Graeme Turner and journalism

Journalism was by no means Graeme Turner's primary research interest, but his contribution outstripped many scholars specialising in Journalism Studies. What he wrote about journalism during his long academic career had a real impact, in both the broader media and communication studies field and among those teaching journalism in universities.

He approached journalism as an important activity. When it fell short, as it all too often did and still does, his critique was sharp, sometimes searing – but it came from the perspective of urging journalists to do better rather than lamenting or, worse, sneering at journalism. As someone who came from the newsroom to the academy in the early 1990s and later that decade watched bemused as journalism and communications academics hurled metaphorical, multi-syllabic rocks at each other in the so-called Media Wars, I very much welcomed Graeme Turner's perspective and contribution.

We bumped into each other over the years at conferences, on course reviews, and as referees for prospective lecturers, but were not close colleagues as some other contributors to this special issue are. Graeme was always good to talk to, though, dispensing academically informed, if earthily expressed wisdom. In 2010, we sat on a panel reviewing the University of Queensland's journalism course. Late one afternoon, as the panel's discussion became mired, Graeme said, ‘If you ever hear yourself saying, ‘We tried this idea 10 years ago and it didn’t work then,’ you know it is time to get out’.

I first came to value Graeme's work as it helped my own journalism. In 2005, I was asked by the editor of The Monthly to profile one of television's golden boys, Ray Martin, by then nearing the end of his second, less successful stint as host of A Current Affair, as the article's headline, ‘The dog days of Ray’, reflected. Graeme's book-length study of television current affairs, Ending the Affair, was released that same year. It was the culmination of his work on the genre's rise and fall. He charted its popularity and influence on politics followed by its ‘tabloidization’ as entertainment values gradually eroded the television networks’ commitment to informing their audience and acting in the public interest.

Tagging along with Ray Martin for a couple of days enabled me to explore how the changing nature of TV current affairs played out in the ambivalence of someone who had made their name as a serious journalist, first at the ABC, then as one of the founding co-presenters of 60 Minutes on Channel Nine, but was now fronting a program increasingly pursuing what the annual Fugly Awards called the ‘fatties, freaks, and finance formula’. Here's a moment where Graeme's work was particularly apt. Martin had been working on a story about a doctor's use of a cancer treatment machine that had been investigated by medical authorities.

Listening while he chews on a roll, Martin is working his way through the 570-page report. He's preparing questions for the health minister [Tony Abbott], who has agreed to be interviewed. It is a small victory for Martin. The program seldom interviews politicians anymore because the ratings counters show that viewers switch channels the moment a politician appears. From this, program-makers conclude that viewers find politics boring. Others conclude that what viewers find boring is the way commercial TV shows present politics. “Watching Kerry O’Brien interview Peter Costello on Budget night,” says Graeme Turner, “is like watching two cats attempt to play with the same mouse” (Ricketson, 2005).

For Graeme, the decline of TV current affairs was cause for lament. Drawing on Simon Cottle's work about journalism's role in constructing people's relationship with the rest of the culture, he underscores the ‘special cultural significance of this television genre in producing the conditions within which citizens can most freely and productively participate in a democracy’ (Turner, 2005: 160). He ended his book imploring adventurous television programmers to grasp the opportunity to take new approaches to program-making as they had in the past, with This Day Tonight on the ABC and 60 Minutes. Without that, he bleakly concluded, ‘not only is there not much of a future for it, but it won’t matter to most of us whether it has a future or not. We’ll be stuck with having to invent another means of generating a public conversation about the things that do matter’ (Turner, 2005: 161).

Like television, radio changed dramatically as a medium during Graeme's academic career. He was particularly interested in the rise of the shock jock and the way its most famous practitioners, Alan Jones and John Laws, abused their credibility with the audience in the notorious cash for comment scandal of the late 1990s. Laws was shameless about it, denying he was a journalist which meant there was ‘no hook for ethics’, which was bad enough but much of Jones's program concerned politics, both federal and state. The idea that the opinions of such a trenchantly political person were for sale to the highest bidder worried many, including Graeme.

He spent a good deal of time studying talkback radio around the country, homing in on Jones's particular approach, which differed markedly in style from other shock jocks such as Laws or Neil Mitchell on 3AW in Melbourne. With Stephen Crofts, he wrote ‘Jonestalk: the specificity of Alan Jones’, which was published in this journal in 2007. When Jones retired from radio, ostensibly on doctor's orders, in 2021, The New Daily asked me to write a piece offering an overview of Jones's career. I called Graeme and at short notice he provided excellent material, distilling the research from a national study of talkback radio into digestible analysis for the news website's readers.

His first point was that Jones's words occupied about 75 per cent of the program's airtime. Rather than talkback radio, Jones was running a talk to program. ‘He was a very skilled broadcaster but in a very particular way. He could marshal complicated material into a series of points he wanted to make, and then 30 min later, present the same points in a different order, which required either careful scripting or a good memory’, he commented. Jones would repeat the same ideas again and again through his programs, ‘embedding political phrases – slogans really – in his listeners’ minds, to the point where they would ring in and repeat these formulations back to him’ (Ricketson, 2020).

These interactions are not only the ones I remember, but they do illustrate an aspect of what Stuart Cunningham discusses in his introduction to this special issue. Quoting Meaghan Morris, he writes that Graeme was ‘the total package’, outstanding in the trifecta of teaching, research, and service to the discipline. Included within the last leg but not explicitly mentioned is communicating with the news media. Somewhat disparagingly, the journalistic term for an academic expert is ‘dial-a-quote’. Graeme fitted the first part of that descriptor, being readily available, but unlike some starstruck academics, he always offered incisive comments, clearly expressed.

After retiring from his last full-time role at the University of Queensland, in 2012, Graeme, it seemed to me, became increasingly concerned with the state not only of the media, broadly defined, but of the nation, and the world. In 2016, he published Re-inventing the Media, which asked scholars to think through the implications of three interlocking issues affecting many countries: what to do about the decline of the mass media; the impact of drastically changing relations between the media and the state, and the consequences for society of celebrity culture. In the wake of COVID-19, The Shrinking Nation was published (2023). It was written at the end of 9 years of Liberal/National Party coalition governments and hammers home the consequences for Australia of the failures of neoliberalism to deal with many problems besetting society. These existed not simply in the media and cultural industries, though they were bad enough, but in providing realistic opportunities for young people to enter the housing market or the cynically ruthless treatment of unemployed people through the Robodebt scheme, among many examples.

He continued to produce academic articles but seemed more focussed on reaching beyond the academy. The final book Graeme produced concerned the sector to which he had devoted his working life – higher education. Broken: Universities, Politics, and the Public Good is part of Monash University's In the National Interest series of short books that are a similar length to a Quarterly Essay and aim to bring expert knowledge to bear on urgent issues facing the country. A growing number of academics have been pointing to the problems dragging down the sector. By 2025, the destructive impact of the Morrison government's Jobs Ready Graduate package for humanities and communications degrees in particular had become abundantly clear. Also becoming clear was the Albanese Labor government's treacle-slow progress towards reforming it. Graeme's short book cut through by taking a case study approach to what the sector looks like to those who choose, or aspire, to work in it. Uninspiring and disheartening summed it up. He did a lot of media about it, including an appearance at Readings bookshop in Melbourne – which was the last time I saw him.

In his final years, too, Graeme set up a website and began a blog about three areas: The Shrinking Nation, which continued the work of the book of the same name; Tales from the Quadrangle, about higher education; and From the Sideline, which has only two posts, about the TV series, Succession, and the Matildas soccer team.

His final blog, published a month before he died, in November 2025, sat within The Shrinking Nation, but really its topic was the shrinking world and what Cory Doctorow calls its enshittification, as captured in the blog post's title: ‘Shit-posting your way to power: Facebook, Trump and the new normal in political debate’ (https://graemeturner.org/2025/10/23/shit-posting-your-way-to-power-facebook-trump-and-the-new-normal-in-political-debate/).

He had been reading Sarah Wynne-Williams’ alarming insider account of working at Facebook before the 2016 US presidential election, Careless People: A story of where I used to work (2025). She revealed how Facebook embedded staff in Trump's campaign team, where they drew on the microtargeting data tools they had designed for commercial advertising to help the Trump campaign. Millions of bespoke political messages were sent out, blending advertising, misinformation, fake news, inflammatory posts and calls for fundraising. Inventing new ways to manipulate voters about an election was bad enough for Graeme but worse was that Facebook's executives were as uninterested in politics as in the public good.

No, it was just about the money. The Trump campaign was one of Facebook's top advertisers, globally, and the corporation's enthusiasm for Trump was driven by the high levels of user engagement his campaign was able to generate as it flooded the zone with outrage, anger, fear, hate, lies and just plain bullshit…What this book describes is moment after moment when the damage Facebook was creating was brought to the attention of Zuckerberg or one of his executives. There is no question, according to Wynne-Williams, that Facebook knew it was doing harm to the children and teenagers it was targeting with misinformation, with attacks on their self-esteem, with encouragement for self-harm, with gendered and racial abuse. But they did nothing about it (Turner, 2025b).

As Graeme was finishing his post, the No Kings protests against the second Trump administration were underway in the United States, attracting more than seven million people across 2600 towns and cities, making it one of the largest protests in the country's history, according to a BBC report (Goodwin and Wilson, 2025). This extraordinary public response to the many alarming actions of the second Trump administration in the space of just nine months was answered by Trump in a genuinely shocking AI-generated video of the American president dropping shit on the protesters.

Graeme was appalled, noting ‘As our political parties in Australia continue to invest in building up what they like to call their ‘social media game’, maybe it is only a matter of time before this becomes an acceptable feature of politics in Australia as well. God help us’. As I write this reflection in March 2026, I am shocked to realise that amid all the chaos, destruction and cruelty Trump has wrought on his own people since last October and now by attacking Iran, the world economy, I had forgotten about both the No Kings protests and Trump's (literal) shit-posting. God help us indeed. Failing that – I am an atheist after all – we need to keep following Graeme's shining, steadfast example.