Latest news with #FourthEstate
ABC News
20-07-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Ken Henry wants Australia's media to do a better job
Ken Henry, a former treasury secretary, wants the media to do a better job. He says the media has to hold Australia's political system accountable for its failure to deliver a better future for younger Australians. "Report after report tells the same story," he said last week. "The environment is not being protected. Biodiversity is not being conserved. Nature is in systemic decline. "We have whole industries with business models built on the destruction of the natural world. "We have turned nature against us. Our destruction of the natural environment now poses an existential threat to everything we value. "I am angry at our failures. But we should all be angry at our collective failure to design economic structures, including environmental regulations, that underpin confidence in a better future for our children and grandchildren," he said. Dr Henry made those comments at the National Press Club on Wednesday. But in the Q&A portion of his speech, he singled out the media. He said none of today's politicians will be alive in 100 years, but younger Australians will have to live in a world that today's politicians leave for them. He said that unless the media holds the political system accountable for its obligation to deliver a better future for our children, that obligation won't be observed. "We used to talk about the critical role played by the 'Fourth Estate'," he said. "It's time that we rebuilt it." What did he mean by that? The 'Fourth Estate' refers to the news media. In Australian society, the first three estates of our democratic state are the parliament (legislature), the government (executive), and the courts (judiciary). As the so-called fourth estate, the media, is supposed to monitor the behaviour of those three estates to keep them accountable. Dr Henry's plea last week for Australia's media to remember its crucial democratic role was important to hear. But it won't be an easy task. Why is trust in the mainstream media declining? Why are people increasingly turning to the 'Fifth Estate' for their news and analysis? The Fifth Estate refers to the growing network of alternative and independent news sources, including bloggers, podcasters, and influencers. It's where a large number of journalists who used to work for legacy media outlets are now working. A significant amount of the journalistic output from the Fifth Estate is dedicated to documenting the chronic and systemic failures of our Fourth Estate legacy media to tell the truth about today's world. The phenomenon reflects something bigger and fundamentally broken about the world we're living in. A fortnight ago, the oldest living former Malaysian prime minister, Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad, who recently turned 100, shared his feelings about where he thinks we're all heading: "Something has gone wrong with the world, with human civilisation," he wrote. "For centuries we have been ridding ourselves of barbarism in human society, of injustices, of the oppression of men by men [...] "But can we say we are still civilised now? Over the last three decades especially, we have destroyed most of the ethical values that we had built up. "Now we are seeing an orgy of killing. We are seeing genocide being perpetrated before our own eyes. Worse still, the genocide is actually being promoted and defended [...] "Will we stop? No. We cannot. Because the very people who preached the rights of humanity are the ones to destroy our hard-fought civilisation. "I hide my face. I am ashamed. Civilisation is no more the norm." In his speech last week, Dr Henry lamented that we have whole industries with business models built on the destruction of the natural world. But many of the people running the world's major media companies are deeply financially invested in those destructive industries. Their media outlets (and think-tanks) have spent decades attacking the scientific community and other media to undermine global efforts on climate change. For how many decades have they been attacking the CSIRO? But for the sake of argument, let's assume that Dr Henry gets his wish and the idealised ethos of the Fourth Estate can be resurrected by enough media companies to form a critical mass. Where can a revitalised Fourth Estate seek its "agreed facts" about the world we're living in, to hold our political system to account for the next few decades? Thankfully, in 2025, Australia's independent courts are still an accepted source of facts and truth. We're very lucky to have a legal system that has avoided the corruption of legal systems in other countries. And in recent weeks, the Federal Court has published a few judgements that should help the Fourth Estate to keep its bearings. One of those judgements was Pabai vs Commonwealth of Australia, published on Tuesday. As my ABC colleagues Kirstie Wellauer and Stephanie Boltje wrote, it was the first time an Australian court had ruled on whether the Commonwealth has a legal duty of care to protect its citizens from the impacts of climate change, and whether cultural loss from climate change should be compensated. Federal Court judge Michael Wigney found the Commonwealth does not owe a duty of care to Torres Strait Islander peoples to protect them from the impacts of climate change or fund adaptation measures. He also ruled that Australia's greenhouse gas emissions targets were matters of "core government policy" that should be decided by the parliament, not the courts. He said he had "considerable sympathy" for the Torres Strait Islander peoples' case, but Australian law, as it stood, provided no real or effective avenue through which they were able to pursue their claims on the matter. "That will remain the case unless and until the law in Australia changes, either by the incremental development or expansion of the common law by appellate courts, or by the enactment of legislation," he wrote. "Until then, the only recourse that those in the position of the applicants and other Torres Strait Islanders have is recourse via the ballot box." But Justice Wigney found some other things. He found that when Australia's government set its emissions reduction targets between 2015 and 2021 — when the federal Coalition was in power — it "failed to engage with or give any real or genuine consideration to what was the best available science" when setting those targets. "The best available science was and is clear," Justice Wigney wrote. "To prevent the worst and most dangerous impacts of climate change, it was and is imperative for every country to take steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions so as to ensure that the increase in the global average temperature is held to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. "Those critical objectives were enshrined in the Paris Agreement, to which Australia is a party. "The evidence in this case indicated that the emissions reduction targets set by the Commonwealth in 2015, 2020 and 2021 were plainly not consistent with those objectives or its international obligations under the Paris Agreement," he found. At the Press Club last week, I asked Dr Henry about that finding. If the media wanted to hold Australia's political system accountable for its obligation to deliver a better future for younger Australians, what hope does it have if Australian governments don't even care about the science? "What has been missing here is a respect for the science, is a respect for the evidence, is a respect for the truth," Henry replied. A second important judgement, published earlier this month, was Wertheim vs Haddad. In that case, Federal Court judge Angus Stewart ruled that a series of lectures delivered by an Islamic preacher, Wissam Haddad, at a Sydney prayer centre in November 2023, must be removed from social media because they contained "fundamentally racist and antisemitic" material. He found the lectures contravened the Racial Discrimination Act. "They make perverse generalisations against Jewish people as a group," he wrote. "Jewish people in Australia in November 2023 and thereafter would experience them to be harassing and intimidating. "That is all the more so because they were made at the time of heightened vulnerability and fragility experienced by Jews in Australia, but they would also have been harassing and intimidating had they been made prior to 7 October, 2023. "That is because of their profound offensiveness and the long history of persecution of Jews associated with the use of such rhetoric. Those effects on Jews in Australia would be profound and serious," he wrote. In his summary of the reasons for judgement, Justice Stewart also had this to say: "The Court has found that the impugned passages in the interview and the sermon say critical and disparaging things about the actions of Israel and in particular the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza and about Zionists, but that the ordinary, reasonable listener would not understand those things to be about Jewish people in general. "That person would understand that not all Jews are Zionists and that disparagement of Zionism constitutes disparagement of a philosophy or ideology and not a race or ethnic group. "Also, political criticism of Israel, however inflammatory or adversarial, is not by its nature criticism of Jews in general or based on Jewish racial or ethnic identity. "The conclusion that it is not antisemitic to criticise Israel is the corollary of the conclusion that to blame Jews for the actions of Israel is antisemitic; the one flows from the other." It was an important passage. It should help Australia's media to think more clearly about one of the most profound conflicts of the 21st century, and to hold Australia's political system to account for its participation in, response to, handling of, and debate about the conflict. Both rulings from the Federal Court have given the mainstream media a solid foundation to work with, for a revitalised Fourth Estate.
Euractiv
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Euractiv
The Brief – 4 July 2025: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Today's edition is powered by NetworkNature Choose Nature: NetworkNature Annual Event 2025 Choose Nature on 16 September in Brussels to explore how Nature-based Solutions can align biodiversity and the economy in times of urgency. Engage with diverse stakeholders and discover pathways toward a resilient future for people and the planet. Learn more. Register. Good afternoon and welcome back to GBU, where we look back on a blistering week that saw a Saharan "heat dome" settle over Europe. This week gave many of us cause to appraise the position of media within the Schuman environs, and the point at which business and public service overlap. As professionals directly concerned with this debate, representatives of the Fourth Estate are ever ready to add their two cents to the conversation. And discussion was lively after Euractiv revealed that the EU is putting rather more money into a coterie of outlets than had previously been acknowledged. If journalists are to hold authorities to account, to what extent is this mission compromised by subsidies that allow them to carry out that task? And even if you don't depend on public funds, does this not make you beholden to commercial interests? Such questions could keep Brussels media circles animated until the cows come home. Having spent most of my time in Brussels managing a small media outlet, I know the struggle of competing with far larger operations. Not everyone has the luxury of a multi-million-euro parent company backing them, and it's a tough war of attrition. For all the canny efforts small media use to attract an audience and deliver a fresh take on current affairs, it is disingenuous to overlook the structural advantages that big media enjoy. Should we not provide a helping hand to smaller initiatives in the name of media plurality? And setting aside the question of how media manages to be commercially viable, subsidies are surely not the main barrier to critiquing our legislators. More problematic is the closeness of journalists and public officials, where friendliness is rewarded with insider access to valuable information. This pursuit of leaks is incentivised by the concentration of lobbies that cluster around the institutions. These are issues most of us will be familiar with, though how we address them – and the tenor of that argument – depends largely on the stakes, which are inevitably personal. Still, we could certainly design a more democratic way of dispensing with public money. Which is kind of the whole point, if we are to accept that the media's primary duty is to the demos . A dull Danish presidency Denmark took over the EU presidency on Tuesday, during which it will focus on a secure, competitive, and green agenda. The generally discreet Scandinavian country also champions a hardline approach to migration – which puts Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen at odds with other European Socialists. But Denmark's guiding principle during its six-month stint at the helm of policy-making will be running a tight ship – which, as Magnus Lund Nielsen writes, means no fuss, limited expectations, and a plea to opposition parties to lay off domestic spats until the duty has been served. Are you not entertained? Not if Denmark can do anything to help it. Tariff countdown With Trump's "reciprocal" tariffs on EU goods due to kick in on 9 July, negotiations to strike a deal were led by trade chief Maroš Šefčovič in Washington. At last week's EUCO summit, France's Emmanuel Macron argued Europe should not bend to the punitive levies. But with the deadline now so near, Germany has pushed for a quick compromise to prevent the worst-case scenario. The latest hope is that the EU pulls off the same deal as the UK – an "agreement in principle" that would keep Trump's 10% baseline tariffs in place. It's something trade ministers had scoffed at a few weeks ago but looks much more appealing when faced with the imminent alternative. And it's not only ministers who have shifted in their attitude towards the negotiations; journalists, too, have lacked consistency in reporting on the saga – as Thomas Moller-Nielsen points out. 2040 climate targets The EU revealed on Wednesday its 2040 target for greenhouse gas emissions, which must be reduced by 90% compared to 1990. The scale of ambition is huge: it will mean cutting emissions to less than a sixth of what they are right now. Achieving the goals will need a massive effort from all sectors – and citizens won't be spared the knock-on costs. Indeed, the project won't be managed solely through efficiency gains and scaling up renewables; it will require a complete change in mindset. And politics, as Robert Hodgson writes. Bulking up the budget In two weeks, the Commission will propose a new budget (MFF), one that is substantially larger (€1.2 trillion) to respond to growing geopolitical instabilities. But with an investment gap of at least €750 billion a year and new defence demands, the discussions about how funds are allocated will be tense. Jacob Wulff Wold highlights the five key fights that must be resolved by 2028. Want to get The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in your inbox? Subscribe to The Brief.
The Hindu
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Jeet Thayil in conversation with Jerry Pinto on his new book The Elsewhereans
Jeet Thayil's new work, The Elsewhereans (published by Fourth Estate), defies genre, forcing readers to reconsider everything they think they know about literary strategies. The subtitle calls it a documentary novel but it is biography, autobiography, family history, ghost story, travelogue, ityaadi. We meet Ammu and George in a village in Kerala and travel with and without them to Mumbai, Hanoi, Saigon, Hong Kong and Paris. On this periplus, ghosts surface and evanesce, skeletons tumble out of closets, one of which smiles at us from the cover. At the heart of this magnificent and compelling mélange, the narrator, Jeet lui-meme, forces us to decide: is this an unreliable narrator? In my opinion, there is no such thing as an unreliable narrator because there are no reliable narrators; there are only compelling narrators and boring ones. Jeet is a compelling storyteller, descended from an ancient line of mariners — water plays an important role in this story. His first commitment will be to the story and so should ours be. I believe that a family story that leaves the family happy will be boring; the real stories are the ones we hold close to our chests, the family's asps. (The more the writer bleeds, the better it reads.) To bring these stories out into the world, to talk about the failures and the addictions, the desires and the disappointments is to remind all of us that every family is a work in progress. Perhaps the first and most natural question to ask the author who turns his hand with elegance and strength to the forms of poetry, the novel and the anthology is about the risk a genre-agnostic book takes in a world obsessed with categories. Excerpts from an email interview: Q: This genre-shifting is an enormous risk in a world of categories. Did it happen organically or was it planned? A: It was very much an organic process. I started with a book that was twice the size, about 400 pages or more. Which might have been some form of Proustian anxiety, the obsessive compulsive need to record every passing digression. Then, in a moment of clarity, I jettisoned everything that didn't fit the single and singular story being told — and ended up with a leaner, tighter, better manuscript. The form revealed itself three or four years into the writing. It might have been the most crucial stage of the whole process, and the most difficult. Q: But at the heart of this magnificent mélange is Jeet Thayil telling us a story so close to him that we sense the vulnerability of the storyteller. Could you talk a little about the psychic cost of such writing? A: Since my parents are a part of the story, I had to ask their permission. It was only right. My mother gave her permission reluctantly, but there was never any question that she would refuse. She'd probably agree wholeheartedly with the epigraph that begins the book: 'When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.' I guess the psychic cost is one every writer must confront: by telling your story, which is also the story of the people you have known, are you usurping or co-opting their voices? If there's a sense of guilt, a residual guilt, it is offset by a sense of duty. That it is your job to tell the story however the chips may fall. Q: As readers, we encounter a series of enigmatic and intriguing women: Ammu, Nguyen Phuc Chau, Da Nang, Lijia, Chachiamma, a dead wife, M. We half recognise these women from our own histories and yet they are completely new. Perhaps this question is about the choice of characters populating the book. A: It started with Ammu, and the novel ends with her. She died in January, at which point I knew it was time to bring this novel to a close. It was always going to be her story. Though I didn't realise until I saw your question that she is only one among half-a-dozen compelling women characters, and that the women own the book. This wasn't planned, but it seems absolute and inevitable. I come from a long line of strong women. There's no way to tell this story without acknowledging and honouring them. Q: The poet and the novelist work together here. For me, this is about the lapidary care with which conversations are constructed or events outlined. Would you like to say something about the interaction between these selves? A: It isn't always possible to separate those selves. If you practise, or embody, both disciplines, it's difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. In my case, and in yours, the poet and the novelist bleed into each other. Which is the way it should be. Genres or labels are for book shops. If you are both those things, how do you separate? And more to the point, why should you separate? If the point of a novel is to tell a story only you can tell, why would you discriminate between your separate yet adjacent selves? Q: You take for granted — and expect perhaps your reader to also take for granted — the osmosis between the world of the dead and the living. Our generation, I believe, was trained to be rational. Was this something you struggled with? A: We have been trained to be rational. We are told to believe half of what we see and none of what we hear. And at this point, in the age of AI, we can't believe much of what we see, either. I can't say I've ever struggled with the question of what is rational and what isn't. The rational world would have us endorse the viewpoint that when the dead die, they cease to exist. And yet, and yet. I've never had much doubt about where the dead go. I know they are among us, unable to fully be here or to fully leave. In that sense, the difference between the world of the dead and the world of the living is nothing more than a veil. All we have to do is look past the veil. It's a way of seeing, of believing in the world that lies beyond the waking world. Or to quote from The Elsewhereans: 'This is where the dead go. To torment us in our dreams. They have nothing else to do and nowhere else to be.' Q: Is 'Elsewhereanism' an inheritance? Or is it a choice? A: I'd say it's a state of being, and in that sense, it's an inheritance. But in every other way, it's an ongoing choice. Is it possible to live in the modern world and be of one place? Who can answer with one word the question, 'Where are you from?' Even if you've never left your place of birth, you may feel like a stranger at home. You may choose to believe that your hometown is wherever you happen to be. You are not of single origin, like a coffee varietal. You are from multiple places. You contain multitudes. Home is where you lay your hat. The interviewer is a poet and novelist.
The Age
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Tech bros, incels, dating apps: is this the literary equivalent of doomscrolling?
SHORT STORIES Rejection Tony Tulathimutte Fourth Estate, $36.99 At some point during her reclusive life, Emily Dickinson began a poem on a scrap of notepaper: 'I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?' The poet herself would remain a literary nobody until years after her death. Perhaps now, as the internet teems with anonymous accounts and inconsequential text, her words will be recognised for what they are: the credo of our over-engaged and under-loved age, the inner song of YouTube comments and unopened Snapchats. Otherwise, if the world still isn't ready, the American writer Tony Tulathimutte is here to take on that mantel on behalf of all the lonely souls online. His new book, Rejection, is set mostly on the internet – on message boards, dating apps, timelines, where the author realises his characters with such artful and painful exactness that his reader will want to trade their iPhone for a Nokia brick. The first story, The Feminist, which went viral when it was published in literary magazine n+1 in 2019, chronicles the decline and fall of a man who imbibes all the tenets of 2010s online progressivism, only to find that, while he has done 'the intellectual labor to empathise with the broadest spectrum of female perspectives', he is still left '[d]ragging his virginity like a body bag into his mid-twenties'. With a cool irony, Tulathimutte shows a man's mind shift from gender positivity and resentment of the patriarchy to the warped victimisation of men's rights accounts and incel forums, like a miniature dramatisation of the transformation of Twitter into X. Other scenarios in the collection revolve around similar young men whose lives do not extend far from their screens. Our Dope Future is narrated by a tech bro whose startups include a 'sexual consent on the blockchain' app and a 'meal-replacement shake called Döpesauce'. The story takes the form of an extended blog post written by this Elon Musk-ite, in which he describes wooing a woman with his 'algorizzim' and subsequently imprisoning and surveilling her to help her achieve her 'life goals'. In another story, a man comes out as gay but is unable to reconcile the openness and liberality of contemporary society – including queer and kink-friendly dating apps – with his own sadistic fetishes. Another is simply a series of metaphors for the humiliating state of being a rejected man: 'Passing your neighbor's house, you catch a glimpse of someone through his living room window, lit up by the television he's watching alone in the dark, and think, What a loser ... on your way home to do the exact same thing.'
Sydney Morning Herald
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Tech bros, incels, dating apps: is this the literary equivalent of doomscrolling?
SHORT STORIES Rejection Tony Tulathimutte Fourth Estate, $36.99 At some point during her reclusive life, Emily Dickinson began a poem on a scrap of notepaper: 'I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?' The poet herself would remain a literary nobody until years after her death. Perhaps now, as the internet teems with anonymous accounts and inconsequential text, her words will be recognised for what they are: the credo of our over-engaged and under-loved age, the inner song of YouTube comments and unopened Snapchats. Otherwise, if the world still isn't ready, the American writer Tony Tulathimutte is here to take on that mantel on behalf of all the lonely souls online. His new book, Rejection, is set mostly on the internet – on message boards, dating apps, timelines, where the author realises his characters with such artful and painful exactness that his reader will want to trade their iPhone for a Nokia brick. The first story, The Feminist, which went viral when it was published in literary magazine n+1 in 2019, chronicles the decline and fall of a man who imbibes all the tenets of 2010s online progressivism, only to find that, while he has done 'the intellectual labor to empathise with the broadest spectrum of female perspectives', he is still left '[d]ragging his virginity like a body bag into his mid-twenties'. With a cool irony, Tulathimutte shows a man's mind shift from gender positivity and resentment of the patriarchy to the warped victimisation of men's rights accounts and incel forums, like a miniature dramatisation of the transformation of Twitter into X. Other scenarios in the collection revolve around similar young men whose lives do not extend far from their screens. Our Dope Future is narrated by a tech bro whose startups include a 'sexual consent on the blockchain' app and a 'meal-replacement shake called Döpesauce'. The story takes the form of an extended blog post written by this Elon Musk-ite, in which he describes wooing a woman with his 'algorizzim' and subsequently imprisoning and surveilling her to help her achieve her 'life goals'. In another story, a man comes out as gay but is unable to reconcile the openness and liberality of contemporary society – including queer and kink-friendly dating apps – with his own sadistic fetishes. Another is simply a series of metaphors for the humiliating state of being a rejected man: 'Passing your neighbor's house, you catch a glimpse of someone through his living room window, lit up by the television he's watching alone in the dark, and think, What a loser ... on your way home to do the exact same thing.'
