“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” ~ George R. R. Martin
The most revealing thing about power is not how it behaves when it is praised. It is how it behaves when it is questioned.
Again and again, we are told that free speech is a cornerstone of democracy. We are told that journalists and writers play an essential role in holding power to account. We are told that transparency matters, that truth matters, that scrutiny matters.
Yet when journalists, whistleblowers, writers, researchers and independent media organisations expose uncomfortable truths, a familiar pattern emerges. Lawsuits appear. Criminal charges follow. Access is revoked. Employment is terminated. Funding disappears. Doors close.
The message is often subtle, but it is unmistakable: tell the truth, but not that truth.
Few cases illustrate this more clearly than that of Julian Assange.
Whatever people think of Assange personally, the central question has always been remarkably simple. Assange was pursued by a foreign power for asking for, receiving and publishing truthful information about that power. The publications exposed evidence of war crimes, civilian killings, torture and diplomatic misconduct. Yet the focus shifted from the actions revealed to the person who revealed them.
Assange himself states: “Journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs. Journalism is not a crime, it is a pillar of a free and informed society.”
That statement should be entirely uncontroversial. Instead, it became one of the defining political and legal battles of our time.
The campaign to free Assange was never only about one man. It was about establishing whether governments could criminalise journalism when journalism became inconvenient. It was about whether the publication of truthful information could be treated as a threat to national security simply because it embarrassed those in power.
During the campaign, Assange’s father, John Shipton, often distilled the issue to its simplest form. Standing alongside journalists, activists and independent media workers, including writers from RAD Faction, Shipton repeatedly reminds us that “reporting truth is not a crime.”
Yet the treatment of Assange demonstrated something deeply troubling. When powerful institutions cannot dispute the facts, they often seek to discredit, punish or silence the messenger instead.
The same dynamic appears throughout media and political life.
Technology writer Niraj Lal has argued that mainstream media operates within a system of incentives that rewards proximity to power rather than scrutiny of it.
“Were a major masthead to repeatedly embarrass a government outside the guidelines of sanctioned activity, they would likely be denied the next scoop, or the next exclusive interview, or access to official information.”
As Lal observes, this creates “a subtle reinforcing culture of sycophantism in mainstream media where the goal becomes proximity to power instead of holding power to account.”
This observation should concern anyone who values democratic accountability. Formal censorship is not always necessary when access itself becomes a mechanism of control. Journalists quickly learn which stories advance careers and which create problems. Editors learn which investigations generate legal threats. Organisations learn which truths are expensive to publish.
The result is not necessarily direct censorship. It is something arguably more effective: self-censorship.
The consequences of speaking uncomfortable truths are not limited to criminal prosecutions or lawsuits. Sometimes they arrive in the form of employment decisions.
The case of Antoinette Lattouf offers a stark example.
Lattouf was removed from her position at the ABC after sharing a Human Rights Watch post on her personal Instagram account regarding the use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. The Federal Court later found that the primary motivation for terminating her employment was to avoid criticism from political lobbyists, sections of the media and members of the public.
The significance of the decision extends well beyond one journalist.
The court’s findings raise uncomfortable questions about whose voices are considered acceptable in public discourse and how institutions respond when external pressure is applied. The issue was not whether the information she shared was fabricated. The Human Rights Watch material reflected concerns that were already being raised internationally. Rather, the issue was that the discussion itself had become politically inconvenient.
Many organisations operate according to a similar logic.
When criticism emerges, the instinct is often not to engage with the substance of the concern. Instead, the focus shifts to managing reputational risk. Questions become threats. Scrutiny becomes disloyalty. Dissent becomes a problem to be managed.
Silencing the critic is often perceived as easier than addressing the criticism.
The same hostility towards scrutiny can be seen in the treatment of journalists by political actors.
In response to One Nation’s increasing popularity, party leader Pauline Hanson appeared to be caught referring to a Guardian reporter as a “nasty bitch” after a staff member had told the same reporter to “shut up”. The incident followed another weeks earlier in which ABC journalists were ejected from a One Nation campaign event for “reporting back to ABC Canberra”.
A spokesperson for The Guardian responded by stating that the publication remains committed to independent journalism and holding power to account, and that its reporters would not be deterred from asking questions in the public interest.
These incidents may appear minor when compared to prosecutions or dismissals, but they reflect the same underlying impulse: hostility towards scrutiny.
A free press is only useful if journalists are permitted to ask difficult questions.
The moment politicians begin deciding which journalists deserve access, which questions are acceptable, or which reporters should be excluded, the role of journalism begins to shift from watchdog to spectator.
The health of a democracy is not measured by how it treats compliant journalists. It is measured by how it treats inconvenient ones.
History repeatedly demonstrates that journalism is most valuable when it makes powerful people uncomfortable. The Pentagon Papers made governments uncomfortable. Reporting on institutional abuse made powerful organisations uncomfortable. Investigations into corruption, deaths in custody, war crimes and corporate misconduct all made somebody uncomfortable.
That discomfort is not evidence that journalism has failed.
It is evidence that journalism is working.
For criminalised communities, whistleblowers and people with lived experience of state violence, independent media is not simply an alternative publishing platform. It is often one of the few places where our stories can be told without institutional permission.
Too often, the systems that harm people are also the systems that shape the public narrative about that harm. Governments write reports about prisons. Police investigate police. Child protection departments explain child removals. Mental health systems define what constitutes legitimate distress. The people most affected by these institutions are frequently spoken about, spoken for, and spoken over.
When those directly impacted attempt to tell a different story, they are often met with hostility. They are dismissed as biased, emotional, unreliable or self-interested. Yet the institutions responsible for their suffering are routinely treated as objective authorities on their own conduct.
This is why independent media matters.
It creates space for knowledge that would otherwise be excluded from public debate. It allows people who have experienced criminalisation, incarceration, state intervention, surveillance and institutional violence to speak in their own voices, without their experiences being filtered through bureaucracies, public relations departments or political interests.
At its best, independent media acts as a counterweight to institutional power. It documents what official reports omit. It asks questions that powerful people would rather avoid. It preserves stories that might otherwise disappear.
RAD Faction exists within that tradition.
Not because independent media is inherently virtuous, but because democracy requires places where people can speak honestly about power without seeking permission from it first. In a media landscape increasingly shaped by access, sponsorship, political pressure and corporate interests, independent platforms provide an essential space for dissent, scrutiny and truth-telling.
Avenues like RAD Faction create a short-circuit around establishment media and the power structures to which they are often tethered. They allow communities to produce knowledge rather than simply consume it. They create opportunities for people traditionally treated as subjects of reporting to become reporters, analysts, writers and storytellers in their own right.
For communities whose lives are routinely narrated by others, that space is not a luxury.
It is a necessity.
The real question is not why journalists and writers continue to expose uncomfortable truths.
The real question is why powerful institutions continue to respond as though truth itself is the threat.
Because when a government prosecutes a publisher, when an employer dismisses a journalist because of political pressure, when politicians attack reporters for asking questions, or when organisations attempt to silence criticism rather than answer it, they reveal something important.
They reveal that they are not afraid of lies.
They are afraid of being exposed by the truth.
And that is precisely why journalism remains essential.
Journalism is not a crime.
For democracy to survive, it never can be.
