Same-sex survey success should have calmed the contemptuous

What is wrong with modern media that so much of it is often contemptuous of mainstream values?

What is wrong with modern media that so much of it is often contemptuous of mainstream values, here and overseas?

The sacking last week of a CBS vice-president, Hayley Geftman-Gold, for a tweet implying the 59 victims of Monday’s Las Vegas massacre by gunman Stephen Paddock did not deserve sympathy because country music fans “often are Republican” was just the most outrageous recent example.

Part identity politics, part the moral vanity of the privileged, it is hard not to be astounded at how many in powerful positions in self-proclaimed progressive media organisations regularly display an anti-democratic disdain for commonly held but different views in their commentary and analysis.

Andrew Bolt on Sky News was first to point out last week, when it became clear that close to 60 per cent of Australians had already voted in the voluntary same-sex marriage plebiscite, that the strong response and separate polling by ReachTel showing overwhelming support for the Yes campaign should have calmed whining by critics of the plebiscite. The exclusive Sky News ReachTel poll of 5000 showed 64 per cent had voted yes and a further 6 per cent planned to do so. Surely such an overwhelming vote in favour of change by the wider population is better for advocates than a vote by 150 politicians, which would most likely have then remained the subject of further campaigning by No advocates.

But the plebiscite criticisms continued apace, reaching a crescendo with profoundly silly comments criticising the postal vote by 87-year-old former prime minister Bob Hawke at the National Press Club last Wednesday.

After mixing up dead former PM Malcolm Fraser and incumbent Malcolm Turnbull, Hawke criticised the plebiscite as the nation’s worst ever economic decision and claimed its $122 million cost could have done much to reverse Aboriginal disadvantage.

Well no, actually. Critics from conservative media pointed out the annual cost of government intervention in Aboriginal affairs was $30 billion, or 250 times what Hawke was complaining about.

So an old man forgets a dollar does not buy what it once did. No big deal.

But how could he forget the stupendous economic follies of the past decade? Think the BER, pink batts, set-top boxes and the original NBN from his side of politics, which combined were about 1000 times the cost of the plebiscite. Or the NBN mark 2, the $50 billion South Australian submarine boondoggle and the imploding national disability insurance scheme from the Coalition, which probably add up to even more.

With half a trillion dollars of accumulated debt since the Global Financial Crisis, the cost of the postal plebiscite is really no more than a rounding error.

Yet the usual suspects were on show to support Hawke.

On Wednesday night on the SMH Online, national affairs editor Mark Kenny quoted Hawke’s criticism approvingly after describing him in his intro as “gregarious and irreverent, the larrikin with the rapier wit”.

On Twitter that afternoon Mike Carlton retweeted another’s comment to his 120,000 followers: “Silver Bodgie vs dumped budgie smuggler. Nearly 90, Hawke is in a different league, Tony Abbott.” Twitter was full of approval for Hawke but ignored the good news about the actual plebiscite.

This paper quoted Labor frontbencher Graham Perrett, against all the evidence of the week, saying the PM “has actually caused harm and anguish and division in some sections of Australian society that’s going to be felt for years to come”. Mainly in the form of abuse of No campaigners, I would have thought, but that is not what he meant.

Surely media and political supporters should be rejoicing that the Australian public they had suspected of being redneck homophobes seems set to give SSM an even more ringing endorsement than the non-compulsory Irish referendum did. But no, the sulky lines of Labor and the Greens held sway over newly emerging facts. Why?

Many in the media just don’t respect the general public and many attribute to Labor and the Greens a kind of moral purity, as if they were not just other politicians. We see the same sort of moral posing by journalists in Britain about Brexit supporters and in the US about Trump voters.

I reckon part of the problem is the diminution of the role of editors and executive producers in many newsrooms, combined with the effects of the modern university system. Not just in journalism, but in teaching, nursing, business and even areas of science, our universities are turning out graduates who want to change the world before they have even got a start in their careers.

Some in the media, like ABC journalists John Barron and Jon Faine and Channel 10’s Waleed Aly, even used the Las Vegas massacre to make political points about the alleged Islamophobia of Western societies. They are using Las Vegas’s dead and 500 wounded to make grotesque points about Islamic terror and the guns policies of President Trump and the Republicans. Sure, it’s fine to condemn America’s obsession with guns, but the previous worst massacre in Orlando Florida happened in June last year under President Obama and Trump was only inaugurated eight months ago.

Paul Murray nailed the hypocrisy best on Wednesday night when he asked where were all the Australians in rainbow colours parading their broken hearts as they had after the massacre of 49 in the Orlando gay nightclub? Were people really indicating that the massacre of country music fans, many of them very young, was any less horrific than the massacre of gay people?

The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, rang the police soon after the shooting began to pledge allegiance to Islamic State. The police are still at a loss to understand Paddock’s motivation. But murder by a white lunatic does not excuse Islamic terror by a Muslim lunatic.

This is taking identity politics into a puerile and evil area. But it is where much of the media is today.

Rather than advocate a helping hand up for the less fortunate, they offer only a wagging finger of moral disapproval to mainstream values. They see voters who oppose SSM as evil homophobes rather than parents who hold their religious faith and family values dear. They see people who fear Islamic terrorism as Islamophobes and racists.

They see crazed killers who admit they murder westerners for political reasons as victims and Islamic terror as a rebellion against Western intolerance.