Heavy media focus and persevering with media cutbacks have pushed Australia to its lowest rating ever within the World Press Freedom Index, run by worldwide press freedom group Reporters With out Borders (RWB).
As soon as a top-20 nation within the index, Australia managed thirty ninth in 2023, in keeping with the most recent model of the index, with its total rating of 73.42 being its lowest ever. That locations us under international locations such because the Dominican Republic, Namibia and Jamaica.
The RWB methodology is topic to sudden lurches — Australia was thirty ninth in 2021 (with a rating of 73.77), recovered to twenty seventh in 2022 however is now again down once more. In keeping with RWB, “hyperconcentration” of media possession has lengthy been a key obstacle, however “the issue has been made worse by mergers and acquisitions of the most important media organisations. Newsrooms have suffered lately from the damaging results of digital transformation, value reductions and layoffs.”
RWB notes Australian journalists don’t worry violence or arbitrary detention, however “nonetheless really feel threatened by different prospects similar to defamation fits, contempt of court docket fees, assaults on social media, or lack of employment on account of authorities or company interference”.
In 2023, the ABC minimize brief a radio stint by Antoinette Lattouf for posting a hyperlink to a Human Rights Watch report on Gaza that was lined by the broadcaster, whereas journalists who signed an open letter calling for stability in protection of the Israel-Hamas battle had been censored by 9’s Fairfax papers, and criticised by different retailers. Elsewhere, Seven Community employed a battle felony, Ben Roberts-Smith, who tried to sue the 9 newspapers for defamation for exposing his crimes earlier than dropping his case final 12 months (it’s at present beneath attraction).
The newest RWB report additionally notes “on the federal degree, the Canberra Parliament has additionally adopted a number of problematic legal guidelines for the reason that finish of the 2010s. These on nationwide safety, espionage and knowledge encryption, specifically, include provisions authorising officers to violate the confidentiality of journalists’ sources”.
Since Labor returned to energy, Legal professional-Common Mark Dreyfus has launched one spherical of reforms to the whistleblower safety legal guidelines he put in place when beforehand attorney-general beneath Julia Gillard, and is making ready one other spherical, in addition to halted the political persecution by the Coalition of Bernard Collaery over the Howard authorities’s spying on Timor-Leste (one other nation that ranks above Australia in press freedom).
Nonetheless, the federal government can be pursuing so-called “anti-doxxing” legal guidelines after pro-Palestine activists uncovered the names of a Whatsapp group that the activists claimed performed a marketing campaign of vilification in opposition to them, whereas two senior safety bureaucrats just lately used the Wakeley knife assault to resume calls for for an finish to encrypted communication apps. The mainstream media has additionally campaigned in opposition to free speech on social media and pushed for on-line censorship.
