On #MeToo, Donald Trump, Covid and climate, our politicians and media are letting us down

Both are manifestations of human nature, which is stubbornly flawed. The press is our best hope in pushing back against nonsense, yet it is drifting with the zeitgeist.

Even as someone once ensconced in the Canberra bubble as a journalist and political operative for many years, my instinct is to avert my eyes, writes Chris Kenny. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

When we see the open deceit and toxicity of politics and the media in the Canberra bubble, it is tempting to despair. Even as someone once ensconced in that environment as a journalist and political operative for many years, my instinct is to avert my eyes, like I have done at car crashes, terrorist bombing sites and makeshift tsunami morgues.

If we stand back and survey the scene, from the brutalised #MeToo politics in Canberra to the indictment of Donald Trump, and from war in Ukraine to our own energy crisis, we see persistent tension between truth and lies. We are informed about political systems we do not trust by media we do not believe.

Strangely enough, one of the most reassuring things we can do is remind ourselves of how bad it has been before, how it has ever been thus. We think we are seeing standards plummet at terminal velocity, with democracy imperilled before our very eyes, but it is weirdly comforting to know these traits are nothing new.

For all our digital devices and algorithmic anticipation, our foibles turn out to be time-honoured. Five centuries ago Machiavelli figured that “politics have no relations to morals”.

The depressing reality is that politics and media are manifestations of human nature, which is stubbornly flawed. Dante knew 700 years ago that the propensity to lie was our greatest flaw; “fraud is man’s peculiar vice”, he declared, noting perpetrators would fill both the eighth and ninth circles of hell.

More than 2000 years ago Aristotle warned that the only thing we “gain by falsehood” is to ensure we are not believed when we speak the truth. Yet in the here and now this same battle between truth and lies is the most important daily struggle.

Winston Churchill understood both people’s fascination with lies and the durability of truth. He observed how “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on” but consoled us by noting that “truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack, ignorance deride it, but in the end, there it is”.

Sure, eventually, we hope, most of the time. But often forestalling the truth does enormous damage.

Whatever we know now about the Hunter Biden laptop, or the absurdity of the Russian collusion claims, matters little after US presidential elections. The disturbing details now being revealed about the political, media and legal mishandling of the Brittany Higgins allegations cannot undo the harm and injustice of the past two years.

We should always expect better from our politics, but I think we let media off the hook too often. There is accountability for politicians in the end – we can vote them out – but we need media to pursue truth over narrative, and far too often they do the opposite.

Perhaps what has changed since the days of Aristotle, Dante and even Churchill is that the truth has become more elusive. This week we learned one of the world’s most prestigious universities, Johns Hopkins, has redefined lesbianism as a non-man being attracted to a non-man, and that Sydney’s Royal Hospital for Women is countenancing the transplanting of wombs into “women assigned male at birth”.

If we can no longer tell male from female, how can we deal with more complex truths?

Media is our best hope in pushing back against nonsense and reasserting reality. Yet it is letting us down, ignoring mainstream views, losing connection with practical reality, and drifting with the zeitgeist.

The same Canberra journalists who knew about the political/media campaign behind the Higgins allegations in 2021 now run protection for Labor’s Katy Gallagher after her misleading of parliament was laid bare. The same cabal who persecuted Alan Tudge and Christian Porter, destroying their careers without even a nod to natural justice, stayed shtum on historical rape allegations levelled at Bill Shorten, right up until Victoria Police announced there would be no charges laid.

Former attorney-general Christian Porter faced a historical rape allegation that he always denied. Picture: Getty Images

This reflects a starkly partisan approach to traumatic issues of personal and political behaviour. Still, grander failures are driven by broad ideological considerations.

We are constantly told by Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen and others that renewable energy is the cheapest form of electricity that will provide reliable and affordable supplies into the future. Yet this deceit is not interrogated.

It is as though the reality of current and future costs, our lived experience and warnings from the International Energy Agency about the road to net zero being impossible on current technology do not exist. We hurtle down an expensive and unreliable road of experimentation with most media failing to ask questions,
let alone call it out.

Since we began our shift to renewables, energy costs have escalated dramatically and reliability has fallen; the state with the highest renewable penetration, South Australia, has the most expensive power; and the infrastructure requirements for the goal of 80 per cent renewable energy – 22,000 solar panels a day and 10 seven-megawatt wind turbines a week for eight years, plus 10,000km of transmission lines – seem beyond us. Yet Bowen spouts his green dream daily without challenge.

We saw confirmation this week that the Covid-19 pandemic did indeed begin at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The evidence has pointed strongly in that direction since the first six months of the pandemic, but most media has aped the lack of interest and denial of China and the World Health Organisation.

Even now, something as crucial as the origins of the pandemic, and the human involvement in creating it, struggles to win the attention of most media.

This is all of a piece with global deceptions on the pandemic that have occurred with media complicity. The effectiveness of vaccines has been greatly exaggerated to support mandates while the comparative risks of the jab for healthy young people have been underplayed.

Media in our country fails to even question the ongoing federal government censorship of pandemic-related information in cahoots with the digital giants. On this, and the failure to hold a pandemic response inquiry, the major parties are on a unity ticket, which should alarm media outlets but instead it seems to mollify them.

Similar factors play out in the US, driving wedges into society. The destruction, killings and mayhem of months of Black Lives Matter protests are left unexamined while congress and the courts work overtime dispensing justice over the 2021 Capitol Hill riot; Donald Trump is indicted for holding on to classified documents while Hillary Clinton’s hosting of classified material on a personal server and Joe Biden’s stash of classified papers are waved through.

If justice is not being applied equally, who can call it out if not the media? How little would we have known about the Higgins-Bruce Lehrmann matter if we were left with the court outcome and media reporting?

Aside from the exclusive reporting in this newspaper, only the ACT inquiry has forced open the cracks and allowed the sunlight in.

It is not as if the Canberra press gallery did not know about any of this. In these pages back in February 2021, I revealed the “dossier” shopped around to journalists and wrote that “Higgins’s claims were revealed in a carefully orchestrated media barrage which coincided with the first day of a parliamentary sitting fortnight” and that it was “reasonable to expect that journalists would be more open about the way this unfolded”.

But no. The bulk of the media leans green left, and tends to move as a pack and be driven not by the pursuit of facts but by the continuation of the predominant narrative – in this case the #MeToo campaign and the Coalition’s “women problem”.

It is a worry. And this preferencing of the narrative over the reality is the core of the problem, in politics and the media. It is a postmodern twist on the age-old problem of human dishonesty and cynical politics.

Aristotle held us to our higher duty: “Though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honour the truth first.” But in this age of postmodern relativism and social media activism, too many have their moral compass set by George Costanza: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”