It’s been a big week for the Australian media. We’ve published a picture supposedly of a terrorism suspect that was actually, not. We’ve presented front page stories full of unsourced and misleading or just plain wrong information about a horrific confrontation between a messed up, radicalised, dangerous Melbourne teenager and counter-terrorism police.



At the same time, as the ABC broadcaster Mark Colvin noted on Friday, the Australian Senate passed arguably the most significant restraints on press freedom in this country outside of wartime. Those measures are on their way to becoming law.

Given that parliament seems to be on a path to deliver a bigger surveillance state and less means for whistleblowers to expose its abuses or for journalists to scrutinise it, a bit of push back from the community might have been expected. This is, after all, a pretty important principle: public interest disclosure and press freedom.

Yet nobody, apart from the industry, the Greens and a couple of crossbench parliamentarians stood up for press freedom. The freedom warriors of the Coalition, and the accountability merchants of the ALP, waved the restrictions through without a backward glance. The community as a whole declined to be outraged.

The absence of cavil is a significant rebuke, given it would be obvious to most that the current environment invites more truth telling, not more secrecy.

So let’s stand still for a moment and put these two events together – our appalling collective performance this week, and the profound lack of public support for our institutional role.

I don’t think we can avoid the reality that these two eventualities are connected. There’s a harsh truth sitting before journalists and their employers this weekend, and it’s this: people don’t support us when we very much need our community mandate because, too often, we fail our readers and viewers and listeners. We often hurl some very hard truths at others, in fact we pride ourselves on it. It’s about time we joined a couple of dots in order to hurl a few back at ourselves.

This week we produced headlines, like the Courier Mail did on Wednesday with “Police Kill Abbott Jihadi” complete with front page illustrations suggesting to the reader that the prime minister had survived some sort of direct attack. (Police have been saying for days they have no evidence of a specific threat to Abbott, who was, of course, in a different city, in a building surrounded by armed police, before leaving for New York.) Reckless, and misleading.

In multi-ethnic Sydney, at a time of heightened security risks, huge stakes and community tensions, the Daily Telegraph screamed “Jihad Joey” at its readers on Thursday. A front page story reported that the “death cult disciple” Abdul Numan Haider had been “tracking” the prime minister before his “frenzied knife attack”.

It’s still not entirely clear if that actually happened, or what “tracking the prime minister” might actually mean in a connected age where we are all invited to #askTony on Twitter or like Tony on Facebook; where any of us can Google “where is Tony Abbott” and pull up a string of references. Noting this fact is not a bleeding heart exoneration of a radicalised kid troubling enough to be the subject of police interest, and out of control enough to stab two police officers – it’s just a simple statement of the obvious.

A number of reports this week had more in common with a graphic novel or a Marvel comic than anything that actually rang true in the real world. Compounding the beat-ups and the breathlessness, we’ve seen the return of “men of Middle Eastern appearance” doing nefarious things. It should be pointed out that some of the things they were claimed to be “doing” have later been retracted.

“It is understood” was also ubiquitous. We all periodically have to use anonymous sources, and sometimes that process brings us closer to enlightenment than to obfuscation. But we all know that something being “understood” is quite different from it being “known.” And so it came to pass. Some things that were “understood” on front pages were later more complex than they seemed. But the myths, once stated, are difficult to retract.

So the sum of the week was mistakes, sensationalism, stereotyping and the amplification of various “understandings” supplied by Lord knows who. Most reporting came from inside the tent of officialdom, projecting thunderously out. Right now, the times require prompt evacuation. We need to step outside the tent in order to have a good hard look in.

Any objective look at the week would present a report card that said: running too fast, filing too much, revealing too little. I’m certainly not putting myself above it. I’m not positioning myself as better and possessed by more clarity and steadiness and insight and truth-telling powers than anyone else. Truth is I’m flat out keeping my feet and my wits most days too. All of us are a heartbeat away from a career ending stuff-up – that’s the business.

But what I am saying is: wake the hell up. I have never been more resolved, in 18 years of practising journalism, of the absolute importance of our function in a democracy. I have never been more sure that the opportunity cost associated with doing this job is, actually, worth it.

I believe we matter. I know I’m not alone in that belief. Yet we act as though we don’t matter, and facts don’t matter, and truth doesn’t matter. Call this Dispatch this particular weekend a love letter to my profession, and an outpouring of grief at its failings.

In Australia right now, there is a complex story to be told. It’s a story with a geopolitical dimension and a local one. This story involves real people. How we choose to frame and tell the story has real consequences for real people – for neighbours living alongside neighbours, for the police and intelligence agencies working around the clock to keep communities safe, and for the politicians who must lead at this moment and make critical decisions about community interest and national interest.

The story we are telling right now is not just a bunch of disconnected fragments to feed the beast and flog a few newspapers. The real story here is whether or not Australia can come through a specific challenge to the fundamental notion of ourselves as a united, vibrant diverse community which has largely avoided ethnic and religious violence: whether we will affirm these characteristics or fall into disputation and rancour.

So as well as playing cops and robbers, we might have to start interrogating other valid lines of inquiry. A couple of thoughts. Have we done enough as a society to invest in our cohesion and mutual understanding? Is our ridiculously paranoid and hostile disposition to unauthorised boat arrivals sending a broader negative message to non-Anglo communities about our true feelings about ethnic diversity?

Are police doing their job out in the suburbs in our cities in an even-handed way? Is national politics helping or harming the current conditions? Are the legal changes being proposed in Canberra justified given the threats – or is this just cynical over-reach? Will going to war in Iraq make us safer, or make the domestic climate more dangerous?

We are, actually, capable of telling this story. It’s a story which demands the best Australian journalism can provide. But we need to take a moment to be clear about what the responsibility of telling it actually requires.

It requires us to seek truth, whether the truth is ugly and discomfiting or whether it is reassuring and soothing. It requires us to ask questions – a lot of questions – of very powerful people, without fear or favour.

It requires us to take the time to get things right rather than assuming in cavalier fashion that an error in the internet age is never wrong for long. And it involves taking steps to ensure we don’t inflame the tinderbox: truth is not inflammatory, but dog whistling and ethnic stereotyping certainly are.

To put it simply, this story requires what great journalism always requires: that no agenda is served other than the interests of the readers. If we are asking the state to be accountable and not abuse its power and position, then best we hold ourselves to the same standard.

If we meet this basic test, then perhaps we’ll be worth defending.