Truth in time of intolerant woke and old conspiracies

This week’s release of the “Kerr palace letters”, as the National Archives of Australia called them, closes the book on the dismissal of Gough Whitlam on November 11, 1975. The long-secret trove — 212 letters between governor-general Sir John Kerr and Buckingham Palace between August 1974 and December 1977 — is illuminating. For wise historians and citizens with clear eyes, the missives provide a time tunnel into the most dramatic event in our political history and the actions of a duplicitous man. Yet the moment was lost due to the wilfulness of scholars and partisan gawkers to transmogrify two-dimensional truth to a hologram of fiction. Claims of palace treachery have come from the graveyard of spotlight deprivation, where dumped Labor leaders carry a torch for Gough. It’s time to abandon a malign conspiracy when only a spooky vibe supports it.

We are living in a time of rampant disinformation, distortion of plain facts, denial of truths and the viral spread of conspiracies. None more outlandish, perhaps, than the footnoted fantasies of Jenny Hocking, the prime mover in the courts to bring the letters into the light. For decades a myth persisted the CIA was behind the dismissal. But in the past few years, Professor Hocking has peddled a new myth, namely that the Queen gave Kerr the “green light” to sack Whitlam. Now that the documents are in the open, there is no evidence for this furphy. Yet the reaction — from republicans to Hocking hacks — was bewildering. “This is a tribute to the mood of the age; the triumph of post-truth and phony history over factual and documented history,” Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston write in Inquirer.

The pandemic has brought out the nutters. That’s what happens in times of paranoia, uncertainty and fear, as Mick Brown notes in our weekend magazine. The outbreak in Victoria has allowed social media hucksters to drive a wedge through communities and fan anxiety about policy responses. Those claiming there is no way of living safely with the virus, that an economy-destroying elimination approach must be followed, are undermining the national strategy of aggressive suppression. By all means, let’s assess the evidence and weigh up competing risks. But suppression is working; human folly and poor tracing are to blame for the crisis in Greater Melbourne. Still, the reporting of basic facts, as Rachel Baxendale did this week on links between COVID-19 infections and the city’s Black Lives Matter protest, was impugned. The story was distorted on Twitter, alleging a foul motive or that the revelation implied causation. It did not.

Many in the news business have lost their minds, if not sense of purpose. A wake-up call came in the form of the epic resignation letter by Bari Weiss, a columnist and editor at The New York Times. She identified a new consensus that has emerged in the press, especially at her former outlet. “Truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else,” Weiss wrote. That pathology saw the removal last month of the NYT’s top opinion editor for running a piece by a US senator calling for troops to be sent in to restore order in cities in the grip of protests; it was a call endorsed by millions of Americans. Readers may recall the new opinion chief’s subsequent infantilising memo to NYT staff that anyone who finds “any piece of Opinion journalism — including headlines or social posts or photos or you name it — that gives you the slightest pause, please call or text me immediately”.

Such groupthink, timidity and vanity hold here, especially at Nine Entertainment newspapers, the ABC and Guardian Australia. As Chris Kenny observed, more than ever there is desperation to quell dissent, to sail with the zeitgeist and to fabricate consensus in the image of journalists’ own sanctimony. “It is the opposite of the inquiry, scepticism, plurality and contestability that should be at the very heart of free media,” Kenny wrote on Monday. It’s why, issue after issue — the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, our climate and border policies, and federal elections — the moralisers miss the yarn. Our competitors, belatedly, are aware of the dangers of “building walls and retreating into silos” on their platforms. Yet they, as Weiss observed at the NYT, continue to be animated, curated and ultimately edited by Twitter’s intolerant storm troopers.

No doubt these failing approaches to reporting and cancelling ideas deemed “not fit to print” are courting a backlash. How could they not? Yet many high-profile media activists keep being sucked into a vortex of disinformation and wokeness. They can see the perils of a new McCarthyism that shuts down debate, yet in the next social media post advocate a police-state lockdown and the heavy hand of Dictator Dan. This consistency deficit hyper device-activity disorder is like following a pinball. The aim of the game is to keep lights flashing, noise whirling and audiences buzzing, from breakfast to drive. It’s an affliction, leading to a toxic swirl of fakery that can drive a wedge and clicks. But it can never help us understand what’s going on or promote a robust contest of ideas that is the essence of a pluralist society.