First because I've attended all but one of these events - I was still posted overseas when the first one happened - and that means I'm intensely aware of being in the distinguished company of those who've spoken before me.
But second, because Andrew Olle was a good friend of mine, and probably the colleague I most admired as well. We first became friends in 1979, on the then-new program Nationwide. The program was led by John Penlington, a pioneer of current affairs television in Australia in the early days of Four Corners. Paul Murphy, Jenny Brockie, Richard Carleton and Geraldine Doogue were among the reporters and presenters. But Andrew stood out. He came to Nationwide already fully armoured as a journalist - Years of standing up to Joh 'feed the chooks' Bjelke Petersen saw to that. In fact one of Andrew's badges of honour was that Joh ended up refusing to talk to him.
We were friends from that time on, and we worked together again on Four Corners in the late eighties and early nineties. Andrew was a perfectionist and a stickler for facts. He also had a remarkable journalistic eye. Like every other reporter on the program, I used to write links for him to read before and after the story I'd put together. Andrew would retire to his office and shut his door, and after awhile, like every other reporter on the program, I'd find that he had torn my links apart and come up with something completely different. It would have been annoying, but in almost every case you had to admit that he'd improved on your work. He had a particular talent for finding the one key aspect of the story you hadn't emphasised enough, and bringing it to light.
Andrew was also at the time Australia's best interviewer. I think someone described it as tactful tenacity: but the fact that, as so many people remarked after his death, his politics were a mystery even to his friends, meant that he could be equally tough on either side. And Andrew's principles of interviewing, built around the base of close listening and short, well-researched questions, were just as effective in morning radio here in Sydney as they were in cross-questioning Bob Hawke or Alan Bond on Four Corners.
I still can't think without strong emotion of the day I answered the phone on assignment in Venice, of all places, to hear the news that Andrew Olle had been struck down. Whatever else happens tonight, please do give as much as you can to the evening's principal cause: research into brain tumours. Andrew was 47 when he died: as Annette and Nick and Sam and Nina would tell you, and as so many of his friends and his audience would agree, much, much too young.
It's Andrew I think of when I read, as I do daily now, attacks on what are variously called "old media", dead tree media", the MSM, for Main Stream Media, or the Lamestream media. Andrew with his meticulous attention to facts and his scrupulous fairness represented the best of old media. And let me say right up front, because much of what I say tonight will sound bleak or even apocalyptic, that I'm a journalism romantic.
I joined the ABC as a half-English dilettante with an arts degree and a Pommy accent. I remember going for an interview at the Herald. First mistake - I went to the Hunter St office, which was just their corporate headquarters, not the actual newspaper. Then I asked someone the way, but apparently the way I said 'Herald' was unintelligible, because I ended up at Harold Park. I did make it to Broadway on time despite all that, but the Herald found my minimal charm and talent easy to resist. Somehow, Aunty, where the BBC voice was still pretty prevalent in those days, saw something in me and, stylish in a denim jacket with patch pockets and a pair of flared trousers, I turned up on February the eleventh 1974 at 164 William St, headquarters of ABC News.
It was a time of turmoil in Australia and elsewhere. Gough Whitlam was Prime Minister. President Nixon was in trouble at home over Watergate, and losing the war overseas in Vietnam.
Britain, where I'd been at university until the previous year, was sinking further into a slough of intractable industrial disputes, three day weeks and power cuts. The Cultural Revolution in China was still not over, Brezhnev's stultifying rule still had a decade to run in the Soviet Union.
And so it was that a mere two months later, on what was effectively cadet work experience in Canberra, with most of my colleagues at lunch in the late lamented non-Members' bar, I found myself writing the ABC News story of the double dissolution of Parliament and the announcement of the Federal election.
"The aide said", wrote Suskind, "that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
So here we all are, and I imagine most of us here tonight would categorise ourselves as the reality based community, but we too are beleaguered.
Here in Australia we still regulate the airwaves. Not often, but sometimes. ACMA famously ordered fact-checking training for Alan Jones after he repeatedly used figures which were - egregiously - scientifically and mathematically wrong about carbon dioxide. But even if this has the desired effect on Jones, which I doubt, it's still shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. You no longer need Fox News or radio shock jocks to feed your prejudices and screen out the facts. You just create a world where you get all your news from the twitter and Facebook and blog sources you've chosen. And that world's already upon us. A September Pew research study showed that a third of under thirties in the US already get their news from social media - far, far more than newspapers and equal with TV. Australia's famously a land of technological early adopters, and I believe the figures here would be similar.
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