Free speech: where do you draw the line?

Journalists face the dilemma whether to report on or ignore the inflammatory ravings of the far right

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

The quote is attributed to Voltaire and 200-plus years later, no-one has come up with a better phrase about the fundamental human right to freedom of speech.

For journalists especially, Voltaire’s quote has to be a guiding principle; ignore or disregard it, and you have crossed the line from journalism to activism.

If we are to be an enlightened society, we have to be prepared to allow all views to be expressed, and then to debate them.

So even, when the views are repugnant — like those of Milo Yiannopoulous or Laura Southern — they should be allowed to speak (of course there have to be some limits, such as advocating violence against a minority or – in Milo’s case – child sex abuse).

Attempt to shut them up or deny them a voice only gives them the infamy they desperately want and hands them the titles of “martyrs of free speech”.

Once you begin to censor or repress free speech, it’s the start of a slippery slope. Much better to give ’em enough rope.

And just because you are granting them the right of free speech, that doesn’t mean there is an obligation to listen, or to transmit what they have to say to a wider audience.

It’s easy to ignore comical nobodies like Milo, lecturing to a few dozen losers in some run down reception centre in the suburbs (albeit not so easy if you aren’t a privileged white straight male). If a few stupid Antifa activists hadn’t turned up at his Melbourne event earlier this year, barely anyone would have even noticed he was in Australia.

Instead, he became a cause celebre, revelling in his 15 seconds of (in)fame(y).

But how do we deal with Fraser Anning?

Anning swims in the same fetid swamp of right wing paranoia, racism and Islamophobia as Yiannopoulous and Southern.

The problem is that — unlike those two — his stage is the federal Senate inside the home of Australian democracy.

And on Tuesday night, he made the most of it, with an openly racist and bigoted maiden speech which drew on the language of Hitler and in calling for a return to the White Australia policies abandoned more than half a century ago.

It was offensive, it was repulsive, it was lunacy — and the media treated it as such.

But the question remains, are the media aiding and abetting the far right by reporting their most outrageous statements?

The jury’s out on this one. On face value, a controversial speech by a member of Parliament, even one who gained his seat as tenuously as Anning, is both in the public interest and newsworthy.

But by reporting on the speech — even if the reporting was universally negative — did the media give Anning a platform that he didn’t deserve?

And has the media done the same thing in the past to people like Pauline Hanson and Jacquie Lambie?

It’s the same dilemma the US media faced in 2016 during the Republican primaries and the Presidential campaign.

In its conventional and accepted role as the fourth estate, the media was dutybound to report the statements of a Republican primary frontrunner and Presidential candidate and, it can be feasibly argued, was doing its job by relaying Donald Trump’s most outlandish, outrageous and offensive remarks so voters could make up their own minds.

This is what journalists are trained to do.

Yet, there’s also no doubt that by doing so — even in a tut-tutting way — the US media amplified Trump’s messages and gave oxygen to beliefs that would be better locked away in a cupboard.

Did the US media fail then by following and covering Trump like any other presidential candidate?

Are the trapped by their own objectivity into giving lunatics a megaphone for their crazed ideas?

The media can hardly be accused of uncritically accepting Trump’s rhetoric; both during the campaign and since he has become President, his every public utterance has been examined and analysed like no other president. An entire fact checking industry has sprung up to call out Trump’s lies, and a measure of the success of the media in doing its job has been Trump’s relentless war against journalism, which is motivated by the intense heat he feels from the ongoing media scrutiny of his words, his actions, and his crimes.

After all, the media hardly has a choice but to cover the most powerful person in the world, a man who could, by pressing a button, start the a nuclear war. Not to do so would represent a catastrophic failure by the media.

Yet, most US journalists would also admit they made mistakes by giving Trump too much air time or not taking his dangerous rhetoric and farcical tweets seriously enough. Trump rated, and for news directors that was enough. By the time the media had detected that they had given Trump a huge leg up by covering him as a oddity and a celebrity, rather than as a dangerous and serious politician, the genie was out of the bottle.

You can detect the same dilemma in the way the Australian media covers racists like Blair Cottrell and Fraser Anning.

Arguably, the media is not doing its job if it ignores the rise of inflammatory racist rhetoric in our community. But at the same time, every news story in the paper or on TV is helping to spread that rhetoric to a wider audience and risks building their support.

So what do we do?

Bernard Keane in Crikey! says we should completely ignore Anning and his ilk.

Keane notes that Anning received less than 20 votes at the double dissolution election, only came to the Senate after Malcolm Roberts was forced to resign for holding dual citizenship, and then switched parties after falling out with Pauline Hanson.

He says that Anning is doomed to lose his seat at the next election unless he can quickly raise his profile, and the best way to do that is by being as controversial as possible and cleaving off enough of the right wing racist Queensland redneck vote as he can. So, he asks, why should the media do Anning’s dirty work for him?

“The result [of Anning’s speech] was predictable — Mosley’s [Keane’s nickname for Anning] name trending on Twitter; media commentators queueing up to condemn him, ferocious criticisms from all sides of politics, all delivering what Mosley hungered for, publicity and profile, all helpful in increasing the chances that when Queensland voters take their ballot papers into the cardboard booth next year, they’ll recognise his name,” Keane wrote.

“The uproar guarantees that Mosley will continue his tactic, conscious that he needs a radically higher profile if he’s to survive in the crowded field of the Queensland Senate ballot paper, especially against big beasts like his erstwhile colleague Hanson and whatever clutch of later-to-fall-out-with-he friends join her under the One Nation banner.”

This is all true, but is it really practical to totally ignore a politician making a controversial speech in Parliament?

One of the true tests of how to cover a politician is how senior they are. And using that test, Anning — a backbencher with a tiny minority party who has no political influence or standing and whose comments are 99% of the time going to be irrelevant to public debate — doesn’t deserve to be covered.

Nothing he is going to say is of significance to anyone except the sub-group of racists and bigots he is hoping will vote for him. To the rest of Australia he is an irritation, a footnote at best.

If Anning is the crucial swing vote for a piece of legislation, or if he has some real contribution to make, then he gets quoted. The rest of the time, he’s just another voice, and a very minor and insignificant one at that.

What the media should definitely not do is give fringe dwellers like Anning, or Cottrell, or Hanson, any more airtime than they would any other minor political figure. Publicity is what they crave, but they shouldn’t get it just because what they have to say is controversial

It’s a fine line to draw and a difficult approach to adhere to.

Anning’s maiden speech livened up an otherwise dull week in Parliament, and gave politicians the opportunity to congratulate each other on how “tolerant” they really are, as they lined up one by one, with an eye on the opinion polls no doubt, to condemn him under Parliamentary privelege.

But of course, he is far from the first Australian politician in the current Parliament to have made harmful and inflammatory statements about race.

As Waleed Aly wrote in The Age, racist and xenophobic language is virtually commonplace in today’s political discourse. There is a double standard in play.

“Anning’s speech is not a momentary aberration,” he wrote. “It is a perfectly natural extension of the past decade or two of Australian media and politics. It is the slow, relentless debasement of our politics through an increasing flirtation with race-baiting that has made this possible. We have a national broadsheet that is now perfectly happy to publish a letter asking us seriously to consider interning Muslims.

“We have free-to-air commercial networks happy to broadcast similar views and provide weekly soapboxes to people such as Pauline Hanson during her years in the political wilderness. We have cable television networks who will interview neo-Nazis as commentators. We have tabloid newspapers happy to publish columns complaining about Indian and Jewish “colonies” in our cities.”

Yes, there was stench of hypocrisy about the self-righteous indignation, especially from coalition MPs.

Far more dangerous than Anning is Peter Dutton, an outright racist who not only currently occupies the role of Immigration Minister but is a potential future Liberal leader.

Given his seniority in the government, Dutton’s casual racism about the African community or new migrants who speak English as a second language, or his ceaseless cruelty towards refugees, is a much bigger threat than anything Anning will ever say.

Dutton has mainstreamed racism in a way that Anning or Hanson can only dream of. And so, for that matter, in a more calculated and less bovver boy manner, has Malcolm Turnbull.

But when was the last time anyone in the media called Dutton out as a racist, or he was censured in Parliament? When was the last time Turnbull was challenged, really challenged, for his unsubstantiated assertions that Melbourne has an ‘African gang’ crime problem?

Voltaire was correct all those years ago that we should protect the freedom of expression as a sacred right.

But the media — and politicians — should also be prepared to challenge racist speech and call out hypocrisy when they hear it. The right to say what you want doesn’t entitle you to avoid criticism.

Whether it’s Fraser Anning or Donald Trump or Boris Johnson, the media must be critical and avoid providing them with a soapbox for their racist views.

Otherwise the media will repeat the same mistakes again and again.

The united front against the hate and bile being peddled by Anning this week was encouraging, but sadly, it’s unlikely to last.