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It was easy to miss on Friday, despite its importance. Our minds were absorbed with other, more pressing matters.
There was domestic violence, brought into sharp focus by the mass killing in Bondi and the murder of Molly Ticehurst the following week. Quite rightly, our attention was fixed on what is a national crisis.
News outlets across the nation carried stories, analyses and editorials, shining a bright, introspective and necessary light into our society's darkest corner.
Little wonder then that World Press Freedom Day came and went on Friday with barely a murmur here in Australia. A measure of our good fortune is that we enjoy a level of press freedom that makes it possible to hold power to account, to question the way society is run, and to call out abuse and wrongdoing. But we shouldn't be too smug.
According to the World Press Freedom Index, Australia ranks 39th for reporting freedom while Norway ranks 1st. Eritrea comes last at 180th. The US, despite its constitutional free speech protections, ranks 55th while New Zealand is 19th.
India, that beacon of democracy and bulwark against a rising China (its Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared "The Boss" by a fawning, foolish Anthony Albanese) ranks a miserable 166th on the global scale. It's a smidge better than China, which comes in at 172nd.
No surprise then that the ABC's fearless South Asia correspondent Avani Dias was denied a visa extension to continue reporting from India after she covered that country's Sikh separatist movement.
Another story, broken by The Washington Post, that the "nest of spies" alluded to by ASIO boss Mike Burgess and quietly booted out of the country in 2020 were Indian operatives caught many by surprise. Our press freedoms ensured we could ask the question: With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Canada, which ranks 14th on the World Press Freedom Index, has been asking that question since last September, when its PM Justin Trudeau accused India of orchestrating the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and Sikh separatist.
Geopolitical expediency might see our government try to sidestep the issue of Indian interference in domestic matters but our inquiring media should keep asking the questions, no matter how awkward.
Ranked 101st on WPF Index, Israel on Sunday shut down the local offices of the Qatar funded Al Jazeera network, which it accused of incitement. Al Jazeera had been a sharp critic of the conduct of Israel's war in Gaza since the October 7 Hamas atrocities. It has also accused Israel of targeting its journalists in Gaza.
The Foreign Press Association, which represents journalists reporting from Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, said Israel had through its ban joined a dubious club of authoritarian states. It was, it said, a dark day for democracy.
I thought deeply about World Press Freedom Day on Saturday night. After much hesitation I watched the movie Civil War, a searing study of the human cost of covering conflict. It reminded me of the journalists I'd encountered on my safe career path who'd risked all and suffered great personal cost reporting from war zones.
The cameraman with the thousand yard stare as he recounted almost being killed for his Levi's in Afghanistan just after the Soviets withdrew in 1989 - the situation only defused when the translator convinced the would-be robbers the jeans were fakes. Cameraman Les Wasley, who covered the fall of Saigon in 1975. Peter George, who reported on the Middle East from Beirut in the early 1980s and spoke of the constant bombardment by Israel. And of Coco the parrot in the Commodore Hotel, which had newcomers diving for cover with its perfect imitation of incoming artillery shells.
There was Neil Davis, who was at the presidential palace in Saigon when the North Vietnamese tank burst through the gates at the end of the conflict. In 1985, I interviewed Davis about his experiences covering the Vietnam War and the war in Cambodia and was struck by his cool detachment.
Shortly after that interview, Davis was killed covering a coup in Thailand.
The Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists say more than 100 journalists have been killed in the seven months of the war on Gaza. Most of them have been Palestinians. Three Lebanese and four Israeli journalists have also lost their lives.
Those who've survived have borne intimate witness to the horrors of the war and will carry those scars for the rest of their lives. A high price for the news we take for granted.
HAVE YOUR SAY: How important is press freedom? Do we take it for granted in our liberal democracy? When you see harrowing footage from conflict zones, do you think of the person who filmed it? Email us: echidna@theechidna.com.au
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
- Telstra has delayed the shutdown of its 3G network amid concerns it may stop customers across Australia making emergency calls. The national telco says it will now switch off the network on August 31 - two months later than planned - to ensure customers have upgraded their devices.
- The Prime Minister admits he's worried about frayed social cohesion following rising tensions at university campuses amid protests over the Middle Eastern conflict. Pro-Palestinian encampments have been set up at several Australian universities, following wider protests in the US, calling for the tertiary institutions to divest funds from Israel and for a ceasefire in Gaza.
- Australian farmland prices are set to rise again this year, but growth will be slower than in the past three years, according to the yearly snapshot from Rabobank. The agricultural lender forecasts farmland value will increase in the next 12 months across all sectors by 5 per cent per hectare, with cropping land to outperform grazing land.
THEY SAID IT: "When we lose a journalist, we lose our eyes and ears to the outside world. We lose a voice for the voiceless." - UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk.
YOU SAID IT: When the algorithm delivers ads for hearing aids and incontinence products, as well as posts about assault rifles, you know social media has lost the plot. Losing news links will be one step more towards irrelevance.
Bruce writes his own question: "Would we all be better off without social media?"
"My news source is online subscriptions to respectable newspapers and TV," writes Stuart. "I quit social media three years ago and haven't missed it at all."
Likewise Phil: "I ditched social media five years ago and got my life back. Hours in the garden smelling roses and lavender and listening to birds instead of staring at the rantings of lunatics and getting irate."
"We are beginning to be selective in what we discuss even," writes Sally. "Say 'holiday' and you are inundated. I have asked many times for ads not to go up on Instagram, to no avail. I get the same emails you do with the addition of male extensions. I'm starting to regret even having social media."
Michele writes: "There are good and bad social media feeds. We cannot shut down freedom of speech so news in the public interest gets left out. However, it is just as important to shut down misinformation, especially political false news, which affects each and every citizen. The answer needs to be strong legislation with penalties that hit the hip pocket and it needs to apply to every social media feed as well as its origin."
"I use television and print media," writes Arthur. "That news has been edited and screened by professionals. Regulations to control the internet are long overdue. A start would be to make it illegal to post anything on the internet anonymously. Anyone who posts anything on the internet should be held responsible for the results of those posts. Persons who repeatedly post false or misleading information or information aimed at radicalising anyone should be barred from loading any further posts. Our government may find it hard to draft appropriate regulations but that is what they are paid to do. They have access to all the resources required to draft the appropriate laws."
Sue writes: "I access my news via my email: I subscribe to ABC AM, PM and Science, The Echidna and a variety of other ACM newsletters, the Conversation and if all that is not enough, I search the internet directly. If social media organisations are distributing information in any country, then that information should be within the laws of the country involved. We saw some fairly extreme downsides to the spreading of misinformation during the COVID pandemic."
Peter, who reads The Echidna first thing in the morning, writes: "I don't 'access' news - I 'read' or 'view'. Your use of the passive false verb 'access' is part of the problem. If people actively chose and thought about the news they read or viewed they could make critical choices, rather than passively absorbing harmful nonsense by default."
John Hanscombe
Four decades in the media, working in print and television. Formerly editor of the South Coast Register and Milton Ulladulla Times. Based on the South Coast of NSW.
Four decades in the media, working in print and television. Formerly editor of the South Coast Register and Milton Ulladulla Times. Based on the South Coast of NSW.
