Andrew Bolt
Saturday, September 17, 2011 at 05:53am
WHY on earth are we talking about yet more rules to punish journalists and even Tweeters?
When did Australians get so terrified by mere words?
In fact, we’re now so terrified of words that the Gillard Government and the Greens think it’s time to make journalists even more frightened to use them at all.
You’d think we were firing bullets, rather than syllables. And you’d think our readers were too brainless to be safely left with a newspaper without the supervision of a government official.
You see, on Wednesday, Communications Minister Steven Conroy marched before a cluster of Canberra journalists and warned he’d wipe the smile off their faces.
“I don’t think any editor and any of you quake in your boots about a complaint to the Press Council,” he declared.
So we’re to have a media inquiry to consider replacing the Press Council, which newspaper owners pay to hear complaints and order corrections.
In its place we may get a fiercer government-appointed regulator, which could police even blogs or Twitter accounts.
Journalist: But you’d also have to define who could be complained about and what the penalties would be once they were complained about? A tweeter, a blogger, a ...
Conroy: Well, as you said. Now you’re canvassing areas that I think will be richly canvassed in the inquiry, and these are the sort of ... these are, the questions is ... you’re asking all the legitimate questions.
What will these people think of next? The Gossip Police?
Well, here’s one thing that Greens leader Bob Brown is already considering for this media inquiry that he first demanded: a witchhunt against the News Ltd newspapers which don’t pay him enough respect.
“Of course, the commissioners will be able to look at the concentration of media ownership which has 70 per cent of the newspapers in the hands of one corporation, that’s the Murdoch empire,” he declared.
Brown is actually wildly wrong here. Murdoch’s News Ltd owns only a third of newspaper titles, including this one, but they’re so popular that around 60 per cent of newspaper buyers prefer them.
This upsets Brown. How dangerous to let impressionable Australians buy so many newspapers that criticise the Greens.
As Brown told the ABC this week, News Ltd papers such as The Australian, which actually has only a modest circulation, were messing with the nation’s mind.
“As far as the Greens are concerned, (News Ltd boss John Hartigan’s) mission in his editorials in The Australian is to destroy the Greens at the ballot box ... It is the hate media ...
“I would be comfortable to see if, for suggestions coming out of a media inquiry, for example, it lifted its standards.”
The Government likewise hates News Ltd newspapers for saying nasty things about its performance, which is why Conroy, in announcing his inquiry, went on about the wickedness of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.
In fact, when Conroy was asked in the Senate if he could “state unequivocally that the Government ... will never require newspapers to be licensed” he couldn’t bring himself to give a straight “no”.
Licensed newspapers? How delightful to appoint friends to an independent statutory authority and have them pull the ruder papers into line.
It is astonishing - depressing - that such tools of the totalitarian should be even considered in Australia.
The crazy thing is there’s no evidence that journalists have suddenly run so wild that tougher laws are needed.
Rather the reverse. Just in the past month, we’ve seen the ABC sack commentator Glenn Milne for writing a column inThe Australian which discussed the Prime Minister’s former relationship with a union conman. The column itself was removed from The Australian’s website on Gillard’s insistence.
Fairfax Radio has meanwhile suspended 2UE presenter Michael Smith for trying to interview an ex-union official about Gillard’s former partner and his rorts.
This suggests the real danger is not that journalists have too few controls over them, but too many.
Already we’re hobbled by defamation laws that are too severe and laws on racial discrimination and religious vilification absurdly broad, as well as laws against bugging phones and breaching confidences.
Then we have our codes of conduct, and a pack of watchdogs ready to bite, including the Equal Opportunity Commissions, Australian Communications and Media Authority, Press Council and a million activist groups, watching, watching.
Meanwhile, broadcasters can be stripped of their licence for not being “fit and proper”. Courts can issue suppression orders. Governments can starve hostile newspapers of advertising.
Journalists today also face an unprecedented public shaming for their sins - real or ideological - thanks to their competitors, or shows like Media Watch or blogs like my own.
And above all there is the verdict of the readers, viewers or listeners, who punish bad journalism by turning off.
You may reply that good journalists have nothing to fear from a stronger complaints body, but defending yourself from even the craziest complaints takes time and money. Often the process is the punishment.
Activists also tend to scrutinise most the journalists who offend them not for their errors but their opinions.
That is why the Greens are so infuriated by the alleged sins of News Ltd, and not the far worse bias of the ABC and The Age. These err only on the side of goodness, as far as Brown is concerned. And such sins are always forgiven.
But the words of a critic? They are evil, and the public must be saved from them.
So make the journalists tremble. Drag them before a tribunal to explain their bias.
Their words are too dangerous to be allowed out without government supervision. And the public is too stupid.
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