Journalists want free speech for them, censorship for the rest of us – The Australian Financial Review

The coalition's justification for these special privileges for the media is that freedom of the press is essential to a well-functioning democracy. That's true, of course, but it is subject to an important qualification. "Freedom of the press" is actually the freedom to print and publish - for anyone, not just the press.

In a democracy, governments, media companies, and journalists' trade unions don't have, and should never have, the right to decide who is or isn't "a journalist" and who qualifies as "the press", so they can get special rights. To do so would be to create an "official media", so effectively license and censor the media - yet, bizarrely, this is what the coalition seems to want.

Double standards: the media picks and chooses when it does and doesn't support freedom of expression in Australia. Supplied.

In 2012, when the Labor government-appointed Finkelstein inquiry into media regulation recommended a de facto scheme for licensing the press, much of the media welcomed such an initiative.

At the moment, the Right to Know Coalition can too easily be portrayed as wanting to run a protection racket for the established media companies against interloping bloggers sitting in their pyjamas at their dining room table, publishing political commentary on the internet at 2am.

No doubt some supporters of the coalition are acting from the purest of motives. But it's very easy to sense a degree of hypocrisy from at least some of those who are lending their name to the campaign, as in the case of Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young. Yet it was the Greens who went to the last federal election with a policy to censor commentators whose opinions they disagreed with. Admittedly the coalition can't be held responsible for winning the support of the Greens, but the it would be taken a lot more seriously if it disassociated itself from people who believe in "freedom of the press we agree with".

The campaign of the Right to Know Coalition has also uncovered the double standards of some in the Canberra press gallery.

In 2014 the efforts of the Liberal government to reform section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (which makes insults based on someone's race unlawful) were dismissed by many journalists as merely a part of the "culture wars", and the idea of freedom of speech was portrayed as irrelevant to most Australians.

Now, five years later, those same journalists are proclaiming freedom of the press as a basic principle of democracy.

An unfair cynic would say that this reveals that too many in the media start caring about freedom only when it affects them. And when their complaints can be used as a stick to beat a conservative government.

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Journalists want free speech for them, censorship for the rest of us - The Australian Financial Review