By Karen Fredericks
SYDNEY — I had never seen a "literary event" like it, and obviously neither had author John Pilger and journalist Wendy Bacon. On October 10 Gould's Bookshop in Newtown, a huge cavern packed to the rafters with shelves, piles, boxes and mounds of books, became the venue for a political meeting on the Australian media monopoly and the need for outlets for independent journalism.
Initially dubious at addressing the crowd of more than 300 via a squealing battery-operated megaphone, Pilger quickly warmed up, warning that "while the media is structured the way it is nothing, fundamentally, will change" and concluding with an exhortation to build a "newspaper of the popular movement".
It was billed as a book-signing, and Pilger did eventually sign copies of his latest book, Distant Voices. But the atmosphere was that of a public meeting or rally. People filled every corner of the ramshackle shop, and Pilger and Bacon were led to the steps in the centre, so they could address the crowd from a slightly raised position. In his lengthy introduction, his voice suitably affected by the metallic ring of the megaphone, bookseller Bob Gould recalled his days as a Trotskyist antiwar activist during the Vietnam Moratoriums.
The Vietnam theme continued in Wendy Bacon's address, in which she compared the journalistic careers of Pilger and the Sydney Morning Herald's leading investigative journalist, Ben Hills. Her comparison was prompted by a half-page article by Hills in the SMH on October 6 in which he quoted Pilger's most high-profile enemies and slammed his work as poorly researched and unsubstantiated — while admitting to never having read any of his five books!
"Why I think Ben is very interesting", said Bacon, battling the feedback, "is that he has a lot in common with John. They both started out doing popular writing for tabloids in the early '70s, they both benefited, although benefited is probably the wrong word, from the Vietnam War.
"During that war many people saw, for the first time, the need for committed journalism. The movement against the war opened up journalism ... it made journalists ask questions about what sort of work they were doing."
Ben Hills, says Bacon, has forgotten such lessons so as to be able to fit snugly into the mainstream press as one of the only
journalists in Australia sufficiently resourced to be able to produce long, investigative stories. Pilger, on the other hand, remains outside the mainstream, although, somehow, he has retained access to a relatively large audience.
According to Bacon, Hills hates Pilger because "John allows his values to show through in his journalism. His values are humanist and they are concerned with social justice. I believe John still has some sympathy for the socialist project as it was originally conceived ... but he can also write. He gets out there and investigates. It's that kind of empirical reporting (as in Distant Voices) that people like Ben Hills find very threatening ... . Hills wants to forget questions of social justice and pretend that every story is just the same as any other story."
Bacon warns that young journalists no longer have the opportunities that her contemporaries — Pilger, Brian Toohey, Marion Wilkinson — had. At least they reached a readership. They were eventually excluded from the mainstream for daring to oppose the powerful, but today's young journalists are excluded before they start. Almost every potential outlet for independent journalism in Australia is gradually being closed down. She pointed to the recent closure of Modern Times, the axing of the SMH Eastern Suburbs supplement and the decimation of freelance budgets for all Fairfax papers.
Pilger's address, continuing the Vietnam allusions, placed a more optimistic slant on the media picture.
"In the end", he said, "we have to control our own destinies. We have to start our own journals. We have to support our own radio stations. The public network in this country desperately needs support.
"If there was a kind of collective campaign about the media in this country, even a fraction of the kind of energy that was expressed by popular organisations about, say, the Vietnam War, a campaign that set out to educate the public on the importance of free information and free journalism, then perhaps things would start to move."
Asked to be more specific about the source and type of independent media needed to fill the void, Pilger outlined his ideas for a new paper in Australia.
"One idea I had some time ago was to cut down the initial outlay, almost down to nothing, and put out a 10 or 12 page sheet which would be promoted by flyers, distributed by volunteers and supported by a network of groups across the country.
"Above all it would distinguish itself by breaking investigative stories, in the same way that the National Times was a paper that you could not afford not to get every week to find out what the political structure was doing, to find out the way politicians run society and wield their power.
"If it was substantial enough, I think it could catch on. It would be something people would go out of their way, not only to get a copy of, but to back, to distribute, to get it around. It would almost become a kind of movement. Between those sheets there would have to be real, hard information, genuine story-telling. Professional journalism is absolutely critical. It's possible.
A Green Left Weekly seller emerged from the crowd at this point and handed Pilger a copy of GLW. Earlier Wendy Bacon had complained that left-wing papers were more propaganda tools than alternative news outlets. I commented that such a criticism was similar to those regularly levelled at Pilger for his committed journalism and asked him if he agreed with her assessment.
"I think we have to be very very careful of being critical of those who are filling the void at the moment, and filling it very successfully", he said. I subscribed for a long time to Direct Action, which I believe was Green Left Weekly's predecessor, simply to get some idea of what was going on in this country. It was a powerful informant and I don't think, apart from the odd tract here and there, that propaganda got in the way of the story telling.
"What was clear was that people simply didn't have the time and the money to do the kind of investigations that Wendy Bacon, Brian Toohey, Marion Wilkinson and others did on the National Times. But publications such as Green Left Weekly are terribly important. They contain analysis from a point of view, and they're good for that!
"... You use words that mean what they say, like 'imperialism', which is a taboo word today ... but these are not difficult concepts to understand. It has always been my experience that once you start to release information, consciousness is raised very quickly."
Pilger ended on a note of optimism and defiance. "Never underestimate the power of information and never underestimate the power of public opinion when it is acting on that information. It is formidable!"