Consumers get a range of views about the successes and failures of US President Donald Trump from News Corp media products, but just Trump hatred at the ABC and Guardian Australia.
Same with recent domestic issues. Some commentators in the News Corp papers have supported Premier Daniel Andrews’ 112-day Melbourne lockdown, while others have been critical. The company’s reporters at the Herald Sun and The Australian have chased the facts, especially those withheld deliberately from the Coate Inquiry into Victoria’s failed hotel quarantine system.
That’s the mistake that let the virus out of Melbourne hotel quarantine, giving Victoria 819 of the country’s 907 deaths and 20,347 cases of the country’s total 27,580. Even The Age, once derided as Pravda on the Yarra, has pursued the truth about what Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton knew of the decision to award quarantine oversight to private security companies rather than police and the Australian Defence Force, as every other state did.
But the ABC has been largely incurious. Guardian Australia writer Meg Simons last Friday week argued nothing should be inferred from an email the inquiry had to ask for after Sutton had told his lawyers at MinterEllison not to send it.
Simons argued that acknowledging – in writing – a receipt of a March 27 email mentioning private security did not mean Sutton actually knew about private security. In truth, it means either that, or Sutton is a dud who does not read his emails while running the health response to a pandemic.
If Simons had been watching Sky News that week she would have seen the former Gillard government Minister Stephen Conroy, a long-time Victorian Labor powerbroker, smash Sutton for his mishandling of the quarantine issue.
Non-subscribers may not realise Labor-aligned commentators regularly appear on Sky News. Former Gillard chief of staff Nicholas Reece regularly appears on Credlin and Paul Murray Live, and Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching on Bolt. From the News Corp papers, Sky News presents a range of commentators, from conservatives such as the Herald Sun’s Rita Panahi and Terry McCrann and this newspaper’s Adam Creighton to centrists such as The Australian’s Paul Kelly, Cameron Stewart and Troy Bramston. Bolt often interviews China critic and climate activist Professor Clive Hamilton. Watching might be an eye opener for left-wing journalists who constantly criticise News Corp.
Why the left media’s need to drag the NSW Health Department’s mishandling of the Ruby Princess into every mention of Victoria’s pandemic failures?
NSW contact tracing was good enough to suppress the virus spread from the Ruby Princess. Why the constant need to blame federal Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton for the Ruby Princess when Bret Walker SC conducted a formal inquiry and blamed the state’s health department?
Why the need to compare numbers in Victoria and the UK mid-year when both had 700 daily coronavirus cases? Our national borders are closed. It’s Europe’s open borders that have unleased the latest wave of COVID-19. Victoria’s response should be compared with NSW’s.
Many reporters have been running a defence of Victorian Labor. Some have been much more professional — the day after Simons’ Guardian apologia for Sutton, Chip Le Grand in The Age published documents obtained under freedom of information making clear Sutton has a serious case to answer. The paper published an email showing Sutton definitely believed he was running his state’s virus response as early as March 13. He wrote to former Health Minister Jenny Mikakos telling her he would have to stop the Victorian Grand Prix. Albert Park’s gates were to open only an hour after the memo was sent.
Yet on Twitter there is only opprobrium for such professional journalism, and praise from the “we love Dan” brigade for Sutton and Andrews.
Here is the flaw with complaints about News Corp’s coverage: leftists want all media to fall in behind a Green Left agenda. Partly this is a natural result of spending a decade on Twitter and imagining its grubby left-wing echo chamber represents wider society.
Just as you won’t see criticism of Andrews at the ABC and Guardian Australia, you won’t find a range of views about NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and her evidence before the state’s Independent Commission Against Corruption about phone intercepts with her disgraced former lover Daryl Maguire.
Twitter twits claim News Corp commentators have been protecting her. Not so. News’s commentators have expressed a range of opinions about the issue. Doubters should check the ABC’s Media Watch program last Monday night where presenter Paul Barry was, for once, fair to Sky News. He showed extensive footage of political editor Andrew Clennell pursuing Berejiklian at press conferences and saying in interviews that Berejiklian should quit.
Sky News’s 7pm presenter Andrew Bolt took the same view on the first night of the inquiry’s public hearings. Some commentators at the News Corp papers thought she should tough it out. Others argued she must go. But at our ABC there were wall-to-wall demands Berejiklian go, even after six months of running interference for the Victorian Premier.
This is where modern journalism now is. Led by The New York Times and its publisher’s capitulation in June to the views of junior staff who felt “unsafe” because the paper published an opinion piece criticising Black Lives Matter violence, much of our journalistic class regards pursuit of a story as illegitimate unless the story damages conservatives. Facts surrender to feelings.
This column last week discussed the mainstream media’s refusal to give proper weight to the Hunter Biden emails story and the decision of Facebook and Twitter to ban The New York Post’s scoop. Never mind neither Hunter Biden nor former Vice President Joe Biden have denied the emails are real and Hunter’s business associate Tony Bobulinski has confirmed they are.
The column quoted Stanford University’s professor of journalism Ted Glasser saying journalists have to abandon objectivity and campaign for social justice.
This is journalism as social work and it’s destroying the trust of readers and viewers.
ABC management should insist the corporation tell the other side of the Trump story. Before COVID-19, the US sharemarket was at record highs, working-class wages were up and African American unemployment was at a 60-year low. The President has been in office for four years without an overseas military intervention. He has achieved more in the Middle East than his predecessors and finally done what his predecessors promised but failed to do on unfair Chinese trade policies.
The ABC might even explain the US is a federal system and health a state responsibility, even in a pandemic.
They might point out COVID death rates in the US are similar to those across western Europe.
It would do the left media good to learn it has nothing to fear from hosting a fair contest of ideas.
More Coverage
‘Offensive and untrue’: Netflix portrayal of Belle Gibson’s ‘rival’ upsets family
‘It’s a falsified dramatic fictional portrayal,’ says Tallon Pamenter, former partner of Jessica Ainscough upon whom a key character in the Netflix series is based.
Lattouf’s direct manager said she ‘tried to stop them’ in emotional exchange
Antoinette Lattouf manager told her there was pressure from higher up for her to be removed from the day she started.