BH:AG
2 November 2011
Hon Ray Finkelstein QC
Chair
Independent Media Inquiry
PO Box 2154
Canberra ACT 2601
Dear Sir
Thank you for the opportunity to make a short submission to your inquiry into Australia’s newspaper industry.
The NSW Nurses Association
The New South Wales Nurses' Association (NSWNA) is the registered union for all nurses and midwives in New South Wales. The membership of the NSWNA comprises all those who perform nursing and midwifery work. This includes assistants in nursing (who are unregulated), enrolled nurses and registered nurses and midwives at all levels including management and education.
The NSWNA has approximately 54,000 members and is affiliated to Unions NSW and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). Eligible members of the NSWNA are also deemed to be members of the New South Wales Branch of the Australian Nursing Federation.
Our role is to protect and advance the interests of nurses and midwives and the nursing and midwifery professions. We are also committed to improving standards of patient care and the quality of services health and aged care services.
The Association empowers nurses and midwives to actively participate in shaping every aspect of their professions: from pay claims and workload relief to professional practice standards and legal protection. Participation in democratic branches throughout NSW allows nurses and midwives to control their own agenda and to ensure that each workplace has a voice in the Association's direction. To supplement this democratic process, the NSWNA regularly conducts or commissions research to consult with our members on the range of pertinent issues as necessary.
We believe that our goal of constantly improving the quality of care in the health and aged care sectors in NSW and ensuring the efficient and effective allocation of scarce resources in NSW is largely well-served by a fairly responsible and interested media culture throughout NSW. However, there are times when we believe it is undermined by some aspects of reporting practice in sections of the media, including the print media.
In the interests of enhancing a responsible, informative media culture that facilitates social progress and democratic practice we would like to address some of our concerns.
Balanced and informative newspapers
The Association is a State-wide, grassroots organisation and our values are informed by our members’ professional duty to act on and advocate for the interests of patients. We rely on a range of media outlets to communicate health-related issues, including industrial relations issues, in an accurate, informative and unbiased manner.
In our view most newspapers, especially the regional and suburban newspapers in NSW, largely do a good job of reporting all sides of an issue and facilitating local public debate and scrutiny of issues of significance to their communities.
However, we are concerned about the lack of balance and avoidance of complexity that increasingly characterises some newspaper coverage of matters of key public interest, including in health, aged care and industrial relations. In our view this needs to be nipped in the bud, as this lack of completeness corrupts the potential for these debates to genuinely inform the NSW public, in a balanced way, of important health, aged care or industrial relations issues.
We believe there is, at times, an excessive emphasis on sensational reporting of errors or failures of care. The reporting of such issues is not to be suppressed, but it is always important to ensure the story fairly contextualises the situation. A media culture that fails to do this or that has an excessive emphasis on dramatic, screaming headlines can create a political and managerial environment that provides short-sighted, knee-jerk responses at the expense of meaningful reform. This is not in anyone’s interest and most certainly is not in the public interest. We have also seen our members, at the frontline of care delivery, subjected to threats and abuse from the public based on such oversimplified media reports.
Our approach to media relations is to provide as much background information as we can to illustrate a point we are making or campaign we are running. We work very hard, often at great expense, to provide credible research and hard data that can withstand scrutiny.
We especially do this for the benefit of newspapers, because the whole point of newspapers is that they supposedly have more space and words at their disposal to cover issues in a more expansive way. If that strength cannot be utilised then they are failing to provide a genuine public service and are failing in their self-proclaimed role of providing scrutiny of important public issues and activities. They are really no different to any other private organisation that has an opinion or view of the world. As a result many of the privileges they demand for themselves – special access to information and public officials, shield laws to protect sources, etc – need to be questioned.
For example, in our experience some papers, especially in the News Ltd group, are increasingly requiring extreme, sensational examples or case studies before they will run important health or aged care issues raised by us.
The NSWNA is very experienced in dealing with the media and has a policy of openness and public engagement. It operates in areas of significant public interest such as hospitals, health services, nursing homes and prisons and is always notifying the media of events it is involved in and, in turn, is regularly contacted by journalists for comment or assistance on health and aged care issues they have become aware of or are working on.
It also understands that many local issues it raises are just that, local, and not of significant wider interest to involve all major media outlets, including the major metropolitan daily papers. Having said that, our media distribution approach normally involves all major metropolitan media outlets, just to keep them informed in case they do see something they think has wider interest or in case the issue develops to such an extent that it does attract wider interest.
However, because of the industries we cover, the NSWNA is also often involved in much bigger issues and campaigns, which have significant public interest and public impact. For the reasons outlined above, newspapers can and should play a key role in informing the public and providing balanced scrutiny of such issues and campaigns. However, it is hard to avoid the impression that there is an increasing need for sensation and dramatic emphasis just to get such public conversations going through key sections of the newspaper sector. We often feel the pressure to comply with this just to try and get an important point across to the general public – a point that is often strong enough, in our opinion, to not always require such sensation.
Our recent campaign to establish mandated patient ratios illustrates this point. Our claims were based on substantial independent local and international research, examining the relationship between patient safety and staffing. This is a legitimate and important public debate in its own right. It should not have to be backed up with “bleeding” or suffering patients or industrial action just to attract the interest of newspapers, which are meant to, and have the space to, subject such important issues to greater analysis than a radio or TV news story.
This point was also illustrated during our 2004 aged-care wages case before the NSW Industrial Relations Commission. This was a case that impacted on a key and, at times, controversial public policy area, potentially involved considerable amounts of public expenditure and included a list of excellent experienced witnesses with interesting stories to tell.
For example, the Association arranged an independent academic researcher – a senior accounting professor in NSW - to analyse the employers' case that the industry did not have the capacity to pay the increases we sought. This person was a witness before the Commission and the media was notified that he was appearing and given a summary of what he was to talk about.
Significantly, the research uncovered widespread sloppy accounting practices and cover-ups in an industry that receives billions in public funding and where concerns about poor standards of care are frequently raised. It also raised important consumer protection and consumer rights issues regarding the use of funds provided by residents, including the controversial accommodation bonds.
These were matters of very clear and significant public interest, backed up by independent research. The Sydney Morning Herald readily understood this point and a balanced article appeared in that publication. However, on this occasion we could not get coverage in any depth in the News Ltd press, which at other times has no hesitation in running aged care victim stories. As a result, News Ltd effectively censored, in its publications, an important public debate about nursing home funding and resident rights.
The NSWNA also believes that, while it is an important role of the press to scrutinise, it is not the job of the modern press to present a pre-determined outcome in its news reporting and news pages. On occasions our officers have been told by journalists that the information we are providing is not relevant or of interest because it is not consistent with the ‘story’ they want to tell or the campaign they are running. It is a cliché, but this lends some truth to the idea that there are times when media outlets do not want “the facts to get in the way of a good story”.
The Association is of the view that the public is entitled to be properly informed about the issues impacting on standards of care in the health system. Distortion of the facts through incomplete and misleading reporting, based on a view or campaign the newspaper itself wants to progress despite an alternative set of facts and information being provided by people who have access to it, does not support the public interest in developing better health and aged care.
In dealing with the media the Association, like all other public institutions, puts its own views on issues and runs its campaign messages. It is the job of newspapers and other media outlets to subject all that to scrutiny and find other supporting or opposing views if they exist. The NSWNA does not believe everything needs to be over dramatised and important information and debates should not be censored simply because they cannot be immediately illustrated by a dramatic individual case study. Many important health and aged care issues can stand in their own right and are capable of being publicly discussed and understood without excessive recourse to extreme personal examples.
Therefore the NSWNA believes the inquiry should look very closely at the content and enforcement of media codes of conduct to ensure we can get a more balanced, issues-based approach, with less individual sensationalism, in the general news sections of Australian newspapers. The NSWNA believes there is an important place in our newspapers for dramatic case studies and the exposure of dreadful individual treatment and behaviour. However, we must not lose the balance between the provision of important information to the public and the coverage of more complicated yet important issues, in a fair and interesting way, and such dramatic “if it bleeds it leads” news stories.
A free press or an independent press?
Also, the emphasis should be on an independent media, not a so-called “free” media. The media, including newspapers, have a vital role to play in our society and as such it should not just be “free” to do what it likes. It must be independent so it can scrutinise society and facilitate public debate without fear or favour. However, there should be and can be enforceable parameters. Those parameters do exist and can be found in most media codes of conduct now. The main issue remaining to be sorted out is enforceability and accountability, in that sense, of the media and newspapers themselves.
Regulation of expenditure during election campaigns and its implications for freedom of speech and media power
Finally, the importance of this debate about the role and conduct of newspapers has been increased by recent restrictions imposed by governments on expenditure by organisations such as the NSWNA during election periods. For example, the O’Farrell Government in NSW has imposed significant restrictions on how much we can spend on our own message, especially during election campaign periods. The Queensland Government has introduced similar laws.
This is a significant erosion of the so-called freedom of speech in our society many media outlets so often talk about. It means, especially during election campaign periods (which have fairly elastic definitions and long lead times in some cases), that newspapers and other media outlets have enhanced power in terms of what messages get put in front of the public and how often they get put before them.
Such attacks on freedom of speech are being hidden behind altruistic reasoning such as restrictions on the power of money. The problem is it simply amplifies the power of private media companies in the political process. You can spend as much money as you like, if you have got it, on pushing an agenda – and right up to election day – if you are a private media company such as News Ltd or Fairfax. However, private entities such as the NSWNA, and their capacity to go around the newsroom practices and priorities of such companies, are being curtailed
It does not serve the interests of democracy or social progress in NSW or Australia to now limit the right of member-based organisations such as ours to promote a viewpoint, debate policy issues and raise concerns during election periods. If we are to be regulated during election periods then the media, including newspaper, coverage of election campaigns will also require significant regulation.
In the period leading up to the establishment of this inquiry there was a lot of national and international discussion about the power of media proprietors and media companies in the political process. Laws restricting organisations such as the NSWNA risk significantly distorting that relationship even more. Surprisingly there has been little media coverage or comment about freedom of speech in this context.
Finally, in terms of newspaper business models such laws also cut off a vital source of potential revenue for newspapers during election periods – especially, as our buyers inform us, newspaper groups demand an advertising premium for election material in the form of the highest casual rate applicable plus maximum colour and preferred-page loading rates.
Recommendations:
1. That the inquiry look at the content and enforcement of media codes of conduct to ensure we can get and maintain a balanced, issues-based approach, with less sensationalism, in the general news sections of Australian newspapers.
2. That the inquiry help switch the emphasis to discussion of an independent media rather than a so-called free media and that the distinction be drawn between the two ideas.
3. That the inquiry consider the impact of election spending restrictions, on organisations such as the NSW Nurses Association, on the role and impact of newspapers in society.
4. That the inquiry either recommend the abolition of all election spending restrictions by member-based organisation, such as the NSW Nurses Association, or develop a framework that provides greater regulation of media coverage during the periods that restrictions on so-called election expenditure by such organisations are in force.
Yours sincerely
BRETT HOLMES
General Secretary