Denis Muller, The University of Melbourne

Two long-running television current affairs programs are coming to an end at the same time, driving home the fact that no matter what the format, they have a shelf life.

The Project on Channel 10 will end this month after 16 years, and after 18 years on the ABC, Q+A will not return from its current hiatus.

Each was innovative in very different ways.

Q+A was designed specifically to generate public participation. Its format of five panellists, a host and a studio audience of up to 1,000 was a daring experiment, because the audience was invited to ask questions that were not vetted in advance.

This live-to-air approach gave it an edgy atmosphere not often achieved on television. From time to time, the edginess was real.

In 2022, an audience member made a statement supporting Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and repeated Russian propaganda to the effect that Ukraine’s Azov battalion was a Nazi group that had killed an estimated 13,000 people in the Donbas region.

After a brief discussion of these allegations, the host Stan Grant asked the man to leave, saying other audience members had been talking about family members who were dying in the war, and he could not countenance the advocating of violence.

In 2017 the Sudanese-Australian writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied was involved in a fiery exchange with Senator Jacqui Lambie over sharia law.

They had been asked by an audience member if it was time to define new rules surrounding migration to avoid community conflict, to which Lambie replied: “Anyone that supports sharia law should be deported.”

Abdel-Magied questioned if Lambie even knew what that meant, before getting into a heated defence of feminism and Islam.

In 2024, an audience member listening to politicians on the panel debate family violence could not contain his frustration, calling out:

How dare you go into politics, in an environment like this, when one woman is murdered every four days, and all you […] can do is immediately talk about politics? That is just disgraceful.

His outburst went viral.

He had put his finger on what was an increasing problem with the program. It became hostage to fixed political positions among those of its panellists drawn from party politics.

As a result, it became predictable, and although the surprise element supplied by audience participation remained a strength, the panellists’ responses increasingly became echoes of their parties’ policies.

While the objective no doubt was to achieve a range of perspectives, it began to look like stage-managed political controversy.

This is not to criticise the established presenters – Tony Jones, who fronted the program for 11 years, Stan Grant and most recently Patricia Karvelas, all gifted journalists who adroitly managed the time bombs occasionally set off in their midst.

Unfortunately, especially for Grant, the program was a lightning rod for attacks on the ABC by The Australian newspaper. ABC management’s abandonment of him, after a particularly vicious attack in 2023 over his commentary during coverage of the king’s coronation, was disgraceful.

Resigning from the program, Grant said: “Since the king’s coronation, I have seen people in the media lie and distort my words. They have tried to depict me as hate filled. They have accused me of maligning Australia. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

The ABC is promising to continue with audience-participation programming along the lines of Your Say, a kind of online questionnaire which the ABC says was successfully tried during the 2025 federal election.

How such a format would translate to television is not clear.

Meanwhile at Ten, there is promise of a new current affairs program, but details are scant.

The Project will be a hard act to follow. It promised “news done differently” – and it delivered. News stories were given context and a touch of humanity by a combination of humour, accidents, slips of the tongue and the intellectual firepower of Waleed Aly.

Aly is a Sunni Muslim, and his “ISIL is weak” speech in 2015 spoke directly and passionately to the fears of the public at the peak of one of the many panics over terrorism.

Inevitably, much of the attention in the wake of the announced closure has been on the celebrated gaffes of long-time presenter Carrie Bickmore, a little rich to be reproduced in a sober article such as this, but findable here.

It may not be an auspicious time for launching a new current affairs program at Ten. Its ultimate parent company, Paramount, in the United States, is in the process of negotiating a settlement with US President Donald Trump over a trumped-up court case in which the president is suing the company for US$20 billion (A$30.7 billion).

He says an interview done by another Paramount company, CBS News, with the Democrats’ former presidential nominee Kamala Harris during the election campaign was “deceptively edited”.

This is said to have no prospect of succeeding in court, but Paramount wishes to merge with Skydance Media and fears the Trump administration would block it if the company doesn’t come across. The Wall Street Journal is reporting it is proposing to settle for $15 million.

Senior editorial staff at CBS have already resigned in protest at Paramount’s cowardice, so what price editorial independence at Ten?

Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Peter Greste, Macquarie University

The video of a Los Angeles police officer shooting a rubber bullet at Channel Nine reporter Lauren Tomasi is as shocking as it is revealing.

In her live broadcast, Tomasi is standing to the side of a rank of police in riot gear. She describes the way they have begun firing rubber bullets to disperse protesters angry with US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.

As Tomasi finishes her sentence, the camera pans to the left, just in time to catch the officer raising his gun and firing a non-lethal round into her leg. She said a day later she is sore, but otherwise OK.

Although a more thorough investigation might find mitigating circumstances, from the video evidence, it is hard to dismiss the shot as “crossfire”. The reporter and cameraman were off to one side of the police, clearly identified and working legitimately.

The shooting is also not a one-off. Since the protests against Trump’s mass deportations policy began three days ago, a reporter with the LA Daily News and a freelance journalist have been hit with pepper balls and tear gas.

British freelance photojournalist Nick Stern also had emergency surgery to remove a three-inch plastic bullet from his leg.

In all, the Los Angeles Press Club has documented more than 30 incidents of obstruction and attacks on journalists during the protests.

Trump’s assault on the media

It now seems assaults on the media are no longer confined to warzones or despotic regimes. They are happening in American cities, in broad daylight, often at the hands of those tasked with upholding the law.

But violence is only one piece of the picture. In the nearly five months since taking office, the Trump administration has moved to defund public broadcasters, curtail access to information and undermine the credibility of independent media.

International services once used to project democratic values and American soft power around the world, such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, have all had their funding cut and been threatened with closure. (The Voice of America website is still operational but hasn’t been updated since mid-March, with one headline on the front page reading “Vatican: Francis stable, out of ‘imminent danger’ of death”).

The Associated Press, one of the most respected and important news agencies in the world, has been restricted from its access to the White House and covering Trump. The reason? It decided to defy Trump’s directive to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America.

Even broadcast licenses for major US networks, such as ABC, NBC and CBS, have been publicly threatened — a signal to editors and executives that political loyalty might soon outweigh journalistic integrity.

The Committee to Protect Journalists is more used to condemning attacks on the media in places like Russia. However, in April, it issued a report headlined: “Alarm bells: Trump’s first 100 days ramp up fear for the press, democracy”.

A requirement for peace

Why does this matter? The success of American democracy has never depended on unity or even civility. It has depended on scrutiny. A system where power is challenged, not flattered.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution – which protects freedom of speech – has long been considered the gold standard for building the institutions of free press and free expression. That only works when journalism is protected — not in theory but in practice.

Now, strikingly, the language once reserved for autocracies and failed states has begun to appear in assessments of the US. Civicus, which tracks declining democracies around the world, recently put the US on its watchlist, alongside the Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Serbia and Pakistan.

The attacks on the journalists in LA are troubling not only for their sake, but for ours. This is about civic architecture. The kind of framework that makes space for disagreement without descending into disorder.

Press freedom is not a luxury for peacetime. It is a requirement for peace.

Peter Greste, Professor of Journalism and Communications, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Emma Shortis, RMIT University

“You just [expletive] shot the reporter!”

Australian journalist Lauren Tomasi was in the middle of a live cross, covering the protests against the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy in Los Angeles, California. As Tomasi spoke to the camera, microphone in hand, an LAPD officer in the background appeared to target her directly, hitting her in the leg with a rubber bullet.

Earlier, reports emerged that British photojournalist Nick Stern was undergoing emergency surgery after also being hit by the same “non-lethal” ammunition.

The situation in Los Angeles is extremely volatile. After nonviolent protests against raids and arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began in the suburb of Paramount, US President Donald Trump issued a memo describing them as “a form of rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States”. He then deployed the National Guard.

‘Can’t you just shoot them?’

As much of the coverage has noted, this is not the first time the National Guard has been deployed to quell protests in the US.

In 1970, members of the National Guard shot and killed four students protesting the war in Vietnam at Kent State University. In 1992, the National Guard was deployed during protests in Los Angeles following the acquittal of four police officers (three of whom were white) in the severe beating of a Black man, Rodney King.

Trump has long speculated about violently deploying the National Guard and even the military against his own people.

During his first administration, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, former Secretary of Defence Mark Esper alleged that Trump asked him, “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?”

Trump has also long sought to other those opposed to his radical agenda to reshape the United States and its role in the world. He’s classified them as “un-American” and, therefore, deserving of contempt and, when he deems it necessary, violent oppression.

During last year’s election campaign, he promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”. Even the Washington Post characterised this description of Trump’s “political enemies” as “echoing Hitler, Mussolini”.

In addition, Trump has long peddled baseless conspiracies about “sanctuary cities”, such as Los Angeles. He has characterised them as lawless havens for his political enemies and places that have been “invaded” by immigrants. As anyone who has ever visited these places knows, that is not true.

It is no surprise that in the same places Trump characterises as “disgracing our country”, there has been staunch opposition to his agenda and ideology.

That opposition has coalesced in recent weeks around the activities of ICE agents, in particular. These agents, wearing masks to conceal their identities, have been arbitrarily detaining people, including US citizens and children, and disappearing people off the streets. They have also arrested caregivers, leaving children alone.

As Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic during the first iteration of Trump in America, “the cruelty is the point”.

The Trump administration’s mass deportation program is deliberately cruel and provocative. It was always only a matter of time before protests broke out.

In a democracy, nonviolent protest by hundreds or perhaps a few thousand people in a city of ten million is not a crisis. But it has always suited Trump and the movement that supports him to manufacture crises.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a key architect of the mass deportations program and a man described by a former adviser as “Waffen SS”, called the protests “an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States”. Trump himself also described protesters as “violent, insurrectionist mobs”.

Nowhere does the presidential memo deploying the National Guard name the specific location of the protests. This, and the extreme language coming out of the administration, suggests it is laying the groundwork for further escalation.

The administration could be leaving space to deploy the National Guard in other places and invoke the Insurrection Act.

Incidents involving the deployment of the National Guard are rare, though politically cataclysmic. It is rarer still for the National Guard to be deployed against the wishes of a democratically elected leader of a state, as Trump has done in California.

A broader assault on democracy

This deployment comes at a time of crisis for US democracy more broadly. Trump’s longstanding attacks against independent media – what he describes as “fake news” – are escalating. There is a reason that during the current protests, a law enforcement officer appeared so comfortable targeting a journalist, on camera.

The Trump administration is also actively targeting independent institutions such as Harvard and Columbia universities. It is also targeting and undermining judges and reducing the power of independent courts to enforce the rule of law.

Under Trump, the federal government and its state-based allies are targeting and undermining the rights of minority groups – policing the bodies of trans people, targeting reproductive rights, and beginning the process of undoing the Civil Rights Act.

Trump is, for the moment, unconstrained. Asked overnight what the bar is for deploying the Marines against protesters, Trump responded: “the bar is what I think it is”.

As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie recently observed:

We should treat Trump and his openly authoritarian administration as a failure, not just of our party system or our legal system, but of our Constitution and its ability to meaningfully constrain a destructive and system-threatening force in our political life.

While the situation in Los Angeles is unpredictable, it must be understood in the broader context of the active, violent threat the Trump administration poses to the US. As we watch, American democracy teeters on the brink.

This article was updated on June 9, 2025 to correct information about Rodney King.

Emma Shortis, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.