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I want to start by citing the Guardian’s latest pitch for support from its readers. As most of you will know, the Guardian asks readers to pay rather than forcing them to do so through a pay wall. One of the ads that runs at the bottom of every Guardian story reads as follows:

This is what we’re up against …

Bad actors spreading disinformation online to fuel intolerance.

Teams of lawyers from the rich and powerful trying to stop us publishing stories they don’t want you to see.

Lobby groups with opaque funding who are determined to undermine facts about the climate emergency and other established science.

Authoritarian states with no regard for the freedom of the press.

The first and last points are the most pertinent to me as head of ASPI. Bad actors are indeed spreading disinformation, and authoritarian states indeed have no regard for the freedom of the press.

And here’s why, as a national security guy, I like this pitch: because a society in which people want to pay for quality news is also a society that will be more resilient to disinformation, misinformation and the gradual erosion and pollution of our information environment. This resilience is a key pillar of our security; you might say it’s the strength on which all of our other capabilities are founded.

It points to a society in which people want to understand complex issues by engaging with facts.

It points to a society in which people want to do the hard work of exercising their critical-thinking skills so that they can evaluate for themselves what they’re being told, so they have healthy scepticism about political and social orthodoxies, not conspiratorial mistrust of traditions and institutions.

Those skills are built up through education—that includes formal education, life experience, auto-didacticism such as reading newspapers, and community and civic engagement. In other words, life in a vibrant and well-functioning society.

And let me stress, self-education through reading and viewing material online is a perfectly legitimate pursuit. But it doesn’t mean believing everything you read, nor selecting your own preferred facts, nor wrapping yourself in a comforting bubble of online fellow travellers who agree with you and validate your views.

What’s at stake here is that democracy, and in my view the functioning of society more broadly, depends on how we, as participants, recognise facts in a sea of information, and how we sort and prioritise those facts into an understanding of the world that we can use as a basis for action—including how to vote and how to perform all the other functions that engaged citizens perform in a democracy.

People will apply different weights, importance and context to facts based on the values those people hold. As long as the facts, or at least the majority of them, are agreed, people with differing values and world views can have a meaningful discussion. This is the foundation for even the most impassioned debate: people drawing on a common set of facts to arrive at different but nonetheless legitimate opinions.

Journalists and news organisations should hold privileged positions in the information environment based on the credibility they build up over time. However, to earn and hold these positions, journalists also have a sacred responsibility to report fairly, accurately and objectively in the public interest. What we can’t afford is for news organisations to retreat into ever more polarised political positions.

Media are vital to moderating and holding together public conversations even on the most difficult and controversial issues. That means leading civil debates on sensitive social issues, respectful debates and disagreements on very emotive foreign policy issues such as the war between Israel and terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah and, yes, how Australia engages constructively with the new Trump administration.

Public institutions need to accommodate different points of view. Rebuilding trust in those institutions, such as the government, the media and higher education, is not helped when they create a sense that open debate will be quashed and dissenting views will bring damage to a person’s reputation.

Through these debates and (civil) contests of ideas, democracy enables us to make adjustments to the way we collectively run our society. All the knowledge and day-to-day life experience of adult citizens are fed back into decision-making by the elected executive. This happens through elections, through citizens’ engagement with the institutions that implement policies and sometimes through less formal means including public protests—hopefully peaceful and lawful ones.

Though imperfect, it has always worked. But it has been dramatically disrupted by the roughly three decades of the popularisation of the internet, and the roughly 15 years of the popularisation of social media.

Yuval Noah Harari in his most recent book, Nexus, about the history and future of information networks, coined the phrase ‘the naive view of information’ to describe the false expectation that if people have access to ever more information they will, per se, get closer to truth. A related misunderstanding is the so-called ‘free market of ideas’—one of the popular beliefs back during the heady and utopian early days of the internet.

The hope was that if all ideas, good and bad, could be put on this intellectual market, the best ones would naturally compete their way to the top. But we’ve quickly learnt that the ideas that are the stickiest, the most likely to gain traction and spread, are not necessarily the most true, but more often the ones that are most appealing—the ones that give us the most satisfying emotional stimulation.

Far from being a functioning open market, it takes an active effort to create and share information that is directed at the truth. Journalism is one such effort. News media that is not directed at the truth but at social order or the creation of shared realities isn’t journalism; it’s propaganda.

Now, why is all this such a worry to the national security community?

Because it makes us deeply vulnerable. In telling ourselves that government involvement in the digital world would stifle innovation, we have only stifled our own ability to protect our public and left a gaping hole for foreign predators. Inevitably, the absence of government involvement leads to security violations. Instead of calm, methodical government involvement we then get rushed government intervention.

Powerful players such as China and Russia can use their resources and capabilities to put their finger on the scales and influence a society. Disinformation can shape beliefs across wide audiences. This can change how people vote or erode their faith in institutions and even in democracy itself. It can turn people against one another. It can impact policymaking and leave us less safe, less secure and less sovereign. It is one thing for our own politicians and media to influence us, but it is a national security threat that we are being influenced and interfered with by foreign regimes, their intelligence services and their state-run media.

I happen to believe in higher defence and security spending not because I seek aggression, conflict or war, but to deter it—because I believe that we keep ourselves safe by being strong and making it clear that we are strong. I also believe that with all the defence spending in the world, if your society is divided against itself to the point of dysfunction, you eventually have to ask yourself: what exactly are you protecting? And that’s why the information domain is as important as traditional military domains to a sensible national security practitioner.

An adversary doesn’t need to invade you or use coercive force to shape you if they can influence you towards a more favourable position through information operations. It costs billions, maybe trillions of dollars to invade another country, overthrow its government and install a more friendly one. Why do that if you can shape the information environment so that the other country changes its government on its own, for a tiny fraction of the price? The AI expert Stuart Russell has calculated that the Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election—which was a bargain for Moscow at a cost of about $25 million, given the massive disruption it’s caused—could be done for about $1000 today thanks to generative AI.

Solutions and responses 

So, what can we do about this? I don’t need to tell you that the business models of the news media are under enormous stress. Ask the person who wrote that eloquent pitch for support for the Guardian.

It’s easy to look around and feel despondent about the scale of the challenge. But it’s worth remembering we are still really in the early stages of the information revolution.

My submission is that the best way to create sustainable business models for strong, independent journalism is to foster societies in which people want to pay for this journalism, because they see value in having high-quality information. And they want this information because they recognise that it empowers them. It does not shut them down. There are rules and accountability but not censorship. Importantly, this requires our politicians, security agencies and the media to protect all views, not just ones the political leadership or journalists agree with. Too often I see genuine debate shut down, resulting in fear and self-censorship by those who might have a different view. For example, there is unquestionably a growing fear in our society from people wanting to support Israel. Shutting down legitimate views just because you think it is for a good cause does not make it right.

If our societies, including our media, focus their demands for accountability upon those countries and governments that cannot extract a cost from us (such as harming us economically as China has done and could do again) and if we hold only democracies to a high standard, we leave ourselves and our sovereignty vulnerable.

We should want to be a society open to ideas, views and debate. That is a foundation for resilience and security. Strong national security starts with a strong society aligned by a common set of principles, and resilient to different ideas.

So, we need to build our resilience to disinformation and the pollution of the information environment, as well as our appreciation of the importance of democratic values and freedoms. That means education throughout life, civics classes, digital literacy and support for civil society dealing with technology and democracy.

It means the government helping to create incentives for media to act as sheriffs in the information wild west (rather than those that abdicate any responsibility). That includes everything from content moderators on social media platforms to hardcore investigative journalists.

Conclusion

This is why I strongly believe that journalists and the national security community have many more aspirations and interests in common than they do natural tensions. And I want to dispel the idea that there is an inherent trade-off whereby the goals of one will necessarily come at the expense of the other.

It worries me when national security is seen as a potential threat to democratic freedoms and liberties, privacy being the most common example. This is the wrong framing.

Sometimes, the national security community gets things wrong. It makes mistakes. From time to time, officials might even behave unethically or, in rare cases, illegally. These are, for the most part, legitimate matters for journalists to pursue.

There is a lot of other national security work that simply needs to remain secret and non-public. That’s the nature of most intelligence work, significant portions of defence work, some diplomacy and some law enforcement.

A responsible national security leader should welcome scrutiny of shortcomings in conduct or competence in their agency. And a responsible journalist or editor should want to live in a functioning society in which national security agencies are able to do their work to protect us and our democratic freedoms. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are, after all, cornerstones of our democracy.

And in a well-functioning democracy, national security is about protecting our freedoms, never about curbing them. CCTV cameras on the street protect your right to walk safely but are not used to profile minorities as is the case in authoritarian countries.

National security agencies that are accountable to oversight by various watchdogs, and ultimately by the elected government and parliament, keep us safe not just in the sense of our physical bodies and lives, but also our society and our democratic way of life.

As part of this, it is vital that media not regard changes to national security policy or legislation only with respect to their impact on journalists. Just as there is a difference between something in the public interest and something publicly interesting, there is a distinction between restricting press freedom and restricting the press.

Government requests for understanding and cooperation in terrorism investigations or measures to prevent public servants leaking classified information isn’t a violation of press freedom.

To decry every government demand or expectation for journalists to exercise responsibility risks desensitising the public to those few occasions which do cross the line of freedoms.

This is why I support the work that Peter Greste and the Alliance are doing to clearly delineate the true work of journalists in gathering, carefully assessing and responsibly reporting facts from the reckless behaviour of those who believe that all secrets are sinister and should be exposed on principle.

Julian Assange, for instance, should never have been viewed as a journalist, but as someone who ultimately put lives at risk in the name of press freedom. Similarly, so-called whistleblowers who only target the secrets of open, rule-abiding democracies are actually doing the work of the Russian and Chinese government and other authoritarians, and they reduce the ability of our agencies to protect the public, including journalists.

Attempting to argue security laws have a chilling effect on sources leaking classified information will not be successful as that is not an unintended effect—it is the point.

Yes, we must hold ourselves and our democratic governments to account. But freedom of the press and freedom of expression are not enjoyed where one is only free to actually harm our own societies.

Political differences managed and resolved through open debate are a good thing. Political and social divisions driven by fear are toxic to our open societies.

You can’t have a free media without a strong democracy, and you can’t have a strong democracy without a free media. Those truths lie at the heart of the common mission between national security and journalism.

Justin Bassi is executive director at ASPI.

This article was originally published on ASPI.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy