Media’s left cheerleaders prove Cicero was right

Tony Abbott and colleagues sit on the backbench in the Representatives Chamber at Parliament House in Canberra yesterday.

The Washington Post adopted a new motto in February last year: “Democracy dies in darkness.” Its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, cited it as the reason he bought the paper. He said: “Certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light.”

Perhaps. But if democracy dies in darkness, The Washington Post’s faint light will have done little to save it. It regularly slants news and current affairs through misleading commentary, factual distortions and omissions. It is predictably to the Left on politics and is partial to Amazon.

A simple search reveals references to Amazon are always positive and informative and that the company’s dodgy labour practices and tax minimisation are quietly ignored. US President Donald Trump alleges Bezos is using the paper to influence congress on Amazon’s behalf by providing a free platform in exchange for political favours. Champions of democracy call that a murky light.

The New York Times proclaims on its masthead, “All the news that’s fit to print”. This famous slogan, adopted by owner Adolph S. Ochs 120 years ago, was a declaration of the newspaper’s mission. He wrote: “It will be the aim of the Times to give the news impartially, without fear or favour …”. He must be spinning in his grave.

The New York Times is deliberately pitched to a left-wing, globalist view, where advocacy journalism is not confined to editorials. Rather than news fit to print, it distorts news to fit the narrative. Its welcoming to its editorial board Sarah Jeong, who once tweeted, “F..k the police” and “White people are bullshit”, shows where the ideological heart of the paper lies.

CNN’s slogan, “The Most Trusted Name in News”, is itself a distortion. A recent Research ­Intelligencer study found Fox News was the most trusted TV news brand, next to the BBC. CNN was the ninth most trusted.

No wonder. The network has been found to repeatedly and knowingly fabricate news and to use “anonymous sources” to spin the stories it publishes.

It is an undisguised Democratic Party cheerleader. Yet The Sydney Morning Herald (“Independent. Always”), The Age, The Guardian, the ABC (impartial by law) and SBS (to name a few) still present these discredited sources as authoritative.

Left-wing media bias doesn’t have to be an orchestrated conspiracy prosecuted by powerful international interests. It can be simply a common view of the world held by most of those who occupy newsrooms.

When neo-Marxist teachers subject students to relentless indoctrination at media school, it is to be expected. After all, the campus is where callow instincts of fairness can be exploited and weaponised. Today, it’s where students are taught intolerance and are told to reject ­alternative views; where they are marked according to their faithful recitation of the approved narrative.

On becoming journalists and under the approving eyes of their media bosses, they work hard to ensure “progressives” retain the commanding ideological heights.

In the process, unwitting or otherwise, their audiences become part of a mutually sustaining feedback loop. Social media and the internet assist this. Few understand or perhaps care that by streaming commentaries that play to their prejudices they may unwittingly self-indoctrinate and become themselves retailers of filtered news and opinion.

So when Time magazine illustrates its cover with a towering Donald Trump dispassionately looking down on a sobbing Honduran two-year-old (who was not separated from her would-be ­illegal immigrant parents), the world sees only a heartless president oppressing a helpless child.

The Democrats’ constant refusal to pass necessary amendments to make America’s immig­ration laws more comprehensive is never mentioned. In such a climate of denial, positive outcomes are hard to achieve.

Australia experienced similar media conditioning when Tony Abbott was subjected to unrelenting vilification and ridicule. Whether it was his walk, his “budgie smugglers” or his approach to fiscal responsibility, immigration and climate change, Abbott, according to the media Left, was a national embarrassment unsuitable for office.

With a little help from their friends, they got their man. Now that their choice, Malcolm Turnbull, is in such trouble and, fearing a conservative backlash, the ABC and fellow leftists are stepping up their negative Abbott commentary. No wonder the Edelman Trust Barometer finds the Australian population’s trust in media stands at 31 per cent, 12 points below the global and US average and an 11-point drop in two years.

In 1996, the publisher of this newspaper, Rupert Murdoch, launched Fox News Channel as a counter to the left-leaning CNN-MSNBC-CBS-ABC oligopoly. Since then, Fox TV regularly has out-rated CNN and MSNBC combined. Indeed, of the major global networks, Murdoch’s expanding interests stand alone in consistently testing the “liberal” mindset, a policy ­appreciated by its questioning audiences and applauded by its shareholders.

In a 1987 editorial, The Age declared: “The effective control of the media is the first step on the road to controlling the values and future direction of our society.”

It was a statement of intent that The Age pursued with alacrity, its agenda coming straight from the US hard Left’s playbook. What was once a proud newspaper is now little more than a green-left pamphlet with a vastly shrunk­en readership. The Age’s fellow travellers, abandoning any pretence of impartiality and independence, now shamelessly take political sides. Their audiences are also declining.

The Edelman Trust found 57 per cent of media consumers worry about fake news and how it is being used for particular propaganda purposes. Like Cicero, they can see: “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the ­alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.”

Democracy really does die in darkness.