EXCLUSIVE: Media Watch and me - The incredible untold story
Joe Hildebrand
Daily Telegraph
Tuesday, September 18, 2012 (6:25pm)
There is an argument that responding to Twitter trolls just gives unnecessary attention to vindictive people with a tiny audience. The same could be said of responding to Media Watch but in the interests of editorial consistency let’s give it a go anyway.
Media Watch has an agenda against the Telegraph. One of many humourless ironies about the program is that it is guilty of the same editorial bias it constantly accuses others of having.
That much is fine: It can think whatever it wants. The problem is that Media Watch presents itself as an impartial arbiter of journalistic standards and some naive and sequestered people in the community—such as my mum and the Gillard Government—actually believe it.
The reason I know Media Watch distorts facts in order to pursue a particular vendetta is because for a long time they pursued one against me. I don’t say this to fish for any sympathy, but just to give some context to the show’s latest canning of the Tele on Monday night.
Joe is not the only one who has troubles with Media Watch 2GB's Ray Hadley alluded to this encounter with this pampered pooches and their banshees
My love affair with Media Watch began in 2007 when a ``researcher’’ called asking for a contact number for a family in a story I’d written. The yarn rapped Fairfax over the knuckles for running ads that praised a cult leader accused of child sex abuse. I happily handed over the number only to discover that when Media Watch ran the story it did so as though it had discovered the outrage itself and did not credit the Telegraph article that prompted it, let alone the paper’s assistance.
I wrote to them saying I thought this deeply unfair and they responded with words to the effect that it was not their job to report on the media every time it got things right.
The following year Media Watch attempted to score points off the deaths of six people in a Sydney Harbour boating accident. It accused the Telegraph and other outlets of wrongly referring to one of the victims by her second name instead of her first and even suggested that this mistake caused distress to her grieving family.
As it happened the young woman was a friend of a friend of mine and so I sent the program a letter telling them that, like Gough Whitlam and Paul McCartney (and indeed one John Joseph Hildebrand), she was in fact known by her second name. Media Watch later corrected the report but offered no apology to us—or the family whose distress they were once so concerned about.
It was not long after this second interaction that Media Watch suddenly took an intense interest in my reporting.
Half-baked smears included suggesting that I had invented swine flu projection figures that were in fact contained in an official NSW Health report and which were confirmed by two independent experts _ one of whom later backflipped after the government tried to hose down the story.
In another report I did on measures which reduced P-plater deaths by a quarter, Media Watch accused me of saying all but a quarter of P-platers died on the road.
A third involved an error made by another reporter in an item I was told to put in a gossip column I used to do. Not willing to dob in a colleague, I placed a correction in the column the following week saying only the error had occurred during production and was not made by me. In a nudge-nudge wink-wink way Media Watch hinted that I was lying. Nasty, biased and wrong.
Again, I say this only to provide concrete examples of Media Watch manipulating facts in an effort to fuel prejudice against this newspaper and its writers.
Which brings us to this week’s hatchet job. As all readers will know, The Telegraph has been waging a campaign against trolls and cyberbullying on social media. A huge number of people support it, some do not.
The problem for Media Watch is that it couldn’t just say it disagreed with the campaign and accepted online abuse as a price of free speech. It couldn’t admit that in recent years the show has gone from digging up genuine media scandals to pontificating from behind a desk like a televised version of Crikey.
Instead it tried to claim that we had somehow got it wrong or were hypocritical or deliberately omitted facts.
First it suggested that we had failed to advise our readers to block trolls. This is just rubbish. Even before the launch of the campaign we ran a story whose very headline ran ``Deny trolls attention and they fade away’’. Two days later we said: ``Social media sites advise users who are attacked online to block trolls or simply switch off’’ but added that some users found this difficult. The same day a page three article quoted a Twitter spokeswoman’s advice: ``If there is something that you don’t agree with, or find insulting, it’s best to block that user.’’
On Saturday a story in the sports section—which perhaps nobody at Media Watch has ever read—was headlined ``Sign off from abuse’’. On Monday, the very morning Media Watch went to air, we ran a column by UTS psychologist Rachael Murrihy across almost an entire page that concluded: ``Block the person and contact the ISP host to have posts removed if possible.’’
Media Watch failed to mention any of this. Either it didn’t do its research (again) or it deliberately ignored it.
Even more cute was that it clumsily attempted to perform a little bit of wedge politics by playing a grab from my esteemed colleague Tory Maguire from The Punch telling Sky News she disagreed with the Tele’s campaign. In a refreshing departure from the usual conspiracy theory that News Limited staff are all working in concert to advance some sinister agenda, Media Watch suggested that because some News Limited staff had a difference of opinion this weakened our position.
Fine. Except what Media Watch didn’t say was that I was sitting right next to Tory on that very same show, at the very same time, discussing the very same topic. Seconds after Tory spoke I outlined exactly the point of the Telegraph’s campaign, encouraging abuse victims to block trolls and also explaining why sometimes blocking did not work.
But did Media Watch show even a token grab of that? No. Did it even tell its viewers I was there? No.
The purpose of the Telegraph’s campaign is to support victims of cyber bullying and abuse and bolster protections where merely blocking and reporting is either not enough or comes too late. It is not just about celebrities—or improbably handsome celebrity columnists—but even more so ordinary people who are less equipped to handle it. Like other anti-bullying campaigns we have simply utilised celebrities to spread awareness and let other victims know that they are not alone.
It does not call for new laws, it does not call for censorship and it does not, as Media Watch suggested in a link so tenuous it would make a Hollywood screenwriter blush, have anything to do with Andrew Bolt.
All of this we could have easily explained to Media Watch and saved them the embarrassment of their confused, selective and erroneous story. But as far as anyone at this newspaper can tell they made no attempt to contact us for a response.
All over the country ever-shrinking newsrooms struggle to keep up with the 24-hour media cycle and the ever-increasing demands of media’s brave new world. Journalists are working harder than ever to hold on to their jobs and keep news and information flowing to a hungry public. Media Watch, meanwhile, has a dedicated staff of 11 people whose sole job it is to hang shit on them for 15 minutes a week.
You’d think they could at least do a better job of it than that.
