As I recently wrote for The BFD, the Australian media currently make a big song-and-dance about “freedom”. By which, of course, they mean their freedom. With typical self-conceit, the media have conflated their interests with the country as a whole. Like the self-obsessed elites of Hollywood, the legacy media are convinced that the things that so terribly fascinate Arts graduates in the inner cities of Melbourne and Sydney are issues of vital importance to everyone in Australia.
They have apparently become very concerned about your ‘right to know’, which is actually their right to know. But should everyday Australians like me really be offended that the government has confidential information?”
Conveniently ignored in all the huffing and puffing over Federal Police raids is that the journalists weren’t the actual targets. The Feds were trying to track down the sources of leaks of confidential information. Journalists have never had an unfettered right to publish confidential material. Journalists have been imprisoned before for refusing to identify leakers.
While there is indeed a reasonable argument as to whether the government is hiding too much behind a smokescreen of “confidentiality”, the self-important ninnies of the legacy media have mostly ignored that. Instead, they’ve screeched about “your right to know”, at the same time as they assiduously hide facts they don’t want the public to know.
Last year, I watched ABC news report that 200 people went on a violent rampage on the streets of Melbourne. They had no video footage in the report, which seemed curious to me. How could something like that happen without any video footage? I was immediately suspicious, so I looked up the incident online and saw that there was footage and that my suspicion was correct: it would have been impossible to show it without viewers noticing that all of the rioters were black Africans.
[…] If the media really cared about our right to know, then they would report everything. When Queensland passed one of the most liberal abortion bills in the world, I found out on Facebook. I immediately went to abc.net.au to find out the details, but it was not even mentioned on their homepage, and I couldn’t find it when I searched ‘abortion’ in their search bar. They had a headline article about the death of the Big Bird actor, and yet couldn’t share this?
The legacy media are even worse at telling their diminishing readership the truth about international news. Not that this is new, of course. Once it was Walter Duranty lying through his teeth that there was no famine in the Soviet Union, now it’s the legacy media lying through their teeth about…well, nearly everything.
I like to follow news from the USA directly. Often I look at our own ABC News website to see what they are saying about an issue. They never, I mean never, report when Donald Trump has a ‘win’. Australians only know one side of his Presidency; it is astonishing. Do people in Australia even know that unemployment in USA is the lowest it has been since the moon landing and that black unemployment is the lowest it has ever been? Do Australians know that he is already building his wall, having appropriated military funding?
The government is not the biggest threat to the legacy media. The legacy media are doing a perfectly fine job of destroying themselves through their own duplicity and elitist disconnect from their audiences.
The media itself is far guiltier of violating our right to know than the government is […] If I were to take this campaign more seriously, it would have to come from a more credible source.
spectator.com.au/2019/11/youre-concerned-about-my-right-to-know-look-whos-talking/