The first obscure pages of Australian newspapers

On Monday, October 21st, many Australian newspapers were published with the first pages obscured to protest against some government initiatives considered restrictive of press freedom. All the major Australian paper newspapers have joined the protest, from those of the News Corp group of the entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch as The Australian, Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun to those of competitor Nine Entertainment, such as The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age is The Australian Financial Review: everyone on the front page shows a text whose words have been covered with a stroke of black marker, and the word "secret".

The decision of the Australian newspapers comes in response to what happened last June, when the police had carried out a series of searches against some journalists. The police had first raided the home of a journalist, an editorialist for Sunday Telegraph and other newspapers in the News Corp publishing group that in April 2018 it had revealed a secret plan by the Australian government to access emails, telephone messages and bank records of citizens without their consent. Later he also searched the public broadcasting station ABC, in Sydney: the search was part of an investigation into an investigation published on the site of ABC in 2017, which revealed illegitimate killings and other episodes of misconduct by Australian special forces in Afghanistan. The two searches were not connected but both were due to the publication of confidential material.

The Australian journalists' union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), has challenged the government – for six years expressed by the center – to have approved some laws in recent years that would have created a "culture of secrecy", preventing them from publishing documents of public interest and endangering the security of whistleblower that reveal the content of confidential material. With this protest the newspapers are asking the government for some reforms to protect the freedom of the press, including the right to challenge the searches, greater protections for the whistleblower, fewer restrictions on access to secret materials and a review of the defamation law.

The front page of daily newspaper has been redacted in a united campaign for the #RightToKnow. Find out more: https://t.co/tv5cIcedle #pressfreedom pic.twitter.com/bIxzlP6Pq5

– MEAA (@withMEAA) October 20, 2019