Misinformation is a problem for the left media as well as the far right

Former US National Institutes of Health director Dr Anthony Fauci.

Journalists at media businesses of the left seem to believe misinformation is predominantly a problem of the far right.

While there are plenty of nutty internet conspiracy theories on the right and some crazy news sources, this column believes some of the most damaging misinformation is delivered by trusted experts trying to reinforce political false narratives national governments find appealing.

Think of the latest revelations in this column a fortnight ago and by this paper’s Sharri Markson on Saturday July 29 about private communications between scientists working to debunk the Covid-19 laboratory leak theory. These scientists were working on behalf of US National Institutes of Health director Anthony Fauci in February and March 2020 trying to disprove lab origin, even though their private communications indicate they thought a lab leak very plausible.

Much of the left media has spent more than three years desperately trying to brand the lab leak a conspiracy theory even though it was obvious all along a leak was a possibility. As this column observed in May 2020, of the two Chinese outbreaks of SARS in 2002 and 2004 the first came from a wet market and the second from a Beijing laboratory.

Fauci was given soft interviews in Australia last week by the Nine papers and ABC RN Mornings. Fauci had been sent questions on July 18 by Markson for her piece in The Weekend Australian Magazine.

Any spin doctor knowing Fauci was to speak on a virtual panel at a Brisbane AIDS treatment event on July 23 and aware of the upcoming Markson story would have advised Fauci to try to get some soft media in advance.

He certainly got it. Neither RN host Patricia Karvelas nor Sydney Morning Herald health writer Angus Thomson mentioned the lab leak in pieces that ran respectively on July 28 and July 27. Thomson even led his story with Fauci’s praise for Australia rejecting conspiracy theories about scientists working on the pandemic. Never mind those scientists had already been publicly revealed in a US congressional hearing to have had concerns the virus might indeed have been created in a lab – a lab in Wuhan partly funded by Fauci.

Similarly, Karvelas on July 26 gave former Coalition prime minister Malcolm Turnbull a free kick at News Corp, publisher of this paper and owner of Sky News Australia. Karvelas let Turnbull make wild claims about Sky News’s coverage of the campaign for an Aboriginal voice to parliament without once mentioning that in office Turnbull himself in 2017 described the voice as a “third chamber of parliament” and ruled it out unequivocally.

Jim Skea is the new head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Picture: AFP

Kim Landers on ABC AM on August 1 did not question misinformation from Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek who claimed the Great Barrier Reef had been kept off the UNESCO World Heritage endangered list by Labor’s better environment policies. Landers did not mention the Australian Institute of Marine Science state of the reef report last year found coral cover across the central and northern reef the best in recorded history.

Similar misinformation slips in regularly in reporting of Australia’s renewable energy transition. The latest Net Zero Australia policy group estimate of the costs of new poles and wires, wind turbines, solar farms and battery and pumped hydro storage is between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion by 2030. That hits up to $9 trillion by 2060. But journalists keep repeating Labor’s line – disinformation – that renewables are the cheapest form of energy.

Environment reporters slavishly repeat the inane slogans of UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres who dominated headlines here with a foolish claim the world had moved from the era of global warming “to the era of global boiling”. By now even the dumbest environment writer should be able to tell when global temperatures are up because of an El Nino weather pattern.

In truth, global average daily temperature the week Guterres made his silly statement was 17.2c. Boiling point is 100c. And, as many scientists have pointed out, the idea of a single global average temperature is silly.

A far more newsworthy statement was made the same week by the new head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change but ignored by most climate writers. Scottish scientist Professor Jim Skea told German newspaper Der Spiegel it was wrong for climate scientists “to imply temperature increases of 1.5C posed an existential threat to humanity”.

The rise in temperature since pre-industrial time is 1.1C, so 2030 “doomers” such as Greta Thunberg are in effect arguing that an extra 0.4C will cause a global extinction crisis. No serious scientist believes it and no IPCC report argues it. Yet Guardian Australia, the ABC and the Nine papers report this misinformation regularly.

Why would they ignore the truth from the IPCC’s new boss? It’s part of a business model based on fear driving clicks to stories by climate activist reporters. It’s where news sites without paywalls go to generate advertising revenue linked to website traffic.

There are a few facts all science writers and good editors should know. Cold weather kills far more people annually than heat. The IPCC has for years made it clear individual weather events cannot be linked to climate change. NASA satellite records prove the area of the globe affected annually by forest fires continues to fall, even during the 2019-20 bushfire season here and in this northern hemisphere fire season.

Nor is it just in politically contentious fields that journalists have moved from sceptical observers to political enforcers of government misinformation. Reporting of the failed rape trial of former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann in the ACT is a case in point.

This paper’s Janet Albrechtsen and Stephen Rice last Thursday published the findings of the Sofronoff inquiry into the collapse of the trial of Lehrmann over the alleged March 2019 rape of Brittany Higgins in Parliament House. Former Queensland judge Walter Sofronoff’s report is scathing about former ACT DPP Shane Drumgold, who was found to have lied to ACT Chief Justice Lucy McCallum and withheld a police report Lehrmann’s lawyers should have been given.

The report vindicates analysis and news stories published by Albrechtsen and Rice since the trial was aborted over juror misconduct on October 26 last year. Anyone not following The Australian will have had no idea about the events detailed by Sofronoff.

Throughout that period news organisations of the left maintained hostile coverage of Albrechtsen’s work and were used by friendly leaks of false information from Drumgold, especially Guardian Australia.

In this MeToo environment, Higgins’s rape story was pursued without a second thought about the presumption of innocence owed to Lehrmann. Lehrmann denies the rape and says nothing happened that night.

Long-time leading civil libertarian Terry O’Gorman summed it up for this column last December 11: “What Janet Albrechtsen has written about the rights of the accused is correct. Some people on the left just won’t read her. I say to them, you have to read people you don’t agree with because it might actually cause you to change your own views.”

O’Gorman reflects the values of a time when lawyers and journalists thought their highest duty was to strive for the truth. Now many journalists flatly refuse to engage with the truth. Think Media Watch’s refusal to deal fairly with Markson over her Wuhan virus coverage.