Sonya Voumard

I really admired Sonya Voumard’s previous book The Media and the Massacre (longlisted for the Stella Prize, see my review) but I was a bit disappointed by Skin in the Game. It’s more of a memoir of her life as a journalist than an exploration of the ethics of journalism, which is what I was hoping it would be.
However, Part II – The Interview was just what I wanted. She writes about her own experience of being interviewed by Jennifer Byrne as a teenager, for an article called ‘What it means to be 13’ in 1975 – and about the brief flurry of fame afterwards and the responses which ranged from supportive to abusive. (No social media in those days, the phone apparently rang all day because young Sonya had expressed her opinions forthrightly on a range of issues). I’m not sure if it’s that article that I remember or if it’s others of its type since then, but I’ve wondered sometimes about the kids who get featured, as Sonya was, in a cameo role in shocking Melbourne readers. Voumard says she survived pretty much unscathed but I wonder if other kids do when they are unscrupulously manipulated into saying things that cause a ruckus afterwards.
Voumard then explores in some detail, an interview with Helen Garner that she did for a student assignment on condition that it was not for publication and it was not to be tape-recorded. Confident that she’d done a good job, she sent a copy to Garner and submitted the assignment – but came down to earth when she received Garner’s critical response. There were inaccuracies and distortions of tone, and in an exchange of letters which Voumard thought then were patronising and humiliating Garner admitted that she had talked about things that should have been kept private, and she also realised, when she saw how she had been perceived, that the age gap between them had led to assumptions on her part that Voumard knew certain things that she actually did not. Voumard, reflecting on this now, can see where she went wrong but at the time she was offended.
Well, you can see and hear this same phenomenon happening any day of the week on the ABC. Time and again The Spouse and I shake our heads in dismay when young journalists (young compared to us, that is!) skate over issues they know nothing about because they haven’t researched to know what we know, from having lived through it. These journos, like the young Sonya, don’t know that they don’t know. (And presumably there are no experienced editors guiding them to do any better.)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/05/15/skin-in-the-game-by-sonya-voumard-bookreview...… (més)

3.75 Stars. Skin in the Game is the first book by Sonya Voumard that I have read, and for me it felt like a book in two parts. I found the first half, which largely focussed on journalistic integrity, absolutely fascinating. Voumard has turned her highly experienced investigative lens onto her own writing career, interrogating her successes, failings and changing motivations. Her use of example and anecdote to highlight the power imbalance between interviewer and subject was highly effective. Read full review >>… (més)

The shifting media landscape should be something that concerns us all, because all of us depend on the media to help guide our opinions and our decision-making about so many aspects of life. This can be as simple as deciding to buy a book because you read about it here on this blog, or as important as changing a lifetime voting habit because you heard about a political party’s policy that affronted your sense of justice and equity. Whatever the issues or events might be, and whether we are using citizen journalists or professionals, our understanding depends always on the integrity of the journalist…

At one point in this thoughtful analysis of ethics in journalism, author Sonya Voumard explores the concept of professionalism. She discusses it with Dr Simon Longstaff from the St James Ethics Centre, who works with public and private sector organisations to encourage ethical frameworks and practice.

He said so-called professions are defined by key criteria: their members must concern themselves with serving public interest over self-interest.

Allied to that is that people in professions serve interests rather than wants. Each profession has some kind of defining end: lawyers are about justice, doctors are about health and journalists should be about the pursuit of truth. (p. 123)

But as we know, particularly in the case of tabloid journalism, it matters what kind of truth is pursued as well as how it is pursued.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/05/13/the-media-and-the-massacre-by-sonya-voumard/… (més)