2018 Press Freedom Medal Citations Peter Greste and Gerard Ryle The Australian Press Council Address: Level 6, 309 Kent Street Sydney 2000 Phone: (02) 9261 1930 or 1800 025 712 Fax: (02) 9267 6826 Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.presscouncil.org.au Peter Greste Peter Greste’s work as a courageous foreign correspondent is well known, but his more recent work as a vocal press freedom advocate and communications scholar is less known, though no less laudable. The Press Council’s selection committee felt that Peter’s decision to use his high public profile—gained through the extreme hardships he himself endured as a prisoner in an Egyptian jail resulting for his own journalistic work—to become a defender of press freedom and the safety of journalists deserved to be recognised and rewarded. He speaks out frequently and eloquently whenever necessary to remind us all of the vulnerability of journalists and of free speech, and that we must all be constantly on guard against the various threats. Peter is a journalist with more than 25 years of experience as a foreign correspondent for some of the world’s most respected news outlets. He currently occupies the UNESCO Chair in Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland. Peter began his career in regional television news in his native Australia through the late 1980s. He left his job at the Ten Network in Adelaide in 1991 and as a young freelance reporter covered the war in Yugoslavia in 1992-93 and South Africa’s first multi-party elections the following year. In 1995, after the BBC and Reuters appointed him as their joint Kabul correspondent, he covered the civil war and the emergence of the Taliban across Afghanistan. In 1996, he moved back to Yugoslavia for Reuters before returning to the UK to work on the launch of the BBC’s 24-hour domestic TV news service, News 24. Three years later, he returned to reporting from the field as the BBC’s Central America correspondent based in Mexico City. In 2001, the BBC recalled him to Afghanistan to be a part of the team covering the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the fall of the Taliban before he resumed his duties reporting on Latin America until 2003. From there, he went to Kenya, working in eastern and southern Africa for the BBC. Later in 2011, Peter left the BBC and joined Al Jazeera as its East Africa Correspondent. He went to Cairo in the Christmas/New Year period in 2013 and, two weeks after he arrived, security agents burst into his hotel room and arrested him and his colleagues. He was charged with aiding a banned organisation and broadcasting false news. The court sentenced Peter and his colleagues to between seven and ten years of hard labour. In February 2015, Peter was deported on an order of the Egyptian President, though he was included in the subsequent retrial that began a month later. Peter and his colleagues were once again convicted in the retrial though with their sentences reduced to three years. Their case has been widely condemned as an abuse of due process and their fundamental human rights. Peter continues to support other journalists in prison. Peter has recently published The First Casualty, “a memoir from the front lines of the global war on journalism”. He has been an outspoken critic of governments using national security as an excuse to clamp down on civil liberties and freedom of speech. Peter won a Peabody Award in 2011 for his documentary on Somalia. In 2014 he received a special Walkley Award for services to journalism, in recognition of his stand in defence of press freedom while in prison. He has also won the Royal Television Society Judges Award, the International Association of Press Clubs Freedom of Speech Award, the Voltaire Award for Freedom of Speech, and the Australian Human Rights Commission Medal. 2 Gerard Ryle After a long and distinguished career as a journalist In Australia and in Ireland, Gerard Ryle now works as head of an organisation that is fundamentally changing the way investigative journalism can be done in a time of dwindling revenues and staff amongst media companies. In such difficult times for journalism around the world, Gerard’s organisation has taken the unusual route of bringing journalists together from a number of reputable news organisations—such as the ABC, BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times and Le Monde, to name just a few —and helping them work cooperatively and effectively together by marshalling their resources to produce big stories and big scoops that most of them could not afford to work on separately. The selection committee noted the importance of this new model of journalism, a new paradigm, in a business that is often ferociously competitive. The story, with Gerard’s help, becomes more important than any one masthead, with clear public interest and public service results. Gerard is the director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which is based in Washington, DC. He led the worldwide teams of journalists that worked on the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations, the biggest in journalism history. These reports about secretive offshore tax havens used by the rich and powerful triggered a global storm of media, political and grassroots reaction. Public protests led to the fall of the governments of Pakistan and Iceland, to multiple arrests, sweeping legal reform, and official inquiries in 79 countries. Governments worldwide recovered more than $500 million in lost revenue, including in Australia, and the financial impact on the corporations named in the Panama Papers alone was calculated to be greater than the Enron and Volkswagen scandals combined. The numbers behind the Paradise Papers and the Panama Papers investigations are staggering: in all, four terabytes of leaked data, 24.9 million files, 514,000 offshore companies, almost 40 years of records, investigated over the course of two years by two separate teams of more than 380 journalists from nearly 80 countries in 30 languages. At a time when journalism everywhere is underfunded and understaffed, Ryle has pioneered a way to marshal the dispersed assets of news organisations around the world, through the innovative use of technology. He has more than 80 big and small media outlets ready to join forces when this is necessary in the public interest. Under his leadership over the past six years, ICIJ has gone from obscurity to one of the best-known journalism brands in the world, despite having what the Washington Post described as the “meagre financial resources of a small non-profit”. On World Press Freedom Day 2014, Reporters Without Borders said Ryle’s work with ICIJ was “the future of investigative journalism worldwide” and it named him as one of “100 information heroes” of worldwide significance. Before joining the ICIJ as its first non-American director in September 2011, Ryle spent more than 20 years working as a reporter and editor for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Canberra Times and The Adelaide Advertiser. His work as a journalist began in his native Ireland after he studied journalism in Dublin. He was later a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan and in 2013 he accepted an honorary doctorate from the University of Liege, on behalf of ICIJ. Ryle has won numerous journalism awards, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, three George Polk Awards, five Walkley Awards and honours from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Overseas Press Club of America, the New York Press Club and Harvard University. He and his ICIJ colleagues also shared an Emmy Award with the U.S. television program, 60 Minutes. 3 .