In June 2019 the Australian Federal Police raided the home of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst and searched it. The next day it went into the ABC’s Sydney headquarters in Ultimo searching for evidence of sources to stories that relied on leaked classified information.
The raids exposed a gaping hole in Australia’s constitution – the lack of explicit protection for press freedom (or freedom of speech more broadly) – and prompted a lot of handwringing about the erosion of press freedom (and civil liberties more broadly), particularly since 9/11. They also triggered two parliamentary inquiries and a host of recommendations for reform. The understanding that underpinned them: years of expanding national security legislation had dangerously reduced the space for journalists to investigate the most powerful in our society.
Now, five years on, what has happened to all the earnest promises to fix things? The answers can be found in a new white paper published by my organisation – the Alliance for Journalists Freedom (AJF) – which assesses the state of press freedom in Australia. Although there have been some incremental improvements, the overall picture is not healthy. In fact, in those five years, Australia has tumbled down the World Press Freedom index from 19th in 2019 to a humbling 39th now.
Safety net
The raids and subsequent slew of national security legislation are a big part of the story. One reason both were allowed to happen is that lack of constitutional protection – a local version of the US’s first amendment that would have obliged Parliament to build press freedom into any new legislation, and the courts to consider it before they issue search warrants for journalists.
That’s why the white paper’s central recommendation is a media freedom act. While an act of parliament is not as powerful as constitutional reform, our draft performs much the same role. It compels politicians to always consider the public interest in a free press when they pass new legislation, and the police and the courts to always consider it before going after journalists. In other words, it recognises a clear public interest in having a watchdog monitoring the most powerful in our democracy, and obliges the system to take it into account when either passing new laws or enforcing existing ones.
The tricky bit is defining who such a law should apply to. Does a YouTuber producing a daily newscast deserve the same protection as an investigative journalist working for the ABC? The answer lies in the reason we protect press freedom. It isn’t because we want to give special treatment to anyone who calls themselves “journalist”. It is because we recognise the need for reliable, ethical, accurate reporting on public affairs, and that depends not on any job title, but on the ethics and standards that lie behind the reporting.
If we take that approach in law, it opens up the opportunity for the news industry to respond by following the lead of almost every other profession and creating a professional association.
Self-regulation not the answer
The association is not a union. We already have one of those – the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) – and it does a fine job of representing journalists in industrial matters. But the point of any professional association is not to protect its members. It is to protect the interests of the people they are supposed to be serving.
There are self-regulation mechanisms for the media – the Australian Press Council holds publishers to account, and quasi-independent government agency the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) watches over broadcasters. But those agencies only monitor their member companies – not individual journalists. There are also a host of smaller publishers, digital start-ups and podcasters who all fall outside their remits.
Broadly speaking, that system of industry self-regulation has been criticised as ineffective in upholding ethics and standards. Witness the recent collapse in public trust in journalism to see the effects of that failure.
That’s why the AJF believes a voluntary industry association is vital. It would admit members who show they understand those ethical and professional obligations and apply them to their work. It would hold its members accountable to a transparent code of conduct. Those members could badge their work with a kind of kite mark to show readers that the journalism is produced in line with a code, and give people a straightforward and transparent way of complaining if they think it breaches the code.
A professional association would also give social media companies a way of identifying and boosting quality journalism up the rankings, and provide training opportunities for members.
Voluntary membership
To be clear, this scheme is not compulsory, so nobody’s freedom of speech is undermined in any way.
Neither a media freedom act nor a professional association will solve all the problems facing Australian journalism, but together they will help provide the legal protection sorely missing at present, and help the industry serve the public that journalists claim to be representing.
Peter Greste is professor of journalism at Macquarie University and executive director of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom. He spent 25 years as a foreign correspondent for the BBC and Al Jazeera across the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.
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