I didn’t get to write the post I wanted to write yesterday, about Caroline Overington and the goings-on in the seat of Wentworth. ABC’s Poll Vault has a pretty good summation of the events, including the continuation of the saga today, which saw the Fairfax papers publish excerpts from e-mails between Overington and George Newhouse.
Rupert suggests that someone doing what Overington did “in the name of the paper” would face disciplinary action. At the same time, he suggests that reporters are entitled to their own private opinion. And they certainly are. Every journalist has to vote, and they are obviously going to have to form an opinion about who they want to vote for. And not every journalist is going to be a swinging voter.
But Overington’s misconduct was not in the fact that she might have had a particular opinion about who should win Wentworth. It was that she was using her influence to try to shape political events. Her job is to investigate and report on these events, not to be a participant in the story of the federal election.
What’s more, the continuing revelations suggest that her involvement may have had little to do with her personal opinion about the election at all. The e-mails to Newhouse suggest that she was looking to leverage her relationships with each candidate to manipulate them for the purpose of creating a story. She was not favouring one candidate over the other – she was working each of them to get them to do something that she could write about – ideally, in an exclusive report, I suspect.
This is reviving the discussion of journalistic ethics that was last held after the revelation of Peter Costello’s dinner rant with Michael Brissenden and colleagues became public. These issues are often not simple, because the work of journalists relies on building relationships to obtain access to information. But Overington was clearly wrong. She attempted to manipulate her subjects through flirtation, threats and the promise of publicity to actually create news events. Her job is to tell us what is happening, not to make it happen.
