The freedom of media has always been questioned when it comes to freedom of expression. Australia’s biggest newspapers have run front pages designed to appear heavily redacted as part of a campaign against government secrecy and legislation that puts reporting and press freedom at risk.
All sorts of the newspaper, be it national and regional including The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the Australian Financial Review hit newsstands on Monday with most of their front-page stories blacked out to give the impression it had been censored similar to how classified government documents are.
They ran advertisements across the country’s television networks, asking viewers by placing a tagline “When the government hides the truth from you, what are they covering up?”
According to Al Jazeera, the protest is designed to put public pressure on the government to exempt journalists from laws restricting access to sensitive information, enact a properly functioning freedom of information system, and raise the benchmark for defamation lawsuits.
The country has no constitutional safeguards for media free speech. The government added a provision to protect whistleblowers when it strengthened counter-espionage laws in 2018, although media organizations say press freedoms remain restricted.
The country minister for communication, Paul Fletcher, was not immediately available for comment on Monday. The government has previously said press freedom was a “bedrock principle”.
One of the leading newspapers of Australia, executive chairman Michael Miller said people “should always be suspicious of governments that want to restrict their right to know what’s going on”.
