Consider: “No COS or PM has ever made such a suggestion to me about anyone”. Mitchell is pointing to a serious line being crossed in an utterly unprecedented way. The highest office in the land had reached a point that it felt it entirely appropriate to demand the sacking of a journalist. To be clear, there is no suggestion Malcolm Turnbull had demanded any ABC journalist be sacked. But to be equally clear, we’re in an age of increasingly aggressive, emboldened political interference in journalism. That doesn’t remotely excuse an ABC chairman who apparently wanted to sack selected staff or intervene in Triple J’s decision to shift the Hottest 100 from January 26 for reasons like “Malcolm will go ballistic”. But it points us to the fact that this story is about something much bigger than how the ABC’s management of a particular time and place seemingly lost its grasp of the fundamentals of independent journalism, and with it, the ABC’s mission. It’s about a civic culture that is slowly falling apart: a political class with fewer civic boundaries, less concerned with the independence of institutions, and a muscular intolerance of dissent. Illustration: Simon Letch Credit: To see this, let’s take an example you’ve almost certainly forgotten that has nothing to do with the ABC.

Andie Fox is a blogger, who found herself chased by Centrelink’s “robo-debt” system, which became a brief scandal as it emerged people were being chased for false Centrelink debts by a computer system that had errors built into it, offered no right of reply, and little chance of fixing errors by speaking to an actual human. Fox wrote of her experience, the humiliation she felt, and the extreme lengths she was forced to in order to have the debt wiped. Loading In response, the Turnbull government unearthed private information about Fox’s case (including about her ex-partner), and gave it to a Fairfax journalist who then published those details as part of Centrelink’s side of the story. This was not private information released between departments for the purposes of, say, administering the welfare system. It was private information released to a journalist for the purposes of discrediting a critic: that is, for the purposes of helping the government win an argument. This, it turns out, is legal. But as a matter of civil conduct, it’s positively frightening. Imagine the effect on government criticism if people know the government is prepared to release their private information for its own political – not administrative – purposes. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Elsewhere, the government would subordinate journalism to unaccountable declarations of national security. Perhaps the high watermark here is the legislation it passed that allowed it to declare something a “special intelligence operation” retrospectively and with no objective or independent justification. The result of this is that it would make reporting on it illegal. So if, for example, a journalist publishes an embarrassing report on ASIO officers breaking the law, the government has the power to declare that report illegal after the fact, and see the journalist prosecuted.