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…
This is the op-ed by Prof. Peter Greste published in The Australian this morning, to start our campaign for a Media Freedom Act. One of the central tenets of a successful liberal democracy is press freedom. As voters, we employ our elected officials to run the government on our behalf, and as with all bosses, we have a right…
The New York-based Committee for the Protection of Journalists is blunt in its assessment of the state of journalism around the world today: “There has never been a more dangerous time to be a journalist,” it declares in its #FreeThePress campaign.
