Joel Fitzgibbon isn’t the only one using A Current Affair’s mishandling of the Craig Thomson sex worker story to call for greater regulation of the media and privacy laws. There are plenty of critics on social media who think it’s further evidence of the compelling case for tighter regulation.
Fitzgibbon has a point on privacy legislation. There was a brief flurry in the aftermath of the phone hacking scandal last year when Brendan O’Connor as Privacy Minister released a discussion paper on a statutory right to privacy. But since then the issue sunk without trace under Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, who instead busied herself with some marginal protections on issues like credit reports.
The media, of course, remains profoundly hostile to the idea of the community having legal protections against having their privacy breached, although it has been unable to offer any justification beyond a nebulous claim that free speech is under threat. And the rank hypocrisy of some sections of the media on the issue is profound, particularly from News Limited which fought tooth and nail to stop the public release of a report critical of The Australian, and which attacked The Age for revealing the extent to which political parties accumulate private information about voters.
Australia’s Right To Know, it seems, only exists when it’s convenient for media outlets.
Nonetheless, the behaviour of ACA doesn’t reflect the general standard of media in Australia and shouldn’t be the justification for imposing tighter regulation. This is an area in which we must tread carefully. Politicians cannot be trusted to have any role in regulating the media — as is plain from the history of media ownership legislation in Australia.
But there is a strong case for a more effective regulator, whether split between newspapers and broadcaster media as is now the case, or operating across all media, with sufficient powers so the community believes there is genuine accountability for journalists, editors, producers and media executives who flagrantly breach community expectations and standards.
Currently, the community appears to have little faith that there is proper accountability for the media. That is the first and most obvious problem to address.
*As dutiful monarchists revelling in the royal celebratory year, Crikey won’t be publishing this Queen’s Birthday Monday. Normal transmission resumes on Tuesday.
“Politicians cannot be trusted to have any role in regulating the media”
Utter crap.
Aye, there’s the rub – look at it, the media can’t control itself (it seems that for an unseemly majority, they can resist anything but temptation – including mixing in a measure of their prejudices with the news when they’re presenting it), and they seem not to exist in a reality that includes those “community expectations and standards”. Where they can profit with impunity, from their “road kill” – because they’re “The Media”.
And where politics by a democracy should be overruled by their prejudices – and they’ll do anything to set that state of affairs to Rights, trying to influence voter perception for next time, to vote “The Right way” – which is a lot easier when “a majority of the medium, and this infleunce on perception, of fitness to govern, is yours”.
As for politicians being able to control the media – no thank you ……. imagine ….. “Abbott/Brandis/Abetz Inc” at the “con-trolls”?
No habla Espagnol!
Don’t all these arguments against control of the media look suspiciously like the arguments against
controlling a certain religious minority which condones the abuse of their own children?
The same modus operandi leads to the abuse of democracy.
It is all quite satanic, someone or some people seem to have yielded to a temptation to “Rule the
Whole World”. We have a “Christian”duty to deliver the Fourth Estate from this temptation, as per the Lord’s Prayer, regularly read in the federal parliament, That lord was Jesus, after all.
And isn’t the present media wallowing in the absolute corruption of absolute power, and should they
be left to wallow? That would be un Christian yet again.
So surely it is time for a certain Cardinal to start counselling along these lines?
It would be absolutely Satanic if he didn’t- “By their actions shall ye know them”.
The media needs to be controlled, for their own sake in the same way that traffic is regulated by
licencing and fines. How hard can it be?