Cherrypicking journos leave public in the dark
Last week, journalists even bagged Bari Weiss’s The Free Press website for publishing the truth about 12 Gazan children pictured in Western media as victims of starvation. All had severe illnesses, including genetic defects at birth.
Some journalists last week tried to claim there was no reason to believe ASIO in pinning blame on Iran for two anti-Jewish attacks – the firebombings late last year of a delicatessen in Sydney’s Bondi and the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne.
They seemed unaware that the Iranian Republican Guard Corps has a long history of exactly this sort of behaviour in Europe and the US, as ABC’s 7.30 revealed on Thursday night.
Why publicly prefer the credibility of the murderous, Jew-hating Nazis of Iran over a statement from our own security agencies?
It’s fascinating to reflect on how many of those urging caution about accepting ASIO’s word were only six months earlier claiming there was no evidence of anti-Semitism in Australia’s suburbs, let alone among “peaceful” bridge walkers for peace.
How would Bob Carr have known he was standing in front of posters of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini and various Hamas and ISIS flags when pictured at the Sydney Harbour Bridge walk on August 3?
After all, he was only premier of NSW for a decade, the nation’s minister for foreign affairs, and a journalist for The Bulletin magazine. Like young protesters who don’t know which river and which sea when they chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” … how was Bob to know?
Left media truth deniers, motivated solely by dislike of Donald Trump, claimed for years that former president Joe Biden was not suffering from mental decline. But even Biden knew enough to warn journalists on October 23, 2023 not to accept casualty figures from Gaza because they were Hamas’s numbers.
Too much journalism is driven by nothing more than hatred of conservative politics.
Another example: last Wednesday a second judge discredited false political claims by former Coalition staffer Brittany Higgins about a cover-up by the Morrison government of allegations she was raped by Bruce Lehrmann in March 2019 at Parliament House.
Justice Paul Tottle in the WA Supreme Court in his judgment in favour of Higgins’s former boss and minister for defence industry, Linda Reynolds, found Higgins had lied 26 times in media interviews about attempts by Reynolds and chief of staff Fiona Brown to cover up the rape allegation. Reynolds and Brown had encouraged Higgins to report it to the police, as Justice Michael Lee found in Sydney last year.
Leaked recordings of talks between Higgins, her now husband David Sharaz and staff at Ten’s The Project made it clear Ten was interested in the story because of the political impact it could have on the Morrison government.
It gets worse: anything negative, however false, can be written to damage US President Trump.
Hence the Russiagate allegations of Trump collusion with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 US election campaign. You would not know from mainstream reporting here or in the US that the latest document releases prove the entire story was false and senior intelligence figures privately said so at the time.
Readers interested in the latest documents released by Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and FBI director Kash Patel can read the details on Substack via Matt Taibbi’s Racket News and Michael Shellenberger’s Public.
ABC’s Media Watch owes it to the public to examine how current 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson screwed up her pretentiously named three-part “Story of the Century” for ABC Four Corners in 2018. She uncritically accepted the words of Democrats-aligned national security figures who knew all along the story was false.
And while at it, new Media Watch host Linton Besser should look at predecessor Paul Barry’s campaign against Sky News Australia host Sharri Markson over her reporting of the Covid-19 virus leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology – a claim that we now know was true.
Yet these are small failures compared with the mainstream media’s refusal to engage with the facts on the renewable energy transition or the latest climate change projections.
This column and The Australian’s Chris Uhlmann have for years discussed problems with electricity grid stability when high penetrations of renewables are reached. This is not just about the unreliability of wind and solar generation but about the physics and engineering involved in integrating different power sources without the system inertia provided by large spinning generators.
California has again faced blackouts this northern summer and Spain and Portugal endured a total system shutdown. Reporters at the Nine papers, Guardian Australia and ABC won’t report the issues – even though the Australian Energy Market Operator has begun to admit there is such a problem.
Now a new paper commissioned by Trump’s Energy Department director, Chris Wright, is being ignored by most media.
Wright’s panel, commissioned to report on the latest climate science to the US Department of Energy, have been bagged in mastheads such as the Guardian for being sceptical about climate doom predictions.
Yet all are serious experts. Professor Judith Curry from Georgia Tech runs the popular Climate Etc blog, Roy Spencer is a prolific researcher and former NASA scientist, Steve Koonin was undersecretary of energy to president Barack Obama, John Christy is an atmospheric scientist from the University of Alabama, and Ross McKitrick is a highly credentialed Canadian environmental economist.
Their paper, only 150 pages and easily available on the US DoE website, confirms most of what Uhlmann, The Australian’s environment editor Graham Lloyd and this column have been writing for years: the careful findings of IPCC reports are overcooked by the media and the UN.
This column can find no coverage of the report here apart from the Guardian’s criticism of it and a piece by Andrew Bolt on Sky News (available on YouTube) that includes an interview with Koonin.
The report concludes that most climate models continue to run too hot and cannot be accurately retrofitted to past warmings. Climate change is not a massive threat to the global economy, there is no evidence in US records for predictions of increased hurricane and tornado activity, flooding or bushfire events.
It finds increasing CO2 is greening the planet and is making the oceans less alkaline, but says the Great Barrier Reef’s health suggests corals are coping with this.
Global sea levels have risen eight inches (20cm) since 1900 but there are significant regional variations attributable to land rising or falling and to erosion, and the effects of damming large US rivers that limits silt build-up in delta areas.
While they accept man-made CO2 is affecting the climate, they point out that cold weather is a far bigger threat to human life than hot weather.
Yet many in the media say we have only until 2030 to save the climate. King Charles has said it many times. This is the sort of stuff real journalists need to call out – just like false photos of Gazan children.
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