Why the ACMA should no longer make decisions about journalistic practice

Australia has a news media problem: our regulation structures, designed for a 20th-century world of information scarcity, have become weaponised in the right’s culture wars against climate action. 

One of its weapons of choice has been to use the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to keep the country’s most influential news source — the ABC — in line. And the authority’s recent “nonsensical” decision regarding Four Corners’ 2021 program “Fox and the Big Lie” has confirmed what’s been clear for some time: ACMA is not fit for its purpose of making decisions about news content.

The ABCs of media regulation

Since 2018, ACMA has conducted 18 separate inquiries into complaints about the ABC’s news and information programs on television and radio. Almost all allege editorial bias — or, in the words of the broadcaster’s code of practice, a breach of the obligation of “impartiality and diversity of perspectives”.

The four cases where ACMA determined editorial bias involve some aspect of the climate wars. In each, the criticism is all about the vibe: a 2021 news package on the impact of logging on Victoria’s water supply; Four Corners’ 2019 “Cash Splash” report on the then federal government’s water infrastructure scheme; a 2018 Catalyst episode on feeding Australia sustainably; a 2017 report from gallery reporter Andrew Probyn describing Tony Abbott as “the most destructive politician of his generation”.

It’s not that the ABC got its facts wrong. Instead, the ACMA quibbles over interpretation disputing the  ABC’s professional judgment: how it applied its facts, whom it talked to (or didn’t talk to). You know, the journalism.

In each situation, including in response to ACMA’s “Fox and the Big Lie” decision, the ABC stood by its reporting teams — and its Four Corners and Catalyst reports remain online.

Rebuilding the ACMA

While the new government has recently extended the term of ACMA chair Nerida O’Loughlin for a further two years, it has the opportunity to remake the authority this year, with the five-year terms of four members expiring between April and August. Those four include three full-time members, one being ACMA CEO and deputy chair Creina Chapman — a Howard-era staffer and former executive and strategic adviser to both News Corp and Nine.

But maybe the ACMA complaints process for journalism is just not fixable. We’ve had 80-odd years of attempting to build tools to address journalism standards, from codes of ethics in the 1940s, to industry bodies like the Press Council in the 1970s, to a culture of media self-criticism (think Media Watch) emerging in the 1980s.

Australia’s big media companies have met each attempt with hostility, friendly co-option, or a bit of both. So shocked were they by the temerity of their post-war journalists in asserting ethical obligations that Sir Frank Packer fought a three-year legal challenge to block the code. It would not be until 1975 that any publisher (such as, surprisingly, Rupert Murdoch) grudgingly agreed to accept it.

It’s the same now. A private dinner between a media owner and the press regulator? That’s how you capture the industry’s self-regulation. Fox Corp complaining to ACMA over Four Corners? That’s the pushback against media scrutiny.

A new landscape

Across today’s media, what’s really changed is context. Once, journalism was limited, either by costs of capital (in the case of print) or by availability of spectrum (like broadcast). Scarcity demanded regulation (preferably self-regulation) of news media practice to ensure communities got the news they needed from the few available sources.

Now we face a world of information glut — some of it true, some of it false, much of it profoundly contestable. It’s the job of journalism to sort out what’s what and explain the difference, without government authorities like ACMA looking over the newsroom’s collective shoulder, editing pencil in hand.

Around the world, we’re already seeing how government agencies are using “fake news” laws not to regulate but to control and restrict. The ACMA experience shows, too, how regulation can be gamified for political ends. Time for the Australian government to leave ACMA to the technical stuff it’s good at and leave the news judgment to the newsrooms.