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Aussie Papers Launch Front Page Censorship Protest

VOA News

   Australia's biggest newspapers ran front pages on Monday made up to
   appear heavily redacted, in a protest against legislation that
   restricts press freedoms, a rare show of unity by the usually partisan
   media industry.

   Australia has no constitutional safeguards for free speech, although
   the government added a provision to protect whistleblowers when it
   strengthened counter-espionage laws in 2018. Media groups say press
   freedoms remain restricted.

   Mastheads from the domestic unit of Rupert Murdoch's conservative News
   Corp and fierce newspaper rivals at Nine Entertainment ran front pages
   with most of the words blacked out, giving the impression the copy had
   been censored, in the manner of a classified government document.

   Richard Baker is a journalist at The Age newspaper in Melbourne.

   "It is really the media standing up on behalf of the people we try to
   serve, which is the public to say, 'Hey, we work in this space so the
   public are informed and can make decisions about, you know, really
   important stuff that government does in their name and when we cannot
   do that we feel like we are failing.'"

   Parliament has long been passing laws in the guise of national security
   that impeded the public's right to know what the government did in its
   name, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) said.

   "Journalism is a fundamental pillar of our democracy," said Paul
   Murphy, the chief executive of the industry union.

   "It exists to scrutinize the powerful, shine a light on wrongdoing and
   hold governments to account, but the Australian public is being kept in
   the dark," he said in a statement.

   Monday's media protest aimed to put public pressure on the government
   to exempt journalists from laws limiting access to sensitive
   information, enact a properly functioning freedom of information
   system, and raise the benchmark for defamation lawsuits.

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