The hidden media truth behind Palestine, Kirk and the climate
Global news last week was dominated by the recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state, blanket coverage of the funeral of young US political activist Charlie Kirk – hailed by the right as a free speech messiah but derided on the left as a gun-toting extremist – and the short-lived sacking of late-night television comedy show host Jimmy Kimmel, who had criticised Kirk.
In truth, those recognising Palestine were signing up to a list already 150 countries long, and despite the extensive coverage in Australia of his murder and funeral Kirk was largely unknown outside the US. Kimmel’s temporary axing became a rallying point for free speech advocates debating whether the left or right was more committed to censorship.
Just as social media algorithms send users ever more content about things they have already clicked on, culture war commentary now drives much of modern media and politics, taking resources away from important news investigations and political policymaking.
This year’s federal election was a petri dish of the phenomenon: Labor promoted its generosity to younger Australians by rolling out Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on youth podcasts and social media. It offered little in the way of policy beyond a splurge of taxpayer money but most journalists went along with it because their readers want free money, unsurprisingly.
The Coalition didn’t even release many of its policies. It focused on deriding Albanese about high cost-of-living issues while promising higher tax rates of its own.
It went to the poll with a nuclear power plan it scarcely campaigned on and refused to engage in advocacy against Labor’s net zero by 2050 policies, even though that was the motivation for the nuclear plan.
On Wednesday last week, The Australian reported the Australian Human Rights Commission had told a Senate hearing that regulation might be needed to prevent misinformation on climate change. The AHRC was not reflecting on misinformation promoted by the federal government on September 15.
Many reporters failed to point out the Albanese government had misrepresented the data included in its own detailed documents on deaths from heat, increasing fires, floods and cyclones, and likely sea level rises.
In effect, media outlets that are favoured by those who believe climate alarmist predictions failed to call out the misinformation in a document used as cover for increasing emissions reduction targets of 62-70 per cent.
At The Australian, Chris Uhlmann did the detailed reading. While the National Climate Risk Assessment included in its technical annex an admission that global warming would reduce deaths from cold, only a percentage rise in deaths from heat was reported in the headline release.
The 444 per cent increase in heat-related deaths was the focus because the absolute number of deaths over the next 65 years would have been only a fraction of the number of deaths in, say, car accidents. Excess heat death totals would have been outnumbered by lives saved from easing of cold conditions.
Alarming predictions about natural disasters failed to mention most were forecast with “low confidence’’ by climate scientists.
This column in 2017 discussed the role of social media in privileging feelings over facts and how that was hurting journalism. The situation has only deteriorated since.
Last week Substack published a compelling essay that links the rise of smartphones to a global decline in school students’ reading, reading ability and even IQ.
“The Dawn of the post-literate society”, by James Marriott, on the Cultural Capital site, quotes university educators discussing young students arriving at prestigious universities unable to read a complete book. Many have only read parts of texts in their entire school years.
Marriott cites 2010 as the year when Western IQs began falling after a century of climbing. This was also the year global school tests began flatlining. Mariott argues this matters because history’s greatest political leaders and artists were once prolific readers.
He links reading by the masses to the rise of democracy. “Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print – the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines – with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement, Marriott writes.”
“In this environment ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticise them and perhaps to change them.”
Now politicians can use social media algorithms to win mass approval via brief messages on social media.
Globally, Palestinianism is riding the surge in smartphone use, surpassing the issue of climate change in online activism.
People consuming content created by Hamas – purportedly from Gaza but some of it proven to be shot in other wars – are leading a drumbeat for recognition of a Palestinian state that was offered by the UK in the Peel Commission report in 1937, at the UN in 1947 and by Israel in the Oslo Accords signed in 1993.
These offers were rejected each time, often in violent attacks against Israel, which was smart enough to accept UN Resolution 181 and proclaim independence in 1948.
Journalists and politicians of the left remain positive about Palestinian statehood, yet the Ramallah-based Centre for Policy and Survey Research has been clear for almost two years that Hamas is more popular than the Palestinian Authority, suggesting claims that Hamas can have no role in a future state may prove unenforceable.
Hamas’s barbarism on October 7, 2023, has destroyed the once strong Israeli support for Palestinian statehood. Remember the two-state solution at Oslo was proposed to PLO leader Yasser Arafat by the late Israeli Labor leader Yitzhak Rabin.
And what of Charlie Kirk’s senseless murder? Surely the world’s media could have done better than battle over whether left or right are more violent in modern America.
The real story – yet again – is the need for US gun law reform, the role of mental illness in gun violence, and the need for students to go back to books and ditch keyboard warrior activism.
Jimmy Kimmel and free speech? This column reckons US President Donald Trump and his Federal Communications Commission chief, Brendan Carr, were mad to buy into the issue.
Censorship has been a project of the left in recent decades, and especially during and since the pandemic.
Trump should have emphasised American Broadcasting Company regional affiliates in markets with high Republican support were wanting to junk Kimmel’s show because its relentless pro-Democrat bias offends their viewers.
Democrats surely must soon realise their electoral fortunes would improve if they cut their umbilical chord to left-wing entertainers and actors who mock Republican voters and Americans of faith.
It might do politicians and journalists tethered to their phones some good to read the speeches of another Republican assassinated with a gun: Abraham Lincoln. Trump could certainly learn a thing or two about presidential rhetoric. Albanese likewise.
More Coverage
Hollywood takeover: a battle for Warner Bros begins
Australia’s media and political establishments are struggling to negotiate a world uninterested in facts and truth but desperate for social media approval.