ABC Friends Tasmania and the University of Tasmania School of Creative Arts and Media invite you to - Dying to Tell the Story - why frontline journalism has never been more important and never more dangerous, and how correspondents cope.

In the first three months of the war in Gaza, at least 79 journalists were killed. The shocking tally includes 73 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza, four Israelis who died in the initial assault by Hamas militants, and three Lebanese who were killed in an Israeli airstrike over the border into southern Lebanon. Those figures are at least partly responsible for pushing the number of media workers killed in the line of duty around the world to near record highs. At the same time, a staggering 321 are behind bars — the second highest on record.

What are the risks of working on front lines? How do journalists navigate the physical, psychological and editorial challenges of operating in the world’s most dangerous environments? And why have things gotten so bad? In this enlightening and at times shocking lecture, one of Australia’s most experienced foreign correspondents, Peter Greste, will explain how reporters operate, the difficulties they face, and why it matters to all of us.

An Australian academic, memoirist and writer, Peter Greste was formerly a journalist working with Reuters, CNN, the BBC and Al Jazeera with extensive experience in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. In December 2013, Greste and two Al Jazeera colleagues were arrested by Egyptian authorities and subsequently sentenced to seven years imprisonment for allegedly falsifying news and having a negative impact on overseas perceptions of Egypt. Following intervention by the Australian Government, Greste was deported to Australia in February 2015.

Since returning to Australia, Greste has directed and participated in the Four Corners documentary Facebook: Cracking the Code (2017), the TV documentary mini-series Monash and Me (2018) about Sir John Monash and Greste’s family’s connections with Monash’s First Australian Imperial Force and, in 2018, was appointed UNESCO Chair in Journalism and Communications at the University of Queensland. In 2019, with lawyer Chris Flynn and journalist Peter Wilkinson, Greste co-founded the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, and in 2022 was appointed adjunct professor of journalism at Macquarie University.

Peter Greste’s lecture is one of a number of events on which the UTAS School of Creative Arts and Media and ABC Friends Tasmania have collaborated. Both organisations have a strong interest in informing people about how the media functions in our society and the role it plays in underpinning a healthy democracy.  Issues Peter’s lecture is likely to explore include the challenges journalists face and the skills they require in performing their roles, tensions around questions of objectivity and subjective argumentation, and the nature and importance of ‘the public interest’.