September 1998 Volume 79  Number 9 "serving the protectors"
Partners of the News
By Brett Williams

Graeme Goodings and Jane Doyle: Channel Seven’s nightly newsreading partnership

Jane Doyle remembers unwinding over a beer with off-duty police officers in a country town pub on Friday nights after a hard week’s court reporting. Her work brought her into close, daily contact with police in those days.

But that was as a cadet reporter, long before she teamed up with Graeme Goodings to form Channel Seven’s nightly newsreading partnership.

Although she and Goodings have little direct contact with police today, they remain well aware of police work’s inherent pressures.

“I don’t envy the police their role,” Doyle says. “It must be very difficult to be a member of the police force. I don’t know how you’d categorize the toughest job in the world, but it certainly would be up there.

“And it must be difficult to maintain a sense of balance when you’re dealing so often with the negative side of a community.”

Born and raised in Queensland, Doyle began her working life as a teacher but made a foray into journalism in the late ’70s. After working in both print and electronic media through the ’80s, she joined Seven’s news team in 1989.

By 1995, she’d become a four-time winner of the Best Television News Presenter award.

Goodings began his media career as a panel operator at 3AW in Melbourne over 30 years ago. His career path led him into radio and television in Tasmania, back to 3AW, and then to 5DN in Adelaide.

After a three-year break from the media in the mid-’70s, he returned to Launceston television, firstly as a writer and producer, and later as a newsreader and journalist. He joined Channel Seven (then SAS 10) in Adelaide in 1981 and became its news presenter in 1983. His on-air partnership with Doyle began when she joined the network.

From his earliest involvement with SA police, Goodings understands the value of ethical dealings with operational cops. “Back in those days we had a pretty good rapport with Media Liaison,” he says.

“I know it’s ebbed and flowed over the years, but they came to be people you could rely on, and they would rely on you not to impart more than was necessary.

“They learnt that we won’t overstep that confidence - you only get away with that sort of thing once. You ‘burn’ somebody and that’s the end of it.”

But both Goodings and Doyle see current-day relations between police and the media as mutually respectful. “Certainly within our newsroom,” Doyle says, “there’s a great deal of respect for the police and the job they do.

“Because police are identifiable, there’s a tendency to talk about them as ‘the police’ and forget that they’re people doing a job, just as we are people doing a job. I think both the police and the media suffer at the hands of the generalist.

“I’m not sure that people always understand the particular difficulties that the police work with, in the same way that I don’t think the community always understands the difficulties of the media.”

Goodings and Doyle’s confidence in police-media relations, however, doesn’t blind them to those situations in which tensions can arise. Doyle says there will always remain “a gap between the two” because of their opposing purposes.

Conflict occurs, she says, when at the same time, the media strive to provide information abundantly and the police, by necessity, release it sparingly.

Goodings describes it simply as the media working “towards one goal and the police working towards another”. To resolve some of that tension, he encourages an ever-improving rapport and ever-increasing empathy.

But what of those times when police feel the media have portrayed them inaccurately or unfairly? Should a network have an open-door policy for discussing police dissatisfaction with media coverage?

“We want to develop as good a relationship with the police as possible,” Goodings says. “If that meant leaving the door open and saying: ‘Come in and talk’, I couldn’t see that there’d be any problem at all.”

Doyle also believes that communication lines must remain open. “If the police force becomes particularly unhappy with us,” she says, “we need to know about it, just as the police force needs to know if the community’s unhappy with what it’s doing.”