Balancing free speech
I believe it was Arundhati Roy who first compared the manufacturing of public opinion to the manufacturing of other mass market products like ‘soaps, switches and sliced bread’, and free speech to a ‘commodity like everything else’. And while free speech is free, it should also be responsible. This becomes particularly crucial when the words run across the front page of a mainstream centre-left newspaper. In my piece this week, I write about the serious issues with the ‘Red Alert’ series, published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, which ‘predict’ that China would attack Australia in three years. As a peace journalism researcher, this kind of conflict-escalatory media coverage is exactly what keeps me up at night.
Professor Monica Attard was at the Adelaide Writers Week earlier this week, which went great but not without controversies. She writes specifically about two Palestinian speakers, whose ideas were not very well-received by those present at the sessions, to an extent that the events curator was told to cancel them both and herself resign.
More on media coverage and women… Sacha Molitorisz turns to media coverage of the online abuse that ABC host Lisa Millar received last week over an outfit she wore to one of her programs. He writes about how the issue of harassment of female journalists turned into news media fighting about the coverage of the issue.
Lastly, the Centre was visited by a delegation of journalists from the Philippines. We had a great discussion on a range of issues from press freedom and journalists’ safety to the changing ecosystem of the media industries and business models in both the countries. We, at the Centre, are now looking forward to welcoming a delegation of Indonesian journalists next week. More on that in our next newsletter.
Ayesha Jehangir, CMT Postdoctoral Fellow
