Silencing Dissent... fly away? (image: Michael Leunig, The Age)

This week The Sydney Morning Herald has run an article commenting on the Australian Federal Government's claimed Aid Budget and the creative accounting being employed to whitewash our minimal assistance through aid despite the massive income streams we currently get (of course, this is completely due to the Federal Government's single handling of the international economy, in addition to the Australian one). The article was based on a report released by Aidwatch, which is (to quote):

...a not for profit activist organisation monitoring and campaigning on Australian overseas aid and trade policies and programs...

The report highlighted the money classified as aid that never left the country, and in locations where the aid money is funding Australian activities. The report has been damaging for a government disinclined to provide real aid internationally but desiring to keep face. As has been investigated in the book from Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison - Silencing Dissent: How the Australian Government is controlling public opinion and stifling debate - the Federal Government has a well worn methodology of minimising criticism. These include, in no particular order: character assassination; loss of funding; loss of charitable status; revoking of security clearances; and loss of job. We have not, thank goodness, had a loss of life (or at least a loss of life that the media has caught up on). What I am concerned about with this is not so much the Government's ruthless tactics that Russian President Vladimir Putin would be proud of, but rather the complicity of the media, the Fourth Estate in minimising the outfall.

Interested in what the media had to say on the revocation of charity status by the Australian Tax Office on Aidwatch, or any mention whatsoever of Aidwatch for that matter, in our major media circles I dropped in and undertook a search of a few sites.

Fairfax

Fairfax runs the big newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Financial Review (and a few more smaller papers) on the east coast. Traditionally considered a fairly small-l liberal (as opposed to the capital C Conservative L Liberal Party that has little true liberal progressive nature to it), it does however sway away from the Centre to the Right on many topics. It does maintain a relatively high journalistic standard in comparison with many of the alternatives.

Fairfax ran the original article on aid funding, based on the investigative report created by Aidwatch and has since followed it up with articles on the silencing of dissent through the revocation of charitable status by the ATO.

News Corp

Running news.com.au no doubt ensures that Rupert Murdoch's Australian baby maintains the dominant news outlet in the country. With journalists at The Daily Telegraph and other tabloids writing for a younger reading age than either the broadsheets at Fairfax or the in-house broadsheet The Australian, it would seem that the website is stocked with articles from this group of writers.

When doing a search for Aidwatch, we get a sum answer of zero articles. Even The Australian, which one would assume readers of higher reading age would be interested in, also turns up zip in the search.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Aunty however has run a few reports on the AM program and others on its news feed ensuring that the story does get some attention. The internal search of news also picked the relevant articles and stories.

NineMSN

A search of the Nine-msn group's news service also turns up zip. Given that this is one of the largest online groupings for television this is highly surprising.

Yahoo!7

Thankfully, due to their allegiance with Yahoo! the Yahoo!7 news, actually provided as local Australian content by Yahoo! does turn up some results. When limited to only that provided by Channel Seven, we get a different, though familiar, story - that's right, nothing to see here either.

Ten

Channel Ten doesn't even bother with news. It knows that it isn't the place for it.

SBS

Unlike the ABC, and in stark contrast to perceptions, SBS evidently didn't value the story high enough either to give it any airtime. After all, what's a billion australian dollars.

Conclusion

• Has debate been stifled through a lack of journalistic backbone and integrity? You bet.


• Middle Australia ignoring it? Does it look like this will affect my mortgage repayments?


• Do they care? I wish they did, but I think that they're too busy watching people gain their fifteen minutes of fame to care about the future of this country.

As a result, it seems to me that the Fourth Estate has failed, and failed abysmally. Despite recent attempts to highlight the limited access to information under the Freedom of MisInformation Act, News Corp is ignoring many of the stories that we should be worrying about in a healthy democracy. After all, a healthy democracy and strong Government should welcome a probing media and a Non-Government Organisation sector that maintains accountability and transparency. It is only a weak one that will hide and obfuscate instead.

ABC, aidwatch, Australia, Australian Tax Office, Channel Nine, Channel Seven, Channel Ten, Charity, clive hamilton, democracy, Fairfax, Federal Government, liberal party, msn, News Corp, Politics, sarah maddison, SBS, silencing dissent, The Age, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald, Vladimir Putin, yahoo!