On almost any day of the week, Australia’s big newspapers go about the business of demanding accountability — of governments, public officials, politicians, business people, police officers, sports stars and many other public and private figures. That’s the way the system operates: the media assumes the role of society’s interrogator and their subjects are expected (or pressured) to respond to that scrutiny.

So it’s instructive to see what happens when the editors of those big newspapers are themselves placed under scrutiny.

The result — as we discovered as part of this week ‘s Crikey-Australian Centre for Independent Journalism’s Spinning the Media survey — is that when they’re on the receiving end, most Australian newspaper editors don’t consider themselves in the accountability business.

Only four of the 10 editors whose newspapers were surveyed in great detail agreed to be interviewed. And of those four, only one, Chris Mitchell of The Australian, was prepared to acknowledge and intelligently discuss the challenges created by the amount of PR that props up Australian journalism. The other three denied there was a problem, while six others (including all three editors in the Fairfax stable) simply refused to engage in any discussion about their professional practices.

We draw two conclusions from this response.

First, it’s no coincidence that the only editor prepared to engage in the debate happens to run the only truly vibrant, intelligent newspaper in the country.

And second, the accountability demanded of everyone else by the six editors who wouldn’t comment, is clearly a one-way street full of potholes.