AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
By Joanne McCarthy June 27, 2014
AT a meeting where I spoke this week I was asked a question.
At any time over the past few years, while reporting on child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and other institutions and campaigning for a royal commission, had I felt unsafe?
I’m asked that question a lot. It’s worth exploring this week after an Australian journalist, Peter Greste, and his Al Jazeera colleagues Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed were given lengthy jail sentences in Egypt. Their “crime” was to have somehow come up against the “national interest” in a country whose people have been oppressed by government for too long.
I, like other Australians, felt a sickening and disbelieving jolt when news of the sentence came through. Only a few hours earlier I’d listened to a radio interview with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. She was careful, but it seemed clear she expected the three journalists would be released.
It’s almost offensive to equate what those three journalists are going through with anything happening to a journalist back here in Australia, but there are some serious issues here about the role of the media in democracies that are worth considering.
For the record, I have never, ever experienced a second of feeling unsafe. For that matter, the only times I even think about whether I feel safe or unsafe are when people ask the question.
As much as I might have felt outraged, sickened, appalled or numbed by the way powerful institutions like the Catholic Church treated people who were sexually abused as children, and again when they turned to the Church for help as adults, and as much as I might have challenged the Church, there’s never been any sense of things getting out of hand.
The men in frocks just go silent when challenged. They don’t return my calls. They hang up if I reach them on their mobile phones. They ask me to leave their properties. They refuse to be interviewed.
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