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Weekends on Joy You are on Saturday magazine joy 94.9 with Maca My co-host is our fantastic executive producer Fiona Brooke Paul is on panel our guest is micha ketchup editor of the conversation Speaking to us from the other side of the yara good morning mission. How are you?
Good morning. It's a great morning in sunny Brunswick. It is, isn't it? Fiona and I were just musing during the break there. How long have we had you as a regular guest? I reckon it's got to be five years or more. I think it's coming up on five years, something like that. Yeah, yeah. Which is great because it's always topical. It's always popular with our listeners.
Where would you like to start, Misha? What about... I think we should start with Misha's just returning back from the US. From the US, yes. Tell us about your trip to the US. Okay, so I was in the United States for a global meeting as all of the different branches of the conversation.
So we've got teams in the United States, in Canada, in the UK, in Africa, France, Spain, Indonesia. So basically we had a big global meeting and that was at Providence, Rhode Island. And then I went back to New York and spent about a week in New York at a conference which was held at Columbia University, which is on the upper west side.
And it was all about the future of journalism and saving journalism. The journalism academic at Columbia called Anya Schiffman, who is sort of very interested in the ways in which we started to support journalism, quality journalism.
And she's been out in Australia a lot with her partner, Joseph Stiglitz, who's an economist. And she's been writing a lot of papers about the Australian government's news media bargaining code. So it was a really interesting time to be here in the US, particularly because I was with all of these sort of academics who are very interested in politics in the future of journalism just a week before the US election. And I got just sort of quizzing about what they thought was going to happen.
Were any of them on the money mission? Did they predict the outcome? Not a single one. I'm near in Joseph's upper west side apartment with all these sort of very well informed, very senior people across politics, media, academia in the US. There's about 15 people. And I said, this room of people
Look, I'm just really interested. Can we just go around and can everyone say who that thing is going to be in? And every single one of them said Kamala Harris.
They were all nervous. In fact, that week, Joe was organizing this letter from seven, and I don't prize winners. And I think it was published on Axios, but it was basically interesting to try to promote and support Carmeler. So they all wanted Carmeler to do well. And they were all very nervous, but they all thought that Carmeler would come. And I think that really goes to the really interesting question of the way in which the media frames your perception of the world.
So there was an article released quite recently on political by some local Steve Waldman. And he was talking about the fact that if you go back to April when Joe Biden was still in the race, there was a poll down the phone in detention. And of people who read newspapers, 70%, like Joe Biden was ahead 70% to 20% per Trump, like at that point. So Biden had a massive lead.
But even back then, if you post people who got most of the information through social media and YouTube, I think Trump was ahead 55-40-something. So it just goes to show that what's happened is the media is fragmented and there is a progressive elite media, New York Times, Washington Post, radio, TV, you know, certain parts of TV. And that group of people get their type of information
and they have their work in basement installation and there's an entire separate audience which is the audience that came out and ended up writing to Trump and they're getting, they're listening to Joan Rogan and they're watching all of these things on
YouTube and it's just entirely different audience of the two worlds that are not needing. I'm sure I heard a startling fact the other day that CNN's viewership has gone from being something like 13 million down to being under a million viewers in a really short period of time.
And that there's just a huge amount of people that are turning off and not engaging at all with the mainstream media. And there was a, you know, a podcaster on, I think, Radio National the other day talking about how people like Josh Rogan and other podcasters should be participating in the afternoon briefings, like as in any other traditional media outlet would.
And so the question would be, it would bring them into the tent more, perhaps give them the opportunity to have more, you know, less opportunity for misinformation if they're in the tent and in the room. I don't think so, because I think
partly the thing that helps those people be successful in the ways that they are is the latitude that they have, really by not describing themselves as traditional journalists, the thinking of themselves in that way. And it's really interesting, I was just up in Sydney last week for a summit hosted by the Alliance for Journalists Freedom, which is the group headed up by Peter Kresta, the Australian journalist who was imprisoned in Egypt. And they were
talking about this problem of the ways in which journalism has to compete against people who are not journalists. And the truth is that trust, the way people form trust these days, social media is taught us is we trust people, not processes. So people like Joe Rogan, and they trust Joe Rogan, even though the Joe Rogan show often has misinformation.
Now, if you're the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper or your ABC media outlet or whatever is, and you're saying trust speaks, you've got a process like we have a fact checking and use confidence in a certain way that we go back to anything. People are less likely to place their trust in that.
I think that you've got this battle between the traditional media and the influences of all forms. And some of them have a lot of the higher journalistic standards than others. There's a whole bunch of differences between them. But the influence is a link. The word is digital news report, which comes out every year. It talks about the fact that increasingly young people are deliberately avoiding news. People are actually saying I'm turning off the news because it's
too hard is one thing that's really happening. Also increasing if under 20s are not really used papers, not watching TV, not listening to radio, getting all of their information pretty much from social media. And social media is an influencer economy. I mean that influencer economy, I don't know if it's possible for journalism to market itself and compete because the things that distinguish a journalistic process
in that context are sort of boring to report you to. That's the truth, I think. And I think one of the distinctions, Misha, you know, you mentioned newspapers. And of course, you know, most newspapers are also digital arm and online. And a couple of weeks ago, I happened to be going past my local news agent just before they opened. And I remember, I remember from many years ago,
there'd be this huge pile of newspapers outside the news agent for them to sell on that day. And of course Saturday was always one of the big days. And the news agent wasn't open. The pile of newspapers was not very high. So the actual number of newspapers that are sold is declining. But
digitally, whether it's ABC, whether it's the A's, whether it's News Corp's, whether it's the conversation, the numbers in the digital world are really very, very high, aren't they? They are, which is a good sign.
But the difficulty is the way those numbers are measured and the question about to what extent do they actually reach the newer audiences. So, yes, it's fine. You know, everybody, you know, when you talk about how many million page views.
But the question, I mean, that's over a month and then the question is, how many of the people viewing those pages are the same people coming back and back and how many other discrete people, how much are you reaching a broad cross-section of the community? Because the importance of the media is we can't have a proper political debate if we've all got different sets of facts.
And the truth is, we increasingly do all have different sets of that. I mean, it's an interesting example. You know, with Trump and all the Trump supporters, there is a high number of those people who believe that the January 6th insurrection was outlawed because they believe the election was stolen. Now, there is no evidence for that. Like, journalistically, it's like no reputable newspaper or media outlet would publish that even as a claim. You'd just say, well, this is a spurious claim. It's nonsensical.
but there's a whole media ecosystem or communication ecosystem is built on this misinformation because people are getting to choose their own facts. And the benefit of the media is if it can actually have a role, sort of as a gatekeeper, as a trusted gatekeeper to say, this is true, this is not here are the agreed facts. Now let's all get together and have a discussion. But if we all fragment into our different worlds,
What we're going to find is increasing partisanship, increasing mistrust across society. It's bad for social cohesion. It's sort of bad for everything. And that's where we are at the moment, I think.
Ah, Misha, we will have to go to a short break. So when we come back, let's get started on questions around the misinformation and duty of care in Australia. Yeah. And, you know, upcoming social media legislation, a couple of other topics. You are on Saturday magazine, Joy 94.9 with Macca and Fiona and Paul. We're speaking with the editor of the conversation. Mr. Kechel, stay with us. There's a lot more out loud, proud, joy.
You're on Saturday magazine with Macca and Fiona and Paul. And we are speaking with Misha Kechel, editor of the conversation. So, Misha, on this station, we have a duty of care. You as editor of the conversation have a duty of care. The government is talking a lot about the duty of care. Tell us what they're talking about with regards to the duty of care.
So this is from a speech that Michelle will roll on the Communications Minister gave at the Sydney Institute, I think on Wednesday night this week, where she talked about this idea of injecting a digital duty of care into the Online Safety Act. And basically it's a general principle that says, if you're producing a product which is media, you have to be responsible for any harms you might cause. And there's a whole range of sorts of harms you can cause.
mental health, depression, body image stuff, misinformation. If not necessarily specific, it's just basically saying if you want to behave in this space as a publisher operating in the Australian environment, you have an obligation to the audiences. And this is of course would be bringing Australia into line with legislation that's happening in the UK and in Europe. That's correct, right? That's right. And it's also
It's really a sponsored decision that was taken in the US in way back in 1996 when the internet was still emerging. And one of the questions was, do you treat online publishing the same way you treat so being newspaper, publisher or broadcaster, where you're responsible for things like defamation, if you get stuff wrong, you've got all those obligations. Or do you treat it like you're running a phone company where if two people have a conversation
Are you really responsible for what they say to each other? And basically, at the US decided they introduced this thing called Section 230 into the Government Act that they have in the US, which basically said that the media, the social media companies, digital companies, were exempt from being traded like publishers.
And that last, since 1996, they've behaved as though they were new all over the world. And all the different forms of harm they've caused, whether it be online bullying, harassment, you know, the stuff that the Facebook whistleblower found Francis Halden's talked about with anxiety, body image, all those sorts of issues, which they've been aware of all the way through.
The digital publishers and social media publishers have just been sort of, well, it's not really, we're not going to worry about any of that.
And I think legislators now are saying, hold it a second, if you want to operate, you've got a responsibility. So the digital duty of care that Michelle Roland is proposing is upon the social media companies to, it will be their responsibility to enforce it and to make sure that it's part of their platform. And then they're going to be fined, for example, if they don't participate and they don't follow through.
That's right. So they've got to do, I mean, there's basically a concept in the law, you know, called foreseeable harm or, you know, foreseeable. And so in torts, you can't, if you can foresee that something's going to hurt somebody, you've got an obligation to act. And it's really introducing a principle like that into the online safety act. And that means they'll have to at least show that they've got programs in place to mitigate the damage or the risk of causing harm.
The devil's going to be in the detail here, Misha, because let's assume you're the head of a large social media organization in the US, perhaps near the end of the alphabet. And you have a particular view, not a number of particular views on how things should be. And this whole idea of foreseeable harm
How is the legislation going to interpret that? Because if your view is quite, you know, if your view is quite different to mine and you think that that view isn't harmful, so I don't need to foresee any harm, how's that going to be arbitrated? How's that going to be worked out? Is it?
the government or the regulator that's going to say, yes, that is foreseeable harm you're allowed to happen. And the person at the other end says, well, no, I don't think it is harmful. Or how could I force it? How is that going to work? It's a good question. And I don't know the answer, given that Michelle Roll had only first mentioned this on Wednesday. So it's still very early stages. But I suspect the way it would work
would be that there would have to be evidence that the publisher has in place a process for managing the relevant harm. So say for example, you know, pornographic images being accessible to children or sex trafficking or pedophilic images, those sorts of things, which all the companies, I mean, they do have processes for taking those things down and trying to weed them out.
But they will have to show that they've got an adequate process in place in that area. And the same thing would be in all sorts of areas like, you know, mental health, body image, young people using too much social media, you know, all sorts of other harm that you could imagine. This information gives information in a way.
The idea would be basically as the makers of the product in the same way that if you're a car manufacturer at a certain point, regulations meant you have to put seat belts in cars because of the foreseeable harms and people crashing their cars.
or with tobacco products, which I've got like a warning system. As a responsible person operating, you have to deal with and address the harms. That sort of is the key thing. I think the mechanism would be less specific, so it wouldn't be like, okay, person X has suffered a harm and therefore they can sue you. It's more
if people complain that they're not doing enough, the regulator would review you and say, well, what systems do you have in place and are they adequate? And we would anticipate, for example, that this will go through Parliament in the next coming couple of weeks. Again, I'm not that I've been sure about this duty of care, which it has moved to the Additionally Online Safety Act, but I think the Government was keen to move quite quickly.
Oh, look, I can't give you a definite answer on that. And it's interesting in a way how these things are related. I mean, there's also the misinformation and disinformation bill, which actually, in some ways, functions on a pretty similar principle. Elon Musk has said that that bill is fascist. And the shadow of education, Mr. David Coleman, said it's one of the worst bills ever put forward by government. And everyone's concerned about its implications for free speech. The natural fact
What it does, the inputs on the publishers, is to actually have a system in place for dealing with misinformation and disinformation. It's not about ACTMA or anybody actually censoring individual posts, if that makes sense.
The legislation around all these issues that the government's talking about, when it's tabled on the test, will be, does it pass? I want it just to jump, if I can, where there is some agreement between the government and the opposition, but the crossbench and not in agreement is election funding.
and the funding of candidates and the Special Minister of State Don Farrell has said, we're going to legislate for this. We're going to limit the amount of donations an individual can make to a candidate and candidates in total to put a cap on how much a party can spend on an election.
What are your thoughts on this measure? Because the independence and particularly call them the teals, although some of them won't like that name, but the sake of this discussion, not the Greens, not the Labor Party, not the Liberal National Party, they object to this. They say it's about restricting their right or their ability to stand for parliament. What are your thoughts?
It's a really interesting question. And it goes to questions sort of fairness versus standard fairness. So there's a famous line I think by, I think it's George Orwell somebody who said, the rich and the poor alike are free to sleep under bridges. And this is at a time when there were vagrancy laws that said basically ban people from sleeping under bridges. And the idea was that law is absolutely fair because everybody lives under the same law.
But of course, the burden of that law falls disproportionately on people without wealth. So that law in one sense is unfair in this punishing one sector society as opposed to the rest. It's sort of the same concept here. I mean, you could say, well, the caps on spending are fair. They apply to all political parties and all political candidates equally.
But the argument being pushed is that the burden will fall disproportionately on the independence and the appeals and groups like that because of the way the laws are structured. Again, the laws have only just come out in the past week. And I don't really want to venture a storm appeal with that argument is true or not because with these laws, you always get an argument that I'll hurt. It hurts later more than the coalition or hurt the coalition more than labor. And it can take a long time
to pick apart whether it actually does or not. So I think we need to continue to look at these laws, but certainly the independence are concerned. I think they're concerned because to some extent these laws were drafted in the wake of concerns about client partner and the individual spending of one person and the idea that one person could really influence election.
The argument is that that then does make it harder for people who are at the major parties who are wanting to sort of enter the political fight to get sufficient resources to do so. Yeah, I'm often suspicious when the government and the opposition agree on something. Yes, that makes you wonder who they're wanting to exclude. And when Clive Palmer opposes us, well, then it must be a good idea.
Now, if I was Kevin Rudd, would I be feeling comfortable in the US as ambassador? Do you think he and Donald Trump is Donald Trump really going to insist? Well, potentially he's going to insist you need to appoint a new ambassador? Again, I mean, who knows? I mean, one interesting thing is that he
Trump has appointed as his deputy chief of staff, somebody called Dan Scavino. And Dan Scavino this week posted an hourglass on social media linked to Kevin Rudd's statement about some posts that he'd removed that were critical of Trump. And that was seen by a lot of people as quite ominous, basically saying the clock is ticking.
Generally speaking, all of the people sort of in the world of diplomacy say it would be unheard of for a government to remove its ambassador on the basis of something like this. You know, the ambassador, the country gets to choose who the ambassador is. I think there are a lot of people who has, I'm sorry, that Rad has done a pretty good job and there are people on both sides of politics who have come out and defended him and called for avenues to stand by him.
But the difficulty with a character like Trump is all the bits, well, something or more rules don't apply, anything could happen. Yes, completely. And of course, none of us, Mischa, would ever have any fear of anything that we've said in the past coming back to haunt us, would we?
You know, doing sort of the job that we do, where you're in sort of the public sphere for many, many years. I mean, we're all facing sort of dumb, absolutely. Well, I mean, I think that we don't, we were hoping to talk more about perhaps some of Trump's outrageous appointments, but I don't think we are really going to have time for that, Lisa. I've still got a minute or so. Which of the outrageous appointments is the most outrageous?
Mesa from your kind of career. I reckon the worst is Matt Gaetz. Yes. Under investigation, the sexual misconduct, statutory rape, child sex trafficking. Everybody in the Congress thinks this guy is an incredibly dark character. Attorney General, that's pretty bad. Robert Kennedy Jr. is Health Secretary, Andy Vaxx, a conspiracy theorist. He promotes crazy things.
Tulsi gathered to run national intelligence, best known for meeting a Syrian dictator, basically blamed Ukraine for being invaded by Putin, said it was their fault. Pete Hegcess, who is the weekend host of Fox breakfast to run defense, who's got no experience.
It really is a cast of very strange, interesting, colorful characters who've got no experience or knowledge about how to do the jobs that they're being pushed into. Now, not all of these people are going to actually get the jobs because they have to be approved by the... Well, that's assuming, that's assuming, Fiona, that these jobs that have to be approved by the Senate, there is the ability for what's called recess appointments. So when the Senate is not sitting,
The president can appoint people to these roles, these cabinet roles, or these departmental roles for 12 months. He can actually appoint them. And who's going to oppose them? I mean, the Republicans have got control, so that would require a back vote on behalf of the Republican senators. I just can't say that happening.
Yeah, it's, we talk about living in a parallel universe. I mean, I think the people that Trump has appointed, he's appointed them for a reason. He's appointed them because he thinks they have the same view as him and he believes they'll be loyal and not being too unkind to any of them. None of them are towering intellects.
No, it is all about sort of the drain, the swamp, sort of just maximum damage, just shake everything up, sort of approach.
Amisha, we are out of time. We are. Thank you so much for the conversation today and I hope that you have a marvellous, sunny and enjoyable weekend. And to all our listeners, if you're not a joy member, you should be. If you don't subscribe to the conversation, you should.
So you are on Saturday magazine. Joy 94.9 with Macca and Paul and Fiona. Coming up soon, our next guest is David Locke, CEO of the Australian Financial Complaints Authority. And boy, have we got some interesting stuff to talk about. Stay with us.
Thanks for listening to another Joy podcast brought to you by Australia's LGBTQIA Plus Community Media organisation, Joy. Help us keep joy on air. Head to joy.org.au. Joy, a diverse sound for a diverse community.
