The sense of panic is becoming palpable. The legacy media are dying, and they and their political masters know it. Hence the flurry of legislative attempts to prop up a failing model. From Jacinda Ardern’s Public Interest Journalism Fund, to Anthony Albanese’s ‘online misinformation’ bill, left-wing governments are desperate to shore up the mainstream media.
And why wouldn’t they be? The MSM are their most reliable supporters. Contrary to their vainglorious claim to be ‘speaking truth to power’, the MSM are little more than political camp followers telling lies for power.
To see it in action, merely follow election-night coverage in any Western democracy. The parade of glum faces on the US MSM last week, or in Australia when Bill Shorten was unexpectedly defeated in 2019, gives away their clear bias.
But nothing exposed the lickspittle MSM’s determination to bellow lies for power quite like the Covid pandemic.
Many reporters behaved like political enforcers rather than questioning journalists.
Some at the ABC even referred to health editor Norman Swan as a “single source of truth on Covid”. Yet his public forecasts in 2020 of the imminent collapse of the hospital system were utterly wrong.
In fact, Swan got nearly everything about Covid wrong. Yet, he still rules the roost as the ABC’s ‘trusted’ medical spokesman.
Swan was a harsh critic of NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, who tried to keep Sydney open whenever possible. He backed [Daniel Andrews] who locked down Melbourne longer than any city in the world.
Yet Victoria had a higher death rate by the end of the pandemic than NSW.
With notable exceptions, the MSM are still at it. When the Albanese government’s Covid inquiry went rogue and delivered a damning indictment of Covid policies, most of the media did their best to bury it.
The Sydney Morning Herald covered the report with a single page one story, plus one inside comment piece by economics writer Shane Wright and an editorial. Its Saturday Review section ignored the report altogether.
The Australian Financial Review gave it similar coverage, although it did run a piece in its Saturday Perspective section. It also gave one of the pandemic’s most sensible voices, former deputy federal chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth, an opinion piece on October 31.
ABC 7.30 on October 29 ran a couple of cursory comments about the report from Canberra correspondent Jacob Greber in a wider seven-minute wrap of the day’s events in the national capital that mainly focused on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Qantas.
To their credit, the inquiry investigators bucked the deliberately restrictive terms of reference Albanese imposed on them, to prevent them investigating the role of state governments. That this was little more than an attempt at enforcing a Labor protection racket is given away by two simple facts: state governments were responsible for most of the draconian Covid measures and nearly all of them were Labor.
Yet even though its terms of reference prevented the inquiry from looking at the failures of state Labor governments, there is meat in the report for the persistent reader.
This includes barbs at Victorian hotel quarantine mismanagement, the negative effects on attitudes to vaccination, statements by the then Queensland chief health officer Jeanette Young (not named in the report) criticising the original AstraZeneca vaccine, the irrationality of school closures, their negative effects on children’s mental heath, and debacles in aged care.
Then there is the great boogeyman of the MSMs and left-governments: ‘misinformation’. Their obsession with attributing ‘misinformation’ to their opponents is directly proportional to their own addiction to telling lies.
The report says misinformation contributed to a loss of public trust but does not focus on the way incorrect commentary from experts often contributed to that mistrust.
New Zealanders would be aware a gargantuan pink elephant in that particular room.
If you don’t have the time or energy to read it, an easy way to understand what really happened in 2020 is to look at the testimony of US health chief Anthony Fauci before the US House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
Fauci freely admitted many of the harshest rules he oversaw had no science behind them and were simply best guesses. There had never been any work to assess the US “six feet separation” rule or mask-wearing for children […]
Worse was the performance of federal and state governments in keeping the virus out of aged care, where most deaths occurred.
Coatsworth says the medical profession needs to think carefully about its attitude to end-of-life care for the very elderly.
My sister and I were blocked from seeing our mum on her 90th birthday and had to sing Happy Birthday to her on FaceTime. We were asked not to send flowers because disinfecting them was too labour-intensive. As if flowers could transmit Covid.
For much of 2020–21, aged care visits were banned. It took a severe toll on residents’ mental health.
Yet most residents caught Covid from staff rather than from family visits.
Now, the political class and their media bootlickers want us to just pretend it all never happened. Not to forgive: just to forget the whole thing.
Never forget. Never forgive.
