The Talking Point: Taking Liberties With the Press

One of the world’s largest and most powerful media dynasties threatens to unravel after a scandal that has veered from high to low drama and back again. Join a panel of leading media commentators and analysts — Margaret Simons, Mark Day and Rod Tiffen, with host Richard Ackland — as the process of teasing out the implications of Hackgate begins in earnest. We take a look at what the phone-hacking scandal means for the media locally and abroad.

The scandal may well permanently reshape the media landscape in the UK, where phone hacking may have been more widespread than previously reported, and where senior government and police figures find themselves compromised. Meanwhile, sections of the US media will be carefully monitoring the progress of an FBI investigation into allegations of hacking into the phones of 9/11 victims and their families, while rumours persist of a ‘black ops’ room at Fox News.

Just as Australia was shielded from the worst of the global financial crisis, so too do the worst excesses of the British phone-hacking scandal seem to have bypassed us, if only by dint of our relative smallness. Some would wish it were not so: amid calls for media inquiries and privacy-protection legislation, it seems the local media configuration may not be left unexamined.