The politics of distraction are infuriating when the regular parties do it. When One Nation tries out the same technique, it’s like watching a car crash in stop motion made by the Wallace and Gromit team.
Sure, party officials voluntarily flew to Washington, met with the NRA and the billionaire Koch brothers and discussed approaching them for $20 million to help One Nation turn Australia into the 51st US state. But that Jazeera guy tricked them into it!
“Islamist!” Hanson snarled at her press conference. “Media entrapment!” Mark Latham barked. Obviously, Hanson and Co aren’t going to do anything but quadruple-down and claim that Al Jazeera slipped her a mind-control drug, which made her tell the hidden camera in her vol-au-vent that Port Arthur was a hoax.
But media entrapment is a real thing, and more serious people than Pauline have queried whether Al Jazeera did overstep the boundaries of ethical journalism in getting One Nation so good.
Two forms of deception were engaged here:
- Journalist Roger Muller spent three years in character as a gun lobbyist, infiltrating the NRA and One Nation, ultimately using the connections he’d built with each to bring them together; and
- The extensive use of hidden cameras to record James Ashby and Steve Dickson bonding over their mutual affection for whisky and a new world order.
Entrapment is a sexy word, but in Australia it has no legal meaning. The police routinely run sting operations to catch criminals and, even if they acted illegally, that doesn’t give the accused a defence.
As to whether Al Jazeera’s secret recordings broke the law: no, they didn’t. It looks like all the recording happened either in Queensland or the US. In Queensland, it’s not illegal to secretly record a conversation to which you’re a party, and it’s OK to publish it if doing so is in the public interest. Recordings made overseas don’t trigger any Australian laws, so they’re in the clear.
For the media, entrapment is framed as an ethical question, but it is really one of public policy too. The morality of journalistic choices isn’t the issue, rather the contest between the public interest in stories of genuine importance, against our legitimate expectation of privacy. Nobody (apart, ironically, from neo-fascists) wants to live in a surveillance state where we’re not ever safe to get on the piss and share conspiracy theories from the dark web.
The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance has a Journalistic Code of Ethics, which bind MEAA members but aren’t a law. They open with the words: “Respect for truth and the public’s right to information are fundamental principles of journalism.” They also invest journalists with the responsibility to “animate democracy”, which means more than just reporting what’s obvious, but obliges them to be prepared to lift some nailed-down lids.
The Code requires journalists to use “fair, responsible and honest” means. It says they should identify themselves before obtaining an interview, and not exploit peoples’ vulnerability.
One Nation might argue that Al Jazeera’s actions breached this standard. Mind you, read literally, it would prohibit all undercover work and put A Current Affair out of business altogether. We couldn’t have that.
More seriously, the Code aims to reflect the infinite degrees of nuance with which the media must contend. It explicitly requires “conscientious decision-making in context” and acknowledges that the standards may need to be overridden sometimes; but only for “substantial advancement of the public interest or risk of substantial harm to people”.
Both principles are alive in the case of One Nation. Jokes aside, Ashby and his friend were seriously trying to shop Australia’s gun laws and democracy to the most genuinely evil coalition of interests in the world. It gets no worse, from the perspective of Australian public safety and social cohesion, than the NRA and the weirdos of the American far-right. Their beliefs are perverted and their money is pure poison.
I last wrote that, when it comes to white supremacists, all bets are off. One Nation’s leaders, bluntly ignorant and foolish as they are, aim to perpetrate the ultimate fraud on Australia’s democracy and apply no limitations to how low they’ll go to achieve it.
Given that reality, a journalistic sting operation which catches them in a situation such as the one revealed this week, is hardly an ethical stretch for a conscientious journalist.
The only entrapment here is the self-own achieved by One Nation’s gang of gullible no-hopers.
I know there’s a lot of self-protection in the stance that Hanson et al are taking, but I also get the sense they really don’t understand the magnitude of what they’ve done wrong. Like when a pet dog poos on the carpet. He knows you’re really angry with him, but doesn’t truly grasp why.
Well, they’ve convinced themselves that Labor/GetUp/Greens is all a conspiracy funded overseas from George Soros and evil Jews and also evil Islamists and Qatar and the Liberals are a sock puppet for a US citizen and his media empire so why is it so bad for them to chase overseas money too?
Don’t forget being FGM practitioners in the list of al-Jazeera wrongdoings.
Graeski – you have absolutely nailed it there with the naughty dog analogy, except the three one nation canines caught in the spotlight here are not your normal hapless frightened animals, they are the mangy snarling aggressive types that immediately bare their fangs and attack rather than accepting any form of discipline.
I see it more like One Nation IS the poo on the carpet. A nasty stain which needs to be cleansed.
I think we really shouldn’t even enter the “entrapment/islamist media/etc.” debate rubbish at all. This is just a blatant PHON attempt to shift the debate. Even just talking about it lets them off the hook. So whenever they try it, ignore it and bring the talking points right back to the actual issue at hand.
There is a bigger issue. The desire of organisations to control their message leads to less transparency. This is surely part of the reasons for the profusion of Royal Commissions: PR spin doesn’t work terribly well in the face of aggressive counsel who are able to find out what the lobbyists don’t want us to know.
In this case, the journalist’s primary interest was less One Nation as such than getting past the NRA’s secrecy and crafted public statements and like any wall the inventive will find a way around it.
This program is also a call for vigilance as the libertarians try to break down Australia’s cultural resistance to their toxic creed.
I think that Rowena Orr was not aggressive. Firmly assertive? Well prepared? allowing no ducking and weaving? Yes to all three. But aggressive? Not in my book.
But I agree that Muller and Al-Jazeera were looking for a way in to the NRA and the Koch Bros organisation and not specifically to target One Nation. One Nation just happened along – busily shooting themselves in the foot at every opportunity.
Despite Pauline Hanson’s foreign owned slur about it would be interesting to know what would be her reaction had one of Rupert Murdoch’s publications done the same exercise as Al Jazeera.
The defamation laws in Oz significantly hinder what can be published/broadcast.
Therefore, in certain instances, a ‘sting’ is the only means available to expose rot.
As Michael Bradley says, the police use entrapment regularly. Especially to catch online paedophiles & traffickers.