at Eton and Oxford.

What will it be next time? What’s your favourite colour? When will you bring world peace? Do you have any personal morality at all? Oops that last one is a real question. Couldn’t help myself.

What would Margaret Thatcher have thought of these two mighty leaders who avoid the regular grillings she accepted?

I would never have thought I would say these words: I believe that Mrs Thatcher would agree with me; Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn are cowards. She had a word for men like them – ‘frit’.

If they really believe in the policies they promote, they should come onto television to explain them, to allow them to be scrutinised and to justify them.

And just this weekend we read that these cowardy-cats in the Tory party may stop junior ministers from going onto the Today programme. I have previously described listening to Today as like accidentally walking into a knitting shop in Bournemouth.

But even I accept that millions listen to it and they have a right to hear from their political leaders on it.

Let’s look at a Western democracy whose leader decided he didn’t need to be held up to scrutiny. Who could I be thinking of? Where did Boris Johnson get his great idea about not having to bother with people like us?

Yes, it’s Mr Chlorinated Chicken himself, Donald Trump. Trump has abandoned formal White House briefings. He, like our PM, prefers to take questions from journalists during photo opps, notably getting onto his helicopter. That’s what you need Mr Johnson!

A helicopter to drown out all intelligent questions! Journalists have to shout out and there is no opportunity for follow-ups. And as we all know, Trump’s on social media day and night.

Of course, if you asked HIM who his favourite politician was he’d say himself. That’s actually true. When asked who his favourite president was, he said Donald Trump.

More importantly, Trump has abandoned any belief in the primacy of truth. If the leader of a democracy no longer believes in the fundamental importance of truth, then that democracy is undermined. That is what has happened in the US and we must not allow it to happen here.

Trump lies as a matter of course now. The Washington Post listed ten thousand of his lies a while back but it’s gone up since then. He lies for convenience and on a whim.

Recently, he repeated a claim that his father was a German, born in a lovely little village. It’s an easy mistake to make isn’t it? I used to find myself saying to my own father of a morning, ‘Guten Morgen PAPI Wie geht’s DIE (dier).’ He’d look confused. He came from Craigellachie.

It’s unfortunate that Trump’s father ISN’T German because it means that if his great new idea of people being ‘sent back’ catches on, my country, Scotland, would get Donald Trump.

I’m not feeling Nicola Sturgeon would be pleased. Trump’s mother came from the Outer Hebrides. I’ve got bad news for you Donald, I asked around on your behalf during my recent Hebridean journey. I couldn’t find anybody who wanted you.

Time for a fish! In honour of Scotland, I’ve brought along a herring to rival the kipper Boris Johnson produced in the leadership election. He said that Brussels bureaucrats had demanded that each kipper had to be accompanied by a plastic ice pillow. That was simply untrue. Even Donald Trump’s never lied about a kipper.

Going back decades, Johnson has lied about the EU.

1991 – EU bureaucrats reject Italian demands for smaller condoms. Rubbish.

The EU set rules on the shape of bananas. Nonsense

More recently, he claimed he was resigning from Theresa May’s government partly because the EU had prevented the UK from passing a law to save the lives of female cyclists. What a feminist that man is! So many women say that to me.

Here is what we all need to decide: what do we do when a known liar becomes our Prime Minister?

I’ve talked to journalists from several television organisations about this issue. They said they would be loathe to use that word ‘liar’. Remember when Andrew Marr told Penny Mourdant her claim that the UK couldn’t stop Turkey from joining the EU was ‘ strange’.

It was strange but it was also untrue, a lie. Is it time for us to start using the L word? I believe that we need to start calling politicians out as liars when they lie. If we continue to be so polite, how will our viewers know that politicians ARE lying?

And several of us have excellent online factchecking services – we need to put more of that information into our broadcast programmes to help viewers spot the porky pies. .

Of course, politicians don’t hold back from criticising us rudely and saying WE lie. The Labour Party said the Panorama on anti-Semitism purveyed: ‘deliberate and malicious misrepresentation designed to mislead the public’.

I am chair of a small international charity the Ethical Journalism Network which helps journalists round the world uphold standards. I honestly never thought I would be campaigning here in the UK to establish the primacy of truth.

If we are going to be asked to cast our votes on the basis of lies, then democracy is in trouble. Hang on a minute, did that already happen?

At Channel Four I’ve commissioned many award-winning international films on Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, North Korea, Iraq, Syria. But the films which matter most are those, like MPs for Hire, which investigate our own country and its politicians.

Another ploy of both Trump and some of our own politicians is to accuse journalists of being negative and unpatriotic. Trump regularly attacks journalists for being ‘the enemy of the people’ and criticises his opponents as negative and lacking patriotism.

He even said that the congresswomen he’d wanted to be sent home should be ‘more positive’ and reminded them that they had an obligation to love their country.

Presumably before they got thrown out of it. Some of you will remember that Trump’s chum Nigel Farage accused Andrew Marr of being ‘an enemy’.

And you might remember the night that this woman, now Secretary of State for Business, Andrea Leadsom, told Emily Maitlis on Newsnight that broadcasters should be ‘a bit patriotic’ because ‘we all need to pull together’.

Boris Johnson’s equivalent of Trump’s attack on the negativity of journalists and opponents is to rail against ‘the doubters, the doomsters’ and ’the gloomsters’.

I don’t need any politician to tell me to be patriotic. And it’s not being a gloomster to question policies. It’s the role of the free press in a democracy.

But it’s not all bad news. There is a leading politician standing up for truth

Michael Gove! He has launched a rapid rebuttal unit to give instant responses to ‘media myths and half-truths’ to ensure that we the people ‘are not being alarmed by scare stories or falsehoods’.

Now I don’t like to be a snitch, but there’s someone Mr Gove should keep an eye on.

Yes, the UK’s most famous recipient of EU farming subsidies, Dominic Cummings. Let’s remind ourselves of just a few Vote Leave messages.

The EU will ban the British kettle. Really Dominic?

The EU prevents us from protecting polar bears. Honestly Dominic?

Turkey – population 76 million is joining the EU. Well we’re still waiting on that.

In the difficult period we are entering, we need the truth and we need proper scrutiny of all our major politicians. Television is a bulwark of our democracy, those who undermine its role are undermining democracy.

It’s time for the television industry to stand up for itself and speak out publicly against what is happening. Yes, we are rivals but we have to form a united front in opposing attempts to side line our central role in the political life of this country.

And forget the idea that the public can judge what is true. We showed 1,700 people six stories and asked them to judge which were true and which false.

Only 4% of people got all the answers right. And why should they? They are not in a position to research the truth of stories. That’s what journalists are there for.

With so much to be done to uphold the role of television in our democracy, where are the other old ladies to help me? All the women I started out with have gone.

What happened to them? I feel a bit like a character in an Agatha Christie story’ And Then There was One’. Were they all murdered? I’m the only one left, did I do it? I’m the obvious suspect. Meanwhile, the men went on and on, gathering their MBEs and OBEs and fresh young wives.

We need to do much better in keeping women in the workplace and ensuring careers are not blighted by having children. As the freelance editor of an ITV programme and a single parent, I had to go back to work after six weeks.

And the percentage of women working freelance has increased since then. For those who are staff, much more could be done to introduce flexible working. The problem barely discussed is the menopause.

A quarter of women suffer significant symptoms and a major survey found that a quarter of women considered giving up work these were so bad.

Often this problem coincides with parents falling sick and children taking major exams.

That happened to me and life was a real struggle. Major broadcasters and larger companies need to take the lead by offering flexible and reduced working to older women so they are not lost to the industry.

Even getting your boss to understand there IS such a thing as the menopause can be a problem. Kevin Lygo is an inspirational leader but his knowledge of middle-aged women’s medical matters is perhaps wanting.

When he was my boss, we were meeting one day when he suddenly remarked that I looked seriously unwell. I said I was not ill. ‘But you’ve gone all red and you seem to have a fever,’ he said. I repeated, ‘I am not ILL Kevin,’ in what I thought was a meaningful way. He repeated that I was and I should go home.

So I went back to my desk and announced I was leaving for the day. Everyone asked me why and I said, ‘Because my boss has never heard of the menopause.’

More recently Kevin has told me that this misunderstanding occurred because he assumed I was too young to being going through the change of life. What a charmer!

Now, some of you may be aware that very occasionally I have a poem published. So tonight, I bring you a first – a MacTaggart poem.

Think of me as your poet laureate. To avoid undermining my reputation as a serious journalist, I use various noms de plum. Tonight, my nom de plume will be ‘Sweetie’.

So here, to conclude, is my poem.

MY TV DREAM

I have a dream

Boris and Jeremy together on telly

Or is that a nightmare?

All BBC presenters massively overpaid equally

A programme about THIS island

Making more noise than Love Island.

And dirty bastards arrested before they die

Or they just die. Either option is good.

The menopause is not mistaken for malaria.

And I can at last come out

And admit I was twelve when the Sound of Music was released

Work that out!

And so I say to you all

So long, good night, auf wiedersehn goodbye

The sun has gone to bed and so must I.

Thank you very much.

Ron Chernow: 'Then Olivier told me that they wanted to try boring at this year’s dinner and I said, Oh, I can deliver on that', White House Correspondents' Dinner - 2019

28 April 2019, Washington DC, USA

Thank you for that lovely introduction, Olivier. I confess that I was surprised when I received the invitation to speak here tonight. I mean, I knew they weren’t approaching me as an international sex symbol, right? Then Olivier told me that they wanted to try boring at this year’s dinner and I said, Oh, I can deliver on that. Big time. Now you’re talking my language. So here I am, your twenty-minute sedative for the evening.

It’s nice to see such a healthy turnout tonight. You all know that on Tuesday the president reportedly said that members of his administration should boycott this dinner. At first I was puzzled by this, but then I learned that a rumor was circulating in Washington that I would read aloud the redacted portions of the Mueller report and everything was explained.

Of course there’s also been some squawking from the comedians and I’m sorry about that. Frankly I thought those folks would have a little more of a sense of humor about my selection—after all, they are comedians—but we need them more than ever during this surreal interlude in American life. As Will Rogers once observed, “People are now taking their comedians seriously, and their politicians as a joke,” and that describes our topsy-turvy moment. I hope the comics will be back for many more star turns in the future. Meanwhile, it’s always fun for a serious historian to stand in the cross-fire of an active war zone. When I asked a friend what the atmosphere would be like at this dinner, he replied, “Oh, the Roman Colosseum.” Now, being a dutiful historian, I thought I should research my audience, so I picked up a copy of Henrik Ibsen’s great play, Enemy of the People. I hadn’t realized before that the president was a student of Norwegian literature. The drama takes place in a small Norwegian town that hopes the discovery of mineral springs will turn the sleepy backwater into a thriving spa. Then the hero of the play, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, discovers that the miraculous springs are polluted and breeding typhoid and other diseases. In his naivete, he imagines that the townspeople will applaud him for saving them from calamity. Then he discovers that truth is a political commodity defined by the town’s business interests and he’s persecuted for truth-telling. His house is stoned, his windows are shattered, and angry mobs brand him, yes, an enemy of the people. So the next time you’re dubbed an enemy of the people, please think of the term in the Norwegian sense and wear it as a badge of honor.

I’m delighted to make a spirited case tonight for the First Amendment. We now have to fight hard for basic truths we once took for granted. We gather here in perfect security because of a little piece of parchment called the Bill of Rights that has acquired the status of American scripture. In the last analysis, that paper barrier stands between a free press and executive tyranny. Its author, James Madison, was a tiny, often sickly man, who probably wouldn’t have gotten past the bouncers in this ballroom and whose low voice would scarcely have projected from this podium.

So fervently did Madison believe in these ten amendments that he didn’t want them tacked on to the end of the Constitution, as an afterthought, but woven straight into the original text. Of those ten landmark amendments, Madison considered the first indispensable. Like all our founders, he regarded a free press as the cornerstone of democracy. As Jefferson famously said, if forced to choose between a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, he would unhesitatingly prefer the latter.

The First Amendment wasn’t written for the exclusive use of saints and choirboys, nor was it granted only on good behavior. As Mark Twain noted, ruefully, the right to stupidity is protected by the U.S. Constitution. That became patently clear during George Washington’s first term in office. As best I can tell, Washington committed only one major blunder as president: He failed to put his name on Mount Vernon and thereby bungled an early opportunity at branding. Clearly deficient in the art of the deal, the poor man had to settle for the lowly title of father of his country.

The press of the early republic was as ferociously partisan as anything we see today. In that golden age of character assassination, writers murdered reputations while hiding behind Roman pseudonyms. Washington became the victim of preposterous slander when the opposition press said he’d been a British secret agent during the Revolutionary War. Obviously the British had gotten a lousy return on their investment.

Some of the most blistering attacks against Washington came from an unexpected source. His Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, had hired a poet named Philip Freneau as State Department translator. Now Freneau was perfectly qualified for the translator job except for one small detail: He knew only a single foreign language. In truth, Jefferson had recruited him to found a party organ called The National Gazette that would publish slashing broadsides against the very president Jefferson served. Freneau performed his task with such malicious gusto that he dropped off copies of his incendiary paper on Washington’s doorstep every day.

It’s hard to convey the anguish that seized Washington’s mind as he reeled from press criticism. One day Freneau printed a cartoon showing Washington behind beheaded a la Louis XVI. In his diary Jefferson recorded Washington’s towering rage: “The president was much inflamed, got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself” and said “that rascal Freneau sent him 3 of his papers every day, as if he thought he would become the distributor” of them. A very 18th century form of chutzpah, eh?

But despite this extreme provocation, Washington always honored the First Amendment, saying such evils “must be placed in opposition to the infinite benefits resulting from a free press.” Like every future president, Washington felt maligned and misunderstood by the press, but he never generalized that into a vendetta against the institution. In fact, when he wrote his farewell address, he never delivered it in person, but had it published in the newspapers for readers to digest. My main theme here tonight is that relations between presidents and the press are inevitably tough and almost always adversarial, but they don’t need to be steeped in venom.

Our founders were highly literate people and none more so than Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant who arrived, thank god, before the country was full. I don’t know why they let him in. Clearly somebody slipped up at the southern border. You know, Hamilton was a human word machine. When Columbia University Press published 27 thick volumes of his papers, the editor joked that he wanted to dedicate the entire voluminous edition to “Aaron Burr, without whose cooperation this project would never have been completed.” Hamilton had a flourishing career as a journalist as well as a government official, founding the New York Post long before its Page Six incarnation.

When writing the Federalist Papers, Hamilton cranked out as many as five or six essays per week and this, mind you, with a full-time legal practice. He would be scribbling the final sentences of an essay as the printer waited in his outer office, ready to rush the latest installment into print. After leaving as first Treasury Secretary, Hamilton defended in the press a major treaty with England. He wrote one set of essays under the pen name Camillus, then launched a second series under the pen name Philo Camillus. Now Philo Camillus heaped extravagant praise on Camillus, and both Camillus and Philo Camillus, for some reason, were rapturous in their adoration for the former Treasury Secretary, one Alexander Hamilton.

During the administration of John Adams, the country lurched into a period of reaction amid a war scare with France and rampant fear of foreigners. Congress enacted the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime for journalists to write about the president in a scandalous or malicious fashion. At this dark moment, Jefferson, with his serene faith in the people, prophesied, “with a little patience . . . we shall see the reign of witches pass, their spells dissolve.” Let it be noted that because of his anti-press record, John Adams not only lost his reelection campaign in 1800, but his Jeffersonian opponents reigned supreme for the next quarter century. Campaigns against the press don’t get your face carved into the rocks of Mount Rushmore for when you chip away at the press, you chip away at our democracy. The tribunal of history does not deal leniently with presidents who punish the press.

People say that we’re now fighting for the soul of America. But, folks, we’ve always been fighting for the soul of America. We’ve always fallen short of the hallowed ideals enshrined in our founding documents. America has always been a work in progress, a perpetual journey, a freedom ride with no final destination. And it falls to each new generation to renew and rediscover our country’s lofty promise. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said memorably that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, but it never does so in a smooth or unbroken line.

Our precious republic feels fragile, even perishable, at the moment. I shudder at the sheer savagery to which Washington politics has descended. But we’ve also seen the wisdom of our Constitution at work with a boldly assertive press, an independent judiciary, and a rejuvenated Congress providing checks on executive power. We’re being tested—fiercely tested—but I like to think that decency will prevail. History shows that, in the short run, the American public can be swept up in all sorts of misguided and wrongheaded things—think Scottsboro Boys; think Japanese internment camps; think Joe McCarthy—but in the long run democracy endures.

During the Civil War, we battled each other not with ballots, but with battalions. We slaughtered 750,000 of our fellow citizens, maiming millions more. Amputees hobbled through every American town. Towards the end of that bloody conflict, a chastened but still hopeful Abraham Lincoln sat around a Virginia campfire with his chief general, Ulysses S. Grant, and he quoted his Secretary of State William Seward as saying, “that there was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency.” Like Lincoln, I believe devoutly in that saving remnant of grace in our country. We’ve fought horrific wars, weathered massive depressions, and ended the unspeakable cruelty of slavery and Jim Crow. America has always been great, not when it boasted, not when it blustered, but when it admitted its mistakes and sought to overcome them.

Okay, let me move on to the president and the press in the twentieth century. Back in the days of William McKinley, there was no White House press room, just a long table for reporters on the second floor. As one journalist complained, “It’s part of the unwritten law of the White House that newspapermen shall never approach the president as he passes . . . unless he himself stops and talks to them.” A rather royal conception of the presidency with no shouted questions allowed.

In those more innocent days, reporters still shielded the private lives of presidents. Let me tell you how Warren Harding got the Republican nomination in 1920. Party bosses summoned him to the proverbial smoke-filled room in Chicago and asked him point-blank if he had any damaging personal issues they should know about. Now Harding, a married man, drank heavily and gambled freely, he’d had a fifteen-year affair with his best friend’s wife, and he had a mistress and an illegitimate baby daughter right there in Chicago. In fact, his young mistress sat in the balcony of the convention hall, enjoying the speeches. But Harding assured the party bosses that he couldn’t think of a single personal problem to worry about. Of course the press corps would grow bigger and more intrusive as the century progressed, and relations with the White House would grow ever more acrimonious.

Even though it may seem wistful and naive and a touch quixotic, I would like to keep alive tonight the fading memory of more civilized dealings between chief executives and the news media. Call it a museum of presidential decorum. At this confrontational moment in American politics, we must recall that civility has been an essential lubricant in our democratic culture and that our best presidents have handled the press with wit, grace, charm, candor, and even humor.

After McKinley’s wooden formality, Teddy Roosevelt proved a virtuoso in dealing with the press. The prolific author of 45 volumes, he devoured a book a day in the White House and retained all of them. One novelist who brought a new work to dinner was amazed that the president had read it by breakfast the next morning. Such a literate president enjoyed a natural affinity with the press corps. He devised a midday ritual called the ‘barber’s hour’ in which reporters would cluster around him as he was being shaved. The babbling president would spout a never-ending stream of opinions while his poor barber, bobbing and weaving with his razor, gamely tried to shave him without slitting the presidential throat.

When Calvin Coolidge was president in the 1920s, he inaugurated the first regularly scheduled press conferences. Reporters had to file their questions in advance and silent Cal sat stiffly behind his desk, working his way through a tidy stack of index cards. Small wonder that Dorothy Parker, when informed of Coolidge’s death, retorted, “How do they know?” Press relations only worsened with Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover. Mired in the Great Depression and his own personal gloom—even his own Secretary of State bemoaned that chatting with Hoover was like “sitting in a bath of ink”—the president hired a hapless press secretary who proved so unpopular that one reporter quipped it was “the first known instance of a rat joining a sinking ship.”

When Franklin Roosevelt came into office, he swept away restrictive rules and treated reporters, lo and behold, like grownups! “We’re not going to have any more written questions,” the genial president declared at his first press conference. “Of course while I cannot answer seventy-five or a hundred questions . . . I see no reason why I should not talk to you ladies and gentlemen off the record.” Please note the ladies and gentlemen. The 125 reporters packed into the oval office were so impressed by FDR’s clear, straightforward rules that they gave him a standing ovation at the end—the first and undoubtedly last time that would ever happen.

In the end, FDR conducted nearly a thousand press conferences, not to mention thirty fireside chats, and even Eleanor Roosevelt held her own press conferences, where she invited only female reporters. This proved a tremendous boon to women journalists across the country since even the most hidebound publishers were now forced to hire them.

Of course, when it came to wit and charm, John F. Kennedy probably retired the prize. His memory reminds us how far a little self-deprecating humor can go. Remember modesty? When a small boy asked Kennedy how he became a war hero, he replied, “It was absolutely involuntary. They sank my boat.” In 1958 then Senator Kennedy was being touted as a presidential hopeful, but he was shadowed by scurrilous rumors that his rich father would buy the race. So at the Gridiron Club dinner, JFK drew a slip of paper from his pocket and proudly announced that he had a telegram from his “generous daddy.” He read aloud: “Dear Jack, don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” The press was enthralled. When JFK held his first televised press conference in January 1961, 60 million captivated viewers were glued to their TV sets, a record only eclipsed by the 70 million who watched The Beatles debut on the Ed Sullivan Show three years later. I often wonder what The Beatles’ poll numbers would have looked like in Iowa and New Hampshire in that presidential year.

Ronald Reagan was a no less sunny personality and a past master of media relations. When he became president, he said, “I think that most of the time the overwhelming majority of reporters do a fine job, and as a former reporter . . . I know just how tough their job can be.” Nevertheless, Reagan had a sometimes bumpy relationship with the press. Then on March 30, 1981, he was shot and nearly killed outside this very hotel, the Washington Hilton, as he was about to duck into his limousine. A bullet lodged within an inch of his heart. Reagan was scheduled to speak, yes, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, so he telephoned in this line instead: “If I could give you just one little bit of advice, when somebody tells you to get into a car quick, do it.” That was a touch of class that has been sorely missing in our political culture in recent years. It was a subtle reminder that, whether Republicans or Democrats, we are all bona fide members of team U.S.A. and not members of enemy camps.

Okay, I know I’m wallowing in nostalgia and ignoring less savory moments of these and other presidents. Richard Nixon forced himself to go to dinners like this, where he had to hobnob with reporters who’d just written exposes about him. In the spring of 1971, he followed the advice of Press Secretary Ron Ziegler and decided to ‘play the good sport’ at the White House Correspondents Dinner. His gesture did not impress the news media. After his next press conference, Nixon grumbled privately, “the reporters were considerably more bad-mannered and vicious than usual. This bears out my theory that treating them with considerably more contempt is . . . a more productive policy.”

When Nixon hosted a party for P.O.W. families and felt bathed in female adoration, he thought his masculine appeal insufficiently acknowledged by the press coverage. “That’s what the goddamn New York Times and Washington Post should be writing about,” he groused. “I’m going to kick their asses around the block.” Such presidential eloquence. Shall we ever see its like again? Don’t answer. Of course the one who ended up getting his ass kicked around the block was . . . you know who.

You know, you folks in the media write the early drafts of history and we historians the later ones. Your work gives freshness, color, and immediacy to our sagas. I know how embattled you feel at this critical juncture as you combat the mistrust of a significant portion of the American electorate. I think you’re doing noble work to preserve democracy at a time when a rising tide of misinformation, masquerading as news, threatens to make a mockery of the First Amendment. There are so many journalistic fakes and forgeries out there that the genuine article becomes devalued and debased. You must also deal with a pervasive world of social media rife with self-appointed pundits who search out news outlets that only strengthen their preconceived views.

Still, this is as good a time as any to take stock and rededicate yourself to the highest standards of accuracy and integrity. Donald J. Trump is not the first and won’t be the last American president to create jitters about the First Amendment. So be humble, be skeptical, and beware of being infected by some of the very things you’re fighting against. The press is a powerful weapon that must always be fired with reluctance and aimed with precision. Warren Buffett has a handy saying: Always take the high road, it’s far less crowded there. And some days in Washington, let’s face it, a politician can sail along that upper roadway for hours without spotting another car. You folks should always remember that you are heirs to a grand crusading tradition that dates back to Ida B. Wells exposing the horrors of lynching; Jacob Riis the misery of Manhattan slums; Lincoln Steffens municipal corruption; Ida Tarbell the machinations of standard oil; Upton Sinclair the scandalous meat packing industry; Rachel Carson the dangers of pesticides; Woodward and Bernstein exposing Watergate; and the New York Times and Washington Post publishing the Pentagon Papers. This is a glorious tradition, you folks are part of it, and we can’t have politicians trampling on it with impunity. H. L. Mencken once warned of a political system that would “keep the populace alarmed . . . by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” We simply cannot allow the press to become an imaginary hobgoblin for political gain.

The thing that troubles me most at the moment is the sustained assault on truth, or at least a cavalier disregard of it, both here and by autocratic regimes abroad. As John Adams said, “facts are stubborn things” and our wishes cannot alter them. Facts are the foot soldiers of our respective professions, they do the hard marching and should wear no ideological coloring. Without the facts, we cannot have agreement in our badly divided nation; more importantly, without the facts we cannot have an honest disagreement. I applaud any president who aspires to the Nobel Prize for peace, but we don’t want one in the running for the Nobel Prize in fiction.

Ulysses S. Grant wasn’t a flawless president, but he was a stickler for the truth. One day in the White House, Grant was busy when a stranger called. Knowing Grant was occupied, an aide informed the usher, “Tell the gentleman that the president is out.” Overhearing this, Grant grew outraged. “No, don’t tell him that,” he said. “Tell him I am engaged and must be excused. I never lie for myself and do not want anybody to lie for me.” That’s a powerful example that all presidents should emulate.

You know, we’ve seen past administrations threaten the press directly, whether it be Lincoln shutting down disloyal papers during the Civil War or Woodrow Wilson stifling dissent with the Espionage Act in World War I. But what is happening today is perhaps even more insidious: a relentless campaign against the very credibility of the news media. Even the smartest courtroom lawyers can’t defend the press against such vague and sweeping attacks. You folks can only preserve that hard-won credibility in one way: with solid, fair-minded, and energetic reporting.

Since I’ve cruelly deprived you of a comedian tonight, I’d like to end with some pertinent quotes from Mark Twain, who cast a satirical eye on Washington folly. He said, “The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.” And I love this quote: “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” He could be scathing about Capitol Hill, saying, “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” He could be equally savage about presidents, saying the U.S. was never content “to have a chief magistrate of gold when it could get one of tin.” And as we head into another election season, I will leave you with one final gem from Twain: “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”

Good night and god bless America!

…

Fred Rogers (aka Mr Rogers): 'I give an expression of care every day to each child', US Senate Commerce Committee - 1969

1 May 1969, Congress, Washington DC, USA

President Nixon was proposing to decimate funding for PBS and public television and Mr Rogers, who became a media legend over the decades that followed, pleaded for funding to be maintained.

Senator Pastore: Alright Rogers, you've got the floor.

Mr. Rogers: Senator Pastore, this is a philosophical statement and would take about ten minutes to read, so I'll not do that. One of the first things that a child learns in a healthy family is trust, and I trust what you have said that you will read this. It's very important to me. I care deeply about children.

Senator Pastore: Will it make you happy if you read it?

Mr. Rogers: I'd just like to talk about it, if it's alright. My first children's program was on WQED fifteen years ago, and its budget was $30. Now, with the help of the Sears-Roebuck Foundation and National Educational Television, as well as all of the affiliated stations -- each station pays to show our program. It's a unique kind of funding in educational television. With this help, now our program has a budget of $6000. It may sound like quite a difference, but $6000 pays for less than two minutes of cartoons. Two minutes of animated, what I sometimes say, bombardment. I'm very much concerned, as I know you are, about what's being delivered to our children in this country. And I've worked in the field of child development for six years now, trying to understand the inner needs of children. We deal with such things as -- as the inner drama of childhood. We don't have to bop somebody over the head to...make drama on the screen. We deal with such things as getting a haircut, or the feelings about brothers and sisters, and the kind of anger that arises in simple family situations. And we speak to it constructively.

Senator Pastore: How long of a program is it?

Mr. Rogers: It's a half hour every day. Most channels schedule it in the noontime as well as in the evening. WETA here has scheduled it in the late afternoon.

Senator Pastore: Could we get a copy of this so that we can see it? Maybe not today, but I'd like to see the program.

Mr. Rogers: I'd like very much for you to see it.

Senator Pastore: I'd like to see the program itself, or any one of them.

Mr. Rogers: We made a hundred programs for EEN, the Eastern Educational Network, and then when the money ran out, people in Boston and Pittsburgh and Chicago all came to the fore and said we've got to have more of this neighborhood expression of care. And this is what -- This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, "You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are." And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it's much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger -- much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. I'm constantly concerned about what our children are seeing, and for 15 years I have tried in this country and Canada, to present what I feel is a meaningful expression of care.

Senator Pastore: Do you narrate it?

Mr. Rogers: I'm the host, yes. And I do all the puppets and I write all the music, and I write all the scripts --

Senator Pastore: Well, I'm supposed to be a pretty tough guy, and this is the first time I've had goose bumps for the last two days.

Mr. Rogers: Well, I'm grateful, not only for your goose bumps, but for your interest in -- in our kind of communication. Could I tell you the words of one of the songs, which I feel is very important?

Senator Pastore: Yes.

Mr. Rogers: This has to do with that good feeling of control which I feel that children need to know is there. And it starts out, "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" And that first line came straight from a child. I work with children doing puppets in -- in very personal communication with small groups:

What do you do with the mad that you feel? When you feel so mad you could bite. When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong, and nothing you do seems very right. What do you do? Do you punch a bag? Do you pound some clay or some dough? Do you round up friends for a game of tag or see how fast you go? It's great to be able to stop when you've planned the thing that's wrong. And be able to do something else instead -- and think this song --

'I can stop when I want to. Can stop when I wish. Can stop, stop, stop anytime....And what a good feeling to feel like this! And know that the feeling is really mine. Know that there's something deep inside that helps us become what we can. For a girl can be someday a lady, and a boy can be someday a man.'

Senator Pastore: I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful. Looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars.

David Speers: 'If a competitor’s legitimate story is labeled “fake” by a self-serving politician, call it out', Press Freedom Dinner - 2017

28 April 2017, Ivy Ballroom, Sydney, Australia

The Press Freedom Dinner is a joint initiative of the Walkley Foundation and the MEAA. This speech first appeared in the Walkley magazine.

I was asked to speak tonight about political reporting in the era of “fake news”. It seems to be the issue dominating media industry discussion around the world over the past 12 months, but I’ve got a slightly different take in the Australian context as to what sort of threat it poses.

A good starting point is trying to work out what fake news actually is.

Everyone seems to have a THEORY.

So let’s begin with a bit of a pop quiz.

Is this fake news?

Well plainly yes it is fake news. There was a bunch of these stories that took off during last year’s Presidential election. It’s impossible to know how many of those who read them actually believed them or just read them for a bit of fun. But we do know the top 20 of these fake news stories generated nearly 9 million shares on Facebook. That’s more than the top 20 real news stories generated. So perhaps it tells us a bit about what Facebook users like. This one about the Pope endorsing Trump was the most shared. This is fake news.

What about this one?

Well yes this is clearly fake news too. This was number two on the most shared list. You can understand why people click on it and share it; it’s a far sexier story than “Hillary confirms education policy” or “Hillary talks tax”.

We now know much of this stuff was created by fraudsters in Macedonia. Or “entrepreneurs”, depending on your point of view. Facebook and Google are now taking steps to tackle this stuff with greater fact-checking and weeding out of obviously fake material, as they should. But I don’t really want to spend tonight talking about what they should and shouldn’t be doing. I freely admit to not being much of an expert on how Facebook algorithms work. I do understand this can be a balancing act at times. No one wants to see some of the brilliant satirical pieces from the Betoota Advocate blocked for example. Well, perhaps some of those radio & TV producers who didn’t realise The Betoota stories were satirical do …

But coming back to the stuff that really is fake news, here’s the thing: I actually don’t believe it’s much of an issue in Australia. I don’t see this as a great threat to our industry. In fact I haven’t seen much evidence of fake news like this here in Australia. Maybe it’s because those Macedonian fraudsters haven’t really bothered with the Australian market. They haven’t bothered to generate fake news stories about Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott. The two of them seem to be generating enough real news to keep up the clicks.

But that’s not to say I don’t think the term “fake news” is an issue. It is. And let me explain why, by returning to this question of what is fake news.

Is it “fake news” when a politician lies, misleads or simply gets something wrong?

Donald Trump claimed to have the largest inauguration crowd in history until these pictures emerged …

Was the President himself guilty of “fake news”?

And what about this headline from just a couple of weeks ago:

That was according to what the US Defence Secretary and the White House spokesman were saying at the time. It wasn’t just CNN, we all reported that the carrier group was heading to the Korean peninsula. It is now, but at the time of those statements it was actually heading in the other direction.

Is this fake news? Well I would argue no. Governments good and bad get stuff wrong, either through cock-up or conspiracy, all the time. I wouldn’t put it in the category of fake news though. It’s just politicians lying or misleading or getting their facts wrong, as they’ve so often done.

What’s more of a problem to me, is how politicians themselves have latched onto the “fake news” label when trying to dismiss a story they don’t like. Donald Trump throws around the “fake news” line more than anyone when he doesn’t like a story or a journalist or a media outlet. But let’s leave him alone for a minute and look at this in the Australian context.

Is this fake news?

“Plum Postings Hobble Reshuffle Choices.”

A story from Dennis Shanahan about a possible reshuffle if George Brandis and Marise Payne are given diplomatic postings. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop labelled this story “fake news”.

Or this?

A story from the ABC’s Stephen Long about the Indian company Adani which is behind the proposed Carmichael Coal Mine, which is apparently facing multiple financial crime and corruption investigations. Resources Minister Matt Canavan labelled this story “fake news”.

And finally: “Govt MPs working to bring same sex marriage policy to a head over next fortnight”. A story from James Massola at the Sydney Morning Herald. Treasurer Scott Morrison labelled this one “fake news”.

Now I’m sure they all think they’re right in the zeitgeist using this “fake news” term. But here’s a tip for them: these stories aren’t fake news and it’s dangerous to suggest they are.

There is absolutely no justification to link entirely legitimate stories from reputable journalists to the crap from fraudsters in Macedonia and other peddlers of material designed to deliberately mislead and undermine how people are informed.

Now it’s true, the media is an easy target. Donald Trump knows it and so do politicians here. When it comes to trust, we’re regularly ranked down there with used car salesmen and even politicians themselves!

In fact we’re in even more trouble on this front than some realise. Some of you may have heard about the “Edelman Trust Barometer”, an annual global survey of trust in major institutions. Its results this year show trust in the media in Australia fell an alarming 10 points during 2016 from 42 per cent to just 32 per cent. That’s near the bottom of the pack internationally. Well below the level of trust in the media in the US, India, China and Indonesia. We scrape in just above Russia and Turkey.

Without trust we are vulnerable. Who are voters going to believe when a politician labels as “fake” a story they simply don’t like?

So what can we do about it? Well at least when it comes to politicians calling legitimate stories “fake news”, I reckon we should call it out. Even if it does mean defending one of our competitors, heaven forbid!

I’m not a supporter of media collectivism. I like the robust political media landscape in Australia, the wildly different voices and the healthy competition. I don’t think we need to start holding hands, but there is an argument for some solidarity when it comes to defending our craft right now.

If a competitor’s legitimate story is labeled “fake” by a self-serving politician, call it out. Don’t let trashing journalism become a go-to response for those politicians who can’t mount a better defence.

The bigger question is what can we do to restore trust in the media. Particularly in my context, trust in political journalism. Let me be clear, I don’t have a magic bullet answer to this. No one does.

But I do think it’s important to understand what’s driving audience cynicism.

Back to basics

As many have noted over the years, audiences are fragmenting and retreating into bubbles or echo chambers on the left and right. Once upon a time you had the choice of a few TV channels to watch, a few radio stations to listen to and a few newspapers to read.

Now you have infinite choices. You can listen to, watch and read an entirely right-wing perspective or left-wing perspective on the world. And many do.

They are attracted to stories and commentary they agree with.

Journalists need to be journalists, not players. Not Twitter warriors.

Facebook and Twitter help create these bubbles — by feeding them the news and opinion they want. The business model for most media outlets is also shifting to accommodate this trend. It’s not hard to understand why. Commercial media outlets live in a commercial world. People want informed opinion and they want commentary. There is no disputing that.

But there is also I believe, a vital role for journalists who try as hard as they damn well can to be straight down the middle and hold both sides to account. To ask tough questions of those in every political party, the big ones and the little ones, to uncover uncomfortable truths and yes, tell audiences what they might not like to hear or necessarily agree with.

Journalists need to be journalists, not players. Not Twitter warriors.

If you want to be trusted as a political journalist, play it straight. If your media organisation values trust, they will thank you for it. Don’t be swayed by the outrage industry on social media.

Admittedly this isn’t as easy as it sounds.

For what it’s worth — after 17 years in the Press Gallery — I reckon this is actually harder than ever right now but also more important than ever.

The advent of social media has delivered many wonderful things — but also a torrent of daily abuse aimed at journalists. Nearly every day my lovely Twitter followers call me either a “lying Labor dog” or a “right-wing Murdoch puppet”. Some of it can even get a lot more colourful than that.

My advice to those who are bothered by this stuff: either ignore it or wear it as a badge of pride.

In fact, I like to believe there’s a real opportunity for journalists right now to re-engage with cynical audiences. And largely by getting back to basics.

I know plenty of people have said this since the Trump victory and Brexit, but it’s true: get out and talk to a wider group of voters than those you usually mix with. Don’t just rely on polls and talkback radio to “get a feel” for the mood.

I’ve picked up more insight into what Australians really think over dinner in an RSL club or at a campground with the kids than I would in a week talking to the political spin doctors in Canberra. Now I appreciate there’s little time or money in most media jobs these days to wander around chatting with “real Australians”. The news cycle is relentless. But as individual journalists and as an industry, we need to maintain that connection with the communities we’re representing.

Transparency

The second serious challenge for political journalists I see is transparency. Or the lack of it. We’ve probably become too complacent about this.

The most glaring issue when it comes to transparency in government in Australia is the secrecy in Defence. There’s no other way I can put it.

8 years ago I was embedded with Australian troops in Afghanistan for a week. We travelled around forward operating bases in Oruzgan and I was able to talk to troops on the frontline openly.

The ABC and many others had similar opportunities. Important stories were told and history was recorded about what the men and women of the Australian Defence Force were doing in our name. These media visits weren’t as regular as some might have liked … and certainly a long way short of the media access the American military provided, but it was something.

In August 2014 Australian troops were sent back into Iraq to help in the fight against Islamic State. Apart from an initial flurry of coverage when they were first deployed, we now hear very little.

For nearly 12 months I’ve been requesting a visit to tell the story of what Australian troops are now doing. I’ve had no success. We get a briefing roughly every 6 months from an official in Canberra, and the Defence website pumps out press releases and lovely photos from its enormous media wing.

But when was the last time you saw our soldiers in the field telling their story? When was the last time you saw the Chief of Defence do an interview?

Early last week when Australian troops were caught up in a chemical weapons attack by Islamic State in Mosul. We found out initially through the American media! Fortunately no Australians were hurt. But why aren’t we told about this? There’s a hell of a fight going on in Mosul and we haven’t had one briefing about it.

Now it’s true, there aren’t as many specialist Defence reporters as there once were. There aren’t as many journalists devoted to finding out what’s going on in Defence and that means there isn’t as much pressure being applied.

But there’s also no doubt the Australian Defence Force has become media shy over the years. It’s a shame, because one day Australians will want to know what we did in Iraq. And they deserve to know.

Then there’s the immigration department and its offshore processing centres. They’ve been running for four years now with barely any media access.

Admittedly a few have been able to access the processing centre at Nauru. But not Manus Island. The Australian Government hides behind the excuse it’s up to Nauru and PNG to decide media access, as if the Australian government has no influence or responsibility to allow some transparency around what’s going on in these places.

Preventing media access of course means the plight of the asylum seekers and the impact these centres have on the local community is out of sight and out of mind for most Australians.

It also makes it extremely difficult to examine why certain incidents occur.

Take the incident two weeks ago — when PNG Defence personnel fired around 100 shots into the Manus Island centre. Last week the Immigration Minister Peter Dutton told me on my program that one of the reasons tensions were running high was because three asylum seekers were seen leading a 5-year-old local boy into the centre.

The local PNG Police commander seemed to disagree, saying the Defence personnel were drunk and that the shooting followed an altercation on a nearby soccer field. A boy aged 10 had come to the centre a week earlier looking for food. Peter Dutton is standing by his version of events, which he says is based on departmental advice and other contacts on the ground.

I’m not judging who’s right and wrong here. But there is a discrepancy and this isn’t a trivial matter.

Now if we did have more media access, I’m not suggesting we’d all have permanent correspondents based in Manus Island. But when a situation like this comes along, where asylum seekers claim there’s an unfair insinuation that paedophilia is going on and when there are fears about what this could do to an already volatile situation between some locals and the asylum seekers, surely allowing journalists in to talk to all sides and accurately report what’s gone on would only be a good thing.

As for transparency closer to home, consider this. We live in an information age. You can find out almost anything you want to know about everything with the device in your pocket. Except how the thousands and thousands of dollars in tax you’re paying each year are being spent.

Sure, we get the federal budget each year that tells us broadly where the money is going, but why not an online real-time portal that taxpayers and journalists can click on and find out where their money is going without having to lodge freedom of information requests?

A number of states in the US have done this, including Texas, which has a population greater than Australia’s. The Texas site is terrific by the way, you can drill right down and see how much is being spent by public servants for example on meals and lodging (roughly $5.5M a month in case you’re wondering). Each individual expense is recorded.

Don’t think for a minute this data isn’t being recorded here already every day. It is, but we just don’t get to see it.

As for transparency around what our politicians are up to, the Prime Minister’s recent reforms to MP expenses are a good step. Forcing them to report every month rather than every 6 months on what they’re spending is a good move. I just wish they’d get on with it.

But what about some transparency around political donations? Why can’t we get a report every month (or in fact in real time) when donations are made to political parties? The Queensland government is rolling out this reform this year. Why isn’t the federal government? Labor says it supports the move. Malcolm Turnbull says he has no in principle objections either. So why isn’t it happening?

And while we’re at it, why don’t we get a daily on-the-record briefing from the Prime Minister’s office? Everyone loves to make fun of Sean Spicer, but at least the Trump Administration is trying to uphold the fine tradition of the daily White House briefing.

Surely some eager junior minister, or Chief Press Secretary Mark Simpkin himself could stand up each morning and explain what our government is doing each day.

Even in the mother of Westminster traditions, Prime Minister’s Questions are followed by a thorough briefing, usually by the chiefs of staff to explain to the press the arguments each side was prosecuting.

Perhaps politicians would have less reason to attack the press and accuse us of writing “fake news” if they opened up and shared more information with us.

Transparency does matter. And even though Malcolm Turnbull likes to talk about being agile and innovative (or at least he used to), transparency in the Australian government is not keeping up with global trends.

To be honest — it would probably help the standing of politicians if they were more open and accountable. And it would probably help the standing of journalists if we fought harder for it.

So in conclusion …

My message tonight is don’t worry too much about the threat of fake news stories getting more Facebook shares than your own. But do worry about the standing of our profession. And do something about it.

Stand up for your colleagues when politicians are trying to rubbish their work. Always fight for greater transparency to shine a light on areas governments would rather hide. And be proud of straight news reporting. If we want to be trusted as journalists, we have to be journalists first and foremost. Not opinionated Twitter warriors.

I’ll leave you with a quote from a politician, but a good one. Abraham Lincoln: “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.”

Read Walkley Magazine content online here.

The Press Freedom Dinner raised funds for The Media Safety and Solidarity Fund.

This is the MEAA's Annual Report into Press Freedom in Australia

Bret Stephens: 'My topic this evening is intellectual integrity in the age of Donald Trump', Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture - 2017

16 February 2017, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, USA

I’m profoundly honored to have this opportunity to celebrate the legacy of Danny Pearl, my colleague at The Wall Street Journal.

My topic this evening is intellectual integrity in the age of Donald Trump. I suspect this is a theme that would have resonated with Danny.

When you work at The Wall Street Journal, the coins of the realm are truth and trust — the latter flowing exclusively from the former. When you read a story in the Journal, you do so with the assurance that immense reportorial and editorial effort has been expended to ensure that what you read is factual.

Not probably factual. Not partially factual. Not alternatively factual. I mean fundamentally, comprehensively and exclusively factual. And therefore trustworthy.

This is how we operate. This is how Danny operated. This is how he died, losing his life in an effort to nail down a story.

In the 15 years since Danny’s death, the list of murdered journalists has grown long.

Paul Klebnikov and Anna Politkovskaya in Russia.

Zahra Kazemi and Sattar Behesti in Iran.

Jim Foley and Steve Sotloff in Syria.

Five journalists in Turkey. Twenty-six in Mexico. More than 100 in Iraq.

When we honor Danny, we honor them, too.

We do more than that.

We honor the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”

And we honor the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with.

So that’s the business we’re in: the business of journalism. Or, as the 45th president of the United States likes to call us, the “disgusting and corrupt media.”

Some of you may have noticed that we’re living through a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business.

The President routinely describes reporting he dislikes as FAKE NEWS. The Administration calls the press “the opposition party,” ridicules news organizations it doesn’t like as business failures, and calls for journalists to be fired. Mr. Trump has called for rewriting libel laws in order to more easily sue the press.

This isn’t unprecedented in U.S. history, though you might have to go back to the Administration of John Adams to see something quite like it. And so far the rhetorical salvos haven’t been matched by legal or regulatory action. Maybe they never will be.

But the question of what Mr. Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.

Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute propaganda for news, boosterism for information.

His objection to, say, the New York Times, isn’t that there’s a liberal bias in the paper that gets in the way of its objectivity, which I think would be a fair criticism. His objection is to objectivity itself. He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt — so long as it’s on his side.

But again, that’s not all the president is doing.

Consider this recent exchange he had with Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly asks:

Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can’t back up factually, and as the President you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that it’s irresponsible for the President to say that.

To which the president replies:

Many people have come out and said I’m right.

Now many people also say Jim Morrison faked his own death. Many people say Barack Obama was born in Kenya. “Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.

We are not a nation of logicians.

I think it’s important not to dismiss the president’s reply simply as dumb. We ought to assume that it’s darkly brilliant — if not in intention then certainly in effect. The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.

He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter: That they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them — or, in his case, both.

If some of you in this room are students of political philosophy, you know where this argument originates. This is a version of Thrasymachus’s argument in Plato’s Republic that justice is the advantage of the stronger and that injustice “if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.”

Substitute the words “truth” and “falsehood” for “justice” and “injustice,” and there you have the Trumpian view of the world. If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, it would be this: Truth is what you can get away with.

If you can sell condos by claiming your building is 90% occupied when it’s only 20% occupied, well, then—it’s 90% occupied. If you can convince a sufficient number of people that you really did win the popular vote, or that your inauguration crowds were the biggest—well then, what do the statistical data and aerial photographs matter?

Now, we could have some interesting conversations about why this is happening—and why it seems to be happening all of a sudden.

Today we have “dis-intermediating” technologies such as Twitter, which have cut out the media as the middleman between politicians and the public. Today, just 17% of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper daily, down from 42% at the turn of the century. Today there are fewer than 33,000 full-time newsroom employees, a drop from 55,000 just 20 years ago.

When Trump attacks the news media, he’s kicking a wounded animal.

But the most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he’s only a severe example of a common type.

The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.

Nearly 25 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the great scholar and Democratic Senator from New York, coined the phrase, “defining deviancy down.” His topic at the time was crime, and how American society had come to accept ever-increasing rates of violent crime as normal.

“We have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard,” Moynihan wrote.

You can point to all sorts of ways in which this redefinition of deviancy has also been the story of our politics over the past 30 years, a story with a fully bipartisan set of villains.

I personally think we crossed a rubicon in the Clinton years, when three things happened: we decided that some types of presidential lies didn’t matter; we concluded that “character” was an over-rated consideration when it came to judging a president; and we allowed the lines between political culture and celebrity culture to become hopelessly blurred.

But whatever else one might say about President Clinton, what we have now is the crack-cocaine version of that.

If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.

One of the most interesting phenomena during the presidential campaign was waiting for Trump to say that one thing that would surely break the back of his candidacy.

Would it be his slander against Mexican immigrants? Or his slur about John McCain’s record as a POW? Or his lie about New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11? Or his attacks on Megyn Kelly, on a disabled New York Times reporter, on a Mexican-American judge? Would it be him tweeting quotations from Benito Mussolini, or his sly overtures to David Duke and the alt-right? Would it be his unwavering praise of Vladimir Putin? Would it be his refusal to release his tax returns, or the sham that seems to been perpetrated on the saps who signed up for his Trump U courses? Would it be the tape of him with Billy Bush?

None of this made the slightest difference. On the contrary, it helped him. Some people became desensitized by the never-ending assaults on what was once quaintly known as “human decency.” Others seemed to positively admire the comments as refreshing examples of personal authenticity and political incorrectness.

Shameless rhetoric will always find a receptive audience with shameless people. Donald Trump’s was the greatest political strip-tease act in U.S. political history: the dirtier he got, the more skin he showed, the more his core supporters liked it.

Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called on Americans to summon “the better angels of our nature.” Donald Trump’s candidacy, and so far his presidency, has been Lincoln’s exhortation in reverse.

Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining. Politics as we’ve had it for most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and dull.

Now it’s all we can talk about. If you like Trump, his presence in the White House is a daily extravaganza of sticking it to pompous elites and querulous reporters. If you hate Trump, you wake up every day with some fresh outrage to turn over in your head and text your friends about.

Whichever way, it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.

Earlier today, at his press conference, the president claimed his administration is running like a “fine-tuned machine.” In actual fact, he just lost his Labor Secretary nominee, his National Security Adviser was forced out in disgrace, and the Intelligence Community is refusing to fully brief the president for fear he might compromise sources and methods.

But who cares? Since when in Washington has there been a presidential press conference like that? Since when has the denial of reality been taken to such a bald-faced extreme?

At some point, it becomes increasingly easy for people to mistake the reality of the performance for reality itself. If Trump can get through a press conference like that without showing a hint of embarrassment, remorse or misgiving—well, then, that becomes a new basis on which the president can now be judged.

To tell a lie is wrong. But to tell a lie with brass takes skill. Ultimately, Trump’s press conference will be judged not on some kind of Olympic point system, but on whether he “won”—which is to say, whether he brazened his way through it. And the answer to that is almost certainly yes.

So far, I’ve offered you three ideas about how it is that we have come to accept the president’s behavior.

The first is that we normalize it, simply by becoming inured to constant repetition of the same bad behavior.

The second is that at some level it excites and entertains us. By putting aside our usual moral filters—the ones that tell us that truth matters, that upright conduct matters, that things ought to be done in a certain way—we have been given tickets to a spectacle, in which all you want to do is watch.

And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.

Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.

One of the more fascinating aspects of last year’s presidential campaign was the rise of a class of pundits I call the “TrumpXplainers.” For instance, Trump would give a speech or offer an answer in a debate that amounted to little more than a word jumble.

But rather than quote Trump, or point out that what he had said was grammatically and logically nonsensical, the TrumpXplainers would tell us what he had allegedly meant to say. They became our political semioticians, ascribing pattern and meaning to the rune-stones of Trump’s mind.

If Trump said he’d get Mexico to pay for his wall, you could count on someone to provide a complex tariff scheme to make good on the promise. If Trump said that we should not have gone into Iraq but that, once there, we should have “taken the oil,” we’d have a similarly high-flown explanation as to how we could engineer this theft.

A year ago, when he was trying to explain his idea of a foreign policy to the New York Times’s David Sanger, the reporter asked him whether it didn’t amount to a kind of “America First policy”—a reference to the isolationist and anti-Semitic America First Committee that tried to prevent U.S. entry into World War II. Trump clearly had never heard of the group, but he liked the phrase and made it his own. And that’s how we got the return of America First.

More recently, I came across this headline in the conservative Washington Times: “How Trump’s ‘disarray’ may be merely a strategy,” by Wesley Pruden, the paper’s former editor-in-chief. In his view, the president’s first disastrous month in office is, in fact, evidence of a refreshing openness to dissent, reminiscent of Washington and Lincoln’s cabinet of rivals. Sure.

Overall, the process is one in which explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification. Trump says X. What he really means is Y. And while you might not like it, he’s giving voice to the angers and anxieties of Z. Who, by the way, you’re not allowed to question or criticize, because anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days.

Watching this process unfold has been particularly painful for me as a conservative columnist. I find myself in the awkward position of having recently become popular among some of my liberal peers—precisely because I haven’t changed my opinions about anything.

By contrast, I’ve become suddenly unpopular among some of my former fans on the right—again, because I’ve stuck to my views. It is almost amusing to be accused of suffering from something called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” simply because I feel an obligation to raise my voice against, say, the president suggesting a moral equivalency between the U.S. and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The most painful aspect of this has been to watch people I previously considered thoughtful and principled conservatives give themselves over to a species of illiberal politics from which I once thought they were immune.

In his 1953 masterpiece, “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists. In none of the cases that Milosz analyzed was coercion the main reason for the conversion.

They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.

I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right. It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina. It is no less stunning to watch people who once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.

And it is nothing short of amazing to watch the party of onetime moral majoritarians, who spent a decade fulminating about Bill Clinton’s sexual habits, suddenly find complete comfort with the idea that character and temperament are irrelevant qualifications for high office.

The mental pathways by which the new Trumpian conservatives have made their peace with their new political master aren’t so different from Milosz’s former colleagues.

There’s the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Trump represents a historical force to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the same fear of seeming out-of-touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the same Manichean belief that, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the United States would have all-but ended as a country.

This is supposed to be the road of pragmatism, of turning lemons into lemonade. I would counter that it’s the road of ignominy, of hitching a ride with a drunk driver.

So, then, to the subject that brings me here today: Maintaining intellectual integrity in the age of Trump.

When Judea wrote me last summer to ask if I’d be this year’s speaker, I got my copy of Danny’s collected writings, “At Home in the World,” and began to read him all over again. It brought back to me the fact that, the reason we honor Danny’s memory isn’t that he’s a martyred journalist. It’s that he was a great journalist.

Let me show you what I mean. Here’s something Danny wrote in February 2001, almost exactly a year before his death, from the site of an earthquake disaster in the Indian town of Anjar.

What is India’s earthquake zone really like? It smells. It reeks. You can’t imagine the odor of several hundred bodies decaying for five days as search teams pick away at slabs of crumbled buildings in this town. Even if you’ve never smelled it before, the brain knows what it is, and orders you to get away. After a day, the nose gets stuffed up in self-defense. But the brain has registered the scent, and picks it up in innocent places: lip balm, sweet candy, stale breath, an airplane seat.

What stands out for me in this passage is that it shows that Danny was a writer who observed with all his senses. He saw. He listened. He smelled. He bore down. He reflected. He understood that what the reader had to know about Anjar wasn’t a collection of statistics; it was the visceral reality of a massive human tragedy. And he was able to express all this in language that was compact, unadorned, compelling and deeply true.

George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Danny saw what was in front of his nose.

We each have our obligations to see what’s in front of one’s nose, whether we’re reporters, columnists, or anything else. This is the essence of intellectual integrity.

Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.

The legacy of Danny Pearl is that he died for this. We are being asked to do much less. We have no excuse not to do it.

Thank you.

JK Rowling: 'I had no idea the phrase, “I’m praying for you,” could sound so intimidating', PEN America Literary Gala - 2016

16 May 2016, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, USA

Video for this one is here

Personally, I want to say thank you very, very much for this huge honor, given as it is by an organization that I have admired very deeply for many, many years. It’s also been an absolute privilege to share this stage tonight with your previous honorees. PEN’s campaigns on behalf of imprisoned writers are essential and inspirational, though it is sad to reflect how needed your defense of writers continues to be today.

Speaking personally, I have very little to complain about where my freedom of expression is concerned. I was once confronted by a Christian fundamentalist in a toy shop here in New York. I had no idea the phrase, “I’m praying for you,” could sound so intimidating. A bomb threat was once made to a store at which I was appearing. The premises were searched, nothing was found, the event went ahead. And the Harry Potter books have figured frequently on lists of the most banned. But, as such lists feature many of my favorite writers, I’ve always been very flattered to be included. Of course, I can afford to take these things lightly, protected as I am by citizenship of a liberal nation where freedom of expression is a fundamental right. My critics are at liberty to claim that I’m trying to convert children to Satanism. And I’m free to explain that I’m exploring human nature and morality, or to say, “You’re an idiot,” depending on which side of the bed I got out of that day.

However, I’ve never taken these freedoms for granted. In my 20s, I worked for Amnesty International, where I learned exactly how high a price people across the world have paid and continue to pay for the freedoms that we in the West sometimes take for granted. In fact, I worry that we may be in danger of allowing their erosion through sheer complacency. The tides of populism and nationalism currently sweeping many developed countries have been accompanied by demands that unwelcome and inconvenient voices be removed from public discourse. “Mainstream media” has become a term of abuse in some quarters. It seems that unless a commentator or television channel or a newspaper reflects exactly the complainant’s worldview it must be guilty of bias or corruption.

Intolerance of alternative viewpoints is spreading to places that make me, a moderate and a liberal, most uncomfortable. Only last year, we saw an online petition to ban Donald Trump from entry to the U.K. It garnered half a million signatures.

[An audience member claps. Rowling holds up her hand.]

Just a moment.

I find almost everything that Mr. Trump says objectionable. I consider him offensive and bigoted. But he has my full support to come to my country and be offensive and bigoted there. His freedom to speak protects my freedom to call him a bigot. His freedom guarantees mine. Unless we take that absolute position without caveats or apologies, we have set foot upon a road with only one destination. If my offended feelings can justify a travel ban on Donald Trump, I have no moral ground on which to argue that those offended by feminism or the fight for transgender rights or universal suffrage should not oppress campaigners for those causes. If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on them grounds that they have offended you eat, you have crossed the line to stand alongside tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justification.

I’d like to conclude these remarks by reading you two short passages from the blog of a teenage girl. In 2009, Tal Al-Mallouhi became one of the youngest prisoners of conscience in the world when she was taken from her home by Syrian security forces. She was 18 years old. Her friends and family had to wait 11 months to find that she had been charged with giving aid to foreign country. Her parents have been permitted to see her only once. There are fears she may have been tortured. This is some of the material that was considered so dangerous and inflammatory that she remains incarcerated:

I do not like the words of the poet Rudyard Kipling: the East is East and the West is West and never the twain shall meet. Instead, I promote the union of the East and West. They meet somewhere. With rational thought, two great souls from here and from there can agree with each other, irrespective of the vast separation of time and space. Oh my brother human, if I disagree with you in thoughts, principles or beliefs, does this deny the fact that we are both human? All you and I have to do is to respect each other. Tolerate the views of your opponents coolly and patiently. While listening to them, do not think to respond before listening to all opposing opinions.

I repeat that beautiful plea for plurality, tolerance and the importance of rational discourse in the hope that Tal Al-Mallouhi will soon be freed. In the meantime, long may PEN continue to fight for her, for the freedoms on which a liberal society rests and without which no literature can have no value. Thank you very much indeed.

Newton Minow: 'What you will see is a vast wasteland', National Association of Broadcasters Convention - 1961

Speech in full

9 May 1961, FCC Address, National Association of Broadcasters, Washington DC, USA

Governor Collins, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. Governor Collins you're much too kind, as all of you have been to me the last few days. It's been a great pleasure and an honor for me to meet so many of you. And I want to thank you for this opportunity to meet with you today.

As you know, this is my first public address since I took over my new job. When the New Frontiersmen rode into town, I locked myself in my office to do my homework and get my feet wet. But apparently I haven't managed yet to stay out of hot water. I seem to have detected a very nervous apprehension about what I might say or do when I emerged from that locked office for this, my maiden station break.

So first let me begin by dispelling a rumor. I was not picked for this job because I regard myself as the fastest draw on the New Frontier. Second, let me start a rumor. Like you, I have carefully read President Kennedy's messages about the regulatory agencies, conflict of interest, and the dangers of ex parte contacts. And, of course, we at the Federal Communications Commission will do our part. Indeed, I may even suggest that we change the name of the FCC to The Seven Untouchables.

It may also come as a surprise to some of you, but I want you to know that you have my admiration and my respect. Yours is a most honorable profession. Anyone who is in the broadcasting business has a tough row to hoe. You earn your bread by using public property. When you work in broadcasting you volunteer for public service, public pressure, and public regulation. You must compete with other attractions and other investments, and the only way you can do it is to prove to us every three years that you should have been in business in the first place.

I can think of easier ways to make a living.

But I cannot think of more satisfying ways.

I admire your courage -- but that doesn't mean that I would make life any easier for you. Your license lets you use the public's airwaves as trustees for 180 million Americans. The public is your beneficiary. If you want to stay on as trustees, you must deliver a decent return to the public -- not only to your stockholders. So, as a representative of the public, your health and your product are among my chief concerns.

Now as to your health, let's talk only of television today. 1960 gross broadcast revenues of the television industry were over 1,268,000,000 dollars. Profit before taxes was 243,900,000 dollars, an average return on revenue of 19.2 per cent. Compare these with 1959, when gross broadcast revenues were 1,163,900,000 dollars, and profit before taxes was 222,300,000, an average return on revenue of 19.1 per cent. So the percentage increase of total revenues from '59 to '60 was 9 per cent, and the percentage increase of profit was 9.7 per cent. This, despite a recession throughout the country. For your investors, the price has indeed been right.

So I have confidence in your health, but not in your product. It is with this and much more in mind that I come before you today.

One editorialist in the trade press wrote that "the FCC of the New Frontier is going to be one of the toughest FCC's in the history of broadcast regulation." If he meant that we intend to enforce the law in the public interest, let me make it perfectly clear that he is right: We do. If he meant that we intend to muzzle or censor broadcasting, he is dead wrong. It wouldn't surprise me if some of you had expected me to come here today and say to you in effect, "Clean up your own house or the government will do it for you." Well, in a limited sense, you would be right because I've just said it.

But I want to say to you as earnestly as I can that it is not in that spirit that I come before you today, nor is it in that spirit that I intend to serve the FCC. I am in Washington to help broadcasting, not to harm it; to strengthen it, not weaken it; to reward it, not to punish it; to encourage it, not threaten it; and to stimulate it, not censor it. Above all, I am here to uphold and protect the public interest.

Now what do we mean by "the public interest?" Some say the public interest is merely what interests the public. I disagree. And so does your distinguished president, Governor Collins. In a recent speech -- and of course as I also told you yesterday -- In a recent speech he said,

Broadcasting to serve the public interest, must have a soul and a conscience, a burning desire to excel, as well as to sell; the urge to build the character, citizenship, and intellectual stature of people, as well as to expand the gross national product. ...By no means do I imply that broadcasters disregard the public interest. ...But a much better job can be done, and should be done.

I could not agree more with Governor Collins. And I would add that in today's world, with chaos in Laos and the Congo aflame, with Communist tyranny on our Caribbean doorstep, relentless pressures on our Atlantic alliance, with social and economic problems at home of the gravest nature, yes, and with the technological knowledge that makes it possible, as our President has said, not only to destroy our world but to destroy poverty around the world -- in a time of peril and opportunity, the old complacent, unbalanced fare of action-adventure and situation comedies is simply not good enough.

Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world.

Ours has been called the jet age, the atomic age, the space age. It is also, I submit, the television age. And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today's world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind's benefit, so will history decide whether today's broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or to debase them.

If I seem today to address myself chiefly to the problems of television, I don't want any of you radio broadcasters to think that we've gone to sleep at your switch. We haven't. We still listen. But in recent years most of the controversies and cross-currents in broadcast programming have swirled around television. And so my subject today is the television industry and the public interest.

Like everybody, I wear more than one hat. I am the chairman of the FCC. But I am also a television viewer and the husband and father of other television viewers. I have seen a great many television programs that seemed to me eminently worthwhile and I am not talking about the much bemoaned good old days of "Playhouse 90" and "Studio One."

I'm talking about this past season. Some were wonderfully entertaining, such as "The Fabulous Fifties," "The Fred Astaire Show," and "The Bing Crosby Special"; some were dramatic and moving, such as Conrad's "Victory" and "Twilight Zone"; some were marvelously informative, such as "The Nation's Future," "CBS Reports," "The Valiant Years." I could list many more -- programs that I am sure everyone here felt enriched his own life and that of his family. When television is good, nothing -- not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers -- nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials -- many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

Is there one person in this room who claims that broadcasting can't do better? Well a glance at next season's proposed programming can give us little heart. Of 73 and 1/2 hours of prime evening time, the networks have tentatively scheduled 59 hours of categories of action-adventure, situation comedy, variety, quiz, and movies. Is there one network president in this room who claims he can't do better? Well, is there at least one network president who believes that the other networks can do better? Gentlemen, your trust accounting with your beneficiaries is long overdue. Never have so few owed so much to so many.

Why is so much of television so bad? I've heard many answers: demands of your advertisers; competition for ever higher ratings; the need always to attract a mass audience; the high cost of television programs; the insatiable appetite for programming material. These are some of the reasons. Unquestionably, these are tough problems not susceptible to easy answers. But I am not convinced that you have tried hard enough to solve them.

I do not accept the idea that the present over-all programming is aimed accurately at the public taste. The ratings tell us only that some people have their television sets turned on and of that number, so many are tuned to one channel and so many to another. They don't tell us what the public might watch if they were offered half-a-dozen additional choices. A rating, at best, is an indication of how many people saw what you gave them. Unfortunately, it does not reveal the depth of the penetration, or the intensity of reaction, and it never reveals what the acceptance would have been if what you gave them had been better -- if all the forces of art and creativity and daring and imagination had been unleashed. I believe in the people's good sense and good taste, and I am not convinced that the people's taste is as low as some of you assume.

My concern with the rating services is not with their accuracy. Perhaps they are accurate. I really don't know. What, then, is wrong with the ratings? It's not been their accuracy -- it's been their use.

Certainly, I hope you will agree that ratings should have little influence where children are concerned. The best estimates indicate that during the hours of 5 to 6 P.M. sixty per cent of your audience is composed of children under twelve. And most young children today, believe it or not, spend as much time watching television as they do in the schoolroom. I repeat -- let that sink in, ladies and gentlemen -- most young children today spend as much time watching television as they do in the schoolroom. It used to be said that there were three great influences on a child: home, school, and church. Today, there is a fourth great influence, and you ladies and gentlemen in this room control it.

If parents, teachers, and ministers conducted their responsibilities by following the ratings, children would have a steady diet of ice cream, school holidays, and no Sunday school. What about your responsibilities? Is there no room on television to teach, to inform, to uplift, to stretch, to enlarge the capacities of our children? Is there no room for programs deepening their understanding of children in other lands? Is there no room for a children's news show explaining something to them about the world at their level of understanding? Is there no room for reading the great literature of the past, for teaching them the great traditions of freedom? There are some fine children's shows, but they are drowned out in the massive doses of cartoons, violence, and more violence. Must these be your trademarks? Search your consciences and see if you cannot offer more to your young beneficiaries whose future you guide so many hours each and every day.

Now what about adult programming and ratings? You know, newspaper publishers take popularity ratings too. And the answers are pretty clear: It is almost always the comics, followed by advice to the lovelorn columns. But, ladies and gentlemen, the news is still on the front page of all newspapers; the editorials are not replaced by more comics; and the newspapers have not become one long collection of advice to the lovelorn. Yet newspapers do not even need a license from the government to be in business; they do not use public property. But in television, where your responsibilities as public trustees are so plain, the moment that the ratings indicate that westerns are popular there are new imitations of westerns on the air faster than the old coaxial cable could take us from Hollywood to New York. Broadcasting cannot continue to live by the numbers. Ratings ought to be the slave of the broadcaster, not his master. And you and I both know -- You and I both know that the rating services themselves would agree.

Let me make clear that what I am talking about is balance. I believe that the public interest is made up of many interests. There are many people in this great country and you must serve all of us. You will get no argument from me if you say that, given a choice between a western and a symphony, more people will watch the western. I like westerns too, but a steady diet for the whole country is obviously not in the public interest. We all know that people would more often prefer to be entertained than stimulated or informed. But your obligations are not satisfied if you look only to popularity as a test of what to broadcast. You are not only in show business; you are free to communicate ideas as well as relaxation.

And as Governor Collins said to you yesterday when he encouraged you to editorialize -- as you know the FCC has now encouraged editorializing for years. We want you to do this; we want you to editorialize, take positions. We only ask that you do it in a fair and a responsible manner. Those stations that have editorialized have demonstrated to you that the FCC will always encourage a fair and responsible clash of opinion.

You must provide a wider range of choices, more diversity, more alternatives. It is not enough to cater to the nation's whims; you must also serve the nation's needs. And I would add this: that if some of you persist in a relentless search for the highest rating and the lowest common denominator, you may very well lose your audience. Because, to paraphrase a great American who was recently my law partner, the people are wise, wiser than some of the broadcasters -- and politicians -- think.

As you may have gathered, I would like to see television improved. But how is this to be brought about? By voluntary action by the broadcasters themselves? By direct government intervention? Or how?

Let me address myself now to my role not as a viewer but as chairman of the FCC. I could not if I would, chart for you this afternoon in detail all of the actions I contemplate. Instead, I want to make clear some of the fundamental principles which guide me.

First: the people own the air. And they own it as much in prime evening time as they do at six o'clock Sunday morning. For every hour that the people give you -- you owe them something. And I intend to see that your debt is paid with service.

Second: I think it would be foolish and wasteful for us to continue any worn-out wrangle over the problems of payola, rigged quiz shows, and other mistakes of the past. There are laws on the books which we will enforce. But there is no chip on my shoulder. We live together in perilous, uncertain times; we face together staggering problems; and we must not waste much time now by rehashing the clichés of past controversy. To quarrel over the past is to lose the future.

Third: I believe in the free enterprise system. I want to -- I want to see broadcasting improved, and I want you to do the job. I am proud to champion your cause. It is not rare for American businessmen to serve a public trust. Yours is a special trust because it is imposed by law.

Fourth: I will do all I can to help educational television. There are still not enough educational stations, and major centers of the country still lack usable educational channels. If there were a limited number of printing presses in this country, you may be sure that a fair proportion of them would be put to educational use. Educational television has an enormous contribution to make to the future, and I intend to give it a hand along the way. If there is not a nation-wide educational television system in this country, it will not be the fault of the FCC.

Fifth: I am unalterably opposed to governmental censorship. There will be no suppression of programming which does not meet with bureaucratic tastes. Censorship strikes at the tap root of our free society.

Sixth: I did not come to Washington to idly observe the squandering of the public's airwaves. The squandering of our airwaves is no less important than the lavish waste of any precious natural resource. I intend to take the job of chairman of the FCC very seriously. I happen to believe in the gravity of my own particular sector of the New Frontier. There will be times perhaps when you will consider that I take myself or my job too seriously. Frankly, I don't care if you do. For I am convinced that either one takes this job seriously -- or one can be seriously taken.

Now how will these principles be applied? Clearly at the heart of the FCC's authority lies its power to license, to renew or fail to renew, or to revoke a license. As you know, when your license comes up for renewal, your performance is compared with your promises. I understand that many people feel that in the past licenses were often renewed pro forma. I say to you now: renewal will not be pro forma in the future. There is nothing permanent or sacred about a broadcast license.

But simply matching promises and performance is not enough. I intend to do more. I intend to find out whether the people care. I intend to find out whether the community which each broadcaster serves believes he has been serving the public interest. When a renewal is set down for a hearing, I intend, whenever possible, to hold a well-advertised public hearing, right in the community you have promised to serve. I want the people who own the air and the homes that television enters to tell you and the FCC what's been going on. I want the people -- if they're truly interested in the service you give them -- to make notes, document cases, tell us the facts. And for those few of you who really believe that the public interest is merely what interests the public, I hope that these hearings will arouse no little interest.

The FCC has a fine reserve of monitors -- almost 180 million Americans gathered around 56 million sets. If you want those monitors to be your friends at court, it's up to you.

Now some of you may say, "Yes, but I still do not know where the line is between a grant of a renewal and the hearing you just spoke of." My answer is: Why should you want to know how close you can come to the edge of the cliff? What the Commission asks of you is to make a conscientious, good-faith effort to serve the public interest. Everyone of you serves a community in which the people would benefit by educational, and religious, instructive and other public service programming. Every one of you serves an area which has local needs -- as to local elections, controversial issues, local news, local talent. Make a serious, genuine effort to put on that programming. And when you do, you will not be playing brinkmanship with the public interest.

Now what I've been saying applies to the broadcast stations. Now a station break for the networks -- and will last even longer than 40 seconds: You networks know your importance in this great industry. Today, more than one half of all hours of television station programming comes from the networks; in prime time, this rises to more than three fourths of the available hours.

You know that the FCC has been studying network operations for some time. I intend to press this to a speedy conclusion with useful results. I can tell you right now, however, that I am deeply concerned with concentration of power in the hands of the networks. As a result, too many local stations have foregone any efforts at local programming, with little use of live talent and local service. Too many local stations operate with one hand on the network switch and the other on a projector loaded with old movies. We want the individual stations to be free to meet their legal responsibilities to serve their communities.

I join Governor Collins in his views so well expressed to the advertisers who use the public air. And I urge the networks to join him and undertake a very special mission on behalf of this industry. You can tell your advertisers, "This is the high quality we are going to serve -- take it or other people will. If you think you can find a better place to move automobiles, cigarettes, and soap, then go ahead and try." Tell your sponsors to be less concerned with costs per thousand and more concerned with understanding per millions. And remind your stockholders that an investment in broadcasting is buying a share in public responsibility. The networks can start this industry on the road to freedom from the dictatorship of numbers.

But there is more to the problem than network influences on stations or advertiser influences on networks. I know the problems networks face in trying to clear some of their best programs -- the informational programs that exemplify public service. They are your finest hours, whether sustaining or commercial, whether regularly scheduled or special. These are the signs that broadcasting knows the way to leadership. They make the public's trust in you a wise choice.

They should be seen. As you know, we are readying for use new forms by which broadcast stations will report their programming to the Commission. You probably also know that special attention will be paid in these forms to reports of public service programming. I believe that stations taking network service should also be required to report the extent of the local clearance of network public service programs, and when they fail to clear them, they should explain why. If it is to put on some outstanding local program, this is one reason. But if it is simply to run an old movie, that's an entirely different matter. And the Commission should consider such clearance reports carefully when making up its mind about the licensee's over-all programming.

We intend to move -- and as you know, and as I want to say publicly, the FCC was rapidly moving in other new areas before the new Administration arrived in Washington. And I want to pay my public respects to my very able predecessor, Fred Ford, and to my colleagues on the Commission, each of whom has welcomed me to the FCC with warmth and cooperation.

We have approved an experiment with pay TV, and in New York we are testing the potential of UHF broadcasting. Either or both of these may revolutionize television. Only a foolish prophet would venture to guess the direction they will take, and their effect. But we intend that they shall be explored fully, for they are part of broadcasting's New Frontier. The questions surrounding pay TV are largely economic. The questions surrounding UHF are largely technological. We are going to give the infant -- the infant pay TV a chance to prove whether it can offer a useful service; we are going to protect it from those who would strangle it in its crib.

As for UHF, I'm sure you know about our test in the canyons of New York City. We will take every possible positive step to break through the allocations barrier into UHF. We will put this sleeping giant to use and in the years ahead we may have twice as many channels operating in cities where now there are only two or three. We may have a half dozen networks instead of three.

I have told you that I believe in the free enterprise system. I believe that most of television's problems stem from lack of competition. This is the importance of UHF to me: with more channels on the air, we will be able to provide every community with enough stations to offer service to all parts of the public. Programs with a mass market appeal required by mass product advertisers certainly will still be available. But other stations will recognize the need to appeal to more limited markets and to special tastes. In this way, we can all have a much wider range of programs. Television should thrive on this competition, and the country should benefit from alternative sources of service to the public. And, Governor Collins, I hope the NAB will benefit from many new members.

Another and perhaps the most important frontier: Television will rapidly join the parade into space. International television will be with us soon. No one knows how long it will be until a broadcast from a studio in New York will be viewed in India as well as in Indiana, will be seen in the Congo as it is seen in Chicago. But as surely as we are meeting here today, that day will come; and once again our world will shrink.

What will the people of other countries think of us when they see our western bad men and good men punching each other in the jaw in between the shooting? What will the Latin American or African child learn of America from this great communications industry? We cannot permit television in its present form to be our voice overseas.

There is your challenge to leadership. You must reexamine some fundamentals of your industry. You must open your minds and open your hearts to the limitless horizons of tomorrow. I can suggest some words that should serve to guide you:

Television and all who participate in it are jointly accountable to the American public for respect for the special needs of children, for community responsibility, for the advancement of education and culture, for the acceptability of the program materials chosen, for decency and decorum in production, and for propriety in advertising. This responsibility cannot be discharged by any given group of programs, but can be discharged only through the highest standards of respect for the American home, applied to every moment of every program presented by television.

Program materials should enlarge the horizons of the viewer, provide him with wholesome entertainment, afford helpful stimulation, and remind him of the responsibilities which the citizen has towards his society.

Now those are not my words. They are yours. They are taken literally, verbatim, from your own Television Code. They reflect the leadership and aspirations of your own great industry. I urge you to respect them as I do. And I urge you to respect the intelligent and farsighted leadership of Governor LeRoy Collins, and to make this meeting a creative act. I urge you at this meeting and, after you leave, back home, at your stations and your networks, to strive ceaselessly to improve your product and to better serve your viewers, the American people.

I hope that we at the FCC will not allow ourselves to become so bogged down in the mountain of papers, hearings, memoranda, orders, and the daily routine that we close our eyes to this wider view of the public interest. And I hope that you broadcasters will not permit yourselves to become so absorbed in the daily chase for ratings, sales, and profits that you lose this wider view. Now more than ever before in broadcasting's history the times demand the best of all of us.

We need imagination in programming, not sterility; creativity, not imitation; experimentation, not conformity; excellence, not mediocrity. Television is filled with creative, imaginative people. You must strive to set them free.

Television in its young life has had many hours of greatness -- its "Victory at Sea," its Army-McCarthy hearings, its "Peter Pan," its "Kraft Theaters," its "See It Now," its "Project 20," the World Series, its political conventions and campaigns, and the Great Debates. And it's had its endless hours of mediocrity and its moments of public disgrace. There are estimates today that the average viewer spends about 200 minutes daily with television, while the average reader spends 38 minutes with magazines, 40 minutes with newspapers. Television has grown faster than a teenager, and now it is time to grow up.

What you gentlemen broadcast through the people's air affects the people's taste, their knowledge, their opinions, their understanding of themselves and of their world -- and their future.

Just think for a moment of the impact of broadcasting in the past few days. Yesterday was one of the great days of my life. Last week the President asked me to ride over with him when he came to speak here at the NAB. And when I went to the White House he said, "Do you think it would be a good idea to take Commander Shepard?" And, of course, I said it would be magnificent. And I was privileged to ride here yesterday in a car with the President and the Vice President, Commander and Mrs. Shepard. This was an unexpected, unscheduled stop. And Commander Shepard said to me, "Where are we going?" "What is this group?" And I said, "This is the National Association of Broadcasters at its annual convention."

This is the group, this is the industry that made it possible for millions of Americans to share with you that great moment in history; that his gallant flight was witnessed by millions of anxious Americans who saw in it an intimacy which they could achieve through no other medium, in no other way. It was one of your finest hours. The depth of broadcasting's contribution to public understanding of that event cannot be measured. And it thrilled me -- as a representative of the government that deals with this industry -- to say to Commander Shepard the group that he was about to see.

I say to you ladies and gentlemen -- I remind you what the President said in his stirring inaugural. He said: Ask not what America can do for you; ask what you can do for America.¹ I say to you ladies and gentlemen: Ask not what broadcasting can do for you; ask what you can do for broadcasting. And ask what broadcasting can do for America.

I urge you, I urge you to put the people's airwaves to the service of the people and the cause of freedom. You must help prepare a generation for great decisions. You must help a great nation fulfill its future.

Do this! I pledge you our help.

Thank you.

John Doyle: 'The news had degenerated into watching people wank at a snuff film', Andrew Olle lecture - 2005

John Doyle's state of the Australian media address from 2005.

7 October, 2005, Andrew Olle lecture, Sydney, Australia

It was during the bombing of Baghdad that I reeled in shock, awe and disbelief when I saw Fox news coverage. Two immaculately dressed presenters were genuinely excited by the pictures they were seeing. One of them shouted 'I want to see the Moab! [The mother of all bombs.] Bring on the Moab!' And I thought it's come to this. The news had degenerated into watching people wank at a snuff film. They were the new type of journalists. The fact is, rarely has there been a more important time for truth in journalism.

I should begin by putting my journalistic credentials on the table - I have none. As a radio presenter I once managed to conduct quite a long interview with John Howard who was then a shadow minister in the Downer shadow cabinet, and covered a lot of ground without extracting any indication one way or the other that a leadership challenge was on.

Whichever corner I tried to box him into, he deftly changed from a solid to a gas, only to reappear as a solid on another part of the canvas, with me clumsily smoting the air. Within a few days he was Opposition leader, within twelve months, Prime Minister and, on paper, the most successful one in living memory. As a television presenter I had quite a productive if unfocussed interview with the then Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer in which we extensively canvassed his future and the future of the National Party. Within an hour of finishing the interview he announced his resignation and retirement. It's clear that while we were talking he knew what he was going to do, but all I could wheedle out of him was that it was 'steady as she goes'. Again a no-contest. In short, I've been thrashed by both champions and plodders. And the boxing metaphor is apt. The media is charged with aggression. Newspapers battle newspapers, radio stations spit at each other and the Television networks hate each other's guts. And journalists joust with politicians and journalists claw at each other, and politicians even on the same side of the street do likewise. It's a cold, cold-hearted world out there. Look at the way Mark Latham treated his Labor family. Look at the way the Liberal family treated John Brogden. To state a truism politicians and journalists need each other, feed each other and form marriages of convenience. I remember working with a high profile journalist on a commercial network a few years ago who stated that his ambition was to work as Peter Costello's press secretary when he assumes the Prime Ministership. His newspaper column has been nothing but full of praise for the Treasurer ever since.

As a means of preparation for tonight, I had another look at some really engaging lectures delivered on previous occasions in this forum by some pretty heavy hitters in the industry and there have been some outstanding insights into the media. Kerry Stokes talked of the need for different voices, different perspectives and diversity of opinion and how vital this was for the health of the media and therefore the health of democracy itself. I notice that this year has seen Seven's Today Tonight and Nine's A Current Affair put to air the same story at the same time on the same night. As nearly as I can tell the programs are the same: same old foot in the same old door philosophy, same mock outrage at feuding neighbours and total dependence on losers, or sad losers, or violent losers, or losers ripped off by shonky gold tooth rat type losers. They now make the ABC's brilliant 90's farce Frontline look less like parody and more like reality television. Both current affairs shows depict a world where it's not only not safe for anyone to leave their home, it's not safe to live. And the commercial news services are carbon copies of each other as well. If one uses a blue background, the other will follow. If one uses a cityscape as a backdrop, the other will follow. Testament to the superficial nature of news as news is seen in whatever happened to Jim Whaley. Jim had been groomed to follow Brian Henderson - the former host of Bandstand, but it began to go wobbly when people started to watch Nine's Ian Ross over on Seven instead. It was decided Jim might have been scaring the viewers a bit, so they began moving the camera back making Jim appear smaller and therefore seemingly less scary. But then Jim was disappearing altogether and by that stage it was all too late. Enter Mark Ferguson a bloke who looks about nineteen, who is then marketed as the man with the experience. Unlike Jim apparently, who has, to my knowledge, been seen in the flack jacket more times than any bloke ever to read a bulletin. So forget diversity of opinion - it's out there on the margins. If you really want diversity go to the ABC or SBS.

Then I watched Jana Wendt's excellent address where she spoke candidly about the immense difficulties of providing popular quality journalism on any commercial network. And she was right. But in the end you can take the girl out of Mary Magdalene's world for a time, but it's very hard to take the Mary Magdalene out of the girl completely. And then we had Jana usher Sam Chisholm into the Logies Hall of Fame and suddenly Sam's back at Nine, and while middle management now have to call him Mr. Chisholm and wear suits, Ray had to lose the suit and loosen the tie in promoting A Current Affair. It was to give people the impression Ray had been at it all day at the coal face tracking down the spivs, the plastic surgeons and the weight loss miracles.

The fact is, as Lachlan Murdoch pointed out in his address here, the media is a business, and if going low sells, then let's mine really low. Lachlan's remarkable thesis seemed to be that elite opinion is to be avoided at all cost. What is preferred is opinion that fuels nationalism. And profits made serve to improve the systems of delivery of information to consumers - colour printing and the like. What is overlooked is that, in the end, delivery and delivery systems are meaningless. Content is all that matters. Rubbish is still rubbish be it on an old 21inch black and white HMV or in high definition through the digital set top box. The Beatles and the Stones sounded great through the crystal set attached to the iron frame of my bed as a ten year old. As for elites: well it's best to encourage worship at the feet of sporting elites, for those who dabble in elite thought may well come to conclusions that are at odds with the prevailing wisdom within the culture of the organization. And while on the one hand the Murdoch organization bleats on about its abhorrence of political correctness and the need to enshrine freedom of speech and opinion, on the other, when dealing with China, is quite sanguine about removing the BBC channel from its Star service because the opinions expressed might upset the burghers of Beijing.

But to give it its due News Limited is digging its heels in regarding Freedom Of Information laws. And is supportive of two journalists who are under threat of gaol for not revealing their sources over a leaked government document. Maybe the time has come for a bill of rights.

I think Jana is right, Lachlan is wrong and Kerry seems to be living in a parallel universe.

I come to this forum as a consumer of media and as someone who's been fortunate enough to sit a little on the inside and observe aspects of how it appears to work. At my first real job at the Small Arms Factory in Lithgow I bought the Daily Mirror every afternoon on my way home. I used to savour the football and cricket think pieces from the likes of Phil Tressider and Ian Heads and Geoff Prenter and they brought me up to speed with the notion of cliché. At the time I had no idea that this would be my career-making preparation allowing me to express moments of life in terms of a traditional softening-up period, forwards stamping their authority on the match, players having either good hands or quick hands or both, being able to sell a dummy or sell a dump or both, being able to bundle people into touch with either a grass cutter or ball and all tackle while second rowers hunted in packs or made busts up the middle or the hard yards before creating something out of nothing and being able to score from anywhere on the paddock while you could throw a blanket over the defence. Players could have the ball on a string in a moment of individual brilliance or weave their magic in a desperate bid requiring courage and commitment in the trenches in a game played in two halves where both teams were a credit to themselves with one player being an ornament to humanity in a match where the game was the ultimate winner. In thirty five years about the only new contributions are American ones: this rookie stepping up to the plate, could end up a hall of famer at this level. Yet despite the tightly spin doctored homogenized responses of sports stars and commentators there is still the odd surprise. Ray Warren suggesting at one stage that the ball popped up like a plume of molten lava or Benny Elias on SBS saying it's like comparing apples and apples, you just can't do it.

I've always loved radio. Mornings was Gary O'Callaghan and Sammy Sparrow until pop meant the 2SM Good Guys introduced the songs that would become the diary of adolescence. Many years later, what's changed? Talkback. That's all. Commercial radio now: AM. Bandwagon talkback, water cooler drivel as talkback thought starters, competitions, finance and weather, quizzes, traffic, more talkback, then an inflammatory lunatic with talkback. FM. Whacky clubs or Crews, old music or a balance of old music with unthreatening new, competitions, requests, racy talkback with swearing and repetition. All programs are substantially written by the daily newspapers. Breakfast and Mornings used to have a deal - Breakfast got the stories on the odd pages and Mornings got the ones on the even pages. The quirky stories are good for the Crews - often they are survey - based stories. Four out of every ten Swedes prefer briefs to boxers. 'Come on guys, what do you prefer? Give us a call.' 'G'day Brian, love your show. I wear briefs, mate.' The Crew might ask blokes who freebag to phone in. One of the Crew will have an insight. 'I always freebag in my trackies'. 'You're wearing your trackies now'. 'Bloody hell!' - much hilarity and that becomes a promo sound bite for the next month. And don't be scared to use the Melbourne chuckle. That's when everything is so funny you can hardly speak for laughter.

Sadly I've only caught John Burgess on radio once: the grab I heard was 'and we're coming up to the bottom of the hour, so let's just ease our way through with a little Anne Murray.' Perfect.

Least forgivable is the program that begins with 'Why don't you just give me a call and tell me what's on your mind'. It's dead air space with a host.

As are TV shows like The Up Late Game Show on Ten which may be telling us what TV will be like down the track when the digital revolution gives us thousands of channels - all with nothing on them.

For some reason or other as an immediate response when first approached to speak at this occasion I wrote down the word Symmetry. This is the tenth Andrew Olle lecture. Like many I can remember where I was and what I was up to when the shockingly sad news arrived. I last saw Andrew in the canteen at Gore Hill at lunchtime on a Thursday. We chatted in the sandwich queue. Not long before he'd worked on a Four Corners special entitled 'What's wrong with the Liberal Party?' a program that ended with Andrew angrily railing at the panel of John Howard, Robert Hill and John Moore for being in denial. I talked about work, his work, and he wanted to talk about anything but work. He looked and was exhausted. He was doing mornings on 702 and The 7:30 Report at night. He had every reason to be exhausted.

Andrew was very generous to me when we were working at the same station. He always offered story ideas, wry observations and encouragement. I did afternoons and it was the only time of day apart from midnight to dawn when nobody seemed to give a bugger about what you did. There was no minute by minute scrutiny that Breakfast in particular has to endure. One of the traps with radio is that it caresses the ego in the most dangerous manner imaginable. The first skill to leave is the ability to listen - when someone else is speaking you are automatically forming your next thought. The long-term affect must be a specific type of narcissistic madness. The trade is in part about finding a performance mask that can be slipped on and can evenly disguise days of euphoria or despair. Andrew was helped on radio because we knew what he looked like. He had a natural elegance and an interesting mask that really exposed itself on television: he had a look of almost permanent skepticism brought about by the asymmetry of his face. Science tells us we are attracted to symmetry. Symmetry equals beauty equals biological success so the argument goes. Yet there was Andrew, a sort of walking proof that the exception can also be true.

I'd see him annually at the NSW Tennis Open at White City. Here he presented as a sort of 'what ho' Bertie Wooster type with attractive slacks and lemon sweater casually draped across the shoulder with the picnic basket in the boot of the Audi parked on the lawn courtside. Yet in the background was this tearaway kiddie from Queensland who'd terrorized neighbourhoods and missed out on gaol by the skin of his teeth. His mask of performance had obliterated this part of his life completely as nearly as I could tell. But I never had a night on the tiles with Andrew and I suspect a few good reds might have allowed a different spiritual genie out of the bottle. As is the case with many journalists.

Journalists like a drink. Often to excess - it's an occupational health hazard. Robert Haupt became a regular commentator on my show. He had tremendous style. And a mission to find truth. But there were days when Haupty would have had a long lunch. And then it was different. A rosy warm smile can make for difficult radio. Then he learnt Russian and went to Russia as a correspondent because he thought that's where it was going to happen. And he was right. Many a time at awards do's I've gaped in awe as highly respected journos have slammed yet another one back and bayed at the moon, or thrown a glass in anger, or picked a fight. At the Walkeley's, fistfights are part of the card. I suspect drink in the journalist's culture might have something to do with massive overexposure to the darker side of human nature.

I've always enjoyed reasoned commentators. I loved the sturdy assuredness of Paul Murphy and now Mark Colvin. I lean forward when I hear Catherine McGrath or Fran Kelly in attack mode. I love Kerry O'Brien getting angry. I pull up a chair for any Chris Masters or Sally Neighbour Four Corners special. I flick the page to the Paul McGeough article. It's the mixture of gravitas and style. As a family in the late fifties we used to sit around the lounge room at night letting Arch McKirdy guide us through Benny Golson or Oscar Peterson or Charlie Parker. A cigarette company sponsored him. It might have been Ardath. And with voice alone he fashioned the smoky atmosphere of a New York Jazz Club. His live commercials for Ardath had him ignoring the copy and the ad would sometimes be reduced to a pause, followed by the sound of a match being struck and an ecstatic draw. And that was the ad. Arch always struck a warm yet authoritative tone. He was a master of the medium having the easy confidence of one who has made the time, the moment, his own and he knew his subject and somehow gave the impression of having left the ego behind. John Cleary has a similarly elegant style. Andrew also, despite his particular asymmetry, had reasoned objective balance. Which leads us to Opinion. Suddenly the world is awash with Opinion. Sadly more Arch Tambakis than Arch McKirdy. Newspapers too, are full of it. Any half-baked dickhead who can string a few sentences together is given a go, particularly if the opinion is inflammatory or somehow ratchets up the climate of fear or loathing - simply and obviously because it sells more newspapers.

When I had a regular radio show I was constantly astounded by the easy access to some of the great minds of our time. It seemed to me that radio had such portability and potential that there was no excuse just to throw the lines open. I had an American physicist called George Smoot on once. He helped discover cosmic background radiation - the echo of the Big Bang, the microwave image of which was given the title 'The face of god'. We pick it up as snow on our television screens. And he was talking about String Theorists whose Maths had rewound the tape of time to escape this universe and seriously postulate that the Big Bang was caused by a collision of two other universes in a cataclysmic event. He said the Maths was pretty good. I thought fair enough. Certainly the idea of other universes seemed redolent with possibility.

Then I spoke with another American physicist, Robert Kirshner who shrugged and said that in the end, a mathematical formula must have Elegance to have truth and to his mind, String Theory still lacked elegance. And I've wondered in wonder about Elegance in this context ever since. To me the doctrinally unencumbered search for the big picture answers of where we came from, where we're going and how we might survive as a species are far more interesting, intriguing and satisfying and more revealing of truth than Faith based examinations that eschew proof and lessen us as humans. While the echoes of the Big Bang provide the clues, the echoes of the Age Of Enlightenment remind us that we are but the stuff of stars.

I remember reading some years ago about the series Dallas being beamed in to the New Guinea highlands. It was being viewed by mountain tribal people who were just a generation removed from First Contact, people who'd had little or no connection with European society at all apart from the odd Christian missionary. Tim Flannery recalls seeing a burial service in the highlands whereby the deceased was picked up and swung over the grave with the family and onlookers solemnly chanting the incantation 'In the name of the Father and of the Son and into the hole he goes'. What were they to make of Dallas? A highly camp styled vacuous rich oil family living the life of Reilly in a bed-hopping fun-filled soap operatic adventure, laced with stylized irony. Probably the highlanders saw it differently - a lifestyle that was heaven on Earth. Irresistible. Vast houses, huge cars, heated pools, money, booze, guns and loose women. And no morality to speak of. Ancient and modern cultural universes brushing against each other. Again a cataclysmic event.

The truth is that in the belly of any society there's a violent brutal core that exposes itself when the thin veneer of culture is stripped away. The recent Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico partially revealed the feral world that snuggles so closely within the first world. And there are web sites that explain that the shape of the hurricane was that of a womb and that while ever the US continues to allow abortion, God will rein such punishments down. Without doubt there are other web sites that suggest the shape is that of a bum hole and is a warning against the legalization of gay marriage. And others suggesting this is simply Gaia attacking the oil industry. The fact is New Orleans has been known to be a disaster waiting to happen for decades. Being in denial about global warming is to court disaster. And Tokyo is a disaster waiting to happen - the earthquake is already 250,000 years overdue.

Welcome to the age of infinite Information. Small cataclysmic events are happening all the time at the speed of light. The Internet allows anyone anywhere to access information that might be true, might be false, but you can find whatever information you need to prosecute any argument you want. Conspiracy theories abound. History can be written any way you wish. In the past, information bound culture. There was a shared sense of a gradually expanding library of sensible and responsible scholarship whereas now information is serving more to fracture culture. The future of information is with bloggers. And who knows what the blogging implications might be of a generation aching for the steely coldness of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and other games involving cyber murder, cyber torture and on line sex and anonymous chat rooms and bomb-making instructions and clubs dedicated to nihilism and terrorism and all manner of misguided madnesses designed to accelerate Rapture.

The genie of limitless spin and unlimited market power has been unleashed. The result is to squeeze the commercial lemon shamelessly with a never-ending stream of services offered that come with the tacit irresistible message of the promise of the good life. And somehow people spending 150% of what they earn makes for a robust economy. And then there's the promise of globalization which has still done little for the Asian sweatshop worker being paid fifty cents an hour to build the shoes for the golfer who is being paid fifty million a year to wear. Never before have we been aware of just how obscene has become the remuneration amongst our top company executives. Five to ten million a year seems to be unexceptional - whether successful or not. And nobody bats an eyelid. We're becoming a nation of acquisitors: special interest, real estate and the stock market.

Changi and Marking Time were written as companion pieces examining the Australian Character - the sweet and sour journey towards the hardening of its heart. It's fitting that we are now exporting our homegrown Aussie version of Christianity to Europe that comes with the powerful message that Jesus wants us all to be millionaires. Paul Keating commented almost as an afterthought that without Reconciliation, we're just here for the view. Speaking of which, it's amazing to think that Reconciliation was so recently a part of mainstream public debate. Mention Reconciliation now and there's a generation of Australians who haven't the least idea of what you are talking about. If it doesn't affect the economy, it's not on the radar. The economy is everywhere. Paul Keating made it pop. He was so successful at it that Peter Costello has modelled his parliamentary performance mask entirely on Paul Keating's: he is walking proof that imitation is the highest form of flattery.

God almighty. The economy.

It's assumed that everyone is now a shareholder, everyone has a portfolio - many with those T2 shares just sitting there as a reminder of how close to gambling the stock market really is. But it's a source of celebrities. There's always someone from Comsec bobbing up in an audition piece on Channel Ten's news, or Karen Tso on Nine or Alan Kohler on the ABC. And when it's budget time, Bill Evans or Saul Eslake. They are as predictable as Phil Koperburg appearing when the temperature reaches 34 degrees in summer. Then there's Koshie who bears all the hallmarks of one having loomed out of the dismal science.

Religion too, has again become a source of celebrity. Archbishop George Pell is probably at the top of the tree with the Jentzens jockeying for position now Peter Carnley has exited stage left, and the Rev. Doctor Gordon Moyes has almost become invisible. But bobbing up on the inside is Sheik alHilali who came out of nowhere during the Doug Wood incident. Well almost out of nowhere. There was an incident involving an unregistered vehicle and an unlicensed driver and some plumbing supplies that were protruding precariously from one of the windows. I don't know what the upshot was. But the Mufti and Kaiser Trad have become Australia's Islamic odd couple. And if they seem a little like rabbits caught in the spotlight or appear to be treading on eggshells with their speech, bear in mind how difficult it is for anyone in the Muslim community to put their heads up in 21st century Australia. And the media doesn't help when it depicts quite falsely Australian youths of Arabic background supposedly claiming an unwillingness to ever integrate. Mercifully some media does attempt to reveal truth and if it wasn't for the excellent work done by Lateline this year with the ABC Investigations Unit, I doubt whether the Rau or Sarlon cases would have appeared at all on the radar. Let alone the exposing of what has been described as an overarching cultural problem within DIMEA. And I think it's fair to say that in days gone by under our Westminster system, any Minister who oversaw such a rancid cultural climate within a department would have been expected without question, as a minimum requirement, to fall on his or her sword.

It's not always so great for a society when God turns up. Reason is often the first thing jettisoned. Evolution is back on the agenda in the United States - which means here as well. Creationists want what they are calling Intelligent Design incorporated into the curriculum and it's meant to be treated seriously. But it doesn't surprise me. Battles won in the past are having to be won again. And as long as within the media elite opinion is reviled, untested populist positions will prevail. I can only imagine what the cost was of the burning of Constantine's great Library in Alexandria: so much knowledge of Astronomy and Maths and all manner of literature, history and art: universal truths that had to lie dormant until rediscovered by another purple patch of human intellectual endeavour. The sadness of today is that the truths are still with us, sitting side by side with uninformed nonsense. Do we need to revisit through individual work contracts the factory life of Dickens for collective bargaining to grow again? And while ever the media allows truth to be bended, more old battles are going to have to be re-won. Humans are not related to chimps. Astrology has answers. There is no connection between Iraq and the increase in terrorism. The earth is flat. The holocaust never happened. To be born in poverty is your own fault. A society is safer when human rights are compromised. There is no such thing as greenhouse gases. Certain races are not as intelligent as others.

And now there's Terrorism. Will it become common, a sort of angry graffiti?

It's complicated. The same political figures who today kiss the hem of Nelson Mandela in a time not so long ago were happy to see him rot forever on Robben Island. Saddam Hussein was the friend of the West, and armed by the West in the war against Iran. Somalia and now Zimbabwe can go to hell in a hand basket because their lack of resources has no affect on the West. And there's the overarching issue of sustainability. To imagine that everyone on the planet can aspire to the lifestyle of JR Ewing at the cost of the global environment and the resources of other nations is to live in a fool's paradise. Arm poverty and ignorance with moral rectitude and hang onto your hats. We live in interesting times.

If commercial radio is so slight because it is under resourced, so too is Television. And if more channels are allowed then the resources will be even further stretched. As it is the ABC has been cut to the marrow and can no longer afford to do much Drama, and commercial networks have decided Drama is too flakey and expensive. Meanwhile our very fine drama schools are pumping out scores of new young actors each year and there is nothing for them to do. The lucky ones might get to appear in a Holden advertisement or survive for a season in the Bell Shakespeare Company. So our local content is reduced to game shows, dancing shows, lifestyle shows and talent quests all creaking under the weight of diminishing returns. Think of something mindless, rope in a couple of celebrities and there's your show.

Big Brother is such a waste of an opportunity. The housemates live in a state of perpetual boredom, unless they're pissed. Why not engage them. A house of really smart gifted young people from various fields: scientists, engineers, mathematicians, builders, a Latin scholar, a poet etc and they have a problem to solve. With a shared incentive of a few million dollars they have to find a solution to Australia's water problems in ten weeks - there's a show.

To get on my hobbyhorse for a moment. Because historically the ABC has been the powerhouse for new ideas that are often taken up by the commercial networks, perhaps the time has come for those networks to subsidize the ABC. After all, the ABC has been the training and testing ground for the commercial networks for fifty years - it's about time the situation was redressed. What I would propose is a tax deductible levy on pre-tax network profit of around 25% to 30% that is pooled exclusively for ABC Drama. In return, the networks get second viewing rights and the right to franchise any series on a rotating basis that is deemed commercially viable. The fact is, it is only the ABC by virtue of being unencumbered by what is popular, that is capable of taking risks. Why is there such a paucity of great locally made drama? Because the ABC isn't doing it. The Americans would hate such a plan and see it as not being in the spirit of the Free Trade Agreement, but so what? This isn't cheese or rice we're talking about. It actually is Culture. A fully funded ABC Drama unit would be to the advantage of the commercial networks. The ABC could become Australia's HBO.

So, what has changed in the ten years since Andrew left us? A conservative Labor government has been replaced by a conservative Coalition government, and the organization he worked for, the ABC, has had to steer through some pretty treacherous waters. ABC News and Current Affairs has somehow survived the Shier era and the petty ideologically driven hounding by former Minister for Communications Richard Alston. The ABC still provides the best news services in the country and arguably services that could be described as being among the best in the world. Radio National is still impossibly excellent. ABC TV has too, somehow managed to survive with its current affairs programs intact, loathed by Labor and Coalition alike, as it should be. And as it should be, it still strives to put forward an alternative view. So that when the commercial media is dictated to by myopic intrusive ownership and ill-informed populism, is forced through thoughtless need to make irresponsible programs that lack both style and substance, caresses inflammatory and cheap, nasty demagoguery that seeks to marginalize the already marginalized, that describes the world in simple terms, provides simple solutions to complex problems and is purely a servant to fiscal outcomes, then the ABC will always seem to aggravate, annoy and frustrate and it's precisely when the ABC is doing this that it is serving its charter. It's preserving its sceptical asymmetrical mask.

Andrew missed out on seeing the events of September Eleven, a blunt cleaver that questioned Western certainty. One of the pilots of the first American Airlines plane to smash into the World Trade Centre was Mohammed Atta. He spent his last hours on this earth in Las Vegas roaming amongst the gambling dens and strip clubs theoretically to further steel his resolve such was his loathing of the excesses of the West. The quest for our media is to ask why it happened and why it's continuing to happen, to understand the motivations of those who are willing to end their lives at a young age on the altar of sectarian anger. To join the dots between that state of mind and the mindset of those in the New Guinea highlands cutting down their pristine forests to feed the generators that provide the power for the television to screen Buffy, or The OC or Joe Millionaire or if they're on line, to power the modem to any cyber freak show the mouse takes them. If this examination isn't exacting and truthful and without fear or favour, then this universe's accidental experiment with self-awareness and consciousness may well have been a total waste of time.

John Doyle appeared on episode 30 of the Speakola podcast to talk about this speech