The Age today has once again slandered firefighters, with reckless disregard for the mental health crisis and rock-bottom morale firefighters have recently reported as the result of repeated media bullying.
The front-page splash of today’s edition announces that a ‘damning secret report has lifted the lid on the culture of bullying and harassment in the CFA.’ The story begins with a front page splash, adorned by images of flames, and continues for a double-page spread, accompanied by a photograph of firefighting apparel. A spray of puerile ideological punditry labelled ‘analysis’ completes the coverage.
It turns out that the ‘secret report’ exposed by this story relates to a survey of non-operational CFA staff. These people are not firefighters. They do not work at fire stations. They work in offices that are not colocated with fire stations and rarely have any contact with station-level firefighters.
Would the average reader realise that? Hell no.
The average reader would assume an article about CFA staff is talking about firefighters. That false assumption was encouraged — deliberately, I strongly suspect — by various cues. The images of flames and of firefighters’ uniforms strongly imply that the allegations relate to firefighters. The opening sentence speaks in misleading terms of a singular CFA culture, one the reader will no doubt assume to be grounded in the attitudes of the most visible part of the CFA workforce: its firefighters. Further leading the reader to that false conclusion is the prominent pre-existing false media narrative of firefighters as misogynist thugs.
The article does not at any point act to explicitly pre-empt the false assumption that its subject is firefighters. The first hint for the alert reader comes three-quarters of the way down page 6, where it is mentioned that the report pertains to ‘professional, technical and administrative staff’. What does this mean? Professionals — that would be the paid firefighters, right, as distinct from the volunteers? A reasonable but incorrect assumption. It refers to white-collar office workers. The only concession to factual accuracy on this front at all is a label on an info-graphic that says the report pertains to “non-operational CFA staff”.
What percentage of readers would pick that up? I’d say it was in the single digits, and furthermore I’d say the the people responsible for this story would prefer it was zero.
(Edit, 18/7/17: I have just noticed that the online headline and image are even more blatantly misleading. The headline clearly conflates the survey’s limited cohort with women across the CFA, from entirely different work settings and cultures. And the image leaves no room for doubt in the reader’s mind: this story must be about bullying among operational firefighters! For a once-respected media entity to engage in such openly misleading practices is quite shocking.)
This story is reckless and irresponsible. It comes just a few weeks after over 1000 professional firefighters made submissions to a parliamentary inquiry into the state government’s proposed fire service reforms. A large proportion of those submissions spoke of the mental distress that is widespread among professional firefighters and their families as a result of a relentless bullying campaign perpetrated by politicians and the media. As I will discuss in a forthcoming article, many firefighters complained of experiencing severe psychological stress for which they have had to seek external assistance. A number submitters employed language that arouses serious concerns about their immediate safety. A few went further, and attribute partial blame for firefighter suicides to the toxic dispute and the media’s role in it.
For these journalists to feign concern about suicide by writing a story that seriously risks provoking suicide makes me sick. Sick and angry. Extremely angry.
Both the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission and the United Firefighters Union have recognised the threat to firefighter wellbeing posed by today’s recklessly slanderous article. Both have sent out mass emails advising firefighters of mental health support services and suicide crisis hotlines.
This is not the first time The Age has employed this kind of bait-and-switch technique to slander career firefighters. The Age has been on-board the campaign to vilify firefighters as misogynist brutes ever since Jane Garrett initiated it in 2015, and in March 2016 published an article that misconstrued reports of gendered bullying in CFA volunteer brigades as applicable to its career firefighting workforce.
Why would The Age deliberately falsely vilify firefighters? No-one deserves to be publicly vilified on false grounds, and that includes men and women who devote their careers to helping the public. It is particularly disturbing when the victims of this vilification are already known to be in the grips of a mental health crisis created by past episodes of vilification.
The publication of this story coincides with the resumption of Parliament. Was the story a gift to the opposition, for use in its campaign to vilify firefighters for political gain? I will read Hansard tomorrow with interest.
Or was The Age’s reckless and irresponsible story motivated by baser concerns? Is a struggling outlet looking to generate clicks with sensationalism? Did it judge — regardless of the human consequences — that the story would hit harder if they could falsely tie it to an existing false narrative: the firefighters-as-misogynist-thugs trope?
(Note added August 11th 2018: After publishing this article, I was alerted to the fact that The Age’s story was published at a time that votes were being taken in Labor’s preselection for the upper house seat of Western Metropolitan:
Among the candidates was Jane Garrett. Like the Liberals, since 2016 Garrett has been positioned as the heroic protector of the public against the marauding evil firefighters. I can only speculate as to why the story was written, but the an infuriating possibility occurs to me: it may well have been deliberately designed to defame professional firefighters for the furtherment of Jane Garrett’s political career.)
Either way, it’s despicable. This story will almost certainly push another cohort of fragile firefighters over the precipice of mental crisis, with potentially tragic results.
Enough is enough. Journalists are not a protected species. It is time for some leadership. This bullying campaign should be called out for what it is, and the perpetrators brought to justice.
Readers experiencing distress in response to this matter are urged to seek support. The following list of contacts is excerpted from today’s UFU bulletin.
SUPPORT SERVICES AVAILABLE
As previously notified, there are dedicated support services available including support services for MFB and CFA members, external support services available to everyone, and the additionally the UFU Welfare Officer.
MFB and CFA
Both the MFB and the CFA have support services which members are encouraged to access. The contact details are as follows:
• For MFB personnel there is 24-hour access to a dedicated counselling service with psychologists by calling 1800 451 138 or 1300 366 789. If you call this service you can have immediate access to a psychologist via telephone or alternatively make an appointment. This service is also available for family members.
• Additionally, for MFB personnel there is an extensive peer support programme where a clinician can be accessed by calling 9665 4405 or 0407 665 174 or the Peer Coordinator on 0417 538 289 or 9665 4516.
• CFA members can access Critical Incident Stress Peer Support by calling either the CFA Chaplain Service on 1800 337 068 or the CFA Member Assistance Program 1300 795 711. [Corrected from previous version]
We encourage you to use the above services provided by the MFB and CFA, but if you feel uncomfortable in doing so there are external support services which all can access.
Services available to all:
On the beyondblue website https://www.beyondblue.org.au/ the following support services are listed that are external to the CFA and MFB and that are available to all.
The website has comprehensive information that deals with a range of mental health awareness and the support and help that is available.
The numbers for these services are as follows:
• Lifeline 13 11 14
• Suicide Call Back Services 1300 659 467
• beyondblue Support Service 1300 22 4636
