Independent journalism & the control of information
Australian Academy of the Humanities 2025-09-19
A still from All the President’s Men (1976, d. Alan J. Pakula). Source: IMDB.When Robert Redford died this week, Bob Woodward the Washington Post reporter who broke the Watergate story five decades ago was quick to mourn, describing the man who changed his life as “a noble and principled force for good”.
It was Redford who persuaded Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein to write a book about their experiences as junior reporters assigned to report a break-in at the Watergate building in Washington, DC.
The hungry young reporters had doggedly followed the unlikely story for years. It was a story that ultimately led to the removal of a US President, and a new ethos of journalism and openness and accountability in politics.
Redford knew that Watergate was a story that needed to reach the soul of America and a bigger audience than just dedicated followers of politics. At the height of his stardom, he committed to playing Woodward in the multi-award-winning movie All the President’s Men.
Journalists — political handmaidens or public good?
Journalism in the early 1970s was becoming more assertive as it was touched by the aspirations of civil rights agenda, but this book and movie sent the message around the world in a heartbeat.
Presidents and prime ministers were put on notice. Criminality and abuse of power would be uncovered and made public. Journalism was not a handmaiden but a public good that needed to be taken seriously.
These days it is another US President who sends messages around the world in a heartbeat, with a message that is the antithesis of everything Redford stood for.
“Quiet,” the US President said when ABC’s Americas editor John Lyons asked about the Trump family’s businesses, “you’re hurting Australia…you’re hurting Australia very much right now, and they want to get along with me. You know your leader is coming over to see me very soon. I’m going to tell him about you. You set a very bad tone.”
Just in case anyone missed the message, an official White House account online later labelled Lyons a “foreign fake news loser”.
The contest between those with political power and journalists and editors is as old as the printing press. From the early days of the antipodean penal settlements governing powerholders used libel laws, licensing rules and stamp duties to restrain the press.
A growing social responsibility
Those with power rarely welcome scrutiny, but even as journalism became more assertive in the final quarter of the 20th century an accommodation of sorts emerged. Freedom of information was legislated by democratic states around the world. Mechanisms of what John Keane called “monitory democracy” became more robust. (Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy)
Journalists and editors began to think of themselves as professionals with moral and practical obligations that went beyond their employer. News organisations adopted codes of practice. Profits derived from advertising were funnelled back into journalism. Self-regulatory codes requiring fairness and accuracy kept state regulation at bay. (Schultz, Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics)
But the flip side was that even the media companies that boasted that they ranged from “fourth estate to real estate” and that their profitability ensured their independence, were willing to do political deals to advance their commercial interests.
Even as the mass media in countries, including Australia and the USA, embraced a “social responsibility” agenda in the decades after WW2, journalists chipped away at the restraints of ‘on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand’ reporting. During Senator Joseph McCarthy’s inquiry into alleged Communist influence in American life, newspapers began incorporating corrections into news reports, highlighting the senator’s unsubstantiated and inaccurate claims.
The message was clear, just because a senator said something did not make it true.
Journalists, politicians & fake news
Fast forward several decades and the Boston Globe in April 2016 published a satirical front page imagining life in America under a Trump presidency. The main headline read “Deportations to begin: President Trump calls for tripling ICE force”, the sidebar “Markets sink as trade war looms” and the bottom of the page, “New libel law targets ‘absolute scum’ in press”.
It was nine years too soon, nothing there would surprise us today.
In between, during the first Trump presidency the Washington Post kept a tally of his falsehoods and came up with an astonishing 30,573 in just four years.
The second Trump presidency was not going to be pushed around. Media companies once keen to assert independence paid up, settling flimsy defamation cases, removing critical reporters, producers and editors. A chill has descended on the once robust fourth estate, in the land where freedom of the press and speech are enshrined. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.
No third-party comments
Nothing so dramatic has occurred, or is likely, in Australia, but the desire to control the media is familiar.
Last week Media Watch reported that both the government and the opposition had got into the habit of providing journalists in the Press Gallery with “drops” — media releases embargoed for convenience, wrapped in caveat that no other views be sought or reported in covering the “news”. High profile journalists said that they objected, but felt they had to accept the conditions.
They should not.
At the very least such reports should note the conditions that had been imposed. It is the antithesis of journalism.
But a collective response could be more powerful: simply refuse to accept the condition. The technology and outlets change, but every generation of journalists has had to fight to be taken seriously.
The management of the Australian press gallery has been the subject of extensive study for decades. Each administration brings its own approach, each prime minister has their own relationship with editors, journalists and media owners. But most have accepted that the media — whatever shape it may take at different times — has a crucial (if sometimes discomforting) role in what some scholars call “democratic system management”.
If our political leaders have forgotten, it is up to journalists and editors to remind them that they are not handmaidens, but professionals charged with a civic responsibility. Media management is a slippery slide to democratic decline.
As Robert Redford told Bob Woodward in 2022, “Donald Trump doesn’t understand democracy. So, it’s easy for him to destroy it. It is easy to destroy something you don’t understand. You can claim it doesn’t exist.”
References: Keane, John, The Life and Death of Democracy (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019) Schultz, Julianne, Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics (Oxford Academic, 2022)
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