Media Tarts

by Julia Baird

  Seventh, ‘Try, in the midst of it all, to be yourself.’ This I still agree with. Especially when ‘it all’ involves spin, obfuscation, policy paralysis and outright lies.

  Eighth, I somehow felt compelled to tell women not to ‘assume that female journalists will be more sympathetic because you’re a woman’. This largely came from the myth that arose in the 1990s, during scandals centreing on Ros Kelly and Carmen Lawrence, that young female journalists ‘carved them up’ with greater vigour than the men. The examples I gave were as follows:

  When I asked the former Australian Financial Review political editor, Tony Walker, if he would advise an up-and-coming woman MP differently to a man, he answered: ‘Yes. Bear in mind whatever misty-eyed notions you might have about the sisterhood, female reporters won’t necessarily cut you slack when the chips are down simply because you are a woman. In fact, possibly less so than males because of the disappointment factor . . . that somehow you’ll be seen to have let down the side.’ But press gallery veteran Michelle Grattan dismissed the assertion that women go harder on fallen women as ‘a bit of a cliché’ and an instance of stereotyping of female journalists.11

  Today, any suggestion female journalists would ‘go softer’ on any woman in the public eye has long gone. But what is obvious is that when it comes to sexual assault, bullying, harassment and the intimidation of women in political cultures in Australia, it is women who have broken the stories, and pursued them most vigorously: Samantha Maiden, Lisa Wilkinson, Katharine Murphy, Amy Remeikis, Louise Milligan, Laura Tingle, Leigh Sales, Karen Middleton and more. Their forensic work was cast as ‘angry coverage that often strayed into unapologetic activism . . . from a new, female media leadership’ in the Australian Financial Review, the AFR’s senior correspondent typically reverting to the idea that women’s work comes from emotion — even hysteria — and not diligence and competence.

  As Katharine Murphy retorted in the Guardian: ‘Investigating allegations of rape and sexual harassment in a sustained way, requiring people to be accountable for how they manage their own workplaces, isn’t activism. It’s public interest journalism by any working definition.’ Nor is it a female concern, but a human one. As to the suggestion this is a new clutch of women raging up to the ramparts, Murphy wrote: ‘I have worked on this beat since 1996. I’ve covered eight prime ministers. I arrive early and I leave late.’

  Lisa Wilkinson was blunt on Twitter: ‘Welcome to the new world order, boys.’

  Ninth — and here is a fraught one — ‘Beware the gender card.’ The gender card is a term used to dismiss women who speak up about sexist treatment. It is also used to silence those who witness, and document, sexist treatment, by implying that by recognising bias, observers will be immediately blinded to any other context, contributors or reasons a woman might be under attack. In the 1990s and 2000s, it was a potent way to ensure political women stayed quiet about discrimination, for fear of recrimination. In 2004, I wrote:

  Former Labor MP Ros Kelly is one who fell foul of the gender card debate. As a federal minister in the 1990s, Kelly, who was a close ally of Labor prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, constantly faced allegations of tokenism and political window-dressing. She was also derided for her ambition. In 1992, evidence emerged to confirm the suspicions of cynical onlookers. The ‘sports rorts affair’ emerged after she was exposed as having engaged in $30 million of pork barrelling with sports grants when she was minister for the environment, sport and territories. In 1992, an officer at the Australian National Audit Office was told by the Finance Department that there was something wrong with the way the sports grants were being administered. In 1993, the auditor-general, John Taylor, sought details of the grants appraisal processes, but was told by Kelly that there was little or no documentation. She told him it was up to her ‘as minister to make the final decision on which projects are funded’. The ANAO report found the money allocated in those grants was obviously skewed: the average grant to a Labor seat was $257,000, compared to $141,000 to a Coalition seat. The auditor-general refused to rule out political bias in the way the grants had been allocated. He told the House of Representatives committee investigating the scheme that fraud ‘was more likely to have occurred than not’.

  Kelly was pilloried by the opposition. Any suggestion by her Labor colleagues that the ferocity of the criticism was to do with her gender was scoffed at. Mike Seccombe called it a kind of ‘victim feminism’ which implied journalists should go easier on women. Joan Kirner was one of those who defended Kelly, arguing there was a tougher standard for women, and that Kelly had been pursued more viciously by opponents and the media because she was ‘an attractive blonde woman’. Journalist Geoff Kitney slammed this argument as ‘both wrong and dangerous . . . What it implicitly argues for is a lesser standard for women because they are women.’ Kelly had failed to meet a minimum standard of ministerial accountability, and was being punished for political ineptitude, not her gender.12

  But can gender play a part in the way attacks are carried out, and in the weight given to mistakes made? Christine Wallace was one of the few who came to Kelly’s defence, writing in the Australian Financial Review that Kelly’s limitations were ‘all out of proportion to the background sniping, bitching and badmouthing she has attracted during her 14 years as a federal MP’.

  Senior gallery journalist Michelle Grattan told Susan Mitchell:

  Most women journalists are feminist and so are most thinking women, so women like Kelly and Bishop are up against it if they’re not prepared to take that on. My view is that Kelly is no better and no worse than a lot of politicians. She was over-promoted, there’s no doubt about that. [But] I have to admit that I was genuinely surprised that the sports rort affair ran as hard as it did.13

  Margo Kingston, who covered the sports rorts issues intently when she was at the Canberra Times, under the editorship of Michelle Grattan, said the idea that Kelly was hounded because she was a woman was ‘crap’:

  She made a decision not on need but [on] re-electing Labor in marginal seats, with public money meant for real people in real need. But the real need in many cases is in safe Labor seats where people are shit poor and have no supporting facilities. They are spitting on their own people . . . I thought she behaved abominably and I was incensed that she was refusing to be accountable and was just sweeping the questions under the carpet . . . I went down and introduced myself when she became minister. She patted me on the knee, offered me coffee but I couldn’t make any sense of her in terms of policy. I just walked out and said I don’t want to talk to her again, she’s not interesting, there’s nothing there. But I certainly didn’t look at her and think she is blonde therefore she is dumb.

  Not all would agree. Ramsey, for one, saw her as ruthless, ambitious, and with ‘a lot of political ability’. He added, though: ‘She’s got this lovely coquettish style, particularly when dealing with men in politics.’14

  Kelly felt more vulnerable because, she believed, people thought she was stupid. She still claims her looks detracted from her credibility: ‘being good-looking and dressing the way that I like to dress — a bit outlandish and stylish . . . That’s just the way I am and then that was a problem in being taken seriously.’15

  Kelly told me feminists were generally hostile to her, but said she was still surprised by the vitriol she saw in stories by female journalists. She and Kingston never liked each other and never connected, she said, probably because Kingston was a lesbian and she was ‘normal, an ordinary mum with two kids’.

  *

  It is difficult to talk about gender when your behaviour is under scrutiny because ensuing media debate usually reduces it to simplistic terms which make feminists seem one-eyed and perennially naive. If women are in any way analytical about what is happening to them in public commentary or in the parliament, it often is interpreted as an attempt to avoid blame. It is reasonable to walk into a debate where there are a number of factors at play and wonder how men would be treated
for the same behaviour. Playing the victim is one thing; being treated differently is another.

  There were, then, different approaches to talking about discrimination. The first was Vanstone’s, which advocates roughing it out. The second was Joan Kirner’s. In her time as premier, Joan Kirner was treated poorly by the media: her weight was exaggerated and mocked, she was caricatured as a flustered housewife wearing a large spotted dress, and she battled to gain credibility as the leader of a state in serious financial trouble. She identified that the way she was being portrayed was a political, not a personal problem and fought back in a very public way, articulating what she was doing very clearly and garnering support for it. ABC journalist Fran Kelly said she was a ‘huge fan’ of Kirner as a politician: ‘There was nothing cloying, selfrighteous about her, she was tough and fought the boys at their own game. She never asked for anything special because she was a woman but pointed out what was problematic in terms of gender within the political system.’

  While she was in a somewhat privileged position as premier, Kirner’s success demonstrated a way ahead. That after decades of discrimination against women in powerful positions, the protests of the women themselves — and many journalists — had led to a recognition that sexism frequently colours reporting on powerful women, and leads to a flawed interpretation of events.

  There had been many changes in the press since women like ‘Housewife MP’ Joan Child first posed next to her Hills hoist, and the ‘kissable’ Kathy Sullivan, stubbed out her cigars and walked into Canberra’s Parliament House. Female journalists entered their profession at a far more rapid rate than the female politicians they reported on. Women formed about 12 per cent of the journalistic workforce in 1960 (compared to 25 per cent of the total workforce), when it stabilised for years.16 There was a substantial influx of women in the 1970s and 1980s, but this was usually into junior positions. A study carried out in 1984 found that the Courier-Mail, the Sunday Mail, the Telegraph, and the Sun all employed roughly four times more men than women, and there was a total absence of women in the highest positions.17 Photojournalism also remained stubbornly male dominated for decades. A survey of regional metropolitan daily newspaper photographers in 1992 found 91.5 per cent of respondents were male, and 8.5 per cent female.18 (More recently, a 2014 Women in Media Whitepaper found that while the media reporting workforce was roughly evenly split between women and men, in print and broadcast, women journalists were only named or acknowledged as journalists of 30.8 per cent of media coverage. Three out of every four political reporters were male.)

  It was not until 1993 that a woman edited a major daily metropolitan newspaper in Australia — Michelle Grattan, for the Canberra Times — although she was only in that position for two years. The lack of women editors has undoubtedly influenced the reporting of news stories in Australia. Others have followed her lead, but in many places the higher echelons of media groups remain stubbornly male. It was only in 2020, for example that the Australian appointed its first female editor in its then 65-year history — Michelle Gunn.

  Over the last three decades, there has also been a transformation in the nature of political reporting, and a growth in the size of the press gallery. In the early 1930s, there were six or seven in the permanent press gallery corps in Canberra, and by 1951 it was approximately 30. The number crept to 50 in the late 1960s. By September 2003, the prime minister’s press gallery list had 270 people on it, including mainstream reporters in print, radio and TV, Rehame and Capital Monitor, as well as reception and administrative staff. (According to the Parliamentary Education Office, there are still about 250 people in the press gallery in 2021.) Over this period, journalists became more competitive, and more independent of the government.

  As the ranks of the press gallery journalists grew, the circulation of newspapers dropped substantially, relative to the post-war growth in the urban population. The proportion of people reading a newspaper dropped from 84 per cent to 73 per cent between 1966 and 1978. In 1987, the combined circulation of all major daily metropolitan and national newspapers was over 3.5 million, and 71 per cent of the population read a newspaper regularly. By 1990, it was three million and by 1994 it had dropped to 2.4 million. The number of newspapers shrank following changes to the cross-media ownership laws in 1987, with 14 major newspapers closing between 1987 and 1992. (In 1987 News Limited, owned by Rupert Murdoch, took over the Herald and Weekly Times newspapers. This meant there were then two major groups who owned most of the newspapers in Australia: John Fairfax Limited and News Limited.) While in 1988 there were 16 national and capital dailies, there were 11 in 1995. The concentration of media gave more power to those who remained.

  *

  Sometimes, through the refracted lens of the press, we are schizophrenic about our politicians — do we want them to be human, or superhuman? In an increasingly sophisticated political environment, there are plenty of contradictions about acceptable ways to behave. Some women break through conventions of behaviour and are affectionately regarded for doing so, while others are castigated for being flippant or shallow, for not conforming to the way men do politics. There is no simple formula.

  And context is crucial. If Stott Despoja squeezed into tight leather pants and sang ‘I Love Rock and Roll’ for a television show, she would have been roundly condemned for trivialising herself with such a stunt. The older, earthier Kirner made a triumph out of something that would make other politicians appear media hungry or just silly. Perhaps it’s also a question of the balance of coverage. Or even what your politics are. Pauline Hanson was certainly herself when she entered politics, unfettered by inhibitions of political behaviour or rhetoric, and untutored in how to handle the media. But hostility to her intolerant right-wing views coloured the response to her: instead of being praised for her lack of pretence and unaffected speech, she was lampooned and pilloried, and probably satirised more than any other politician that decade. She was made grotesque, subhuman, demonic. Just as she broke through a few rigid patterns of political behaviour, while reporting on her, the press broke a few of their own.

  POSTLUDE

  Pauline Hanson: ‘a man’s woman’

  Don’t overlook or deny the most obvious thing about Pauline Hanson. In the eyes of many, she is an attractive, sexually alluring woman. This is not an explanation of her popularity — but it is the doorway of instinctive appeal through which her message enters . . . About Hanson there hangs the potent scent of late-blooming sensuality.1

  — journalist Nicolas Rothwell

  When feminists advocate the election of more women to parliament, we can be sure they don’t have women like Pauline Hanson in mind . . . it is men who comprise the majority of her candidates — and it is men who fall at her feet and sweep her up into their virile arms. Make no mistake, Pauline Hanson is a man’s woman.2

  — historian Marilyn Lake

  On 6 November 2003, Pauline Hanson walked out of Brisbane Women’s Prison to face a panting media throng. She was thin, vulnerable and clearly shaken by the 11 weeks she’d spent in a high-security wing of the prison. Into her words, usually spiked with censorious and intolerant tones, came a note of compassion. After saying she wanted to hug her children and father, she said:

  PH: The message that I’d like to say is — I got caught up in the system that I saw fail me and I just, I am so concerned now for the other women behind the bars here — and men — that have also seen the system fail them and that’s my biggest concern. And I — my love and wishes to the girls that I’ve shared the last 11 weeks with and I’d like to say a big thank you to the prison staff who’ve done an excellent job and I would like to send an extra special thank you to Alan Jones and to Bronwyn Bishop for their support and not giving up on me, especially the people of Australia.

  Journalist: Did you get a hard time in jail?

  PH: The system let me down like it’s let a lot of people down. And there are other girls in there that the system has let down. And it’s only because of mon
ey, power and position that stops them from getting their freedom.

  At this moment, the martyrdom of the incendiary redhead who’d dragged the entire country to the right — particularly on border security and immigration — was complete. The public flocked to support the woman who had taken on the major political parties, sparked a phenomenally successful movement, been emulated by conservatives and vilified by progressives, until she was convicted of electoral fraud and landed in jail. She had waited for almost three months before the Court of Appeal overturned her conviction. As Cosima Marriner wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that weekend, she had been elevated ‘from a politically controversial figure to a modern-day martyr — Australia’s Joan of Arc, complete with red tresses’. In a significant shift, she was no longer viewed as the victim of the media and ‘elites’, but of the ‘system’, political and legal, which had conspired to put her into a jail cell. The fact that she had registered the party with a list of 500 supporters, while there were only three official members — some called it a clumsy attempt to maintain control of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation political party, others called it a $500,000 fraud — was largely glossed over. (The Court of Appeal held that the supporters believed they had become members, and therefore the application was valid.)

  She was out. The pundits licked their lips, the political analysts scratched their heads, the fingers of the pollsters clicked against the abacus of public opinion. Hanson’s appeal had always been her status as a ‘non-politician’. She did not talk like them, look like them, or act like them. She flouted codes of behaviour, conventions of dress, and stumbled over big words. The major parties, long afflicted with the curse of narcissus in selecting candidates that looked like themselves, repeating generations of pale men equipped with the rhetoric of political compromise, were stumped. And feminists — who historically have found it far easier, or been far readier, to defend women on the Left — were uncomfortable as the import of her right-wing and racist policies was swamped by the apotheosis of the Woman Who Defied the System. As one reader, Harry Heidelberg, wrote to Margo Kingston’s web diary on smh.com.au: ‘I am spellbound. She’s a gutsy woman and I’m sorry — I can’t help but like her. Also, she’s HONEST . . . In a time when we have never been more oppressed by the system, doesn’t she still have some resonance? She once said she was the mother of the nation. Mothers teach. Maybe she can educate us given the extraordinary trip she’s been on. I want to hear more. It’s not about ‘we are in danger of being swamped by Asians’ or ‘please explain’ or ‘Easytax’ or all the rest of it. She’s a mirror and it’s a journey.’