by Leigh Sales
In a case like James Scott’s, there is an unfortunate collision between two forces. Maximum public curiosity and therefore maximum media harassment coincide with the peak vulnerability of the people involved. Not surprisingly, the early weeks after a traumatic event are usually when people are least able to talk to the media and also least able to judge whether they should. In February 2009, one of the most devastating bushfires in Australian history tore through Victoria, killing 173 people on a day that became known as Black Saturday. Months afterwards, a university study found that many of the traumatised survivors who had spoken to journalists could not even recall being interviewed.
That study, carried out by the Centre for Advanced Journalism at Melbourne University, spoke to twenty-eight journalists who had covered the Black Saturday fires and to twenty-seven survivors they had interviewed. The researchers noted that the pressures on journalists were acute and that it wasn’t surprising that ‘errors of judgment are made, inconsistencies abound, blind eyes are turned, ethical lapses occur, compromises are made, and . . . the interests of the affected public fade into the background’. They noted that there was little evidence of journalists acting in bad faith, yet good intentions themselves were not enough to guard against lapses. Even so, the research found that most of those twenty-seven survivors felt their experience with journalists was generally positive and that the media did a good job.
There’s one important difference to note between an event like Black Saturday and a story like James Scott’s: on Black Saturday, the victims vastly outnumbered the media. In James’s case, it was dozens of journalists all homing in on one person.
Maybe you buy some of the pressures that journalists face as an excuse for the way we sometimes behave and maybe you don’t. Even if you believe most of what I’ve said about the validity of chasing James Scott’s story, how about my other outrageous claim: that I would have interviewed James in much the same way as Richard Carleton did, even though James has explicitly told me how hurtful it was? First, there’s a stigma about paying people for their stories (chequebook journalism), and I would have been keen to prove that I wasn’t going soft on James just because my network had paid him. By the time of James’s interview, there were questions about the credibility of his survival tale, most unjustly, but they could not be ignored. I would have considered I was giving him a chance to correct the public record by asking about this.
Second, even though the chocolate was a silly side issue, a journalist is there to ask what the public wants to know, and the public wanted to know the brand of chocolate. I accept that this is not as sound a reason as my first, but as I pointed out earlier, I’ve been schooled to believe that if the public wants to know something, I should ask about it.
Third, once James declined to reveal that information, I would have doubled down, just as Carleton did, confused about why James wasn’t forthcoming. I would have considered it a dent in his credibility, and been annoyed that while Nine had paid for the full story, James was withholding not just information, but one of the key details viewers wanted to know more about. The chocolate bar had become tantalising because it was being kept so hush-hush – why was it so important? If James had answered Richard Carleton’s question with, ‘It was just plain Cadbury chocolate,’ everybody would have moved on and 60 Minutes probably would have focused mostly on what James wanted – the miracle of surviving against such overwhelming odds.
Would I have worried about subjecting James to a fairly rigorous interview when his health was fragile? Yes, but I still would have been tough, justifying it on the grounds that it was his decision to strike the deal and do the interview, and the risk was therefore his. That is defensible thinking for a journalist. Is it defensible thinking for an empathetic human being?
When I look back at the mistakes I’ve made as a reporter, including experiences that to this day make me feel ashamed, I can see that they were usually due to a failure of empathy. I’ve never made a deliberate effort to lie, mislead or skew. I’ve never actively set out to hurt somebody. Sometimes I have made errors of fact due to carelessness, ignorance, haste or misspeaking (the last being something that is hard to avoid 100 per cent of the time on live television). The mistakes that niggle me most, though, relate to questionable decisions I’ve made in the process of gathering material for broadcast, due to the pressure of deadlines, my ambition to deliver a cracking story, or my own lack of maturity and compassion.
In 1994, when I was twenty-one, I worked for the Nine Network in Brisbane on a local news/lifestyle hybrid called Extra, which led into the 6 pm news. I was desperately eager to make a good impression and move up the newsroom ladder. As the most junior person in the place, I did all manner of jobs, including rolling the autocue, printing scripts, answering the phone, preparing research briefs for journalists, and assigning camera crews. Eventually I was allowed to have a stab at reporting a few stories myself.
One story I pitched was about children who have difficulty making friends – why does it happen and what can parents do? We arranged to film some footage at a primary school near the TV station, and I briefed the cameraman to keep an eye out in the playground for any children who were sitting alone. I asked him to make sure they weren’t identifiable but to shoot in such a way that it was clear they were isolated. There is always one such child in any schoolyard and when the cameraman returned with the footage, he had filmed a little girl left out of the play. She was shot from a distance and a hat shielded her face, although her long, platinum-blond hair poked out from under it.
I interviewed a school principal and a psychologist and the story came together fine. It went to air and my boss liked it. As I was preparing to head home, merry with self-satisfaction, the main office phone rang and I answered it. It was the father of the blond girl. He told me that I had publicly identified his daughter as a child with no friends.
No I didn’t, I told him, I’d deliberately asked the cameraman to make sure the child could not be identified. Of course she couldn’t be identified by a stranger, he replied, but look at her hair! Every child, every teacher, every parent at that school could recognise his daughter, he said. And not only that, he went on, they were all so excited to be on television that every last one of them would have watched the story. He finished by telling me that his daughter did have a lot of trouble making friends and that I had made the situation worse by labelling her that way in front of all her classmates.
I was gutted, of course, and now, more than twenty years later, I’m still appalled that I didn’t see the obvious point he was making before I put the story to air. I had next to no experience, so I’ll offer that in my defence, but really? I didn’t have the basic common sense to see that the child would be recognisable to every last person in her circle, and that it might be a problem? I can truthfully say that I didn’t think of that, but I do wonder if on some level I chose to ignore any qualms because I needed pictures to tell the story on television. The whole episode still upsets me and I am ashamed to share it publicly.
About a year after that, I was working for the ABC when the newsroom chief of staff sent me on a light plane to Windera, some 200 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, where I went on a raid of a cattle farm with the Police Stock Squad and the RSPCA. A farmer was in trouble for allowing his cows to starve. I recall feeling disgusted as we walked around the property in blistering heat. The animals were skeletal and there were several carcasses lying in a dusty, parched paddock, looking like deflated balloons. The farmer arrived home partway through the raid. He had a number of children with him but I can’t recall seeing his wife. I remember looking at him with contempt and wondering what sort of awful person would let their animals suffer like this.
I recently rewatched this story for the first time in twenty-one years and noticed that I’d reported it as a straight animal cruelty story. I had not interviewed the farmer; I can’t recall now if that was because he refused or because I didn’t ask. The thing that strikes me today is tha
t even though I mentioned drought in the story, at no point did I explore the question of why the animals were starving. I couldn’t get past my own shock at their condition. Were they starving because the farmer’s family was also starving? I did report that there was feed in the shed on the property and yet I didn’t ask why, since feed was available, the animals had not been fed. It was a pathetic piece of reporting on my part because I lacked the empathy to put myself in the farmer’s shoes, and so I came nowhere near telling the real story and nor did I do the right thing by him.
I’d like to put both those episodes down to youthful inexperience, but sadly, I can identify similar mistakes when I was a senior reporter. In 2005, more than a decade later, I was the ABC’s US correspondent, based in Washington DC. I was sent to New Orleans when an epic hurricane hit America’s southern coastline. Hurricane Katrina basically wiped New Orleans off the map. On my second or third day there, I made it to the city’s airport terminal, by that time the scene of the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents. Many of them had been at the city’s convention centre for several days prior to the evacuation, with no food or running water and no way to communicate with their families. They were angry, traumatised, and in some cases hostile.
I was at the airport looking for a story for ABC Radio’s AM program. I had a couple of hours to find something to report and transmit to Australia. One of the people I interviewed was an elderly African American woman who was in tears and probably shock. She didn’t know where several of her family members were and she listed them by name. She had four or five grandchildren with her, the eldest of whom looked about ten.
I knew I had struck journalistic gold. She was emotional and she had a compelling story to tell. I asked question after question to prompt her to keep talking. The longer we went on, the more emotional she became. I was thinking, Just one more question, I just have to keep her going a little bit longer to have enough for a story. Finally, in a soft voice, the ten-year-old said, ‘That’s enough.’ I pretended not to hear him and asked another question. ‘That’s enough,’ he said more boldly. I then wrapped it up. To this day, it mortifies me that it took a ten-year-old boy to tell me when enough was enough. Twice.
The thing is, if you asked me where I would rank myself on a scale of journalists, where 1 is a psychopath and 10 is a decent person trying to do the right thing, I’d give myself a 10. I would say you’d be lucky if I were the journalist to knock on your door. Yet I’ve just laid bare some examples that suggest I can be as mercenary and reptilian as anyone. There may be some journalists who have never made the mistakes I have, but I suspect that, if we’re honest, many of us would have to admit to acting less than ideally under pressure.
I don’t often talk to my colleagues about these issues. We don’t sit around discussing what goes into making the sausage. I know very little about how other journalists persuade people to do interviews, or how they deal with survivors they meet in disaster zones or in the aftermath of great trauma. An American psychologist and academic, Dr Elana Newman, has noted an historical avoidance of scholarship regarding trauma and journalism. She suggests that this may be because journalists don’t want to think about the connection as it forces them to confront the fact that they often benefit from others’ misery.
That Hurricane Katrina story that caused a ten-year-old to pull me up for harassing his grandma? Nominated for Australia’s highest journalism honour, a Walkley Award. In Dr Newman’s words: ‘While journalists do not create the conditions they cover, many recognise that they do receive awards and recognition for telling the public about these calamities and repugnant situations. Thus, the relative lack of scholarly investigation of trauma in the news may be continuously shaped by a tension inherent in acknowledging and avoiding the impact of trauma more broadly.’
It’s an uncomfortable thought: we journalists may not like thinking about these questions because it might force us to change the way we operate. Despite the aversion, though, what would happen if more journalists did front up to these questions? What might we learn?
On the morning of 10 January 2011, Amanda Gearing could not believe the intensity of the downpour she was watching through the window of her study in Toowoomba. It was as if some sort of artillery in the sky were bombarding the earth with water. Bullets of rain ricocheted off the driveway and within minutes a violent brown torrent was invading the street. The ferocity of the onslaught itself was strange enough, but Amanda’s house was perched on one of Toowoomba’s highest points, the last place you’d ever expect to see a flood. In fourteen years of living there, Amanda had never seen anything remotely like it.
What she didn’t know at the time was that she was witnessing a superstorm, created by the collision of two intense thunderstorms off the coast of south-east Queensland earlier that morning. The rivers and dams of Toowoomba and its surrounds were already full and the soil sodden, thanks to a record wet season, and when this superstorm hit, it caused what police would later call ‘an instant inland tsunami’.
In the foothills of the Great Dividing Range and on the coastal plain east of the city, the water moved so fast and with such force that hundreds of residents were caught unawares in their homes, cars and shops. One minute people were pottering about in their kitchens, the next they were running for their lives. Many of those attempting to drive to safety in their cars and trucks were swept off roads by a wall of water crashing on them without warning. In numerous cases, bystanders – themselves lucky to escape death – watched aghast and powerless as the flood swept away friends and neighbours.
By the time the rain stopped and the water subsided, thirty-three men, women and children were dead, with three more missing, presumed dead. Nineteen of those deaths were in the Lockyer Valley, a picturesque area of rolling fruit and vegetable farmlands some 20 kilometres from Toowoomba (and about an hour’s drive west of Brisbane). One of the valley’s towns, Grantham, lost twelve people in just two hours from a population of about five hundred, a tragedy that made global news and prompted a visit by Prince William.
As Amanda Gearing watched from her window on the morning of the storm, she had no idea of the extent of the catastrophe. She would find out soon enough. Amanda was a journalist, meant to be taking a step back from daily news reporting to work on academic research, but early that afternoon she had a call from the Brisbane chief of staff for The Australian newspaper, who’d been hearing reports of massive flooding, widespread destruction and an overwhelmed emergency services network. Could Amanda file some freelance stories for them? She grabbed her notebook and mobile phone, organised a photographer and ventured out.
Amanda was no young cowboy reporter trying to make a name on a big story. She was a very experienced, competent journalist with years of reporting in outback Queensland behind her, covering every kind of story imaginable. She was fifty years old and a mother of four. When you operate as a solo reporter in a regional area of Australia, invariably accidents, tragedies and deaths become a staple. You can’t hide in a big newsroom, ducking and weaving every time the chief of staff is hunting for somebody to go and solicit a photograph from a family whose sixteen-year-old has been killed. You’re the only person available for ‘death knock’ duty. In Amanda’s years of working in Toowoomba, she had become particularly experienced at death knocks, performing dozens for Brisbane’s Courier-Mail.
Like most journalists, I am terrified of doing death knocks and will do anything to avoid them, so I’m fascinated by Amanda’s experience. I contact her via Skype and I ask her whether she has any particular technique to encourage people to talk.
Amanda says, ‘It was that I didn’t ask them to. Because I put myself in their position, the only thing I could do was think, If this was me, what would I do? And it did not feel right for me to go to someone’s house who had just lost their husband or their wife, or run over their child, or whatever they had done, and say, “Can you give me information, can you give me a story, can you give me anything?” I couldn’t ask
for a glass of water. But what I could do was say, “The process you’re entering is a difficult process. It will go on for a couple of years.” And I did feel that I could give them empathy, be sorry for the loss, which I was. I could give them information about the process they were entering. I could give them information about what the police were already saying and ask them, “Is there anything you would like to say?” I would say, “There is going to be a story in the paper about this. If there is anything you would like to say about your child or husband or wife, the paper is interested now. Next week, they probably won’t be so interested.” More often than not, they did. Ninety per cent of them did.’
That regular exposure to death meant that by the time Amanda ventured out into the floods in January 2011, she was extremely experienced at speaking to people in the midst of the unimaginable. Even so, the scale of the loss and trauma she came across in the Lockyer Valley was beyond anything she had ever seen.
There was Daniel McGuire, a member of the Grantham Rural Fire Service. When the Lockyer Creek broke its banks, he attempted to evacuate his 31-year-old wife, Llync, and their three children, Jocelyn, five, Garry, twelve, and Zachary, seven, in a rural fire truck. But a violent wave of water, taller than the truck, crashed down on them as they were driving out of their yard. Daniel saved Zachary by pushing him out of the car window and onto a tree. The force of the water then propelled Daniel out of the cabin and he managed to clamber up a tree too. But the family members remaining in the truck couldn’t escape and all three drowned as it sank.
