The role of the media in uncovering corruption

Speaker:
Quentin Dempster
Journalist, ABC Television

Facilitator:
Helen Couper (Director, Integrity Services, CMC)

Panel discussion:
Quentin Dempster (Journalist, ABC)
Linton Besser (Journalist, Sydney Morning Herald)
Leanne Hardyman (Media Adviser, CMC)
Nicole Thomas (Manager, Communications and Media, ICAC)
Professor Julianne Schultz (Professor, Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Griffith University)

 

Abstract:
There’s an old joke in Australia that politicians never call inquiries into anything unless they know the result beforehand. But two judicial inquiries provoked by the media were set up by politicians through very unusual circumstances and exploded pre-existing public apathy. This did not fit the cynically accepted pattern.

What I want to examine is the prelude to both the Fitzgerald and Wood royal commissions in Queensland and New South Wales to look at the political and media climate which prevailed at the time.

In the process I hope to show how the media has worked and can work in the future to uncover corruption.

Evan Whitton, the great pattern journalist of Australia, has coined the term ‘the Cameron effect’, a theory on the formation of public opinion.

Who knows what forms public opinion? James Cameron was a journalist on the London News Chronicle.

He observed that many people read the sports pages and almost nothing else. The Cameron effect holds that public opinion can be formed in a way similar to a physics experiment in a laboratory where a space is bombarded with particles (in the media’s case, with facts) until a critical mass is reached. At this point the bombardment of just one more particle, one more fact, is all that it takes to cause an explosion.

The Cameron effect was apparent in the circumstances leading to both the Fitzgerald and Wood royal commissions after decades of strident political denial of the existence of widespread police corruption.

In Australia the politicians, of all parties, have largely and privately held the media in contempt. Media can be deeply superficial, inconsistent, hypocritical, easily diverted and often sensational. There has been much to be contemptuous about.

But for all that, the media contributed, however artlessly, to the Cameron effect and its eventual cathartic change to police and political culture. As a consequence public consciousness about corruption has been raised as never before. Honest police, whistleblowers and officials making public interest disclosures are no longer totally isolated. Journalists, lawyers and public officials have formed valuable and informal alliances on occasions to stiffen the backs of the politicians.

Even though it does not have search warrant, subpoena or coercive powers, the media has an invaluable and continuing role to play in uncovering corruption.