industry & research
campusreview.com.au
was fairly typical of wars pre-9/11, over
tangible things like land or ethnicity or
water, journalists were observers rather than
participants, but what 9/11 did was turn
it from a war over things into a war over
ideas. And in that conflict, in that battle over
ideas, the space where ideas themselves are
transmitted becomes a part of the battlefield.
That's the media itself.
Journalists have become targeted by
governments, both implicitly through
legislation and being dragged into prisons
under the legislation in the way we were,
and explicitly in which journalists and media
organisations are deliberately targeted by
governments – or extremists, who have seen
that it's now perfectly valid to go and take the
heads off journalists.
Broadly speaking, in the contest of ideas,
journalists are taking a massive hit.
I think that when George W. Bush said,
"You're either with us or you're with the
terrorists," what he effectively did was make
the war on terror a binary choice. You're on
one side or the other. There's no middle
ground. The problem is that the space
that journalists occupy is by definition that
middle ground. We have a responsibility
and professional duty to understand and
interrogate all sides in a conflict. When
you do that, you cross the line as far as the
Americans or others are concerned. If you
interview an extremist to try and understand
what motivates and drives them, what the
ideology is, you're accused of supporting
terrorism or advocating for terrorism.
Australia has a law which prohibits the
journalist from giving voice to an extremist
under the Foreign Fighters legislation, and so
that kind of thing I think makes it impossible
for journalists to do their job. If you're doing
your job professionally, under the new
regime, you're gonna get yourself in trouble.
That's a very dangerous situation to be in.
I'd like to talk about trust in media or the lack
thereof. This is an issue in Australia and even
more so in America. Can you talk about why
you think trust is declining?
There are a host of reasons. The first is
the digital revolution, which has done
enormous damage to journalists and to
trust in media, partly because what we have
is an explosion in sources of information.
When you have so many sources
of information, you get an illusion of
democracy or democratic choice, and
that's a serious problem because all sources
of information are not the same.
What happens with algorithms and social
media is we get pushed towards opinions
which tend to support our own, and if those
opinions don’t jibe with what you see in the
mainstream press, you're likely to distrust
those mainstream sources more than the
things that support your views.
That's a problem, because good
journalists will do their best to get to the
bottom of a story, regardless of what they
think or what the audience thinks.
When you've only got good, professional
news organisations to use as your sources,
if they contradict or challenge your views,
you're much more likely to think again
about your views rather than question
those news organisations.
The digital revolution has forced news
organisations to change their work, and not
always for the better. There's a primacy now
of speed over accuracy. We used to joke
about the new news slogan "Never wrong for
long". It is the idea that you should simply get
information out fast, particularly when you're
competing with Twitter, and then try and
follow it up. If people on Twitter are saying, as
in the Las Vegas shooting, it's a Muslim, then
there's an inclination for news organisations
to quote Twitter as saying, "There are reports
he is a Muslim." That's a gross abrogation of
journalists' responsibility, but the pressure
to say it simply because it's on Twitter is
immense, and that's a major problem. We
haven't figured that out yet, particularly
because news organisations are also in a
desperate struggle for eyeballs, and if you're
slow or overly conservative, you lose those
eyeballs and you lose revenue, and that's a
serious problem.
Another problem is Donald Trump's
dismissal of “fake news”. His definition of
fake news seems to be “whatever news I
don't like”. By dismissing CNN or The New
York Times or The Washington Post as fake
news, he gives licence to his supporters and
other political leaders to use those terms to
undermine confidence in news services that
spend enormous amounts of time, energy
and money in getting the story right. That's a
serious attack on a democratic institution. I'm
not saying every news organisation is perfect,
but we're in danger in being so dismissive of
news reports that are incon venient.
Switching gears, what made you decide to
join academia after a career in the field?
A whole host of reasons. The first is that my
life has changed a lot since getting out of
prison. It's a very different world now. I'm in
a very different position to when I went into
Egypt. Prison has given me a voice, it's given
me a story, it's given me a platform and a
reputation to speak about press freedom
issues, and it's given me a mission. It's an
important part of who I am and what I do
now, and simply going back on the road as
I did in the past feels to me like sidestepping
or abrogating responsibility, particularly
because so many people supported us on
that principle, and I feel I have a duty and
a responsibility – and a passion – to follow
through on that.
Being the UNESCO chair in journalism
and communication is particularly useful
and important to me because I have a very
unusual platform. The UNESCO bit of the
job involves research and advocacy around
press freedom issues. Because that's rusted
into what this job is, it's a very unusual
job in academia that demands that level
of commitment to advocacy, and that's
something I feel very strongly about.
It's also a great opportunity to pass on
some of the lessons I've learnt as a journalist
over the past 30 years. And finally, there's
the prospect of going back to Brisbane,
which is where my parents and my partner's
family are, so I want to return for personal
reasons as well.
There are increasing numbers of journalism
graduates, yet a shrinking job market. How
can universities justify graduating so many
journalists in this kind of environment?
It's a good question, and something I've
been grappling with as well. What is it that
we're asking students to do? Journalism is
a kind of extension of the world's second
oldest profession. We're storytellers,
essentially, and I don't see that role ever
disappearing entirely. There'll always be a
need or a demand for good journalists.
At the moment, we're in a state of
transition, a state of flux. We've come from
the world of old media, the world I grew
up in, began my career in, into the digital
revolution where we still haven't figured out
quite how it's all going to work.
It's not particularly easy or comfortable
for the new generation of journalists, but
we've got to accept that that's the world
we're dealing with at the moment. We just
need to provide the fundamentals of what
it is that we do and, more importantly, the
role that journalists play in a functioning
democracy, and trust that the industry will
pick itself up and that journalists will find a
role for themselves. n
19