In a ret­ro­spec­tive piece in the SMH con­cern­ing a new pub­li­ca­tion out of the Uni­ver­sity of Mel­bourne deal­ing with how media work­ers responded to and processed last year’s Black Sat­ur­day fires, Mallesons IP part­ner Natalie Hickey writes (among other things) that “It is worth reflect­ing that a healthy democ­racy does not need free speech at all costs. Words can wound and infor­ma­tion can cause pain.”

What a realisation!

So often in our tabloid, syndicated-to-the-hilt, visu­ally ori­ented, and, of course, com­mer­cially dri­ven media the objec­tive of “the public’s right to know” is utilised as an over­rid­ing jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for pub­li­ca­tion of con­tent that, sim­ply, is unnec­es­sary for the pub­lic and unhelp­ful for those it concerns.

In the Bible, a king called David writes, “You love all words that devour, O deceit­ful tongue.” Words can wound, and infor­ma­tion can cause pain — and so often our media will “love evil more than good, and lying more than speak­ing what is right.” (Also David, Psalm 52) The defense that it rates well is inad­e­quate, yet it is enthralling to dis­cover a gen­uine dis­cus­sion of jour­nal­is­tic ethics that reflects bib­li­cal truth about speech.

God teaches that Chris­t­ian peo­ple are to speak the truth in love, and that, what­ever other abil­i­ties we may have been given by Him, if we don’t exer­cise those with love, we have noth­ing. Oh, that our press would oper­ate on this basis — to do so would serve the “pub­lic inter­est” well!