Charting a course through profound and profane

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson at the State Library of Victoria. Picture: Aaron Francis

That we live in times in which everything from change to reputation to controversy is digitally amplified, with the volume often turned up to 10, has been obvious for years, or at least should have been.

Having been rather vocal, sometimes too vociferously, on this subject for rather a long period, it was surprising that our ­society’s leaders had been so sanguinely supine. As a result, we have institutionally ingrained some seriously bad behaviour and have dominant digital companies culturally ill-equipped to cope with the contemporary challenges.

For Big Digital, the line of least compliance should not have been the starting point for our journey into the future. Had fewer politicians, and not just in Australia, not been seduced by net narcissism, we might have cognisant communities better able to cope with the e-existential challenges.

That includes, sometimes tragically, the teenagers whose ­insecurities and vulnerabilities are magnified cruelly in so-called ­social media — or the seemingly powerful global companies that panic and prevaricate at the first mutterings of the anti-social media mob.

There is no doubt that a mob mentality has taken hold in much of the West, and among the most pronounced of the mobs are illiberal liberals who are roaming the landscape in the seemingly endless, insatiable quest for indignation and umbrage. It is vituperation as virtue.

So here we are on the cusp of truly extraordinary developments in artificial intelligence and yet, collectively, our shared level of emotional intelligence is plumbing the depths.

There is no doubt that our technical ability to create, to distribute and share information and images and much more, will be exponentially enhanced over the coming five years. But that is the contradiction — while we are creating that capability, we are challenging our capacity for empathy. One example of that trend is the seething secularism that portrays any person of faith — whether an evanescent evangelical or occasional attendee at mass or synagogue or mosque or temple — as a nutter, a fruitcake, a devotee of the deviant.

And there surely are religious texts that, if you are literal, are a tad apocalyptic, a bit bizarre. Job’s endless sufferings and travails resonate across the faiths … in our times, surely a trial lawyer could have monetised his trials, his ­agonies

And there certainly have been egregious abuses in the Catholic and other churches for which the powerful must be held to account, but to focus solely, obsessively on the sins is to caricature all those who have faith.

We are going through a strange phase in seeking affirmation through alienation, virtue in ­victimhood. Like many trends in business, it is a confluence of the personal, the sectoral and the cyclical. Where are the shared experiences in the contemporary West? Why has the village square shrunk and been subdivided?

The verticals in digital run deep and some clearly have the ability to radicalise, whether the neo-fascist or the jihadist.

At least there is a more vigorous debate on these subjects, and it’s clear that there will be more regulation of companies that have sought to defy definition and avoid a reckoning.

That we in the West are clumsily grappling with these issues as “developed” nations makes one wonder what the impact will be on countries like China, India and ­Indonesia, that are combining their industrial revolution with a digital revolution, coping with mass rural-to-urban mobility in the age of the mobile.

So we have the cross-border, and we have the crass-border, the seamless spread of witless nonsense, delivered digitally, globally, endlessly, daily. We must ask what is the provenance of digital drivel and why it was so successfully spawned in the early days of internet “idealism”? In essence, it was because the anarchic architects believed that open-source code 01010101 should be complemented by open-source content — the only problem is that there actually is a hierarchy of content and of news, the fact-based and the fantasy-based, the profound and the profane, the veracious and the vacuous. In this e-emptiness, there is a craving for credibility and a scepticism about elites, a scepticism that I presume, I hope, is still part of the Australian character.

The question we must ask is who are the elites, who is the establishment? Australia famously dealt with a tyranny of distance, now the world has a tyranny of the distinguished, a smug, sneering elite that derides popular concerns as “populism” and whose self-image is fuelled by an abiding sense of absolute superiority. In media, one sees that sense of supercilious superiority in some of the Washington press corps … it’s fair to say that a significant majority of DC reporters are liberal, and that they fall into two categories, liberals who are professional and professional liberals.

The latter category has expanded as the numbers who have failed the Donald Trump-stress test have grown.

Average Americans sense that Trumpian distinction and while they don’t like the trashy tweets or the shameless self-indulgence, they do see that the US President is challenging the contemporary establishment, which regards Middle America as a louche lumpen­proletariat, as despicably deplor­able — this is the same Middle America that came to the world’s rescue twice last century.

These are decent, thoughtful people — and not the dotish troglodytes that much of the media mocks ceaselessly. In the midst of this media miasma, there’s a reason The Wall Street Journal is the most trusted paper in America … the reporters report and the columnists columnise, and the difference between the two is obvious to readers not oblivious to the sin of reporters opining and failing to have the objective of being ­objective.

Let’s be loud and clear — The Wall Street Journal would not be as trusted without the investment in journalism made by Rupert Murdoch, and The Times, the most trusted paper in the UK, may not even exist without his continuing commitment. And The Australian would simply never have been ­created.

These inconvenient truths tend to be ignored but they are immutable facts. This is the Keith Murdoch Oration but it would be remiss to ignore what Rupert has done for media and for our country and for many other countries with what was an exceedingly modest inheritance — no offence to Adelaide. I once caused an unintended stir by jesting that it was called the City of Churches because it was interesting for about an hour each week. To see Rupert up close each day, to witness the restless curiosity, the endless energy, and a genuine humility is in such stark and breathtaking contrast to the ill-informed institutional critiques.

This evening is indeed about inheritance. About the inherited responsibilities we all have, to our land, our country, our place, our people, our planet. We are custodians, and as custodians we must be conscious of consequence and context.

We in this room are, almost without exception, people of privilege and so what will we do with that prestige, that position, that power, that possibility? Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese to win a Nobel prize for literature, wrote: “Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.” How will we flow through time? How will we make the most of our time?

This is an edited extract of the Keith Murdoch Oration given by News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson at the State Library of Victoria last night. News Corp is the parent company of News Corp Australia, publisher of The Australian.