Left-wing journos need to get their hands off Twitter and engage with facts

Victorian Premier Dan Andrews has used his daily press conference ritual to take much of the media hostage — willingly, it must be admitted. Picture: Wayne Taylor

Social media’s polarisation of journalism and its associated “Murdoch Derangement Syndrome” are messing with the minds of left-wing reporters.

The Twitter feeds of many journalists are awash with criticism of any reporters, especially from this newspaper, the Herald-Sun and Sky News, who ask tough questions about Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’s handling of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Much of this ill-informed criticism comes from people who — despite a lack of evidence — sought to blame Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton for the Ruby Princess debacle in Sydney. When the Commission of Inquiry, led by Bret Walker SC, debunked that idea there was deathly silence on Twitter.

Here’s the thing. If people open their ears and minds, they will hear Sky News presenters such as Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones regularly criticising the Morrison government.

They will see that criticism of Morrison’s handling of the aged-care sector started in The Australian, and they will learn that this newspaper’s Yoni Bashan led the early breaking news on the Ruby Princess.

If they look back further, they will see The Australian scrutinised the Abbott and Turnbull governments just as it had earlier led reporting of the Rudd government’s bungled reversal of the Pacific ­Solution at the cost of 1200 ­asylum-seeker lives.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has been wrongly blamed for the Ruby Princess debacle. Picture: Sean Davey

If you look at Bolt’s blog, you can find harsh criticism of Abbott’s decision to award Prince Philip a knighthood and suggestions it could cost the then prime minister his job. Nor is Jones an automatic defender of Coalition governments. He led much of the attack on former Queensland premier Campbell Newman, who lost an unlosable state election to Annastacia Palaszczuk in 2015.

Good journalists should ask tough questions of all governments. But around the world, and particularly at our ABC, nothing Republican President Donald Trump, Tory PM Boris Johnson or our own Liberal PM Scott Morrison do can be reported fairly. Little scrutiny is applied to Joe Biden, UK Labour or the ALP.

So senior reporters who really should know better sign up to the Twitter hashtag “# I Stand With Dan” and try to delegitimise any serious reporting of what has gone wrong in the only state that has bungled its response to the coronavirus. They are blind to the fact that 701 of Australia’s 788 COVID-19 deaths (as of last Friday) and 19,728 of its 26,513 cases have all been in Victoria.

No questions to answer there, apparently.

These barrackers are happy to be fobbed off by Andrews’s politically smart decision to establish an inquiry so he does not have to ­explain to reporters who can still do journalism why the state put ­diversity ahead of safety in appointing quarantine contractors, why for months it rejected offers of help from the Australian Defence Force, and why it has bungled contact tracing.

Andrews tells a soft interview on ABC’s 7.30 on September 7 that he has never been less interested in politics, and all the media sheep tweet it out with dewy-eyed ­admiration.

This is a guy who has led his party ruthlessly for a decade. Political? Never.

In fact, Andrews has used his daily press conference ritual to take much of the media hostage — willingly, it must be admitted. After all, his only viable strategy if he wants to keep the state’s top job is to be seen by voters as the man fixing the problem he created.

This reached high farce last week when Twitter was awash with derision for comments by Morrison that Victoria should look to NSW, which he described as the “gold standard” for reopening its economy and continuing to suppress the virus. No shame on Twitter when two days later news emerged that Andrews was indeed sending a team from Melbourne to Sydney to learn from NSW’s ­contact tracers.

Herald-Sun investigations editor James Campbell nailed it on Wednesday: “No one in Melbourne likes to hear Sydney does it better. Yesterday, the government dropped the pretence that everything is fine with Victoria’s contact tracing regime. Victorian health officials will now fly to Sydney … to learn how NSW does its ‘gold standard’ contact tracing system.”

This would be the same oversight that has been repeatedly questioned by The Australian’s Rachel Baxendale — who has in turn been subjected to bullying from the usual Twitter “know nothings”.

In fact, issues within the state’s heath system, including the ­bureaucratic suppression of Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton, were detailed in this column on July 13 and by Peter van Onselen first in The Weekend Australian on June 24. The Age confirmed his analysis on July 7. The problems go back to Andrews’s own time as health minister, as even The Project’s left-wing celebrity Waleed Aly admitted in The Age on Friday.

We owe 3AW’s Neil Mitchell for one of the key revelations of the week when he interviewed Sutton last Tuesday. Sutton admitted he had not recommended the city’s nightly curfew. Then on Thursday Mitchell got Police Commissioner Shane Patton to admit the force did not ask for a curfew either.

Andrews finally admitted he was responsible for the curfew decision which he believed would make life easier for police who would not need to chase people at night for possible lockdown breaches.

That’s the same police force that on September 2 handcuffed a pregnant mum at her home — in her pyjamas and in front of her children — in response to a post she had made on Facebook.

The curfew revelations came the week after Justice Margaret McMurdo on September 1 said she would not be recommending criminal charges against police involved in the Lawyer X scandal.

This newspaper began calling for a royal commission into the ­relationship between VicPol and Victorian Labor governments more than 15 years ago — and it’s still needed.

Reporters who don’t read the news much should forget about what they imagine the politics of various outlets to be and just engage with the facts.

A good place to start is The Age splash last Friday from Victoria’s hotel quarantine inquiry. Andrews’s health bureaucrats were forced to explain why they had deliberately stopped Sutton from taking personal control of the state’s virus response. Fact.

For my money, the biggest dills last week were the Twitterati who lampooned Alan Jones for reporting that only nine per cent of Australian COVID-19 deaths were without comorbidities. Jones was quoting official Health Department figures.

If people knew more facts they would know something I have yet to hear on the ABC. The US Centres for Disease Control says only six per cent of the 196,000 coronavirus deaths there were “from COVID”, rather than with it. That is, comorbidities such as heart and lung disease actually killed most of those Americans.

It’s not hard to understand if you follow the news. This column first reported these numbers for Italy way back on March 29. The Italian Health Ministry said at the time that only 12 per cent of Italian deaths were “from COVID” and 88 per cent were with COVID and other comorbidities. Heart disease, lung disease among smokers, high blood pressure and diabetes were the main comorbidities.

All that doesn’t really fit with the preferred narrative of journos who like to scoff at conservatives, even when they are correct, and sanctify left-wing state leaders.