A hamstrung media

And of course the issuing of an embargo is entirely arbitrary - if a company says it is embargoed, then it is embargoed and cannot be questioned. A perceived gentleman’s agreement exists.

Ultimately it’s a tussle for power. The company issuing the embargo backs it up with the threat of denying further information to any media organisation of personnel breaking the embargo.

But then on the other hand major news outlets surely also hold power and could just as easily deny coverage to the company, a case of sort of embargoing the “embarger”.

In Australia, the corporate world has an open contempt for the media and continually attempts to bring it into line. Some companies have taken the embargo one step further by actually barring journalists from investor briefings and such like.

Blue chip fund manager Perpetual has banned journalists from listening in to its investor briefing, and this follows RAMS Home Loan Group which did the same when its business started to sink because of the sub-prime meltdown in the US.

The Australian Financial Review said Perpetual “plans to post the briefing on its website at a later time, saving institutional investors the heavy scrutiny of silent journalists”. Although MediaBlab is not quite sure what “silent journalists” are?

The newly elected Australian Government, seeks to address the excessive secrecy of the previous government, by promising to be more transparent and improving Freedom of Information laws.

But politicians are quick to resort to their own form of permanent embargo - the “off-the-record” announcement. Politicians caught out by an astute journalist can quickly recover and say, “Of course, what I just told you is off the record”.

A scandal erupted over this practice in Australia earlier this year when it was revealed that a leading politician, over a dinner one evening, gave a group of Australia’s most senior journalists important information that could affect the smooth working of the government of the day.

The next day minders contacted the journalists in question to inform them that information revealed the previous evening was now deemed off the record and to their shame, the journalists clubbed together and withheld the information, denying the public valuable insight and denying their own newspapers important front page news stories.

It’s time the media took the gloves off and did what it’s supposed to do - arm the public with information that governments and corporations may not want revealed, or want revealed at a time that suits them.