No job is lonelier than defending freedom of speech in Q&A land
ABE Fortas, the US Supreme Court judge, once said that judging was the loneliest job in the world, "in which a man is, as near as may be, an island entire". I can think of a lonelier job: defending freedom of speech on ABC1's Q&A.
It used to be uncontroversial, even popular, to argue journalists should be free to write what they believe to be true, and newspapers should be free to propel it into the public arena.
Not any more. As I discovered on Q&A on Monday, these days defending the ideal of a free press will win you bemused looks from chin-scratching audience members, narrow-eyed stares from liberty-allergic politicians and a tsunami of tweets asking if you have gone completely mental.
Two freedom-of-the-press issues came up on Q&A: whether right-wing commentators bore responsibility for the actions of the Norway nutter Anders Behring Breivik; and the question of whether, post-phone hacking, it was time to tame and possibly break up the "Murdoch empire".
My answer to both was no.
No, you cannot blame the grotesque murder of 77 Norwegians on the fact Mark Steyn or Keith Windschuttle once wrote a column bemoaning the decline of Western culture. And no, we should not invite the state to dismantle Rupert's regime.
Instead, if you really don't like what his papers have to say, you should set up your own post-Murdochian, pot-stirring paper. That's one of the great things about press freedom: anyone with the nous and the know-how and a fundraising sidekick can press their own ideas and offer them up for public consumption.
I may as well have been calling for Stephen Fry or some other modern-day national treasure to be put in the stocks and pelted with rotten oranges, such were the looks of horror shot my way by my co-panellists. Especially by Labor Minister for Human Services Tanya Plibersek who, according to one blog report, spent the whole show with "narrowed eyes, casting daggers at her tormentor" (that's me). In the discussion on the Norwegian killer, Plibersek seemed outraged when I suggested right-wing writers, however much we might disagree with some of them, were not "the cause of all violence and horror in the world".
Indeed, my suggestion made Plibersek sick to her stomach, she said. "I cannot understand that you think that it is fine for people to go out and say we should kill all Muslims . . . and that that has no real effect in the world," she said.
Even after I pointed out that the right-wing columnists being fingered as intellectual accessories to the worst crime in peacetime Europe did not call for all Muslims to be killed but simply expressed disagreements with the ideology of multiculturalism, still Plibersek seemed convinced that their words were wicked, the moral equivalent of weapons.
"What you're saying is that there is no responsibility if you preach hate for what happens when you preach hate," she said, once again mixing up "making legitimate criticisms of multiculturalism" with "preaching hate". She said public debate should be "more courteous", which really means more boring.
Read on in link:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/no-job-is-lonelier-than-defending-freedom-of-speech-in-qa-la...
