Last week CMT lodged our submission to the consultation by the Department of Communications on the proposed News Media Assistance Program.
News MAP is the first attempt by the government to set out a comprehensive policy on how to assist news media. It’s a welcome initiative because it seeks to achieve some level of agreement on what should be supported by the government and the rationale for doing so. It will also provide a framework for gathering evidence on changes in the news landscape as well as the best mechanisms to support news in Australia.
We address several aspects in our submission, but our leading point concerns the need to be clear on what this program is designed to support. One of the key concepts in the paper is public interest journalism, defined by the ACCC as ‘Journalism with the primary purpose of recording, investigating and explaining issues of public significance in order to engage citizens in public debate and inform democratic decision making at all levels of government’. We agree that public interest journalism should be the foundation for any support offered by the government under this program. But we think the current definition is too narrow because it defines journalism without reference to its operational aspects. In short, we think the existing definition ought to incorporate references to professional standards such as accuracy and impartiality.
Closely associated with this is the concept of quality. We support the inclusion of quality but, in order to avoid any perception of interference in editorial decisions, we think the best way of embracing quality is to restrict the circumstances in which it is to be deployed. We think there are two contexts where it is both justified and necessary. The first is the well-established journalistic standards mentioned above. The second is when News MAP is used to allocate public funds on a competitive basis. In our view, a set of quality indicators could be developed for application in this situation so that decision-making can be transparent, and evidence based.
The News MAP consultation paper was released in December in conjunction with ACMA’s advice to the government on its new Media Diversity Measurement Framework. The Measurement Framework is also an important step in understanding the news landscape in Australia. It will draw on the foundational work of the Public Interest Journalism Initiative and other researchers as well as a new program of work from ACMA. In time, it should help in regulatory decisions that seek to assess the sources that matter and how our news environment might be harmed by further concentration of ownership.
Derek Wilding, CMT Co-Director