
AJF’s idea for a National Working Group is designed to help maintain the integrity of Australia’s security, while protecting press freedom.
AJF’s idea for a National Working Group is designed to help maintain the integrity of Australia’s security, while protecting press freedom.
Sometimes it takes deeply shocking events to remind us why we need certain social institutions to work freely and effectively. We’re now not just having a pandemic, but we’ve also had a drought and a catastrophic bushfire season to underscore – in red ink – just how important it is to have a well-resourced and genuinely free media that does…
A free press is not about special treatment for the media, but ensuring our governments are held to account, writes Professor Peter Greste. The ABC’s failed court bid is yet another blow — and we should all be worried. On Monday, the Federal Court issued a judgment that I suspect will come to be seen as a pivotal moment…
This article was originally published in The Australian. In the debates on press freedom, a lot of the media’s critics tend to dismiss journalists as pleading for special privileges. “No one is above (the law), including me or anyone else, any journalist or anyone else,” Scott Morrison said, anticipating the Right to Know coalition’s campaign calling for legislative changes to…
The two raids by squads of Australian Federal Police officers on Wednesday sounded horribly familiar. This piece originally published in the Daily Telegraph. Images of them pushing their way into the offices of the ABC and the home of Daily Telegraph journalist Annika Smethurst, warrant in hand, riffling through personal belongings in a search for evidence recalled a night in…
The raid on the ABC shows we need a law to protect journalists and their sources This article was originally published in The Guardian. Democracy is, by definition, government by the people. Politicians act on behalf of those who employ them; that is, us Australian voters and tax-payers. As their employers, we have both a right and a responsibility to…
In a scene right out of a thriller, agents from the Filipino National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) raided journalist and editor Maria Ressa’s Manila office at 5pm on Wednesday February 13, after most courts had closed. They took her from the Rappler newsroom where she is editor, to a police watch house and threw her in a cell. Ressa’s lawyer…