Newspapers must not criticize the Greens?

Australia has a "Green" (actually far-Left) political party that gets some seats in the Australian Senate. The ABC is Australia's public broadcaster. The Australian is Australia's national daily newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch, of Fox News fame.

"The ABC's Media Watch, hosted by Paul Barry, criticised The Australian on Monday night for its coverage of the Greens, saying "since it became clear the Greens might hold the balance of power, The Australian has been targeting them with a succession of negative articles".

The Australian's editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, sent a detailed response to Media Watch's questions but Barry aired only one sentence.

One criticism from Greens leader Bob Brown is that The Australian has run more than 20 articles critical of the party since August 15, just days before the election.

Mitchell had noted that since August 15, the paper "would have run several hundred political stories". "Twenty negatives on the Greens seems very few," he told Media Watch.

"We would have run many more negative stories about Labor and the Coalition in that period." He added the Greens' "views on the economy, death taxes, the shutting down of the coal industry, etc, need to be widely reported".

Source

What the newspaper did was "out" the far-Left policies in the platform of the Green party -- pointing out how extreme they are. Very few Australians would have read the platform for themselves and would have just assumed that the Greens were simple tree-huggers. If the Greens don't like their policies becoming known, they should change them.