The ABC reports this morning that Business Day journalist, Paddy Manning has been fired:
Fairfax business journalist Paddy Manning has been sacked for writing an opinion piece fiercely critical of the publisher’s recently-announced restructure and its use of so-called “advertorials”.
The senior reporter was dismissed yesterday afternoon after writing an online piece for Crikey, in which he attacked the company’s restructure plans and the editorial practices at the Australian Financial Review.
Here’s an excerpt from Manning’s Crikey piece yesterday:
Today’s rubbishy “First Person” sponsored editorial in The Australian Financial Review is a perfect example of why the business sections of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age should not be merged with the Financial Review Group — a decision announced by Fairfax last week.
Brought to you by the Commonwealth Bank, it features a rambling interview (plus vision!) with former Business Council president Graham Bradley, who calls for a wave of deregulation by the incoming Abbott government. Bradley declares over the past five years “we’ve not had a government in Canberra that’s been truly respectful of business, interested in business and supportive of business generally”.
Such creeping advertorial — touted as commercially necessary but also fundamentally ideological in its inevitable pro-business slant — has been noticeable in BusinessDay for at least a year: witness the introduction of saleable sections like Executive Style, My Small Business and IT Pro, as well as the use of outside columnists like mortgage broker Mark Bouris, former fund manager Matthew Kidman and even the return of media buyer Harold Mitchell.
The result has been to cramp space for news, features and the opinions and analysis of BusinessDay‘s own reporters and columnists, who are guided by a code of ethics and have no vested interests to push.
“Too often — even for many of its own hard-pressed reporters’ liking — the result is PR-driven ‘churnalism’ …”
…The result also has been a predictable skew on vital topics like climate change and industrial relations.
It is reporting with fear and favour. And you know what? Nobody reads it. Educated readers — The AFR‘s demographic — hate it. Ultimately, even advertisers shun it. It’s a business model for business journalism that had been tried at both The AFR and The Australian. It doesn’t work.
One can only observe the irony of the news reporter being fired for telling the truth about the newspaper.
