Left-wing journalists try to censor the inconvenient facts

The activist Left increasingly will bully any journalist impertinent enough to report facts.

NSW police take the alleged attacker into custody in Sydney’s CBD.

The hysterical preeners of the virtue-signalling Left must exhaust themselves daily with mental contortions working out what facts are suitable for public consumption and what needs to be suppressed. Slaves to political fashion, social media memes and their own sanctimony, these people seem to lack any guiding principles or ­intellectual integrity.

If they had their way, media ­reports last week would have told us about a fatal stabbing rampage and shown a man standing on a car in Sydney’s CBD, beeping out the audio of what he was yelling and telling us merely that there was some shouting. Apparently, the public could not be trusted with the knowledge that the man yelled “Allahu akbar”.

You need to remind yourself that these same activists tend to have an anarchical attitude to government secrecy, supporting the Julian Assanges of this world who would share even the most highly classified secrets. Yes, ­secrets are evil to these leftist ­activists, except the secrets they want to keep from a public they believe is not wise or woke enough to be trusted with reality.

They want to save the mainstream from their own bigotry and knee-jerk reactions. They must consider themselves secular saints — arbiters of the national debate for the common good — but in truth they are delusional.

My Sky News colleague Laura Jayes ran headlong into this idiocy when she happened to tweet breaking news from last week’s stabbing, including the fact that a man, armed with a knife, was ­yelling “Allahu akbar” as he called for police to shoot him. Jayes ­posted video showing exactly this.

If journalists start self censoring we all lose. It’s not our job to filter facts.

We are all entitled to our opinions, but not our own facts. So let’s stick to them. And I’ll keep reporting them ⁦@SkyNewsAust⁩ ⁦@newscomauHQ⁩ https://t.co/8Lra1nHDjW

— Laura Jayes (@ljayes) August 14, 2019

Soon enough on social media Jayes was criticised for being ­unhelpful, encouraging “unnec­essary othering” — whatever that is — and “Islamophobia”. News reports yesterday revealed “Allahu akbar” also got a mention on a grotesque video made by the alleged killer; I guess that should never have been reported either.

We have seen a similar response from ABC presenter and purveyor of offensive and violent abuse on social media, Benjamin Law, over transgender issues. He has slammed this newspaper for collating its extensive reporting on these issues, much of it written by Bernard Lane, on to a web page.

On the one hand Law thinks we should be alive to the complexities confronting transgender-identifying children but on the other he doesn’t want the national broadsheet to facilitate an informed discussion. Truth is, of course, he is only interested in his views and those of people he agrees with. His problem with The Australian’s coverage is simply that he won’t agree with all of it.

Benjamin Law.

Instead of welcoming a page on these issues, or perhaps offering an article, Law took to Twitter (where else?) to call it a “despicable” move to “demonise” trans and gender-variant kids and give vent to “extremist” voices. We are to presume that in an ideal world Law’s would be the first and last word on this issue.

Never mind that federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has now launched an inquiry into the medical processes involved, prompted largely by the cases and concerns reported by Lane. Federal and state medical authorities are examining whether they can handle these difficult cases better — we are left wondering whether this is acceptable to Law or whether this too fits under the category of demonisation.

Law, who still appears regularly on ABC radio and television, has publicly threatened to “hate-f*ck” Coalition politicians he disagrees with on gay issues and to “projectile diarrhoea” on the kids of other protagonists.

He sounds like a lovely chap with, at least, some expertise in the demonisation of which he speaks.

The activist Left seems to demand a virtue-signalling monoculture. We saw plenty of that last week when the Left — including most journalists, of course — sided with the illogical, hypocritical and alarmist criticism of Australia by some small island nations and New Zealand over climate action.

Cartoonists couldn’t resist drawings of drowning islands. Journalists with furrowed brows talked about the existential threat of climate change to these islands.

Never mind that Tuvalu’s land mass has expanded by almost 3 per cent over the past few decades, with three-quarters of its islands growing rather than shrinking. Never mind the most pressing dilemmas for almost all of these nations is poor governance, inadequate education, healthcare and employment opportunities.

And never mind that Australia is committed to Paris Agreement emissions reductions and that global emissions continue to rise steadily thanks mainly to China — a benefactor these Pacific nations don’t criticise. We must be the only country where our journalistic cohort’s natural disposition is to agree with any criticism of our country, no matter how ill-founded.

The facts often don’t fit the narrative, so the Left prefers to leave them out. And increasingly they will bully any journalist impertinent enough to report any facts that the green-left evangelists find too confronting.