As readers may remember, I’m just back from a visit to Canada. One thing an Australian notices immediately is that there is virtually no right-of-centre media in Canada. The paper the great newspaperman Conrad Black set up, and which was a voice for conservative views, had to be sold off – and was never the same – after Black lost that hit-job US court case, the one Mark Steyn covered in detail and which was in the same league as the four risible Trump indictments, two federal and two at the state level. (Remember, readers, that in the US, federal prosecutions have a dishonourable, nay shameful, conviction rate of about 99 per cent. Prosecutors threaten everyone involved with 400 years in jail. They offer immunity for testifying to some peripheral players. They then usually scare the accused into a guilty plea with a much reduced sentence. Only a rare few very brave souls, the Conrad Blacks and the Donald Trumps, fight this criminal justice travesty and force the issue to court, though if you’re right-of-centre in a court in Washington DC where 95 per cent vote Democrat, or in Manhattan, your chances are really bad. So though I am about the biggest US fan in Aussie academia, it is also my view that the US federal criminal justice system stinks. Ours, Canada’s and even two-tier Britain’s are far better.)

But back to Canadian media and it’s wall-to-wall soft-left to hard-left leanings. In the Great White North (can one still use that potentially triggering label, e-Safety Commissioner?) there’s no equivalent to our Sky TV. No equivalent to the Australian. And certainly nothing remotely like this fine publication, The Spectator Australia (which is why we have Canadian subscribers). You might as well be seeking a unicorn if you set out to find a columnist who defends Trump. Ditto if you expect to read about how Canada’s per capita economic growth has been simply awful since 2015 when the lefty Liberal Trudeau Jr took office. Or that the first year of Mark Carney has been the worst economic first year in memory. Put it this way: when you’re there, so laughably one-sided are the newspapers and the TV current affairs shows that you start thinking that it’s almost as though the left-wing Canadian government had some sort of fund that subsidised mainstream media journalists. That the Canadian government paid part of the salaries of legacy journalists. Wait. They do! Now don’t get me wrong. Yes, yes, yes, of course these private sector legacy journalists, and the companies that employ them, will tell you that this taxpayer-funded largesse in no way at all affects how they cover stories, or which ones they put front and centre, or how much time each story gets. No sirree! Totally balanced and impartial purveyors of unbiased timeless truths, that’s their line. Don’t you fret about Big Government quietly slipping Big Media a few bucks every now and again.

Now where have we heard that sort of self-justifying claptrap before? Oh, I know.  It comes up whenever any conservative points out that ‘our’ ABC hasn’t got a single, solitary conservative as a producer or presenter on anything current affairs related.  Not a one. They take a billion and a half taxpayers’ bucks but can’t even be shamed into hiring a token conservative. Half the country is made to pay for opposition propaganda.  And when one complains? ‘We police ourselves, old boy! We look inside ourselves, ask ourselves if we’re being balanced and impartial and fair. And then nod and decide that we are. We’re professionals after all.  We’ve been to journalism schools at those famously balanced universities of ours, the ones that make viewpoint diversity a central aspect of their missions.  Did I say that with a straight face?’

Now at the risk of going out on a limb here, let me suggest that that sort of answer is not wholly convincing. The best way to get ever closer to truth and best outcomes is not by having some monolithic group, with identikit outlooks and values, police themselves as far as balance and impartiality are concerned. Nope. As John Stuart Mill argued a century-and-a-half ago, you need to hear from people who really believe a differing point of view. They will present it better than a non-believer. Then you try for a cauldron of competing views that get tested by those who disagree. That won’t be perfect. But it will do far better than some Ultimo promise of ‘impartiality’.

And, relatedly, once the government gets in the business of paying legacy media private sector salaries, you will find that the private companies and the journos rather like this money coming in. They won’t immediately shift any views 180 degrees. But shortening a story here about Covid thuggery or emphasising one there about how Mark Carney actually can walk on water, well, no harm done. Right? Except before you know it, you have Canada and no right-leaning media at all.

Don’t forget that the same happened in New Zealand under Jacinda ‘We will continue to be your single source of truth… unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth’ Ardern.  Not sure that assertion has stood the test of time, by the way. But the point is that the lefty government there went down the path of paying private sector journalists with taxpayer monies. When the lefties across the Tasman lost, the recent conservative government ended this.

Which takes us to Albo and Australia.  Who knew until recently that this most left-wing government in Australian history had quietly put some $68 million into a ‘journalism assistance fund’? That it was subsidising the pay of about two thousand journos in over 150 newsrooms and TV stations? That Nine snagged the most. But also Seven. Crikey. The View. (Sorry, the Conversation, but same idea). Yet not a penny to Sky or the Murdoch newspapers.

This is a disgrace, a flat-out disgrace. Albo has picked up on what the lefty PMs in Canada and NZ tried. He’s shameless. But so are the participating big media companies, the ones with their hands out for these thirty pieces of silver. (Look up the reference if you’ve gone to an Australian school in the last two decades). Oh, and the journos don’t even have to alert their viewers and readers that they’ve been bought – no obligation to disclose!

There is a remedy but it requires Trump-like cojones. Every question from every media outlet that takes this money (and from the ABC) should be answered by the Libs and by One Nation with a preface that calls them out as bought-and-paid-for hacks. Trump says ‘fake news’. Use something else.  But be relentless, repetitive and unbending in calling this out as incompatible with a free society – paying some, not all, private media companies’ journalists’ salaries.

It’s enough to make you barf. Come on Libs and One Nation. Grow a pair and be relentless in attacking this Pravda-wannabe arrangement. Just watch Trump, or Farage for that matter, and treat these ‘paid piper’ journos with the contempt they deserve.