ABC head of investigations, John Lyons
Twice last week Australian journalists and media organisation executives had the opportunity to shine a light on how our government operates. Twice they decided to instead cooperate with the government and pander to an obsessive hostility to transparency that hides under the name of “national security”.
According to an account of the ABC’s handling of the “cabinet files”, which were brought to its attention last year by their discoverer, the ABC last week handed the documents back to the government, after publishing a handful of stories that editors, journalists and ABC executives deemed in the national interest. Coincidentally, last week the Canberra Times handed back to Defence a notebook lost by a senior Defence official. In both cases, “national security” was the justification for media organisations co-operating with governments to suppress information.
In the case of the ABC, the argument put forward by John Lyons, seemingly as the authorised account of the handling of the documents, was that the ABC only had three choices:
[T]he first was to ‘do a WikiLeaks’. The second option was to hand all the material to the police, and the third was to do journalism — go through the documents and examine whether there were stories of public interest.
The self-serving framing of that choice — Lyons goes on to detail the sins of WikiLeaks, clearly in contrast to the “journalism” that the ABC did — obscures that the ABC had more options than the one it ultimately chose, which was to act as gatekeeper, publishing only stories from a subset of the documents and then collaborating with the government to return them to obscurity.
If the ABC didn’t want to “do a WikiLeaks” and publish the documents in their entirety, it could have followed the example of The New York Times in its handling of the Chelsea Manning material. Having obtained the WikiLeaks material from The Guardian, The New York Times offered to go through the documents with State Department representatives and redact documents when officials were able to make the case that publication would cause significant harm. That is, The New York Times made the decision that the public should see the documents, but also that the State Department should be given the opportunity to make the case where individual documents might cause significant damage. If it made the case well enough — and not merely asserted — the documents were redacted. But the NYT’s default position was to publish them.
As it turned out, by the admission of the US government during Manning’s trial, it could find no evidence of any harm done by the publication of the documents. Not for the last time, the claims of grave breaches of national security reflexively made by government officials were shown to be false. Interestingly, Lyons didn’t mention the Manning materials in his discussion of the options open to the ABC. But the ABC took a decision to play gatekeeper. The documents would not be published. The ABC itself would decide what it was in the interests of its readers and viewers to know, and then they would be handed back to the government.
The Canberra Times adopted the same reasoning — except it didn’t publish anything at all about the contents of the notebook. It wouldn’t even tell us which bumbling senior official had risked causing — we’re told — such huge damage to national security by losing it. At least the ABC gave us some tidbits to embarrass Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong. Rudd, of course, is now suing the ABC.
It’s possible that existing laws that criminalise journalism — such as those introduced by George Brandis in 2015 — might have acted as a check on publication of the documents. In neither case, however, was this claim made. For its handling of the documents, the ABC duly got pats on the head from foreign policy thinktanks and News Corp for being “responsible”. Except, we don’t know how “responsible” the ABC was. We will never see the documents, so we can’t see whether the decisions about the national interest made by its journalists and executives about what should be revealed make any sense. We simply have to trust the gatekeepers that they know best.
And it’s “responsible” only if you pretend that there isn’t a war on transparency being conducted by the government, one that it is winning. We know far less about the activities of our intelligence and security agencies than Americans or Brits do about theirs. Laws preventing intelligence officials from revealing wrongdoing, and preventing journalists from reporting it, have been put in place. The cloak of operational secrecy is draped over an absurdly broad range of activities to preclude the potential for media scrutiny of the kind taken for granted in the United States. We have no Bill of Rights or European Convention on Human Rights to provide institutional support for press freedom. Senior bureaucrats call for the rollback of freedom of information laws and, with government support, bitterly resist releasing any material that might reveal their activities.
The ABC and Fairfax had, by good luck, the opportunity to strike back in this ceaseless war on transparency. Both decided, instead, to “play fair” and hand the weapons they had obtained back to their enemy. Getting brownie points for making nice with a government committed to undermining a free press and eradicating scrutiny helps no one.
Our Murdoch Guthrified ABC (with Lyons and his lineage) ‘kowtow to this bumbling, repressive government’? Perish the thought …… but hand me that form guide.
Well said Klewso, and I wonder if gas prices and availability are in the form guide as well? Or the Murray Darling fiasco? Or flogging workers and the unemployed to death?
What utter bastards the LNP are, and how piss poor has the ABC become….
Would that your comment were complete, Leon. Alas there is bipartisan complicity in the ‘national security’ dodge. Once lost, rights are extremely hard to regain, even small ones. Rights-stripping, dressed as national security, is even harder to reverse, such as the once-easy amble over Canberra’s parliamentary roof, the ability to visit a court house without ‘security scanning’, to wander unobserved in park taking the air … Folly to visit the blame on the LNP alone.
Yes, ABC should have done a NYT and then would not look like it sent some cub reporter into the basement to riffle through the papers to find the dirty bits.
There are now too many fleas jumping off the shaggy dog tale about The Cabinet Files from the self-appointed gatekeepers at the ABC, including ex-Murdoch hacks like John Lyons, and McKinnon, with an astonishing number of relatives in sensitive government jobs, who was apparently the first point of contact with the (ahem) “Canberra Bushie”, and junior journalists who seem to have no idea how public admin works (high security cabinet documents collected over “five governments”? hello?). PM&C took the blame for “losing” the documents, even though PM&C is not located in Parliament House, from where the ABC has assured us, the cabinets originally came (how does the ABC know that?) . Hope someone is keeping tabs on who is investigating what, and watching for any outcome, because we all want to know what really happened. Yours sincerely, Godwin Grech.
I agree Godwin. The story of two filing cabinets found in an ex-govvie store in Fyshwick sounds very suspicious to me. The papers of five governments all stowed in two cabinets? And no-one noticed that those two filing cabinets weighed so much? (Paper weighs a lot whereas empty cabinets are light.) Not those who despatched the cabinets, those who moved them, those who received them, the person who bought them? It was only when the purchaser drilled open the locks that the papers we’re discovered?
Next week it will be “ABC finds recently purchased bridge was already owned by NSW Govt”.
Notice how the ABC meekly disguised the faces of the members of the secret political police who were ransacking the ABC’s office?
Bernard, I don’t say this too often, but you are absolutely right. To make matters worse, the ABC’s director of news is quoted in Lyons’s fond, rambling account about snags and utes saying that the ABC “could have told hundreds of stories over weeks or months,” but instead “chose to be selective and responsible in what we broadcast.” Just how did these faux reporters, given their extensive training in operational intelligence, actually make these choices? How did they, as Lyons explains, weed out the documents that “could endanger public safety or national security if published”? It seems to me the ABC was too worried about its relationship with this government and its budget to seriously challenge the alarmism peddled by the intelligence agencies. So, in a semi-panic it ran a few embarrassing but safe yarns about the pollies and hurriedly handed the rest back. And this is what passes for journalism at the national broadcaster.
No Brett – this is what has always passed for journalism everywhere.
Remember that the Grey Lady gave us Judy Miller (who won a prize named after a gossip columnist).
There was never a golden age when their self-indulgent preaching of “speaking truth to power” or “outside the tent pissing in” or “taking the bullys lunch money” or self-identifying as parsnips or whatever the f*ck they’re doing these days, ever meant what it said. Kronkite would not be remembered if it had (because what would distinguish him?).
Aforesaid eager seeking (and jealous guarding) of insider status* – and the inch deep pond beyond which this self-referential pod is unable to see (and certainly baulks at venturing from) has always defined journalism as it actually gets practiced.
If you haven’t noticed this, you’re probably a journalist (but then so is Andrew Bolt).
*(Laurie Oakes built a whole career on ‘drops’, and that was before we crossed the “Senator in correspondent pool” rubicon)
Lykurgus, pull your head in. Did I make mention of a golden age? Of course, journalistic practice has always fallen short of its ideals. But to deny, as your comment appears to suggest, that good journalism still happens out there is to imply we don’t need journalism at all, which makes me wonder why you’re reading Crikey. In this instance the ABC fell well short of the ideal; indeed it seemed from Lyons’s musings that some journalists don’t even know what the ideal looks like. I will leave the over-generalisations to others.
Well said, Bernard. Those brownie points are worthless to the ABC – the Coalition will continue to target our national broadcaster & slash their budget. The ABC is like a battered wife who returns willingly for more punishment.
Consider if the files had been carelessly despatched to an op shop under a Shorten Labor govt – ye gods, News Corp would be demanding the PM’s scalp (if not all the government scalps), ‘national security’ would be depicted in tatters, the media barrage would continue for weeks. Notice how quickly this Coalition cock-up is fading.