Monday, 23 July 2007

The Australian’s strong ethical justification over Haneef

Denis Muller, Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne and a former editorial executive on The Age and The SMH, writes:

It is now clear that there was strong ethical justification for The Australian’s decision to publish the leaked transcript of the interview of Dr Mohamed Haneef and the Australian Federal Police.

There were three main ethical questions:

  1. If the transcript had been obtained by unlawful means, was there a justification for publishing it that outweighed the unlawfulness?
  2. How did the newspaper strike the balance between serving the interests of the leaker, serving the interests of the newspaper and serving the public interest?
  3. How did the newspaper strike the balance between the public interest in preserving the integrity of the legal process and the public interest in penetrating some of the secrecy surrounding the State’s pursuit of Dr Haneef?

We now know that the transcript was lawfully obtained, and that the leaker’s motive was to serve the interest of his client by countering the selective leaking already indulged in by the police.

We also know, from The Australian’s leading article of 20 July, that the newspaper considered it in the public interest to remove the ability of investigators or public officials “to cherry-pick and distort the evidence”.

These are good answers to the ethical questions, and make an irresistible case for publication.

In a more general sense the public interest has also been served by demonstrating the dangers of what can happen out of public view when the State is able to act in secrecy and without adequate lines of accountability.

Moreover, subsequent analyses by The Australian have shown major inconsistencies in what was presented to the magistrate, justifying the accusation by one of its writers that the police had “verballed” Dr Haneef.

It is now five days since the leaked transcript was published, and everything that has happened since has vindicated the newspaper’s decision.

As recently as yesterday the Australian Federal Police were allowing a false story to run about Dr Haneef’s alleged plot to attack a building on the Gold Coast, until the commissioner, Mick Keelty, was finally dragged into a denial.

This morning The Australian reported that AFP officers wrote into Dr Haneef’s diary the names of overseas terror suspects, grilled him over whether he had written these potentially incriminating notes, and eventually admitted writing the entries themselves.

God knows what the police regard as improper conduct but this grotesquerie too would not have been exposed but for the publishing of the leaked transcripts.

The public interest is usually best served by transparency. This applies to media decision-making as much as to anything else. The “story behind the story” can be as important as the story itself.

The BBC has recognized this in adopting a recent report by a former program-maker, John Bridcut, on the issue of impartiality. The report contains 12 guiding principles, the eleventh of which reads:

“Impartiality is a process about which the BBC should be honest and transparent with its audience.”

Bridcut notes: “You can’t close the doors any more. In our broadband culture … audiences know almost as much about the decision-making process as the broadcasters.”

There is broader lesson here. The Federal Government has been blathering about “trial by media” in the Haneef case. It is nothing of the kind. Trial by media involves the media in usurping the role of the courts. The Australian has merely subjected the processes of law-enforcement to embarrassingly effective scrutiny.

However, it is easier for cheap shots like that to stick when the media themselves don’t take the public into their confidence about how and why they made their decisions.