If there was an award for the most parliamentary inquiries leading precisely nowhere, the plethora of handwringing investigations into the future of journalism over the last decade would have to take the gong.
There was the fuss in the dying months of the Gillard government in which then communications minister Stephen Conroy tried to push forward more ethical regulation of journalism, to howls of outrage from everyone in the media.
There was the 2016 exercise when a Senate committee looked in to journalism as part of proposed changes to media ownership legislation. A Groundhog Day exercise if ever there was one.
Most recently, on the fifth of this month, the report of the Senate select committee into the future of public interest journalism was released and almost totally ignored. This latter committee is a bit of a zombie, dead before it even reported. All three of the senators who were behind its establishment – Labor’s Sam Dastyari, Nick Xenophon and the Greens Scott Ludlam – are now out of the picture.
This, combined with the reflex hostility of the government to the committee’s existence, let alone its findings, guarantees its recommendations will be ignored, just like those of its predecessors.
Given this woeful history, it’s reasonable to ask why the issue of the future of journalism keeps being investigated, and why so little action results.
Source:
theguardian
No comments:
Post a Comment