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.’
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’.
However, during Covid, the media often decided to ‘speak power to truth’.
When I joined the Daily Mail as a reporter around May 2022, the publication, to its credit, was pushing back against some of the more insane pandemic measures, particularly the nightmarishly interminable lockdowns in Victoria and the ridiculous border closures of WA.
However, it previously had been an enthusiastic barracker for many over-the-top Government actions.
Also, the efficacy and safety of the Covid vaccines remained pretty well quarantined from any questioning.
As a lowly reporter, I am largely insulated from the decision-making.
However, I asked around to find out why the Mail, as with most Australian media, fell into line during the pandemic.
Here are five factors as described to me by insiders, and also at times observed by me:
- There was overt Government pressure. I have been told that Mr Hunt or other federal and state health officials rang editors directly to harangue them that they were “putting lives in danger”. In what was being billed as once in a century emergency this pressure could be hard to resist. The other reason traditional outlets want to keep governments onside is they need a champion against social media destroying their business model by giving away their content for free. Australian governments have obliged in this regard by making the likes of Facebook pay traditional outlets for their content.
- Social media platforms punished any deviation from the official Covid narrative. Digital news sites rely on social media exposure for most of their traffic, so any drop-off threatens their bottom line. Outlets that did not promulgate the approved narrative risked getting a strike or being downgraded by algorithms to keep their stories submerged online. Mark Zuckerberg recently told Joe Rogan that the Biden administration put pressure on Facebook to remove even factual posts that conflicted with the message authorities were selling. That also happened in Australia. It remains unclear to what extent the social media giants censored by their own volition and how much was ‘self-censorship’ to keep governments happy.
- Media outlet owners gave directions to their publications. The Daily Mail is the Australian online version of a mass-circulation British tabloid owned by a family of press lords in the UK. I do not know whether orders came out of London about how Covid was to be covered but head office must at least approve of what the Aussie offshoot is doing.
- The mood of the readership as expressed in clicks, social media shares and comments will ultimately prevail in any commercially driven news. Commercial outlets cannot stay out of step with their readers for long. During the Covid period, I was told the Mail audience was readily enthusiastic about imposing and enforcing restrictions and mandates. I find this depressing.
- Editors believed what authorities told us. As I have been a dissenter on nearly all Covid matters, I have experienced the sincerity of that belief expressed to me quite bluntly. I have pitched stories that were rejected as ‘anti-vaxxer’. I have had major arguments about the way my stories have been edited and sometimes accepted edits I did not like to get a story published.
The media’s conformity also likely acts as a reinforcing feedback loop.
Journalists move as a pack, rather like seagulls squalling over chips. Former Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen made this observation when he labelled his press conferences as “feeding the chooks”.
All outlets obsessively keep a close eye on their competitors to make sure they haven’t missed important or high-rating stories and to check the details and developments they have against each other.
Added to this professional incentive to watch your competitors is the fact that the Australian media industry is a small ecosystem, where peer pressure can be pronounced.
Being in the information business, media professionals are particularly sensitive about the risk of being saddled with weaponised terms such as ‘conspiracy theorist’ ‘anti-vaxxer’ and ‘cooker’.
We can see the visceral fear that terms like this inspire for a veteran journalist in a recently published article, where despite trying to deny it half the time, veteran journalist Brendan Foster is forced to conclude the Covid vaccines could be killing him and others of his acquaintance.
The headline encapsulates his ultra-defensiveness: ‘I kept getting sicker. But you won’t catch me reaching for a tin foil hat.’
Even as he grudgingly compiles strong evidence the vaccine is taking his health and potentially his life, the author seems mostly worried that we might think he is expressing “some crazed, anti-vax conspiracy theory”.
It seems the closer he gets to his death the more he adores his probable executioner as “one of the greatest achievements in medical science”. Like George Orwell’s Winston from the dystopian classic 1984, he learns to “love Big Brother”.
I suspect such veneration of ‘experts’ has become more pronounced in journalism as the profession has become more tertiary educated.
In the days of yore, a school leaver could join a media outlet as a copy boy or cadet and basically do an on-the-job apprenticeship to learn journalism, which is the appropriate training for what essentially is a trade rather than academic discipline.
Now a university degree is pretty well mandatory to even get a job interview, and increasingly post-graduate degrees are expected.
People who come out of university (like myself) are indoctrinated at some level to revere ‘expertise’ because that’s the validation of academic knowledge.
However, veneration of authority is fatal to good, or even ‘real’ journalism.
The ‘real’ reporting on Covid has largely come from independent journalists such as the author of this Substack or others equally forensic and fearless including Maryanne Demasi, PhD and Alison Bevege.
While the mainstream media jeered that confidence in government had taken a nosedive after the pandemic, they appeared not to notice that so too did the public’s trust in them.
“The media (which included social media) continued to be the most distrusted institution in Australia. Only 38% of survey respondents said they trusted its institutions, a fall of five points,” a survey by global communications firm Edelman found last year.
I’d suggest one way for the traditional media to regain trust is to show more distrust of what is fed to us by governments, authorities and experts even in, or especially during, ’emergencies’.
In other words, the media should simply do their job.
David Southwell is a reporter for Daily Mail Australia. He has over 20 years’ experience in media and communication and has worked on local papers, for wire service AAP and for News Ltd newspapers and websites. Follow David on X. First published on Dystopian Down Under.
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As the scheme is drawn up by politicians, with a clear track record, the entire effort can only be breathtakingly incompetent.
No, not “only”.
Richly laced with malice on one hand and corruption on the other.
Skidmark report.
‘Green’ is not green, not Gaia friendly, inefficient, impractical and far worse for the eco-system than hydrocarbon usage.
It serves another purpose however. That is why it is pushed.
Skidmore is the kind who’d have assisted Stalin meeting purge targets. To produce a report like this net zero one he can have no moral compass at all. His only motivation is steal off the normies and fill his fat chops in the swill. If green energy were so marvellous the price mechanism would have made it the energy production of choice. Note Skidmore etc have abolished the price mechanism in the energy market for any useless windmills to exist.
“Where there is no market, there is no price system and where there is no price system there can be no economic calculation”
Ludwig von Mises
A heat pump that produces water at 80 degrees Celsius should not require the extra insulation and larger radiators needed by the current puny examples.
Do come back and tell us when they have a practical system that is commercially viable, but in the meantime I am not holding my breath.
Put into other words: What Skidmore would like to mandate is demonstrably useless but experimental, new technology might eventually change that. That’s obviously always a possibilty. But until this possibilty has actually manifested itself, mandating the use of the technology is misguided. Let’s do this now and hope a miracle (ie, an unexpected technical breakthrough) will make it work in future! is not a sound policy.
Got one have you?
Heat pump technology is no where near your mentioned 80°c, more like 30° to 35°c .
It’s got a colossal way to go before those efficiencies are reached, maybe never!
I’d be interested to know how you install a heat pump in a flat; where the water tank will go in a small property which wasn’t designed to have one; and how much footage the much larger radiators will require?
I look forward to your response.
GDP is a poor measure of the economic impact of this strategy.
The UK could subsidise huge numbers to dig holes and then fill in holes and it would have a positive impact on GDP.
Not that doing something is necessarily negative — some strategic investment could be positive for the UK — it is just that whenever governments ‘prove benefit’ by mentioning GDP I get suspicious.
Agreed, GDP basically stands for G*d D*mn Profits, and is really not the best metric for wellbeing.
Heading back to serfdom like in the olden days only the ‘elite’ will be doing any travelling so don’t worry too much amount the availability of rare earth metals.
Watch out for the climate lockdown protests happening in various cities and towns.
Animal living space (that includes all humans) require adequate ventilation and air movement otherwise you get mould growth both on your walls and in your airways. So insulation has to be balanced with ventilation and the required heating for creature comfort. As with all things in life there is balance, it is a shame that there is so little with the net zero debate.
Why are these people not honest about the fact that a heat pump is not a simple swap-over with a gas boiler. The low temperatures produced generally require replacement of conventional radiator systems with ones with larger surface areas, or ideally underfloor heating. Their heat-up and response times are poor and their performance decreases at sub zero temperatures.
So give up any hope of a comfortably warm house without costly subsidiary heating.
I agree. I am one of the very many who will not be able to have a heat pump or any real alternative to Propane or Natural Gas heating. For me there is not enough land available around my home to install the necessary heat sink. The local electric supply is not enough to service the requirements of electric heating, heat pumps and or cooker, and this is without the fact, I cannot in anyway, afford the installation costs of heat pumps if I had the room and the electrical supply in the first place.
As for solar panels, there are as much use as a hand brake on a canoe when it comes to electrical supply, and as with wind turbines, after nearly 150 years of development from the first concepts, they are still in the development stage, and still constrained with the limitations in there effectiveness.
The proposals and laws regarding the private housing stock, including the much earlier ban of LPG boilers and the rental prohibition of D/E properties, is just theft, expropriation and communism.
No wonder then, that they are also technically impossible or ridiculous.
And all because of a hoax as their cover story.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/net-zero-will-lead-end-modern-civilisation-says-top-scientist
Communism collided with reality. So will net zero. .
How much suffering will be inflicted in the process remains to be seen.
In both a few organise the world for everybody else and consider any cost and suffering (of others, of course) a price worth paying to achieve their utopian society.
Net Zero and Covid are one in the same scam, go to Joel Smalley substack new article “Why do so few of the general public smell a rat?”
Exactly. Two strands of the same thread. There was never a “pandemic” and there can be no such thing as a “climate emergency,” whatever that might be.
The “elites” are planning to take over the planet and everything in and on it, or at least the bits they want. To achieve this they need global control of the world population and any means to achieve this will suffice. Along the way population numbers have to be reduced, not because the planet cannot support the world population but because too many people will be a management issue so a rather large cull is required.
Net zero is a euphemism for depopulation.
Net zero = reduce carbon.
The carbon is US, the people.
The point of documents like this is to be the quoted reference for justifying action required in the future. What a total waste of money.
A green activist and a Tory MP cross – what new hellish hybrid is this? (There’s a lot more of them than you imagine.)
People like this hate human progress, they want to reverse the discovery of fire and the cooking of meat that led to the massive increase in brain size that itself enabled science, the industrial revolution and the transformation of human existence.
Their plan is to take most of us back to the Stone Age and ensure poverty and early death returns.
Don’t take your eye off the ball, be ready to fight.
“Climate emergency.”
It genuinely makes me laugh but can anyone explain what constitutes a ‘climate emergency?’
Perhaps it’s when some Aussie is tapping away at their keyboard of their old DOS computer and the computer breaks? CLI mate emergency?
That probably makes as much sense as any other explanation.
Hahaha! Very geeky joke mate.
“Battery storage is one option touted, but moving to all electric cars in short order will use up all the lithium and cobalt in the world. Not that it matters that none will be left for storing grid power, since the cost of this exercise is very silly to start with.”
Ever heard of sodium-sulfur batteries? Or even lithium-sulfur batteries? Or semi-solid flow batteries? It has ALWAYS been a bad bet to bet against human ingenuity.
https://www.freethink.com/entrepreneurship-innovation/flow-battery
In most of human history the technological developments come first, society then learns how to adapt change and benefit from that development. With covid and with climate change we have an invented political dogma and a petulant demand from the exponents of that dogma that technology will and must supply the answer. They are blind to any suggestion that the current technology on which their dogma depends cannot deliver or is actually damaging or dangerous.
For sure human technology could well come up with some innovative developments. But it has not yet come up with them yet and there is actually no climate emergency that requires us to sacrifice human society in advance of developing technological solutions that can deliver and work well for the whole of society.
A perfect description of the futility of the virtue signalling much loved by politicians and their lackeys.
So why are they relying on Middle Ages technology ….. ie windmills?
Skidmark producing an independent report?? About as independent as Witless and Unbalanced’s statistics on Rona
In what way is an Eco Zealot MP “independent?” This Report is an absolute farce.
Another brainwashed dreamer. There are 22 million gas boilers in the UK providing us with the best central heating system we ever had. Those old enough to remember nipping around to the shop to get a can of paraffin for our mothers know that all too well. I recall rolling up newspapers into a figure 8 and putting a bunch of kindling sticks on and then some coal from the bucket once the sticks were alight. ———I now sit in a cosy house with a thermostat that keeps us at about 20 degrees for the cold winter and then turn it off all summer. Yet these eco dimwits acting on their top down instructions about CO2, who would have difficulty explaining climate change dogma to five-year-olds are going to tell us all how to live and would leave us all back sitting in the cold at astronomical cost. Their stupid NET ZERO policies are estimated to be going to cost about one and half trillion and our impoverishment is just seen as collateral damage in this absurd war on CO2, which is even more absurd when you realise that this is not and never was about the climate. It is about the world’s wealth and resources and who gets to use them, and the silly west has decided it will go along with the idea that we have used up more than our fair share of the coal oil and gas in the ground and must STOP. This is ECO SOCIALISM. There is no climate emergency—–Wake up people
“One would have to conclude that the entire effort is either wholly unserious or breathtakingly incompetent.”
Reword as ‘One would have to conclude that the entire effort is wholly unserious, breathtakingly incompetent, or intentionally destructive of our energy system and way of life.’
As Neil Oliver has said, these plans are intended to prepare us not for green energy but for no energy.
An interview slot on the British Biased and Corrupt news channel is long overdue, Chris.
Skidmore has said he’ll stand down as an MP at the next GE. Good riddance. His undoubted extensive knowledge of windmill deployment in Plantagenet and Tudor times has served him well; no doubt he has already lined up a comfortable niche position where his qualifications in Modern History will be so useful.