This Is Why They’re Hated

Do the legacy media still not get why they are overwhelmingly hated and distrusted? If the penny hasn’t dropped yet, perhaps they ought to look at their own coverage of the past week.

For the past week, the legacy media in Australia have been nearly universally obsessed with a single scandal, to the exclusion of almost all else. Day after day of page one stories. Multiple articles every day, with some news outlets making special landing pages for their, in their own words, “exhaustive coverage”. The ABC alone had nearly 40 articles in just three days. Even the Governor-General shoved her oar in.

So, what was the scandal? The torture-murder of a young Australian man by a gang of African teens? Nope: not a single mention on the ABC, just two on the Age. More ‘random’ stabbings in Melbourne by Africans? Not a peep. Revelations that a former PM deliberately worked to entangle Australia with communist China, which later rewarded him with a handsome sinecure? Two stories, in the centre-right media, tops. How about the Albanese government’s sotto voce reveal that “parliamentarians, the Australian Public Service, law enforcement, justice and legal professionals” and teachers, will all be forced to undergo Islamic studies courses? Hell, no, the media ran even quieter on that one than the government.

So, what did obsess the media to the point of monomania for a week – and still going?

Some football players hired strippers. One smacked the stripper on the bum four times when they’d only paid for three, which is duly, hysterically, touted by the media as “sexual assault”. They may have snorted coke off a stripper’s tits. Oh, and they told said strippers they were tradies, not football players, so they didn’t get charged a celebrity premium.

That’s it.

No police charges, despite an ‘active investigation’. Of course, quickly recruited lawyers for the strippers are fishing for damages payouts even before police have finished deciding whether to bother pursuing the case or not.

Yet the players have been handed season-ending suspensions by the AFL, which almost certainly torpedoes the club’s chances at a premiership. The entire AFL establishment has relentlessly hair-shirted itself in a public display of ritual self-flagellation. Predominantly female journalists have linked the high-jinks to domestic violence and murder. The same PM who has steadfastly refused to apologise to the Japanese prime minister for his crude sexualised jokes about her, piously wittered that it was “unacceptable” and blatherskited about “women and their safety”.

Even more astonishingly, Governor General Sam Mostyn, who hasn’t said a word about the PM’s grotesque, smutty insult to a fellow head of state, weighed in with the full battle-axe treatment. It was, she sanctimoniously intoned, an important reminder of the need for “constant vigilance for respectful treatment of women everywhere”. Unless, apparently, you’re a former pop star or female foreign head of state insulted by the PM. Or women stabbed in the street by an African. Mostyn also linked the players’ indiscretion to “domestic and sexual violence against women”.

Leaving aside the hypocrisy of Mostyn’s complete silence over the crass antics of the man who put her in her job, there is also the extraordinary legal ramifications. While no charges have been laid, there is, as said, an active police investigation. Can somebody say ‘prejudicing a trial’? Can anyone recall, ever, a Governor General commenting at all, let alone so prejudicially, on an active police investigation?

When police arrested Paul Denyer for the Frankston Serial Killings in 1993, then-Premier Jeff Kennett commented in an interview that he was glad the murderer had been caught, all hell broke loose. Denyer had, after all, merely been arrested, not convicted yet. Prejudicial comments by a political leader could easily have led to Denyer escaping conviction by a declared mis-trial. The Victorian DPP openly considered contempt charges against the premier.

So, why is the Governor General not being similarly warned?

And where is the legacy media’s sense of proportion?