Andrew Olle lecture: When people are losing interest in the news, journalists must ask ourselves hard questions

This is an edited version of the 26th annual Andrew Olle Media Lecture delivered by ABC journalist and author Leigh Sales in Sydney on Friday, October 27.

Twenty-five people have stood here before me, and whether you consider them champions or charlatans, they’re giants of our industry. It’s an honour to join them. Can I tell you, it was also a relief to receive this invitation from Ita Buttrose, and that goes back to something that happened on November 10, 2020.

At around 1:00pm that day, my 7.30 producer rang to tell me we’d landed an interview, rolling in an hour and a half. It was COVID, so I was working from home and had a mad scramble to make it in time.

Now, as ABC staff will attest, it’s often very difficult to find a vacant space in the car park, as it was on this day. I did a couple of laps but there was only one free spot — the one marked ABC Chair, Ita Buttrose. 

I had no time to waste, so I swung the car in, killed the ignition, raced to the lift and thought, “As soon as this interview is done, I’ll come and move it”.

I went upstairs, got busy and promptly forgot.

When I returned at 8:10pm after the show, I could see a note under my windscreen wiper. In beautiful cursive script, it read: “Please DON’T (in capital letters and double underlined) park in my car spot again.”

I framed Ita’s letter, which now has pride of place above my desk.(Supplied: Leigh Sales)

And there was that famous Ita signature and date. In the top left-hand corner was stapled a business card that read “Ita Buttrose AC OBE”.

Being a lifelong journalist, and as such a lover of an anecdote, I found this turn of events thrilling. I carefully put the letter on my front passenger seat so as to not crease a souvenir from a legend.

As I approached the back gate, a security guard waved me down. This was unusual because normally at the time I left, nobody was around.

I can only describe his face, when he clocked it was me, as ashen. “Oh no,” he said. “Ms Sales? Really? Ms Buttrose’s car space?”

“I know, it was me,” I said, trying not to laugh. “I’m very sorry.”

“Oh no,” he said again. “Look I’ve been sent out here to get the person’s details, but … I can’t with you Ms Sales, that would be disrespectful. Look, we know who you are, I’m going to let you go, but you know if there’s phone calls tomorrow, I’m just doing my job.”

I drove out and by then, I was laughing so hysterically I had to pull over. I rang the executive producer of 7.30 Justin Stevens and told him what had happened. He found it less amusing and said something like, “What is wrong with you? I’ve been warning you about this for years.”

In more trouble than a mink in Denmark

This is because of an incident more than a decade ago. I once parked in a space assigned to somebody who had died the day before because I was fairly certain they wouldn’t be using it. Back then, Justin was my interview producer so I left a note on the car with his name and number. Justin was appalled but my rationale was I was going to be in the studio and not easily contactable.

Fast forward to 2020 and Justin said, “Listen, you need to contact Ita directly and out yourself before somebody else does, you should apologise personally.” It’s that kind of common sense and forward thinking that makes him a brilliant director of ABC News.

So at 8:31pm, from my dining room table, I sent Ita this text:

Ita, I have to apologise, that was me in your car space today. I’m so sorry if that inconvenienced you. I’m working from home mostly but sometimes have to race in on short notice when interviews or things materialise. When I got in today, there was nowhere to park and I thought ‘Oh surely Ita is working from home’ but you obviously weren’t. And I must confess — it’s not the first time I’ve done it. Also, there was a security guard waiting for me tonight and the poor bugger, when he saw it was me, he nearly died. He was all worried that he would be in trouble for reporting me. Anyway I’ve told him it’s all on me and he’s not in trouble at all. Anyway, I’m sorry, it would have been extremely annoying and I won’t do it again. Leigh.

As soon as I hit send, I rang Annabel Crabb and read her the text. She said, “Mate, you are in more trouble than a mink in Denmark.”

I went to bed at 10:30pm. No reply from Ita. I woke up at 6:30am, checked the phone. Nothing. I ate breakfast, dropped the kids to school, did the 9:00am editorial conference call for 7.30 and still: nothing.

Finally, at 11:25am, I received a reply from Ita. It read: “Dear Leigh, I know the frustration of not being able to find a car space. You are forgiven. Best regards, Ita.”

Let me say one final thing about Ita Buttrose before I move on. When Ita was a cadet, news reports still identified women by their husband’s names. “Mrs Daniel James delivered the Olle lecture last night” and so on.

In that context, in heavily male-dominated workplaces with zero concessions to women, let alone single mothers like Ita, she was the first woman to edit a major Australian newspaper, founding editor of one of the country’s most influential magazines Cleo and editor of the Women’s Weekly at the peak of its power, landing in one in four households. She pioneered her own publishing empire with the magazine Ita and of course she’s now been chair of the ABC for almost five years. That’s a fraction of what she’s done, including extensive charity work.

The word trailblazer gets over-used but there’s not a female journalist here who doesn’t owe a debt to Ita and others of her generation who trod a very rough path so we had a better one. Ita, thank you.

A bias towards the cracking story

Back to her car park. I’ve been sitting on that anecdote for three years, waiting for the perfect moment to tell it publicly, because I knew it was a great story. Journos are often accused of bias and actually, I agree. Real journalists all do share a bias … towards the cracking story.

You don’t care which side of politics or which social media zealots you’ll offend, or whether it will be long and difficult; you tolerate your friends and partner thinking you’re mad; you push on through three hours sleep a night because once you’re hooked, you just can’t help yourself.

It’s the Seven Network’s Chris Reason at the Thai cave rescue in 2018. The kids are out but Reaso figures maybe the soldiers at the roadblocks have gone home. It could be a chance to finally get pictures inside the cave. Everyone’s knackered, his cameraman wants to kill him, but back into the car they hop, and sure enough — a scoop. Chris Reason: hopelessly biased towards a great story.

Peter Dutton and Annabel Crabb sitting at a dining table during filming of Kitchen Cabinet.(ABC)

It’s The Australian’s Hedley Thomas, unable to let go of a story he first covered decades ago, about a missing Northern beaches mother, Lyn Dawson. Hedley cut his teeth in journalism on a typewriter but took his forensic skills into podcasting. Millions of downloads later, after fresh investigations, Lyn’s husband is convicted for murder. Hedley Thomas, also hopelessly biased.

It’s the ABC’s Annabel Crabb, interviewing Opposition Leader Peter Dutton on Kitchen Cabinet — having the courage to ask him to his face if his remarks about letting Lebanese Muslims into Australia were racist, even though she knew that merely inviting him onto her program would trigger an abusive social media pile-on for weeks, ironically from partisans certain she would give him a free kick. Yep, she’s biased too.

That bias towards a great story is the same whether we file for TikTok or Four Corners, work at Nine News or Mamamia, whether we have three minutes of audio, or 70,000 words.

But sadly, right now, the reality is, the public is losing interest in stories we’re telling. The Digital Media Australia report last year noted that about two-thirds of people say they actively avoid the news. When asked why, the reasons included it’s untrustworthy or biased; it harms my mental wellbeing; it wears me out; there’s too much politics; and it leads to arguments I don’t have time for.

I’ve been avoiding the news, too

Recently, I’ve been one of those people avoiding the news. I’ve spent this year doing jobs in front of and behind the camera that have given me a break from immersion in the daily news cycle and that’s been a relief. What is going on, when the news is losing not just its regular audience, but alienating a career newshound like me?

News avoidance and declining trust are media discussions going on around the world right now, from the BBC to The New York Times, and at every major organisation in between.

When the ABC first invited me to give this lecture, despite the honour, I declined. The main reason is it’s just so tiresome that when you do something like this these days, instead of thinking, “What sincere views should I share and how will people respond?”, what you have to consider is, “How will what I say be taken out of context and weaponised by ABC-haters and Twitter nutters? How will I manage a spread of misinformation unrelated to what I actually said, and will my employer have the guts to stand by me? Do they really want me to say what I actually think?” That’s what it is to step into the arena in 2023.

British broadcaster Louis Theroux.(7.30 Report)

David Anderson and Ita asked me to reconsider, and I did. In doing so, I’m influenced by somebody I greatly admire: the British broadcaster, Louis Theroux, and the thoughts he shared in this year’s MacTaggart Lecture about the BBC’s fear of its critics, of putting interest groups offside and of causing offence:

“And so there is an urge to lay low, to play it safe, to avoid the difficult subjects,” Theroux said. “But in avoiding these pinch points and unresolved areas of culture where our anxieties and our painful dilemmas lie, we aren’t just failing to do our jobs, we are missing our greatest opportunities.”

He went on: “Playing it safe and following a formula may be a route to success for some but it never worked for me. The risk of not taking risks is something worse. Not just failure, but a kind of loss of integrity.”

I particularly agree with Theroux on that last point. Saying no to delivering this lecture, or standing here and delivering something that offends nobody, would be the safer, easier path. And that’s why on reflection, I choose the other way.

In pursuit of trust and respect

When I took six months of leave last year, stepping out of the news cycle for the first time in almost 30 years, it gave me time to reflect. And that time off helped me better understand why exactly the news is at risk of turning me off.

I moved to Sydney from Queensland the year after Andrew died so I never met him. His journalistic conduct was renowned: a tenacious interviewer, polite but firm in holding powerbrokers to account. He paid meticulous attention to facts and was scrupulously fair. Even his friends weren’t sure how he voted. He pushed no barrows, a man his wife Annette once said was, “cursed with seeing both sides of every argument”. He was interested in humans in all their complexity.

When Andrew Olle died there was a massive outpouring of public grief. Why? Because you can sum up his journalism with two words: integrity and independence. And those values made him worthy of the public’s trust.

The late great journalist, Andrew Olle.

My own opinion as to why many people are losing interest in the news? Because that kind of journalism is not as common as it once was and as a result, people rightly don’t always trust us anymore.

Too often, too many journalists at all media organisations are abandoning values espoused by people like Andrew Olle, for various reasons. One is that some reporters prefer to be activists and crusaders rather than fact-finders or straight reporters. They enjoy their heroic status among the tribes of social media or their subscribers. I’m not sure they can even identify their own bias.

Others haven’t had enough training to understand what independent journalism actually is, or their organisation has an ideological bias and the reporter knows the way to get ahead is to toe the line… better still, to step over it. Or perhaps it’s awkward and exhausting to constantly push back against the groupthink of your colleagues.

Another reason is fear of the consequences of reporting the full picture: that inconvenient facts could set back a cause the journalist believes in. Others think objectivity is impossible and so even striving for it is pointless.

All of this thinking leads to journalism with an agenda and that kind of reporting is a sure-fire way to win strong support from a particular audience. But does it win broad respect? Does it lead to lasting public trust? I would argue not.

I believe in holding power to account

I believe in evidence, logic, accuracy, setting aside your own opinion in your reporting, being open-minded and non-judgemental. The job is not telling the audience what to think; it’s giving them the fullest set of facts possible so they can make up their own minds what to think.

I believe that becoming a journalist means you relinquish the right to be an activist, even on important issues you really care about. In this, I agree with Noah Oppenheim, the president of NBC News who says, “If you choose journalism as your route, you are giving up some other options that are available to the general public.”

Personally, the time I’ve found this the hardest in my career was during Australia’s same sex marriage debate — because of how much I love my LGBTQI friends and how important that issue was to them. I was in conflict between my belief in the necessity of impartial journalism and my belief that my friends deserved the same rights as me.

I considered being 7.30 anchor a serious responsibility and so to me, the choice was either step down if you can’t do the job properly, otherwise treat both Yes and No same sex marriage campaigners with equal respect and fairness, and leave the advocacy to others, which is what I did.

I believe in treating everyone on whom you report fairly, even if you privately think they’re a dickhead. That doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions or put forward facts — so long as you’re fair — that might lead the audience to also conclude the person is a dickhead, or not.

I believe talking about yourself should be the exception in news coverage. Your own background will help direct you where to find stories; that’s why diversity in newsrooms is important, to tell stories that represent the broadest section of the community possible. A journalist’s personal experience should be most useful in giving a voice to rarely-heard people or issues, not in amplifying their own.

I believe in holding power to account on behalf of people less powerful, whether that puts you on the right size of the zeitgeist or not, whether it guarantees you a social media pile-on or not.

I believe in distrusting authority and testing what I’m told by politicians against the available evidence.

I believe it’s essential to strive for objectivity, even if it is an unachievable goal. And being objective doesn’t stop you gathering facts and presenting analysis that may make a case in one direction, as long as you’re not deliberately withholding contrary facts to frame something as more clear-cut than it really is.

In 2017 Australians voted in favour of allowing same-sex couples to get married.(ABC News: Marco Catalano)

Reflections on COVID reporting

Now that you have that context, I think broadly what’s causing me disillusionment with the news is media behaviour at odds with those values. Reporting that pushes an agenda instead of being rooted in impartiality and fair-mindedness undermines my trust that what I’m being told is reliable. And I feel like I see more and more of this kind of thing, everywhere. I’m deliberately not naming media organisations because nowhere is immune to it.

The simple truth is that sometimes I struggle to trust some of what I read and hear and that’s because on issues I know something about, I can see when I’m being told half a story. That’s either because I’ve gone myself to primary sources for research, or because I have direct personal experience. The audience knows too, from the evidence of their own lives, when an issue isn’t as clear-cut as they’re being sold by journalists. And that chips away at their trust in us.

In recent times, few issues in Australia have been framed in as black and white a fashion as COVID policy. It was frequently and falsely set up as being between two options, lock it down or let it rip. But once initial preparations were made in 2020, that was inaccurate. Every additional measure, from masks to contact tracing to social distancing, quarantine, vaccines and later antivirals, were variables that slowed or hastened the spread of the virus.

Melburnians experienced one of the longest COVID lockdowns in the world.(AAP: Daniel Pockett)

I can’t tell you how many Australians contacted me privately during COVID, on social media, via email, letters or in the street, to thank me for asking politicians and experts whether harsh lockdowns and border closures, especially deep into 2021, were warranted and proportionate.

Citizens could see in their own lives that lockdowns came with severe costs: mental health issues, emotionally damaged children, domestic violence, undiagnosed illnesses, family separations, neglect of people with disabilities and financial hardship.

Questions mounted once more people had either had COVID or been vaccinated. It’s hard to believe now that a little over two years ago in Australia, you faced potential criminal charge if you sat alone outdoors under a tree reading a book. But questioning any of it guaranteed you would be bullied and accused of being in favour of killing people.

During that period, I wasn’t asking challenging questions simply to be contrary or to peddle my own opinion. I was closely reading primary source data: from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the federal and state health departments, the Centers for Disease Control in the US. I was studying what other countries were doing, Australia’s pre-COVID pandemic planning, our death rates from other illnesses, and what experts in many different fields were saying, from mental health to the law to economics.

And like I had always done, I was using those facts to inform my reporting and to test what people in power were claiming.

Since when was it brave to ask questions?

Of course, the problem was hellishly complicated. Everybody wanted to make safe decisions. Some journalists who baulked at questioning Australia’s lockdown policy, even by the end of 2021, were acting from genuine concerns for public health. I accept the complexity.

But even if every last measure was truly essential and proportionate: when governments are imposing some of the most anti-democratic measures in Australian history — without parliamentary oversight and with limited basis in pre-pandemic wargaming – surely, it warrants the most universally vigorous scrutiny imaginable.

When I was probing the logic of COVID policy in 2021 — for example, asking if it was reasonable to put the entire state of Victoria into a five-day lockdown every time there were two or three well-traced COVID cases — colleagues would say things to me like, “Geez, you’re brave to go there.”

Daniel Andrews, the Victorian Premier, speaks at a press conference on COVID-19 on August 11, 2020.(ABC News: Daniel Fermer)

When I was in Melbourne during a snap lockdown in February 2021 and saw a handy opportunity to go to a press conference by the Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, who had declined multiple requests for a 7.30 interview, a number of friends and colleagues said to me, “Are you sure?” knowing it would prompt days of abuse and threats on social media.

Since when is it brave or outrageous for a journalist to ask questions of an elected leader to test if their decisions stack up against available evidence?

The public should be able to trust us to do this every time: not just on COVID, but on any issue, including and especially the highly complex ones: sexual assault allegations and the rights of the accused versus the rights of a complainant; the rigorous protection of the wellbeing of all children who walk through the doors of a gender health care clinic; and many others.

When I see reporters whose work always somehow lines up with one side of an issue that’s complicated, I know I’m seeing activism, not journalism. It erodes my trust in what they’re telling me.

One message I received on social media during lockdowns stayed with me. A woman wrote something like, “Please I beg you stop asking these questions, you are making it so much worse.” I had sympathy for that. I thought YES, you are so right, asking questions DOES make it worse. It makes it worse for me too! It would be so much easier to simply believe that people in power always do the right thing, that they can be trusted, that your sacrifice is essential.

Where she was wrong was in thinking the answer was to stop with the questions. I’m afraid I have too much experience covering politics. So often, I’ve seen from governments of all stripes, a slide towards whatever is most expedient, self-serving or best masks incompetence.

The two biggest stories of my career

I couldn’t help but notice parallels between the pushback to questions about COVID policy and the pushback 20 years ago to questions about the war on terror, which I covered as the ABC’s Washington Correspondent right after 9/11.

The same binary framing as COVID was used, except instead of “lock it down or let it rip”, it was “You’re either with us or with the terrorists”. We forget now because it was so long ago but at that time, people were also living in fear of imminent, widespread death. We were told that terrorist ideology was like a virus, that another mass casualty attack could claim any one of us, any time.

The fear where I lived in the US was visceral, but even here in Australia, people felt personally at risk. Politicians told us they had to impose extreme measures never taken before to guarantee our safety. Decisions were made in secrecy: we had to trust them that it was necessary. If you dared question any of it, you were accused of siding with the terrorists.

New York City’s Twin Towers, photographed the day before the terrorist attacks of 9/11.(Supplied: Kate Officer)

Of course, that spin was used to justify what became disastrous US foreign policies — an invasion of Iraq that ultimately created Islamic state, a campaign in Afghanistan that eventually ended with the departure of the US and return of the Taliban, torture as an interrogation tool, never-ending detentions of suspects without charge… all these things fuelled radicalisation and made global terrorism worse.

We were assured that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction – imagine if nobody had ever questioned that. I started reporting on the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison in 2001, when the first prisoners from Afghanistan arrived. About 30 detainees are still there, some never having faced any kind of trial. Call me crazy, but I reckon that’s worth a few hard questions right now and it was certainly worth a few back then, despite accusations of being a terrorist-sympathiser.

COVID and the war on terror, 20 years apart, are the two biggest stories of my career and that’s why I’m focusing on them. AG Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, in a brilliant essay for The Columbia Journalism Review this year, noted that when the stakes feel highest — from the world wars, to 9/11, to the pandemic — people often make the most forceful arguments against journalistic independence. He defines it this way:

Independence is the increasingly contested journalistic commitment to following facts wherever they lead. It places the truth—and the search for it with an open yet sceptical mind—above all else. Those may sound like blandly agreeable clichés of Journalism 101, but in this hyperpolarised era, independent journalism and the sometimes counterintuitive values that animate it have become a radical pursuit.

Independence asks reporters to adopt a posture of searching, rather than knowing. It demands that we reflect the world as it is, not the world as we may wish it to be. It requires journalists to be willing to exonerate someone deemed a villain or interrogate someone regarded as a hero. It insists on sharing what we learn — fully and fairly — regardless of whom it may upset or what the political consequences might be. Independence calls for plainly stating the facts, even if they appear to favour one side of a dispute. And it calls for carefully conveying ambiguity and debate in the more frequent cases where the facts are unclear or their interpretation is under reasonable dispute, letting readers grasp and process the uncertainty for themselves.

We should ask ourselves hard questions, too

Every media company should consider the pursuit of independent journalism essential to their credibility. This obligation is particularly vital for the ABC and other public broadcasters because people rely on us so much as a source of trusted, impartial information.

Our choice of stories and the way they are told should mean that no member of the audience can ever identify an ABC “position” on an issue. And we should ask ourselves very hard questions about whether that is always the case, especially on the issues Louis Theroux calls the “pinch points”. At the ABC, we ask questions of people in power. But we also hold power ourselves. And so we should not be afraid to ask uncomfortable questions of ourselves too.

According to Roy Morgan Research, the ABC is Australia’s most trusted media organisation. But all media organisations, from the ABC to News Corp, are being affected by news avoidance and declining audience trust. The media overall is close to the bottom of the trust index.

The ABC is currently the 18th most trusted brand in Australia, while News Corp is the 4th most distrusted. Back in 2019, the ABC was fifth most trusted.

Let’s have the guts to look that in the face. It’s incumbent on every individual journalist in every newsroom to ask ourselves, are we doing something that’s causing audiences to avoid the news and to trust us less? If we’re too scared to scrutinise that, and to examine the issues we choose to emphasise and how we go about reporting stories and to perhaps have some awkward conversations about that, then we compromise our integrity.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time this year, behind the scenes, working with young, talented journalists, and I think their passion and energy and empathy is awesome.

I don’t want to discourage a new generation of reporters from having a go of doing journalism their way. I’m simply making the best case I can for the kind of reporting that I think is most powerful and trustworthy, and that bears the hallmarks of legends such as Andrew Olle: journalism that’s based in curiosity, not ideology. Like I said, I hope I’m right. Maybe I’m wrong.

Leigh Sales reporting from Washington in 2002.(Supplied)

A responsibility and a privilege

It’s very easy sometimes to focus on the negatives of our industry when really, the chance to tell people’s stories, to investigate wrongdoing and affect change, and to report on the world around us, is amazing. I was reminded what a privilege it is recently when I had coffee with an intern at the ABC who’d come in under an inclusivity and diversity program.

She started as a journalist in her 20s and everything was going great: she was having a fantastic career, working overseas, on the up and up.

Then one day, when she’s 30, she wakes up and she can’t move. And she’s diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. With MS, there are periods when you’re functional and then periods when it’s debilitating. And so her journalism career was in tatters. She wasn’t able to hold a full-time job for a decade.

And then this year, she landed this internship at the ABC.

She told me that after a decade of despair, she was just so, so happy to have a job that for the first week, she went to sleep every night holding onto her ABC lanyard.

We are so lucky to have the chance to do what we do on behalf of the public. I think a lot about whether I personally do enough to honour what a responsibility and privilege that is, and I hope I’ve done my best tonight and always — not to win the approval of people in this room but to deserve the trust of the regular Australian watching or listening at home.