Mind the vitriol and keep to the centre

The best place for intelligent reporters remains the centre with an eye on left and right flanks.

At last Monday’s Sydney launch of Troy Bramston’s biography of Paul Keating by Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson there was an ­interesting discussion of Pearson’s ideas about the reforming “radical ­centre” of politics.

Keating spoke of the virtues of reforming from the centre and said real, lasting reforms could never be delivered from the far left or far right of politics. Those ­places were occupied by parties of protest.

Yet in media, as in modern politics, the centre is being ­hollowed out. This column has complained of the damaging ­effects of social media on modern journalism, especially Twitter, which is the triumph of soft feelings over hard facts.

But if Twitter is a rude, aggressive echo chamber of the left, some newspaper blog posts can be just as obnoxious, and just as far from the centre of rational discussion as Twitter’s twits. I am a keen reader of comments on Twitter and of newspaper blog posts, and I do not begrudge readers their firmly held opinions, even when they are wrong.

The democratisation of modern media is healthy if it is looked at by journalists in its proper context, but it can be dangerous if people shape their news to receive accolades from noisy, but often unrepresentative, blog posters. This is the danger of politics as clickbait. Last Monday I woke early to an angry post on my third column in as many months on Bill Leak, ­Gillian Triggs and Section 18C of the Race Discrimination Act.

Why had Mitchell done nothing about Triggs and 18C when he ran The Australian, and why did he not appeal the Andrew Bolt case to the High Court, an angry post read. I answered briefly and rationally.

Chris Kenny had been writing about Triggs for three years and I retired only 11 months ago so most of the reporting of her early problems related to the Human Rights Commission’s politicised investigation into children in detention was done in my time.

And the 2011 Mordecai Bromberg decision against Bolt under Section 18C was taken in an action by a group of Aborigines against the Herald Sun in Melbourne, a sister paper owned by a different holding company. The Australian had no legal standing in the case.

I did not say I most certainly would have taken it further had Bolt been working for me on The Australian.

I also did not say the 18C campaign in the years leading up to the election of Tony Abbott in September 2013 was largely driven by The Australian.

What puzzled me was the vitriolic nature of the post. I had ­already been surprised by the post-Trump vitriol in feedback on stories by Paul Kelly and Greg Sheridan. They are two of the country’s finest journalists and are far from left wing. They have been criticised for years in the progressive media for being too conservative.

Just as the ABC must be careful not to see far-left praise on Twitter as mainstream endorsement of its positions, newspaper columnists and editors must realise the readership centre is a long way from the sorts of posts I am about to cite.

On a piece by Kelly last Thursday that rightly condemned the opportunism of Bill Shorten’s ­attacks on Peter Dutton for saying what has been widely known for decades about Malcolm Fraser’s Lebanese concession: “Turnbull pulls off the Gloves. Paul you have lost the plot ... I know Paul you prefer Turnbull to Shorten but you are backing a dud.”

On Kelly’s regular Wednesday column, a thoughtful piece about the dangers for our country from a potential collapse in the global trading order: “Seriously Paul, you should look to your mate at PwC about that free counselling ... you would have to be Australia’s oldest snowflake but I am sure he could help out a fellow lefty.”

There have been literally hundreds like that in the past few weeks.

Now anyone who has read Kelly’s searing, Walkley Award-winning chronicle of the collapse of the Rudd and Gillard governments, Triumph and Demise, and thinks Paul is a lefty sits so far to the right that the centre of national politics is not even visible from where they are.

Examples from Sheridan’s recent columns? On a very sensible piece on November 19: “Another load of nonsense from GS. I used to think he was wise on foreign ­affairs. He knows nothing.”

Sure that’s why he has written so many books on the subject and was offered by Tony Abbott the job of high commissioner to Singapore. Or in response to Sheridan’s piece the day after the election admitting he got it wrong: “Greg is a bubble dweller. Credibility shot”. Or this one: “I think Mr Sheridan is just another media junkie out of touch with reality.”

I did write the day before the election in this column that I thought Trump could win, and that was based on what I had seen of state polling in the Mid-West. But some of the crowing by others who picked Trump is just too much in the face of the facts.

Clinton won the popular vote by more than two million and Trump became the only winner in US history to take the presidency with such a low percentage of the popular vote. And why all the crowing about what a great president Trump will be? Don’t we have to wait and see?

I believe there is a chance he could prove to be as much of a ­surprise as Ronald Reagan was, and I remember well the Left’s horror at the Reagan ascendancy. But I am not certain yet, and if you are you must be either psychic or an ideologue.

I have enjoyed watching the US electoral revolt against elite opinion. But as Bolt wrote last Thursday on his blog in response to an Andrew Hastie article in The Australian: Trump is a populist and nothing like a conservative.

It is also worth recalling that ­although Rowan Dean and Ross Cameron did pick Trump all along, Bolt, Mark Latham and Alan Jones all succumbed to the polling and thought that by election day he would fall short.

For journalists the lesson must be this: the best place for intelligent political and foreign affairs reporters remains the centre with an eye on left and right flanks.