ABC Chair Kim Williams AM Delivers 2024 John Monash Oration hosted by the Commonwealth Bank
The General Sir John Monash Foundation held its 13th John Monash Oration with the chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Kim Williams AM delivering a timely address on truth, trust and knowledge in the media.
The highly anticipated annual event, hosted by the Commonwealth Bank, brought together a distinguished assembly of Foundation members, friends, supporters and Scholars to reflect on the vital role of leadership in shaping Australia’s future.
In his Oration, Mr Williams argued strongly that the role of the media is to preserve and protect democracy in the face of major societal challenges and upheavals.
“Our duty is to show people that the truth can survive and still be discerned in a world of multiplying fake news, bigotry and populist opinion,” Mr Williams said. “We must make democratic politics based on the exercise of reason once again the norm.”
Zelie Heger, a 2010 John Monash Scholar and barrister from Eleven Wentworth Chambers, provided a response to Mr Williams’ address. Ms Heger, whose scholarship supported her pursuit of a Master of Law in Human Rights at the University of Cambridge, underscored the media’s important role in democracy and the justice system.
“The media is not something we can take for granted, and we need to invest in it to ensure it continues to be a beacon of truth and knowledge in the face of so much disinformation and irrational thought,” Ms Heger said.
The evening also celebrated the enduring partnership between the General Sir John Monash Foundation and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. This collaboration has enabled emerging Australian leaders to pursue postgraduate education at some of the world’s most prestigious universities. Since the partnership began in 2003, the Commonwealth Bank has awarded fourteen Commonwealth Bank John Monash Scholarships, with recipients continuing to demonstrate leadership at national and international levels.
Jillian Segal AO, Chair of the General Sir John Monash Foundation, expressed her gratitude for the Commonwealth Bank's ongoing support, saying: “For over two decades, the Commonwealth Bank has stood with us in our mission to cultivate the next generation of Australian leaders. Their commitment to education and leadership is commendable, and we are proud to continue this journey together.”
Andrew Hinchliff, Group Executive, Institutional Banking and Markets Commonwealth Bank, said: “It’s an honour to continue our long-standing support for the General Sir John Monash Foundation. The scholarship program has fostered the talent of incredible young Australians who are going on to make significant contributions in their chosen fields and in our society more broadly.”
A complete transcript of Mr Williams 2024 John Monash Oration and Ms Heger's response can be found below.
Kim Williams AM | Speech Transcript
Wednesday 4 September 2024
Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Sydney
Colleagues: friends of knowledge, and the devotion to scholarship and ethical, civic- minded leadership, which provides the reason for being for the Sir John Monash Scholarship Program.
I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners on these ancestral lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation on which we gather tonight. I pay my respects to Elders past and present and to the Elders of other Indigenous communities in Australia.
I also take this moment to acknowledge the diverse peoples and cultures who have been welcomed to this nation, along with the laws, freedoms, rights, and faiths they have brought or represent.
Acknowledging this is crucial, given the never-ending assault on difference which characterises our society.
It’s my great honour to be here today as the chair of one of Australia’s most important institutions – or to be more precise, one of Australia’s most important democratic institutions: the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
That’s how I regard the ABC – not as simply a TV, radio and online network, but as a central component of Australian democracy.
All of us here today are serious people. We watch the news. We try to interpret the times. The state of democracy around the world is often in our minds. Suddenly, it appears more fragile than we once thought. Locked in a battle – in places literally – with nasty, authoritarian forms of populism.
Its survival depends on us and what we do.
Citizens need to understand this worrisome phenomenon.
Building that understanding needs reportage, analysis, commentary, discussion and strong informed leadership.
That battle between democracy and populism is often a contest between the truth and lies. Because where there is no truth, there is no democracy. Truth is the oil that makes the machinery of freedom work.
This matters. In every sense.
Countries where the truth triumphs are richer, happier and free-er. Even In the recent tally of medals In the Olympics - population of the USA and China aside - It was the advanced democracies that performed so demonstrably well because they celebrate and support meritocracy.
Remove truth and you get a screaming match that creates and channels anger and hatred. People yelling past each other. Claiming that walls can keep enemies out, that drinking bleach can cure Covid, that everything that’s going wrong with our nation, our society and our own lives is someone else’s fault and must be avenged.
Decisions based on untruths – stuff that is merely made-up – is a recipe for policy disaster.
In some ways the man we honour this evening, General Sir John Monash, provides a lesson in the need for the truth and reason to guide our decisions.
Monash was a man who built his reputation on bringing reason to bear on fact-based realities. An engineer. A general.
Just as an engineer he built bridges using the laws of physics, as a general he built victories on the cold logic of battle. And like all truly great engineers, he was open to new materials, new technologies and new forms of organisation. He didn’t suffer foolish plans that were based on pride, emotion and hope.
In some ways he invented modern warfare. The most accomplished of his contemporaries and military historians alike have said he was the greatest, most thorough and most imaginative general of the first world war – something proved by his masterminding of the most decisive battle of that war – the Battle of Amiens – after which his opposite number General Ludendorff declared the war was effectively over.
Reason, facts, logic . . . these things drove his decisions. The Australian Corps was in good hands indeed.
And yet, he had contemporaries who based their decisions on the illogic of prejudice and populism. And they didn’t like Monash.
Seldom has a great Australian been subjected to such calumnies.
In June 1918, as the allied forces had begun to repulse the German Spring Offensive, Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig decided to appoint Monash, then head of the Australian 3rd Division, as head of the Australian Corps. Monash’s credentials for the position had been demonstrated by his recapture of Villers-Bretonneux, the first great setback for Ludendorff’s desperate gamble, rightly now a famous battle honour for our nation.
But two men who thought their opinions were more important weren’t convinced. War correspondent Charles Bean and journalist Keith Murdoch saw things differently and began a campaign to convince Prime Minister Billy Hughes to intervene and give the battlefield command to Major General Brudenell White instead.
They began a lobbying campaign on the lie that Monash’s peers didn’t rate him. It was out-and-out nonsense – a disinformation campaign, which collapsed when Prime Minister Billy Hughes, touring the frontline, was told repeatedly the exact opposite: that Monash had the esteem of all who worked with him.
Bean’s and Murdoch’s folly was a great example of the idiocy of spreading fake news and of basing decisions on prejudice and ego. As Monash’s biographer, Geoffrey Serle, so aptly put it, to have distracted Australia’s higher commanders during some of the most vital days of the war “… is perhaps the outstanding case of sheer irresponsibility by pressmen in Australian history.”
Monash later gained the grudging respect of Bean, but Murdoch’s strange enmity lived on in his barely explicable opposition to Monash’s favoured design for the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance, against which his newspaper The Herald waged a relentless campaign.
‘The tomb of gloom’, Keith Murdoch’s newspapers called it, painting it as an elitist project that they wanted replaced with a square and cenotaph at the top of Bourke Street. His cheap, populist campaign almost succeeded. Thank God it didn’t.
Without Monash’s leadership, the epic, solemn shrine that remains a source of reverence and pride to all Victorians, may have been lost, replaced by something decidedly utilitarian and pedestrian.
In both of these controversies, had populism triumphed over evidence, history would have been different and we the poorer. The Allies’ brilliant offensive may not have broken the Hindenburg line so easily in October 1918, many more may have died as a result, and Melbourne may have been robbed of one of its most imposing, sacred and city-defining architectural treasures.
After his great victories, Monash, went on to grace Victorian and Australian society for just another 13 years before his death aged just 66 in 1931.
His life was a resounding victory for integrity and a signal defeat for racism and authoritarianism at a time when such dark antidemocratic forces were gathering pace in Europe.
One of his greatest achievements was not succumbing to hubris. Like the noblest characters of classical times, he ignored calls to enter politics, overthrow the Scullin government and establish himself as some sort of dictator. Interestingly, the man he defeated in 1918, General Eric Ludendorff, wasn’t as wise. His dictatorial ambitions helped undermine the Weimar republic and pave the way for Hitler and the Holocaust.
How fortunate were we to have a Monash not a Ludendorff.
It has been said that, by contrast, Monash’s achievements made the spread of antisemitism in Australia impossible. Our diggers wouldn’t hear a word against him. That alone should cause us to remember him as one of the truly great Australians.
So . . . why is remembering Monash in this way still important?
Most directly, I would say that in a world of multiplying Ludendorffs, we need more Monash-es. The Monash Scholars present today are next generation thinkers and leaders for this nation at a crucial time in world affairs.
Monash demonstrated in his own life that freedom’s triumph depends on each of us . . . our leadership . . . our integrity . . . the individual decisions we each make to put the country above personal ambition . . . our fidelity to democracy over populism . . . our commitment to reason and truth over irrationalism and lies . . . and the importance of being open, always, to innovation and progress.
For those of us in the media, the implication is clear. Our duty is to show people that the truth can survive and still be discerned in a world of multiplying fake news, bigotry and populist opinion. We must make democratic politics based on the exercise of reason once again the norm.
In practical terms, it means creating a trusted source of news to provide the fuel that sustains our democracy.
I’m guessing many of you are ardent podcast listeners. I certainly am. One of my favourites at present is “The Rest is Politics”, with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart.
Something they have been discussing recently is the need for trusted sources of news to combat the global rise of anti-democratic populist movements that spread hatred and lies.
Fascinatingly, one person warning against this is JD Vance who wrote in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy that only 6 percent of American voters believed that the media was “very trustworthy”. They know that the mainstream media frequently exposes right wing conspiracy theories as nonsense, it’s just that they don’t care. They believe what they want to believe.
“This [Vance writes] isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep scepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream.”
One wonders how far Mr Vance has changed his views in the eight years since he published that, but on the crucial point he is correct. The very institutions of our society are losing the public’s trust in large part because there is no longer a broad consensus about the facts.
We saw an example of the damage lies can cause in the ugly riots that spread across cities in England and Northern Ireland recently. Fake news. Some of it Russian disinformation. All of it enabled by the new media world in which we live.
As a recent Guardian editorial said:
Our media landscape, which is symbiotically linked to politics, has both raised the temperature of civic life and created forums for destructive, anti-democratic impulses to coalesce in new ways.
And as Artificial Intelligence becomes more sophisticated, this sort of thing is likely to become more common. Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that there would soon be billions of personalised AI assistants producing content for the world – exactly the sort of invented content responsible for these violent xenophobic riots in the UK. This worries me.
In the face of all this, the contest for liberal democracy is now a battle to establish the primacy of the truth.
The truth unites, lies divide. The truth builds social cohesion, lies create social confusion. And democracy has to respond by getting better at spreading the truth, everywhere.
We have to bridge the divides between classes, cultures, genders and communities. Creating richer, better quality news content and disseminating it across the entirety of our nation. City and country getting the same high quality of service.
This is getting harder.
Across the world, leading trusted news media are battling to remain viable as their revenues are captured by tech companies and their audiences are taken by TikTok, YouTube, Insta, Facebook and myriad others.
According to the latest survey of 47 countries by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, across the globe the percentage of people getting their news from online platforms rather than media publishers is steadily increasing. It is now at 72 per cent compared to 22 per cent only a few years ago. The revenue costs are stingingly severe, a sorry tale of layoffs and closures, emptying newsrooms and defunct mastheads. Regional and rural media has been particularly hard hit.
The result is the accelerating breakdown of social cohesion. And the creation of the increasingly divided, coarsened, intolerant and violent world we now inhabit.
As Chairman of the ABC as well as the Reuters News Agency Trustees, I understand the economic pressures global news gathering is under to maintain its quality, diversity and vital importance.
What can we do, here in Australia? Because the same forces undermining newsrooms across the world are at work here too.
In 2023:
newspaper revenue was 4.4 per cent below that of 2019
television advertising revenue was down 10 per cent on the previous year
and broadcast radio advertising revenue was down 4 per cent on the previous year.
Online advertising now accounts for more than half of all advertising revenue in Australia, with two-thirds of that going to just two players, Google and Facebook.
And while digital subscriptions for our news media are growing, they are not keeping up with readership and revenue losses.
As a result, the number of newspaper journalists almost halved between 2011 and 2023.
The number of regional news outlets is in an even more dire state of decay, especially in Queensland.
This situation hasn’t been helped by Meta’s declaration in March that it was closing its Australian news partnership team and not entering new commercial deals with news organisations – currently worth more than $70 million annually. Together with Google, these agreements have to date contributed $200 million per year to help keep newsrooms afloat. Meta’s decision is accelerating an already rapid diminishment of newsrooms with severe, even savage cuts at Nine, NewsCorp and SevenWest.
The axe keeps swinging, and every time it falls, the truth and democracy suffer a blow.
The ways people consume news, information and entertainment are altering at startling rates:
Since 2011, broadcast television’s reach has fallen by a third – from just over 90 per cent to just under 62 per cent.
Radio listeners are consuming nearly a quarter less per week than they were a dozen years ago.
The Financial Times recently reported that for the first time ever, less than half of 16 to 24 year olds in the UK (48 per cent) tuned into regular broadcast services in an average week – down from more than three quarters (76 per cent ) in 2018.
Even young children aged 4 to 15 are moving online – only 55 per cent of them are watching broadcast television in an average week, compared to 81 per cent six years ago.
Where are these viewers and listeners going? Increasingly to social media.
They’re curating their own viewing, getting their news from many user generated sources, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and increasingly TikTok.
According to the Pew Research Centre, a third of Americans aged between 18 and 29 are regularly getting their news from TikTok. Journalists trained in media ethics are often being sidelined in favour of the views and values from unknown strangers.
And increasingly content is being created using no journalists at all. AI is now an active generator of produced news.
You don’t have to be a Luddite to worry about what this may mean for the truth and for democracy if it is not within editorial guardrails. It is silly to stand in the way of innovation, however we need to know that what is produced can be trusted.
Already the Reuters Institute study reports that just 40 per cent of respondents say that they trust most news. This is down from 50 per cent in 2018. Younger, poorer and less educated people tend to trust news less, there is little difference between left and right. The most disengaged citizens trust the media the least.
What this survey does suggest is that the top trust factors were ‘high journalistic standards’ (80 per cent) and ‘transparency’ (81 per cent).
The survey also stated that – at 64 per cent – trust in the ABC was significantly ahead of any other news source in Australia.
People trust the ABC because we earn their trust through our professionalism and objectivity and observe standards of public accountability.
These characteristics should be a feature of ABC content wherever it is found. Whether it is on our television, radio or digital platforms or indeed, on social media providers where the ABC will go to find new audiences.
We need to do all we can as a nation to reinvest in the sources of the truth – newsrooms and documentary production – because truth and knowledge aren’t optional extras for Australian democracy, they are essential to it.
New ideas are needed to restore the commercial health of our commercial newsrooms. It’s my hope that they succeed. Nine. Seven. News Corp. The smaller independent players like Schwartz and Crikey. All are vital parts of our democracy.
The ABC is not in opposition to commercial newsrooms, we are in an alliance with them to create an informed democratic citizenry. An alliance of complementary viewpoints and emphases that together provide the basis for a sound democratic debate.
The commercial broadcasters can be helped by good government policy – something I strongly support. Sadly, recent attempts – like the agreements with Meta to ensure advertising revenues are shared fairly with content providers – haven’t totally succeeded. But we can’t give up.
Ockham’s razor suggests the most obvious and direct way to strengthen Australia’s news services is to invest more in the most trusted source of news in the country: the ABC.
It has after all suffered severe funding declines for way too long. For perspective going Back 40 years, if government indexation had applied the decline is just under half a billion dollars. If we look at just the last 12 years, even after allowing for the Albanese Government’s restitution of the Morrison government cuts, the decline is 13.7% in real terms. No media organisation in the world could possibly endure such protracted neglect without an eventual decline in its geographical reach, production quality, and general news standards.
If we are serious about improving the ABC, its flaws must be acknowledged. However, I believe the ABC is a capable vital contributor to the thought landscape and will be so even more, with better investment. Its journalists are capable of remarkable work - they have demonstrated it time and again. And in turn, Australians are capable of almost anything.
My intention – one I sense has the instinctive support of Australia’s citizens – is to inject new life, new pride, new purpose and higher intellectual intent into the news, discussion and documentary side of the ABC.
I extend this to serious drama too – because serious drama focuses citizens on the big, vital issues of the times, gets them discussing, arguing, seeing things from new angles, and recognising what they have in common. Great drama has of course done that since the invention of theatre in classical Athens.
Only real effort to up the energy of serious journalism and reach out to the majority wherever they live, whatever their level of education, can give us the level of re-engagement in democratic debate that we so crucially need.
We live in interesting – some may say “dangerous” – times. Political upheaval. War in Europe. Worrisome conflict in the Middle East. Geopolitical uncertainty in Asia, Africa and the Pacific. Climate change. People movement. Roiling culture wars. I don’t think there is enough serious factual debate and reporting going on to inform the Australian people across these vital issues and to counter the increasing levels of sometimes intentional disinformation being created around them. We have to provide it and make it accessible.
What can be done? The first thing is a recommitment to objectivity.
On this subject, let me encourage you to read the recent book Collisions of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, by someone I know and admire, famed American newspaper editor Martin Baron. a leader worthy of Monash’s mission.
Marty Baron as you probably know was the creator of the renowned investigation team at the Boston Globe, which some of you may have seen in the 2015 movie Spotlight. His memoir covers so many fascinating aspects of running contemporary media organisations that it probably should be considered compulsory reading for today’s media executives. Maybe for any executive.
One of the subjects he takes on is the declining commitment to the principle of journalistic objectivity that he encountered during his time rebuilding the Washington Post following its purchase by Jeff Bezos.
Having grown up in a world of ubiquitous social media and identity politics, some of Baron’s younger journalists were starting to regard themselves not as objective reporters but as activists and partisans. Angry at the glaring inequalities in American society, swept up in the BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, they wanted to put aside staid notions about staying above the fray, and to enlist their newspaper in the cause. This caused serious headaches at the Washington Post, as it also did famously at the New York Times and other US news media.
Tempting as it is to want to take sides, I think all of us in the media and cultural institutions generally must resist. As Baron puts it:
“The [journalistic] profession’s traditional ethics standards [have] been fashioned with one overriding idea: How can news organisations earn the public’s trust?”
I think Baron is right. Trust is the crucial issue. Once the media compromises its absolute commitment to the truth, how can the people be expected to trust what it reports? How can anyone be certain about any fact? How can they safely put any faith in their leaders? How
can they believe something as straightforward as who won an election? How can the peaceful handover of power be guaranteed?
To put it another way: When the truth is relative, democracy is imperilled.
In my view, objectivity must never be compromised in any media organisation, especially in a publicly owned one like the ABC.
I am already on the record of calling for a renewal of Radio National. Its current audience is comparatively small, but its potential importance is huge. I see it as a source of future leadership for celebrating and interrogating intellectual and creative life In Australia - a flagship if you like, an exemplar of high standards and intellectual intent for the rest of the ABC and the nation to follow. Much the same role that Radio 4 plays at the BBC. Let me be clear, Radio National will remain a broadcast platform but there is no doubt audiences will increasingly enjoy the deep catalogue of debates and ideas it hosts on-demand as audiences evolve and our digital audio platform, ABC listen, continues to grow.
The Australian Financial Review – a paper I read and admire – has had a great slogan over the years. “The daily habit of successful people.” I want listening to Radio National and its podcasts to become the daily habit of thinking, engaged and well informed citizens.
The same should go for local and regional radio, as well as ABC TV news, current affairs and serious documentary, children’s, and education programs and our key digital platforms, ABC News, ABC iview and ABC listen.
In summary, in every area of the ABC, we need ambition, ambition, and more ambition.
The goal is to create a distinctive ABC voice and ethos, with all parts of the organisation recognisable for their integrity, aspiration and high standards.
While the ABC Charter makes clear that the ABC should balance programs of wide appeal and specialised interest, I think the ABC needs to manage the difficult balance between push and pull in programming for a wide diversity of Australians, whilst always aiming for the highest standards in all that it undertakes.
The ABC I chair will always respect the intelligence of its audience, and our pursuit of the best journalistic values will be second to none.
Our future lies in taking the high road to reliable, durable quality.
This is the direction that will give the ABC a sense of purpose that will remake it as one of the most important institutions of our democracy. It Is after all the mirror, the camera, and the microphone of Australia.
I want all who work for the ABC, who support the ABC, and who have responsibility for funding the ABC, to recognise its vital role in our democracy and to be infused with a spirit of positivity and optimism about Australia and its future.
Right now, the ABC is in the Australian frontline of the contest for global liberal democracy and its values.
As Sir John Monash managed to do in 1918, this is another fight Australian democracy must and will win.
John Monash Oration Reply by Zelie Heger
Wednesday 4 September 2024
Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Sydney
Kim Williams AM, Andrew, Jillian, distinguished guests, scholars, friends and supporters of Foundation.
I also acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, the Gadigal people, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
Thank you, Kim, for those inspiring words, about General Sir John Monash, and about the importance of the media to our system of government and our very way of life.
The media is not something we can take for granted, and we need to invest in it to ensure it continues to be a beacon of truth and knowledge in the face of disinformation and irrationality.
I’ve practised as a barrister here in Sydney for the past 11 years. My clients have included Commonwealth and State governments, public institutions – including the ABC – as well as international corporations and private individuals. Prior to that I worked for the Chief Justice of the High Court and the Chief Justice of the Federal Court. And, with thanks to the General Sir John Monash Foundation, I undertook a Masters in Law at Cambridge where I focused on human rights law.
Tonight want to touch on a few of the themes Kim has mentioned, but from a lawyer’s perspective.
There is a symbiotic relationship between the media and the law.
In ways that I will explain, the media promotes the rule of law, and the law promotes the media.
Kim has addressed the importance of the media to our system of democracy.
One important aspect of that is the rule of law: the idea that no person, and no government, is above the law and a breach of the law will result in consequences.
The media can have both a positive and negative influence on the rule of law.
The positive dimension is this. The media promotes accountability, exposing when government is not abiding by the laws it has made.
This requires the media to be independent of government. It also requires journalists to have protections for their sources and protection from legal action that prevents them from reporting in the public interest.
The law of defamation has developed to serve this end, although different views may be taken about whether it has achieved it.
Where a media organisation is sued for defamation, it is a defence if they show they were reporting the substantial truth. That is the defence that succeeded for Channel 10 in proceedings brought by Bruce Lehrmann. Or they can rely on the defence of qualified privilege: that there was a public interest in reporting on the issue and the reporting was reasonable in the circumstances.
The media also has a role in educating the public on what the law is. I recently appeared in a case brought by Ms Tickle, a transgender woman, who successfully claimed that a social networking app, Giggle for Girls, had broken the law by excluding her on the grounds of her transgender status.
That judgment was widely reported by the media. And that meant that the court’s judgment, which was a first in this area of gender identity discrimination, could have an educative effect beyond the two parties to the proceedings.
But the media’s impact on the rule of law can also be negative, when it is used in the wrong way. To take a hypothetical and general example: a court upholds the rights of an unpopular minority group. A section of the media criticises the decision without proper analysis and exaggerates its consequences. It turns into a political issue. A topic for shock jocks. Responsive laws are rushed through parliament to take the heat out of the situation. That is not a good policy response, and in that scenario the media shoulders part of the blame.
So those are a few ways in which the media and the law intersect.
Next I want to ask: what are the characteristics that are essential to the media’s role as a source of truth and knowledge, which are vital to ensuring it can play this important role in our democracy?
Kim mentioned the need for objectivity. It is important for institutions like the ABC to maintain objectivity, so that it can maintain the trust of the Australian people.
A related concept is impartiality, which is also an important concept in the legal world.
A judge is supposed to be impartial when deciding a case. A barrister is also supposed to be impartial, in the sense that they are supposed to leave their own personal/political views behind when deciding whether to take on a case, and in deciding how to run it. A barrister’s job is to put the best argument they can for their client, consistently with their professional obligations, to ensure the Court is well informed and justice can be done.
There is a parallel to the media here. Likewise, the media is there to present both sides of the argument, to ensure the public can reach an informed view on the best available information.
Of course that does not mean the media is required to give all sides of an argument equal air time, no matter how irrational they might be.
So what does impartiality mean then exactly, in the context of the media?
The ABC’s editorial policy refers to the concept of “due impartiality”. It involves:
- a balance that follows the weight of evidence;
- fair treatment;
- open-mindedness; and
- opportunities over time for principal relevant perspectives on matters of contention to be expressed.
Impartiality does not require that every perspective receives equal time, nor that every facet of every argument is presented. The balance “follows the weight of evidence”.
In the current climate, the concept of impartiality has been tested. Kim referred to the example of Baron’s younger journalists who, in an age of social media and identity politics, were starting to regard themselves as activists and partisans and wanted to enlist their newspaper to the cause. Baron resisted those urges, as will the ABC I’m sure.
But what of the many who, with the assistance of the internet and social media, can self publish without the constraints of journalistic ethics? Some of these self publishers do take sides. They consciously and overtly channel their own culture, background and world view.
This is potentially a concerning phenomenon because, as we’ve heard, more people are now getting their news from social media and other online sources.
Does the concept of impartiality need to be updated to account for this phenomenon, or jettisoned altogether?
The answer must be “no”. These voices cannot and should not be silenced of course. They have their place. But their voices must be balanced by authoritative impartial trusted sources like the ABC and other news organisations. That is why it is so important for news organisations to have a presence on social media. And viewers must be educated with the skills and awareness to be able to tell an authoritative source from one that is not.
What should the government be doing to address media under threat?
So, what can be done to ensure the media remains a bastion of truth and knowledge?
Funding and investment is one important aspect, as we’ve heard.
From a lawyer’s perspective, I’m also interested in the ability of the law to address these issues.
Kim has referred to the multi-million-dollar deals struck between Google/Facebook and media organisations. This essentially involved Google/Facebook paying news organisations for the ability to link to their news publications.
Those came about as a result of a law passed by the federal parliament.
That law is a fascinating study in the power of the law to shape the media market.
The legislation gave the government the power to designate a digital platform – such as Google or Facebook – and upon designation they would be subject to the news media bargaining code. Upon designation, the digital platform would be required to negotiate with news organisations to pay them a fee for displaying their news and, if agreement could not be reached, then they were subject to compulsory arbitration.
The funny thing is, no designation has ever been made, and so the code was never enlivened.
The mere threat of being designated was enough to encourage Google and Facebook to get on the front foot and conclude agreements with news organisations to reach an outcome that was mutually acceptable, rather than risk arbitration.
As you’ve heard Meta has announced it will not renew its agreements with Australian publishers. But, at least for a time, the law had the desired effect. Whether you agree or disagree the policy response, it is a clear example of how the law can have a profound impact on the media landscape.
There are other legal options being explored.
In 2019 the government asked the major digital platforms to develop a Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation. The code is voluntary, but ACMA monitors compliance with the Code and reports to the government.
Last year the Government engaged in a consultation process on a draft Bill to strengthen ACMA’s powers to deal with mis-and disinformation on digital platforms. It would enable ACMA to register and enforce a code of practice and, if it deemed the code ineffective, to make its own standard. Of course it will be important to strike the right balance between addressing objectively untrue content, and freedom of expression, and I’ll leave others to debate whether the bill does so or not.
Of course, laws can only go so far.
Another important part of the solution is education. As a parent of school-aged children, so far I’ve managed to keep them away from social media. But I realise that this won’t be possible for ever.
In my view it is crucial that children be educated in the benefits and risks of social media, and be trained to detect authoritative and trustworthy sources of news from those that are not. And this should start early, because children are being exposed to social media from an alarmingly young age.
The ABC plays an important role in this endeavour, being a member of the Australian Media Literacy Alliance and producing literacy content for general audiences and school-aged children: with items on explaining the news, questioning the media and tips for teachers. That’s important work.
In these various ways – funding, regulatory intervention and education – we can protect the integrity of our media. We can slow the rate of truth decay. The media’s important role in our democracy, and our justice system, can be preserved.
A fundamental principle of that system is that “justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done”. For that occur, a strong and independent media is vital.