April 13, 2019
Welcome to Best of the Week, written in sunny Sydney. On the radio is Triple M Classic Rock, where you’re never more than ten minutes from AC/DC. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
This week: The Geoffrey Rush libel verdict, and what went wrong when I reported fake news to Facebook.
They hadn’t got it
I was sitting at this desk 24 hours earlier as I watched the live video stream of Geoffrey Rush’s defamation victory over The Daily Telegraph come through on Thursday afternoon.
I squirmed watching Justice Michael Wigney tear apart the newspaper and order what looks likely to be a record breaking libel payment to the actor. For anyone who has to deal with libel law, there’s no schadenfreude.
You might remember that scene midway through in All The President’s Men when Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee is reading Woodward and Bernstein’s copy.
“You haven’t got it,” he tells the crestfallen journos. When they try to argue, he adds: “Get some harder information next time.”
Eventually, of course, they got it. As a result President Nixon had to resign.
That’s the correct dynamic. The journos go out and find out what they can and bring it back to the editor. The editor makes a call on whether it’s enough. And sends them back to look harder if they haven’t got it.
In my small world, I’ve had a few days as an editor where I had to make a call on whether we really had it.
They’re among the most memorable, but also most stressful days. When you’re not writing a story with the cooperation of the subject, there’s never an absolute, 100%, definite moment where somebody rings a bell and tells the editor that you’ve got it.
But you have to make a call, and quickly. Mediacom’s mass axing of staff over forged campaign reports; the Atomic 212 awards scandal; 303’s sale to Interpublic; the threat of an injunction to stop us revealing the Kiis rebrand. Every one was a big call for me at the time.
