Australian News Media’s Lukewarm Response to the Counter-Terrorism Laws That Curb Its Freedoms

The final speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Saira Ali and Catherine Son, exploring Australian media’s response to counter-terrorism laws that limit press freedom. Such laws emerged in the post-9/11 era, and Australia has now passed a record 96 counter-terrorism laws since 2001 – these compound the lack of explicit provisions for press freedom under Australian law.

Any of these laws also impact on the Australian news media, so how have Australian media responded to security laws that restrict press and other freedoms, then? How have they responded especially to the ASIO Act, Metadata Retention laws, and the Espionage & Foreign Interference Bill, each of which challenge source protections, discourage investigative reporting, and foster a climate of self-censorship?

Such laws challenge journalistic legitimacy, which is crucial for transparency and accountability in democratic contexts. These measures are justified in state rhetoric by the growing securitisation of the state, and such impacts are further exacerbated by general resource constraints and editorial limitations in journalism. Are Australian media resisting such impacts?

Australian governments have been using such laws to target Australian journalists and the whistleblowers whose information they report on. This has led to risk-averse practices in newsrooms, with journalists discouraged from pursuing such stories; globally, by contrast, media organisations have pushed back, with varying degrees of success, against such constraints in France, Poland, Mexico, Hong Kong, and Hungary.

This project explored these efforts in Australia between 2014 and 2024, conducting a content analysis of news reporting on the three laws and examining the framing approaches present in such reporting. Three frames emerged from this: acceptance of the need for these laws (18% of the 460 articles examined); understanding of the need mixed with concerns about the impacts (22%); and token pushback and resistance (60%).

At first glance, then, there was some resistance to these laws; such resistance gradually declined over the period examined here. 76% of articles about the ASIO Act in 2014 and 2015 took a resistance approach, for instance; after the law was passed, however, such resistance essentially evaporated; 58% of articles about the Metadata Retention laws provided pushback (variously highlighting the chilling effects of the legislation, or the practical and logistical concerns in retaining such metadata), and again this resistance quickly dropped off the media agenda; and only 50% of the coverage of the Foreign Interference Bill still offered any resistance, and again such resistance quickly vanished after the passage of the bill. In this case, such media coverage was also accompanied by formal institutional opposition to the bill, during hearings.

This muted response highlights structural and cultural challenges, then; it raises critical questions about the media’s ability to protect civil liberties, if it cannot even effectively defend its own rights. Only a proactive media culture can uphold and strengthen press freedoms and push for the necessary legal reforms to enshrine such freedoms in law.

Instead, Australian patterns in media industry responses are characterised by restraint and only episodic resistance – they are largely tokenistic. As press freedoms erode further, securitisation narratives are therefore likely to be normalised, and critical engagement will decline further, which severely challenges civil liberties.