Handmaiden to the Establishment: Peter Greste’s Register of Journalists
When established, well fed and fattened, a credible professional tires from the pursuit. One can get complacent, flatulently confident, self-assured. From that summit, the inner lecturer emerges, along with a disease: false expertise.
The Australian journalist Peter Greste has faithfully replicated the pattern. At one point in his life, he was lean, hungry and determined to get the story. He seemed to avoid the perils of mahogany ridge, where many alcohol-soaked hacks scribble copy sensational or otherwise. There were stints as a freelancer covering the civil wars in Yugoslavia, elections in post-apartheid South Africa. On joining the BBC in 1995, Afghanistan, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa fell within his investigative orbit. To his list of employers could also be added Reuters, CNN and Al Jazeera English.
During his tenure with Al Jazeera, for a time one of the funkiest outfits on the media scene, Greste was arrested along with two colleagues in Egypt accused of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. He spent 400 days in jail before deportation. Prison in Egypt gave him cover, armour and padding for journalistic publicity. It also gave him the smugness of a failed martyr.
Greste then did what many hacks do: become an academic. It is telling about the ailing nature of universities that professorial chairs are being doled out with ease to members of the Fourth Estate, a measure that does little to encourage the fierce independence one hopes from either. Such are the temptations of establishment living: you become the very thing you should be suspicious of.
With little wonder, Greste soon began exhibiting the symptoms of establishment fever, lecturing the world as UNESCO Chair of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland on what he thought journalism ought to be. Hubris struck. Like so many of his craft, he exuded envy at WikiLeaks and its gold reserves of classified information. He derided its founder, Julian Assange, for not being a journalist. This was stunningly petty, schoolyard scrapping in the wake of the publisher’s forced exit from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2019. It ignored that most obvious point: journalism, especially when it documents power and its abuses, thrives or dies on leaks and often illegal disclosures.
It is for this reason that Assange was convicted under the US Espionage Act of 1917, intended as a warning to all who dare publish and discuss national security documents of the United States.
In June this year, while celebrating Assange’s release (“a man who has suffered enormously for exposing the truth of abuses of power”) evidence of that ongoing fixation remained. Lazily avoiding the redaction efforts that WikiLeaks had used prior to Cablegate, Greste still felt that WikiLeaks had not met that standard of journalism that “comes with it the responsibility to process and present information in line with a set of ethical and professional standards.” It had released “raw, unredacted and unprocessed information online,” thereby posing “enormous risks for people in the field, including sources.”
It was precisely this very same view that formed the US prosecution case against Assange. Greste might have at least acknowledged that not one single study examining the effects of WikiLeaks’ disclosures, a point also made in the plea-deal itself, found instances where any source or informant for the US was compromised.
Greste now wishes, with dictatorial sensibility, to further impress his views on journalism through Journalism Australia, a body he hopes will set “professional” standards for the craft and, problematically, define press freedom in Australia. Journalism Australia Limited was formerly placed on the Australian corporate register in July, listing Greste, lobbyist Peter Wilkinson and executive director of The Ethics Centre, Simon Longstaff, as directors.
Members would be afforded the standing of journalists on paying a registration fee and being assessed. They would also, in theory, be offered the protections under a Media Reform Act (MFA) being proposed by the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, where Greste holds the position of Executive Director.
A closer look at the MFA shows its deferential nature to state authorities. As the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom explains,“The law should not be protecting a particular class of self-appointed individual, but rather the role that journalism plays in our democracy.” So much for independent journalists and those of the Assange-hue, a point well spotted by Mary Kostakidis, no mean journalist herself and not one keen on being straitjacketed by yet another proposed code.
Rather disturbingly, the MFA is intended to aid “law enforcement agencies and the courts identify who is producing journalism.” How will this be done? By showing accreditation – the seal of approval, as it were – from Journalism Australia. In fact, Greste and his crew will go so far as to give the approved journalist a “badge” for authenticity on any published work. How utterly noble of them.
Such a body becomes, in effect, a handmaiden to state power, separating acceptable wheat from rebellious chaff. Even Greste had to admit that two classes of journalist would emerge under this proposal, “in the sense that we’ve got a definition for what we call a member journalist and non-member journalists, but I certainly feel comfortable with the idea of providing upward pressure on people to make sure their work falls on the right side of that line.”
This is a shoddy business that should cause chronic discomfort, and demonstrates, yet again, the moribund nature of the Fourth Estate. Instead of detaching itself from establishment power, Greste and bodies such as the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom merely wish to clarify the attachment.
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Return to home pageGreste — “in the sense that we’ve got a definition for what we call a member journalist and non-member journalists, but I certainly feel comfortable with the idea of providing upward pressure on people to make sure their work falls on the right side of that line.”
Can he not see that this is a pathetic admission of an intention to hobble journalism?
Sky v AIM
One disagrees with however Greste defines journalism and Assange has as much right as anyone in claiming to be journalist.
However, journalists need to follow professional, ethical and moral behaviour vs contrary examples that abound in RW MSM and ideological left/indie media
Greste ‘the organisation I represent, the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, has also strongly objected to Assange’s decision to publish a huge file of unredacted documents.’
Offshore this became apparent via Mueller Report and conga line of RW grifters inc. Farage, Fox News, Seth Rich conspiracy, Trump campaign members inc Stone, Bannon etc al and Russians/FSB/GRU (who phished/stole Podesta DNC emails); published by RW legacy media to benefit Trump & GOP Vs Democrats.
Fast forward where now RNC emails allegedly stolen by Iran and dropped to media, but the same RW legacy media won’t publish because they embarrass Trump & GOP.
An Ecuadorian friend asked, ‘why is this RWNJ narcissist being platformed by the Anglo ideological left and a poor nation like Ecuador had to help his suboptimal choices and behaviour?’
My concern is context too, Assange garnered much support in Anglosphere, but deflecting from innumerable journalists who are genuinely courageous, in danger, or already dead by calling power to account (vs a westerner raising a fist in the air and blame US for everything), eg. in Russia, Turkey, Gaza, Syria etc?
The Australian government worked quickly to free Peter Grest, but left Assange in an awful lurch for 14 years. What does that tell us about who is the real journalist?
Andrew Smith versus Julian Assange.
A dog barking at a lion.
Steve Davis: If you know so much why can you neither offer substantive analysis nor credible support for your non position, vs. just shoot messengers, a la RW MSM and their influencers?
Too easy, so we should just respect your opinions, be ‘quiet Australians’ and ignore the offshore RW autocratic ecosystem inhabited by Kochs, Fox, Abbott, Downer, Farage, Assange and too many of the Anglo faux anti-imperialist left, who glibly and lazily share same talking points, hmmm?
Nero Cane: So why only Australian context &/or journlaists?
To take an empathy bypass globally on journalists and/or activists in Asia, Mid East, Turkey, Russia etc., risking their lives, incarceration and/or being killed by RW regimes, to support Assange?
Andrew Smith implies that Assange is without courage — “deflecting from innumerable journalists who are genuinely courageous, …”
Now there’s a dog barking at a lion.
As for blaming the US for everything “eg. in Russia, Turkey, Gaza, Syria etc?”, any journalist who does that is on the right track.
I’m not sure what the reference to Turkey is about, because Andrew in his usual vague generalisation manner avoids giving any details, but US interference in the affairs of Russia, Gaza and Syria is continuing to keep the globe in turmoil and suffering.
Critics of Julian Assange, almost without exception, refer to the publication of unredacted documents as evidence of irresponsibility that put lives at risk. Peter Greste is among that number.
The full story of the documents is rarely told.
Here’s one account.
“The unredacted material, including names of sources, became publicly available because two Guardian writers, David Leigh and Luke Harding, published in 2011 a cash-in book, ‘WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy’, in which they, for reasons never explained, disclosed the password to all of the WikiLeaks files. Assange published the unredacted files in response to the Guardian’s disclosure of the password, in order to provide the named sources a measure of protection.”
Here’s the full story according to Wikileaks — “WikiLeaks did redact the War Logs…. The Afghan War Diaries first, after which they sought to redact more so they created a redaction software program to remove all names for the Iraq War Logs, and then went back and un-redacted the names that they could, publicly known figures, etc.
WikiLeaks also redacted the State Department cables when they [WikiLeaks] began releasing them in Nov. 2010. It was in Sept. 2011 that WikiLeaks became aware that unredacted cables were posted on the internet by others, who’d gotten them through a combination of an ex-WikiLeaker posting encrypted folders online and Guardian journalists publishing the password to decrypt those files in a book in Feb. 2011. WikiLeaks called the State Department to warn them to notify those who could be named. Then WikiLeaks published the unredacted files, to confirm an authentic set of the documents — otherwise, with the unredacted files already online and out of their control, people could be framed by inserting false documents into those datasets.”
An article from Pearls and Irritations sums it all up nicely — “After the publication in July 2010 of the documents on the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon claimed that the site had put human lives in danger (US troops, Afghan collaborators, informers) and that Julian Assange perhaps even had ‘blood on his hands’ (CNN, 29 July 2010). Alas, the US has not been able to furnish a single example, including during court hearings. Fourteen years later, this accusation, endlessly repeated, lives on. On 25 June 2024, star pundit Patrick Cohen celebrated the liberation of Assange on the TV show “C à vous” (France 5) by saying that some “operatives on the ground … had paid with their life” after the revelations of WikiLeaks.
The following day, the judge of the US Federal Court of Saipan (Northern Mariana Islands) set out the lack of professionalism of the French journalist at the hearing which ratified Assange’s guilty plea: “The government has indicated that there is no personal victim here. That tells me that the dissemination of this information did not result in any known physical injury”. In the media, the most mobilised against the circulation of fake news, this information has not generated an avalanche of corrections.”
So the assassination of Assange’s character continues.