Evan Jones: Independent Australia
When it comes to the issues that matter, both domestic and international, the Sydney Morning Herald has become a journalistic laughing stock.
WHEN I WAS an undergraduate, many moons ago, the student paper editors would occasionally do a spoof of the mainstream media. The putdown of the media (the Cold War then raging) was richly deserved.
These days, a comparable take on the Sydney Morning Herald (‘Independent. Always.’) is warranted.
Especially on matters of international import, we see through a glass darkly in the SMH. It can’t be an accident.
Journalists need to listen to media critique before it’s too late
Julian Assange
This simmering concern crossed the threshold with the treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Of articles denigrating this chap, released after being imprisoned and tortured for having exposed the crimes of the U.S., we have not one but six moralistic essays: by Peter Greste (albeit more tempered than previously), David Crowe, Peter Hartcher, Jordan Baker, Jacqueline Maley and George Brandis.
Assange’s presumed failures, both as activist and personality, dominate the articles. Foremost, Assange’s WikiLeaks disclosure of purported unredacted files put lives at risk.
Assange also purportedly facilitated Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, with the damaging files purportedly provided by Russian hacking. Much criticism is directed at Assange for the Clinton upending, but Clinton’s loss had nothing to do with Assange. The warmongering and scandal-prone Hillary lost on her own accord (see Diana Johnstone’s 2015 Queen of Chaos) — so we have her and her anointing Democratic National Committee to thank for the loose cannon in the White House that is Trump.
Moreover, Assange did not get the files from any Russians.
Reuters journalist Andrew MacAskill, SMH June 2019, claimed that:
‘WikiLeaks emerged as a key protagonist in Russia’s interference in the U.S. 2016 Presidential Election, with material hacked by Russian operatives disseminated through the group. Assange himself spread conspiracy theories related to the figures in American politics at the time.’
These claims are complete rubbish.
Then we have resurrected Assange’s alleged and damning deep personal failings with respect to his relations with Swedish women complainants. Nils Melzer, the authoritative United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, put paid to that affair (see, for example, Oscar Grenfell and Matthew Ricketson) but it appears that no SMH journalist got the message.
Foremost amongst Assange’s SMH critics is one Peter Hartcher. The anomaly of having Hartcher criticise Assange has already been pointed out by John Jiggens, Greg Barns and Binoy Kampmark.
Julian Assange is free: Two-faced media welcomes him home as a hero
I highlighted over ten years ago (‘Peter Hartcher: the fifth columnist’) that Hartcher’s columns and media utterances give the appearance of someone who has been well incorporated into Establishment verities. His late-1990s presence as the Australian Financial Review’s correspondent in the U.S. appears to have been a key turning point.
Here’s Hartcher, June 2020, carelessly reproducing the furphy that Russia was paying off Taliban members to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Here’s Hartcher, October 2020, representative of his longstanding contribution to anti-China propaganda.
Peter Greste, now journalism academic, claims:
‘The distinction [between “journalism” and information dissemination — read Assange] is important because of the particular role journalism plays in our democracy, elevating it beyond freedom of speech. Journalism comes with the responsibility to process and present information in line with a set of ethical and professional standards.’
Lots of SMH journalists themselves don’t obey Greste’s maxim. I have noticed, in a succession of articles, perennial reproduction of fake news by SMH journalists (complemented by the partisan republishing of reporting and opinion pieces from select U.S. and British media): ‘Fairfax, the Israel lobby and unchallenged propaganda’, March 2019; ‘Freedom of the press: to what end?’, November 2019; ‘We cannot trust the media’s reporting on international affairs’, January 2020; and ‘The Israel lobby and media independence’, August 2020.
Israel is a subject prone to particular bias, not least due to trips by journalists and editors to Israel sponsored by the Israel lobby and to opinion pieces by Israel lobby spokespersons. In ‘Cringeworthy Media Down Under’, February 2022, I discussed the uncomprehending takes on their subject matter by select SMH journalists in important roles. It appears that they don’t read anything to provide background to their subject. Not enough time between deadlines?
I made my own minor contribution to the persecution of Assange: ‘The Crime of Julian Assange’, March 2022. I was particularly aggrieved by the transparent corruption of the British judiciary. Criticism has been offered by investigative journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis and WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson but has been ignored by our SMH coterie (and our political class).
Prior to the courts charade we have the insidious role of the British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), then under a certain Keir Starmer. The CPS recommended against the Swedish authorities questioning Assange on British soil, thus creating the imbroglio that led to Assange seeking security in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The CPS soon thereafter dissuaded the Swedish authorities from dropping extradition demands. Meanwhile, Starmer made several secret visits to Washington, records of which the CPS claims to have destroyed.
Mainstream journalists are failing to speak truth to power
Other non-mainstream outlets complement a picture of Starmer that is far from flattering. Matt Kennard, via Grayzone, June 2020, has Starmer tied into the American and British intelligence services. Kennard also has Starmer secretly undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party via connections in The Times newspaper and publicly by the “anti-Semitism” smear. Kit Klarenberg, via Grayzone, July 2024, claims that the CPS under Starmer was long protecting serial sex offender Jimmy Savile.
Then there’s Starmer and the Israel lobby. The Electronic Intifada has tracked his trajectory. Starmer has made himself a direct vehicle of the Israel lobby and became Labour Party leader as its frontman. He has systematically expunged (here and here) all pro-Palestinian voices from Labour ranks. Longtime Middle-East commentator Jonathan Cook says it all in his headline: ‘Starmer learnt the price of power was support for genocide.’
Starmer has simultaneously moved Labour to the Right on economic policy.
As British media watch Media Lens notes:
‘In June [2024], billionaire Conservative donor John Caudwell supplied some detail: “What Keir has done, as far as I can see, has taken all the Left out of the Labour Party. And he’s come out with a brilliant set of values and principles and ways of growing Britain in complete alignment with my views as a commercial capitalist.”’
But what do we read of Starmer in the SMH? We hear from expatriate Geoffrey Robertson, who mentored Starmer at his human rights specialist, Doughty Street Chambers.
Robertson claims that:
‘As head of his chambers for 20 years, I can attest that Starmer’s integrity was beyond reproach.’
Kathy Lette, with her customary panache, seconds her sometime partner Robertson. Evidently, there are two Keir Starmers. But which of the two is now residing at 10 Downing Street? Don’t expect enlightenment from the SMH.
Then there’s George Brandis. What is superannuated Brandis doing as a columnist in a quality paper? Brandis follows Amanda Vanstone and, before her, Peter Reith — all ex-Liberal Party hacks. Management can’t possibly imagine that this lot has offered enlightened opinion. The letters from irritated and bemused readers attest to their reception.
Fact-based journalists under fire
Ukraine
The slanted coverage of world events is well reflected in the Ukraine saga. It’s all Russia’s doing, centred on the evil Putin who wants to re-establish the Russian Empire.
From my memory, the SMH declined to look at the U.S.-led Maidan coup in February 2014. The snipers firing from dissident-occupied buildings have not been reported on. The then President, Viktor Yanukovych, democratically elected whatever his demerits, was chased from office.
Russophone Ukrainians were set upon by the Banderists, characterised most brutally by the massacre at the Odessa Trade Unions House in early May 2014, progressing with an estimated 14,000 murders in the Donbas before the Russian invasion in February 2022.
Add the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines on 26 September 2022. The U.S. had been threatening Russia (and Germany) for some time over the pipelines. The Polish military was systematically disrupting the pipeline-laying in early 2022. The Polish authorities had earlier sanctioned French energy company Engie for participating in the financing of Nord Stream.
Seymour Hersh’s report in February 2023, accusing the U.S., went around the world but it elicited no further interest from the SMH. Instead, the paper reproduces The New York Times, December 2022, which claims that the whole thing is a real mystery. The SMH later reproduced, March 2023, a Reuters/AP diversion that a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible, with a rented yacht no less. Preposterous!
Tell that to the Germans, whose gas-dependent economy took a nosedive and will remain so hereafter. But the SMH hasn’t been interested in the European economy, nor in the fact that the long-term agenda of the U.S., from World War II onwards, has been to keep Europe under its control, with unified Germany (originally West Germany) as its handmaiden.
Now it has the Eastern European satraps (Poland, the Baltics) and even all the Scandinavian countries at its behest. Ukraine as sacrificial lamb, Europe will be suppressed — all in the U.S.’ supposed long-term interests. The Soviet Union/Russia as bogeyman, with Eastern Europe necessarily incorporated into NATO — this is the media Kool-Aid.
Thus does the SMH reproduce the British Telegraph which tells us, May 2024, that Putin was using gas as leverage for his evil designs on Europe but he has now been thwarted (German Chancellor Olaf Schwarz claims “hostile suppliers”) and the Russian economy is suffering. Wrong on both counts. And hasn’t the author, one Tim Wallace, contemplated Russia’s nod to the Western timeless axioms of comparative advantage and free trade?
Trashing of Rebel Wilson’s rights exposes media’s decency decline
Latika Bourke, May 2023, reporting Germany’s warmongering former Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, notes that the Russian invasion of Ukraine:
‘…exposed Germany’s reliance on Russian gas and led to the cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that would have deepened the country’s dependence.’
Bourke declines to mention the September 2022 destruction which certainly marginalised Germany’s “dependence” on Russia, but was not done at Germany’s behest and which dramatically enhanced Germany’s dependence on U.S. gas supplies at a significantly increased cost. Who is Germany’s greater enemy?
The SMH’s Ukraine coverage, apart from the reprintings from the usual Anglo-American media suspects, was heavily centred on Mick Ryan, ex-Major General and “strategist”. I estimate that Ryan logged 52 articles between February 2022 and February 2024. He was also cited as an authority by house journalists. It’s the conventional good guys versus bad guys stuff. Strange that Ryan’s bylines ceased six months ago.
The U.S.
The implicit line in SMH coverage of the U.S. is that Donald Trump is the problem. If Trump (and his “brainwashed” supporters) can just be marginalised then everything would be hunky dory.
Foremost in this stance is American-born Bruce Wolpe, sometime Democratic Party adviser and former Fairfax media executive. Wolpe has been a regular “independent” contributor to (and book reviewer for) the SMH/The Age since early 2019, the third year of the Trump Presidency. Wolpe has been consistently a rootin’ tootin’ Joe Biden fan.
In his November 2020 review of The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos’ pandering biography of Biden, Wolpe writes:
‘Like all great artists in the later phases of their lives (think Picasso, Dench, Eastwood, Horowitz, Callas, Aretha, Agassi) who strip their work to its most basic elements, Biden now deploys his gifts with stunning precision, understatement and power. That is how Biden will govern.’
Hello?
In February 2024, the majority of the American population knows that Biden is past it. Wolpe knows it. Yet Wolpe wants the Democrat rank and file to take to the streets and support the man.
Mainstream media steering us clear of the bigger issues
The mainstream media has become an increasingly unreliable source of news that really matters.
Says Wolpe:
Let them see the man with the clear vision and the steady hand who will keep the country safe from the madness that is Donald Trump.
Getting a ceasefire in Gaza… would affirm Biden’s mastery in foreign policy and American leadership in the world.
And pigs might fly.
Then suddenly, June 2024, Wolpe has it that it’s time for Biden to go. And this is the SMH’s informed opinion.
These days, Wolpe has a bolthole as “Non-resident Senior Fellow” at the University of Sydney’s U.S. Studies Centre. The U.S. Studies Centre was established in 2006 following concerns that the U.S. was “on the nose” after its criminal invasion of Iraq on false pretences in 2003. It is a propaganda outfit within a university and it is a sizeable beast.
Tellingly, the Centre’s numbers outrank Sydney University’s once-fabled History Department, which has been shrivelled over recent years by successive administrations. Cynicism anyone?
Fatima Payman
As with Julian Assange, so with Senator Fatima Payman — abuse.
Rodger Shanahan, 4 July, puts in the boot:
‘…the resignation of a Muslim ALP senator from the party has brought the problems bedevilling the Middle East directly into domestic Australian politics. But those seeking to use grievance politics as a way of garnering political influence should also appreciate the degree to which identity politics is the root cause of many of the Middle East’s problems.’
Grievance/identity politics? Shanahan is reputedly an expert on the Middle East, but all he can come up with is contrived obscurantism. Shanahan claims that Sudan is a more significant area of global crisis, but it has been ignored in Australia. Look over there! So, why doesn’t Shanahan write about Sudan for our edification?
Fourth Estate or weapon of the state
On the same day, the SMH Editorial chimes in:
The Greens and Muslim organisations may wish to use the Gaza war to obtain footholds in Labor’s heartland, but the Herald believes that the time for such tribalised politics and imported old-world quarrels has long passed.
[Payman’s] rebellion was both short-lived and ineffective.
Ongoing Israeli genocide is an old-world quarrel?
James Massola and Paul Sakkal, 6 July, emphasise Payman’s susceptibility to a dodgy “influencer” and Muslim sectarianism, concluding with:
‘As many people struggle through a cold winter and an ailing economy, the sight of their representatives shouting about a far-flung war, over which Australia has next to no influence, must be galling.’
Australia has next to no influence? On the contrary. Labor could close down the Israeli Australian embassy, close its own embassy in Tel Aviv, close its doors to the omnipresent Israeli lobby and recognise a Palestinian state tout de suite. Payman knows that her gutless party machine will do no such things.
The fearless Peter Hartcher, 6 July, must have his say. Hartcher bizarrely sees Payman becoming ‘the Pauline Hanson of the Left’. Payman’s seeming wilfulness ‘couldn’t await a peace process’. What peace process? Hartcher’s sermon is dripping with condescension (Payman has ‘a unique personal credential of shared injustice’) and contemptible.
Then there’s the insufferable Parnell Palme McGuinness, who appears to be belatedly filling the shoes of Miranda Devine who abandoned Fairfax media for Murdoch in 2011. McGuinness, 7 July, has Payman as the sweet face of a burgeoning political Islam, threatening supposedly well-functioning societies around the globe.
Israel is the acid test and the SMH flunks the test. The “A” word (apartheid) is verboten. So is the “G” word (genocide), save for the reporting of its (“flippant”) use by Payman, pro-Palestine protestors and so on. There hasn’t been a single article providing an explanation of the character of the Israeli state and the background to Hamas’ 7 October uprising.
The ‘Letters’ page provides only marginal relief. Submitted letters are heavily vetted (as are comments to articles published online). A consistent thrust of letters deemed acceptable is: why can’t these warring tribes get together and be nice to each other? Problem solved.
At least there has been progress on one front — nauseous op-eds in the SMH by spokespersons for the Israel lobby are now sparse to non-existent. Touch wood. Now we get articles, not least on so-called escalating anti-Semitism and the suffering of the Australian Jewish community, from journalists seemingly on the drip.
Rosemary Sorensen, 1 July, outlines the abuse of Payman (and of Assange) by the Australian mainstream media in general. However, Nine Entertainment’s SMH and The Age are the papers of record on Australia’s Eastern seaboard, and possibly further afield. These papers now traduce journalistic standards on a daily basis.
Reading the SMH sours my breakfast (and no doubt the breakfast of other SMH journalists not part of the fake news and bile factory). But given that I am not being bombed to pieces or in high-security prison, I can view the SMH’s posturings with detachment.
Speaking of which, when was the last time that the SMH covered the status of the political prisoner, Dan Duggan? The answer is 23 July 2023. That’s right — 12 months ago. But Duggan is a victim of the leader of “the free world”, to which our Australian Government and the Australian mainstream media defer.
A total disgrace all around.
Murdoch-led media’s relentless stranglehold won’t deter fearless truth-tellers — like IA
Dr Evan Jones is a political economist and former academic.
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