In Australia we have some of the best journalism in the world. For citizens of this country it is easy to be informed.
In this rainbow region we are blessed to have two free newspapers, one weekly the other monthly, both with a range of local and national highly relevant news.
We also have access to the online free Australian edition of independent The Guardian. And then there is the weekly Saturday Paper and The Monthly, again independent, though not free.
No journalists have been killed in Australia. Several have faced court for doing their jobs, recently James Waugh, Cheng Lei and Antoinette Lattouf.
In the last year 32 journalists have been killed in regions without an active conflict, 47 journalists have been killed in regions where there is an active conflict.
Three very good websites document and discuss these deaths. cpj.org (the Committee to Protect Journalists), unesco.org (Observatory of Killed Journalists) and rsf.org (Journalist Without Borders).
In discussing a slight drop in the numbers of journalists killed in non-conflict zones in 2024 UNESCO comments: ‘It suggests that progress may have been made in some non-conflict
countries in fighting attacks against journalists for their reporting in peacetime, which peaked in 2022 with sixty killings.’
In this world there are those who work hard to keep people ignorant and ill-informed. It is up to us, in this anomaly of the ‘global south’, to do our bit. For social media warriors there are relevant hashtags #noimpunity #endimpunity #speakjusticenow.
But most importantly inform yourself. Especially in this age of disinformation. Simply re-posting a meme, ‘piling onto’ a cause, watching AI-generated YouTube videos or falling for other forms of clickbait is not being informed.
I reckon Carl Jung summed it up pretty well when discussing the collective unconsciousness and especially a ‘psychic epidemic’. ‘The greatest danger of all comes from the masses on whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled’.
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. 
