Protecting and promoting public interest journalism

Several media freedom issues have surfaced over the last fortnight.

First, Damon Johnston wrote a piece for The Australian on his battle in the Victorian Supreme Court over his reporting on an investigation by the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission. Jonston and the newspaper were resisting an argument put by Peter Marshall, Secretary of the United Firefighters Union, that, if successful, would severely restrict the scope of an offer of confidentiality a journalist makes to a source.  Justice Lisa Hannon refused Marshall’s application for discovery of documents that would have revealed his sources.

Then there was a report in the SMH about AB v ABC in which an interim injunction was issued by the NSW Supreme Court, along with suppression and non-publication orders. The applicants are three high profile sports people who exchanged group chat messages, with the content described as “shared jokes, insults of named other people ... and crude descriptions of sexual acts and domestic violence”. The messages were exposed after the ex-partner of one showed the evidence to an ABC journalist. This is an interesting matter that has a way to run, so we’ll come back to it in a future newsletter.

Finally, there was the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. The Special Envoy’s proposal for an additional mechanism to provide oversight of the ABC and SBS does not seem viable or desirable to me. But she has exposed a shortcoming with the current system – and I don’t mean the absence of standards schemes for online content, which has been recognised for years and came to prominence in the fiasco involving YouTube and Sky News in 2021. The Envoy is right to point to the absence of any satisfactory means of establishing whether mainstream media organisations have, on the whole, provided accurate and fair coverage of the conflict in the Middle East. We’ve been conducting our own research on this, which we’ll publish in the next couple of months, but the nature of the complaints-driven compliance systems that apply to broadcast, print and online news has exposed a real gap in any authoritative assessment of reporting. We learned at Friday’s Royal Commission hearings that ACMA has been doing some work on this, but it appeared from the Chair’s comments that this review is itself based on complaints. We’ll need to wait for more information about the scope of the review, but the community is certainly in need of the kind of impartial assessment ACMA can provide. In the absence of a timely, public facing investigation or inquiry by the regulator, it’s not surprising there are calls for some kind of intermediary accountability mechanism. Indeed, these calls could – and may well – arise out of any matter of serious community concern.
 
Our current accountability mechanisms might need to work a bit better if we want to defend the various protections journalism needs to do its job, while also resisting demands for another layer of oversight.

In other developments this week, Michael updates us on Australia's new AI policy, announced by the Prime Minister on Wednesday, Alena tells us about the latest journalism research presented at an international conference in Dublin and I look at how proposed gambling ad laws capture "notable people".

Read the newsletter.

References:

Damon Johnston article in the Australian: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/legal-victory-for-freedom-of-the-press-and-your-right-to-know/news-story/

Report in SMH about AB v ABC: https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/abc-barred-from-reporting-high-profile-sports-figures-crude-descriptions-of-sexual-acts-20260706-p60cyy.html  

AB v Australian Broadcasting Corporation [2026] NSWSC 767 judgment: https://www.caselaw.nsw.gov.au/decision/19f1c1d8e6a99b58ecec60de

YouTube and Sky News issue as reported in the final report of the Senate Committee that looked at Media Diversity in Australia: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Environment_and_Communications/Mediadiversity/Report/section?id=committees%2freportsen%2f024602%2f78581   

Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion – Hearing Block 3: https://asc.royalcommission.gov.au/hearings/hearing-block-3-sydney