You’ve got to love the left if you are a journalist today, or risk being branded amoral.
At the ABC, Guardian Australia, and now Al Jazeera in a silly piece about News Corp’s coverage of coronavirus, journalists who ask important questions about COVID-19 or climate change must be doing so to curry favour with Rupert Murdoch.
Al Jazeera, in a half-hour show called “Murdoch’s Misinformation: COVID-19, China and climate change”, quoted two former prime ministers tossed out by their own parties. Never mind Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull remain hated by most of their former parliamentary colleagues in the ALP and Coalition respectively. Al Jazeera rolled out Turnbull and quoted Rudd about the Murdoch papers’ coverage of climate change. It glossed over the fact both lost their leadership – Turnbull twice – after tripping over their own climate policies: Rudd in 2010 and Turnbull as PM in 2018 and opposition leader in 2009.
Al Jazeera did what Media Watch has been doing for decades, insisting there is no scientific debate about climate change because the science is settled. Except it really isn’t as journalists with any curiosity can learn for themselves on science blogs or by reading successive reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that show the Guardian’s favoured RCP 8.5 climate crisis by 2030 scenario is a deliberate statistical outlier the IPCC itself does not predict.
The truth is despite Al Jazeera’s stitch-up, the positions of different journalists within News are different. This paper as far back as 2002 supported a market mechanism to reduce emissions at the cheapest possible price: just as John Howard did at the 2007 election.
Nor do News Corp commentators Andrew Bolt, Chris Kenny or Peta Credlin deny the climate is changing. They ask sensible questions about the cost of mitigating it. Fair enough, given there is as yet no viable baseload alternative to gas, coal, uranium or hydro when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.
Rather than accept commentators can have legitimately held views, critics trying to delegitimise popular media businesses insist this is all part of a conspiracy by News to profit from denialism, effectively painting people such as Bolt, Kenny and Credlin as amoral. Editing this paper I had spectacular disagreements with all three, but I know them to be brave, serious, committed and honest. They are not told what to think by anyone.
The latest battlefield in the “War On Murdoch” is COVID-19. Critics are using the same delegitimisation tactics. They dishonestly brand any criticism of lockdown strategies as denial of science.
Bolt has quite correctly argued since late March that the best strategy to save lives from COVID-19 would be to keep the virus out of aged-care homes. Bolt was angry last week that Prime Minister Scott Morrison had repeated criticisms by partisan journalists claiming Bolt is prepared to risk the lives of the elderly. He has said the opposite for months.
Nor are SkyNews’s commentators speaking with one voice. Credlin is more cautious of the virus than many fellow presenters, while Alan Jones is more dismissive of it, as this column noted on July 27. Many have criticised this paper’s economics editor, Adam Creighton, for asking whether the damage done by hard lockdowns might not prove worse than the virus. Yet commentators around the world as far back as March have pointed out there are no proven vaccines for any coronaviruses and if one is not forthcoming humans will indeed need to adapt to living with COVID-19.
Creighton is a highly trained, prize-winning economist who has worked for the Reserve Bank and written for The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Jessica Irvine, economics writer at the left-leaning Channel 9 newspapers, has also written extensively about the high economic costs of lockdowns and their unintended adverse consequences. Her morality is not questioned by Creighton’s Twitter persecutors.
Can any journalist – citizen even – really be so economically illiterate as to believe shutting down a large city such as Auckland for four cases (36 by Friday) of COVID-19 is a reasonable strategy? Can any journalist be so politically illiterate as not to link NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s latest lockdown to the looming national election?
This is all about politics. Journalists give the game away on Twitter daily when they defend Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews despite abundant evidence of his government’s mistakes while blaming Morrison and Peter Dutton for the Ruby Princess debacle despite abundant evidence NSW Health was the major problem.
Journalists who hate News Corp’s work need to ask if their own political biases do not contribute to the success of News Corp and products such as FoxNews. A look at the latest elections in the US, UK and Australia should give them a clue about how out of touch they are with voters.
It is not just the biases of activist journalists that undermine the “corona-narrative” about News Corp: many of its most senior journalists have supported lockdowns, starting with SkyNews’s political editor, Andrew Clennell, and this newspaper’s Greg Sheridan, Dennis Shanahan and Paul Kelly.
Journalists need to ask questions of governments of all political complexions, not just conservative governments. This column three weeks ago argued reporting of the virus was becoming a culture war that young journalists should resist by holding all authorities to account.
The mainstream newspapers have by and large done this well. On Twitter, critics claim News has run a protection racket for the Berejiklian government and Dutton’s Australian Border Force over the Ruby Princess.
In truth this newspaper’s NSW political correspondent, Yoni Bashan, broke many of the early stories about failures of process in the handling of the Ruby Princess’s return to Sydney on March 19.
News Corp’s Herald Sun and the Channel 9-owned The Age have exposed the truth of Victoria’s hotel quarantine debacle. What we know, despite ranting by Twitter users who would know better if they actually read the papers, is the federal government and the military did indeed offer troops to help with Melbourne quarantine in both March and June.
Yet senior journalists last week tweeted out false claims Defence Minister Linda Reynolds lied in a press release outlining offers of ADF personnel.
Equally, News Corp – and all media – should apply the blowtorch to the federal government over the failures of the aged-care system it oversees and the aged-care regulator it funds. Bolt and this newspaper’s Niki Savva have done so.
Critics of this company face some unpleasant truths about their own political obsessions. US polling by Gallup and Harris Poll suggests concern about climate change is collapsing in the face of COVID-19 and recession. Economists and epidemiologists differ on responses to the virus, just as economists and scientists differ on responses to climate change. Our job is to report it all; not join the left media in censoring things left-wing politicians disagree with.
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