I was frying other fish for most of today, so am only just catching up with the Right to Know conference. The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance was live-blogging the event here, if you want a lively, if partial, means of catching up. (The blogger concerned was annoyed that News Limited CEO John Hartigan failed to mention that the Alliance was part of the Right to Know coalition).
I confess I haven’t yet read all the speeches, but I did like the one by ABC Managing Director Mark Scott. He opened with a jibe about debuting on A-PAC -(the Foxtel vehicle that is a competitor to Auntie’s own proposals for a public affairs channel) before going on to make some rather pointed remarks about self-regulation that will not have endeared him to News Limited, or the rest of the industry.
“A free media stays free when it is understood by the society it serves to be exercising power legitimately. If it is not accountable, it lacks legitimacy. I believe that a commitment to robust self-regulation needs to go hand-in-hand with a push for media freedom. It will make our arguments with authorities more credible, more effective.
Scott spruiked the ABC’s own independent complaints handling system, making the point that it is more rigorous than anything else on the media scene in Australia. He also had some criticism of the Australian Press Council
“While some of our critics point to the Press Council and argue it should have a role in monitoring ABC affairs, as a former print executive I am only too aware of the deficiencies in that process. The Council’s workings are opaque and its judgments given precious little display. It has no power to order corrections.
As for the right to privacy – what might be described as the current hot-button issue – Scott was not opposed. This puts him at odds with Hartigan, who has said that a tort of privacy is not needed. Scott argued:
“With digital surveillance, location tracking and genetic tracing becoming commonplace, there is a very firm case for the law to allow people to protect their privacy. It is a fundamental human right.
In some ways, a tort would just synthesise and rename elements present in several other longstanding doctrines of common law and equity, such as breach of confidence. The Australian Law Reform Commission proposal for a new statutory right of privacy, properly worded, is a sophisticated idea worthy of serious debate. To dismiss even the need to address the issue – the need to have a thoughtful and comprehensive debate – doesn’t seem to be in keeping with the openness and plurality of perspectives that media freedom should be all about.
As anyone who read my previous post will surely predict, I agree with most of what Scott said.
To dismiss serious matters as not worthy of debate, and to suggest all critics are stupid and wrong, does not strengthen the case for freedom of the media. It weakens it. Surely the industry is mature enough to see this?
