The economic shock of COVID-19 has rapidly worsened the already ailing revenue streams for journalism. Among the thousands of media jobs lost in 2019 and 2020, the loss of journalists with expertise in writing about men’s violence against women passed almost unnoticed. This loss, however, is significant and troubling.
The Saturday Paper recently published a piece by Jane Caro and Polly Dunning on the decline in women’s media. “The Hoopla, Australia’s bureau of HuffPost, WHIMN, ABC Life, 10 Daily, BuzzFeed Australia and many others have been lost entirely, while much of the mainstream print media has similarly dropped their women-centred sections”, they wrote. Daily Life at Nine once published some of the strongest and most diverse feminist writers in Australia. It’s now a “lifestyle” section concentrating on fashion, beauty and family-friendly stories.
Many of the journalists who specialised in men’s violence against women are no longer writing habitually for mainstream news. Miki Perkins won multiple awards for her reporting on family violence for The Age. She is now their environment reporter. Gina Rushton, Hannah Ryan, Sherele Moody, Clementine Ford, Celeste Liddle and Ruby Hamad are among the many journalists who were once writing regularly about the nuanced causes and effects of men’s violence against women. While some of them are still working as freelancers, the loss of specific, regular, expert writing is concerning.
Journalists with expertise in this area have also built up a strong of contacts. They know who has the inside knowledge to fill in the background, who can give quotes on the record, who is too scared of losing funding to tell the whole truth, who is pushing a specific agenda, and who can give the most up-to-date information in time to meet deadline. They know the risks involved in telling survivor stories and how to conduct interviews that paint an honest picture, while still being sensitive to the effects of trauma.
It also takes time to build up trust with experts who work on the frontline of violence, particularly in communities who have been given every reason to mistrust journalists. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have good reason to be suspicious of the predominantly white mainstream media, which has far too often erased, minimalised or sensationalised the effects of colonisation on First Nations people. But reporting on family violence without including Aboriginal voices is failing to tell the full story.
Dr Margaret Simons is a Walkley Award winning journalist and an Adjunct Professor at Melbourne University’s Centre for Advancing Journalism. “Experience is always important in journalism,” she says, “but perhaps particularly so when you are dealing with a complex criminal, social and human rights issue such as domestic violence.”
“To give an example, an inexperienced reporter is less likely to make good judgements about what weight to give to certain kinds of information, such as statements by neighbours that the perpetrator seemed like a ‘good guy’. If you have experience, you are likely to understand those statements in the context of the nature of domestic violence, as a hidden crime out of sight of neighbours and acquaintances.
You might still report them, but rather than saying ‘he was a good guy’, you might say something like ‘as is so often the case with domestic violence, neighbours and friends had no idea what was going on’.”
Having journalists with expertise in men’s violence against women in newsroom also means reporters can do better at leading stories rather than just responding to crime and breaking news. They understand that violence is not just a crime story, it’s about health, human rights, education, politics, economics, education and social justice.
Dr Jennifer Martin is an award-winning journalist of more than 25 years experience. She’s now teaching and researching journalism at Deakin University. She says losing journalists with expert knowledge is always going to hurt. “It places more pressure on the section editor to keep abreast of a range of topics and it also means that less experienced reporters can be influenced by people with different interests and agendas.”
Dr Martin points to Melissa Davey’s investigation that exposed the malpractice of obstetrician Emil Gayed, who needlessly removed women’s reproductive organs and left many others with life threatening infections and significant trauma. “It is highly unlikely a general reporter having to cover a range of stories would be able to produce this kind of journalism that changed lives for the better,” she says.
There’s definitely a benefit in moving the discussion about men’s violence out of the “women’s news” sections. It is as much, if not more a men’s issue than a women’s issue. Men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violence and they are more often violent to themselves and each other than to women. Journalists with expertise in this area are better equipped to keep this focus on their reporting and give their audiences information about potential solutions as well as prevalence.
The crash in funding for journalism means very few publications have the resources to devote wide, regular, ongoing coverage of men’s violence. Thousands of jobs in journalism have disappeared, inhouse journalists are required to cover a wider range of issues, and almost no one has the budget for freelancers. Almost every freelancer I spoke to for this article had experiences that matched my own. Pitch after pitch getting the same response from frustrated editors: “it’s a great idea and I wish we could run it, but we just can’t pay for it”.
Winner of the 2020 Walkley’s Our Watch Award, Nina Funnell, says audiences are still keenly interested in these stories but there’s little funding available for them. “Freelancers are dependent on finding grants or working with the few outlets that still have a freelancer budget. It’s a frustration for survivors and journalists, and for editors as well.”
Jess Hill, who wrote the Stella Award winning book, See What You Made Me Do, has a different perspective. She says the level of knowledge and curiosity among inhouse journalists has increased significantly, even in the last year. “The sophistication in their understanding has really changed. There’s much more understanding of the institutions that create injustice and a better awareness of domestic abuse as a system rather than a collection of isolated incidents.” She cites Jacqueline Maley, senior journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald’s report on John Edwards stalking Olga at her yoga class. “She really understood and explained why this was so sinister and the red flags it should have (but didn’t) raise with police. That report showed how some journalists have moved away from sensationalist reporting and are much more interested in the nuances, explaining how surveillance and control is so terrifying for survivors and exploring solutions at a systemic level.”
While this is certainly encouraging to hear, Hill also says it’s almost always because those journalists made the effort to educate themselves. Depending on overworked and under-resourced journalists to maintain this level of knowledge without the support of other journalists with years of experience and expertise is risky.
There are however, other signs of hope. Journalism is no longer confined to the pages of mainstream news outlets. Using social media channels, Clementine Ford recently reported on a man who sent a series of sickeningly abusive texts and voice messages to a woman who “politely turned down his (repeated) insistences that she send him photographs and come to his house”.
Social media, crowdfunding sites, niche publications and smaller independent news sites are filling the gap left by mainstream journalism and thereby highlighting those gaps for the people who seek them out.
It will take some time for journalism to find its feet in the post-COVID world and a great deal of expertise will be lost along the way but hopefully a more educated readership and the dedicated journalists doing their best to improve their coverage will encourage the rebuilding to include expertise on men’s violence as an integral part of journalism, rather than the niche sideline it has been in the past.
Jane Gilmore was the founding editor of The King’s Tribune. She is now a freelance journalist and author, with a particular interest in feminism, media and data journalism and has written for The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Daily Telegraph, The Saturday Paper and Meanjin, among many others. Jane has a Master of Journalism from the University of Melbourne, and her book FixedIt: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media was published by Penguin Random House in 2019.
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