Here’s a pet theory of mine. I reckon we got a better cohort of journalists years back when it was a craft.  You finished high school and then went and apprenticed at a newspaper or TV station working for some gruff old editor. And it was drilled into you that getting your facts exactly right was not just everything; it was the only thing. Sure, there were left-leaning and right-leaning papers. But journalists cared about truth and facts and that put limits on what they would do to help their preferred side of politics.

By contrast, and I speak as someone who has spent most of his working life in the very left-leaning university world, I am immensely sceptical of the worth of scores of the degrees on offer, including journalism ones. Whole chunks of our universities are places where monolithic orthodoxy of outlook now reigns supreme and unchallenged – where the permitted range of views covers the whole gamut of political beliefs from A to B (and maybe not even stretching as far as B, certainly there are more PC flags flying than permitted viewpoints). The wokest places in Australia, with the possible exceptions of big Sydney law firms, any ABC studio and the administrative headquarters of the AFL, are our uni campuses. Think Western madrassas in terms of the openness to dissenting outlooks. So one spends four years getting a degree where many students never hear a conservative point of view on anything and where all the latest American identity politics fads are de rigueur. My theory is that that sort of weaponising of grievance politics may not be the best type of training for future journalists. Now that’s just a theory, I know, but make of it what you will, readers of this exceptional publication.

I could also point readers to various US surveys of the esteem in which today’s journalists are held. Take the representative Gallup poll from earlier this year that asked respondents about their take on the honesty and ethics of all sorts of occupations. Journalists came in near the very bottom. They even scored just below lawyers (ouch!), though they did manage to scrape scores above telemarketers, car salesmen and members of Congress. More interestingly, the partisan divide in terms of how journalists are perceived was massive. For Democrats, 41 per cent had a high or very high view of the honesty and ethics of journalists. For Republicans it was a mere nine per cent – making a partisan gap of 32 points!

‘Are you surprised?,’ say all of us right-of-centre conservatives. Look at what has been uncovered by House of Representatives’ committee investigations in the US.  Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers swear under oath about the special treatment Hunter Biden got. Then there was last week’s long-serving FBI agent/whistleblower who came forward and swore under oath (with huge criminal penalties for lying) that the FBI knew the Hunter Biden laptop was real from as far back as November or December of 2019, so a year before the 2020 presidential election. The top players in the FBI knew, in other words, that the letter put out by the 51 intelligence agents weeks before the 2020 election claiming ‘the laptop had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation’ was a flat-out lie (and those 51 signees knew this too). The FBI also opted not to tell the various social media companies that the laptop’s contents were real when these Facebook et al. companies started to censor the New York Post revelations about the laptop (including those by Miranda Devine). The FBI even went to meet with these companies to intimate the laptop was bogus. Put differently and bluntly, the FBI was part of the biggest and most successful disinformation campaign since the second world war all while ironically operating under the cover of claiming others were running a disinformation campaign. And remember, plenty of poll data shows that if US voters had known about the laptop’s contents then Trump would have won and won handily. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – on any ‘like with like’ comparison this whole FBI disinformation/get Burisma investigators fired to help Hunter/sell access to ‘the big guy’/the list goes on makes the wrongdoing around Watergate look like a parking infraction.

But you know what? The main left-of-centre news outlets in the US just aren’t covering it. A small paragraph about the IRS claims on page 14 of the NY Times, at most. Polls show that over 50 per cent of Democrat voters in the US still, to this day, believe the lie peddled by the Biden campaign and the 51 intelligence officers that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. When you say to ABC and Fairfax viewers that the FBI, from before the 2020 election, was clearly complicit in allowing the Democrats to cover-up corruption they think you’re from Mars.  Ditto when you point out this only got verified because the Republicans took the House in 2022 and launched investigations where documents and whistleblowers came to light. Say it with me. ‘Way worse than Watergate!’ And as I write this Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner Devon Archer is scheduled soon to testify before the House Committee that then vice president Joe Biden was in Hunter’s ‘pay for access’ up to his ears.’

And yet the legacy press (‘our’ ABC included) will not report this in any remotely serious way. No curiosity. No commitment to the truth if it hurts their favoured side. In fact, they will bend over backwards to do anything not to help that nasty Orange Man. (Remember celebrity philosopher Sam Harris who said Trump was like an asteroid plunging to earth and so any actions taken to stop him, virtually any including lying, were warranted? And this despite four Trump presidential years of no wars, best economy in half a century, energy self-sufficiency and – just to annoy the greenies – the fastest decline in carbon emissions of any country in the West.) Well, Harris’s is the sort of attitude many journalists have to the truth. ‘Too dangerous to tell the deplorables what is really going on my good man.’

Compare that to 1998 when the left-leaning Washington Post broke the story about Bill Clinton’s under the table (couldn’t resist) dalliance with Monica Lewinsky in the White House. The Post broke it despite the high chance it would bring down the Clinton presidency. Does anyone believe that paper would today report anything that would endanger the Democrats’ hold on the White House? Heck, these legacy press reporters demean themselves by pretending Joe Biden is half-functioning and doesn’t have dementia. Reverse whose son lost the laptop and which party’s man was in the White House and ask yourself how these papers and all the non-Fox TV stations would report these things? Or ‘our’ ABC?

Or cross the Atlantic, look at how the BBC is covering the debanking of Nigel Farage. Or recall, yet again, the shameful, cowardly, incurious way in which the mainstream media covered like paid cheerleaders each and every government diktat and claim during Covid, however ludicrous. Personally, I’m amazed that Americans rate journalists as more honest than telemarketers or used car salesmen. (I am prepared, however, to concede that it’s a toss-up as far as their match-up with politicians goes.)