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    We shouldn’t forget which Australian commentators carried water for Trump | Jason Wilson

    Now that Donald Trump has gone, what will his ride-or-die supporters in Australian media do? How will they “own the libs” when the libs have their hand at the tiller? Whose ideas will they crib as US conservatism falls deeper into a post-Trump fugue?
    The recent output of high-profile Australian Trumpists suggests that the solution will be to gradually back away from Trump himself, even as they double down on aspects of the Trumpist movement.
    That’s necessary because, even for the diehards and the know-nothings, since the 6th of January, Trump the man has revealed himself to be a spectacularly toxic liability.
    He departed, according to Gallup’s numbers, as the least popular US president in the history of opinion polling: he had the lowest average approval rating over the life of his presidency and, unlike every other president since Roosevelt, he never enjoyed majority approval.
    Most of his lame duck period was spent trying to overturn the election he lost, culminating in his incitement of a mob that stormed the Capitol building in DC. More than 100 people are facing federal charges, with prosecutors alleging some intended “to capture and assassinate elected officials”.
    Canny as ever, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell conceded, a day before Trump left the White House, that that crowd was “fed lies” and “provoked” by Trump.
    Trump spent the balance of his time since the election indulging in, on the one hand, an execution spree in federal prisons and, on the other, handing out pardons to cronies or mercenaries who wantonly murdered Iraqi citizens.
    It seems likely that state attorneys general and federal prosecutors alike will be jostling each other to serve him subpoenas and summonses.
    And a defanged, de-platformed Trump can’t even prosecute his case in the court of public opinion.
    So what’s a branch office culture warrior to do? Defending Trump directly would not only telegraph their moral bankruptcy but demand the kind of ingenuity that subsidised rightwing media neither demands nor rewards. If defending Trump is beyond the powers of a McConnell, it’s surely beyond the likes of a Sky News host?
    Some Australian conservatives simply sprinted from the blast area following the Capitol assault. Former US ambassador and treasurer Joe Hockey, who golfed with Trump through the Muslim ban, Charlottesville, the separation of children from parents, and the Covid-19 disaster, did well enough in his appointed role to earn a reputation as a “Trump whisperer”. But the riot, apparently, was too much to stomach. Hockey was, now, “appalled at the behaviour and incitement” of Trump, his family and his camp followers.
    Hockey followed up with an op-ed in the Nine newspapers which opined that “Biden’s calm but firm response to the attack on the Capitol is the leadership that most Americans want.”
    Perhaps the Capitol violence brought about an authentic change of heart for Hockey. Or perhaps he’s concerned about who will now be buttering his bread. His DC lobbying firm, Bondi Partners – staffed with cherry-picked Australian diplomatic talent – can no longer pitch the possibility of Hockey buttonholing Trump on the links.
    In the less rarefied air of Holt Street, Greg Sheridan also rapidly turned on Trump. Throughout last year’s election campaign, Sheridan held out the prospect of a Trump victory, claiming on 1 November that the “genuine authoritarian threat” came from Biden supporters, since his campaign was backed with the threat of “a plague of violent riots all through the big cities from people who won’t accept democracy if it yields Trump.”
    As late as 14 November, Sheridan was arguing that Trump offered a series of important lessons to conservatives around the world, including that “nationalism and patriotism are powerful forces that galvanise voters in a positive direction”.
    When nationalism and patriotism galvanised voters in the direction of sacking a federal building in order to overturn the election result, Sheridan dropped them like so many hot yams. Suddenly, the deplorables he had previously celebrated as “Trump’s liberty-loving base” were depicted as “clowns, thugs and street-fighting fascists”.
    For those who over-indexed on the president and his movement, and who cannot cut him loose quite so cleanly, it makes some sense to imagine the possibility of Trumpism without Trump. Enter James Morrow, whose work is difficult to talk about without courting paradox: its signature tone can only be described as low-energy histrionics.
    Morrow has shamelessly barracked for Trump both on Sky News and in the Daily Telegraph, and like all such rightwing Trumpists in Australia, he has done so safe in the knowledge that Trump’s failures, such as his catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic, will never have any effect on him.
    As the quick spread of coronavirus among White House staff and cronies in October amply showed, those who spruiked for Trump in the United States at least had skin in the game.
    A week ago, in a column addressing the fallout from the Capitol riots, Morrow wrote that “while it is a long bow to say Trump incited the incident (he in fact tried to calm protesters down), it is also true that his conduct since the election will forever mar his achievements from Middle East peace to wage growth.”
    This dead-ender nonsense might be worth a chuckle if it didn’t erase the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands, and the way that Trump and his enablers bequeathed so many domestic and foreign policy nightmares to Biden.
    In the Middle East, Trump simply gave carte blanche to longstanding US clients like Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He approved – and even boasted of – a series of massive arms deal with the kingdom, raking in another half a billion dollars’ worth of blood money in the dying days of his administration.
    Saudi Arabia will use some of these weapons in their ongoing war on their neighbours in Yemen, where 13 million people are at imminent risk of starvation.
    In another parting blow on 10 January, Mike Pompeo declared the kingdom’s enemies, the Houthis, a terrorist group, which will make it even harder to provide them with aid. The Financial Times editorial board – hardly a den of communists – described this as “a cynical effort to scupper Mr Biden’s ability to ease Middle East crises and reset US policy”.
    And whatever wage growth there may have been has been wiped out by the cratering of employment, in an economy whose destruction was hastened by Trump’s fecklessness and lies (remember when he told people to inject bleach?)
    On Thursday Morrow offered a piece of whataboutism that laid much responsibility for what Biden calls America’s “uncivil war” not on conservative media outlets and United States senators who encourage the baseless belief that the November election was stolen, but on “radical campus politics … violent demonstrations in American cities that were often dismissed as ‘mostly peaceful protests’ [and] social media platforms doing everything they can to silence conservative voices”.
    Having read that, it was diverting to see Morrow in the same article criticising the prose style of Biden’s inauguration speech.
    It’s embarrassing, of course, that this kind of commentary occupies such a prominent place in Australia’s national political discussion. But it’s just one example of the kind of thing that would have no home, and no constituency, without the active subsidy of News Corporation. That company’s role, over decades, in bringing us the disaster of Trumpism cannot be overstated.
    From my place in the US, which I have not been able to safely leave for a year due to an unchecked pandemic, I can say unambiguously that the Trump administration was incompetent, racist and corrupt from the moment it was sworn in, as many predicted it would be. We shouldn’t forget which Australian commentators carried water for a disastrous presidency until the second that it became inconvenient to be seen to do so.
    We shouldn’t let them forget, either. More

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    The media has mostly not taken the bait on dubious Biden claims – with some Australia-linked exceptions | Jason Wilson

    The big difference between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections is that this time, mainstream media outlets are mostly not taking the bait on a dubiously sourced set of digital materials associated with the Democratic candidate.Outside the rightwing bubble, the exceptions are disproportionately connected with Australia: Australian writers, Australian outlets, and/or outlets associated with News Corporation, who, like its founder, has Australian origins.The New York Post, a News Corp tabloid, has been leading the pursuit of the story of a data cache which is purportedly a copy of the hard drive of a computer belonging to Hunter Biden. They’ve not had much support from other established newspapers, but News Corp’s Fox News and a flotilla of lesser conservative media outlets have been dutifully amplifying and even adding their own touches to the tale.On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on Wednesday night US time, for example, the host implied that documents associated with the story, which his editorial team had shipped across the country, may have been stolen by people trying to shut down reporting on the cache.The Daily Beast reported on Thursday, however, that freight company UPS had simply misdirected the package, which has been recovered.The original New York Post Biden piece had huge problems on arrival, so much so that a journalist there reportedly refused to add their byline to it.The chain of custody was one of the issues. The data supposedly came from a computer, dropped off by an unidentified person, who was presumed but not positively determined to be Hunter Biden by the owner of a computer store in Delaware.That man’s story of how he retrieved the data from the machine and how he came to give it to the authorities and Rudy Giuliani has shifted. The FBI subpoenaed a computer from the store, which is reportedly connected to a money-laundering investigation, but it’s impossible to compare that machine with the supposed copy.Anyone who reports on leaked digital materials, as I have, knows that it is trivially easy to fake, modify, subtract from or add to, and otherwise mess around with any documents in any cache. Some documents carry indelible marks, such as any emails that are signed with DKIM security signatures, but everything else can be messed with.In this case, we haven’t seen the originals, just PDF printouts, and the New York Post has not been forthcoming with any detailed or satisfactory account of its own authentication process. It hasn’t said how it determined the authenticity of the cache as a whole, or individual items it has reported on, and has continued handwaving about the FBI subpoena, and the lack of denials from the Biden camp.If it does know for sure that the material is a genuine copy of Biden’s laptop, it isn’t letting on how. At least some of the material appears to be authentic. A sex tape released last week, for example, appears to really feature Hunter Biden. But that doesn’t mean that Giuliani has it because Hunter Biden took all that data to the computer shop. We still don’t really know who put them together, how, and for what purpose.This explains the queasiness of most mainstream outlets – of whom Giuliani told the New York Times that “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.” The Wall Street Journal and Fox News were both reportedly offered elements of the story, and each refused.(One of Fox’s news anchors, Chris Wallace, commented that “I can understand the concern about this story. It is completely unverified and frankly, Rudy Giuliani is not the most reliable source anymore. I hate to say that, but it’s just true.”)None of this appears to have been a concern for the leadership at the New York Post, which once again now includes Col Allan, its Australian-born one-time editor in chief, and an outspoken Trump supporter. Allan retired in 2016 but is now back there as a special adviser, and was reportedly leading the charge to publish the material quickly.Once they pushed it out, Fox News started running with the pack that the Post had whistled up.So too, at crucial moments, did Australia’s News Corp outlets. On Sunday 18 October, Sharri Markson hosted Steve Bannon on her Sunday evening program. Bannon crowed about an email from Hunter Biden’s lawyer which supposedly showed him asking for the computer back.Bannon told Markson that the lawyer called the shop owner, “and when the guy said I can’t remember, I’m going back to my shop, he sent a couple of emails in a panic saying ‘I’ve got to get my hands on this right away’”.That email was subsequently released by a Fox reporter, and merely contained a request that the proprietor “review your records” on the matter. The lawyer, meanwhile, is on record saying that the Bidens “have no idea” where the email came from.Markson’s show, like most of Sky’s fare, is not widely watched. But she’s willing to have Bannon on. One might say that he couldn’t get arrested in the US, except that he recently was, and charged with fraud in connection with a border wall crowdfunding scheme, aboard the mega-yacht of his reported employer, Guo Wengui, whose bitter fight with the Chinese government has driven him into exile.Giuliani’s material was good enough for News Corp’s post; Bannon’s record apparently posed no concerns to News Corp’s Markson. News Corp’s Australian commentariat, and expatriate New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, have all assisted in pushing the story, and pushing back on criticism.While most media outlets had a reckoning after 2016, it didn’t extend to crucial parts of News Corporation, including the most prominent faces of its Australian operation. More

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    Former Republican congressman says Murdoch's media outlets fuelling 'climate rejectionism'

    A former Republican congressman has blamed Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets for fuelling “climate rejectionism” among conservatives, suggesting they could be part of the reason why the United States is failing to lead the world to tackle global heating.Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina congressman who has renounced his previous climate denialism and now leads a group seeking to rally conservatives to act, questioned the role of News Corp and Fox Corporation during an event hosted by the Australia Institute.Inglis told the progressive thinktank that Australia and the US shared a form of “climate rejectionism that comes in conservative clothing”.He said both countries also shared “a particular news organisation that has a great deal to do with that” – and pointed the finger at Murdoch’s Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in particular.“If you look at Fox viewers in America – that’s where you find the climate disputation,” Inglis said.Inglis said his group, RepublicEn, which campaigns for conservative leadership on climate action, believed that a change in the way the issue was covered by those outlets would be “the holy grail” in unlocking greater ambition in US policy.“If Fox would just change or if the Wall Street Journal editorial page would just change – either one of those and this would be finished, we’d be done with climate, we’d be acting,” he said. “It really is that important – so if anybody can get to the Murdochs please let me know.”Business leader and former Sydney lord mayor Lucy Turnbull also sheeted home some responsibility to large media businesses such as News Corp during the same webinar event on Wednesday.Turnbull’s husband, the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, was ousted as leader of the centre-right Liberal party in 2009, and again in 2018, in part because of internal battles over climate policy.“There are a lot of people who have a huge level of conviction about the fact that climate change is with us, that we have to act,” she said. “The problem is that the polarisation makes it hard to do that because you have the people [who believe] that it isn’t a problem despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is.”In a clear reference to News Corp, Turnbull added: “They have a very loud voice in a lot of political debate aided by very large media organisations, especially one which crosses both the US and Australia and other countries besides.”She said this had resulted in a “fragmented, deeply polarised conversation”, which could be a symptom of the fragmentation of politics around the world.The comments come as another former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, campaigns for a royal commission to be launched into the Murdoch empire in Australia.The petition, launched on the Australian parliament’s website on Saturday, has so far attracted more than 236,000 signatures.The focus on the company comes after Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son, James Murdoch, said one of the reasons he had stepped away from his father’s media empire was because it legitimised disinformation and sowed doubts about facts.He told the New York Times climate change and coronavirus were both public health crises and “political spin” should not get “in the way of delivering crucial public health information”.James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, also issued a joint statement in January – midway through Australia’s summer bushfire crisis – to say they were “particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary”.Last year, however, Rupert Murdoch told shareholders “there are no climate change deniers” around his company and said his business was early to commit to “science-based targets to limit climate change” and was working to reduce its climate emissions.Inglis and Turnbull discussed media coverage as part of the wide-ranging webinar on Wednesday, which also canvassed the forthcoming US presidential election.Inglis contended that Republicans would undergo a “reappraisal” of their position on climate policy in coming years, although that reassessment would come faster if Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump for the presidency. Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate accord is due to take effect the day after the November election.Inglis, who previously visited Australia in 2017 as a guest of the Australia Institute, recounted how he had once insisted that climate change was “nonsense”.“I didn’t know anything about it except that Al Gore was for it and, in as much as I represented probably one of the most conservative districts in America, that was the end of the inquiry,” he said.But Inglis said he had a “three-step metamorphosis”, based on his children pressing him to take environmental issues seriously, his own visit to Antarctica to see ice core drilling evidence and his snorkelling trip to the Great Barrier Reef.He spoke of the importance of bridging divides, saying he was grateful to have been “extended grace by people who knew it was real before I did”.Inglis urged people on the left of politics to accept new entrants to the conversation “without saying you’re the dumb kid in the class, the last one to get it” because “if you welcome them in we can solve this thing”. 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    The Murdoch media’s China coronavirus conspiracy has one aim: get Trump re-elected | Kevin Rudd

    News Corporation The Murdoch media’s China coronavirus conspiracy has one aim: get Trump re-elected Kevin Rudd News Corp is campaigning full-bore for the US president, with reports of a Wuhan lab ‘intelligence’ dossier being seeded across its empire On the China coronavirus lab conspiracy, ‘let’s be clear: Murdoch is campaigning full-bore for Trump,’ the former […] More