We once called TV journos the ‘Filth’. Nine’s management has earned the label

The “Filth”: that was what we called television journalists when I was a police reporter at The Sun News-Pictorial in the 1980s. It was not a term of endearment.

Back then, police rounds were a journalist biodome. Newspaper and radio reporters shared a rabbit warren of rooms a few doors down from the St Kilda Road police complex, and were largely left alone by their motherships as long as they stayed out of trouble and broke yarns.

Breaking yarns was relatively easy for the Sun journos. After all, we vastly outnumbered our competitors, were treated as the police gazette, and had our own network of citizen informants who called in news tips for cash.