When it comes to accusing politicians of being ‘dictators’, legacy media really ought to sit this one out. For all their blatherskite about ‘speaking truth to power’, and their endless shrieking about ‘Trump the dictator’, the record shows that legacy media don’t have a lot to boast about when it comes to dealing with actual dictators.
Even in the immediate years preceding WWII, news outlets from home magazines to the New York Times ran flattering, even admiring, profiles of Hitler, portraying him as a country gentleman who ate vegetarian, played catch with his dogs and took post-meal strolls outside his mountain estate. “All kinds of publications – from serious political journals to LIFE and even American Kennel Gazette, a dog magazine – were covering this story about the ‘real’ Hitler,” says Despina Stratigakos, an architectural historian at the University at Buffalo.
They were just as fawning over Mussolini. The Saturday Evening Post serialised Il Duce’s autobiography in 1928. Papers ranging from the New York Tribune to the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Chicago Tribune credited Mussolini and the new, modern ‘experiment’ with fascism with returning Italy to ‘normalcy’ and revitalising its economy.
They’re still at it.
While left-wing journalists love pointing to the economic harm Donald Trump’s tariffs are doing to the US economy, few point out the non-market authoritarian world is struggling […]
Dictators standing with China’s Xi Jinping – Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian – all face economic problems, as does Xi.
And don’t forget ‘Dictator Dan’ himself, who left behind a basket-case economy in Victoria.
Yes, there’s nothing the legacy media love more than a socialist dictator overseeing a collapsing economy. Who can forget the roster of lefty hacks who signed a fawning open letter to Hugo Chávez and begging him to visit Australia?
Much of the left-wing domestic media in Australia quietly prefers Xi to Trump, and favours Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s appeasing of China over former coalition PM Scott Morrison calling out of China over the origins of Covid […]
The axis of evil leaders with Xi are described in most media as a systemic threat to the US and to capitalism. Yet their own economic indicators suggest they could do with more free market vigour.
Even when the Australian legacy media were turning cartwheels over the ‘rise of China’ and its supposedly miraculous economy, none of them stopped to ask the most basic question: Is it true? After all, the only source of China’s economic statistics is the Chinese Communist Party. Who would seriously believe anything they say?
As it turns out, there’s only so much even the CCP can paper over, for so long. When China has at least 50 ‘ghost cities’ – massive property developments with no one actually living in them – it’s pretty obvious that this is not a healthy economy by a long shot.
China remains mired in a property crisis reminiscent of the bubble that smashed Japan’s miracle economy in 1989. And now China confronts more misallocation of scarce resources as various companies and regional leaders vie for market share in EV production and AI.
The legacy media have also been cock-a-whoop at China’s flooding of the EV market with cheap, heavily subsidised rubbish: a failed loss-leader strategy that Xi is already publicly calling to end.
While Russia’s economy has borne up under the strain of war and sanctions better than anyone expected, a large part of that is due to massive exports of oil and gas, especially to India. Otherwise, Russia’s economy is in the doldrums. The Russian economy is barely bigger than Australia’s, in a country with nearly six times the population. Russian GDP per capita is $US14,889, compared to Australia’s $US64,407.
Xi may dream of making China the world hyperpower, but he’s pushing it all uphill. Not only does China severely lack the cultural clout of America – millions of people flood into America every year, while no one’s trying to sneak into China – economically, it’s stuffed. Its population will shrink rapidly over the next 50 years, leaving an already stagnating economy in a deeper hole than ever.
Where people such as former Labor PM Paul Keating used to claim before Covid that China’s economy was already bigger than that of the US, it is now clear US GDP exceeds China’s by more than $US10 trillion: $US30.5 trillion to $US19.3 trillion. Add in the GDP of the EU ($US20 trillion), the UK ($US3.8 trillion) and Japan ($US4.2 trillion) and the traditional US partners plus America dwarf the Chinese economy three to one.
In the long run, too, the blunt truth is that China is not just an unreliable and dangerous trading partner, but very much the opposite of an ally.
In Australian media terms, such alliance issues are treated very differently depending on the source. In the left-wing Guardian, ABC and Nine mastheads, Albanese has brought maturity to the relationship with China and has settled diplomatic ties with our South Pacific neighbours.
This is entirely characteristic of the left’s dismal judgement and propensity to toady to dictatorships. All Albanese has got from the Chinese relationship is scuffed knees, while our South Pacific neighbours are taking our money and letting China take them over anyway.
We are right not to let China in under our guard in the Pacific. But we also need to tell our island neighbours some hard truths. We need to remind Vanuatu, which is bowing to China over a planned treaty arrangement with Australia, that we were first in with aid after the devastating 2015 cyclone.
And we also need to be resolute with their cargo-cult, gibsmedat, mentality. The claim that their islands are sinking is arrant bullshit and, in any case, if they want to complain about carbon emissions, then take it up with China and its 35 per cent of global emissions. Australia’s one per cent are not the villain.
And China is not their friend. As Palau’s president admitted last week: the Pacific is effectively “already at war with China”.
