DogBitesMan

The horrific scenes of bushfires in Australia have flashed around the world, uniting people in a shared humanity. In the Black Saturday infernos, 173 people died and 414 were injured, hundreds of homes were destroyed and hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests, farms and fields were burned in the worst natural disaster of its kind to strike Australia in its recorded history. There would be very few people anywhere in the world who, have seen or … Read entire article »

If truth really is the first casualty of war, is journalism itself among the victims of the conflict in Gaza? If truth suffers in the charged atmosphere of death and destruction, can proper professional and ethical objective journalism survive intact and can journalists – the truthmongers – still tell war’s stories fairly and accurately for the rest of us to understand? It is a question many thoughtful journalists have asked over the years from places as … Read entire article »

The jailing of an Australian foreign correspondent in Singapore for drug taking highlights yet again that dangers for journalists come in many forms. Worst of all are the hundreds of deaths every year of journalists working in their own or other people’s countries. These continue to be tolled out regularly on professional websites such as the Committee to Protect Journalists at http://www.cpj.org/, together with the thousands of media workers seriously injured every year while doing their … Read entire article »

A decision by an Australian court that an accused paedophile must be set free because he cannot get a fair trial sends yet another clear warning about the limits of campaigning journalism in free democracies. The accused man, Dennis Raymond Ferguson is, according to many people in Queensland and in that state’s media, the kind of man who should never be allowed into the community – and certainly not near children. For obvious legal reasons, this column … Read entire article »