Whitewash!
Last year’s Whitehaven Coal hoax created quite the stir. But was it merely the tip of an insidious journalistic iceberg threatening news reporting today?
HE pressed send, and waited for the phone to ring. It did, and he answered: his name was Toby Kent, and the information they had received was genuine.
It seems that is all anti-coal activist, Jonathan Moylan, needed to do to cause a 9 per cent drop in Whitehaven Coal’s share price in January of 2013, shaving hundreds of millions of dollars off the company’s market value.
He didn’t hold any press conferences or collude with any other organisation. But his email, imprinted with his personal number under the name of an actual ANZ employee, reached 295 journalists. Within hours the fake press release — which claimed that ANZ had withdrawn $1.2 billion in funding from Whitehaven’s mine project — had been republished by several mainstream news organisations, including the Australian Financial Review and the Australian Associated Press. The damage was done. Moylan’s mission was successful.
But it wasn’t long before the story was revealed as a hoax by ANZ and Whitehaven, at which point the share price rebounded, and Moylan was promptly arrested. His trial concluded in July this year.
The incident obviously gave the media lots to talk about, with over 600 articles in Australian print and online publications mentioning Moylan’s name since January last year. Much of this space was allocated to the trial and its outcomes. Ink was also spilled over the impacts of the hoax on Whitehaven Coal, its shareholders, and the integrity of the share market. Some even took to outlining Moylan’s motives, ideology and supporters.
Yet the role of the news outlets in broadcasting and perpetuating the story appears to have been given a more modest treatment. When media responsibility was mentioned the discussion often appeared towards the end of articles (after most readers have moved on), and the tone was largely redemptive, echoing the judge’s rejection of Moylan’s claim that journalists were to blame for the share price plunge. Headlines certainly avoided the issue.
When the actions of the journalists in question were occasionally scrutinised, others were quick to point out that they themselves would not have made the same mistake. Fingers were pointed, the culprits were identified.
And so, with this apparent blip of media mis-judgement behind us, can we be assured that good old-fashioned journalism—that is, carefully researched and free of external manipulation—has returned?
Churnalism — the elephant in the press room
The now infamous hoax should have sounded alarm bells about a concerning, and largely hidden undercurrent emerging in mainstream news reporting. It is known as “churnalism”: the uncritical acceptance of press releases and other PR material, which is published (sometimes almost word-for-word) as news.
Chances are you have been unknowingly reading press releases masquerading as news every day.
Despite the shock and surprise that blew across the pages during Moylan’s media storm, this journalistic practice is more common than you may think.
A number of studies have found that between 40 and 75% of media content, including in leading Australian newspapers, is influenced by some sort of public relations activity. In other words, journalists rely heavily on pre-packaged content from PR and marketing agencies as inspiration for, and increasingly as a direct “copy-and-paste” source of news. Chances are that you have been unknowingly reading press releases masquerading as news every day.
In 2008, the Australian Press Council voiced its concerns about this trend in its State of the News report. In the report, communications and PR analyst Dr Alana Mann explains that, while targeted press material can be genuinely useful for journalists, the sheer volume of PR emails and phone calls received by news desks today makes the task of sorting the meaningful from the irrelevant, and fact from fiction, an increasingly difficult one.
To add to this challenge, falling print media sales over the past two decades in Australia have resulted in substantial corporate restructures, cutbacks to newsroom resources and reductions in editorial staff—more than 1,000 journalists lost their jobs between 2009 and 2012. And in May 2014, Fairfax Media announced a further round of redundancies, which the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance attacked as an “assault on quality journalism.”
Even with the best of intentions, journalists’ hands are, to some extent, tied by these industry constraints; not to mention the disincentives they face against time-intensive investigative rigor when competing with lightning-fast online content, the pressures of the 24/7 news cycle, and the vested interests of advertisers.
As Mann laments, “the issue of reliance on PR sources is a
symptom of a much greater problem – the challenge posed to newspaper quality by the focus on profits.”
So while Moylan’s stunt may have unintentionally highlighted the need for better journalism standards (even if it wasn't acknowledged openly by the media itself), the path to achieving this may prove a little more thorny.
