Australian politicians are hardly global figures. So when Kevin Rudd spent five days in London in April 2008, it might have otherwise passed unnoticed by the British public. But, then, there is a rule about Australian politicians winning the attention of Britons: if all else fails, invoke the republic. Sure enough, the prime minister declared, just hours before an audience with the queen at Windsor Castle: ‘Once a republican, always a republican.’ Australia would, Rudd said, see in the coming year ‘an accelerating public debate’ about a republic. It was enough to gain Rudd some coverage in the British press, and excitable Tory monarchists took notice.

That accelerating public debate has not materialised, at least not yet. Apart from featuring in the Rudd government's 2020 Summit in 2008, where it garnered enthusiastic responses from the Summit's 1000 delegates, the republic remains off the national political agenda. For now, any questions about the republic have been deferred. There is a global recession to worry about first, and there has not yet been the requisite debate on how a second republic referendum process might proceed. But with the leaders on both sides of Australian politics avowed republicans – current opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull was, as most readers would recall, the chair of the Australian Republican Movement during the failed 1999 referendum – it seems only a matter of time before the republic returns to our public debate.

New leadership. Fresh ideas for the future. An education revolution. Fixing the federation. When Kevin Rudd led Labor to office in 2007, he did so promising change. It was an irresistible proposition for an electorate weary of an 11-year-old government that was running out of energy and ideas.

Not long after the 2007 election, flushed with the excitement of a Labor victory, I sat down at home in Sydney to write a dispatch for the British magazine Prospect. What could Australians expect from their new prime minister? The fact that Rudd was still a relatively new figure on the Australian political scene only made the guessing game more interesting. His leadership offered a blank sheet onto which everyone could write their aspirations, if not idealisations.

There were a few things about Rudd that were clear. While very much one whose leadership remained a work in progress, this was to some extent offset by evident strategic nous and media flair: recall, for instance, his address to Chinese Premier Hu Jintao in fluent Mandarin at the APEC summit of September 2007. It was clear, too, that Rudd would bring a certain temperament and style of governing to the Lodge – this was likely to be a presidential prime minister, rather than one leading a cabinet based on primus inter pares. Certainly, there was no question about his discipline and stamina.

The heady optimism of the possibility of journalists reclaiming responsibility for the Fourth Estate ideal lingered well into the 1990s. A backlash was nonetheless building, which, by the end of the decade, had debased many of the principles that propelled the earlier movement. Audiences grew weary of disclosure and moral certainty, managements tired of the costs and journalists found their attentions directed towards small-time shysters, and populist campaigns designed to ‘name the guilty man’, and swamp public figures with saturation coverage. Just as had happened at the beginning of the century when the popularity of the American muckraking magazines reached into the mainstream before disappearing, the investigative journalism popularised in the 1980s progressed along a similar path.

At the beginning of the 1990s there was a plethora of programs and publications with an overtly watchdog agenda, most notably in commercial television current affairs. For a time the disclosures on the programs propelled ratings and set news agendas in what had become a highly competitive business. But the need to churn out product and keep the ratings high made it hard to sustain substantial investigations. The focus moved back towards consumer rip-offs, small crimes, law and order, the century-old standbys of popular journalism. The people meters that shaped much television programming dictated that this was what the audience wanted.

Long since most people have forgotten – if they ever knew – what the first, second and third estates were, there is general understanding that the Fourth Estate is another name for the news media. By a curious process of hype, self-promotion, definitional flexibility and being a good idea, the Fourth Estate has survived.

Just.

The ideal of the news media successfully fulfilling a political role that transcends its commercial obligations has been seriously battered. Its power, commercial ambitions and ethical weakness have undermined its institutional standing. There is now a widespread, and reasonable, doubt that the contemporary news media can any longer adequately fulfil the historic role the press created for itself several hundred years ago. Then it created itself as an institution of political life designed to act on behalf of the people and report on and give voice to those in positions of political, corporate, economic and social power. In the intervening decades the news media has itself become a source of real and significant power and influence, an industry prepared to exercise and pursue self-interested commercial, political and cultural agendas.

The press was the bastard estate of the eighteenth century. At a time of limited suffrage, but growing literacy, the press became a crucial political institution, intimately connected to the concerns and preoccupations of its readers. By pursuing an institutional ambition the press created itself as more than another business. It created the wont which it supplied. Innovation and willingness to pursue technological developments later enabled the press to grow and diversify to the point where newspapers are now a small part of the news media.

By claiming a public and essentially democratic purpose, which shapes its other imperatives, the news media has been able to define itself as an institution with a public political, social and cultural role. As a ‘business affected by public purpose’ (Hutchins, 1947: 90), the media has asserted influence across a wide range of endeavours. Indeed it has been argued that the media is central to ‘determining the level of the civilisation in which it operates. Freedom of the press … means freedom to turn that level up or down’ (Hocking, 1947: 45). The contemporary news media has spun the dial in both directions at different times.

The claim to this central, independent status is based largely on the liberal arguments of the Enlightenment, which led to the successful creation of the notion of the press as the Fourth Estate in nineteenth-century Britain, and as an institution of such importance to the democratic process that it must not be limited in the United States. It emerged formally in other countries as well – the Fourth Power in France and Spain, the Third Estate in Sweden with constitutional guarantees of press freedom since 1766, and even, for a time, as the Seventh Power in the former Yugoslavia.

Australian journalism has changed significantly in the last fifty years, to become much less constrained. It is no longer restricted to reporting verbatim the public pronouncements of prominent men. It has become more investigative and more independent of politicians and owners, more able to pursue Fourth Estate ideals. This is evident in the attitudes of journalists, as has been shown, but can also be seen in the types of stories pursued and the methods used. In this chapter I trace the process by which Australian journalists have become more expansive in their editorial expectations, in a transition which can be characterised as a move from reporting to investigating.

In this chapter I identify key individuals, events and institutions as signposts on the road of transition. The evolving commitment to pursuing Fourth Estate ideals is examined by analysing some major breakthroughs in the form and content of Australian journalism since the late 1950s.

The data presented in this appendix is drawn from the survey of Australian journalists conducted under the auspices of the Media and Democracy project. Six hundred journalists involved in daily news and current affairs production around Australia were sent the questionnaire in June and July 1992. Forty-one per cent completed and returned the self-administered 178 question survey. The survey was also sent to 50 opinion leading investigative journalists, producers and editors, who had taken a prominent role in the production of the investigative and watchdog journalism published and broadcast in Australia during the 1980s. Nearly 80% of this sample responded.

This survey has also been administered in five other countries, in one of the most ambitious cross-national studies of journalists ever undertaken. To ensure that the Australian survey adequately addressed the issues central to my preoccupations, I added 35 questions explicitly addressing the news media's Fourth Estate role, and an entire section on investigative journalism. Journalists selected to participate in the survey were chosen at random. The method of selecting the sample varied from country to country, depending on the available information. In Italy for instance the sample was drawn from the national directory of journalists; in Britain, Sweden, United States and Germany it was drawn from a sample of news rosters from selected news organisations; in some cases individuals were selected by news editors and others directly by correspondence.

Overview of methodology

In Australia I worked directly with the Australian Journalists' Association (AJA), an organisation I was a member of, and had a history of collaboration with, on previous research.

For nearly two centuries the idea that the press plays a central role in the management and maintenance of a representative democracy has framed debates about the media. The eighteenth-century claim, that the press was entitled to its own independent standing in the political system, as the Fourth Estate, has become an ideal which continues to influence the attitudes of those working in the late twentieth century news media, as well as politicians and citizens. The press, in the words of Jürgen Habermas was the public sphere's ‘pre-eminent institution’ (Habermas, 1992: 181) and despite profound changes to society, communications and political life, the modern news media, and those engaged in its production, continue to embrace this institutional role.

The role as the public sphere's ‘pre-eminent institution’ was not conferred, but won during the political, economic and social transformations of the Enlightenment. At a time of limited suffrage, but increasing literacy, ‘the press’ – in the words of George Reeve editor of The Edinburgh Review, who in 1855 penned a classic formulation of the Fourth Estate – ‘created the wont which it supplies’ (Reeve, 1855: 470). As Rupert Murdoch observed 106 years later, before he became the owner of one of the largest media empires the world has ever known: ‘Unless we can return to the principles of public service we will lose our claim to be the Fourth Estate. What right have we to speak in the public interest when, too often, we are motivated by personal gain?’ (Mayer, 1964:51).

In defending its standing as the institutional Fourth Estate the Australian news media has sought to assert a role central to what one network's corporate lawyer described the ‘maintenance of our democratic society’. This role is not recognised in the Australian Constitution, and indeed the question of whether the Constitution even implies a right to freedom of political expression was only resolved by the High Court in 1994 and has since been subjected to continuing legal debate. Nonetheless James Maclachlan, general counsel for Channel 9, articulated a widespread view when he told a parliamentary committee that the news media played a central political role in representative democracy ‘acting as a watchdog and providing a forum for accountability of the exercise of public and private power’ (Cooney, 1994: 37). Given the Constitution's diffidence on freedom of expression, some reluctance by the judiciary, executive and parliament to allow a watchdog media industry to become Maclachlan's ‘fourth link in the estate’ would be understandable. The other institutions – once also considered estates – accept the aspirations and actions of the news media cautiously.

The strongest Australian public advocate of the democratic purpose of an unfettered press is, somewhat ironically, an academic lawyer: David Flint, professor of law at the University of Technology, Sydney, long-time chairman of the Australian Press Council who in 1997 became chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority. Flint advocates, virtually without qualification, the democratic purpose of a free press, constitutionally empowered to act as the Fourth Estate.

The ability of the Fourth Estate to accommodate a wide range of operational definitions may demonstrate the flexibility of the ideal, but it also ensures that the operation of the news media is based on a fundamental paradox. Of the institutions which emerged to provide checks and balances, to ensure that the political system was subject neither to the arbitrary authority of a capricious monarch, nor the tyranny of the majority, the press was the only one whose survival depended on, and was measured by, commercial success.

Commercial success helped to ensure independence, but also made the press' Fourth Estate ambitions vulnerable to owners seeking to inflate profit by tantalising audiences. Profit bought a ticket to independence. But it also held the seeds of the press' undoing as a political institution. While the press demanded and won the right to play a central role in the conduct of political life, its independence relied on the interest and goodwill of private owners. As Habermas observed, the transformation of the press into a commercial operation provided ‘the gate through which privileged private interests invaded the public sphere’ and newspaper publishers changed from being merchants of news to dealers in public opinion (Habermas, 1989: 182–5).

This transformation established the preconditions which made it possible for the widely varying definitions of the Fourth Estate, already outlined, to emerge and develop.

Recognition of the importance of information, to economic and social well-being, predated general acceptance of the idea that citizens should have access to a wide range of information, to enable them to form opinions and make responsible political judgements. The demand for access to information has had a long history in social and intellectual thought, often accompanied by the idea of providing information for profit (James, 1991: 37–41). As the power of the monarchy, aristocracy and church splintered, challenged by revolutions, and social and political movements, the press emerged and assumed greater power (Stephens, 1988: 170). The press intruded itself into the political system, to become the principal agency for the provision of information to facilitate political choices, and the relationship between the media, politicians, government and citizens encapsulated in the shorthand description, the Fourth Estate, developed. In 1855 George Reeve traced the development from:

The Australian journalists surveyed express considerable personal faith in the ideal of the Fourth Estate and their responses indicate that this faith influences approaches to their work. They demonstrated a readiness to distinguish between the commercial objectives of the organisations that employ them and the editorial principles they value. Recognition of the tension between these competing elements is important. It is not sufficient, however, to establish that the Australian journalists surveyed fully accept the obligations imposed by the principles that underpin the ideal of the Fourth Estate.

In this chapter I test the validity of the journalists' assertions about the idealised Fourth Estate using the information gathered from the survey. The five contests to the Fourth Estate examined in relation to the corporate news media – political purpose and independence; commercial priorities; understanding of public opinion; diversity and accountability – are evaluated on the basis of the information gathered from the two groups of Australian journalists.

Political Purpose and Independence

The political purpose and independence of the news media are important elements of the Fourth Estate. This principle implies that the news media will fulfil a political function and accept a serious purpose. Those advocating an institutional role for the press in the very different political and economic environment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries argued that the news media would demonstrate political independence.

The innovations during the 1960s and 1970s set the scene for profound change during the 1980s. During this decade, Australian journalism moved to assert its place as an equal contender in the political process.

The development of this standing occurred in three distinct phases. Much of the reporting focused on disclosing official corruption. Journalists adopted a critical attitude towards public figures and elected officials. This was far removed from the approach described as appropriate in the 1930s, in which news was the statement of facts by responsible men which journalists had no responsibility to judge. By the 1980s, position afforded little protection, and journalists and editors routinely made judgements about veracity. Many of the journalists who came to prominence during the 1980s had formulated their approach to journalism during the politically turbulent 1970s.

While a number of the major articles published and broadcast in the 1980s built on work that had been done before, the more assertive investigative reporting of the 1980s did not develop in a simple linear fashion. The crafting of news stories and the practice of journalism does not lend itself to such certainties: the quest for sources and confirmation is more chaotic. Articles published during the 1980s particularly by the National Times, Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Bulletin and Courier-Mail, and broadcast by Four Corners and 60 Minutes, built on what had been reported before, but took it to new levels of significance.

If, as has been argued in the previous chapter, the late twentieth-century news media industry is a flawed embodiment of the Fourth Estate, the question remains whether journalists, editors and producers, desire, or are able, to muster sufficient intellectual authority to stake a meaningful claim to custodianship of the ideal.

In this and the following chapter I examine empirically the attitudes of Australian journalists towards the Fourth Estate. This is done by describing, evaluating and comparing the information gathered from the Media and Democracy survey of two groups of Australian journalists

The data provides a snapshot of the attitudes of the Australian journalists surveyed in 1992 towards their work and its place in public life. The full survey, its methodology and results are set out in the appendix.

The data provides a springboard to consider of the roles, practices, methods and attitudes of Australian journalists and to test whether the contests to the Fourth Estate, examined in chapter 5, can be sustained from the perspective of the journalists surveyed.