Rival Australian media organisations are banding together to fight the continuing squeeze on press freedom, after a number of significant legal decisions went against journalists and whistleblowers in June.

Melbourne journalists Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus escaped jail time but were fined $7000 each for contempt of court in June, after
refusing to reveal their sources for a 2004 Herald Sun exposé.

Chief Judge Michael Rozenes said that upholding the journalists’ code of ethics did not exempt journalists from criminal charges.

“Courts in Australia and England have made clear statements to the effect that journalists are not above the law and may not without penalty expect to be permitted to follow their personal collegiate standards where those standards conflict with the law of the land,” Rozenes said.

Days earlier, former public servant Allan Kessing was sentenced to a nine-month suspended jail term, after being found guilty of leaking official documents on airport security to journalists in 2005.

The resulting story, by Martin Chulov and Jonathan Porter of The Australian, prompted a federal government review of airport security and ultimately a $200million overhaul.

But in an ominous precedent for both whistleblowers and investigative journalists, the trial judge emphasised to the jury that Kessing’s was a strict liability offence, in which no question of public interest arose.

Kessing has borne the brunt of the government’s campaign against confidential sources, whistleblowers and leaked official documents.The government has dedicated more than 30,000 hours of Australian Federal Police time to its war on information leaks in the past decade.

Alliance federal secretary Chris Warren said the government’s concern over information sources is misplaced.

“This government is obsessed with the source of leaks, rather than focusing attention on the content of the leaks, and fixated on controlling information and debate rather than addressing issues of national importance,” he said.

The recent debacle over Mohamed Haneef’s detention is another stark example of the campaign against leaks, and the furore over leaked police documents prompted further comment from Warren.

“This is part of a worrying trend which has seen the government use the law to go after journalists and their sources. In the process theyare taking the focus off the real issues at hand and criminalising journalists’ daily work,” Warren said.

For more on the Haneef leaks, The Australian’s Hedley Thomas examines the case in detail on page 9 of the August Walkley Magazine.

The Alliance has also lent its support to the recently formed Right to Know coalition, which aims to fight restrictions on Australia’s freedom of speech.

Combining key players from Australia’s major media organisations, the coalition is lobbying for reform to shield laws (so journalists can protect their sources), whistleblower protections and Freedom of Information restrictions.

Meanwhile, Allan Kessing maintains his innocence and intends to appeal, despite legal costs already eating up more than half his superannuation payout.

The Alliance launched the Confidentiality of Sources Appeal in July, to raise funds for Kessing’s legal fees; at last count more than $10,000 has been raised.

There’s not much time left to make your contribution to the Appeal, which closes on Friday, August 31. Call the Alliance on 1300 656 512 for details.
Photo of Allan Kessing by James Croucher, The Australian.

“Excuse me Ms Hanson, what did you mean when you said you had no problem with the ‘Christian Muslims’ in Australia?”

Pause. Some crowd members burst into laughter. Others scowl.

“No, ah, there was no meaning in the Christian Muslim statement.”

When Pauline Hanson, Queensland parliamentary hopeful, visited Alice Springs earlier this year, she was met by locals both hostile and hospitable.

Ostensibly, she was in Alice to launch her biography, Untamed and Unashamed, and the local media presence that day on the lawns of the Alice Springs Town Council was not unexpected.

What was unexpected was this final question from the crowd. Not from the local television reporter, radio news journalist or seasoned press hound, but from an unassuming 16-year-old boy who’d left school early to witness the spectacle.

Darcy Davis is an Alice Springs local who has been the Alice Springs News' casual youth and entertainment writer for about a year. He was six years old when Hanson launched One Nation in 1997.

“I’d heard it [Hanson’s quote about Christian Muslims] on the radio a couple of weeks before and it stuck in my mind,” Davis said. “When she started talking about Muslims being the main problem in Australia it sparked off that thought again so I thought I would ask at the end.

“I got quite a sour look. That was pretty much it, and then people were going up to shake her hand and talk to her. There were some real Pauline enthusiasts there."

The Hanson article was a deviation from Davis’ usual youth and entertainment beat. He wrote his first article while he was in primary school, when permission to go on an interstate trip with his aunt to see a David Helfgott performance was granted on the condition he write about it.

It was published in the Alice Springs News, the local weekly independent newspaper. When the Davis family moved to China for two years, Davis' articles about the cultural differences he was experiencing were published in the ASN over several weeks.

Once back on the dry red central Australian soil, Davis began to cover the local music scene and now generally writes an article a week, paid at 13 cents a word.

Most of his friends don’t bother reading his work, Davis said, but he does get some feedback from his teachers. “My English teacher often comments on them. And I think [the articles] might have come into consideration when he was writing my report! And the librarians – they always have a paper in there, they like to chat about what I’ve just written.”

Davis also co-hosts a radio show on community station 8CCC and a career in the media seems inevitable. His dream job would be at Triple J or Rolling Stone. As for news reporting, well, it’s not really his style: “I think that I’m not straight enough to do that. I couldn’t handle just doing things so seriously, I want to have some sort of flair.”

 - Story and pic by Sarah Aitken

Media mogul Conrad Black’s four-month trial in Chicago has provided fertile ground for the emerging journalistic trend of intense, multimedia real-time reporting on big court cases.

The former Fairfax boss’s fall from grace was well documented, as he faced 13 charges including racketeering and tax evasion.

The jury deliberated for 70 hours before finding Black guilty on July 14 of fraud and obstructing justice, but Judge Amy St Eve dismissed prosecution calls to have the flamboyant former mogul thrown directly in jail.

Black’s courtroom antics inspired a bevy of blogs around the world – try The Guardian for a UK perspective (http://business.guardian.co.uk/conradblacktrial), or The Toronto Life’s pun-laden site (http://www.torontolife.com/blog/conrad-black-trial/) which includes a “Black Book” of the dark Lord’s lexicon.

Big-trial blogging has come into its own in the past two years, notably for Phil Spector’s murder trial and the Enron case.

Coverage is usually a combination of blow-by-blow updates, occasionally in real time, with colour commentary, analytical features and deep background – reporters have often covered the cases for years before they go to trial.

Photo galleries, timelines and profiles are often featured, while multimedia add-ons such as graphics, podcasts and video are becoming more common, and inviting reader comment is mandatory.

Mary Flood, who covered the Enron trial for the Houston Chronicle, told Poynter Online last year that the extensive nature of her blog “transformed many readers to responders”.

“I suspect the internet just changed the way big trials will be covered … I hope it allows us to provide enough solid background information along with the daily drama that we can leave people smarter about their courts than we can with even cameras in the courtroom,” Flood said.

She believes the team approach to covering big trials in such depth will soon spread to all big breaking stories – like natural disasters and even sporting events.

Trial-blogging has been less enthusiastically embraced in Australia, largely because of our harsher contempt laws.

The culture could be set to change, however, with investigative journalist Colleen Egan poised to blog the Corruption & Crime Commission hearings over Andrew Mallard’s wrongful conviction.

Egan, who last year won the Walkley for outstanding contribution to journalism, has been doggedly following the Mallard case since 1998, and can take no small credit that this inquiry is taking place at all. Already the Sunday Times-hosted site features profiles of key players, a timeline of the case and discussion points about the legal system.

Watch this space: http://blogs.news.com.au/perthnow/mallard.

 (Pic: Mike Bowers, Sydney Morning Herald)

After more than a year of new industrial relations legislation, the true victims of the WorkChoices system are becoming clear.

The WorkChoices goals were to offer a “more flexible, simpler and fairer system of workplace relations for Australia… to improve productivity, increase wages, balance work and family life and reduce unemployment.”

But the people who lose out with WorkChoices are those with little choice – low-income casual workers, and women in particular.University of Sydney researchers Marian Baird and Rae Cooper found that low-paid women are most vulnerable under WorkChoices, without the safety
net of the award system to guarantee their pay and conditions.

These women are the “collateral damage” of the new legislation, struggling to support their families on unpredictable hours and earning.The 25 women interviewed for Down and Out with WorkChoices, Baird and Cooper’s report to the NSW Office of Industrial Relations, had facedpay cuts, job insecurity and work intensification. Meanwhile, the National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW) has released a report outlinin the raw deal women have been given over wages, regardless of their occupation or education.

The report, What Women Want, outlines the possible impact of WorkChoices on women from most demographics, and the fact wemay now witness a refining of women’s bargaining skills when naming their price in comparison with their male colleagues.

Western Australia, which has been at the forefront of political debate about the value of Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs), has alreadyproven a woman’s worth, paying only 75¢ for every $1 earned by a man in a similar occupation.

The report claims women from all walks of life will be affected by the new WorkChoices industrial relations system.

The power of the traditional media is on the wane and the growth of the new media is not filling the vacuum, according to the former NSW premier, Bob Carr.

Carr, himself a former journalist with ABC Radio and The Bulletin, was speaking at the Alliance’s “Public Affairs in the Power Capital” conference in Canberra last month.

He said that all available evidence pointed to an “inter-regnum” as people stopped consuming newspapers and network news, but that what was growing up to take its place was not yet capable of delivering professional and unbiased news coverage.

“At present we are seeing a bleeding, not only of the economic viability of newspapers but also of free-to-air and network television,” Carr said. “This is a revolution of our times. It is as if we are in a transition period between the demise of the old media and the failure of an alternative to emerge. The public interest in traditional media is clearly fading, but news and comment on the computer is still a vast and untidy fusion.”

He pointed to the steady declines in circulation and advertising revenues, not only in Australia, but in the United States, where only 37 per cent of people said they now read a daily paper, and in the UK, where the national broadsheet papers had been forced into format changes to attract new readership.

“It seems as if reading of newspapers, on a daily basis, is declining as fast as smoking.”

This meant there had been a corresponding decline in the political influence of the traditional media, the former NSW premier said. He cited the recent NSW election as an example of a poll at which both newspapers and radio commentators had made a concerted effort to unseat the Iemma government.

“It’s their right to do that. They can campaign against the government of the day, but they got it very, very badly wrong in NSW. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that if you wanted a case study of how newspapers, passionately campaigning, failed to influence an election outcome, look no further than the last NSW state election.”

Carr also said that he believed the decline in newspapers’ economic fortunes was making it difficult to produce quality investigative reporting and that Freedom of Information stories should not be confused with investigative reporting, as the information gleaned through FoI was “only what politicians and public servants expected to be released in any case”.

“That’s not investigative journalism – investigative journalism is still as expensive and as difficult and as time consuming as it has ever been.
“An editor faces the choice of taking on a team or getting individuals to form an investigative unit, and have them fail to deliver a juicy scandal after six or 12 months.”

Much of the day’s discussion focused on the relationship between media and politics in an election year. Other speakers included Stephen Mayne, the founder of Crikey.com, Steve Lewis of The Australian, Paul Bongiorno of Network Ten, Peta Credlin from Senator Helen Coonan’s office and Dr Anne Tiernan of Griffith University. For more information on speakers and transcripts go to http://publicaffairs.alliance.org.au.
 

This Mark Knight cartoon is just one to be auctioned off by the Media Alliance and Walkley Foundation, to raise funds ahead of World Press Freedom Day (May 3).

From the cheeky and charming to the powerful and poignant, follow the links from the Walkleys home page to view the cartoons and photographs on offer. Andrew Meares' gorgeous "Swimming" (scroll down...) is also up for auction.

Bidding closes at 6pm, April 26. All proceeds go to the Alliance Safety and Solidarity Fund, to support and protect endangered journalists in the Asia-Pacific region.