Striking the balance between journalists’ private free speech rights and the public duty they owe to impartiality and their employer’s reputation is one of the most complex ethical issues confronting the media today.

It is in the spotlight again because of remarks made by Laura Tingle, chief political correspondent for the ABC’s 7.30 program and staff-elected member of the ABC board, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on the weekend.

The remarks were made on a politics panel chaired by former ABC political correspondent Barrie Cassidy, and consisting also of three other political journalists: Nikki Savva of The Sydney Morning Herald, Amy Remeikis of Guardian Australia, and Bridget Brennan, ABC presenter and former Indigenous Affairs Editor.

It’s an example of how years of social media ubiquity has created new challenges for journalists as they try to navigate the professional and personal spheres ethically.

In the context of a discussion about immigration, during which she referred to a previous remark by Savva, Tingle said:

On the night of Peter Dutton’s address-in-reply to the budget, I was sitting there with this terrible chill running through me thinking, okay, we’re back into this territory. I don’t think […] we’ve had the leader of a major political party saying everything that is going wrong in this country is because of migrants.

She continued:

I had this sudden flash of people turning up to try to rent a property or at an auction, and they look a bit different – whatever you define different as – and he has given a licence for them to be abused where people feel they are missing out. We’re a racist country, let’s face it. We always have been........

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