Dangerous registers: The folly of Journalism Australia

Oct 8, 2024
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The nature, and agenda, of Journalism Australia is clear. It will segregate the washed and unwashed, granting dispensations and protections to the approved while lessening the protections for lesser scribblers.

Journalism Australia Limited was formerly placed on the Australian corporate register in July. The directors were formerly listed as Macquarie University academic Peter Greste, lobbyist Peter Wilkinson and executive director of The Ethics Centre, Simon Longstaff.

According to Greste, yet another journalist turned academic, the new body will set “professional” standards for the craft and demarcate the lines of media freedom in Australia. (The latter object should immediately send a shiver of alarm.)

The organisation, for a registration fee, will offer its members the protections under a proposed bill to be known as the Media Reform Act (MFA), a bill drafted by members of the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom. Greste is that outfit’s Executive Director.

As the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom explains, “The law should not be protecting a particular class of self-appointed individual, but rather the role that journalism plays in our democracy.” Immediately, it is clear that an entire world of scribblers is to be excluded from the privileges and protections Journalism Australia intends. The organisation would only “admit members who show they know and understand the law and their professional ethics, and apply them to their work.” Members would be held accountable through a complaints system, and – a charming addition this – able to “badge their work with a quality kite mark next to their by-line.”

Mary Kostakidis, herself a veteran journalist of some standing, smelled a rat. “This is about control,” she tweeted. “The target will be independent journalists like myself because we are not constrained by an organisation’s policy to for example ‘avoid using the word genocide, or Palestine, or apartheid’”. It was in the nature of independent journalism to “question and critique US foreign policy, AUKUS, and Israel” using such platforms as social media, “the other thing that must be excised because the government has lost control of the narrative.”

The MFA becomes, perversely enough, a vehicle to assist those in law enforcement and the judiciary to “identify who is producing journalism”. How better to do this than to put your hand up and claim membership of Journalism Australia? Such people would only be those “producing content that is in some way already accountable to a code of conduct or set of professional standards, whether through their employer or some other external mechanism.”

The Alliance also proposes a reversal of the onus on proving one’s standing as a journalist for non-members. In cases where law enforcement agencies wished to search the data of non-members “such as an independent freelance journalist or a volunteer for a local news service, they must still give that person the right to object, but it is up to the target of their investigation to show the court that their work meets the required standard.” Member journalists, on the other hand, are entitled to a “rebuttable presumption” that their work warrants protection.

Greste’s position on journalism has always been a pseudo-aristocratic one. It’s an attitude that bedevils the Fourth Estate: individuals who think that press standards are dictated by immemorial rules forged by some forgotten elite. This attitude hardened with his arrest as an Al Jazeera English journalist in Egypt. His 400 days in prison gave him an aura of legitimacy.

When Greste became the UNESCO Chair of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland, he adopted a patrician air to those he regarded as impostors of the craft. He attacked the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, for not sticking with the traditional script of journalism – at least the sort as understood by Greste. Even as the enormity of Assange’s arrest in 2019 was dawning on dim-witted journalists across the globe, Greste would still cling to the rationale adopted by the US Department of Justice: that Assange could not be a journalist for allegedly revealing sources in unredacted documents, putting them, and the security of the United States, at risk.

In June this year, while celebrating Assange’s release (“a man who has suffered enormously for exposing the truth of abuses of power”) Greste was still of the view that WikiLeaks had not met that standard of journalism that “comes with it the responsibility to process and present information in line with a set of ethical and professional standards.” It had released “raw, unredacted and unprocessed information online”. In doing so, it had created “enormous risks for people in the field, including sources.” At no point does Greste mention Assange’s own history of fastidious redaction, a point made abundantly clear in defence submissions in the publisher’s extradition trial.

The nature, and agenda, of Journalism Australia is clear. It will segregate the washed and unwashed, granting dispensations and protections to the approved while lessening the protections for lesser scribblers. In doing so, it will become a servitor to state power, in effect, its mediator and filterer. It will shun and condemn the publishing efforts of WikiLeaks and those of similar ilk.

Greste could not help but concede that two classes of journalist would arise from his proposals, “in the sense that we’ve got a definition for what we call a member journalist and non-member journalists, but I certainly feel comfortable with the idea of providing upward pressure on people to make sure their work falls on the right side of that line.” The rest of us have every good reason to feel less than comfortable with this accommodation of power and the Fourth Estate.

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