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REVIEW: THE TELECARD AFFAIR: DIARY OF A MEDIA LYNCHING
WHORES OF BABBLE-ON
By R.J. Stove
News Weekly
The Telecard Affair follows the same format as its author’s The Media of the Republic (saluted by John Young in News Weekly on February 13, 1999) That is, it faithfully chronicles tabloid rant on a day-to-day basis, this time concerning not the Princess of Wales’ obsequies, but Peter Reith’s downfall in October-November 2000. Gerard Charles writes, what is more, from a standpoint of a genuine intellectual: one whose deep philosophical expertise ensures that mass-circulation sloganeering tortures him as much as graffiti tortures a serious art-connoisseur.
Even by Australian standards of public morality, the Telecard affair represented something new. Not only did Reith’s continued survival as a future prime minister menace so many vested interests that he had to go; his family had to be made an equally conspicuous laughing stock.
Pre-Telecard, an unwritten law held that while leaders’ own indiscretions were fair game, their families were off-limits. (Remember the public outrage when Ian Sinclair sniped at Dallas Hayden’s expense?) In the brave new post-Telecard world, this pettifogging distinction no longer operates. Why anyone neither homicidally arrogant nor psychotically masochistic would condemn family members to the lynch-mob by seeking political office in a post-Telecard climate is not clear. Might as well lynch the family members oneself and have done with it.
Among the Federal Government’s unofficial triumvirate from 1996, only Reith possessed the discernible backbone. Reckless he might sometimes be; mendacious he is not.
Of that sub-Clintonesque linguistic bravado by which Howard enriched English prose with the concepts ‘core promises’ and ‘non-core promises’, Reith is incapable.
Howard’s mind – in Lloyd George’s phrase – ‘always bears the impress of the last man who sat on him’. Not so Reith’s.
For years Reith has dared to believe in things, and to expound a coherent world-view behind such beliefs. To be, in short, ‘a conviction politician’. On that account alone he was marked down well before the waterfront did its worst. By dragging maritime unionists into…well, let’s be optimistic and say the 15th century, he aggravated his offensiveness, but by no means caused it.
From hectic films and plays of the ‘Front Page’ type we often, erroneously, conclude that sordid journos revel in their sordor. Charles reveals a different picture: one of journos, incredibly but indubitably, deluding themselves that they inhabit the moral high ground. We are asked to accept that Providence has endowed tabloid hacks with an omniscience that the Directorate of Public Prosecutions’ mere fumbling amateurs could never hope to attain.
Even basically civilised spirits, the Michelle Gilchrists and Malcolm Farrs, stand convicted in Charles’ pages of the same attitudinal vices that – much more predictably – abound far lower down the food-chain: in, for example, the babble of the Australian’s George Megalogenis, perhaps best known for gloating (April 24, 2001) over Eminem’s distinctive chivalric code.
Sometimes, reading Charles’ eloquent attacks upon Murdoch media pundits, I feared the consequences of using his own formidable sledgehammer to crack these intellectually modest nuts.
I wasn’t altogether convinced by The Media of the Republic’s eagerness to cite Hume’s, Kant’s and William of Ockham’s fallacies as causing agents for Paul Kelly’s drivelling; nor am I fully persuaded that pointing out Journos’ slatternly pseudo-logic will give them a taste for true logic. Cannibals, by definition, are impervious to vegetarianism’s charms. In any case, we can take heart from demographics: five years hence Internet developments and further print-media collapses will have made Laurie Oakes and Co. even less relevant to serious mental activity than they are now.
A regrettable shortcoming in Charles’ assessment is the absence of a control group, by which to judge the Murdoch’s stables antics.
Did The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age behave any better in the Telecard Affair? If so, how and why? And what of overseas comparison? Surely tabloid terrorism, far from being a Murdoch invention, was inescapable in the media empires of tyrants like William Randolph (‘You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war) Hearst? Does not the extreme rarity of such media lynchings in Continental Europe indicate the worth of European privacy laws, as against the mindless Anglophone First Amendment-ism? And so on.
A whole new book could be usefully devoted to such questions. Gerard Charles would be a good man to write it.
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