Overview

Media Moguls, Whistleblowers and the Price of Freedom Racked by public distrust, cowed by government surveillance and powerful corporations, the mainstream media is in crisis. Newspapers which flourished for centuries and TV networks that once ruled the world are failing. Andrew Fowler's The War on Journalism tells how the media helped write its own epitaph. Drawing on personal interviews and his background in investigative journalism, Fowler traces the decline of the culture of truthbringing. It's a tale of sackings, cutbacks and self-censoring editors, deals, threats and government standover tactics. Alongside tabloids like the News of the World, notorious for phone hacking, giants like the BBC, Australia's ABC, The Washington Post and The New York Times, The Guardian and Le Monde come under fire. When first WikiLeaks and then Edward Snowden blew the whistle, they did more than reveal explosive secrets- they undermined establishment, or insider, media - where governments 'leaked' information to favoured reporters in return for sympathetic coverage. Along with lawyer-turned-gonzo-journalist Glenn Greenwald, these outsiders challenged everyone from The Guardian on the left to Rupert Murdoch's global media empire on the right. The establishment fought back with draconian laws to silence the new journalism. From the UK to the US to Australia, governments harass journalists, threatening to jail both whistleblowers and those who publish their leaks. Staying one move ahead of post-9/11 intelligence agencies is fraught. Every cell phone is a mobile tracking device. The public's right to know is a battleground. At stake are the kind of journalism that survives and the kind of world in which we will live- democratic or dominated by executive government, unchallenged and unaccountable, spying on its own citizens and producing fraudulent arguments to fight horrific wars. The internet - which promised people easy access to information and each other - is now being used to produce a dark future. This is a defining moment, not just for journalism but for us all.

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ANDREW FOWLER is an award-winning investigative journalist and a contributing reporter for ABC's Foreign Correspondent and Four Corners programs. He has been chief of staff and acting foreign editor of The Australian newspaper and a reporter with SBS Dateline and Channel 7, as well as heading up the ABC's Investigative Unit. Andrew began his journalism career in the early 1970s covering the IRA bombing campaign for the London Evening News. He first interviewed Julian Assange for the Foreign Correspondent in early 2010 and went on to write the bestselling book, The Most Dangerous Man in the World, which has been translated and published in countries as diverse as China, South Korea, SA, Russia, Indonesia, Romania and Taiwan. The Most Dangerous Man in the World was described by Daniel Ellsberg (whistle-blower of the Pentagon Papers) as 'A gripping thriller. By far the best account of Julian Assange's motives and the talents that make him so dangerous' and by Geoffrey Robertson QC as 'the most balanced, fair and factual account yet published of a saga much misrepresented in the media'. Andrew's original ABC program about Assange and WikiLeaks won the New York Festival Gold Medal and he has subsequently interviewed Assange in October 2011 and July 2012. Andrew Fowler currently spends his time between Paris and Sydney, writing and making documentaries.

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