Australia's Free Speech Disgrace

In Australia, the Labor Government and Greens have been unhappy with the press coverage they've been receiving in various newspapers, mainly those owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Fair enough, you might say, on a number of grounds.

The government has done a dismal job of running the country, passing ruinous mining and carbon taxes, harassing businesses with excessive labor regulation, and generally doing their damndest to choke off the economic success story that is modern Australia

Meanwhile, they've received fawning coverage from other papers, notably the Sydney Morning Herald and Age. Not to mention the taxpayer funded ABC, whose reporters opinions range from 'left of centre' to 'crush the bourgeois capitalist pigs!'

And in the marketplace of ideas, News Corp papers compete for scarce advertising dollars and reader eyeballs. If they're unfair or too biased, then other papers will step into the breach. Perhaps Murdoch papers succeed because they air viewpoints that are of interest to readers, or are just more entertaining.

In addition, Australia already has an intrusive self-regulatory body, which does things like forcing opinion piece writers phrases like 'illegal entrants' to be changed to 'irregular entrants' without their knowledge or consent.

But that's not enough for the Labor government - apparently fawning political coverage is their right as the government, and those naughty newspaper editors aren't falling into line.

As a result, they conducted an inquiry into setting up a government regulatory body of media outlets, both print and online. The results are in.

Let's listen to the hilariously self-serving summary from censorious d***head, The Honorable Ray Finkelstein, QC. From page 8:

I therefore recommend that a new body, a News Media Council, be established to set
journalistic standards for the news media in consultation with the industry, and handle
complaints made by the public when those standards are breached. Those standards will likely be substantially the same as those that presently apply and which all profess to embrace.

Got that? The things you were doing before voluntarily will now be mandatory! But since the standard will "likely be substantially the same" (that's a guarantee you can take to the bank), and "all profess to embrace" the current rules, what's the difference?

Except, you know, the difference between a volunteer army and conscription, or the difference between going on a diet and being chained to a treadmill, or the difference between working on a cotton farm and being a plantation slave.

The 'voluntary' bit is kind of important in the sphere of human liberty.

And what role will the government have in all of this? Page 9:

The News Media Council should have secure funding from government and its decisions made binding, but beyond that government should have no role. The establishment of a council is not about increasing the power of government or about imposing some form of censorship. It is about making the news media more accountable to those covered in the news, and to the public generally.  

Oh, well that's a relief! At best,  it will be a court that makes up its own laws. In middle case scenario, it will be a puppet of whoever is in power. At worst, it will be another permanent bastion of the left, deciding what constitutes appropriate speech in Australia.

Nothing to worry about there!

Who will be regulated? From page 295:

If a publisher distributes more than 3000 copies of print per issue or a news internet site has a minimum of 15,000 hits per annum it should be subject to the jurisdiction of the News Media Council, but not otherwise. 

Paging Doctor Evil! We need a payment of one million dollars!

Let's put this in perspective. This site is read by nobody. Really, it's true. And yet it gets a couple of thousand hits a month. Some of these are spam sites. Some of them are links to images. Doesn't matter - this website will be under the jurisdiction of these clowns.

If I'm regulated, everyone is regulated. And with the Australian courts absurd view that writing anything anywhere on the planet makes you subject to Australian defamation law, who knows how many sites they'll be trying to regulate.

An important change to the status quo is that, in appropriate cases, the News Media Council should have power to require a news media outlet to publish an apology, correction or retraction, or afford a person a right to reply. This is in line with the ideals contained in existing ethical codes but in practice often difficult to obtain. 

I would delete every trace of this blog and eat the contempt of court order before I would publish anything at the demand of the Australian government. I would set up a thousand mirror sites before I would remove one word at the request of the News Media Council.

Why do we need to do this anyway?

These proposals are made at a time when polls consistently reveal low levels of trust in the media, when there is declining newspaper circulation, and when there are frequent controversies about media performance.

Have you looked at the approval rating of the current government recently? Have you looked at the approval rating of lefty academics that would populate such a council? Have you looked at the approval rating of speech-censoring government suck-ups like the Honorable Ray Finkelstein, QC? Give me Rupert Murdoch any day.

Do you think that right-wing speech disliked by the government is more likely to get censored? Andrew Bolt makes a great case that it will - when citing examples of biased coverage, what does he turn to but ... News Limited Coverage of global warming! Nothing about unbalanced coverage in favor of the global warming position in The Age (let alone the ABC).

And why, pray tell, is that a problem?

The Honorable Ray Finkelstein, QC, would do well to take heed of Ken at Popehat's "Chicago Manual of Style For Censorious Dipshits". As Ken notes:

The obligatory “we believe in freedom of expression” paragraph in the standard defend-our-censorship communique is simply embarrassing. That’s why the Chicago Manual of Style For Censorious Dipshits (“CMSCD”) recommends eschewing it and launching straight into the meat of your uninformed and conclusory stomping on First Amendment law.

Back to Finkelstein, sure enough first we get the fig leaf...:

It is worth pausing at this point to affirm that there is nothing wrong with newspapers having an opinion and advocating a position, even mounting a campaign. Those are the natural and generally expected functions of newspapers....

and then the inevitable 'but shut up and say things I like':

However, to have an opinion and campaign for it is one thing; reporting is another, and in news reporting it is expected by the public, as well as by professional journalists, that the coverage will be fair and accurate.
.
Nonetheless, there is a widely-held public view that, despite industry-developed codes of practice that state this, the reporting of news is not fair, accurate and balanced.

I reserve my right to make my reporting exactly as unfair and unbalanced as my heart desires, and not one whit less. Whether what I write about the world is "fair and balanced" is absolutely none of the business of the Australian Government, and only a tyrant would think otherwise.

I have a long-running dispute with Papa Holmes about the appropriateness of swearing on this site. So it takes a large amount of self-control to limit my remarks to these:

Ray Finkelstein, your snivelling and disgusting appeal for for government censorship over the Australian press makes you unworthy of the common law traditions of liberty bequeathed to you by men much better than yourself. Your views on government censorship of papers should make you far more at home in countries that do believe in this kind of censorship, such as China, Cuba, or North Korea.

Against Internet Pile-ons

One of the things I missed while I was away was the chance to comment in a timely fashion on this interesting piece by Ken at Popehat on the ethics of making people 'internet famous', as he puts it. I generally agree with a lot of what Ken writes about, so it's interesting when I find myself disagreeing on something.

Let me start with the opening part of Ken's post, and then jump around a bit:

For some time, I've been thinking and writing about this question: is it "fair," and "right," that if I act like a sufficiently notable choad on the internet, I may become instantly famous for it, and the consequences of that fame may follow me and have profound social implications?
I keep coming back to two answers: (1) yes, and (2) to quote Clint,deserve's got nothing to do with it.

Obviously the answer is going to depend on exactly what you did in the first place. But usually, what sort of things make somebody become 'internet famous'? Usually it's something like the following:
-Making a racist remark or video
-Saying something particularly mean or off-colour
-Writing an obtuse and inadvertantly funny email
etc.

In general, does that deserve having a lot of nasty web posts come up whenever someone googles your name?

Punishments can be fair in one of two ways.

The first is that the punishment is fair to that individual. Given John Smith did XYZ, is it fair to John Smith personally that he suffers the consequences?

The second is that the punishment is fair given the overall scale of the bad behavior that society is trying to deter and the overall costs of punishment.

To see the difference, think about medieval punishments for theft and highway robbery. The punishment for these was incredibly severe, and harsher than for a lot of other more gruesome crimes. But why? Getting robbed isn't that bad in the scheme of things.

The reason is the lack of enforcement. It was very difficult to catch highway robbers. Hence, when the King did catch one, he had to do horrible things to make an example out of them. This was the only way he could hope to deter crime, without a police force to do it for him. The individual punishment for that robber was surely not fair, but the overall social aim may have been worth it (or not. But it's not an indefensible proposition).

In the case of the generic 'guy acting like an @$$hole' and getting a whole ton of nasty internet posts, I think it's very rare that the actions are fair to him personally.

Ken disagrees:

Some people worry that the result is unduly harsh or unfair — that anyone can become a pariah because of "one mistake." I'm all for the concept of mercy, but I think that concern is misguided for a number of reasons. First and most importantly, the internet is manic and has a short attention span. You have to do something truly epic to go viral. One angry email won't do it unless it is so extreme that it reflects a disturbed mind. If you "just have a bad day," you'll slip into obscurity quickly. It takes talent, or sustained effort, to become internet famous. Consider the case of XXX of Brandlink Communications. Like Christoforo, he acted like an ass, and won a day or two, tops, of internet fame — but now he's slipping inexorably into deserved oblivion. And he's still employed. And it's only been six months, but if you say YYY, people will say "who?"

It's true that the internet has a short attention span. In terms of the number of people who will remember your name offhand, your internet fame will be short-lived. But the internet has an incredibly long memory. When people actually search for you, for whatever reason, they'll still find all the same stuff.  If you want to see the example of the YYY name above, see what searching for her name produces. You may not remember her name off the top of your head, but someone who searches for her is going to find that stuff for a long time to come. And that is what makes it unfair. The woman in question acted rudely on a train, and was caught on video. I confidently predict that the nasty web coverage will still be found by people searching for her name for a longer period of time than a person would serve a prison sentence for manslaughter.

Next, Ken argues that this doesn't matter, because everyone can make up their mind:

Finally, some argue that internet infamy can be "out of proportion" to the offense. Perhaps. But isn't that the call of every person who reads about your actions? People don't win instant internet notoriety based on third-hard accounts of conduct. They win it because they do something on video, or in writing, that's notable. If what they did really isn't that bad — if it's truly been blown out of proportion — then can't future readers determine that for themselves? There's more than a whiff of paternalism to the "blown out of proportion" concern — it seems to suggest that we ought not write about someone's misdeeds because future readers can't be trusted to assess their significance themselves. I disagree. ZZZ's future employers, employees, associates, and friends are perfectly capable of reading up on the situation and making up their own minds.

Sure, but there's still a huge selectivity. Every day, hundreds of millions act like rude d***heads in some situation or other. How many of those are likely to have all their future employers focusing on one bad specific incident in their lives, even if they do 'make up their own mind'. The argument seems to be 'hey, maybe they won't all punish you for it!'. But that doesn't speak to the selectivity of it all. There's still a sizable negative cost, and it gets applied in a very arbitrary and capricious way.

Okay, so maybe it's not fair to the individuals, but is it worth it overall? Ken argues yes:

For the last hundred years, people who care about such things have been complaining about the anonymity of modern life. People who used to live in small towns live in big cities, and people are turned towards television and globalized, homogenized culture rather than towards their neighborhood. One consequence is the ability to treat people badly — even in serial fashion — with relative impunity. It used to be that you'd get the reputation as the town drunk or the town letch, or the village idiot, and that reputation would follow you until you move on to another town. But now many people don't even know their neighbors, let alone their whole "town."
With respect to certain bad behavior, the internet can change that — it can transform you into the resident of an insular town of 300 million people.

But here's the meat of my objection - very few of the major cases of internet fame involve people actually doing anything, as opposed to merely saying something.

And I take a strong stand that mean words on their own just aren't a big deal. Unless you're actively inciting criminal behaviour, words don't matter that much. Make a really mean comment about Trig Palin? Post a racist video on the internet? That makes you an @$$hole. Know what else makes you an @$$hole. Littering. Cutting people off in traffic. Peeing on the seat in a public toilet and not wiping it up. And a million other things that we don't get the vapours about, even though I don't want to associate with people who do them regularly. Rudeness is never going to be eliminated, and I suggest that you may well not actually enjoy living in a society where it had been. It would certainly be a lot more boring.

For the most part, the tendency towards internet pile-ons is associated with a more pernicious trend - sympathetic offense. That remark wasn't directed at me, but I'm going to be outraged on behalf of somebody else, even if that someone else isn't personally offended. This of course leads to what John Derbyshire memorably described as the 'evolution towards the ever thinner-skinned'. Here at Shylock Holmes HQ, we are proud to fight against this trend.

What I don't like about internet pile-ons is the sense of gleeful indignant rage they involve. The people piling on usually are really enjoying laying the boot into someone, assured of their own righteousness.

And that is always an ugly emotion to watch when spread across a mob, even if just an internet mob.

I respectfully dissent.

A Snapshot of Modern Britain

Article 1 - British Police spring into action to arrest woman for saying nasty racist things on a train:

A woman has been arrested after an online video apparently showed a woman abusing ethnic minority passengers on a packed south London tram.
...
British Transport Police said a woman, 34, had been arrested on suspicion of a racially-aggravated offence.
...
In the online clip, the woman confronts several passengers, saying: "You are not British". She then starts swearing. 

A British Transport Police spokesman said: "The video posted on YouTube and Twitter has been brought to our attention and our officers have launched an investigation. ....We will not tolerate racism in any form on the rail network and will do everything in our power to locate the person responsible."

Article 2 - Theodore Dalrymple recounting how the British legal system doesn't give a rat's @** about burglary:

While on the subject, let me just recount one story to illustrate how seriously the British state takes the defense of the property of its citizens. I was looking through the criminal record of one of my patients in the prison and discovered that he had not long before been convicted for the fifty-seventh time for burglary. Since most criminals will happily admit, in confidence, that they have actually committed between five and fifteen times as many crimes as they have ever been caught for, it was quite possible that this man had committed more than five hundred burglaries. And what was his terrible punishment for his fifty-seventh conviction for burglary? A fine of $85, presumably paid for from the proceeds of his activities.

Now that's a society with its priorities set straight! Get your feelings hurt by racist white trash assholes? Leave no stone unturned to arrest them! The same racist white trash assholes are breaking into your home right this second while you're on the phone? Sorry, we're very busy. Stop by the office later and we'll give you a useless police report so you can file an insurance claim.

It's also refreshing to see that the British Police have also taken a leaf out of Ken at Popehat's "Chicago Manual of Style For Censorious Dipshits":

The obligatory “we believe in freedom of expression” paragraph in the standard defend-our-censorship communique is simply embarrassing. That’s why the Chicago Manual of Style For Censorious Dipshits (“CMSCD”) recommends eschewing it and launching straight into the meat of your uninformed and conclusory stomping on First Amendment law.

Yes indeed, the British Police are admirably straightforward - they don't believe in freedom of expression, and don't care if you know it.

See Ya Later Free Speech, We Hardly Knew Ye

Australia continues its lamentable decline as yet another country where the delicate feelings of designated victim groups trump freedom of speech.

The estimable Andrew Bolt was held today to have breached the Racial Discimination Act. Let The Australian tell the story:

At issue was Bolt's assertion that the nine applicants had chosen to identify themselves as “Aboriginal” and consequently win grants, prizes and career advancement, despite their apparently fair skin and mixed heritage. 

[Justice Mordecai Bromberg] found that "fair-skinned Aboriginal people (or some of them) were reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to have been offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated by the imputations conveyed in the newspaper articles" published in the Herald Sun.

I personally couldn't give a fig about whether Pat Eatock chooses to self-identify as Aboriginal or not. I care very deeply about the fact that Pat Eatock, with the help of the courts, feels that her exquisitely precious hurt feelings entitle her to sue people who say things she doesn't like. I care that Australia has decided that rather than laugh these claims out of court, it would prefer to join the camps of censorious, cowardly nations that have gutted the concept of free speech of all its meaning, limiting it effectively to citizens' right to agree with politically correct platitudes.

Yes readers, the Commonwealth of Australia, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that nothing is more important than whether your words might subject Pat Eatock to "highly personal, highly derogatory and highly offensive attacks".

Here is the relevant section of the Racial Discrimination Act (1975) that Bolt was held to have breached:

SECT 18C Offensive behaviour because of race, colour or national or ethnic origin

(1) It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:

(a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and

(b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.

Following my own advice, you should read the original judgment here. I waded through it, and didn't find myself any less outraged.

Starting at paragraph 67, you can find nearly one hundred paragraphs as to just how terribly hurt and offended the plaintiffs were by the mean, nasty Andrew Bolt, wrapped in all the hackneyed, threadbare language of the professional grievance industry - "offended", "humiliated", "insulted", "disgusted", "angry", "upset".

My advice to the plaintiffs - grow a fucking spine.

You can also find wonderful nuggets testifying to the decayed state of free speech in Australia. At paragraph 350:

The right to freedom of expression is limited to its reasonable and good faith exercise having regard to the right of others to be free of offence. The requirement of proportionality does not involve the subjugation of one right over the other and is consistent with achieving a balanced compromise between the two.

How wonderful and balanced our free speech is to be, compared with this crucial and equally important right to be 'free from offence'.

Generally speaking, there are defences available for fair comment and public interest. But too bad, because according to Mordecai Bromberg they didn't apply! You can read all about it.

Perhaps the best thing about this is that the original articles are included at the bottom of the judgment. Read them for yourself and decide just how hurtful they are, and whether a free and just society ought to outlaw their publication.

So how does Pat Eatock justify this farce to herself?

After the decision, which was greeted by applause and cheers in the Federal Court, Pat Eatock said ``It's never been an issue of freedom of speech, it's been an issue of professionalism.''

Pat Eatock apparently is either too brainless or too disingenuous to countenance the possibility that the case might be both an issue of professionalism and freedom of speech, in the same way that September 11 was both an issue of architecture and terrorism, and the play Othello was both an issue of Venetian military structure and murder. I'm also look forward to Pat Eatock's fascinating exposition on what rational theory of government would require a role for the Australian Government as the regulator of media 'professionalism' in the first place.

I have long held proudly to the Australian cultural tradition of plain-spoken humour, robust public debate and a generally relaxed attitude to matters of race, gender and sexuality.

What a fucking joke. It's time to accept the fact that the Australia now has a plurality of nitwits who think that the appropriate response to nasty newspaper articles is to draft and pass laws making them illegal, and to drag the publishers of such articles into lawsuits costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What an embarrassing travesty for the country I love. What a humiliating debasement of freedom from a once free and proud people.

In the current context, it brings me no joy at all to type these words:

I'm glad I live in America.