Guardian,
Alison Rourke in Sydney, Thursday 14 July 2011
 |
| Julia Gillard, the Australian prime minister, has said the phone-hacking scandal raises questions about the role of the press in a democracy. Photograph: William West/AFP/Getty Images |
Pressure is mounting in Australia, where Rupert Murdoch built his first newspaper empire, for an inquiry into the media in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.
The prime
minister, Julia Gillard said she was "truly disgusted" by the
intrusions of privacy carried out by the Murdoch papers in the UK and that she
was open to the idea of a review in Australia.
Gillard
also said she was not surprised events in Britain were raising questions about
the "role of the media in our democracy and the media's role
generally".
The leader
of the Green party, Bob Brown, called for a full inquiry into the ownership and
regulation of Australia's media. "Following events in Fleet Street it's
very clear that there is sufficient concern about the potential of similar
events (happening) in this country," he said.
"There's
been a massive abuse by News of The World and we need to learn from that and
not just sit on our hands and hope it doesn't happen here," said Brown.
According to Brown, he had been given conflicting advice as to whether hacking
into people's phone messages was illegal in Australia.
"You
can't hack into a server or a servant of a server but the law appears to be
silent on hacking into someone else's message bank," he said.
In
Australia, News Ltd, which is wholly owned by News Corp, runs around 150
national, capital city, regional and suburban news outlets, including the only
national newspaper, the Australian. Murdoch owns the only daily newspaper in
four capital cities: Brisbane, Darwin, Adelaide and Hobart. News Ltd dominates
the Sunday newspaper market with about 70% of readership. There has been no
formal suggestion of phone hacking by any employee of News Ltd in Australia.
Nick
Pullen, a media lawyer and partner at the firm HWL Ebsworth in Melbourne, said
Australian law on hacking voicemails was grey, partly because there had not
been any litigation on phone hacking in Australia.
"There's
no court findings into the interpretations of the current law on the ability to
get into a person's message bank by trying out pin numbers once you get on to
their server," Pullen said.
Brown has
called for a statutory watchdog to replace the self-regulation of newspapers in
Australia. At the moment, according to the Australian Press Council,
self-regulation "rests on the willingness of publishers and editors to …
adhere voluntarily to ethical standards and admit mistakes promptly".
News Ltd's
chariman, John Hartigan, told ABC television an inquiry into the operation of
the media in Australia was "totally unnecessarily". He said
regulation by the Press Council, which is an industry-funded body, was
sufficient.
On
Wednesday Hartigan announced a review of all News Ltd editorial expenditure
over the past three years to confirm payments to contributors and other third
parties were for "legitimate services". He said he had no reason to
suspect any wrongdoing. "I've worked in newspapers for 45 years, a lot of
that as an editor," Hartigan told ABC TV.
"I
know the newsrooms, I know how cultures develop and I'm hugely confident that
there is no improper or unethical behaviour in our newsrooms."
News Ltd
has said the review at its newspapers will have an "independent
element". But Brown questioned whether any findings would "suffer the
same fate as the many boxes of documents which went to the Metropolitan
police".
The
proposed inquiry will also look into the concentration of media ownership in
Australia. "It warrants a look at who owns the media and why we have the
biggest concentration of press ownership, by News Ltd, in the democratic
western world," Brown said.
Chris Nash,
professor of journalism at Melbourne's Monash University, said: "The fact
that the Murdoch papers have a clear political agenda on very specific issues
is a problem for democracy."
Over the
past few months News Ltd papers have been waging a forceful campaign against
the Gillard government and its alliance with the Greens. "The way it
operates is [conservative opposition leader] Tony Abbott creates headlines and
News Ltd prints them," Nash said.
Hartigan
has denied there is any company-wide directive to try to oust the Gillard
government.
Related Articles:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.