As a gal determined to commit my life to journalism, my sense of hope has taken a beating over the last few years. Notably, the ongoing genocide in Palestine as the subsequent imperial expansion of Israel into neighbouring Middle Eastern nations has exposed the unsettling politics that underpin our media institutions. I have watched committed and established journalists be forced to quit their jobs at legacy media outlets, with some being outright dismissed by publications claiming to be “independent, always”.

On the Breaking News: The Rise of Independent Media panel, Antoun Issa (Deepcut News), Antoinette Lattouf (Ette Media), Amy Remeikis (The Australia Institute) and host Osman Faruqi (Lamestream) discussed the crisis of faith between readers and mainstream legacy media outlets, and offer a surprisingly hopeful look at what I feared to be a grim media future.

We have reached an unsettling crossroads in media coverage whereby fact checking has become political, and refusing to give equal airtime to facts and conservative conspiracies is labelled as biased coverage. The journalists on this panel are the face of a new wave of journalism, a fifth estate if you will, that prioritises independence and accuracy over the influence of the powerful that has seeped into established publications. The genocide in Palestine largely catalysed these voices to break away from legacy media to be able to speak plainly on global events without pressure from editors to pad out the truth in qualifiers and devil’s advocacy.

Where Remeikis was once fearful of maintaining relationships with morally corrupt industry actors at her legacy media job, she says that “now, I can just tell them to get fucked.” I’m hoping that this freedom will allow for the amplification of voices left underreported or misrepresented by major publications going forward.

The one thing I know to be true in this world is the fact that not a single person is truly objective. Journalism suffers as an industry from the unattainable requisite of objectivity, particularly when mass media outlets are highly privatised and exist within what Deepcut News calls the “political media establishment”. When working under the wing of these media powerhouses, journalists are afforded a shiny golden sticker of objectivity that immunises them from allegations of bias, but this is ostensibly stripped from you upon leaving the office and handing in your building pass—as the journalists on this panel have done.

“You have to work so much harder to publish the truth,” Remeikis tells us, because people come at you with counterfactuals to try and prove that the information you are publishing is biased. I am sure that this is amplified for women in the political reporting sphere, where there is a tendency to nitpick women’s words for signs of emotion or personal involvement to discredit them as hysterical. But what is the point of this false neutrality in situations that are unequal and unjust?

As Remeikis asserted to the room, “straddling both sides just so no one will attack you is not journalism.”

Issa and Faruqi spoke to the proximity to power that exists in legacy media today, meaning that the sociopolitical conversations forced into the spotlight are heavily tainted by the right-wing.

A major example of this influence is the current immigration debate, which has been stoked into an unignorable blaze by the neo-Nazi ‘March for Australia’ protests. The panel scoffed at reporting by their former employers that the neo-Nazi's were simply protesting housing—and the enemies of that concern just so happened to be migrant families.

“It’s a scary time when Nazi protests are driving national debate,” Issa says, bringing attention to the creep of access journalism in our media landscape. Access journalism is when relationships with the powerful are prioritised by the media, something that often comes from the privatisation of media outlets and has been spearheaded by the Murdoch Monopoly that exists in Western media.

Issa explains that while at The Guardian, he was often writing pieces acting as a press release for governments or major corporations. Journalism should never be a mouthpiece for power; it should fundamentally sit at a critical distance from such power structures to serve the public interest and the communication of accurate information wherever possible.

“Access journalism makes us courtiers, not insiders,” Remeikis adds, explaining that while the media continues to act as a public tastemaker, those tastes are poisoned with the dollars of the billionaire class.

The lines between the media class and the political class have become completely blurred, says Issa, something that becomes immediately obvious when political discussions are being created by the media to seamlessly supplement conservative discourse and bring it to the forefront of the zeitgeist.

While discussing the influence of political elites on legacy media, it was impossible to ignore the insidious impact of the Pro-Israel Lobby on our media institutions, and how these lobby groups operate in driving biased political rhetoric into outlets bestowed with the stamp of ‘objectivity’.

Remeikis spoke of her experience reporting at Parliament House in Canberra opening her eyes to the pervasiveness of these groups.

“Before I even got my feet under the desk, I was approached and asked if I wanted to go on a trip to Israel, all expenses paid.”

These lobby groups do not want to be seen, and their pressure on legacy media institutions has largely been concealed by the institutions themselves. But when journalists start getting threats, or unfairly dismissed due to their reporting like Lattouf was, the impact is undeniable. Issa tells the room that we must keep looking at them, because they do not want us to.

Lattouf stood up and took off the jacket to her pristine pastel matching skirt suit to reveal a cotton t-shirt reading PRESS across the front. She turned. The back of the shirt was entirely filled, shoulder to shoulder, with a list of at least 262 names.

“The biggest threat to journalists today is, undoubtedly, Israel,” she says, bringing attention to hundreds of reporters killed in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military.

I left The Capitol with not only a deep sense of responsibility but also hope, that I can exist as a journalist with a conscience, as someone bound to subjectivity by my heritage, my context. I used to worry that I could never be the journalist I wanted because I could never scrub the Indigeneity from myself, and I am not someone who can stomach going against my fundamental ethical standards. These journalists have shown me that my moral compass and my unique perspectives do not make me a ‘bad journalist’, and there is a place for me in the fifth estate alongside them.