The text below is a slightly edited version of the author’s remarks to the M20 Media Freedom Summit held online in Delhi on September 6, 2023 by the M20 Organising Committee, which comprises 11 editors from India and a former judge of the Supreme Court.When Australia hosted the G20 back in 2014, I participated in one of the parallel acronyms that Siddharth Varadarajan mentioned in the opening – the L20 for Labour Unions. I remember thinking how valuable something like this sort of get together would be for journalists and independent media, so it’s great to see our Indian friends have – as they so often do – gone beyond my idle pondering to real organising action. So thanks to all our friends on the Indian organising committee for making this happenTo me, what makes a gathering of journalists from the G20 countries so valuable is that it cuts across one of the big blockages to the spread of news and information. The global supply chain for news is still – mainly – funnelled through the north Atlantic, through those big news centres of east coast USA – particularly New York – and western Europe, still mainly London.As global relations fragment and shift, we need to think ourselves away from the in to the centre, out to the periphery model of news distribution to the power of the network, of one to many and many to one. The global reach of the G20 nations – and of their respective networks within their own regions – is a great opportunity to help that news-sharing process along . So I’m delighted to be in on the ground floor of what I hope will become a significant part of the global infrastructure of a free media.Australia doesn’t confront the sort of authoritarian challenges that so many of you have already spoken about. To be honest, there’s something to be said for having low-key politics, although it can be frustrating for us as journalists looking for news. But, rather than complacency, that should encourage an enthusiasm for reimagining the sort of news our peoples need.The loss of pluralismIn Australia, pluralism of news and opinion, remains under threat. Ownership of traditional media remains heavily concentrated – mostly now owned by just two corporations, one local and the other, the more culturally and politically powerful US-owned News Corporation. This causes three specific challenges in the current moment:First, products have been consolidated. Almost all corporate-owned regional media either stopped printing or closed altogether under the cover of Covid in 2020. Media is now wholly national in its perspective. State or city mastheads endure simply as a branding device.Also read: Why M20? To Remind G20 Leaders That the World’s Problems Can’t Be Solved Without Media FreedomSecond, it feeds a uniformity of what makes news – parliamentary politics, crime and disasters, weather (but rarely climate!). This uniformity has become reflected in the news choices, too, of the national broadcaster, the ABC.Third, it acts to disadvantage emerging independent media (and of course I work in Independent Media so I’m talking my own book here) as the large corporations have been able to dominate funding from the big tech platforms, with, for example, 90 percent of money paid by Meta and Google under the legislated News Media Bargaining Code going to the big two.The crisis of fake newsRight now, Australia faces a crisis of misinformation driven by the rise of ethno-nationalist populism. (Parenthetically, I might note that both Australia and India share an experience here: in both our countries, the populist right are attempting to co-opt our shared national sport of cricket in their scheming, to the outrage of us all).A quick background to the current crisis: in 2017 Australia’s First Nations issued the Uluru Statement from the Heart, calling for a constitutionally-mandated Indigenous Voice to the national parliament. Last year, the newly elected Labor Government agreed to submit the question to a national referendum, with the vote scheduled to be held on October 14 this year.Australia’s populist right has taken this proposal just about as well as you might expect. Australia’s journalism is struggling to deal with the embrace of mis-information and downright disinformation by conservative politics and media through the craft’s traditional truth-based tools.Indigenous journalists – like First Nations elders and leaders – have been abused and attacked – including by political leaders and senior journalists who should know better, in some of the most appalling and racist terms.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyJournalists in jailOne big issue that does unite Australia’s media is the demand for freedom of Australian journalist Julian Assange, jailed by one G20 member, the UK, at the request of another, the United States. We are also deeply concerned at the continued detention in a third G20 member, China, of Australian broadcaster Cheng Lei and writer Yang HengjunA slip over SLAPPTime for some good news: there are early signs that recent amendments to the national defamation law to add a public interest test are acting to restrain SLAPP writs in Australia. I admit a self interest, or at least, a self interest on behalf of Crikey: The first first major test of the law was set to be a case initiated by US media oligarch who may be known to some of you, Lachlan Murdoch, over the suggestion by one of our columnists that the fake news on Fox News might have contributed to the attempted January 6 coup. The day after Fox settled the Dominion Voting Systems case for about $780 million-odd US dollars, Murdoch withdrew the case against Crikey at the, for a rich-lister, much more meagre rate of about one million US.Around the same time, a high-profile multi-million dollar defamation action by a special services officer over deep investigative journalism reports of war crimes by Australian forces in Afghanistan was rejected by a jury.Also read: Media, Media, Whatcha Gonna Do? Whatcha Gonna Do When They Come For You?Governments change, secrecy enduresWe’re learning – again – that although governments change – as ours did last year – government secrecy does not, with a continuing freedom of information case demanding access to the Prime Minister’s official diary and an industry demand that the government stop its continuing prosecutions of two whistle-blowers that it inherited from the previous government.Let me conclude by saying that, yes, we have challenges of press freedom, although we can rely on a refreshingly militant and united industry (most of the time anyway) in standing up against those challenges. We have the usual challenges – and great opportunities – in the disruption of the digital transition.I believe, though, that the core of our challenges are in our own hands: how do we build a diverse and independent media, grounded on our craft’s deep respect for truth? On that, we have much work to do and much to learn from our friends and colleagues around the world.Chris Warren is the Media columnist of Crikey! in Australia and a former President of the International Federation of Journalists
