It’s been a week for rights and freedoms in politics. Christian Porter, at the Great Synagogue in Sydney, finally unveiled the government’s much anticipated religious discrimination bill – providing his response to an internal campaign from colleagues to enhance religious freedom that will now be superseded by an external campaign from religious, civil society and LGBTQI groups.
On the same day, in another part of the city, heavy hitters from the legal and media worlds, including the new chair of the ABC, Ita Buttrose, caucused to try and advance the cause of press freedom. Now, obviously, Porter has a substantial workload, and any minister would have been hard pressed to front two time-consuming events on the same day, but the attorney general’s presence for one, and his absence from another, seemed to speak volumes about the order of priority for the Morrison government.
The media event was a summit put on by the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom – a group put together by the television journalist Peter Greste, who was imprisoned in Egypt while working for al-Jazeera. A number of proposals were chewed over during the day: a new Media Freedom Act, the potential for constitutional change, as well as a wish list of practical measures pushing back on the creeping culture of government secrecy. The more modest wish list of reforms is being championed by media companies in the wake of police raids on the ABC and the home of News Corp political journalist Annika Smethurst.
Asked about the police raids, Buttrose expressed the view the government was fully intent on intimidating whistleblowers, and the strategy was working. She noted the ABC had lost a couple of stories in recent times because potential whistleblowers had balked, concerned about the consequences.
She was also strongly of the view that Australians would rally to the cause of journalists and journalism and media freedom if the profession was prepared to engage with audiences, show them the value of what we do, and explain what was at stake.
Bret Walker, the prominent silk, invited to give the keynote about Australia’s culture of secrecy, offered the necessary corrective to any journalistic hubris, noting at one point: “I honestly don’t think we should get sentimental about a caste of people called journalists.” He contended what distinguished journalists from others was the profession took the risk of being wrong, and carried the risk of being punished by authorities. To soften the blow perhaps, he noted he “saluted” the profession for taking these risks.
In any case, back to Buttrose and the public rushing to journalism’s defence. It would be heartening for me if her instinct was right. Perhaps it is true for her own organisation, the national broadcaster, which does tend to rank more highly than other news properties in public polling about trust.
The latest Guardian Essential polling in June found a majority of people surveyed had at least some trust in SBS TV news (60%) and ABC radio news (57%), while none of the other sources gained above 50%.
More broadly, research would suggest readers and viewers don’t love what they currently consume. A couple of general perceptions. Australians are becoming less interested in news, with 62% of respondents in the latest annual Digital Media Report from the University of Canberra in collaboration with the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford saying they avoid consuming it occasionally, sometimes or often.
Australian news consumers are also more likely than readers and viewers in other countries to think our news is too negative. Globally, the survey found trust in news was declining, with falls in the countries surveyed of around 2% on the previous year. In Australia, the annual drop was six points, from 50% to 44% in 2019.
So while we’d like to think our audiences cherish us, the field evidence tends to suggest otherwise. Against this reasonably depressing backdrop, the media industry has to work out how to pursue its case, because we really do need to win this fight, not for us, but for the citizenry we serve.
Good journalism – whether it is loved or loathed by its consumers – remains critically important in a liberal democracy, and Australia absolutely, objectively, has a problem with press freedom when the people who keep the secrets become increasingly assertive about keeping them.
Agencies are resisting a culture of routine (let alone unauthorised) disclosure, because they are fundamentally risk averse. This risk aversion is understandable given the complex security threats that countries now face. The era of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden has also shaken institutional confidence. The big, disruptive, disclosures of our age demonstrate agencies and governments really don’t have a foolproof capacity to sit on information they would regard as private, so legislatively the environment becomes more hostile for institutional forces on the side of disclosure, like journalism.
Given we have a problem, two approaches suggest themselves. Media companies can act like every other noisy rent seeker and blast their way to the front of the government’s priority queue. By dint of noise and brute persistence, we can attempt to make the government of the day sufficiently concerned about the negative consequences (for them) of doing nothing, which generally tends to persuade governments to act. You don’t have to be universally loved in the community to be powerful in a Canberra power play – just ask the banks that managed to forestal a royal commission for yonks, or the mining industry that killed a super profits tax stone dead.
This might sound an unusually cynical observation from me, given cynicism isn’t my normal default – but forgive me in this instance. I really don’t mean this particular observation cynically, I’m simply observing the usual custom and practice in Canberra. The dynamic I’ve just described is realpolitik: a case study.
I’ve flagged two approaches. The one I’ve just outlined involves zero introspection on our part. It just involves building a barricade and populating it. The second option is predicated on humility – which is not a quality the media is renowned for. It involves truth telling, which is the business we should be in.
Rather than pursuing a power play, perhaps we need (as Buttrose says) to engage our audiences, but not with a vaulting, self-congratulatory message about our own greatness (people really can see through that cynical genre of corporate messaging I’ll call the ‘I’m not a bank bank’ ad) but with an expression of humility.
Journalists are servants of the truth, and the truth is what we do is critically important, but we don’t always do it perfectly. I’m not perfect. No one is. We should absolutely pursue a right for journalists to perform our democratic function, but not a right to abuse our power or get things wrong, which we often do by inference when we champion free speech debates. The clarion arguments for expanding rights tend to drown out any reflection about our accompanying responsibilities.
I’ve never thought, as a journalist, I have a right to be egregious, or truthy, or cavalier, or to be an undisclosed cypher, or a culture warrior, or a troll, just because I get paid to hold politicians accountable. My deepest anxieties are about the civic responsibilities associated with my position rather than my rights, or lack of rights, and, given that’s my truth, I have no problem projecting it to my readers.
However this debate ultimately plays out, we need to connect with our audiences and readers. We need to build an organic constituency outside the power plays of politics, and we need to be worth defending, because the times could not be more serious. The fight we are in in the 21st century is the truth fight, and demagogues are busy weaponising relativity to create their own realities. Disdaining journalists and journalism is a key weapon in that war.
Walker told this week’s press freedom forum the fact that creating these legal frameworks in a democracy – the necessary balancing between secrecy and disclosure – is so obviously difficult was not (as it could be) despair-inducing, but, actually, galvanising.
The degree of difficulty should inspire us to work harder, the silk said, to land in the right place.
He’s exactly right.
