By Jenny Brinkworth
Award-winning journalist Peter Greste has last week asked who is and who is not a journalist, during the triennial Australian Catholic Bishops Communications Congress.
Speaking to more than 170 Catholic communicators last Thursday 29 August, Mr Greste was referring to the Australian bishops’ 2024-25 Social Justice Statement on ‘Truth and Peace’, highlighting that in a world that is awash with social media, it can often feel as though journalists’ jobs are redundant.
“How do we describe who is and who is not a journalist?” he asked.
“How do we define the boundaries of what we do when anybody with a smartphone nowadays can produce journalism-like content, when anyone can produce a story that looks like a piece of news.”
But trying to define who is a journalist is the wrong approach, according to Mr Greste who lectures in journalism at Macquarie University and is a vocal campaigner and advocate for media freedom.
“What we should be doing is thinking of not who is a journalist, not as a particular class of individual, but thinking of journalism as a process…as a methodological system for gathering, organising, assessing and presenting information in line with a recognised code of conduct; a set of ethics, a set of procedures and processes that give this information that we’re trying to convey a certain quality which elevates it beyond mere ‘bloggery’, beyond mere punditry, that gives it an authenticity, that gives it a credibility and an authority that sets it apart.”
Mr Greste said this is what the 2024 Social Justice Statement talks about when it speaks of the “search for truth”.
“Because if we do not apply those ethics and standards to all of the communication that we’re producing, regardless of whether you call yourself a journalist or a blogger or a communicator or a speechwriter or whatever, if we do not adhere to those fundamental ethics and principles, then what we are doing is adding to the noise and not to the truth.”
While the media was in a period of transition and the future wasn’t entirely clear, he said he was “absolutely dead certain that we will always need good journalists” and that telling stories would always be important.
Asked about threats to press freedom, Greste noted that Australia doesn’t have constitutional protection as exists in the United States through the First Amendment.
“And what that means is that Parliament, in the rush to pass national security legislation, passes laws without having to consider its impact on press freedom and, equally, the courts don’t have an obligation to protect it when these issues come up before the courts,” he said.
The organisation he co-founded, the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, has called for a Media Freedom Act that establishes those principles in a way that a constitutional amendment might, but “without actually having to go that extra step”.
“I think that’s part of the solution to protecting journalism,” he said.
Referring to the Congress theme of Missionary Message in a Modern World, Mr Greste acknowledged the difficulty of communicating in a hostile world but urged delegates to have the “courage” to uphold the truth in a society that is “tending more towards divisiveness” and is “more polemic”.
Mr Greste used his own experience of being arrested in Cairo in 2013 along with a Canadian-Egyptian journalist and Egyptian producer to highlight the difficulty of finding the truth in these harrowing times.
Mr Greste was accused of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood which the interim administration in Egypt had declared to be a terrorist organisation.
He shocked the audience when he described his cell, an eight-foot square box with a steel door, a “stinky squat toilet” in one corner and a leaky sink in another, and then said there were “16 guys” in it, some of whom were “quite literally going crazy”.
“I realised then that this was a little bit more serious than anything I’d experienced before,” said Mr Greste, adding that it was not unusual for foreign journalists to be temporarily detained and send home.
“The next day, I was taken to the National Intelligence Directorate. And I learned there the charges that we were facing. The charges included being members of a terrorist organisation, aiding and abetting a terrorist organisation, broadcasting false news with intent to undermine national security, financing terrorism.
“When you think about those charges, you realise they’re about as serious as you could possibly get, short of literally pulling the pin on a grenade and rolling it into the middle of a crowded room like this one.
“We were facing a very, very long time in prison.”
Mr Greste said the challenge was to try and work out why the arrest had been made when the reporting he had carried out for Al Jazeera was relatively superficial because he had only recently arrived in the country.
“I couldn’t reconcile the gap between those incredibly serious terrorism charges that we were facing and the reality of the very boring, frankly vanilla journalism that we’d actually been doing,” he said.
“How was it that we’d come into this kind of situation? This was an existential problem. We had to get to that word, truth.
“We had to get to the truth of what this was about before we could understand how to deal with it, how to fight it.”
The possibilities included that someone had misinterpreted what was broadcast, which seemed unlikely, or that by working for Al Jazeera, a Qatari organisation he and his team had been caught up in some sort of wider struggle between Qatar and Egypt and were “pawns in a kind of diplomatic battle between these two powers”.
But Mr Greste queried why they would come after an Australian and two Egyptians, particularly an Australian who had no connections whatsoever, or deeper connections with, anyone in the Muslim Brotherhood or any other similar organisation.
“There are plenty of other journalists who have deep networks, legitimate networks, who you could have made that case, but not me,” he said.
“And the third possibility was that this was an attack on press freedom. This was an attempt to send a very clear message to all of the journalists who were working in Egypt. Either you toe our line, or you face the consequences. You do not speak to the Brotherhood, because if you do, this is what will happen to you.”
“If it was politics between Qatar and Egypt, then we could align ourselves with Egypt, portray ourselves as friends of Egypt…or we could say, no, this is about press freedom, and we stand on the principle. We fight it on that basis.
“In the end, when we couldn’t answer that question with any great clarity, we decided to flip it. If we don’t know what the right answer is, if we don’t know which will work, let’s invert the question. How will we feel if any of those strategies fails? And when we did that, things became so much clearer.
“As far as I was concerned, the cynical choice, the choice to present ourselves as friends of Egypt in some way, was ultimately a lie. It was based on a lie. And if it failed, I’d have felt utterly sick.
“So the only choice for us at that point was to recognise it as an attack on press freedom, because we hadn’t been engaged in any terrorism, any conspiracy. Our work stood for itself, as far as I was concerned.”
Mr Greste wrote two letters declaring it to be an issue of press freedom and had the letters smuggled out.
“That framed the whole argument afterwards, and it helped galvanise a very potent international response,” he said.
“Now, the fact is, I don’t know the counterfactual. I don’t know what would have happened if we’d taken a different strategy. But I remember recognising that, actually, I think we’ve done the right thing.”
There were two moments when the way forward crystallised in his mind – one when one of the guards asked: “So Mr Peter where are you from?” and when he said “oh mate I’m from Australia”, he said “Ah Australia welcome in Egypt”.
I recognised that he didn’t see me as an existential threat. Similarly, when the judges opened his laptop that was in the evidence box, the first thing that came up was Triple J which he had been playing when he was arrested. Clearly the laptop hadn’t been opened since the arrest.
“This had nothing to do with the evidence, it was all about the politics.”
Greste said the problem of talking about the search for truth is that it’s a “very, very slippery beast”.
“It’s a very difficult thing for us to get our hands on. As a journalist, I’m constantly grappling with this, because I’ve realised over the years, that the deeper you look into these issues, the deeper you look into stories, the more complicated truth seems to be.
“We often approach stories with fairly two-dimensional views of the way things really are. We have our ideas of villains and heroes, the good guys, the bad guys, the perpetrators and the victims. But the more we look at these things, the more complicated and difficult it often gets.”