The Rebel Wilson story is a statement about the SMH’s news culture — and that’s a big problem

Is it possible for a great newspaper to implode under the weight of its own editorial misjudgment?

As former editors of The Sydney Morning Herald, we’re asking ourselves that question as the journalism of this storied 191-year-old masthead descends towards the gutter. 

The SMH’s decision to pursue and publish a salacious story by columnist Andrew Hornery about the actor Rebel Wilson’s same-sex relationship isn’t an errant misstep. It is an unambiguous statement about its news culture.

Great newspapers don’t just not publish stories like this — their owners, editors and reporters don’t even think about publishing them. They are the clickbait and bilge water of journalism.

By legitimising such journalism, the SMH seems to have decided to target a primary readership beyond its traditional base of the socially and politically aware, so-called A-B readers. Is it all about the clicks? It seems so. 

How can the “quality broadsheet” values that made the SMH great sit alongside such a policy? How do traditional readers, or journalists such as Peter Hartcher, Kate McClymont, Ross Gittins, Adele Ferguson, Nick McKenzie and Peter FitzSimons, coexist in an editorial culture deploying News Corp-style tabloid sleaze in pursuit of a larger audience? The short answer is they don’t. 

Hornery is not a bad journalist. For many decades, he has skirted a very fine line between salaciousness, PR and what makes for breakfast chatter on a Sydney Saturday morning. His long feature published last year in the Good Weekend supplement about former Liberal powerbroker Michael Yabsley dealt with sexuality in a restrained, respectful and compelling manner. It was a great piece.

But in attempting to out Wilson, he and his editors crossed a line.

This story is primarily a failure of leadership; of the editorial and commercial custodians who seem to misunderstand what the SMH actually stands for. 

What makes this worse is that although both The Age and the SMH are distinctive by not being News Corp, they increasingly seem to want to ape its excesses.

When it comes to quality journalism, reputations take many years to build (191 in the case of The Sydney Morning Herald). The awful realisation following the Wilson fiasco is that in the current media hyper-climate it could all unravel in the pursuit of more and more eyeballs.