Odd shots, 11: Covering demagogues only serves their interests

This is the eleventh post in a series about the ways that people online blame the media for society’s ills. The title derives from an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” The first post appeared on 24 August 2019 but there was an earlier post on 18 February of that year titled ‘Don’t shoot the piano player’.

Times shown in this post are Australian Standard Daylight Time except after 6 October 2019 and before 5 April 2020 when they are Australian Eastern Daylight Time. Most of what follows is about US President Donald Trump, so if you’re allergic to such commentary maybe skip this post. I’ll start on 28 August when on Twitter New York University’s Jay Rosen commented at 8.38am, “You know that thing where Trump gets rewarded with media attention for doing something stupid, racist, tradition-busting, or outrageous? I wrote a thread about the options journalists have when they feel caught up in that kind of cycle.”

Rosen’s tweet pointed to one from 12.57am on 19 August put up by Julia Ioffe of GQ Magazine, who said, “This is the fundamental problem of Trump: he provokes by saying horrific things that cannot go unchallenged, but in challenging them, you rev up him and his base to double down in delight (and sincere belief) and horrify you more, which means you have to challenge it again, etc.”

This problem had appeared in the Australian context prior to the May election when Fraser Anning, a right-wing populist, was trying to generate support in the community by saying things that reminded people (everyone; although he denied it, saying that that outrage was a media beat-up) of the Nazis. But Anning was not reelected to the Senate in May last year, so he no longer offers a dilemma to journalists working in Australia.

For American journalists Trump will, however, continue to do so. He was (unsurprisingly) back in the headlines on 26 September when at 6.45am the account of MSNBC, a US media organisation, tweeted, “.@NicolleDWallace cuts away from President Trump's news conference: ‘We hate to do this, but the president isn't telling the truth ... what Trump appears to be trying to do is to turn his own impeachment into a big deflection.’” The tweet came with a video. In response to this, at 4.53pm on the same day Amy Remeikis, a Guardian Australia journalist, tweeted, “Cutting away from a press conference because the leader isn’t telling the truth - and then debunking it in real time.” Then, at 6.20pm on the same day Paul Bongiorno, a columnist with the progressive Australian news outlet The Saturday paper, tweeted, “will Australian networks be game enough to do this? There is plenty to fact check. We are drowning in a sea of bull shit [sic].”

On 27 September at 7.07am David Corn, a US journalist who is the Washington, DC, bureau chief of the news outlet Mother Jones, tweeted, “My latest: Trump's intelligence chief offers a timely reminder: Trump is a liar. Don't let this slip by. Please read, RT, and share.” In response, Mehdi Hasan, a columnist of US media outlet The Intercept, tweeted, “This is a key point but will be forgotten fast: if, say, Obama's own intelligence chief had gone to Congress & basically said Obama is lying, it would have been a huge story. But Trump, as ever, produces so many controversies, that most don't get proper attention. Frustrating.” Corn responded to this, perhaps unfairly, with some sarcasm, “I wish I had time to read your tweet, @mehdirhasan. I am sure you are making an intelligent point. Gotta run.....”

Rosen reappeared in my timeline on 27 September at 8.42am when he tweeted, “Treat it as a hypothetical. Suppose one party — far more than the other — begins to rely on fictions and conspiracy theory to hold itself together and project normalcy. Can a news organization dedicated to both impartiality and factuality cope? In theory, yes. In practice, nope.”

Then on 7 October at 12.18pm Rosen tweeted, “’He's destroyed the information space, so everyone thinks it's just us vs. them.’ Philosopher @jasonintrator Jason Stanley, author of 'How Propaganda Works,' on CNN. This is why the problem goes way beyond ‘how to cover’ the president.” The tweet came with a link to a CNN video in which Stanley answered questions put to him by a CNN anchor. CNN is a US cable news channel. Trump uses “bald-faced lying”, Stanley said, so the situation now is different from how it had been in the past, when administrations had lied but the truth was still important. Now it isn’t. The president knows what he says it untrue, Stanley went on. It’s just “us vs them” now. “It’s about winning and losing,” he said, “It’s not about the truth.” He talked about the “division of the information space”. “The information space is corrupted,” Stanley said. “The president has destroyed the information space.”

How to counter this tendency? the anchor asked. “We have to return to what’s true and what’s not.” Focusing on the facts, not a horse race (a term Rosen uses often but which Stanley didn’t use). “Not us vs them.” He said that totalitarian regimes like spectacle, where politics is like a game.

Three days later, on 10 October at 8.03am a US account named Bill Maxwell with over 59,000 followers tweeted about some more weirdness from the Orange Liability:

Holy shit! 

Trump on the Kurds: 

"They didn't help us in the Second World War, they didn't help us with Normandy." He says they're only interested in fighting for "their land."

Trump suggests he has no problem with Erdogan being "tough" on the Kurds.

At 9.10am on 19 April this year, author and media analyst Thomas Baekdal tweeted, “Newspapers, you seriously need to stop reporting from Trump's press conferences. This is no longer about making people informed. This is Trump having a very specific political agenda to misinformed and to confuse people, and using us in the press to spread it.”

It was other politicians, too, not just Trump. So, for example, Jonathan Groves, a retired academic and former editor with 2141 followers, tweeted on 3 October at 8.22am, “The era of the live interview should end. @NPR just granted a politician five full minutes to misrepresent what’s in the White House call log.” “NPR” is a US non-profit news outlet. Groves’ tweet came with a link to a podcast titled, “Republican Rep. Jim Banks Discusses The Latest Impeachment Inquiry Developments.” Jim Banks was at the time a member of the lower house of the US Congress representing an Indiana electorate.

“Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick earlier called on Americans to sacrifice their lives, telling Fox News that grandparents across the country should be proud to die from the coronavirus if it meant the younger generations could get back to work,” tweeted Australian Dave Ewart at 12.03pm on 18 April this year. It seems as though the contagion wasn’t just one infecting the lungs, but also the mind, possibly inciting Trump in return to call on the citizens of some states, during the Covid-19 crisis, to arm themselves and rise up violently against their elected representatives.

But it wasn’t just in the US that people were getting frustrated with the kind of rhetoric that is strong on surface and weak on content. On 1 October at 4.17am Guardian columnist and left-wing activist George Monbiot had tweeted, “Can we please stop calling them ‘populists’? It creates an association with popularity, and suggests they are closer to the people than other politicians. Let's call people like Trump, Johnson, Modi, Morrison, Bolsnaro, Duterte and Orban what they are: Demagogues.” Morrison is the prime minister of Australia, Modi is the president of India, Bolsonaro is the president of Brazil, Duterte is the president of the Philippines, and Orban is the president of Hungary. Boris Johnson (the UK prime minister) shouldn’t need any introduction from me.

And journalists were sometimes the butt of comments from people in the community. For example, on 7 October at 1.07pm Jay Van Bavel, a social neuroscience professor at New York University, tweeted, “I’m so tired of watching partisan hacks argue with one another on political talk shows—I hear so many logical errors, lies and conspiracy theories. I’d vastly prefer a show with a historian, political scientist and legal scholar who slowly explain what’s happening.” A call from the bleachers for an expert rather than a politician – but where does the amateur end and the professional start? Who is to decide if not the voter?

Odd shots, 10: The media uses hyperbole to draw readers

This is the tenth post in a series. The series title derives from an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” The first post appeared on 24 August 2019 but there was an earlier post on 18 February of that year titled ‘Don’t shoot the piano player’. 

War, madness, civil strife, fire, cold: a kind of metaphor involving hyperbole (the use of unlikely expressions in order to achieve a rhetorical goal) is commonplace and so this post is one that is different from the others in this series. This time, the charge that is levelled at the media is deserved. Journalists do, indeed, use unwarranted expressions to draw readers to their stories. They do it for selfish purposes: to get people to commit the time necessary to read them.

And they do it frequently. Such things are cheap shots (or “reliable formulations”, if we are to avoid hyperbole). Having said that, the use of metaphors seems to be innate. Think of words such as “watchband” or “switchplate”, for example. In each case metaphor is employed for the purpose of nominalisation: in order to find a suitable term for a novelty. The reuse of words like this is a normal part of linguistic practice and is common to all cultures that use language (ie it is universal).

The point to be made here is that some kinds of metaphors exploit people’s tendency to focus on aberration. We are hard-wired to notice things that are different in some way. The flaw in the manufacture that will reduce the value of a product, the odd smell in the room that presages disaster, the striking countenance that introduces a potential mate, the stumble that singles out the halt individual in a herd, the swallow that promises summer. Writers use this human characteristic in order to control how we behave.

As with the other posts in this series, the examples in this survey were gathered over a period of time, in this case about three weeks in late 2019.

Military metaphors

On 17 September the Guardian tweeted, “Brazil fire warning shot to surfing rivals in Olympic qualifier.”

On 21 September on the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) website the kicker for a story read, “The comedian stands to reap a fortune as his iconic '90s sitcom intensifies the streaming arms race.” The story was about the 90s TV star Jerry Seinfeld.

On 21 September on the SMH website the kicker of a story read, “The President warned of a drawn-out fight with China over $500 billion in trade, in a setback for Australian hopes of easing a tariff war.” Once again using the language of conflict to draw the reader’s attention to a link.

On 23 September on the SMH website the kicker for a story read, “The call is at the centre of an escalating battle after the media reported Donald Trump asked the Ukrainian leader to investigate whether Joe Biden misused his position while vice-president.”

On 25 September at 3.49pm I saw a news story from The Verge in a tweet that had the headline, “Amazon reveals $180 Echo Frames smart glasses with Alexa built in.” The first sentence in the story was, “Amazon is getting into the smart glasses race.”

On 28 September the SMH put up a kicker for a story that went, “Joe Biden hopes to benefit from the coming impeachment battle. But it could also cement the view he is a deeply flawed candidate whose best days are behind him.”

On 3 October the SMH ran a kicker that went, “A second big front in the US trade wars would do even more damage to the global economy and compound the damage to the US itself.” At 6.31 the SMH account tweeted, “Comment: Now Trump wants a tit-for-tat stoush with Europe, no wonder markets are fearful.”

On 5 October the SMH ran a kicker that went, “We watched in puzzlement as the world unleashed an armoury of unconventional policies. Now it's our turn.” The story was about the Reserve Bank of Australia’s recent decision to drop the cash rate – the rate of interest banks have to pay to borrow money – to 0.75 percent.

Biblical metaphors

On 30 September the SMH ran a story with the headline, “'Retail apocalypse' claims another scalp as Forever 21 files for bankruptcy.” In the story it wasn’t clear where the expression came from there is a paragraph that goes like this:

Forever 21's bankruptcy is the latest in a long chain of collapses, store closures and similar bankruptcy claims, with prominent US retailers such as Sears, Toys 'R' Us, J. C. Penney, Barneys and Macy's all falling victim to the 'retail apocalypse'.

But the quote wasn’t attributed to anyone in particular. It appears to have been an invention of the journalist.

On 25 September at 1.51pm the Australian’s account tweeted, “Fallen rugby star Israel Folau conceded breaching Rugby Australia’s Code of Conduct over social media posts when he was before the Tribunal in May and offered to make a public apology, court documents reveal.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the news outlet’s website.

Boxing metaphors

On 24 September at 10.23am News dot com tweeted, “Living treasure and ecowarrior Sir David Attenborough has unleashed a scathing attack on Australia, saying we “don’t give a damn” about the world. He has also taken a swipe at @ScottMorrisonMP.” The tweet came with a link to a story on its website that read, “Sir David Attenborough slams PM Scott Morrison’s climate change track record.”

On 2 October the SMH ran a kicker that went, “NAB to take a heavy hit on back of more compensation payouts to clients charged for financial advice that was not delivered, refunds for dubious insurance, and software accounting changes.” “NAB” is the National Australia Bank, one of the largest companies in the country. The company had been embarrassed during a royal commission that established on 14 December 2017 by the Australian government. The final report was delivered to the governor-general on 1 February 2019.

Metaphors evoking madness

On 24 September the SMH used a kicker for a story on its home page that went like this, “Prime Minister Scott Morrison came face to face with a frenzied political force unlike anything an Australian election can produce.”

Metaphors evoking disaster due to fire

On 25 September the SMH ran a kicker for a story that went like this: “The Morrison government has moved to contain the blowback over its declaration that China is no longer a developing nation.”

On 25 September in the evening, the SMH ran a headline for a story about the Mascot Towers building that had started to show serious structural faults following its construction and after people had invested money buying units in it. The headline went, “'Absolutely gutting': Mascot Towers owners slam minister's claims.”

Metaphors evoking disaster due to cold

On 28 September the SMH ran a kicker that went, “Police uncovered a series of 'chilling' videos shot by murderers Schmegelsky and McLeod where they detailed their plans to steal a boat and escape to Africa.” The reference was to the murder of an Australian and his American girlfriend in Canada that had taken place in July. The adjective in inverted commas was one that had been used by the Royal Mounted Police.

Nautical metaphors

On 27 September the SMH ran a kicker to a story on its homepage that went, “He went to his first AFL game in 2014 after immigrating from India. Now his family home is a sea of orange.” The reference was to the Australian Football League, which uses a unique code and set of rules and is played around the country but especially in the states of Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia.

Metaphors evoking the action of injustice

On 25 September in the afternoon a story appeared on the SMH website with the headline, “'Witch hunt garbage': Trump lashes out after impeachment announcement.”

On 3 October the SMH ran a kicker that went like this, “The closest galaxy to the Milky Way, Andromeda, is cannibalising smaller galaxies on its way towards us.” This is an unremarkable metaphor, though perhaps not a very sensitive one as some might say it reflects an outdated colonialist approach to human cultural diversity.

Metaphors evoking civil disturbance

On 3 October the SMH ran a kicker about the stock market downturn. It went, “It’s not just Australia where shares are under the pump with Japanese and South Korean markets joining the global rout.” At 3.25pm the SMH account tweeted, “Markets Live: $40 billion wiped away as ASX joins global rout.” The ASX is the Australian Stock Exchange, based in Sydney.

On 5 October the SMH ran a headline on its homepage that went, “I am the whistleblower who lit the fuse under a financial giant. It cost me dearly.” The kicker went, “The whistleblower who revealed serious wrongdoing at IOOF speaks for the first time about blowing the whistle and the toll it took on his mental health and relationships.” “IOOF” stands for IOOF Holdings Limited, a company that offers services such as financial advice and superannuation. According to Wikipedia the company originated in Melbourne in 1846 as the Victoria Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. The story was written by the whistleblower and the first sentence went:

I am the IOOF whistleblower. It was me who lit the fuse under a financial giant and now choose to tell my story of what happened and the toll it took.

Odd shots, 09: Journalists write fake news

This is the ninth post in a series about the ways that people online blame the media for society’s ills. The title derives from an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” The first post appeared on 24 August 2019 but there was an earlier post on 18 February of that year titled ‘Don’t shoot the piano player’.

This survey started on 5 October 2019 and continued until 14 December of the same year, so it’s not exhaustive. Times shown are Australian Eastern Daylight Time except before 6 October, the day daylight saving kicked in.

The survey starts with a case of official harassment of a journalist, something which, along with public opprobrium of the same category of professional, is everywhere on the rise. In some countries, as we all know (or, at least, as we should know) journalists are jailed or, even, killed. The following case is less extreme but it is still worrying and is indicative of a trend that is readily evident.

On 5 October at 6.14am Jillian York, who works at the EFF (“The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.”) tweeted, “This, vaccines, prevalence of guns are just a few of the hundreds of reasons I dread every visit to the US.” The tweet came with two images (see below) relaying a conversation a journalist had had with an immigration official upon arriving in the US. The images had been put up in a tweet from Joseph Cox, a journalist with US media outlet Motherboard. He had said, “Definitely a very normal conversation for a democracy.” “CBP” stands for Customs and Border Protection, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security.

The case was soon picked up by other media outlets. For example, on 7 October at 10.16am MSNBC, the US media company, tweeted, “A Customs and Border Protection agent reportedly refused to return journalist Ben Watson's passport at Dulles International Airport until Watson ‘admitted’ to writing propaganda. Watson joins @kendisgibson to describe what happened.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the organisation’s website that included a video. The webpage has this on it:

Ben Watson, News Editor for Defense One, says that a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to return his passport at Dulles International Airport after Watson told him he was a journalist. The agent refused to return the passport until Watson admitted that he wrote 'propaganda.' The CBP has issued a statement saying they are investigating the incident.

Kendis Gibson is the MSNBC Live weekend anchorman and had 25,820 followers when I checked his profile.

Then on 12 October at 2.27am Jessica Sidman, the food editor at the Washingtonian, tweeted, “My brother is on a @united flight from LA to Boston and saw this guy boarding with a shirt that reads Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.’” The tweet turned into a thread.

He told the flight attendant and she asked what he wanted her to do. 

He told her he didn’t want one passenger threatening to kill other passengers. 

He told her @united should do the right thing. She went to talk to the captain. 

Then security pulled my brother off the plane. He talked to a security official. 

The security guy said they couldn’t do anything just because it was offensive. 

My brother said it wasn’t offensive, it was THREATENING. 

They offered to put my brother on another flight. They didnt say anything to the guy with the shirt.

This is a photo her brother took on the day.

On 14 October at around 11.50am Australian Jason Wilson, who freelances for the Guardian and lives in Oregon, tweeted a link to a story on the New York Times website titled, “Macabre Video of Fake Trump Shooting Media and Critics Is Shown at His Resort.” He commented, “Someone will act on one of these media kill lists one day and there will be no consequences for the people who have done the most to whip up hatred for journalists.” I replied, “They already did in Maryland last year ..” and included the link to my story.

Then things started getting bizarre as the administration or, at least, its supporters, began to enter into the spirit of things. On 14 October at 6.25pm Cindy McCain, the widow of Congressman John McCain, tweeted, “Reports describing a violent video played at a Trump Campaign event in which images of reporters & @JohnMcCain are being slain by Pres Trump violate every norm our society expects from its leaders & the institutions that bare [sic] their names. I stand w/ @whca in registering my outrage.” “WHCA” is the White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents that institution’s press corps. I saw this tweet in my timeline on 15 October.

The next day, on 15 October, at 7.57am an account with the Twitter handle @JDLukenback and 7373 followers tweeted, “This violent video is privately endorsed by Trump and his sycophants around him, you can be assured of that. They may publicly condemn this kind of bullshit, but they know it plays well with his mentally sick supporters.” It came with an image.

Then John Moffitt, whom I follow and who is a US astrophysicist, palaeontologist and geologist, tweeted in response, “You and I both know that people will die as a result of the #TrumpVideo but Trump supporters cheering this Snuff Film will shrug their collective shoulders at the body count.”

On the same day, 15 October, at 8.21am NBC News reporter Ben Collins tweeted, “The timeline behind the account that created the now-infamous violent Trump video paints a familiar picture. An amateur meme maker makes a viral video. Reddit's r/the_donald welcomes him in, offers money and community, and asks for more.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the US TV network’s website.  The story tells about an account named TheGeekzTeam on the social media site Reddit that was encouraged to make videos critical of Trump.

The next day, 16 October, there was another case. At 7.49am on that day, Nick Gillespie, an editor at US media outlet Reason, tweeted, “This story that Trump advisor Peter Navarro made up a fake source in multiple books is shocking and should lead to his firing.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the website of US media outlets Raw Story titled, “Trump trade adviser busted for making up ‘whimsical pen name’ to quote himself in his books for years.” The story was dated 15 October and contained this: 

A senior economic and trade advisor to President Donald Trump has been busted for making up a person he can quote in his books and to justify his policies. 

A shocking expose in The Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that Peter Navarro invented the name “Ron Vara,” an anagram for Navarro, to justify his own opinions in his books. https://adage.com/article/news/mark-zuckerberg-touts-broad-power-expression-fifth-estate/2208301

A response from social media sites, facing the deployment of false information by politicians, was expected. On 24 October at 6.34am the Nieman Journalism Lab, at Harvard University, tweeted, “Facebook is just gonna come out and start calling fake news fake (well, ‘false’).” The tweet came with a link to a story on its website that had this information in it. The story went on, after the first paragraph: 

One thing that will still not be labeled [sic] “False Information,” though, are false Facebook ads placed by politicians, which the company announced recently would be allowed to run without restriction. (As CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it in his Georgetown speech last week: “We don’t fact-check political ads. We don’t do this to help politicians, but because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying. And if content is newsworthy, we also won’t take it down even if it would otherwise conflict with many of our standards.”)

This appeared to me to be sensible. The following image shows what will appear on mobile phones where the company’s apps are being used.

Then, of course, there was a backlash against the social media company. On 23 October at 11.26pm Rob Rogers, a cartoonist with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, tweeted, “Mark Zuckerberg claims that Facebook can't be the arbiter of truth. He has decided that he will allow false political ads and propaganda to run on the site. Money talks, truth walks.”

The next day, October 24, at 6.41am Oliver Willis, a person who calls himself a senior writer at media outlet Shareblue, tweeted, “@AOC asks Mark Zuckerberg if he would allow her to run Facebook ads saying Republicans supported the Green New Deal. He says he doesn't know. Zuckerberg: ‘I think lying is bad’ but then he claims that it's not Facebook's role to take down lies in political ads.” “AOC” refers to Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat. Shareblue describes itself as, “the No. 1 digital platform for progressive news, reaching millions of people each month.” The tweet came with a video showing the congresswoman asking Zuckerberg some questions in a hearing.

On 30 October at 7.16am Kenneth Roth, the CEO of Human Rights Watch, tweeted, “Facebook employees rebel against Zuckerburg's decision to allow politicians to post any falsehood they want—'a threat to what FB stands for.’” The tweet came with a link to a story on the New York Times’ website but I don’t have a subscription and I had already viewed my monthly allowance of articles, so I couldn’t read the story.

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, announced on 31 October, starting a thread at 7.51am, “We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…” He went on to list his reasons, which include the use of microtargeting and deep fakes. He also said that he wanted individuals in the community to be the ones pushing messages out about candidates in elections, not well-funded parties.

At 7.55am on the same morning, a Bloomberg journalist specialising in social media tweeted, “Twitter stock took a little dive when @jack announced the company would stop selling political ads. Which is weird because Twitter makes virtually no money from political ads, so either people were unaware or there's something I don't know.”

The Guardian was fairly quick to enter the debate, now with a policy. On 2 November at 6.20am I saw a tweet from the Guardian which said, “The Guardian view on political advertising: time to regulate it, Mr Zuckerberg | Editorial.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the company’s website. 

Then “deep fakes” began to enter the discussion about fake news. On 25 October at 9.11am journalist Miriam Cosic tweeted, “If seeing is no longer believing the question is, Could ‘deep fakes’ weaken democracy?” The tweet came with a link to a YouTube video. California had just, a few weeks earlier, made it illegal to use “deep fake” videos. The kicker on this story runs, “AB 730 makes it illegal to circulate doctored videos, images or audio of politicians within 60 days of an election.”

As for journalists, they were being forgotten. They are collateral damage amid all this hatred, all this fear and loathing. At 12.35pm on 14 December Nieman Journalism Lab tweeted, “At least 30 journalists worldwide are imprisoned for spreading ‘fake news’. That’s a huge increase since 2012.” The tweet came with a link to a story.

Odd shots, 08: Use of anonymous sources

This is the eighth post in a series about the ways that people online blame the media for society’s ills. The title derives from an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” The first post appeared on 24 August but there was an earlier post on 18 February this year titled ‘Don’t shoot the piano player’.

This survey started on 25 September and ran until 11 October. Times shown are Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) except after 6 October, when they are Australian Eastern Daylight Time.

A jibe that journalists overuse anonymous sources is frequently evident, as the first case in this survey shows. But, soon enough, there was a case where an anonymous source became a whistleblower and, when that happened, people started getting behind the journalists involved. Their common enemy, now, was the politician (Donald Trump) that everyone on the left loves to hate.

To start with: a typical grouch about using anonymity when deploying material from a source in a story. On 25 September at 6.26am BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg tweeted, “Another source says Jacob Rees-Mogg described what happened as 'constitutional coup' – [Rees-Mogg’s] team [is] not denying tonight, but [he] won't comment.” Rees-Mogg is a conservative British politician serving as leader of the House of Commons. The tweet was part of a thread about the reactions of politicians in the UK to news that the Supreme Court had disallowed the prime minister’s prorogation of Parliament. In response to this tweet, at 6.28am Alok Jha, the science correspondent of The Economist, another UK media outlet, retweeted her tweet with a comment of his own: “Seriously, this anonymous ‘another source’ thing is getting mega tedious.”

Then, on 27 September, the shit really hit the fan. At 4.01am on that day there was a tweet from the New York Times that said, “Breaking News: The whistle-blower is said to be a CIA officer who was assigned to work at the White House. His complaint suggests he is a trained analyst.” The story was that Trump had promised the president of Ukraine a loan if he would give Trump incriminating information about the son of Joe Biden, one of the Democrats up for nomination as the party’s presidential candidate ahead of the 2020 election. Information had come from the White House that had prompted the Democrats to announce that they would launch a Congressional enquiry into the case.

A few minutes later, at 4.06am on the same day, 27 September, the NY Times tweeted, “Here's more from Dean Baquet, our executive editor, on why we published limited information about the whistle-blower whose claims led Democrats to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Trump.”

In response to this, at 5.31am Mieke Eoyang, a VP at Third Way (“a national think tank that champions modern center-left ideas”) tweeted, “Message the @nytimes is sending to IC whistleblowers: even if you do your best to follow the rules to protect your identity, we will hunt you down and identify you, unless you publish your allegations anonymously in our op-Ed pages.” Then, retweeting her tweet and adding a comment was former Newsweek journalist Jeff Stein, who at 6.25am said, “Good question raised here by @MiekeEoyang : Maybe NYT reporters should double down on exposing identity of insider who penned famous Op-ed, rather than publish anonymously sourced speculation on Ukrainegate whistleblower.” Then Neil McMahon, an Australian journalist with 10,324 followers, tweeted, “True. It's a curious argument from NYT editor Dean Baquet that we need to know information about the whistleblower to assess their credibility but has zipped lips about Anonymous who penned that famous oped.”

I didn’t know what the op-ed piece referred to in these tweets was but, presumably, it was something about a politician that the newspaper had received from a whistleblower to publish on its website.

At 7.10am on the same day, a man named George Little, who describes himself as former chief spokesman for the US Department of Defense and the CIA, tweeted, “I was @CIA spokesman when @nytimes relaxed its standards for publishing the names of or identifying information about @CIA officers. I fought it. It's still wrong today. Whistleblowers in particular should be treated like newspaper sources, which the NYTimes staunchly protects.”

I saw a tweet from Jennifer Brandel, co-founder of media consultancy Hearken, at 12.45pm on the same day, that went, “Some math to put #CancelNYT in context. If the @nytimes publishes ~250 stories a day, which is 90,000 per year, and you read every one, and thereby learn a ton but disagree with their choices on even let’s say 5% - that’s 4,500 stories. How much are the other 84k worth to you?” The #CancelNYT hashtag had already been going for a while and I tuned in and it was being used widely. The news outlet Business Insider reported on that day:

The whistleblower who filed an explosive national-security complaint against President Donald Trump is a CIA officer who was once assigned to the White House, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The hashtag had slowed down by the following day but the reaction to the newspaper’s action in revealing some details about the identity of the whistleblower was a striking reminder, if any were needed to remind us again, of the power of social media and of the way that it has changed the world. And on the same day the Guardian used another anonymous source in its story following up on the information release, which was titled, “'This is very strange': Ukraine's view of the Trump whistleblower complaint.” The story included this:

“Politics should not affect whether our troops get what they need, supporting the guys who are out there,” said Mykhailo, a veteran of the conflict who served in 2014 and 2015, who spoke on condition that his last name not be used.

On 27 September the Huffington Post published a story that used another anonymous source, this time to allege that the White House had stored transcripts of the US president’s conversations with the Ukranian president on a server designed for other types of documents: those containing classified secrets. The story said:

An explosive letter from an unnamed intelligence official was released Thursday detailing attempts by the White House to cover up Trump’s wrongdoing.  

On more than one occasion, White House officials put transcripts of Trump’s conversations into a “standalone computer system” that was meant for storing sensitive and classified intelligence information.

By 29 September tweets in the #CancelNYT hashtag had all but dried up.

Then the case of another anonymous source blew up in the public sphere. Again, it was related to Trump. I first saw signs of activity on 1 October at 8.40am when Ben Dreyfuss, the editorial director of US news outlet Mother Jones, tweeted, “One of the reasons I want this presidency to end so soon is so I can read about the dysfunctional daily lives of cabinet level bagmen who spent the peaks of their careers not leading vast departments and creating change but being butlers to an old man with internet poisoning.” At 8.43am on the same day Anthony Nungaray, a California State University scientist replied to this tweet with this, “The books and subsequent movie is gonna be epic. It'll take years of evidence unraveling, numerous indictments and criminal trials, but it'll be worth it. I can hardly fucking wait.”

This exchange of tweets related to a story that had broken this morning in Australia about an allegation that Donald Trump had asked for help from the Australian government to get information on Robert Mueller, the ex-director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (which he led from 2001 to 2013). The people involved in the case were a former Liberal Party politician, Alexander Downer, and Goerge Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign aide. His Wikipedia page says:

On or about May 10, 2016, at London's Kensington Wine Rooms, Papadopoulos allegedly told the top Australian diplomat to the United Kingdom, Alexander Downer, that Russia was in possession of emails relating to Hillary Clinton.

Mueller had been visible in the public sphere investigating what were allegations of wrongdoing by the US president, in effect receiving information from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Now, Trump was trying to dirty Mueller’s reputation. A story in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) on this morning had the headline, “Donald Trump asked Scott Morrison to help discredit Mueller probe” into Russian election interference. Morrison is the Australian prime minister.  The story said:

Details of the phone call were restricted to only a select number of senior officials, mirroring the handling of Trump's controversial phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, The New York Times reported on Monday local time (Tuesday AEST).

A bit further down the page the story went on:

Australia's former high commissioner to the United Kingdom, Alexander Downer, helped trigger an initial FBI investigation into Trump's links with Russia after having drinks in London with Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos. 

Downer has said that Papadopoulos told him at the bar Russia had damaging material on Trump's presidential rival Hillary Clinton.

On 1 October at 6.39am Papadopoulos tweeted, “I have been right about Downer from the beginning. A wannabe spy and Clinton errand boy who is about to get exposed on the world stage. Great reporting, NYTs! Mifsud is next.” A story had appeared in the New York Times on Monday. “Clinton” referred to here is former US secretary of state and 2016 Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whom Trump beat in the 2016 presidential poll. “Mifsud” referred to Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic who, according to Google (quoting Wikipedia), “became involved with George Papadopoulos, an advisor to the Donald Trump presidential campaign, and was later accused of being a link between that campaign and Russia. In 2018, he was described as missing, and an Italian court listed his location as ‘residence unknown’.”

On the same day at 8.34am Simon Cullen, a UK freelance journalist, tweeted, “Here’s the letter Australian ambassador @JoeHockey wrote to the White House in May, offering Australia’s support to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation. (Via @KerrieYaxley)” Joe Hockey is the current Australian ambassador to the US. Kerrie Yaxley is a political reporter for Australian TV station Channel Nine, which owns the SMH. Cullen’s tweet contained an image showing a letter on official letterhead (see below).

On 1 October at 7.55am, Antony Green, the ABC’s election analyst, tweeted, “'Clinton errand boy'! Downer as a representative of Australia reported a conversation to his government, which is exactly what he was supposed to do in his nation's interest.”

The seed had been planted and was growing daily in this new world of commoditised messages we live in. Every claim seems to be meet with an equal and opposite counterclaim as the polarised extremes battled for attention in the public sphere. The story had new facets added to it day after day as the political back-and-forth rolled on. 

On 2 October at 5.33am Washington, DC, resident Matthew Yglesias (who had 438,289 followers when I checked his profile) tweeted, “I was confused as to exactly what the conspiracy theory involving Italy that Trump and Barr are pushing was so I looked into it and ... it’s wild stuff.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the website of US news outlet Vox about an investigation by US Attorney General Willian Barr into “the origins of the FBI investigation of links between Russia and the Trump campaign”. 

The thing was still going two days later, on 4 October. At 2.37am on that day Papadopoulos tweeted, “We will soon find out who directed Alexander Downer to spy on me. The Australians don’t freelance without our rubber-stamp, this came from the top of the CIA.”

Then on 4 October at 11.04am Trump tweeted, “As the President of the United States, I have an absolute right, perhaps even a duty, to investigate, or have investigated, CORRUPTION, and that would include asking, or suggesting, other Countries to help us out!” Papadopoulos tweeted on 6 October at 8.10am, “I understand the effort to try and discredit me for two years, and ongoing, because of the information I released that exposed the worst spying scandal in modern American history. This will continue unhindered. We are at the precipice, folks. Stay focused.” 

The Associated Press, a US media agency tweeted on 9 October at 8.26am, “BREAKING: White House notifies House that Trump administration will not participate in impeachment probe, which it calls ‘illegitimate.’.” On 9 October at 9.05am Jim Sciutto, a CNN anchorman, tweeted, “New: WH official who listened to Trump's July phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky described the conversation as ‘crazy’ and ‘frightening,’ leaving that aide ‘shaken’, according to whistleblower complaint. @cnn reporting.” CNN is a US cable TV network.

I’ll finish this survey with a different case, not related to Trump at all. (Surprise!) On 11 October at 6.32am Mark Di Stefano, a BuzzFeed UK journalist, started a thread:

During the Brexit media panel today at Reuters Institute, @puzzlesthewill said something that stuck with me — he just succinctly put something we’ve been all talking about re: anonymous sourcing. He said it was something he discussed with @flashboy. Here goes: 

"Journalists sometimes merge habits and principles. There are lots of habits of how journalism is done that start in important principles. Protecting your sources is an important principle. Giving people a right of reply is an important principle."

"When malicious actors find ways to exploit those and turn them against your audiences, it’s time to update your reporting process so that your powerful platforms and principles can’t be misused."

The account with the Twitter handle @puzzlesthewill is Will Moy, executive director of Full Fact, a UK factchecking charity. On its “About” page, the organisation says, “We are a registered charity. We actively seek a diverse range of funding and are transparent about all our sources of income.” The account @flashboy is Tom Phillips, editor at Full Fact.

Odd shots, 07: Misogyny aimed at female journalists

This is the seventh post in a series about the ways that people online blame the media for society’s ills. The title derives from an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” The first post appeared on 24 August but there was an earlier post on 18 February this year titled ‘Don’t shoot the piano player’.

This survey started on 3 September and went until 29 October. Times shown are Australian Eastern Standard Time except after 6 October when daylight saving kicked in, meaning times shown on days after then conform to Australian Eastern Daylight Time.

There is general awareness in the community of the problems that women face on social media. This was illustrated well on 30 September at 9.13pm when an account called History Scientist with 14,371 followers tweeted, “This tweet is okay because Twitter only let on sober and responsible people who wouldn't use it as a license to harass women they come into contact with.”

And on 3 October at 3.29pm a female lawyer I follow and who has 1820 followers tweeted, “Dude who lost his shit and sent a string of abusive emails after innocent inquiries to clarify meaning then thinks he can lecture others on appropriate behaviour.” The tweet contained an animated GIF showing a female singer tossing her hair as she stood on-stage.

But when it comes to journalists who are also women, some in the community think special rules apply. For example, on 3 September at 4.09pm an account named “Voltaire’s bastard” (with 5381 followers) tweeted, “Sharri *hairflick* Markson. Chris Lilleys [sic] greatest character yet. #BoycottMurdochNumptyNews” Markson works for the Daily Telegraph, a Murdoch paper.

One person who understands the problem well is Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) TV host Julia Baird. On 3 September at 10.05am she tweeted, “Just got this email in response to my latest [New York Times] column. It's truly amazing, how hateful people are. And don't worry I am ok, just illustrating what can happen when you exist in a public space and express an opinion.” The image included with the tweet said, “Here’s to cancer! We cannot wait until cancer eats your bones you baby-murder-supporting bitch!” Baird had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2015. It looked as though, from using Google, Baird’s column had been removed from the New York Times’ site. I checked to try to find it on 24 October.

Guardian journalist Melissa Davey brought my attention to the problem of misogyny against female journalists again, on 17 September at 9.03am, when I saw a tweet from her that said, “This piece made me cry, not least because Kate is a dear friend of mine who has overcome so much adversity and who does so much for others yet was attacked in the most vile way, attacks which continue to this day.” It came with a link to a story by a freelance journalist named Kate O’Halloran that detailed how, one day when she was using Twitter, she had been attacked mercilessly for a mistake she had made in relation to something seen on TV during the broadcast of an AFL game.

On 3 October at 6.36am Jessica Huseman, a reporter with the US media outlet ProPublica, tweeted an image showing a threat from someone she had received (see below).

Huseman commented, “Ah, social media. Thanks @instagram!” In response to this, Patricia Rossini, an academic at the University of Liverpool Department of Communication and Media, tweeted, “If that doesn't go against @instagram's community guidelines, I don't know what does.” Then, adding her own take, Julie Posetti, a research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, tweeted, “Dear @instagram via @facebook, How on earth can you decide that this threat of sexual violence against a female academic ‘does not violate community standards’?? The patriarchy is alive, vulgar and threatening online.”

What to do about it though? Maybe some humour? In this vein the ABC’s Julia Baird tweeted on 5 October at 3.35pm, “Spent the day at my mum's aged care home, visiting residents with my oversized dog. He licked hands and faces, made people giggle. A nice antidote to the ongoing onslaught of nastiness in my feed today. Here's a happy Saturday cartoon.” Here’s the cartoon that came with the tweet:

In response, on the same day at 11.01pm freelance journalist Sandra Eckersley demonstrated solidarity by tweeting another cartoon:

On 7 October at 3.19pm a long thread started on Twitter from a former journalist named Jennine Khalik. She has over 15,000 followers and used to work for Crikey. It seems that she angered some people in the Muslim community by supporting homosexuality. The sniping had gone on for years and she had moved to a job outside journalism because of the bad conduct of some people. Some of her comments follow here.

I tweeted one thing, and it has completely spiralled in the last 24 hours. The same people have gone after other women journalist friends, but have gone after me the hardest. I don’t know how else to say this: leave me alone. I saw a lawyer when one of them threatened to confront me in person at the Sydney Writers Festival because I was speaking at two events. She was basically encouraging a pile-on which might have led to me being removed from the events. 

I did not want to bring attention to this. But I have to defend myself for posterity. It has been 2 years of quietly speaking to friends & employers about what to do re rumours, defamatory tweets. 

I resigned from my job at Crikey (a team I adore) for another non-journalism job get away from being in the constant firing line. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth for bullies. I am laying low.

On 9 October at 6.27am the auto magazine Jalopnik tweeted, “’Not to be sexist, but...’ What it's like to be a woman who works in car journalism.” The tweet came with a link to a story on their website by Alanis King that went, in part:

For those of us who work in and around cars, the hate and harassment comes at work, where we should just be able to clock in, do our jobs, and clock out, without all of that.

Journalist Michelle Rafter retweeted Jalopnik’s tweet with a comment of her own, “Even though women represent half of all drivers and most of new car buyers, women journalists who report on cars get all the trolls.”

The stories were coming regularly from different women who practice journalism. On 12 October I saw a post on Facebook from a person who used to teach me, for my journalism degree, at university, and who still works as a journalist, and who had appeared on a TV program in recent days. She said, “More on trolling. I've been trolled a lot and most of it has focussed on my gender. I have learned to manage this, no problem, and I rarely engage because life is short. This time, because I suggested we open our borders to Kurds, it's all been about my religion. Amazingly anti-Semitic. I've reported about 30 accounts to Twitter and not one has been found to be in violation of Twitter's policies. Anyhow, I think I've blocked them all now but there is one tweet which just says ‘She's Jewish, isn't she?’ As if that explains anything or everything.”

Network Ten ran a story on its website on 29 October about a journalism student who had been at a climate change rally in the Sydney CBD and who had then gone, with friends, to the Paragon, a city pub. The bouncer had told her to take off her hijab and she had refused. The police were called. She later received an apology from the company that owns the hotel, but they gave her an account of events that was, she said, incorrect. 

"I was humiliated, I felt violated, and more than that -- now I was being gaslit to convince me that my response to the violation of my basic rights was an 'overreaction'," Iqbal wrote [in an article on the website 5why].

The problem also extends to female politicians. On 9 October at 8.37am Ginger Gorman, an author, tweeted, “I'm about to address the Commonwealth Women's Parliamentarians at the Parliament in SA. I'll be explaining why #predatortrolling against female MPs and journalists is a democratic threat. Here's the latest example via @abchobart.” The tweet came with a link to a story on the ABC’s website that was titled, “Tasmanian councillor Rachel Power announces resignation citing 'personal attacks', social media comments.” The story by Lucy MacDonald was dated 2 October and the first paragraph ran:

A Tasmanian councillor has announced her resignation live on radio, saying ongoing "personal attacks" and social media harassment have taken "too much" of a toll.

Gorman’s book is titled ‘Troll Hunting’.

“Many thanks to all who responded to my thread on the importance of airing different views. I do still worry about the level of abuse aimed at some of our guests, & it is especially targeted at women of colour, Indigenous people, Muslims. Respect matters & has a material impact,” Baird tweeted on 7 October at 12.44pm. I haven’t included the Twitter thread she referred to, at least not in this post. It will be in another post in this series, a post about the ABC’s ‘The Drum’ panel show.

Jay Rosen, of New York University, tweeted on 12 October at 1.02pm, “I get a lot of hate tweets. (But nothing like what outspoken women and people of color receive. No comparison intended.) Recently there has been a shift. I have always been a corrupt poisoner of young minds. In the last two weeks I have also been called mentally ill. This is new.”

The types of criticism that outspoken women in the public sphere are burdened with can be quite specific. On 5 October at 2.02pm BuzzFeed tweeted, “’Narcissistic, self-indulgent, worthless, cruel: criticisms leveled [sic] against social media influencers and young women who write about themselves sure sound a lot a like [sic],’” the tweet came with a link to a story by Shannon Keating, the media outlet’s LGBT editor, who is based in New York, about how self-revelation stories and the internet culture of today had resulted in writers being recognised on the street as well as criticised by some in the community. The story contained this:

“If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist,” [writer Emily] Gould told the New York reporter, Curtis Sittenfeld. “If a man does the same, he’s describing the human condition. But people seem to evaluate your work based on how much they relate to it, so it’s like, well, who’s the narcissist?”

The Sittenfield story referred to in the quote above was published on 22 April 2010 and was titled ‘The Art of the Confession’. Keating’s story went on:

Futile as it might be, we’re all trying to cling to these distinctions — to maintain our humanity, our selfhood, our creative drives, as things separate and apart from the capitalist internet project.

And later:

It’s horrible to admit it, but part of the reason I wrote about my experience of falling in love with someone on a cruise, and leaving a long-term partner in the process, was because I was trying to convince myself — as well as all the strangers who’d read about it — that, in the end, I’d done the right thing. Some writers have gloriously thick skins, or the whole reason why they write is to offend and get a reaction out of people. I wish I could say I had a stronger sense of self, but the truth is, for the most part, I just want to be liked. To be assured that I am good: if not a good person, then at the very least a good writer. Why write anything at all — in a throwaway tweet, in an online article, in a book, wherever — unless you want someone to appreciate what it is you have to say?

Posetti announced this month that she would be helping to conduct a study into the misogyny that is aimed at female journalists. She would be canvassing widely within the profession to unearth information about the problem.

Odd shots, 06: The media are stenographers

This is the sixth post in a series about the ways that people online blame the media for society’s ills. The title derives from an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” The first post appeared on 24 August but there was an earlier post on 18 February this year titled ‘Don’t shoot the piano player’.

This survey covers a period of just over two weeks starting about a month ago. For variety there is also a short excursion back to 2008 and 2007. Times shown are Australian Eastern Standard Time except after 6 October this year when daylight saving kicked in, meaning times shown on days after then conform to Australian Eastern Daylight Time.

Accusations of simply promoting government “propaganda” are commonplace on social media as people try to come to terms with the difference between the rate at which the community moves and the rate at which their own imaginations move. This disconnect seems to characterise the dynamic lying at the root of the frustration that people sometimes feel when they see things on TV or read stories on news websites. Their ideas are ahead of the larger community’s, and so they lash out at the media. The media is thus a convenient scapegoat.

A problem also lies with something mentioned in an earlier post in this series. As noted there, news stories cannot, in all cases, contain all the nuance and subtlety that every issue warrants, in everyone’s eyes. To ask for such a thing is to demand the impossible. All news stories are proxies for larger debates.

Having said that, the media does need to hold the powerful to account, and the powerful are always more interested in getting their own message to their audience than they are in respecting the truth. Everyone wants something from journalists, and people who talk to journalists are very careful, in most cases, about what gets published. This can lead, for example, to interviewees asking to see a story before it goes public, in order to possibly “correct” a point. This can even mean that people change what they said in an interview, if what they said could embarrass them. So while people want the exposure that journalists can often provide, they also want to control the message.

On the other hand, what a politician says in public is, on its own, newsworthy. To say otherwise is to commit a solecism. So publication is a bit like Occam’s razor: you want to be fair, you want to be intelligent, but you also want to just report what’s happening. And it seems that many people are not happy with the way this is done.

With the examples that follow the themes are consistent although some accusations aimed at the journalist are partly justifiable on the basis of the evidence available. In some cases the suspicion lingers, after seeing the evidence, that the article in question was merely a bit of spin launched by the government in order to earn the community’s approval. In all cases, however, despite what appears to be a lack of rigour in the reporting, there is something at least that warrants attention. Whether there are other, more important things, to occupy the community’s attention, is another matter. Based on personal experience the evidence shows, however, that people in general are attracted to the ephemeral and the digestible, and will ignore more solid reporting even if reading something more substantial is in their best interests.

I will finish with an example from about a decade ago which shows how time can put things in context better than any journalist is able to do.

Going in chronological order, I will start on 25 September 2019 when, at 7.08am, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) journalist David Crowe tweeted a link to a story in the SMH about the prime minister’s response to student and climate activist Greta Thunberg. His tweet went: “'Let kids be kids.'-- Scott Morrison's plea after Greta Thunberg's UN warning goes viral.”

In response to this, with a retweet, former SMH journalist Asher Moses tweeted, “This is what you get from journos who care more about ‘news’ and drops from politicians than truth and justice. They manipulate facts to serve the interests of power and ignore key context such as inaction leading us to certain extinction. This is copy [and] paste govt propaganda.” I found it hard to see how Crowe had “manipulated” anything other than letters in his word processing software by pressing the keys in the order necessary to type out his story. This was a straight report, pure and simple, and the attack from Moses seemed, to me, to be unfair. Given the government’s position on the environment, it is newsworthy to simply report what the PM says about Thunberg, the prominent Swedish student and activist.

Then, a few days, later, on 29 September at 5am, I saw a tweet from New York University teacher Jay Rosen about a different subject: US politics. He said, “Don't know what went awry here, but this reads like a press release from Ivanka Trump's office. Perhaps you think I am exaggerating. See for yourself.” The tweet came with a link to a story with the title, “Ivanka Trump's role as top diplomat reemerged at UNGA.” The story was from CNN and was dated 28 September. “UNGA” is the United Nations General Assembly which, Google says, is “one of the six principal organs of the United Nations, the only one in which all member nations have equal representation, and the main deliberative, policy-making, and representative organ of the UN”. The CNN story contained this:

Trump was in New York to promote her Women's Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) initiative and to practice diplomacy on the world stage, a role she's embraced with mixed reviews, hamstrung by her father's mercurial tendencies and policies that are sometimes at odds with her objectives.

It went on a bit later:

President Donald Trump recognized her work multiple times during his remarks before world leaders at the UN, thanking her directly during a speech on religious freedom Monday and referencing W-GDP during his address to the General Assembly Tuesday.

Rosen’s point was fair in this case: this was a bit of a puff piece, but this kind of story is not unusual. Having said that, I did wonder why the story had been reported beyond its relevance of Trump’s tendency toward nepotism. The US president’s daughter is not a politician, although pointing out the flaws in Trump’s character is, in itself, useful.

Now, to the UK and to the subject of Brexit (the UK’s exit from the European Union). On 8 October at 6.42pm, an account with the Twitter handle @mattsumption and 774 followers tweeted, “Good journalism is publishing texts of political spin verbatim from government sources, the longer the texts, the more journalism you are doing.” “Peter Oborne has some words for James Forsyth (among other client journalists).”

Oborne is “a British journalist and broadcaster” according to Wikipedia. “He writes a political column for the Daily Mail and Middle East Eye.” Forsyth is “a British political journalist and political editor of The Spectator magazine” according to the same source. The Spectator is a conservative paper. The tweet came with this image.

I couldn’t immediately make much sense of the context these comments were made in but I did find out. The article in question was by Oborne and had been published on 4 October in Middle East Eye. It had the title, “UK Brexit crisis: The next few weeks could shape Britain for decades to come,” and it went, in part: 

[UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s] slovenly dress is not merely expressing contempt for the grey suits and traditional country tweeds of Tory MPs and party members. He’s deliberately showing contempt for the British Conservative Party itself.  

And not just that: he’s sending out a statement that he holds Britain in contempt too, including his attitudes towards its institutions, its values, its rule of law and its parliamentary democracy. 

To further his cause, he can rely on the support of an army of client journalists who crowd around him for access and information. They tend not to ask difficult questions about his ultimate objectives or who funds him. 

Large sections of the British media share much of his destructive agenda, craving access and information. In return, Cummings receives their protection.

In response to the tweets quoted above, an account with the Twitter handle @Dr_Tad and 3288 followers (with Berlin put down as the user’s location) tweeted, “Yes, it’s a long honoured tradition among journos to report such spin by adding quotation marks and minor bits of paraphrase. Speccie really letting the side down.” “Speccie” is a shortened form of the name of the Spectator, a right-wing media outlet. 

Because of the Spectator’s natural bent, its reporting positively on the conservative UK PM should not be remarkable. There are media outlets that are progressive (such as the Guardian) and there are others that are conservative in their editorial positions (such as the Murdoch papers). Newspapers conforming to their natural bias is not really noteworthy unless you want to point out that it is undesirable. I have written before about how issues get politicised as soon as they become public property and, to digress for a moment, I think that we all need to care less about what political parties think about issues, and to care more about the wellbeing of the entire community.

Back in the US again, on 9 October at 2.20am an account named Walker Bragman, belonging to a New York journalist with 20,871 followers, tweeted, “This whole thing with Ellen DeGeneres defending her friendship with war criminal and monster George W. Bush is a good example of how celebrities serve as cultural ambassadors for our brutal capitalist system.” A bit later, at 2.49am, Jacobin Magazine, a New York progressive media outlet, tweeted, “When you ask your favorite [sic] liberal media figures why they never use their platform to fight for global justice or stand against American imperialism.” The tweet came with the following image. In it, US TV host Elen Degeneres says, “I’m friends with George Bush.” 

I found it hard to criticise Degeneres for saying this and harder still to see why her statement was unpalatable. Degeneres is a trusted source of information for millions of people so, naturally, what she says is of interest to many. On the other hand, the Iraq invasion of 2003, which was led by the US, was not beneficial for anyone, as history proved, and Bush was badly advised to go ahead with it. 

In the Australian context, on 11 October at 7.55pm Melissa Clarke, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) foreign affairs reporter, tweeted, “Scott Morrison runs water for his PM’s XIII team, then takes a selfie with the players, in a match against Fiji. That is one happy rugby league tragic, right there!” The tweet came with a photo showing the Australian prime minister taking a selfie with some football players, presumably in Fiji.  Morrison had been shown in a video as well, taking bottles of water to players on the field at a rugby league game held in Fiji. In response, on 13 October at 9.01am Tim Dunlop, an Australian author with 9475 followers, tweeted, “Journalism as propaganda, pure and simple....serves no other purpose than to show the PM in a particular light, an image he is very happy to have perpetuated.”

This I thought was a bit unfair as Morrison’s trip to Fiji – a country with its own problems, notably a lack of democracy – was designed to bolster ties to countries in the Pacific. Climate change is causing problems on many of the islands that make up these countries and rising sea levels especially. Morrison’s Coalition government has poor energy policies that do not aggressively deal with climate change, so keeping good relations with the Fijian leader Frank Bainimarama – a man who loves his football – is actually pretty important. Showing Bainimarama how an Australian politician can be a servant for his or her people might furthermore form a constructive lesson. Giving an oblique message.

The next day the attacks on Clarke continued however, for on 12 October at 10.16pm, in relation to her tweet, Rex Widerstrom, a freelance journalist and political consultant with 637 followers, tweeted, “From one journalist to another: this is a disgrace. You should be ashamed, either of your gullibility, or alternatively your willingness to be used in the hope of personal advancement. I employ journalists. If I saw this on an applicant's social media, their CV would hit the bin.”

Guardian journalist Greg Jericho also got the boot in when, on 12 October at 7.10pm, he tweeted, “When I see how easily our media gets suckered in by Morrison’s schtick, I wonder: Is Australia’s political media more gullible than the US or UK?” In reply, with a retweet, Moses, tweeted, “Sycophants and stenographers who are drunk with their proximity to power, no longer even trying to get at the truth or hold power to account. Completely pathetic press gallery.”

So, just to demonstrate how journalism really works, here’s a case study. The photos that appear below were taken on 11 June 2008 between 7.34pm and 7.36pm. The story on the TV at the time was about ideas that were being thrown up about GM Holden manufacturing hybrid (petrol-electric) vehicles in Australia. Labor was in government at the time and they were subsidising the auto industry because it wasn’t sustainable on its own. Toyota had announced that it would built hybrid Camrys in its Melbourne plant. 

The Australian auto industry was finally allowed to die by the (conservative) Coalition government under Tony Abbott. But in 2008 the Labor party – which has always tried to help workers, especially in industries such as manufacturing and mining – was throwing around ideas. The ABC news story involved interviewing the GM Holden boss in Australia, the industry minister, Kim Carr, and a Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) employee named David Lamb. There was also a guy from the Federated Chamber of Auto Industries and a guy from a magazine named GoAuto. So the ABC did its best to get a range of view. Even so, the idea fell flat because no-one – especially the company itself – wanted to really make cars in the country, and they certainly didn’t want to invest in the new plant and equipment that would have been necessary to tool up their factory for the new models. 

Lamb quit CSIRO in 2011, having worked there from 2003 as the CEO of the Australian Automotive Technology Centre. Before that he worked for Ford in Taiwan. He now lives in Melbourne and tutors in English. When Labor aired its policy for electric vehicles in advance of the May 2019 federal election people were again talking about making EVs in Australia, but of course Labor lost the election. 

It would be easy to criticise the ABC, on account of the 2008 story, for being captured by either a carmaker or by the government to put out a scheme that no-one really believed would happen. The story was, in fact, a total brainfart and it was accompanied (as the photos show) by copious quantities of compelling “relevant” imagery in the form of footage supplied (probably) by carmakers. Factories with robots always look good on-screen, they’re so photogenic. 

But nevertheless, the story was perfectly legitimate, although from this far away in time and in the absence of a transcript of the interviews used on the program it’s impossible to really judge either the people involved in the story or the journalists who put it together. Perhaps it was unwise to run it though given that nothing concrete had been announced either by the carmaker or by the government. 

To contextualise the state of the industry, at the time, the following is another shot from the TV, this time from the Special Broadcasting Corporation’s news half-hour on 18 July 2007. The photo shows Ford Australia plant workers looking unhappy after being let go from their jobs at one of the company’s plants (either Geelong or Broadmeadows). When the country was under a different government, Ford shut its plants, as did Holden. In 2014 even Toyota announced that it would shut its production facility in Victoria, and it closed three years later. 

It wouldn’t have hurt for the ABC to do some of this kind of contextualisation in their segment but perhaps they did. I can’t know at this far remove from the moment of the broadcast. But journalism has this ephemeral aspect to it. It’s not history, but people often call it the first draft of history. When people criticise journalists for submitting their critical faculties to someone else’s opinions, they are missing this point.