29 September, 2018: Andrew L. Urban wrote in The Spectator Australia ” free press is not the same as a fair press,” adding, “If your world view and opinions are fashioned by what you consume in the no longer credible mainstream media, you will have formed your opinions on incomplete or even false information.” This is a subject burning with the heat of the current debate over the dishonestly called digital duty of care legislation.
“The separation of powers means that the legal system is answerable to no one,” I said, speaking at the September 22, 2018 Sydney launch of my book, Murder by the Prosecution (Wilkinson Publishing). It is unfortunate that I can rephrase that sentiment and replace ‘the legal system’ with ‘the media’.
Throughout the Anglosphere, left-leaning mass media entities have become advocates for left wing, socio-political positions. I should know it can happen; I am a journalist and I have become an advocate – pursuing wrongful convictions and advocating for innocents behind bars.
A free press is not the same as a fair press; all media commentators have an absolute right to express their political opinions. Citizens, if left uncensored by the tech giants of social media, likewise. The loss of public trust in much of the media is the result of self inflicted wounds, made up of a thousand cuts of lies by omission, lies by distortion, lies by mischaracterisation and misrepresentation. Integrity has been abandoned. Deception has been normalised.
The mechanisms that regulate the media do not include provisions (nor should, other than the ABC’s charter) to regulate such editorial decisions that mislead readers, viewers and listeners. But with power comes responsibility.
Rather than informing the public, the left-wing media are deceiving them
“An old friend, confined by ill health to his home and hence a big consumer of the mainstream media, looked at me in amazement when I talked about some of Trump’s triumphs and said stubbornly, his jaw set: ‘I never hear anyone else saying that stuff,’ writes Kerry Wakefield (The Spectator Australia, Sept 22, 2018)
She points out that consumers of the Fairfax press and ABC know little or nothing about the unfolding intelligence agency abuse of power at the top levels of the FBI and Department of Justice in the US. I maintain a heavy schedule of watching Fox News to stay informed, not because I prefer their coverage but because of the absence of such coverage in Australia. I don’t suggest that American politics should be more extensively covered than Australian politics, but they should be covered and covered thoroughly. US political news is not immaterial to Australia (or the world).
If your world view and opinions are fashioned by what you consume in the no longer credible mainstream media, you will have formed your opinions on incomplete or even false information. [Ring a bell?]
As Chris Kenny reports (The Australian, Sept 22, 2018), the ABC reported that Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Stokes dictated the prime ministership of this country, with the prodding of The Australian, for instance, without a shred of evidence. Indeed, contrary to the facts.
“Apart from the teenage silliness of pretending that Murdoch and Stokes could just phone a few underlings to create a false media dynamic and force serious journalists to conjure up stories and commentary that then swung the votes of more than 40 MPs to change the leadership of the Liberal Party, (ABC Political Editor Andrew) Probyn had obvious facts wrong. In these pages during the week I detailed how his claim that this newspaper had been ‘unabashed in its advocacy for an end to the Turnbull prime ministership’ was not only wrong but the opposite to what transpired.” Is that the same as lying?
“Across three years of the Turnbull prime ministership and about 936 editorial columns, Probyn will not find a single editorial calling for this outcome.”
Or take climate change: professionally curious journalists would have informed the public of the great scientific uncertainty around the causes of global warming … such as it was (was!). But the propaganda of the alarmists has stuck: ‘97% of scientists agree…’ That false and misleading statistic (referring to just 75 mostly Californian scientists) was debunked years ago, yet retains currency because no popular media has cared to (or wanted to) challenge it. That’s lying about emissions by omission. It’s not as if it were hard to find reputable and credible scientists who can explain the fraud. (Start with one of our own: Professor Ian Plimer.)
Had the public been better informed, there may well have been a stronger push back against the strangely self harming energy policies of the past decade.
So the left wing media flies around in circles, repeating and reinforcing left wing ideologies; it has lost the trust of those of us who prefer rational debate and evidence based decisions made by our politicians.
The absence of integrity in much of the mainstream media is a multi-continental malaise. Once the go-to news sources like Fairfax, the ABC, CNN and The New York Times have become Fake News Central; biased, untrustworthy, dishonest, hypocritical and divisive.
In his book, The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray offers page after page of specific examples (with references) of how deaf and blind have been the mainstream media and politicians in the Western half of Europe (including the UK) on matters of Muslim immigration.
Problems generated by illegal (and legal) migration are downplayed or underreported by the left wing media everywhere. That’s lying by omission.
Murray refers to “Research into the political sympathies of Swedish journalists (that) revealed that in 2011 almost half (41 per cent) were sympathetic to the Green Party … the Left Party (15 per cent), the Social Democratic Party (14 per cent) and the liberal conservative Moderate Party (14 per cent). Only around 1 per cent of journalists expressed sympathy for the Sweden Democrats . . . Yet in 2016 this party … was the highest-ranking party in the Swedish polls.”
As if to prove Murray’s point, by completely missing it, The Guardian published its sneering review of his book under the headline, ‘Gentrified Xenophobia’. “Naked racism may still be unacceptable in polite society. But post-Brexit vote there’s a clear market emerging for a slightly posher, better-read, more respectable way of saying that you’d rather not live next door to Romanians or think Muslims are coming to rape your womenfolk,” sniffed Gaby Hinsliff, with the double whammy of a misaligned racist smear and a snobby sneer.
To paraphrase Trump, ‘the fake news media is the enema of the people.’
***
Some recent examples:
1 The former ASIO chief’s criticism of media self-censorship. Former ASIO director-general Dennis Richardson said Australian media had “dropped the ball” in their treatment of antisemitism after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks. He argued that concern about inflaming social tensions had contributed to inadequate reporting of antisemitic preaching.
His specific example was the material delivered by Islamic Sydney preacher Wissam Haddad in November 2023, which did not receive widespread attention until the legal proceedings and Federal Court ruling in 2025.
2 The erroneous Gaza babies claim and delayed correction. The ABC repeatedly broadcast a claim that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours unless aid arrived. The underlying UN estimate concerned approximately 14,100 cases of severe acute malnutrition expected over a 12-month period, not 14,000 imminent deaths in two days.
The ABC’s own ombudsman found that the broadcaster had not made reasonable efforts to ensure accuracy and had failed to correct the significant error as soon as reasonably practicable. The correction was made on air during the afternoon, while the earlier morning broadcasts were not formally corrected online until 28 May, a week later.
3 In the US, the controversy over Hunter Biden’s laptop became one of the most consequential disputes about media credibility and political bias during the 2020 US presidential election. It involved three separate questions: whether the material was genuine, whether it implicated Joe Biden in wrongdoing, and whether media organisations and social media platforms acted fairly in deciding what the public should see.
The central criticism is that some major news organisations were too reluctant to investigate and report the story before the election, partly due to political bias, trying to protect the Biden administration. This bias was also propelled by fake news about Russian disinformation.
On 19 October 2020, 51 former intelligence officials signed a public statement about the Hunter Biden emails. It included former CIA directors and senior figures from the intelligence community. The crucial wording was that the emails’ release had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Subsequent forensic work authenticated a substantial body of emails, strengthening criticism of the initial scepticism.
“There has been a lot of crowing this week about the fact that the New York Times has finally come clean and admitted Hunter Biden’s laptop saga is not Russian disinformation. It’s real. You don’t say,” writes the Australian journalist who broke the story in the New York Post just before the US election, Miranda Devine (Daily Telegraph, 23 March 2022).
“This old bombshell was buried in the 24th paragraph of a story buried on page 20 of the newspaper, but at least the Grey Lady’s readers now know something that readers of the Daily Telegraph and the New York Post knew 17 months ago. It is an indictment of the Times and a betrayal of their readers who were kept in the dark about the true nature of Joe Biden before the 2020 election.