Is there anything more nauseating than the self-righteous crybaby antics of the legacy media when anyone dares hit back? Remember their shock, shock I tell you, when they were called mean names and even had a plastic drink bottle thrown at one reporter – a plastic drink bottle, Susan! It wasn’t even completely empty! – by angry protesters who they’d smeared for weeks as ‘Nazis’ and ‘White Supremacists’, simply for not wanting to be locked in home detention over a moderately dangerous disease?
Even worse, what about when they coined the term ‘fake news’ to smear anyone who dared disagree with their carefully manufactured narratives – only to have an uppity US president throw the term right back at them? How dare you! It’s their word! You plebs can’t use that word!
Well, we can and we will. For the organisers of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Brisbane are doing so in the most hilarious way possible.
Picture the scene at the recent Brisbane Conservative Political Action Conference. The cream of Canberra’s press gallery, those immaculate arbiters of truth who spend 365 days a year breathlessly recycling press releases from the prime minister’s media unit, arrived expecting their usual VIP treatment. Instead, they were greeted with a stroke of genius that deserves a permanent spot in the annals of political trolling.
Every single reporter, scribe and solemn commentator was handed a mandatory conference lanyard bearing two exquisitely chosen words: “Fake News”.
One can only imagine the horror rippling through the press pack. Fainting couches were no doubt deployed in the green room. How terribly distressing for men and women accustomed to casting stones from glass towers without ever expecting a pebble to bounce back. Worse: they were being forced to be honest for the first time in their careers.
The howling from the Australian’s reporting contingent was particularly magnificent. To read their wounded dispatches, one would think they had been marched into the town square and pelted with rotten fruit, rather than mildly inconvenienced by a piece of office stationery.
What a joke. It wasn’t about security, it was the organisers’ idea of onsite entertainment and amusement for attendees as these journalists dutifully got on with doing their jobs, regardless of this pathetic attempt at intimidation and humiliation.
Intimidation! Humiliation! Good grief. One wonders how these delicate blooms survive the harsh elements of the real world. For years, the legacy media has treated ordinary citizens, taxpayers who simply want to go about their business without being hectored by sanctimonious columnists, with open contempt. They label patriotic citizens as extremists, run interference for failing governments and manufacture outrage cycles with the precision of an Orwellian Minitrue. Yet the moment someone cheekily turns the mirror back on them, they throw a collective tantrum worthy of a toddler denied an ice-cream cone.
Of course, the pearl-clutching reached a fever pitch over the involvement of figures like Warren Mundine and Senator Pauline Hanson. The commentariat is positively apoplectic that politicians are exercising their own democratic right to decide which journalistic outlets are worthy of their time.
What’s it say about politicians who argue they are up to governing the country but want to pick and choose who brings the scrutiny they need to face ahead of the election?
Oh, spare us the constitutional lecture. For decades, the legacy media has enjoyed an unearned monopoly on defining the political agenda, treating access as a privilege to be dispensed to compliant courtiers while excommunicating anyone who deviates from the approved orthodoxy. When populist leaders like Pauline Hanson decline to roll out the red carpet for mastheads that treat their voters with undisguised disdain, it is suddenly treated as an assault on democracy itself.
Both major parties and their handmaidens in the press gallery need to thicken their skins. Anthony Albanese spends half his waking life whining that the media is being terribly unfair to his monumentally disastrous economic record, while journalists cry foul whenever an event organiser refuses to treat them like sacred royalty.
If the legacy media spent half as much time examining their own staggering institutional bias as they do whining about novelty lanyards, public trust in journalism might actually crawl out of the basement. Until then, they should wear their plastic badges with pride. After all, if the tar and feathers fit, wear them: preferably on a lanyard around your neck.
Personally, I’d have issued them dunces’ caps, too.
