The CMT newsletter has been on summer break, but the events we cover have been rolling on at breakneck pace. This is especially true in the US, where we’ve seen the Pentagon’s press-corps ‘rotation’ program shuffle the New York Times out and Breitbart News in, along with the systematic dismantling of fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram.
Here in Australia, Antoinette Lattouf’s case against the ABC has been receiving saturation coverage. The decision of the Federal Court might help us to see things more clearly but the daily hearings seem to have exposed one misstep after another by the national broadcaster. In amongst the craziness, there’s even some overlap in the observations of Chris Kenny in The Australian and Linton Besser on Media Watch:both question the decision to hire her as well as the decision to fire her. As I've said before I also take this position.
Receiving far less attention is one of the most important regulatory developments caught up in the whirlwind end to 2024. This the announcement from the Assistant Treasurer and the Communications Minister that the News Media Bargaining Code would be supplemented with a news bargaining ‘incentive’ that would take the form of a tax imposed on certain digital platform services if they don’t offer financial support to news providers. We’ll be addressing this at an event next month – details at the end of this newsletter.
And another important development for us was the release last week of Delia Rickards’ Report on the Statutory Review of the Online Safety Act. The report’s findings provide the basis for another government announcement in December that it will develop a proposal for introducing a digital duty of care into the Act. This is a really significant move. It’s something we supported in our submission to the review last year, and we’ll do more work on this in 2025.
To help make sense of some of last year’s top issues, we’ve published Sacha Molitorisz’s ‘Year in Transition’ podcast, the last in our Double Take series from 2024. Sacha talks with ACMA’s former Deputy Chair, Creina Chapman, and former Media Watch host, Paul Barry, about the state of news media in Australia and how some aspects might be regulated.
In our stories below, Michael looks at Meta’s decision to end fact-checking in the US and what this means for the role of the Facebook Oversight Board, while I consider the regulatory gap that allows Nine to pull its local news service from Darwin. Also in this issue Dr Susanne Lloyd-Jones, who joined the UTS Faculty of Law last month from UNSW, looks at how journalists and law-makers might need to brush up their act on cyber security. And we introduce Dr Alena Radina – our new Postdoctoral Research Fellow – who tells us about her research interests and background.
As usual, we’ll rotate the editorship of our newsletter among the CMT team throughout the year. Thanks for joining us on what promises to be a wild year of transition!
Derek Wilding, CMT Co-Director