Journalists jailed for doing their jobs

As Derryn Hinch learned last year, jailing journalists is not confined to oppressive Middle Eastern, Asian, African or Russian regimes

**This picture has a scanned reverse - see associated content at the bottom of the details window** Raymond Edmund Fitzpatrick, owner of the newspaper the 'Bankstown Observer' who serverd 3-months for breach of parliamentary privilege along with Frank Browne.

IN the wake of China’s violent oppression of Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, Chinese journalist Qi Lin was secretly put on trial in Beijing three years later for “leaking state secrets”. His case was not publicised in the Chinese press but reports were published in Australia in February 1992.

Weeks later Queensland newspaper journalist Joe Budd was serving a two-week prison sentence for refusing to name a source from a 1989 article at the centre of a defamation case.

In 1993 Adelaide journalist Chris Nicholls shared a maximum-security cell with a murderer after refusing to name in court his source for a story damaging to the South Australian government.

Last year Melbourne radio host and journalist Derryn Hinch joined Bankstown newspaper proprietor Raymond Fitzpatrick and freelance journalist Frank Browne and Perth newspaper reporter Tony Barrass in serving time for offending Australian parliaments or courts.

Unlike Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, whose detention in an Iranian jail in 2009 accused of spying, inspired the film Rosewater which opens in Sydney on Thursday, Australian prisons do not subject jailed journalists to brutal interrogation and torture.

But as Australians welcome Brisbane-born Al-Jazeera journalist Peter Greste’s release from an Egyptian jail, after his conviction for falsifying news and aiding the Muslim Brotherhood, jailing journalists is not confined to oppressive Middle Eastern, Asian, African or Russian regimes.

Fitzpatrick, a political candidate and construction standover man known as the Mr Big of Bankstown, and Browne, editor of Fitzpatrick’s Bankstown Observer, found themselves in Goulburn jail in mid-1955, sentenced to three months for breach of parliamentary privilege.

In May 1955, Federal politician Charles Morgan told Parliament a Bankstown Observer article of April 28, 1955, impugned his personal honour and challenged his fitness to be a Member of Parliament. The article, MHR and Immigration Racket, alleged Morgan, a lawyer before entering Parliament, engaged in corrupt refugee migration schemes from Europe to Australia before World War II.

Arguing that Fitzpatrick was attempting to silence his criticism of corruption in Bankstown, Morgan had the matter referred to the Privileges Committee, which concluded a breach of privilege had occurred. Prime Minister Robert Menzies then successfully moved both men be committed to 90 days’ jail.

In post-war Italy, journalist Antonio Trizzoni was sentenced to two years’ jail and fined six million lire (£35,000) in 1953 for defaming the Italian Navy’s wartime conduct and libel after three admirals complained Trizzoni’s book, Ships and Armchairs, described them as cowards.

British investigative journalism pioneers faced regular prosecution as they challenged parliamentary proceedings and decisions. Publisher William Cobbett frequently crossed the Atlantic from 1790 to avoid jail in England and America.

From 1802 Cobbett published Parliamentary debates with his Weekly Political Register, when it was illegal to report proceedings of Parliament, only final decisions. He was found guilty of treasonous libel in June 1810 after objecting in The Register to the flogging of five militiamen, after a mutiny over paying for backpacks, by Hanoverian mercenaries. He was sentenced to two years’ jail in Newgate Prison.

Pall Mall Gazette publisher William Stead landed in London’s Holloway prison in 1885 after shocking articles exposed British traffic in young girls for prostitution. Stead published his interviews with prostitutes, pimps and brothel keepers, under the headline The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, revealing girls were purchased, drugged with laudanum and raped.

Stead worked with Salvation Army officers Josephine Butler and Bramwell Booth to contact reformed prostitute and brothel keeper Rebecca Jarrett to help demonstrate that a 13-year old girl could be bought from her parents and used in prostitution. Through prostitution procuress Nancy Broughton, Jarrett learnt of Eliza Armstrong, 13, whose alcoholic mother Elizabeth sold her the girl for £5.

Jarrett had midwife and abortionist Louise Mourez confirm Eliza’s virginity. Eliza was then taken to a brothel and lightly drugged with chloroform to await her “purchaser”, who was Stead. When Eliza, identified as Lily in Stead’s reports, screamed on waking to find Stead in her room, he left and placed Eliza with Booth, who put her in the care of a family.

As pressure built for new child protection laws, competing newspapers searched for “Lily”, while Eliza’s mother went to police claiming she had not consented to put her daughter into prostitution.

Stead, Jarrett and Mourez were found guilty of abduction and procurement. Jarrett and Mourez were sentenced to six months jail, while Stead was sentenced to three months.

He continued to edit the Gazette from prison, later claiming: “Never had I a pleasanter holiday, a more charming season of repose.”