Background Briefing

To talk straight you should use...

"The maxim of quantity. Don't say too much or too little.
Quality. Don't tell lies or mislead.
Say what is relevant.
And the manner. Don't be obscure or incoherent.
These form the rational basis for co-operative communication."

Background Briefing investigates why there's precious little of it.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Stan Correy: In Australian politics, truth casualties are mounting up, and of course, this is not just an Australian trend. Bill Clinton said he never really had sex with Monica. The Bush Administration seemed hardly to know Enron existed. Some film of Dutch atrocities in Bosnia mysteriously went blank in the processing. In England, a government official sent an email saying her department should bury uncomfortable information under cover of the very day of September 11.

You're with Radio National's Background Briefing, and today we probe the smoky world of ambiguities, misinformation, dissembling and not so much lies, as the avoidance of truth. I'm Stan Correy.

There's more of course. Senator Bill Heffernan and the fabricated Comcar document is the latest episode. And then there was Archbishop Hollingworth, who couldn't quite remember that he had in fact had the question explained to him, so he couldn't have got it wrong. And of course, there were no children thrown overboard.

One part of the mind can know just what it is doing while the part that supposedly knows, remains oblivious of this. More obviously, information is selected to fit existing perceptual frames, and information which is too threatening is shut out altogether. The mind somehow grasps what is going on, but rushes a protective filter into place. Information slips into a kind of black hole of the mind, a blind zone of blocked attention, and self deception.

How neurological the problem is, or how politically expedient, is a moot point. But there seems to be an awful lot of it about. At Harvard University, moral philosopher, Professor Sissela Bok looks into these sorts of conundrums. Just after Watergate and the end of the Vietnam war, she wrote a book about 'Lying in Public and Private Life'. On the phone from Boston, Sissela Bok.

Sissela Bok: People are always saying, 'Well there certainly seems to be more and more lying'. I'm convinced that that has probably been the case since the beginning of time, and certainly it's hard to say that there's more now than for instance in the 1970s, and of course if we think back 100 years ago, 150 years ago, all the lying that had to go on in connection for instance with slavery and discrimination and that kind of thing. So I don't believe that there's necessarily more lying per capita, but one thing that is clearly true, is that people feel that they know more about more lies than they've ever known before, and that is partly because of the media now. I think the media play an absolutely indispensible role in exposing lying and in providing accountability. Nevertheless, people now see someone like President Clinton in the United States, saying one thing and saying another, and they can see that on split screens. So they have the personal experience in the sense of being lied to in a way that was not possible 150 years ago.

Stan Correy: We're now inundated with debates about government spin doctors and misinformation. But one of the strangest and confusing trends of recent times is that as people have become even more aware of the masters of misinformation, the spin doctors have been whirling more than ever. Last month, the US Defense Department officially revealed it had opened an Office of Strategic Influence, and that one of its stated roles was to put out disinformation. So appalled was public reaction that Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld announced within ten days it would not happen.

Donald Rumsfeld:You know, there have been so many stories about this office, and commentary, some portion of which has contained inaccurate speculation, and assertions that the office could become involved in activities that the department has in fact not done, is not doing and would not condone. I guess notwithstanding the fact that much of the thrust of the criticism and the cartoons and the editorial comment, has been off the mark, the office has clearly been so damaged that it's unclear to me, it's pretty clear to me, that it could not function effectively. So it's been closed down.

Reporter: Mr Secretary, from the outset though, within days after September 11, I think you were one of the first in the Administration to stand here and say, 'It's imperative for the United States to reach out, and in fact educate the rest of the world, if not the Muslim world, in terms of what the US is and will be doing', so how can the Pentagon do that effectively, or is it going to be - ?

Donald Rumsfeld: We'll just have to do it with the offices that existed previously.

Stan Correy: Maybe that could be more disinformation too. At the time, an American website, Satirewire.com put out the following piece:

Washington, D.C. (SatireWire.com) Following Tuesday's announcement that the Pentagon had closed the controversial Office of Strategic Influence, which allegedly was created to spread false information abroad, the agency said it has been unable to convince OSI employees to stop reporting for work.

"There is no-one here spreading misinformation now, and certainly there won't be anyone here spreading misinformation daily from 8am to 5pm, Sir. Yes, Sir, we're gone, Sir, no-one here at all, Sir." responded one information specialist.

The Under-Secretary of Defense, Douglas Feith, who had been in charge of the office, stated:

"I don't understand. I sent out a memo about the closure. Didn't you people get the memo?"

"Yes, sir. By which we mean of course, No, Sir."

"Well, what did you do with it?" asked Feith

"We translated it into 46 languages, and sent it to journalists in 102 nations, Sir. We also had our bombers drop leaflets about it across the Middle East, Sir."

"You didn't," said Rumsfeld, wincing.

"Oh, right, we didn't, Sir, no, Sir. We did not do that Sir, nor are we having it continually broadcast from special operations aircraft, nor will we be having it planted on so-called objective news sites across the Internet. The Corporal will be - not be - handling that end of it, Sir."

"We never should have started this," muttered Rumsfeld, throwing up his hands and walking out.

"Oh, ingenious, Sir, new disinformation. The OSI wasn't closed, it never even opened. I won't get to work on that right away, Sir."

Stan Correy: So who would have thought up the idea for the Office of Strategic Influence? A Washington firm of spin doctors, called the Rendon Group. They got the job because of their work for the CIA in Iraq in the 1990s. And the Pentagon hired them after September 11 to work out ways of improving the US image in the Arab world. They obviously failed.

You'll hear today an odd phrase: the phenomenon of the 'agentic shift'. An 'agentic shift' happens when individuals or groups become so obsessed with people in authority they lose any sense of independent thought. Public servants used to have written into their employment regulations that they would remain independent and give frank and fearless advice to the Ministers in the ruling government of the day. Over the past 20 years or so, these public servants have either been politicised themselves or got rid of and replaced by spin doctors, media advisers, and a new breed of consultants called 'contentious issues management specialists'. From the University of Tasmania, Rick Snell.

Rick Snell: It's become a common feature now of most public service and most ministerial departments to have this kind of Praetorian Guard that's been created, where you've got people who surround the minister, or surround the particular office that's the subject of whatever concerns that we have, whose primary purpose is to manage and control information and perceptions of their master or mistress, depending which organisation that you're dealing with, and they in many cases have been brought in from outside the public service, so former journalists, so the media people have been recruited into the task, or they're PR consultants, or they're communication experts, or they are former or current politicians who don't have a seat in Parliament at the moment, be brought in for advice, who effectively treat the whole operation of public office as effectively protecting it from attack, so that the party in power can enjoy the spoils of that particular public office. So it's far more important to try to maintain yourself in office, rather than to achieve particular types of programs.

Stan Correy: There's been a great deal of media coverage about exactly what happened during the children overboard incident. All eyes will be on Canberra this week as a Senate Committee begins its investigation into what they're calling 'a certain maritime incident'. It's already tarnished by the fact that the Howard government is refusing to let its advisers, spin doctors and media managers give evidence.

Unlike several people high up in the Defence Department, who still finally saw their primary loyalty being to the actual facts of what happened, these people have a primary loyalty to the government of the day. This is the 'agentic shift'. From the University of New South Wales, Professor of Politics, Elaine Thompson.

Elaine Thompson: It sounds very complicated, but in fact is a very simple idea, as many of the great ideas are, which is that rather than seeing themselves as representatives of something above and beyond the government's short-term political will, or political whim, or political desires, but as the protectors of what they saw as the public interest, or certainly having a duty to raise other alternatives, ask hard questions, you come to see yourself as the agent of your political masters. So you've shifted from seeing yourself as somebody who ought to raise all the difficult questions to seeing yourself as an agent and actually assessing yourself in terms of the quality of how good a bureaucrat you are in terms of how well you become the agent of your political master.

Stan Correy: At its heart is the phenomenon of groupthink. It's well understood that people will group together with others who think in the same way. But in the 1980s, social psychologist, Irving Janis introduced the concept of groupthink in a study of American foreign policy fiascos. How could really clever and experienced people in government fail to prevent major disasters when they had all the best advice and the best resources? It's all to do with groupthink. In Holland, Professor Paul Hart concentrates on what he calls 'Type 2 groupthink'. That's where members of a group lose all perspective. They fall to critically examine evidence, because they are too eager to please their political masters.

It just takes one or two powerful members of the group to manage the thinking and the information flow.

Paul Hart: Generally there's like two ways for a leader to run a meeting. He can start welcoming the members and say, 'Well, ladies and gentlemen, this and this is the problem for today. This is what the problem looks like, and this is how I think it should be handled. What do you think?' Or you can of course have a much more open style in which you say, 'Good morning ladies and gentlemen, we've gotten all kinds of information, let's have a talk about what we think it might mean.' And in the second case, this more open leadership style, the leader keeps his cards to his chest, so the members have no way of knowing what he or she thinks, and he does not transmit implicit norms about what is good, what is not good and so on and so forth. Whereas in the former style, the leader kind of frames the whole issue, and in some ways robs the group, intentionally or unintentionally, of its critical mass, because if the leader is important to you, if he makes decision on your future, career future, or if he's a very senior person with enormous authority, it's not so easy for the individual member to put up his finger and say, 'Well, you frame the issue like this, but in my view we should reassess that, we should think of it differently.' So you get sometimes this bizarre situation in which only very few members think along the lines of the leader, but the silent majority stays literally silent, because each individual in that majority thinks that he's the only one to have a different opinion. So you get this kind of collective ignorance if you like.

Stan Correy: In America, the political scandal that took lying to new heights of grandeur was the Watergate crisis. It destroyed the presidency of Richard Nixon, but within ten years the lying game was back in full swing in Washington, DC. And the Iran Contra crisis introduced a new weapon into the spin doctor's armoury. Plausible deniability.

Paul Hart: And you come to this famous phrase of 'plausible deniability'. You know, let's not be too meticulous in recording what we've done, because suppose somebody will dig into it later, it will be very good if we cannot pinpoint who knew what at the time. And the phrase 'plausible deniability' was often used in the case of the Iran Contra scandal, where you also had like a very small group around Oliver North and the then Director of the CIA, William Casey who were doing these illegal arms for hostages deals with the Iranians. And that group was very meticulous not to take notes, in fact in some cases for a long time they didn't even meet; they met on the web, they had an Intranet in which they communicated in the understanding that they were not seen by others. They had their sort of highly secure lines to each other. There were four of them. So they were physically not even identifiable as a group, it took a long time before we understood who were part of the group.

Stan Correy: Professor Paul Hart of the University of Leiden.

Now many of us have probably wanted to have a confidential conversation and started it by saying, 'This conversation didn't happen'. In other words, if word of this ever gets out I will deny it happened. There may be nothing much wrong with that. There are times when confidential talks are legitimate. It's only when those confidential talks have a bearing on public policy, and when there may have been shenanigans, that it becomes important. There is a difference between confidentiality, secrecy, manipulation, distortion and lying.

Linguists are good at analysing all the ways people get out of exactly telling the truth. Herbert Grice was a 20th century philosopher of language who wrote a classic book on 'the co-operative principles of communication'. His understanding of the meaning of language in conversation is still used by linguists of today. So Radio National's Background Briefing took some of the recent goings on in the Australian parliament to the Linguistic Department of Sydney University for analysis.

First, explaining the Grice principles, is John Gibbons.

John Gibbons: The maxim of quantity, 'Don't say too much or too little'; the maxim of quality, 'Don't tell lies, or mislead'; the maxim of relation, 'Say what is relevant'; and the maxim of manner, 'Don't be obscure or incoherent'; these actually form the rational basis for co-operative communication. If these maxims are violated then there's usually either a lack of communication and/or indeed, a blockage or distortion in the information flow. And these maxims, if we apply them to language behaviour, we can start to see whether there might be the possibility of miscommunication or indeed, misleading communication.

Stan Correy: Now, imagine yourself at one of the Senate Estimates Committee hearings.

Last month, Labor Senator John Faulkner putting the blowtorch to the belly, in this case, of Max Moore Wilton, the Head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the PM&C. In this exchange, Senator Faulkner has just asked Max Moore Wilton whether he knew from a highly placed source on the government's People Smuggling Committee that there were doubts about the story of children being thrown overboard.

Max Moore Wilton replies.

Max Moore Wilton: It's very difficult, Senator, without knowing whether a highly placed source existed. I know that people always think that their sources are highly placed, so it's very hard to really answer that question since I don't know who - I mean some people...

Senator Faulkner: I know you are highly placed so I feel comfortable asking you.

Max Moore Wilton: Yes well that at least I think is established in the hierarchy, but since I don't know who this highly placed source is, I mean a lot of people claim that they're highly placed, and they're generally not, I wouldn't want to speculate.

John Gibbons: He problematizes the source of the information, the highly placed source, and he never in fact directly says that he did not receive such an alert from a high ranking person. If evidence of such a contact by a high-ranking person emerges at a later date, he can claim accurately not to have lied. However his answers are clearly not in accord with the maximum of relevance, they never actually directly address the thrust of the question.

Stan Correy: When you say 'problematizing', that he's problematizing the source of the information, what do you actually mean?

John Gibbons: To problematise is to look at something in the preceding discourse usually, and say, 'This part of, say, your question, is a problem, and I can't answer it without you clarifying that particular part of the question.' In this case it was the high ranking source but he didn't answer at all the section about there being doubts about the stories of children being thrown overboard, he never answered that part of the question. He just problematized the source of this information, the high-ranking source in fact in this case.

Stan Correy: A little later during this marathon Estimates hearing last month, Senator Faulkner continues the pressure on Max Moore Wilson.

Senator Faulkner: Well isn't it true that according to the tabled reports that we've had the benefit of reading, that the bureaucracy, including PM&C, if not mainly PM&C, failed to bring the correct facts to the attention of the Prime Minister and Ministers? Isn't that true?

Max Moore Wilton: In what regard, Senator?

Senator Faulkner: Oh I suppose in regard to the photos if they had have known.

Max Moore Wilton: It's very difficult to answer questions of that generality. In which particular instance did the 'bureaucracy' fail to bring to the Prime Minister's attention. Isn't it true -

Stan Correy: Again, says John Gibbons, Max Moore Wilton uses a well-known deflection technique and avoids the question.

John Gibbons: We must remember that this questioning is about the fact that children were not thrown overboard, but that three government ministers stated that they were, and all the participants know that this is the topic, this is what it's about. When Senator Faulkner asks about people failing to bring the correct facts to the attention of the Prime Minister, Moore Wilton problematizes 'the correct facts'. Now there is no doubt about what the topic of that is, what that refers to, but I think in this case he's clearly violating the co-operative principle, he knew very well what the correct facts were, but he was in fact again avoiding answering the question, very successfully too, I might add.

Stan Correy: Senator Faulkner then puts another question to Max Moore Wilton. Faulkner says that two official reports have shown that 31 officials, from Moore Wilton's department had serious doubts about the children overboard story. But none of these officials seem to communicate these doubts to the Prime Minister or his ministers.

Senator Faulkner: And none of them brought to the attention of the Prime Minister, or ministers, these…

Max Moore Wilton: … a fact of life. Taking your question, Senator.

I'm not sure about the 31 officials, I'd have to go back and look at it.

Senator Faulkner: Well that was my count.

Max Moore Wilton: Well you related it directly to the photographs.

Senator Faulkner: No.

Max Moore Wilton: You related that question directly to the photographs. I don't think the 31 officials were aware that the photographs were incorrectly captioned, I certainly was not.

Senator Faulkner: I didn't relate it to the photographs.

Senator Hill: That's where the mistake -

Senator Faulkner: I didn't.

Senator Hill: The photographs.

Senator Faulkner: I made it very clear that there are two categories here of people who knew the claims that the children overboard claims were not correct, and that, and that the photographs, the two photographs that were made public, didn't relate to the children -

Two quite separate categories.

Max Moore Wilton: Well Senator, you

Senator Faulkner: You can't make a division because of the nature of the reports.

Senator Faulkner: That's why I'm including 31 of the total number.

Max Moore Wilton: I suggest to you, Senator, you can make the division. There may be some officials who were aware 1) that claims of children being thrown overboard were not substantiated subsequently; there may be some officials there. There may be some officials or there certainly were some officials, who became aware that the photographs did not relate to the 7th October. I don't necessarily know that it was all of the officials mentioned. And there may be some officials who knew both subsequently in the case of both events. but to lump them all together and to say that those two things follow, I think is a complete failure of logic.

John Gibbons: Faulkner's question you see, ends by saying 'All these people knew about it and none of them brought it to the attention of the Prime Minister or ministers.' Max Moore Wilton replies by questioning the number of officials, and he never actually answers the question to say whether government servants did or did not pass on the information. He never ever answers that question. So again, the maxim of relation is broken, he's not answering Faulkner's question, which is quite explicit, but rather again, problematizing the number of people involved, and therefore avoiding answering the question. I think what we can see in all these exchanges is the avoidance of the provision of information. This is not lying, I think it's important to say that at this point, this is not lying, but I think there is a case for saying that it's misleading.

Stan Correy: At all these Senate Estimates hearings this year, it was astonishing the number of things that people couldn't remember about the children overboard incident. It became apparent that very few minutes of key meetings are written, and hardly anyone even takes notes.

Here at the Estimates hearing, Senator Robert Ray asks Head of Immigration, Bill Farmer, whether he took notes during those key meetings last year.

Senator Robert Ray: I asked did you, or any of your other colleagues, at that meeting, take a record of the meeting. In other words, take notes as they went through that they can subsequently refer to that may assist us in this regard to these questions or any other questions.

Bill Farmer: Well I can speak for myself Senator, I very rarely take notes of meetings.

Robert Ray: You've got such a good memory.

Bill Farmer: Except to the extent Senator, that I need to take action on them afterwards. I'm the Secretary of the Department.

Senator John Faulkner: Did you authorise a note-taking, Mr Farmer.

Bill Farmer: No I didn't.

John Faulkner: There were two other officers, Ms Godwin, and Mr McMahon, is that the responsibility of either of those - you don't take notes at all. So be it. Do you ask one of the other two officers present at the meeting to undertake that responsibility?

Bill Farmer: No, the meetings were being run by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. This was a high level officials meeting and frankly Senator, when I was a Division Head I wasn't a note-taker either, except the extent that I needed to take action on matters arising from the meeting. And those matters would by definition have been matters falling within the responsibility of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs.

Senator John Faulkner: And that didn't happen.

Bill Farmer: That did not happen in the case of me, insofar as the matters you're talking about are -

John Faulkner: Yes, but it may well have happened on…

Stan Correy: Even at these 'high level' meetings, and that's a phrase used by Bill Farmer no less than 32 times during the Senate Estimates, no-one, it seems, kept any notes or the notes they kept were vague. And this was possibly deliberate. Officials all over the world have realised that if it's not written down, then they can more easily claim to not remember exactly who said what. Ethics and Public Administration expert at the ANU, John Uhr.

John Uhr: What this story dramatically illustrates is the poverty of record-keeping within government. What we know about this story is in part reconstructed from things like the Bryant Report and then other letters that were tabled during the Estimates round of hearings, things that were added into the story later as different versions started to either solidify or dissolve. It's not surprising in a way that the facts of the case are hard to establish, in part because we're looking at the dramatic incident leading up to a very important election, but also because the tenor of the times really is that your task as a decision maker within government is to get on and make the decision, not to worry unduly about having all the due forms and processes that used to enfeeble traditional forms of government, not to worry unduly about those, just get on and make the decision and try and streamline the process of public decision making.

Stan Correy: The Commonwealth Auditor General, Pat Barrett, has spoken often about the need for record keeping in government departments. Here's a reading from one of his speeches.

Good records that form an accountability trail are the first line of defence against accusations of bias and/or misinformation.

From the University of Tasmania, Rick Snell.

Rick Snell: The power that be, the ministers or the public service departments themselves, or even parliament in many ways, effectively don't understand what they're getting at. The critiques that they make are based on the reasoning of an idealised version of the Westminster system, with the expectation that ministers will respond, take responsibility, that the issues will be substantially dealt with. So again in children's overboard saga, most of the activity's gone to dealing with the problems of perception, rather than coming back and saying 'There's been a monumental cock-up here. There's been some fundamental breakdowns in communication, in archiving, in information flows, and ensuring proper communications occur at all the levels. That's not where all the attention's been addressed, it's effectively looking to pin blame, or seeing who's going to carry the can, to solve the particular problem.

Stan Correy: You're listening to Radio National and Background Briefing, where we're attempting to tease out the truth from the fiction, the snow from the grit, the flannelling from the facts in politics. I'm Stan Correy.

 

... I can't remember every detail of everything said...
... I don't recall...
... I may have misunderstood the question...
... It was a bad line...
... I wasn't aware...
... My information was …
... I wasn't there. It was not my responsibility...
... There was no reason to doubt the information...

 

At this point in the hearings, Senator Robert Ray has been questioning Bill Farmer about why Farmer didn't attempt to verify the information about the children overboard.

 

Bill Farmer: As the Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, it is not my responsibility now to form a view on the chain of events that's now coming out in the parliament.

Robert Ray: ….If you made a mistake based on that, it's your duty to learn about it. It's your duty to learn from past mistakes so you don't repeat them, that's the point we're making. If you don't have the intellectual rigor to go back and find out if you've got - maybe you've got no doubts in your mind at all this is still true, in which case I can desist. But if you have doubts in your own mind as to the veracity of the information you gave in good faith to Mr Ruddock, you have a responsibility as the Head of the Department to go back and try to make sure it never happens again and you've got a duty to analyse what happened. Not sit as a man in the street and say, It's too complex for me to follow.

Bill Farmer: Senator, I don't need lectures on my responsibilities.

Robert Ray: Well you've just got one.

Bill Farmer: Thank you. I don't need them as the Head of a government department. We live in our department, day in, day out, with administering, as you know Senator, from your own experience as a former minister, administering highly complex legislation and doing it in controversial and difficult circumstances, and if the Department makes mistakes, one of my jobs, and one that I take extremely seriously, is both saying if we've made mistakes, and taking steps to rectify them.

 

Brigadier Bornholt at the Senate Estimates hearing.

Brigadier Bornholt: On 10th October I was in a meeting with my staff and at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, my staff officer came in and said to me that the Minister's media adviser had spoken to her twice about photographs that they wanted to release and he was specifically interested in the break-up of the people who had been in the water on 7th October, and the numbers of women and children. She had tried to deal with him on two occasions to say to him that there was no evidence that we could find that would corroborate such a claim. After he had, as she said, got quite angry with her, she decided that it was time to hand the problem over to me, because I won't have my staff dealt with like that.

Senator Robert Hill: Well I don't know that's a …

Brigadier Bornholt: And I then spoke to him.

Senator Chris Evans: Senator Hill you cannot interject every time you do not like something a witness says.

Robert Hill: No.

Chris Evans: That is exactly what you are doing.

Robert Hill: No. You ought to call the primary witness if you want that evidence, rather than go to a secondary source.

Senator John Faulkner: The brigadier just said that he will not have his staff dealt with in that manner. He will not-

Robert Hill: Yes, but if you want to find out whether the staff were dealt with in that manner, you should
be calling the staff and not the brigadier.

Senator Jacinta Collins: I do not think he asked that question.

John Faulkner: At this stage, Minister...

 

John Uhr: Public servants have sets of obligations that they have to measure themselves against, laid down in the Public Service Act and Regulations, and they have employment conditions that are matters of public record, for the most part. Ministers now have some sort of code of standards, code of ethics that the Prime Minister's released, and I congratulate him for doing that soon after he was elected in 1996. So there's some sort of standard that we know that they want themselves to be measured by. How strict the Prime Minister is in doing that measurement is another thing. But ministerial staff, really escape any public attention. We've had the Estimates hearing in Canberra a few weeks ago, they don't appear. The Ministers appear, the armies of public servants appear, but these crucial links or elements that hold government together, are just largely invisible at that time of public accountability. They hold enormous power, increasing power, if I was a minister I'd be relying upon my office staff to order my work, and I'd be I suppose piously suggesting that I'd take full responsibility for the good and bad work that they do. But as a community, I think we need more than that now, we need some other form of monitoring of people on the public payroll who exercise a lot of power, and at the moment are really just excused from all burdens of public accountability.

Stan Correy: John Uhr. What he's talking about is a growing trend in democracies based on the Westminster system.

Last year in Tony Blair's New Labour government, the influence of unregulated spin doctors was dramatically illustrated. A spin doctor technique which has the unfortunate name of 'burying the bodies' was exposed via a leak A Labour Party spin doctor called Jo Moore, sent a now famous email on September 11 after the news of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Part of the email to her staff read that September 11 was:

"… a very good day to get out anything we want to bury."

Stan Correy: After this story broke last year, Tony Blair and his master spin doctor, Alistair Campbell, tried to portray Jo Moore's email as a mistake, and Jo Moore continued in her job. But this year, she tried to 'bury another body'.

The BBC's political correspondent, Nick Jones.

Nick Jones: What finally the straw that broke the camel's back over Jo Moore was a row that she was trying to use the funeral of Princess Margaret, the Queen's sister, as another occasion to bury bad news. And of course, now that the public have understood this manipulation that's been going on, that you can use a busy news day when the papers are full of something else, as a moment to slip out some bad news, the journalists you see, are on their guard, and we're always on the lookout for the government trying, as you say, to bury bad news.

Stan Correy: And the current debate about spin tactics in British Labour politics is very relevant to what's happening under a conservative government in Australia. Nick Jones again.

Nick Jones: There is a feeling that if governments are too aggressive with regard to the media, if they're seen to be manipulating the media, that this is perhaps adding to the general cynicism which people have of politics, and that of course is a matter of great concern in this country where we've just had a general election, where the turnout fell disastrously low, and which concerned everybody. It was the lowest almost for a century. As to the spin doctors themselves, they you see, have been able to operate in a murky half world, they're off camera. Now they're unlike the position in the United States where when you see spokespeople for the government of the United States, whether they're in the White House or the Pentagon, they are clearly identified and you see who they are. You see the President's spokesman, and everybody knows who it is. We have, you see, 40 of these ministerial spin doctors, led of course by Alistair Campbell, and they live in a world of off camera briefings, they are sources, as they are known in the newspapers, they are insiders, they are ministerial aides, they are not identified, and that has caused concern. So I think what we are seeing now is a fight back first of all by the Civil Service, and secondly by some parts of the media, who are saying Look, we're no longer going to be spun in this way.

Stan Correy: In Britain, one of the responses to the growth of these spin doctors is to draw up a special code of ethics. Sissela Bok, a moral philosopher from Harvard University, says these kinds of codes deliberately set the bar so high that they're impossible to apply in the real world.

Sissela Bok: It's interesting to me that the many codes of ethics that have sprung up, codes in government, in hospitals, in businesses, sometimes they serve as a kind of smokescreen. For instance, I was interested to read that Enron had a very fancy code of ethics, which had words like 'integrity' all over it , and it's obvious in some organisations that the code of ethics means just about nothing, and in some ways it's a kind of protection. People can say Well look, we have a code of ethics, so what can be the problem? And therefore I do think that people in organisations whether it be the government or a hospital or something like that, they need to look very carefully at that code and say To what extent does this code ask us to live up to the very highfaluting standards that are being upheld here or set forth.

Stan Correy: Spin doctors are often seen in parliamentary democracies like Australia and Britain as an inevitable result of the Americanisation of politics. In Britain, home of Westminster, it's seen as the growing presidential style of a prime minister like Tony Blair. In Australia, the politicisation of a previously independent public service is one legacy of the Washington model of public administer that's popular in Canberra. Australia has a mix of the two systems referred to as Washminster. John Uhr.

John Uhr: Maybe the story's much simpler than that, that we don't have to worry about whether it's Westminster derived or Washington. What we have is an experiment going back 20 years or so now, that's really an experiment in devolution, in giving ministers much greater control, so that lots of apparatuses of government don't have to be called into action every time a minister wants to make a decision, and agency heads within public service environments can have a greater degree of discretion, so that we don't have to have intrusive central agencies, always ensuring that decision making is done by the book. So it's now time not so much to turn the clock back, or even worry about whether this is consistent with Westminster or Washington, but simply to carry forward the spirit of reform so that the kind of pretence to accountability can be more properly enacted by making sure that the people who are holding power and exercising the capacities as public decision makers, ministerial advisers, as well as ministers, really own up when things don't go as planned, or as they should.

Stan Correy: In Australian politics the episodes of smoky ambiguity, misinformation and maybe outright lying are mounting up.

The quest for truthfulness may seem a trifle idealistic if you're a politician or a political party. But according to Sissela Bok, from Harvard University, if veracity is lost in public or private life, then societies begin to fall apart.

Sissela Bok: Trust between people, between individuals or within organisations, or between governments and citizens is absolutely crucial, and that is what is undermined. When people lie, it's not just that they hurt some particular individuals and it's not just that they hurt their own reputation, which of course they certainly do, but it really is also that they damage trust in ways that they often don't think about beforehand at all, and you know, I should mention when I was writing the book 'Lying', I spent maybe days thinking of how to end that book. My father, Gunnar Myrdal a social scientist, had always said that the last word in a book has to be very crucial to that book. And my last word was 'veracity'. But here are the last two sentences,
'Trust and integrity are precious resources easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.

Music

Now it's time for Background Briefing's regular window on the world, a spot of clarity, or is it comedy, in uncertain times.

Schmenron from Capitol Steps

Stan Correy: Background Briefing's Co-ordinating producer is Linda McGinnis. Technical production, Mark Don. Research, Paul Bolger. The Satirewire.com reading was by Rachael Zalay. There's a link for Satirewire.com on our website.

The Shmenron piece is from Capitol Steps in Washington, DC. There's a link to their website too.

Kirsten Garrett is Background Briefing's Executive Producer. I'm Stan Correy, this is Radio National.

Further Information

Satirewire
A reading from Satirewire featured in this program.

Capitol Steps
The Shmenron piece can be found here.