In his blunt, plain-spoken way Donald Trump often says things that are true but that few other politicians will articulate openly. Take Trump’s regular attacks on what he calls ‘fake news’. In essence his target is the legacy press or media – think New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, CNN, etc. Most of these have yet to admit that their two-plus years of running the Russian collusion scam was just that, a scam. It took over three years for most of them, still not all by the way, to concede that the Hunter Biden laptop and its contents – a story broken by Australia’s Miranda Devine – were real. And remember, Devine broke this before the 2020 election and had it been reported (instead of suppressed by the mainstream media and social media giants) polls showed it would have swung the election to Trump. The legacy press was not going to have that happen. Then there was its related coverage of the 51 intelligence officers, seemingly recruited by the Biden campaign, who signed the joint letter saying the Hunter laptop claims had ‘all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation’. They knew at the time that was false. Want to bet on whether all sorts of journalists working for these ‘fake news’ outlets knew it too?

And don’t get me started on the behaviour of the legacy media during the Covid lockdown thuggery and aping of the authoritarian approach adopted by the Chinese politburo. Journalism is meant to involve scepticism and questioning. Any questioning of the Imperial College modeller supremo Neil Ferguson? I knew in March 2020 that this was the man who had massively (orders of magnitude) over-egged his years-earlier mad cow disease predictions. And who had been so wrong on foot and mouth that myriad livestock had had to be killed for what turned out to be no reason. I don’t know that the man had ever underestimated or come close to what actually turned out to be true numbers in any of his models, ever. Isn’t that sort of relevant? Remember, models just churn out whatever the inputted assumptions dictate. Garbage in, garbage out. But the scepticism of news sources was restricted overwhelmingly to online non-legacy outlets. Or what of questioning and scepticism of public health cadres and government itself by the mainstream journalistic caste? Such scrutiny was almost invisible through most of the lockdown thuggery, through the undermining of our economy and of many people’s work ethic, and during the sell-out of the young for those over the life expectancy age (not that many of the latter actually wanted to sacrifice their grandchildren).  Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya – top ten in the world on anyone’s list and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration (that argued against lockdowns and has been proven totally right) – has said repeatedly that governments were the biggest source of disinformation throughout all of Covid.  Even a hint of a soupçon of a trace of a suggestion of an echo of journalistic scepticism as regards the daily bleatings of public health types might have been helpful. Instead, we got cheerleaders.

There are myriad other examples. This is why in US polls journalists now rate the lowest of all occupations in terms of public trust – even below politicians and lawyers, which is no mean feat. And that is why Mr Trump’s description of the journalistic caste as purveyors of ‘fake news’ is essentially correct. Too blunt? Sure. A bit crass? Yep. Demeaning? By all means. Sure to trigger anger by those caught within its ambit? Undoubtedly. But in essence, true, and not disinformation or misinformation in the way such bogus outfits as the RMIT ‘fact-checkers’ about the Voice purported to label No arguments.

(Full disclosure: I was one of maybe at most four law professors who came out openly for No, in my case from day one, and I did not think a single thing the RMIT people attacked as wrong was in fact wrong, not one. The facts were all correct and the opinions about the future were just that, opinions, though ones I think were far more likely than not to transpire – the whole fact-checking industry is overwhelmingly left-wing propagandists and it undermines free speech and the John Stuart Mill ideal of the cauldron of competing ideas getting us slightly ever closer to the truth. The fact that it was the Liberal party who, during the lockdowns, first proposed the initial iteration of this current Acma Bill is a total disgrace to the party and to the individual politicians who signed off on it.)

In this serpentining, Alistair Cooke-manner I come now to the good news. We on the freedom side of democratic life can welcome the establishment of a new prize for journalists. It aims to be everything that the Pulitzer Prize was, but is no longer. It is called the ‘Samizdat Prize’, the name coming from what the underground press in the former Soviet Union was called. Apparently, a loose translation is something like ‘we publish ourselves’. And this new prize was established by the Real Clear Foundation in the US. As with Pulitzers it only applies to American journalism. But a week ago the three inaugural winners were announced (again, aiming explicitly to reward the ‘standing up to authority and being inquisitive’ sort of actions that Pulitzers did before they became trinkets doled out by to those toeing the establishment line).

And who were the first three winners?  Jay Bhattacharya for his fight against lockdown thuggery and taking on the Fauci line on things pandemic related. Matt Taibbi for all of his work to do with the Twitter Files.  And Australia’s Miranda Devine for all of her work related to the Hunter Biden laptop (again, all of it true though derided as mis- and disinformation by other media, the intelligence services and the Biden administration for three-odd years) and on the wider aspects of the Biden family corruption (which the legacy press ignores but which is plain as day).

All three are deserving and did far more to give journalism a good name than anyone in any public broadcaster or near on any private news organisation too.

What we now need is some wealthy Australian who has what is known as ‘F-You!’ money – meaning they are wealthy enough that they can’t be cancelled – and who care enough about this country that they will sacrifice the lost invitations to inner-city dinner parties – to spend some of that money to set up this sort of award for actual bravery and scepticism for journalism here in Australia. Come on!

What’s the point of having bucketloads of money if you don’t spend it on things that might make the country better for your kids and which others won’t or don’t have the means to do?