by David Southwell, Daily Sceptic:
When the Albanese Government’s expert panel on Australia’s Covid response delivered its report late last year the verdict was damning.
The panel found that harsh Covid measures were imposed often without any actual basis of evidence, which caused deep and widespread harm as well as loss of confidence in Government.
The media, which I am a very small but picturesque part of, gleefully jumped on this finding.
The Australian Financial Review’s headline was fairly typical: ‘Heavy-handed Covid restrictions have destroyed trust in Government.’
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Noticeably missing, however, was any self-awareness of the media’s collective failure to hold maniacal governments to account during the Covid period, a failure which was near total and is largely ongoing.
At the start of the pandemic, I was not working in the media but in comms. From the vantage point of a news consumer I saw a deep, depressing and even bewildering abdication of the Fourth Estate’s supposed role to question and challenge those in power.
Instead of questioning draconian lockdowns at press conferences, I heard journalists cheering them and asking why they weren’t longer and harsher.
An example of the howling hysteria media outlets descended to was when two teen girls facing petty criminal charges broke lockdown travel restrictions prompting News Ltd tabloids to print photos of the pair on their front pages with the headline ‘Enemies of the state’.
When the Age ran an article about a hospital intensive care unit overflowing with the unvaccinated, whom the journo breathlessly told us were victims of the “scourge of disinformation”, I grew increasingly uncomfortable.
“Others come to the realisation too late that the deadly virus is real, begging for a vaccine before being hooked up to a ventilator,” the author Melissa Cunningham wrote, in a sentence that I was startled to realise could be nominated for the propagandist’s hall of fame.
When then federal Health Minister Greg Hunt and former Victorian Chief Medical Officer Brett Sutton praised the story as “powerful” and “important” on Twitter, I knew there was something seriously wrong, because the media’s job is not to push the Government’s message.
At least that shouldn’t be its job – governments have very big budgets to do their own propaganda, which is why just about every second ad you see on commercial media and online is publicly funded.
If journalism has a public policy role beyond mere description or stenography, it should be to relentlessly question what governments, authorities and, yes, even ‘experts’ are saying and doing.
The bias of journalism should not be towards the Right or Left, but towards scepticism, and towards seeking out the voices and views that may be getting drowned out.
To quote the old axiom, journalism’s role is to ‘speak truth to power’.
