Hypocrisy Plus?

Each year someone from the media industry presents the Andrew Olle Lecture. Andrew was a brilliant journalist that was taken from us far too soon as the result of a brain tumor in 1995. Previous lecturers have included: John Hartigan, Senator Helen Coonan, John Doyle, Harold Mitchell, Kerry Stokes AO, Eric Beecher, and David Williamson.

This year they chose Ray Martin. He chose to speak on the abandonment of serious journalism by the commercial networks. I have thought about this for the past 6 hours. I initially thought it was some sort of ridiculous joke that the world had conspired to play on me. But it isn't.

I do understand that Ray was a real journalist for the 10 years that he worked for the the ABC. I could even begrudgingly concede that some journalistic skill is required for 60 Minutes, when he worked for about 7 years.

Then any integrity he had as a journalist began to be eliminated as he took over the Midday Show in 1985 with his fluffy interviews of celebrities, authors and the other forms of light entertainment that was the bread and butter of the show. Yes there was the odd politician that came on but the Midday audience was housewives* - hardly the place for anything too deep or controversial.

From there he descended into the gutter journalism of A Current Affair, a salacious "current affairs" program that does in depth stories like parking ticket scams, the effect of ill-fitting bras (lots of breast shots in those stories) and the latest diet fad. He held this spot (a little on-and-off) from 1994 to 2005.

So notorious was this show for aiming for the lowest common denominator of the viewing public (ie the more scandal the higher the ratings) that the scornful phrase "but Ray Martin said so" was born, and still continues to flourish today. It is used in times when a real topic is given the lightest treatment, with an incredibly biased viewpoint that may or may not reflect the truth. Unfortunately many parts of the Australian population consider A Current Affair to be hard hitting news and as such it has to be the God-honest truth. For these people, real current affairs shows on the ABC and SBS are too boring because they use big words and keep going on and on about things. These people also love Alan Jones and John Laws and thought Pauline Hanson was "speaking for the people".

So how Ray then turn around and criticize commercial networks for dropping some of their real news and current affairs programs? Where is this man's integrity - personal and professional?

* No disrespect meant for the term but this was Australia in the 80's.