When an established, credible professional tires from the pursuit, they can get complacent. From there, the inner lecturer emerges, along with a disease — false expertise.
Australian journalist Peter Greste has faithfully replicated the pattern. At one point in his life, he was hungry to get the story. He seemed to avoid the perils of mahogany ridge, where many alcohol-soaked hacks scribble copy sensational or otherwise.
There were stints as a freelancer covering the civil wars in Yugoslavia, elections in post-apartheid South Africa. On joining the BBC in 1995, Afghanistan, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa fell within his investigative orbit. To his list of employers can also be added Reuters, CNN and Al Jazeera English.
During his tenure with Al Jazeera, Greste was arrested along with two colleagues in Egypt accused of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. He spent 400 days in jail before deportation.
Prison in Egypt gave him cover, armour and padding for journalistic publicity. It also gave him the smugness of a failed martyr. Greste then did what many hacks do: become an academic.
It is telling about the ailing nature of universities that professorial chairs are being doled out with ease to members of the Fourth Estate. It does little to encourage fierce independence.
Such are the temptations of establishment living: you become the very thing you should be suspicious of.
Greste soon began exhibiting the symptoms of establishment fever, lecturing the world as UNESCO Chair of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland on what he thought journalism ought to be. Hubris struck.
Like so many, he exuded envy at WikiLeaks and its gold reserves of classified information. He derided its founder, Julian Assange, for not being a journalist.
This stunningly petty, schoolyard scrapping, in the wake of the publisher’s forced exit from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2019, ignored the obvious point: journalism, especially when it documents power and its abuses, thrives or dies on leaks and often illegal disclosures.
It is for this reason that Assange’s conviction under the US Espionage Act 1917 was intended as a warning to all who dare publish and discuss national security documents of the United States.
In June, even while celebrating Assange’s release (“a man who has suffered enormously for exposing the truth of abuses of power”) there remained evidence of Greste’s ongoing fixation.
Avoiding mention of the redaction efforts that WikiLeaks had used prior to Cablegate, Greste still felt that WikiLeaks had not met that standard of journalism that “comes with it the responsibility to process and present information in line with a set of ethical and professional standards.” It had released “raw, unredacted and unprocessed information online”, thereby posing “enormous risks for people in the field, including sources”.
It was this very same view that formed the US prosecution case against Assange.
Greste might have at least acknowledged that not one single study examining the effects of WikiLeaks’ disclosures, a point also made in the plea-deal itself, found instances where any source or informant for the US was compromised.
Greste now wishes to further impress his views on journalism through Journalism Australia, a body he hopes will set “professional” standards for the craft and, problematically, define press freedom in Australia.
Journalism Australia Limited, placed on the Australian corporate register in July, lists Greste, lobbyist Peter Wilkinson and Simon Longstaff, executive director of The Ethics Centre, as directors.
Members would be afforded the standing of journalists on paying a registration fee and being assessed. They would also, in theory, be offered the protections under a Media Reform Act (MFA) being proposed by the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, where Greste holds the position of executive director.
A closer look at the MFA shows its deferential nature to state authorities.
As the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom explains: “The law should not be protecting a particular class of self-appointed individual, but rather the role that journalism plays in our democracy.”
So much for independent journalists and those of the Assange hue, a point well-spotted by journalist Mary Kostakidis.
Rather disturbingly, the MFA is intended to aid “law enforcement agencies and the courts identify who is producing journalism”. How will this be done?
By showing accreditation — the seal of approval, as it were — from Journalism Australia.
In fact, Greste and his crew will go so far as to give the approved journalist a “badge” for authenticity on any published work.
Such a body becomes, in effect, a handmaiden to state power, separating acceptable wheat from rebellious chaff.
Even Greste had to admit that two classes of journalist would emerge under this proposal: “in the sense that we’ve got a definition for what we call a member journalist and non-member journalists, but I certainly feel comfortable with the idea of providing upward pressure on people to make sure their work falls on the right side of that line”.
This shoddy business demonstrates, yet again, the moribund nature of the Fourth Estate.
Instead of detaching itself from establishment power, Greste and bodies such as the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom merely wish to clarify the attachment.
[Binoy Kampmark lectures at RMIT University.]