It’s a postmodernist dance around the verifiable facts
People with penises can join the Girl Guides but those who call it out lose their jobs? Discredited journalism deserves awards? This post-truth world is dangerous.
We live in a post-truth world, and it is dangerous. It is also a very different world to the one described by the so-called elites – the green left and progressive liberals – who claim truth has been devalued by the fake news of the populist right and mainstream media.
To demonstrate their idea of fake news, they will cite Donald Trump’s mangled attempts to discuss coronavirus medications, or his rhetoric over a border wall aimed at delivering the same border security Democrats and Republicans have promised but often failed to deliver. Or they will try to dismiss any assessment of climate policy that is not ridiculously alarmist about the problem, or ignorantly simplistic about the solutions.
It is the political left and its comrades in media and academe who have dispensed with fact and truth in favour of their world views, moral causes and partisan aims. From climate change to border security, from immigration to law and order, and from gender to taxation, they disregard reality in pursuit of ideology and political fashion.
People with penises can join the Girl Guides and those who call this out or seek to change the rules can lose their jobs. A Christian rugby player who quotes the Bible to condemn what he believes to be sinful behaviour is banned from the game, but a Muslim AFLW player who boycotts a gay pride game for similar reasons can lace up her boots the following week.
On climate change we are told to “follow the science” but we are seldom told about the benefits of a warming planet (plant growth, higher rainfall, milder winters). Also, it is proposed that adjustments to Australia’s policies will result in beneficial changes to the climate, which is patently false according to the science.
On national weather records we are seldom, if ever, reminded about how earlier temperature records have been revised downwards, or that the Federation drought, and its attendant temperature and rainfall data, is not included as part of the official records. References to such facts are denounced as heresy.
When we endured a horror fire season at the end of a serious drought it was described, even by official bodies, as “unprecedented” despite reports over the past two centuries proving otherwise. To buttress the claim, official reports recounted only anecdotal evidence – the summer and the fires were legitimately horrific, requiring no exaggeration, but the quest for “unprecedented” status was all about the climate narrative.
Scientific findings that fell short of linking drought to climate change were ignored and even subtly revised, ex post facto, to maintain the narrative. The flooding rains that, as ever, followed the drought, were not linked to climate change.
In an era of unprecedented access to information and primary sources, the plain truth on many issues is harder to discern than ever. We have tools available to us that were unimaginable even 20 years ago, so that we can use a pocket device in an instant to research anything written or discovered in the history of human civilisation – yet we are dumbing ourselves down with hashtags and memes.
Truth is the first casualty. TikTok is the latest beneficiary.
Think about how easily Labor’s Medicare privatisation lie was propagated during the 2016 election campaign. Think about how most journalists and commentators told the public Trump could not win in 2016, Scott Morrison had no chance in 2019 and Brexit would never be supported by UK voters.
We have become a society where people can see what their digital friends have had for dinner, or how they dance to the latest song, but may know nothing of what they think about anything that matters.
Perhaps we do not talk enough, perhaps we are disappearing into digital silos surrounded by our own algorithm-constructed versions of reality, so we lose the value and wisdom that flow from ideas being contested in the public square.
Reality is kept at bay. Governments and other authorities seem to believe well-intentioned motives justify manipulation of the facts.
During the pandemic, coronavirus-linked deaths of 90-year-old people in palliative care routinely have been referred to as “tragic” while we have been constantly told that “everyone” is at risk. Extremely rare vaccine-related deaths were played down to reassure the public about low risks, but the equally rare Covid-related deaths of healthy young people were played up to heighten and broaden fears.
Former deputy chief national medical officer Nick Coatsworth told me on Sky News on Wednesday that for young healthy people and children the Omicron variant is certainly no more of a threat than influenza, and he illustrated the point by sharing how, while he will vaccinate his children against both, if he had to choose he would go for the flu jab as more important. All but a couple of other media outfits ignored this clear advice, based as it was on expert clinical experience and overwhelming data.
When Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 US presidential election, she protested that she “did win three million more votes” than her opponent and blamed the loss on Russian President Vladimir Putin, who she claimed “interfered to hurt me and help my opponent”. She then vowed to be part of “the resistance” even after post-election and Inauguration Day riots led to violence and vandalism in Washington DC and other cities. She was not accused of undermining democracy.
When Trump disgracefully refused to concede defeat in the 2020 election, wild riots and storming of the Capitol by his supporters was described as an insurrection and for many weeks media wrongly reported that protesters had killed a policeman – there were deaths from natural causes and an overdose, but the only direct death from violence was a protester shot by security. This came after a year of Black Lives Matter and anti-Trump riots that led to more than two dozen deaths and the vandalisation and destruction of hundreds of properties in protests across the US, which media often described as “mainly peaceful” even while standing in front of burning buildings.
Throughout most of Trump’s term, the US media and progressive mainstream media around the world treated seriously a raft of conspiracy theories about Russia and Trump, and Australia’s public broadcaster produced an epic three-part series entitled The Story of the Century claiming Trump was installed as a Putin puppet. Investigations and inquiries have revealed the conspiracies to be groundless and that they sprang from Clinton operatives with links to the Obama White House, but the ABC has not apologised or retracted.
The ABC put into the public arena historical, uncorroborated and implausible sexual assault allegations against attorney-general Christian Porter, and politicians and journalists pursued the story, ensuring it ended Porter’s political career, even though police had examined the matter and decided not to pursue charges. Less than two years earlier, many of the same politicians and commentators supported and campaigned for Bill Shorten to be elected prime minister even though they knew he had faced historical sexual assault allegations that police had examined before deciding not to pursue charges
ABC reporter Louise Milligan spent years pursuing Cardinal George Pell on spurious and implausible historic sexual assault charges and received prestigious journalism awards for doing so. Pell was exonerated in a High Court acquittal, but Milligan has kept the awards.
A sports reporter for The Age, Sam McClure, won a Quill journalism award for a story sensationalising claims about events at an AFL team camp but legal action by the company that ran the sessions triggered an apology and settlement. With the story discredited in this way, the award was rescinded – but McClure and other senior journalists argue this was unfair, and moves were afoot this week to consider reinstating his honour.
In 2013 Kevin Rudd escaped censure for making the absurd suggestion that turning back asylum-seeker boats would trigger an armed conflict with Indonesia. Journalists reported his fantasy as fact, even though they knew boats successfully had been turned back under a previous Coalition government, and that in 2007, from opposition, Rudd had promised to do the same.
This week journalists admonished the Coalition for suggesting Labor might be manipulated by Chinese interests, suggesting there was no evidence for such claims. Just five years ago Labor senator Sam Dastyari took money from Chinese interests and advocated Chinese foreign policy positions on the South China Sea at odds with those of his country and his party; Dastyari also warned a Chinese confidant that ASIO might be monitoring his calls.
We killed our domestic car manufacturing industry because we were determined to avoid endless subsidies, and partly because our climate policies had increased the manufacturers’ energy costs. But now we subsidise the purchase of electric vehicles, most of which are manufactured in China, thanks to Australian iron ore, copper and coal.
Truth is not partisan, no side of politics has a mortgage on clear-eyed honesty. But I think you will agree that most conservative diversions from the facts tend to attract forensic scrutiny.
The real problem is that instead of a relentless focus on pertinent facts, we have been overwhelmed by a postmodern focus on assumed motives and individual truths. Statements typically are judged against a preferred narrative rather than against the verifiable facts.
That is anti-science, anti-intellectual and anti-truth. But how to fix it when debates are occurring in increasingly disconnected silos?
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