It was a day of triumph and a day of shame for The Age newspaper, the once-great Melbourne daily. On Friday June 2, 2023, with justifiable pride, the newspaper trumpeted its victory over the defamation suit brought by Ben Roberts Smith, VC. On the same day, the newspaper announced that it would “trial a reduction” in the frequency of its editorials.
Here was a tragic mix of irony and cowardice that left little doubt that The Age was now blind to the public trust and to the opinion-forming roles of the journalism that earned The Age the reputation it enjoyed for more than a century. Its future ambition is populist banality.
Not surprisingly The Age was nevertheless moved to publish an editorial on its victory over Mr Roberts Smith despite its decision to cut its editorials. What appeared was a very poor effort with little sense of the historic occasion the newspaper ought to have been celebrating. Descending quickly into low-life vulgarity, the eighth word of the editorial was “f—ing”, and it didn’t improve as the words slid down the page.
The contrast with the quality of the news coverage of the paper’s defamation victory over Mr Roberts Smith was startling. From the front page headline “War Criminal” through the first six pages of detail, including the fine reporting of Nick McKenzie, the paper showed that it was still capable of journalism of a quality that is rare in Australia.
But then, on page 28, was the announcement under the heading “A grand tradition is changing”. “In place of daily editorials, we will feature more readers commentary, new columns and quizzes”, the paper declared. Thus the voice of The Age is muted, silenced, degraded, to make space for the glib idiocies of neurotic readers, self-serving columnists and irrelevant quiz-questions. As the Latins would have said, Sic transit Gloria mundi.
Before plumbing the depths of this disgraceful abandonment of tradition, it seems appropriate to note that the defeat of Mr Ben Roberts Smith’s suit was not the first famous defamation victory achieved by The Age. Surprisingly, the triumphant newspaper failed to mention the famous libel actions between 1893 and 1894 when the Victorian railways commissioner Richard Speight sued David Syme, owner of The Age, for $25,000 for libel.
Syme pleaded “fair comment”. He won the case and Speight recovered only one farthing in damages. David Syme did not respond to this triumph by enlarging the letters page, hiring more columnists and publishing quizzes. Instead the newspaper continued to inflict its opinions on all who preferred to buy it and its reputation, circulation and value continued to prosper.
Here a personal confession: I am one of the disappearing gang of leader writers who worked for The Age during the golden era of editor Graham Perkin, a man who cared greatly for what the newspaper stood for and said. I can say with confidence that Perkin would have been outraged at the mere suggestion that editorials should be replaced, even occasionally, by quiz games.
I do not claim that my generation was superior. Quite often we were not, but on our best days we exerted real influence. Under Perkin, The Age led the campaign to end capital punishment in Victoria. It supported the pro-choice case for abortion despite hostile opposition from religious interests, and it published the first newspaper leader advocating decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults. Other local causes championed by The Age were fluoridation of water supplies, decontamination of the Yarra River, protection of disadvantaged children through Perkin’s “Minus Children” Campaign.
On great foreign policy and national political and economic issues, The Age took a more conservative stance. It did not seriously consider whether genuine national interest concerns might have prompted the often aggressive behaviour of communist powers. It sat uncomfortably on the fence throughout the Vietnam war and had little to say about the distributional inequity that characterised Australian political and social life. The Age was, after all, part of the capitalist establishment.
But there were two great moments in Perkin’s leadership of the newspaper. With the support of his chief executive Ranald Macdonald he persuaded a reluctant company board that the newspaper should support Gough Whitlam’s bid for office in 1972. It was qualified support, but nevertheless The Age had supported Labor. The shock and horror of the Melbourne fogeys was pained and palpable.
Three years later, only a day before he died aged only 45, he assumed a towering Cromwellian rage to write a devastating leader calling for the resignation of the beleaguered Whitlam government. “Go now, go decently” was the final great heading that he wrote. The text of the leader came straight from the bowels of the 17th century Protector who in his time told another rump parliament: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately. In the name of God, go!”
And so back to the present and to the future. The words of the 2 June Ben Roberts leader revealed the paucity of elegant writers at The Age. It also revealed the poverty of corporate memory and the lack of any real appreciation of what the paper’s victory meant for future investigative journalism. In its hour of triumph The Age editorial was limp and lifeless when it should have been powerfully rededicating itself to the paper’s historic purpose and declaring its future intentions. Instead readers can look forward to more and more frequent silly letters, columns and quizzes. That is a tragic loss.
In this moment of grief it seems appropriate, for perhaps the last time, to close by naming and saluting those leaders writers who helped to teach me the trade. Graham Perkin, Geoff Hutton, Creighton Burns, Peter Cole Adams, Les Carlyon, Neil Jillett, Claude Forell, John Hamilton, Cameron Forbes, Len Radic. I apologise for any inadvertent omissions. We will not see or read such glorious prose again in the pages of the funny little newspaper that used to be The Age, and the loss is incalculable.