Australian media Monday published blanked-out pages to protest the increasing monitoring of government on what is published.<\/p>\n
The front pages of Monday’s edition\u00a0 showed a heavily redacted government document, accompanied by a media campaign demanding changes to laws that criminalize journalism and penalize whistleblowing.<\/p>\n
All major Australian media outlets are seeking improvement in the working environment for press in the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn’t impact me personally but it has an impact on what we can report,\u201d a journalist from Sydney said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government is closely watching my employer the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Agency] as we are the public broadcaster,\u201d the journalist said requesting anonymity over restrictions to speak on the issue.<\/p>\n
Australian publishers including Nine, News Corp, the ABC, SBS, The Guardian, and journalists\u2019 union the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance are running a campaign under \u201cRight to Know\u201d to seek stronger protection for media freedom after years of perceived deterioration, Sydney Morning Herald reported on Monday.<\/p>\n
Nineteen media organizations and journalist unions, some of them traditionally rivals,\u00a0banded together for the “Your Right To Know”\u00a0campaign.<\/p>\n
The campaign was sparked by an incident in June, when\u00a0federal police raided a public broadcaster’s office and a reporter’s home in their search for leaked government documents.<\/p>\n
A former army lawyer was charged over the leaks, and a number of journalists could also be charged.<\/p>\n
The campaign is calling for six legal changes, such as a system that limits which documents can be labeled “secret”\u00a0and the right to contest a search warrant.<\/p>\n
Daily Sydney Morning Herald said that Australian police raided home of News Corp political journalist Annika Smethurst for six hours on June 4 over an April 2018 story.<\/p>\n
It reported that the journalist had revealed a proposal for electronic intelligence agency the Australian Signals Directorate to take on an expanded domestic role and figures inside the government were concerned about the idea.<\/p>\n
In a similar operation, Australian police raided the Sydney headquarters of the ABC on June 5 over a 2017 series on accusations of war crimes committed by Australia\u2019s special forces in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
The police action, supported by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, triggered an outpour of condemnation by free press advocates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Australian media Monday published blanked-out pages to protest the increasing monitoring of government on what is published. The front pages of Monday’s edition\u00a0 showed a heavily redacted government document, accompanied by a media campaign demanding changes to laws that criminalize journalism and penalize whistleblowing. All major Australian media outlets are seeking improvement in the working […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":11032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1417,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-australia","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11030"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11033,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11030\/revisions\/11033"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}