The very first amendment made to the American Constitution protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
It is claimed that freedom of expression is essential to protect every other right that flows in a ‘free’ country. But is that true?
In Australia, we have spent the past year considering the health of our own democracy – the voters have strengthened the power of parliament by electing large cross-benches to hold the major parties (Labor and the Liberals–National coalition) to account.
A National Anti-Corruption Commission has finally been established.
Parliamentary inquiries have revealed the scandalous betrayal of taxpayers by large corporate consultancy firm, PwC.
The court system has exposed a revered Victoria Cross (VC) recipient, Ben Roberts-Smith, as a probable war criminal.
But in every case, our ‘free’ news media has not merely had a role reporting on these stories – in the case of the VC recipient who failed in his defamation bid, the role of the media became the story itself.
Just as Roberts-Smith has gone from hero to zero, the two journalists he sued for defamation are now the heroes, talking us through how they conquered the odds to complete their mission.
We surely have feelings of gratitude for the journalists’ efforts.
But it is shattering to realise that somehow, as a nation, we blindly handed the Victoria Cross to a war criminal who became one of our most revered Australians.
We now face a difficult journey addressing our responsibility for war crimes, and unpicking how this could possibly have happened – what system, what culture, what sort of deranged groupthink could have perpetrated such a gigantic fraud on the Australian public?
What is worse, this hero-to-zero story is not an isolated case. It adds to a pattern of news stories where accepted norms and embedded narratives have been turned on their heads.
The PwC scandal, whereby a trusted accounting company betrayed Australian taxpayers, has exploded thanks to media reporting. For the Australian office of PwC to betray Australian taxpayers – in order to line the pockets of global clients like Glencore Mining – can only be described as economic treason. We have to ask how did we get into this situation where the institutions we rely on – the ATO, Treasury and even the Australian Federal Police (AFP) dropped the ball – and it fell to the free press to fill that void?
The free media has played a vital role in quashing astonishing abuses of power by our own government.
The appalling persecution of the Murugappans – a Tamil family of four better known as ‘the Biloela family’ went on for ten years in a game of cat and mouse that only ended with a change of government last year.
Similarly, the media was critical to ending the secret prosecution of Bernard Collaery – a lawyer accused of breaching the federal Intelligence Services Act 2001.
Mr Collaery helped his whistleblower client reveal embarrassing details about how Australia’s government, in 2004, spied on East Timor to gain a commercial advantage in sharing of Timor Sea oil and gas reserves. Think about it.
Spying on one of the poorest countries in the world to steal economic advantage from them was said to be in our national interest.
Revealing that shameful activity to an incredulous public was said to be against our national interests. It took nearly ten years for Collaery, aged 77, to be freed from persecution by his own government.
Later on, a couple of Guardian journalists figured out, and revealed, the staggering truth about Robodebt.
An ABC Four Corners story ‘Fox and the Big Lie’ revealed Murdoch media’s deliberate undermining of American democracy to protect Fox profits, bringing down right-wing icon, Tucker Carlson, in the process. And it was the media who discovered Scott Morrison’s multi-ministry scandal.
It took a persistent, questioning media effort to reveal that a 95-year-old nursing home resident ‘injured during an interaction with police’ had, in fact, been tasered, as she slowly approached them in a walking frame.
So much of this news is demoralising, and often calls into question our precious perceptions as to who we really are and what it means to be Australian.
Sometimes these media reports are particularly hard, because they reveal things that politicians, governments, institutions and we, the people, do not want the truth to be. We wish it wasn’t true and so it falls to the media to force us to face it. To protect the truth, however unpleasant it proves to be.
This is never easy or simple – we are dismayed by the shattering of the mythology surrounding Ben Roberts-Smith. But we also need to remember the bravery of SAS soldiers who defended the truth and, in many ways, salvaged our honour as a nation. These men who stood by the gut-wrenching truth would rather run headlong towards Taliban bullets than talk to friendly journos.
It is a lot to absorb when heroes become villains and villains turn out to be heroes. It is especially troubling that truth can take so long to emerge.
As former US Secretary of State, Madelaine Albright, wrote: ‘The ability of a free and independent press to hold political leaders accountable is what makes open government possible – it is the heartbeat of democracy.’
♦ Catherine Cusack is a former NSW Liberal MLC.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
