DAVID LESER ASKS GOOD QUESTIONS

SUBJECT

David Leser

OCCUPATION

Journalist

INTERVIEWER

Mele-Ane Havea

PHOTOGRAPHER

Toby Burrows

LOCATION

Sydney, Australia

DATE

February, 2021

As I prepare to talk with award-winning Australian journalist David Leser, I realise it’s almost a year to the day that I was set to interview him in front of an audience. That event was cancelled due to the rising concern over a novel strain of the coronavirus. But at the time, I was deeply immersed in his new book, Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing. Reading his nuanced and complex account of misogyny over generations and geographies left me feeling a mix of horror, relief, resignation and renewed energy for change.

I was struck when reading his work by what seemed to be a dogged commitment to searching for truth and exploring complexity. A commitment he’s demonstrated for over 40 years working across the world covering war zones, political uprisings and peace movements, with intimate psychological portraits. More recently, his work has focussed on misogyny and climate change.

In the year that’s passed, we have experienced a global pandemic, which, for the many, was a period of increased social isolation. This occurring in a world where we share information at light speed over social media platforms seems to make it harder and harder to find the facts and discern truth. Our collective ability to hold nuanced conversation seems to be decreasing at a time when it is more essential than ever. I sit with David to explore these issues.

MELE-ANE HAVEA: This issue of Dumbo Feather is about the destabilising and destructive effect that disinformation is having on our culture, about the idea that we are now living in an attention economy that is being controlled by many forces, most of which are not benevolent in nature. In that context and in the context of your extremely long and distinguished career as a journalist – as an activist for truth in many ways – I’d love to start by hearing some of your reflections on our time, on where we find ourselves.

DAVID LESER: Well there’s so much here. I would go so far as to say that disinformation and misinformation, some of it unconscious, more of it wilful and often sinister, are potentially the greatest ‘threats’ that we have to a liberal democracy, to a reasonable and robust exchange of ideas. It’s a threat to truth-telling, to the idea that we can coalesce around common facts. So at the same time that the planet is roaring, that we are occupying a country which is ground zero for climate change, that we see the storming of the Capitol of the world’s most important democracy, that we have so much sadness, loneliness, violence against women, suicide and economic deprivation, so many structural problems, I could go on – at the same time as all of this, we have technology disseminating and amplifying all this disinformation. And it feels like we’re now at the precipice, if not actually falling over the precipice. What do they say about journalism? That it’s the first brushstroke of history. You collate and distill as much as you can in a short space of time. I don’t know whether I’ve ever got to the absolute “truth”. Certainly, it’s seen through my own biases. The people I have interviewed or failed