Pardon the French but it was a quelle surprise! moment. The reference is to the discussion between David Speers (presenter of ABC TV’s Insiders program) and John Lyons (the ABC’s global affairs editor) in Washington DC not long after it became evident that Donald J. Trump had won the 2024 US presidential election.
Lyons told Speers he had just read Hillbilly Elegy by US vice-president-elect JD Vance. Lyons said the book “paints a devastating, bleak picture of so many parts of America – children going to bed at night with pain in their mouths because their teeth are rotten”. He added: “It’s that America that elected Donald Trump tonight.”
Lyons did not mention that this was the cohort of American society that Hillary Clinton mocked as “deplorables” in 2016 and President Joe Biden dismissed as “garbage” shortly before the election on Wednesday AEDT.
Then came the surprise. Lyons declared: “I think the media here (in the US), the left-wing media needs to … seriously look at how they got it wrong. It’s the second time they’ve got it wrong. They got it wrong in 2016 when The New York Times editor called the staff together and said, ‘What’s happened, how come you didn’t see this coming?’ They’ve got it wrong again tonight.”
It should come as no surprise that the mainstream media in the US – led by The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times; free-to-air networks ABC, CBS and NBC; and cable news channels MSNBC and CNN – is left-wing. What is unusual turns on the fact Lyons blamed the left-wing media for underestimating Trump’s support in 2016 and 2024. He could have added 2020, when Trump lost narrowly to Biden.
Lyons is a senior editor at the taxpayer-funded broadcaster. He is partly responsible for the fact the ABC is a conservative-free zone without one conservative presenter, producer or editor for the ABC’s key television, radio or online outlets. The ABC is at least as left-wing as The New York Times, NBC and the like. Yet Lyons chose an ABC platform to criticise the left-wing media in the US.
Anyone who tuned in to News Corp’s Fox News or reads News Corp’s New York Post or The Wall Street Journal would not be surprised by Trump’s substantial victory this week. The same is true of those who read News Corp Australia’s papers or watch Sky News. This is not the case with the ABC.
A few recent examples illustrate the problem that Lyons chooses to overlook at his own workplace.
On October 27, Insiders ran an extract of an interview between Speers and Rory Stewart, who is best known as co-host with Alastair Campbell of The Rest is Politics podcast. Stewart is a former British Conservative MP who was expelled from the party for voting against it over Brexit. He is now quite hostile to the Conservatives.
Asked by Speers about the likely outcome of the US presidential election, Stewart declared, “I believe Kamala Harris will win.” He even criticised polls that suggested Trump had a slight chance of victory. Speers did not challenge Stewart’s prediction, which turned out to be hopelessly wrong.
On November 4, ABC TV’s Q+A ran a US election special program. There was a panel of four with Patricia Karvelas in the presenter’s chair. The panel comprised Anthony Scaramucci (who worked for Trump for a couple of weeks), Dennis Richardson (a former senior Australian diplomat and security chief), Amelia Lester (a Nine newspapers journalist) and American-born Australian commentator Bruce Wolpe. Wolpe is a Trump antagonist while Scaramucci is a Trump hater. There was no Harris antagonist or hater on the panel.
Scaramucci described Trump, variously, as “Gestapo-like”, a national socialist (that is, Nazi), which received loud audience approval, and compared a Trump campaign meeting with “a Nazi rally in 1939”. Karvelas did not challenge any of these claims.
Writing in Nine newspapers on November 7, Peter Hartcher threw the switch to hyperbole. He began with George Washington’s declaration that democracy was “an experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people” but declared that this had now been abandoned as a failed experiment on account of Trump’s victory. Elsewhere in the paper, Niki Savva claimed “the despicable Donald Trump has provided a formula for success built on lies, misogyny, undermining institutions and dividing people”.
This implies that over half the American electorate that voted for Trump-Vance are fools who have no regard for democracy and willingly elect despicable leaders. It’s a slightly different version of American society replete with deplorables and human garbage.
An objective reading of the US presidential election indicates that Trump won handsomely because he identified cost of living and border security as the issues most Americans were most concerned about. Trump’s commitment to reduce energy prices with his “drill baby drill” message also had a certain appeal.
Then there is the issue of leadership. Trump presents as strong. On October 20, The Wall Street Journal reported on Trump meeting its editorial board. In response to a question by Paul Gigot about whether a Trump administration would use military force against a blockade on Taiwan, the former president replied: “I wouldn’t have to because he (China’s President Xi Jinping) respects me and he knows I’m f..king crazy.”
Like all of us mere mortals, Trump has his faults. But it’s difficult to see how a person who was elected by a majority of American voters in a fair election constitutes a threat to democracy.
The Trump-Vance duo supported by the likes of Tulsi Gabbard and Nikki Haley are a threat to the professional class that runs the Democratic Party.
Trump won significant support among lower-income Americans without tertiary degrees. Research by the CT Group Australia indicates a similar trend is under way in Australia with respect to Peter Dutton and the Coalition that may, or may not, influence the next election.
Lyons would be well advised to be a bit less global and bit more local. Australia’s media left is just as out of touch as its American counterpart.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.
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