Address by ABC Chair Kim Williams AM
DG8 Summit, ABC Ultimo
12 November 2024
Welcome to the ABC.
It gives me very great pleasure to welcome you all here to the ABC.
The ABC is 92 years young and has had, as with all of your own institutions, a rich and often colourful history. No doubt we will all swap stories socially over the next couple of days.
You all provide broadcast and online offerings for the propagation of news, ideas, and a diversity of cultural information covering the whole landscape of content offered across our planet. And long may you do so.
However, before I go further, I would like to observe the traditional recognition of country, which is appropriately standard to gatherings like this, in our nation.
Here in this part of Sydney I acknowledge the Traditional Owners on these ancestral lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, on which we gather for this conference and thank Brendan Kerin for his welcome to us all.
I recognise the Gadigal cultural heritage, beliefs and relationship with these lands and waterways and acknowledge their continuing vital importance and that territory has never been ceded.
I also extend my respect to other Aboriginal language groups and First Nations peoples with us today.
I also take this moment to acknowledge the diverse peoples and cultures who have been welcomed to this nation, along with the laws, freedoms, rights, and faiths they have brought or represent.
Acknowledging this is crucial, given the never-ending assault on difference which too often characterises the world today.
I salute you all, the delegates to this summit and the generous and public-spirited institutions and programs for which you have responsibility.
From your endeavour, thought is encouraged, analysis generated and knowledge shared from a diversity of subject domains commencing with political coverage, domestic and foreign, through to global security issues, so prominent in world affairs presently, although in reality, those issues are rarely far away.
And then onto all manner of cultural information and communication that ensures better appreciation and understanding of the many wonders that comprise the experience of humanity at large in our diverse societies.
Without wanting to indulge in exaggerated veneration, we are after all, broadcasters at heart, I sincerely pay tribute to all of you who serve the valuable mission of gently pushing the world along the path to greater mutual understanding.
One which is always peaceful, focused on democratic development and freedom, in a non-partisan, evidence driven mission to inform policy, debate and foundational knowledge.
You all provide welcome hosting in your services for a wide range of news, opinions and myriad other information and observations about your cultures, their history and their people and the never-ending revelation which the delivery of knowledge and creativity offers.
My comments today centre on the vital importance of trustworthy news coverage about international affairs and the necessity that it be sustained and vigorously promoted.
It has a simple theme: The truth matters.
Especially right now.
It is difficult to approach this subject without reference to undoubtedly one of the deepest thinkers of the last one hundred years on the relationship between politics and the truth: George Orwell.
Orwell famously served in the Spanish Civil War and noted how while in Spain he continuously read news stories about things that quite obviously never actually happened. Small skirmishes he participated in, involving a few dozen soldiers, were written up as huge battles, complete with tanks and aircraft.
People he knew to be loyal were denounced as traitors and accused of conspiracy to betray the Republic. He himself was denounced as a fascist. All of it pure invention, made up by propagandists to suit the needs of fascists, communists and others.
Famously, he described this trend towards inventing facts for political ends as “frightening” because and I quote “. . . it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”
He described this trend as even more frightening than facing bombs, a fear he knew something about.
Before most other thinkers, Orwell had recognised that truth wasn’t possible in a world ruled by populist demagogues. There was no truth in Franco’s Spain. Or Stalin’s Soviet Union or other manifestations of autocratic leadership.
In such a world, he wrote, all we get is invented accounts of what should have happened according to the political needs of parties or rulers of the day.
The fascists and communists were the worst, but they were not alone.
He was describing something we know now by another name: Fake News.
Orwell articulated this with his usual memorable, “cut through” prose. But he wasn’t the only contemporary to recognise its horrible reality. Probably just about everyone on the European continent during the Second World War knew that the official news they received was often seriously or even completely untrustworthy.
So, while the secret police weren’t listening, they tuned their crystal radio sets to the one source they judged they could trust – the BBC, whose foreign service broadcast to millions across the world, from Norway to North Africa, and to the farthest reaches of the British Empire. It led most of us to develop services on the BBC as a living role model.
Orwell famously worked for the BBC foreign service between 1941 and 1943, writing and recording news broadcasts about the progress of the war, and while he acknowledged there was a necessary element of censorship and propaganda about such work, he did it with a clear conscience, knowing that of all the news services in the world, the BBC’s was probably the least censored and the most trustworthy.
It had a well-earned degree of integrity you could rely upon. Especially if your life depended upon it, as for many people it did.
Symbolically, perhaps, when the Allied invasion of Europe was getting underway in the early hours of 6 June 1944, it was the BBC that alerted the French Resistance by broadcasting the Morse Code for the letter V – three dots and dash, which of course just happens to be the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. A liberators’ anthem.
The BBC, the truth, reliable facts, trust – these things went together, along with freedom. And still do.
The story of the BBC in World War II tells us something: Freedom and the truth go together. And when truth is absent, tyranny is never far away.
Simply put: a strong media led by people who believe in professional journalistic ethics is one of our most important democratic assets. We all have that duty of care to respect and protect the core obligation as witnesses. As a celebrated editorial champion, Sir Harry Evans described journalists, Truth Tellers.
Another international correspondent from that time who still receives mentions in despatches about ethics was Martha Gellhorn. She is now probably better known for her nine-year relationship with Ernest Hemingway and her remarkable published correspondence with him.
Nevertheless, she had the courage to write near the end of her life, drawing from her experience of the Spanish civil war and many others: “After a lifetime of war-watching, I see war as an endemic human disease, and governments as the carriers”.
Need I mention the relevance of this to our own times?
The decline of traditional media and the challenging of democracy around the world today are linked.
Misinformation has become politics by other means, and frankly, disinformation has become war by other means.
As a result, the world is in the middle of a crisis of mistrust of information, constituting perhaps the greatest threat to liberal democracy in the world today.
Our devices are awash with this fake news. Every email, every news story comes with a fear that we might be a target of some attempt to exploit the innocent for commercial gain or mislead us for political ends.
And it is producing a radical mistrust of mainstream news sources.
New research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University tells us that across 47 countries surveyed, just 40 per cent of respondents say they trust most of the news they read or hear.
The research tells us a few interesting things.
First, the level of trust in news is roughly the same across the political spectrum, with a slightly higher level of distrust on the political right.
Second, people who are younger, poorer and less educated tend to trust news less than those who are older, wealthier and more highly educated.
And third, and perhaps most usefully, it tells us that the strongest measure of mistrust by far is disengagement with politics. While around half of engaged citizens trust the media, less than a third of disengaged citizens do so.
Here among the people disengaged from politics, are the targets of the pedlars of lies and misunderstanding. And here are the citizens the news needs to reach out to.
To quote Gellhorn again, she said: “People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics”.
For those of us who want to end the global slide into authoritarianism and its inevitable violence and conflict, the task is clear: We must reach out to the disengaged and rebuild trust in the media as the basis for rebuilding trust in liberal democracy.
There’s a saying: Information is power. I have another saying: Trusted information is democratic power.
The Reuters research also tells us the factors most likely to create that badly needed trust.
People are more likely to trust media if they believe it:
• displays transparency,
• employs high journalistic standards,
• represents people like themselves fairly,
• and is free of obvious bias.
In other words, all those things the BBC most displayed during the Second World War, and which I believe bodies like the ABC which I am privileged to chair display in Australia today. Your journalists across the media sector display similar virtues and professional aspirations.
In other words, the way forward is to give people confidence by employing professional journalistic ethics and by reaching out to those currently not listening and engaging.
One of the great privileges of my life is having served on the board of the Reuters Trustees for the last nine years, seven of them as Chair. The Trustees are responsible for the adherence by Reuters News as one of the world’s major journalistic enterprises, to the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
2021 represented the 80th anniversary of the first iteration of William Haley’s creation of the Reuters Trust Principles in a time almost as troubled operationally, politically and commercially as today. Haley was then the director of BBC News rising to the post of BBC Director General. He saw the need to imbue Reuters with an indelible sense of its ethical purpose, when the mainstream London newspapers were admitted as part owners of Reuters by the UK Press Association.
Haley was a true editorial visionary, first at the Manchester Guardian, then at the BBC and finally as the editor at The Times.
There have been a number of iterations of the Principles since then, probably most importantly with the amendments made, prophetically back in 1984, with the creation of the Founders Share and the Founders Share Company – the company I chair, as part of public listing of Reuters then.
This saw the firmament of the Trust Principles from a simple shareholders’ agreement to a set of amendments that gave commercial force to the protection of what are now the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles are timeless, embodying the core precepts of editorial integrity, independence and freedom from bias, together with the allied responsibilities as to widest possible service availability, recognition of diverse coverage responsibilities, and commitment to maximum effort in maintaining news leadership. The guardianship of that set of obligations is taken very seriously with due regard to dedicated ethical purpose by the Trustees of the Principles.
Let me turn closer to home.
Today the ABC fulfils its editorial duty internationally in three main ways.
The first is delivered through ABC correspondents distributed across the globe. From Port Moresby, to Jakarta, Tokyo, Bangkok, New Dehli, Jerusalem. Istanbul, London and Washington through the local journalism network in Suva, Honiara, Apia, Nuku’Alofa, Dili, and a partnership in Vila. And we are eager to restore our representation in Beijing.
We need to be in Beijing to ensure clear and regular reporting from the dynamic nation that China is, with its many profound economic, political and diplomatic resonances around the world.
Beijing is an important centre of world affairs, and we need strong representation in that critical centre.
Second, through ABC International Services is the aim to become a trusted and valued broadcast media and digital content provider in the Indo-Pacific region. We want the ABC to be a place people in our part of the world, turn to, getting the crucial, factual news needed to take their countries forward peacefully and democratically.
Radio Australia, our international television Channel ABC Australia, our digital and social media wings ABC Asia and ABC Pacific, as well as ABC News generally, are providing great service from Uzbekistan and Afghanistan in north-western Asia, to Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea to our north, and to French Polynesia and the Cook Islands in the southwest Pacific.
All up, this effort is currently reaching an audience of several million people each week, including through many crucial in-language services.
And our reports reach many more through content sharing and interchange agreements. We spread the truth far and wide.
Third, just as importantly, we are also proudly helping our neighbouring countries build up their own media capacity, a crucial part of their democratic infrastructure.
This effort, the work of ABC International, a service funded with the assistance of Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade but also with other partners, is training and mentoring a new generation of media professionals. Not just in public interest journalism, but the many technical and business aspects of providing news and information.
Australians have read, viewed and heard many of our Indo-Pacific partner journalists and news stories on our domestic News, 7.30 Report, Foreign Correspondent and specialist radio programs.
This is hugely important and purposeful work. There’s no propaganda involved. No invented facts. No fake news. It’s an expression of our commitment to the ethics of the news profession.
Its value is obvious when you consider the potential cost of doing nothing.
Because the many billions of dollars Australia spends on diplomacy, regional development and defence could easily come to nothing if democracy in our region is radically undermined by the unchecked spread of misinformation & disinformation.
It is important that the ABC has correspondents in most territories in the Pacific and throughout Asia.
Spreading the truth is our most effective diplomatic tool. And our role has to be active.
Providing trusted news and helping spread the truth is in the national interest. But perhaps more importantly, it’s in the interests of a more stable and democratic world. Especially a more stable and democratic Indo-Pacific region. It is part and parcel of being a good neighbour.
It won't surprise any of you that to be a trusted and influential abroad, we need to be trusted and influential at home. Our domestic media base must also be strong, because it provides the springboard for our international efforts.
Unsurprisingly we have the problem of the tyranny of the algorithm in our domestic settings where Australian newsrooms are not in peak condition presently. The continuing loss of advertising and other sources of revenue to the various large digital delivery platforms is leading to quite savage retrenchments.
Journalist numbers are falling, in places alarmingly. Barely a quarter passes without substantial layoffs being announced in the major commercial media companies. Newsrooms are being cut down. Many of my colleagues have, I expect with heavy hearts, read the names of journalists, some household names, others, friends, ‘taking a severance package’ as they say. In the face of this, the value of a strong ABC as a source of truth and trust increases every day.
That’s why I believe investing in a far stronger ABC is a crucial starting point for improving our democracy and enhancing our freedoms, here and in our region. It is the subject of continuing advocacy to the Australian government and parliament presently.
I wish you all a productive set of meetings where we get to enjoy listening to each other and work through issues of moment in our collective endeavour. Your nominated subjects are splendid ranging across matters such as the safety of journalists; AI; distribution; advocacy and communications; content collaboration; cybersecurity; climate change and sustainability; drivers of trust in media; and communicating the value of public service media.
The agenda before you speaks to serious and relevant subjects. And it’s why everyone who cares about one’s own national, regional and global democracy, no matter what news organisation they work for, must also fight to ensure George Orwell’s nightmare vision of a world in which objective truth cannot survive, does not come true.
In fact, this fight and it is a very real fight as the French President made clear in a brilliant speech earlier this year, is up to all of us!