The enemies of free speech are everywhere.

because the left has infiltrated just about every institution in the West. An angry editorial in The Australian newspaper:
‘Our role is to bear witness, not play down the truth’

WHEN the Australian Press Council was established, it was given two equally important roles: to promote press freedom and provide an independent and credible forum to deal with complaints about media reports. It has failed spectacularly on the first measure and is now embarked on a course of action that is killing its credibility as an arbiter. Hubris is endangering its future.
It is trying to become a de facto editor-in-chief — a national oracle on how to run newspapers. This is well beyond the competence of the non-journalists who make up the majority of every adjudication panel assembled by the Press Council and their ignorance is showing. They are turning this organisation into a laughing-stock.
To discharge its role as an independent arbiter, the Press Council must maintain the respect and confidence of both sides whenever it seeks to resolve disputes. But by improperly seeking to expand its reach into matters beyond its competence, its credibility is ebbing away.
This week, it informed Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph that it was not too happy that it published a photograph on its front page of American photojournalist James Foley, who apparently was about to be beheaded by Islamic State terrorists. It told the Telegraph that “on balance” there was no breach of Press Council standards, but it considered the photograph “could well have been published on an inside page without losing its effectiveness”.
With the utmost respect, the non-journalists who dominate Press Council adjudication panels don’t know what they are talking about. Unlike the editors at the Telegraph, they have no training or experience that could provide a rational basis for this unjustified intrusion.
This is not the first time the council has purported to give itself a role in deciding whether material has been published on the correct page. To expose this jurisdictional overreach in the most concrete form possible, The Australian has decided to disregard the requirement that a forthcoming ruling should remain secret until it is finalised. We do not do this lightly. However, it is the clearest way of revealing a major breach of trust by an organisation that has lost sight of the limited role set down in its constitution. We are taking this course not because the council looks like ruling against us. In fact, its provisional ruling broadly supports us. It says that “on balance” it does not believe that a “clear breach” of council standards occurred. That, however, is not the point. The dispute in question concerns a complaint about a photograph of the crash site in Ukraine of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. The decision to publish that photograph on our front page last July was ours and ours alone, and the Press Council has no legitimate role in such a matter — regardless of the conclusion it may reach.
We will never accept that the Press Council or anyone else has any business telling us what we can and cannot publish on our front page. It is a direct challenge to editorial independence that should be rejected by every media outlet that takes press freedom seriously.
In some instances, a shocking photograph conveys the truth about important events in a far more accurate way than thousands of words. The truth can sometimes be confronting and even shocking. But the role of the news media is not to suppress or play down the truth. And if that means publishing shocking and confronting photographs, so be it. Significant numbers of photojournalists have paid with their lives to reveal the reality of confronting events.
Who can forget the enduring impact of the famous photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl who had just been caught in a napalm attack during the Vietnam war? That image did more to bring home the reality of the war than almost anything else.
Our decision to publish the MH17 photograph on our front page was not straightforward. It involved debate and discussion among editorial executives who concluded that it would be wrong to hide or play down the truth of what had happened. We carefully cropped the photograph to protect the identify of the dead and to avoid worsening the anguish of their families. That decision drew on years of collective experience and reflected The Australian’s judgment. That is what press freedom is all about.
The Press Council, however, in its provisional adjudication says any risk of causing distress to the victims’ relatives and friends could have been further reduced by publishing the image on an inside page or by pixelating parts of it.
The reality of that murderous attack in Ukraine shocked and distressed the entire nation. Blurring a photograph or hiding it away would have inaccurately diminished the event’s significance, dishonoured the dead and amounted to a betrayal of the duty we owe to our readers. In the spirit of Holocaust survivor Primo Levi: bearing witness is a crucial role for journalists and photojournalists.