By Dr Dan Mealey, former SASR member who served in Afghanistan
How Australia’s media, police theatre, and institutional cowardice have spent a decade turning Ben Roberts-Smith into a pre-trial symbol of disgrace, danger, and presumed guilt.
Another ANZAC Day approaches, and with it will come the familiar pageantry of top brass solemnly reciting “Lest We Forget” from the pulpit of performative reverence, feigning support for the Australian soldier while betraying the very spirit those words are meant to honour.
Excuse my cynicism.
Credit where credit is due: the top brass has become exceptionally performative in their concern toward soldiers suffering from PTSD, a label that conveniently shifts the focus and the locus of 1,800 veteran suicides away from their leadership failure, toward their soldiers’ mental problems.
Excuse my cynicism, once again. But the wounds borne by Australian soldiers run deeper than PTSD, and Ben Roberts-Smith’s ordeal is emblematic of those deeper injuries.
For the last decade, Australia has watched something sinister in motion. It has watched the manufacture of guilt – a guilt assembled in headlines, repeated in media introductions, fused into imagery, and then fed to the public until a man’s legal status becomes almost irrelevant beside the public identity constructed for him.
The contamination has not been subtle. The ABC, The Guardian and countless other news outlets have for the last decade introduced Roberts-Smith, as “Disgraced War Criminal, Ben Roberts-Smith,” with this accusation preceding a criminal court process.
These are not neutral descriptions floating harmlessly above a pending criminal process. They are branding tools. They are cues. They tell the public not merely that allegations exist, but what moral conclusion it is expected to reach before the criminal trial has even begun. They tell the country what sort of man he is supposed to be. Importantly, they tell potential jurors what emotional posture to adopt before evidence is tested in the only forum that is meant to matter.
This is the poison of media contamination. Once a man is introduced for years as disgraced, criminal, fallen, toxic, and morally finished, the ritual disclaimer about the presumption of innocence becomes little more than wig-and-robe judicial pageantry. Officials still mouth it, journalists still occasionally nod at it. But presumption of innocence is not preserved by muttering the phrase after you have spent a decade salting the earth around it.
Police media offices were never created primarily for some romantic ideal of transparency. Scotland Yard’s first formal press office was about control, and the logic has endured: control the first version of events, suppress rumours, maintain confidence, assist investigations, deter wrongdoing, and protect the institution. Some of those purposes are legitimate. Some are deeply uncomfortable. All of them sit in tension with the presumption of innocence when the machinery of publicity is unleashed before a person has even stood before a court.
Criminal Lawyer, and former Police Prosecutor James Glissan offers a detailed legal analysis of how criminal law proceedings really work, explaining the court procedure from arrest to court hearing, and clarifying the nuances of a lawsuit explained in plain English.
The point made in Criminal Lawyer James Glissan’s linked analysis above is devastating because it is true in practice: once the first story is out, once the images are released, once the name is everywhere, the damage is done. The first statement becomes the headline. The correction, if it ever comes, becomes a much less sensational (and hense an entirely unnoticed) footnote.
And in the Roberts-Smith case, the visual theatre was not incidental. The official AFP and Office of the Special Investigator media release stated: “Images of the arrest and the press conference is available via Hightail.” That line is chilling. It reveals the modern architecture of criminal publicity in its rawest form. Before a criminal trial has begun, before a jury is empanelled, before the accused has had his day in court, the State is already packaging the imagery of guilt for distribution. The law may still speak of innocence. The image does not.
And images are everything.
The point made in Criminal Lawyer James Glissan’s linked analysis above is devastating because it is true in practice: once the first story is out, once the images are released, once the name is everywhere, the damage is done. The first statement becomes the headline. The correction, if it ever comes, becomes a much less sensational (and hense an entirely unnoticed) footnote.
And in the Roberts-Smith case, the visual theatre was not incidental. The official AFP and Office of the Special Investigator media release stated: “Images of the arrest and the press conference is available via Hightail.” That line is chilling. It reveals the modern architecture of criminal publicity in its rawest form. Before a criminal trial has begun, before a jury is empanelled, before the accused has had his day in court, the State is already packaging the imagery of guilt for distribution. The law may still speak of innocence. The image does not.
And images are everything.
A man is arrested in public. Cameras are present. Police uniforms fill the frame. Police cars, lights, handcuffs, urgency, spectacle, force. The message this sends to the public is not quiet, not restrained, and not procedural. It is thunderous. This man is dangerous. This man is criminal. This man is a flight risk. This man is already, in some deeper public sense, guilty. That is what spectacle does. It bypasses the intellect and colonises the imagination. Most importantly, it colonises the imagination of the very citizenry from which jurors are drawn.
Which brings us to the most disturbing feature of all.
It is one thing, already bad enough, for police and prosecutors to use pre-arranged media architecture for the institutional purposes set out in policy logic.
It is another thing entirely when police and prosecutors serve the very journalist at the heart of the Roberts-Smith defamation saga, by giving that journalist the scoop.
On the day of the arrest, ABC’s 7.30 immediately turned to Nick McKenzie, describing him as one of the reporting duo who revealed the allegations, and asked for his response to “those images we just saw.”
Whether every operational detail is ever forced into daylight or not, the appearance is grotesque enough. The journalist whose career and Walkley Awards have been inseparable from Roberts-Smith’s destruction, was preferentially given a front-row seat by the AFP to report on the arrest in real-time, while the State distributed the imagery. That is not the clean separation of institutions. It is a grotesque convergence of State power and media appetite.
And that’s the point that should enrage every Australian who still cares about fairness.
Because once the media class has spent years defining a man with terms like “disgraced” and “war criminal”, and once cameras are rolling as police lights flash and handcuffs appear, the practical message to the world is no longer merely that charges exist. The message is much louder than that. The message is that this man has already been morally sorted. That he is not just accused, but marked. Not just charged, but dangerous. It is a message directed to the public, to employers, to neighbours, to families, and most dangerously of all, to potential jurors, that this man is guilty.
That’s why this is bigger than Ben Roberts-Smith.
This is about whether Australia still understands the difference between reporting and conditioning. Between justice and theatre. Between due process and public ritual humiliation.
And Australia should know better, because Australia has already lived through a catastrophic warning. On 7 April 2020, the High Court of Australia unanimously allowed Cardinal George Pell’s appeal and quashed his convictions. Unanimously. Seven to zero. Before that, Pell had been subjected to years of sustained and fevered media condemnation, then imprisoned for more than 400 days before the High Court overturned the case. This lesson should have been seared into the national mind: media frenzy is not truth, moral certainty is not proof, and institutions can be swept along by the passions of an aroused public circus.
That’s why the comparison matters. Like Pell, Roberts-Smith has become the unwilling centrepiece of a collapse in moral and judicial restraint. In both cases, there’s the same foul blurring of truth and “public interest”, the same risk that prosecutorial or investigative judgment becomes infected by a media culture that mistakes social engineering for reporting. The more serious the allegation, the more easily the phrase “public interest” becomes a weapon in the hands of journalists who imagine themselves not as reporters of fact, but as conductors of national morality.
The Prosecution Policy of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) holds the position that “the more serious the alleged offence is, the more likely it will be that the public interest will require that a prosecution be pursued.” That said, here lies the Achilles heel of the DPP, because it’s not the public defining what is in the “public interest.” “Public interest” is in the toolkit of journalists. And too many of them have abused that privilege, using it not to inform the public but to pre-define what the public should feel, fear, and condemn.
“Public interest” has become a mask behind which journalists pursue narrative dominance, professional glory and ideological malice. Once that happens, the distinction between fact-reporting and social engineering collapses. What remains is a press class that has confused its role with that of a national conscience.
And when this goes wrong, when journalistic impropriety is exposed, when courts reveal how much of public understanding has been shaped by appetite, omission, insinuation, theatrical framing, and selective moralism, what consequences follow? Usually none. No genuine remorse. No proportional accountability. Certainly no equivalent suffering to the suffering inflicted on those they have publicly branded for years.
That is why the Roberts-Smith affair is not merely about one soldier. It is about the sickness of a culture.
This sickness has many fathers: a media class intoxicated by its own righteousness, institutions more interested in controlling narratives than protecting fairness, and a broader national envy that delights in cutting down men who are conspicuous, decorated, physically imposing, inconvenient, or difficult to fit into fashionable ideological scripts.
Australia has not simply scrutinised one of its most decorated soldiers. It has culturally stalked him. It has permitted envy, moral vanity, and bureaucratic self-protection to merge into a campaign of destruction.
And the people who carry the heaviest part of that burden are not the editors, not the police media units, not the commentators, not the prosecutorial bureaucrats, and not the journalists collecting prestige, ratings, and awards from the carnage.
It’s Ben’s family.
It’s those who love him.
It’s his parents.
It’s his two teenage daughters reduced to hysteria watching their Dad arrested with calculated and premeditated malice.
It’s the people forced to watch a son, a father, a human being turned into a national symbol of disgrace while the legal process that is supposed to test guilt has scarcely begun.
They are made to absorb not only fear, but humiliation by proxy.
This isn’t justice. This isn’t a fair go. This is not Australia.
And the final obscenity is this: once a nation gets used to this process, once it accepts that loaded labels, strategic imagery, police-media choreography, and years of narrative conditioning are simply how high-profile justice now works, then the presumption of innocence is dead in everything but name. It survives only as a phrase spoken by officials while the cameras roll and the Hightail links circulate.
Australia should be ashamed that it has come to this.
Ashamed that so many journalists are no longer capable of restraint.
Ashamed that a criminal trial can be prefaced by a decade of branding and an arrest presented like an episode finale.
Ashamed that so many people now seem unable, or unwilling, to recognise the difference between an equitable court process, and a town square lynching.
And most of all, ashamed of the leaders who will soon stand at ANZAC Day podiums intoning “Lest we forget,” while having long since forgotten their own soldiers, their dignity, and their right to fairness before the law.
A nation that permits this cannot credibly claim to honour service. It merely exploits soldiers in war, abandons them in peace, and then wraps their betrayal in self-serving ceremony.
An Analytical Briefing (Version 6) Pre-arrest Publication is an IT forensic investigation report undertaken by the legal defence team which found Channel 9 Reporter Nick McKenzie filed his story about the arrest of Ben Roberts Smith at Sydney Airport the day before the arrest clearing showing he had been tipped off by the AFP.
The Finding
Nick McKenzie — the Nine Entertainment investigative journalist who has
reported on Ben Roberts-Smith for almost a decade, was a named defendant in
Roberts-Smith’s defamation proceedings, and has an admitted history of ethical
misconduct in this specific matter — filed an article on the Sydney Morning
Herald’s systems on 6 April 2026.
Roberts-Smith was arrested on 7 April 2026.
The article was titled: ‘ben-roberts-smith-arrested-over-multiple-war-crimes’
The arrest had not yet happened when the article was filed.
This means someone with advance knowledge of a classified AFP operational
arrest — flight details, timing, airport location — provided that information to
McKenzie before the arrest occurred. McKenzie is not a neutral journalist in this
matter. He is a direct participant in the preceding civil litigation with a
documented personal and professional stake in the outcome of this prosecution.
Cairns News has a complete copy of the forensic report which will be published shortly.#
