Sistema y Lenguaje CLP®
3.1 Características generales
This study is a work of media studies scholarship that focuses on journalism’s ability, and responsibility, to report crime. This case involves a number of complex issues and, for this reason, is multidisciplinary in scope. It investigates the specific question of how Tasmanian journalists used a criminal matter as an opportunity to challenge the accountability of the state’s democratic institutions, but it also draws on wider questions of public interest in child sexual abuse and exploitation.
1.4.1 Journalism, accountability and institutional decision-‐‑making
The relationship between news, crime and politics is well-‐‑covered territory in media studies. However, in the quickly changing news landscape, the boundaries around which we define newsmaking are blurring. Journalism is ‘the business or practice of producing and disseminating information about contemporary affairs of general public interest and importance’ (Schudson 2003:11). However, the rise of public relations in Australia and elsewhere challenges the claim that journalism is the only
21 For instance, news coverage and public opinion were identified as being a key trigger for the
Attorney General’s request for a review of the defence as to ‘mistake of age’ laws (Tasmanian Law Reform Institute 2012b:1).
profession involved in the creation and dissemination of news (Breit 2011:8). I am interested in the impact of news on the professional decision-‐‑making of lawyers, and other actors. Journalism is often criticised for being variously irrelevant, incompetent or detrimental in matters of democratic deliberation (Beecher 2005; Castells 2009; Cottle 2005; Fenton 2011; Veil and Ojeda 2010) and frequently dismissed and downplayed among professionals in legal and political fields (Breit 2011; Freedman 2010;). A similar impasse appears in research (Djerf-‐‑Pierre et al. 2013; Howarth 2013; Tiffen 2000; Slotnick 1991).
This study investigates the role of journalism in a controversy that encompassed society, law and politics, with particular attention to the elements of news coverage that can be seen to contribute to outrage, scandal and conspiracy. Many argue these elements in mediatised public debate are increasing as the ever-‐‑changing media environment trends towards less control on what information passes as news (Castells 2009; Clarke 2007; Eldridge 1999; Thompson 2005). As such, re-‐‑establishing journalism, as separate from other forms of mediatised communication, such as blogging, in public debate is vital.
1.4.2 Journalistic interest in child sexual abuse and exploitation
These crimes involved the commercial sexual exploitation of a child. Sexual abuse of children is a contested subject within wider anxieties about the contemporary rights and vulnerability of children in societies deemed to have a pervasive and sexualised media culture. The question as to what extent are media increasingly sexualising children remains controversial in Australia and elsewhere (Faulkner 2010; Lumby and Albury 2010; Hartley 1998; McKee 2010).
I approach these questions by considering how news representation of commercial child sexual exploitation is contributing to the increasing recognition that the treatment of children is a public matter, not a private issue. How journalists represented and contributed to the reappraisal of the professional and institutional
responses to the sexual abuse and exploitation of young people is important. Recent inquiries into the abuse of children indicate that the focus is shifting to the criminality and immorality of institutional responses to sexual crimes against children, rather than just prosecuting offenders. The ongoing Australian investigation into institutional abuse (Australian Royal Commission 2014) the inquiry into the Catholic Church in Ireland (Murphy et al. 2009), Operation Yewtree (Greer and McLaughlin 2012a) and two recent inquiries into child sexual exploitation in the English boroughs of Rochdale (Rochdale SCB 2012) and Rotherham (Jay 2013), are examples of this shift.
Public debate about these issues, especially in relation to crime, is about language and definition, which is specifically a question of communication. Child sexual exploitation is a compelling subject to investigate because it challenges positivist assumptions about moral panics (Cohen 2011; Howitt 1998). The shift from secrecy to visibility, from the silence of taboo to the act of calling an action a crime, is a public act that defines an emerging problem. These shifts in social awareness and action by definition engage public organisations including news organisations. In these circumstances, journalists act not only as observers in the contest of definition, accusation, and attribution of responsibility, but, in their choice of sources and language, they make a contribution to how the public understand the issues being debated.22 This study investigates how Tasmanian journalists navigated the line between moral panic and salacious reporting as they sought to make sense of the
22 For instance, an analysis of two major Australian daily newspapers over a two-‐‑year period
(Goddard et al. 2005) found that the language used for crimes involving children abused by an adult in a position of trust, such as a priest or a member of the family, differed from the language used for cases of commercial sexual exploitation of children. In these cases, terms such as ‘brothels’ and ‘pimps’ were found to portray the crime as prostitution rather than abuse, which shifted attention to those who coerce children into these situations and away from those who pay to abuse them. They concluded that this language ‘effectively transmogrified the rapist into a customer’ and constructed the child ‘as an accomplice to his or her own sexual abuse’ (2005:281–286).
circumstances that not only facilitated the organised sexual abuse of a child, but also appeared to allow a notable number of perpetrators to escape conviction.
1.4.3 A note on personal involvement
This investigation emerged from my professional association with Terry Martin, who employed me to help him to write his autobiography in 2009.
When Terry Martin was arrested, I was working from home, finalising a first draft of the autobiography that he had contracted me to help him write. After several months of interviews in 2009, I had collected the material to describe his journey from small business to state politics. We had agreed that it would be written as a story of how one man kept his integrity in the dirty world of politics. On the day I called to say there was a rough draft for him to look at, he did not answer his phone: it was turned off while Tasmania Police interviewed him about his involvement with a child sold into prostitution and the child pornography collection they had found while searching his home. Martin and I met the following week and I told him that while his case was going through the courts, I would not continue to work on the book. I left Martin’s house ambivalent about the extent of his guilt: he did not deny having sex with the girl, only that he thought she was old enough to be working as a prostitute. I could not distinguish my incredulity from my general dismay that such a mistake could be made, especially by someone who seemed to act with such integrity in his professional life. Martin’s explanation that the medication prescribed for his neurological illness led him to being unable to control or judge his sexual impulses further complicated his explanation. The contract was ended and I did not contact Martin throughout the period of this research.
While a relationship, even a professional one, should raise concerns regarding ethics and objectivity for researchers, my experience as a journalist enabled me to be distinguish Martin as a subject. Perhaps, if I did have a strong opinion about his guilt or innocence, I may have decided not to pursue this investigation. However, I
was ambivalent about the role Martin played in a much larger story about transparency and accountability and it was the story around Martin that was the site of my investigation. Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) is a salient warning to anyone drawn to writing about those accused of crime. Perhaps too it is a reminder that researchers and journalists can come to form attachments and biases in their research and so the question of objectivity is not limited to those who research people they knew prior to their research. Throughout the course of the research for this study, this ambivalence remained and the questions it raised partly informed the curiosity that drove my research. This is perhaps a case of what Malcolm (1990:25) describes as the ‘strange absence of feeling’ she felt about the individuals at the centre of her research. The legal and ethical restrictions on interviewing Martin while he awaited trial, combined with my own feelings of ambivalence towards him, made it practically impossible to contact him, so I did not.
The ongoing legal matters throughout the entire study period and the trauma associated with the crime meant it was legally and ethically too difficult to approach the plaintiff, defendants or witnesses, or their families. It was possible for me to investigate how journalists can report social problems without interviewing those subject to criminal proceedings. For these reasons, I do not address the interesting and important questions relating to the injustices associated with news reporting on crime. Nor do I endeavor to investigate claims that there was any miscarriage of justice. Instead, I focus on the question of how the practices of journalists, and those they encounter in their work, inform and influence public debate about crimes that appear to highlight failings or breaches in the social, political or legal fabric of a community.
My interest in the questions that were raised as events unfolded were also informed by having worked as a professional journalist in Australia, including Tasmania, and through the lived experience of living in Hobart community when the debate unfolded. As an observer, I was struck by the confusion expressed in
public reaction. From a former journalist’s perspective, I was curious to understand the dynamics behind the coverage because it appeared that the news agenda was being set by both news organisations and their sources. I was also curious about the way the story became not only intensely political and but also focused on a few individuals. As a member of the Hobart public, the level of outrage and confusion about the case intrigued me and led me to question those who claimed journalists were contributing towards a moral panic and to wonder what other factors may have been at work.
1.4.4 A note on referencing
Due to the relatively short study period, the limited number of journalists and the high number of texts cited, the author-‐‑date system was not adequately clear when citing news items. This study uses author, day-‐‑month-‐‑year in the in-‐‑text citations of news items for the purposes of clarity, to clearly distinguish news items from scholarly work and to assist readers with the chronology of events. This approach is similar to that used by Jenny Kitzinger (2002) who observed the necessity to list the full date for the news items. News items using this system are listed under Appendix 1. Other media items, such as websites, media releases and blogs, are cited in-‐‑text using the name-‐‑year system and can be found in the References.