Dark Emu exposes the ostriches as Leftist media seeks narrative instead of facts
The ABC and Leftist media’s obsession with narrative over fact has disturbing consequences only now becoming apparent.
One of the constant themes in this column over more than a decade has been how the growing disconnect between the political/media class and mainstream values has distorted politics. Now we can see even more disturbing consequences from these forces, as the liberal Left media divergence from the mainstream has blinded them to reality and truth.
When journalists serve only their green Left clique, they can surrender their allegiance to the facts and become slaves to the narrative. The more journalism serves a narrative, the more it dishonours the truth.
Hence the Love Media failed to interrogate the highly questionable and demonstrably exaggerated Dark Emu claims by Bruce Pascoe; most Western media ignored obvious evidence that Covid-19 might have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology; the ABC and like-minded media have accepted tendentious and thin character assassinations by Louise Milligan and Four Corners against Cardinal George Pell, former Attorney-General Christian Porter and Prime Minister Scott Morrison; and after years of media obsession about every Donald Trump extravagance and error, the deeply worrying stumbles of President Joe Biden are censored. (And I will not even bother, here, to reprise the deceptions on climate change and border protection.)
Increasingly, reality does not matter so much in public debate as the narrative. Journalists come to know that the way to win plaudits and acceptance from their colleagues is not by interrogating facts but by advancing narratives.
We are aimlessly wandering along a postmodern path where facts are fungible, everyone has their own reality, and each media organisation relies less on the quality of its content and more on sharing a disposition with its chosen market. The public square might soon disappear and be replaced by a series of ideological wormholes.
To illustrate all this we can start in Wuhan where the origins of the virus in late 2019 left some of us considering and publicising some highly relevant facts. For instance, early last year it was a publicly available fact that the closest known coronavirus to Covid-19 had been sourced from bats in caves and mineshafts in the Chinese province of Yunnan, almost a decade ago, before being taken to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Some coincidence, then, that Covid-19 should pop up in Wuhan and nowhere across the more than 1800km between those two locations.
Countless additional facts pointing to possible accidental release from WIV have been revealed since, many by The Australian and Sky News’ own Sharri Markson. Yet until recent weeks, most of the world’s media, certainly that aligned with the liberal Left, have either ignored or dismissed the Wuhan laboratory leak theory.
Why would this be? Perhaps the biggest story in the world, many facts available and ignored, the only plausible answer is that because then president Donald Trump flagged the lab leak theory and wanted to blame China for the pandemic, it did not suit the “narrative” of those wanting to pin America’s pandemic pain on the president.
The stubborn ignorance of this approach was exposed brilliantly this week by US comedian Jon Stewart appearing on The Late Show, a favourite forum of the woke. “Oh my God there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan China, what do we do?” mocked Stewart. “Oh, you know who we could ask, the Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab – the disease is the same name as the lab!”
Allowing for comedic licence, the point about obvious coincidence was well made, exposing the absurd resistance to exploring this theory over the past year. The liberal Left and woke types who usually enjoy Stewart’s work were stunned, some even called his comments racist. Conservatives noted that if they had said the same thing last year they would have been banned by the digital media giants.
Consider how Markson – one journalist working on her own on this story from Sydney – has unearthed crucial information about “gain of function” experiments, funding and research links to the US including with chief infectious diseases adviser Dr Anthony Fauci, and this week video of bats being used for research at the WIV (previously denied by senior officials). Yet over at the ABC, the large teams of researchers, producers and reporters at Four Corners did not manage to report, uncover or even debunk any of this – perhaps they did not even try.
Instead, Four Corners’ Milligan has pursued Pell for years, leading to wrongful convictions, enormous trauma, and eventually a 7-nil High Court repudiation. Milligan also broadcast a shameless hit job of bizarre, anonymous and implausible sexual assault claims against Porter, who sued for defamation, and the resultant ABC statement essentially argued they had put the claims into the public arena but did not expect anyone to believe them. Seriously.
This week, Milligan tried to smear Morrison as doing the bidding of an extreme group of right wing conspiracists, based mainly on the Prime Minister using the phrase “ritual abuse” when addressing the scourge of child sexual abuse in parliament. Yet a quick word search of the royal commission report that Morrison was speaking to shows “ritual” was used 43 times.
In these three Milligan episodes, the facts have always been thin on the ground or opaque, but the smear against conservative targets has been clear. Yet no other journalists at the ABC have questioned the reports, researched the issues or contradicted the claims. Why not? Afraid of interrupting the ABC narrative?
Speaking in the UK this week before his Geneva summit with Vladimir Putin, President Joe Biden was obviously meaning to talk about putting pressure on Russia over the appalling situation in Syria when he repeatedly confused that country with Libya. “We can work together with Russia, for example in Libya,” he said, before later referring to the “rebuilding of Syria, of Libya, err,” and then mentioning Libya one more time.
Yet much of the media failed to mention any of this bungling, let alone make it the focus of their reports. This contrasts sharply with coverage of Trump, whose every stumble was highlighted, even when it required disingenuous reporting to trick it up.
Trump poked fun at this earlier this month, pointing out how Biden’s horrible series of falls walking up the stairs to Air Force One failed to get the saturation media coverage that the Republican president received when he walked carefully down a ramp. “It was like an ice-skating rink,” explained Trump, “but they made that a big story, but they didn’t make the Biden fall, the triple fall I call it”. This is a classic case of reality being usurped by the narrative.
US political examples abound. Last year there was media hysteria claiming Trump had ordered police to clear protesters from Lafayette Square, adjacent to The White House, so he could attend a church photo opportunity. The New York Times called this a “defining moment” and the line was run here by the ABC, of course, and at Channel 10 where Trump’s alleged actions were described as “inflammatory”.
But a US investigation this month found there was no political input into the decision to clear the square. Police made the call so workers could safely install security fencing – this correction has come way too late to alter the narrative and was not reported prominently.
You might think presidents would hold themselves to a higher standard, but in Geneva after his summit with Putin, Biden referred to Capitol Hill protesters killing a police officer in the January riots. Perhaps the President is too willing to believe his own narrative, because the Washington DC chief medical examiner found in April that Officer Brian Sicknick died, tragically, of natural causes during the riots.
Back on home soil, anyone who has dipped into Pascoe’s book promoting a revisionist, and strangely westernised, view of pre-European Aboriginal society could not avoid at least some scepticism about his claims. Detailed and scholarly critiques contesting and rebutting many of Pascoe’s claims have been available online and in book form for at least two years, sparking a spirited debate in some media.
Yet at the ABC, Dark Emu has received only praise and promotions, while Pascoe has been lauded. Eschewing fact checks and debate, the ABC, en masse, has gone with what it sees as the woke Indigenous narrative (one that some Indigenous people now view as demeaning towards traditional hunter-gatherer skills and knowledge).
So, how to address this obsession with narrative over fact? How to replace this desire to please woke colleagues with an eagerness to serve audiences with relevant facts?
The ABC reckons one way is to relocate 300 staff from its inner-city headquarters at Ultimo to work from a yet-to-be established building in Parramatta.
The national broadcaster’s chair, Ita Buttrose, and managing director, David Anderson, clicked on to Google maps and headed to western Sydney this week, telling the media this modest decentralisation will not happen until 2024.
Still, it is a step in the right direction, the sort of dispersal this column suggested as far back as 2014. If ABC producers and journalists live and work in the suburbs rather than just sneer at them, they just might come to absorb, or at least respect, mainstream values.
Auntie’s cousins at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation this week decided to cut themselves off from viewer comments on social media to protect their journalists from criticism. Rather than be accountable, they will further isolate their staff from the mainstream.
In the UK this week, a new television news service focused on mainstream, right-of-centre perspectives. GB News launched with spectacular ratings, shaking up the media landscape.
That experiment hints at a silver lining for Buttrose and Anderson. If they can possible convince their liberal Left cohort to comprehend and reflect mainstream views, not only will it lead to respecting reality ahead of narrative but it might actually connect them with a growing audience.
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