Why Media Watch is still one of the most important shows on TV
Media Watch has always punched above its weight. With episodes just 15 minutes long, the Monday night fixture has earned points for impact and relevance over more than three decades.
Reflecting on the first episode on May 8, 1989, The Age’s TV critic, Barbara Hooks, observed “the notion of accountability has never been more critical”. It’s a recurrent refrain: viewers in every decade have argued we need this concise, extensively researched guardian now more than ever. And the show’s recent revelations about Nine’s* “reverse engineered” real-estate show, Find My Beach House, as well as several pointed digs at the ABC suggest this watchdog still has teeth.
New ABC Media Watch host Linton Besser.
The show has had its detractors over the decades. Media Watch is habitually dismissed as irrelevant: self-important, biased and basically only watched by a dwindling clique of old-school media wonks whose opinions don’t matter anyway. But given it’s lasted more than 35 years on air adhering to its original format, it’s hard to think of many shows with comparable staying power.
Media Watch is a key component of the ABC’s line-up on one of the network’s most-watched weeknights. The recent ratings, another gauge of the response to the show and its newly installed host, Linton Besser, indicate the national TV reach for the first show of the year was 841,000 viewers. That’s not a paltry number: it’s an audience any free-TV broadcaster would welcome for a stalwart prime-time series that’s just introduced its seventh regular host. The second episode ratings are comparable – and these tallies don’t include those who watched on ABC iview.
These numbers persuasively counter any argument of irrelevance or claims of a paltry following. Beyond that, though, there’s the substance of the show. The founding host, journalist and barrister Stuart Littlemore, established a durable template and set a distinctive tone over nine seasons. Frequent targets of his criticism were chequebook journalism, conflicts of interest, plagiarism and mistakes. He had an abiding dislike of personality-driven current-affairs, placing subjects such as Mike Willesee and Derryn Hinch in the crosshairs. He had an eagle-eye for sloppy spelling and grammar, conveying the impression of an acerbic, exacting and intimidating schoolteacher who really expects you to do better.
His successor, lawyer Richard Ackland, was more avuncular but in his relatively brief tenure landed what has become one of Media Watch’s biggest scoops with the “cash for comment” scandal that outed Sydney radio titans Alan Jones and John Laws, exposing their practice of taking payment for positive promotion of various companies and failing to disclose those deals to their listeners.
Plagiarism, conflicts of interest and chequebook journalism remain on the radar for Media Watch, although common targets in recent years also include Sky News hosts, slanted news coverage in News Limited papers, and promotions disguised as news stories in TV news bulletins and daytime programs on the commercial channels.
The program’s researchers have also chased down the origins of some news stories that have captured attention around the globe. That was evident last August in the coverage of the UK’s Southport race riots following the murders of three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance class: the initial spark for the violence was tracked back to a single suspect tweet. Few other enterprises have the expertise, the resources or the will to chronicle such developments, and it’s significant work.
