STUART Littlemore is right. (Gosh, that hurt.) In last Monday’s Media Watch on ABC TV he said present arrangements for bringing errant journalists to book were defective.
Journalists, including this one, frequently get stuck into the professions for being closed shops, arrogant and unanswerable.
Journalists themselves, however, have to some degree escaped public accountability. There have been five mitigating factors. First, there has been an unenforceable and half-hearted tradition of “”right of reply” through the letters column. Second, there has always been the right to sue for defamation (if you have the patience of Job and the pocket of Kerry Packer). Third, there has been the right to go to the Press Council. Fourth, the journalists’ union runs an ethics committee, which once in a blue moon hears a complaint from the public. Fifth, members of the public can sometimes (at an editor’s whim) get to write articles under their own name.
All of the above, except the complaint to the ethics committee, require lodging a complaint with the media proprietor. This does not make the journalist individually accountable. Nor does it redress the situation where the journalist is under proprietorial pressure (explicit or cultural) to write in a certain way.
The fifth route _ the journalists’ union’s ethics committee _ is less satisfactory than going to the Law Society with a complaint about a lawyer. The committees are dominated by journalists, rarely open to the public and their findings are rarely publicised. Fortunately, the journalists’ union has commissioned a review of the process.
Defamation is of little comfort. Defamation is the vehicle for silencing the press on pain of heavy damages and legal costs used by the rich and powerful, and mostly by those who do not want their transgressions exposed.
Littlemore showed a case of a set up in which a hidden TV camera picking up a ordinary young bloke pocketing the wrong change. The victim put it in his pocket without looking at it, and the TV crew accosted him demanding explanations. Littlemore suggested he sued for libel. Come, come Stuart, as a barrister, charging the fees you do, you should know ordinary young blokes cannot sue for libel.
But I have to agree with Littlemore that a strong, independent panel that can name and castigate individual journalists for appalling conduct would give an effective remedy.
At present, ordinary people have no redress. And this had some disturbing consequences.
It gives ammunition for politicians and the rich and powerful against reforms of the defamation law. They argue that the people in the street need to be protected against the ghouls of the press. True, but defamation law does not do it. None the less, they believe it, so there is no pressure to reform defamation laws. This results in the doctors, lawyers, property developers, top public servants, politicians and the like hiding their wrongdoings and incompetence behind an unjust shield. Once you give people in the street an effective remedy in the form of a cheap, lawyer-free forum which can listen and publicise press wrong-doings, the argument for stringent defamation falls away, or at least loses its present misguided public support.
The upshot is, of course, that the ordinary person in the street loses both ways: no protection themselves against bad journalism and a hampering of good journalism that exposes wrong-doing for the public good.
Also, the lack of redress against individual journalists means that journalists are beholden primarily to their employer and not to the public. This makes Australia’s present concentration of media ownership worse than it ought be.
Once you make journalists answerable to the public directly (rather than through their employer in the defamation courts or the Press Council), journalists can be and can be seen to be more independent and more responsive to the public good.
It is now time to have an independent tribunal for public complaints, heard in public against individual journalists. The tribunal should be all members of the public (with perhaps one journalist and one lawyer as adviser). No costs should be awarded and no lawyers allowed (at least not on the journalists’ side).