The journalist’s Trump dilemma

 

Peter Strempel, 11 May 2025 

Do you report Trump as the deranged, possibly senile, definitely moronic old lecher and conman he has been for some time, or do you have to take him seriously because he’s the president in the USA?

I think the likely answers are a bleak reflection on the state of play in journalism, which I regard as rather more dead than alive in a media landscape filled with ego, ignorance, and confected spectacle to the deliberate exclusion of ‘news’ or the craft that can bring it to audiences.

If you’re in the USA, corporate interference with nominal press freedom has long been a barrier, and certainly since Trump, courage, intellectual integrity, or even constitutionally-imposed duty for courts and legislators to supervise and limit executive power appear extinguished in the nation’s rapid descent into tyranny. The USA today, as portrayed by its own media, is a pastiche of cheap superhero comic book dialogues, Dan Brown tropes, and drug-fuelled, paranoid conspiracy theories so dumb they make mediaeval superstitions seem sane.

Unconstitutional behaviour by Trump’s junta is unopposed. Armed gangs of thugs with badges are running around, like overfed versions of a cross between the Gestapo, KGB, and Iran’s morality police, arresting, detaining, and disappearing people, seemingly at whim, without a hint of due process. Their SOP is clearly more Heinrich Müller than constitutional and black letter law. Media outrage at this debasement of American constitutional democracy is almost as muted as integrity and intelligence in its congress.

There is reason to be fearful. The rich and powerful can stifle or end careers. Which is all the more reason for anyone who really is a journalist, as opposed to merely being a media worker, to show some courage in applying journalistic principles: independence, transparent analysis, and questioning everything, including one’s own assumptions and biases. That’s still happening in places, but journalism is actually being displaced by satire as the main source of news and truth in the USA.

In Australia the journalistic imperative is less clear. The local media cartels have long abandoned journalistic principles for a kind of consensus bourgeois banality: courage only when critiquing the powerless, but cowardice always when the rich and powerful might react to scrutiny; analysis only according to a media-owner endorsed formula of pro-plutocrat, neoliberal, bourgeois platitudes; and integrity only as lip-service. This rather putrid consensus applies quite evenly across News Corp, Nine Entertainment, Seven West Media, and Paramount Global (Channel 10).

News Corp does stand out a little from the pack. It has employed all the fascist agitprop, hysteria-mongering, misinformation specialists it can lay its hands on, and for decades that seemed to be a reasonable investment for the return of docile governments, carrying out every wish of the Murdoch family. Mainly in the form of subsidy, destroying public institutions, and turning blind eyes to moderately creative tax evasion. But that ROI calculation must seem a little risky these days.

In this media landscape, the ABC has essentially become a social media influencer network, too afraid to do much journalism, and only the people at SBS can answer for its magazine format approach to not reporting news of consequence in Australia rather than producing decontextualized stories targeting only minority audiences in the hope they will see some relevance in the irrelevant.

The remaining online/press presence in Australia does contain patches of journalism at times, but they shine rather rarely these days. The rich and powerful can get away with most transgressions for years before a media worker suddenly discovers what the rest of us have known for years. Some examples include the collective blindness of the ‘press corps’ to Barnaby Joyce’s adultery until after his ‘citizenship’ re-election, or the rather obvious proclivities of Alan Jones, or the Robodebt fraud conspiracy. But the list is really quite long. And always displaced by celebrity gossip, the irrelevances driving the sports industry, and the confection of conveniently timed outraged about some non-issue every time some actually newsworthy event occurs that gets zero coverage.

So, why would anyone with a comfortably-paid position in that media landscape risk practising real journalism? I would suggest there is now such a small niche in real journalism that there is room for people with an ounce of integrity to make names for themselves, and quickly. But they have to be educated, smart, capable of analysis under pressure, and mostly less concerned about their own egos than the stories they tackle.

How would such people report on Trump, and his Australian analogues? I would suppose you have to report what he says, but always in which contexts. You have to try to fathom why he says what he says, and how it will be received in the US media landscape, which is the only one he’s deliberately trying to manipulate. There’s so much fun to be had with the astonishingly silly justifications for the incoherent drivel of the president by his own administration and so-called commentators that I’m amazed not more media workers have specialized in that area alone. And then you have to step back far enough to see the words for what they are, as if not spoken by Trump. Finally, you might have to guess at how the known bourgeois drudges in the Australian media landscape will interpret such words, and whom they serve with their interpretations. In the negative: who is not served by local interpretations?

But that’s not enough. When I said ‘educated’, I don’t mean you have a university degree in journalism, or economics, or law; those are guarantees only that you know how to follow a paint-by-numbers formula. You have to know something about a wide range of subjects, including especially history, political economy, philosophy, art and literature. Not so you can be a snob, but so that you can ground current events in their historical settings of causes, effects, consequences, and contexts. Even more than that, you have to know enough about the history of your own craft to break away from the deadening assumption that your audience is always full of semi-literate morons. Prose and scripts should aspire to the literary, not to the drably utilitarian. People who are ignorant and functionally illiterate should have to work to understand your diction, grammar, allusions, and similes. Your audience should be assumed to be adult, smart, and engaged rather than infantile and with the attention span of a guppy. If any or all of these characteristics are missing, it’s not really journalism. It’s just entertainment or straight-up propaganda.

Reporting Trump, then, has to be as much about reporting what actually happened, in what context, and what is not said, and why that’s far more important than what the bourgeois media drones will regurgitate as meaningless, decontextualized snippets, like confetti thrown at some ghastly bourgeois Christmas party where everyone is secretly half-cut on cheap booze and eager not to see any bad behaviour by others, in the hope their own misdemeanours will go unnoticed, like Chris Dore’s drunken excesses since last getting sacked for them.

Election 2025 disappointment all around

 

Peter Strempel, 8 May 2025 

Some preliminaries

Despite the egregious irresponsibility of 77 million American voters electing an imbecile conman as president, not nearly all Americans are actually fascists, imbeciles, or just plain evil. Seventy-five million voted against the serial sex offender, bankrupt, and fraudster. And about 36 per cent of eligible voters didn’t bother casting a ballot at all.

Things are different in Australia. It is difficult for a politician to be charged with any crime, but once that occurs, generally they will step down at least until found innocent. Anyone actually convicted has no chance at a further political career.

Australia also has compulsory voting. People who don’t cast a ballot face being fined. That leads to a generally high turnout: an estimated 98 per cent of 18.1 million registered voters cast a ballot, of which 780,000 were ‘informal’ meaning the ballots were incorrectly completed or deliberately defaced to make voting intention unclear under our optional preferential system. More on that later.

The Australian election 

Some media commentators have called the election outcome a ‘landslide’ even before a final count is anywhere in sight. But it does appear as if the Australian Labor Party (ALP) has increased its majority in the house of representatives, and will still need to negotiate support for its legislative programme in the senate, from the Greens or the defeated Coalition parties (Liberal national Party in Queensland, Liberal Party of Australia and National Party of Australia elsewhere, except in the Northern Territory, where the amalgam is called the Country Liberal Party).

Judging by social media comments following the Australian election, we may have a much higher proportion of conspicuously evil, fascist imbeciles than the USA. That’s after we discount the obvious bots/trolls employed so openly by News Corp. Those bots/trolls are easily identified by the use of American idioms, profile pictures not of actual people, and the use of quaint translation engines by for-hire foreign bot/troll farms. Genuine Australian right wing nutjobs use local idioms, can’t spell, and have no idea about grammar and syntax, quaint or otherwise.

Another trend in social media commentary appears to be that despite abundant election information online, a great many people are ignorant of the fact that political parties do NOT control the flow of preferences. For everyone, not just foreigners, optional preferential voting means that lower house seat contenders must be ranked in numerical order of preference. So, if you have six candidates, you must number the candidates from 1 to 6 in order of your preference. If you vote only with 1, your vote is invalid. If you repeat a number, your vote is invalid. If you skip a number (or numbers), your vote is invalid. If you use ticks and crosses, your vote is invalid. It’s really not that hard to do, and the Australian Electoral Commission has a website on which you could practice vote to make sure you got it right.

Usually there are dozens of candidates for the Senate, so you get to number by political party, with a minimum of six preferences called ‘above the line’, which is literally a black line printed under the party names, below which are listed the candidates of that party). Or you can number every candidate by preference, which could be quite an arduous task if you have 30-plus candidates (my ballot paper had about 50).

Political parties are permitted by law to print and distribute ‘how to vote cards’, which are leaflets showing how to vote according to the preferences a particular party would like you to allocate. But no one has to vote the way the parties would like them to. Every voter is perfectly free to number ballots in order of their own preferences. So, while some commentators have argued the election outcome shows the ALP had won by flow of preferences as determined by the ALP and the Greens (who usually preference each other on their how to vote cards), the very poor showing of the Greens, and an apparent lack of preferences flowing from the rabid right wing minor parties to the Coalition, strikes me as evidence that voters rejected how to vote cards and made their own preference choices. I always do, and at this election I’m sure my preference flows would have baffled so-called progressive commentators as much as the closet-fascists in the majority of Australia’s commercial media.

It explains why the Greens did so poorly for the House of Representatives: Fewer voters preferenced Greens first, and ALP voters did not pass on their preferences to Greens candidates, the way ALP how to vote cards instructed.

What explains the disappointing results? 

Anti-Trump sentiment is a powerful explanation for the election outcome: the overwhelming vote for the less-than-popular ALP, with a prime minister characterized by timidity and a disappointing lack of all leadership characteristics, is a clear indication that people were saying to themselves: ‘I don’t have a choice here. I simply cannot risk an imbecile mini-Trump being elected, and the only way to make sure of that is to vote for the lesser of really fucked up options all the way down the ballot paper.’

I see a lot of people making excuses for the Greens’ poor performance. I don’t think you can be a party of obstructionism forever. It’s juvenile and has no potential for a growing voter base. Blocking environmental and housing measures because they didn’t go far enough is self-defeating.

Worse, you can’t pursue some fictional but ideologically extremist alphabet-soup cause while forbidding open debate and and discriminating against women for demanding the same rights to determine their identities. To put the matter plainly, there is no LGBT ‘community’, and there are no LGBT ‘rights’ if they aren’t human rights. Otherwise we are really talking privileges. For a small group, and not accessible by others equally.

As far as the idea of community goes, it is geographically diverse, so not a localized community at all. But neither are there recognizably common interests. No one has yet been able to explain to me what are the common, ‘community’ interests between, say, Alan Joyce and a Fortitude Valley rent boy. Or between Penny Wong and a West End bull dyke. Or between Joyce and the bull dyke. And so on across the entire confected alphabet soup.

Socioeconomic class, and therefore existential, real interests, unite more people than a bunch of letters cynically exploited for political purposes, with never any intention of helping the most underprivileged and disadvantaged people in the country.

But never mind. I was prepared to ignore that particular hypocrisy. Even the Greens know that it will go nowhere and achieve nothing beyond motivating culture war insults, because it is entirely confected ideological perfidy with no remotely realistic success criteria, and therefore no achievable outcomes.

And worst of all, people are really sick of imported hatreds: you cannot achieve anything but carnage even by Middle Eastern standards if you back Iranian Islamofascism against Israeli Judaeofascism. It is obscene, bordering on treasonous, to seek to profit politically from a far-away, centuries-old, genocidal lunacy by pitting Australians against Australians. This was the single reason I voted against my sitting Greens MP and did not offer my second or third preference to him.

I am still astonished at how ignorant every Greens MP and acolyte I spoke to remains about Middle Eastern history, especially about who funds and drives that intractable genocidal mania today. What, exactly did the Greens achieve for Palestinians, or for those radicalized Muslims in Australia who believe Iranian propaganda? Just heightened fear and distrust. And the Greens remain entirely in denial about their ignorant, extremist folly.

More generally, what have the Greens achieved for their supposed constituencies of terrorists, heteroclites, and Maoist wannabes? I propose: absolutely nothing. Except fear-mongering and social division within Australia.

Speaking of pitting Australians against each other, the undisputed and most vile manifestation of that kind of politics is still most openly pursued by the mercenaries, plutocrat shills, fascists, and outright lunatics in the Coalition, conspicuously supported by the Murdoch family propaganda factory, but almost as blatantly by the Liberal party fan club in the Nine Entertainment fantasy ecosystem.

The demonization of the least powerful, most vulnerable people in our society by those organizations constitutes a special kind of evil. The ALP election win will offer some respite from it, but the ALP is not known, either, as a champion of the poor, the elderly, or the sick. Unemployed people are still subject to regular indentured servitude in programs that make treadmills seem like reasonable alternatives. The elderly are still subjected to unconscionable mistreatment in so-called aged care facilities. And despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, the chronically or mentally ill are still condemned to suffer in silence if they don’t have the money to pay for private care, or to make themselves heard.

There is an indescribably facile propaganda phrase that casts the ALP as a ‘centre-left’ party. That can only be true if right wing extremism, like the White, nationalist Christofascism of the Coalition, represents ‘conservatism’. And I reject that proposition categorically. The Coalition has been moving to right ever since Menzies; how could it have remained a ‘conservative’ party after this decades long shift to the right? Ergo, the Coalition really does represent right wing extremism.

By contrast, the legacy of Burkean and Menzian conservatism is reflected precisely in the contemporary ALP: timidly reformist without ever challenging the interests of the wealthiest people and corporations. Ergo, the ALP is Australia’s only conservative party. That’s what voters elected on 3 May: a timid leader of a timid party that wouldn’t ever risk anything resembling an actually progressive agenda.

And they elected this cowardly bunch because the Trumpian imbecility of the extreme right just wasn’t worth the risk to them. I would go so far as to say that the Greens suffered an electoral setback for the same reason: a moronic, Maoist extremism, stifling debate in its own party branches, and breeding the audacity to arrogantly, but ignorantly, shout down the very people whose votes they needed, as if they thought they were the murderous Maoist cadres during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Was there any upside? 

You might think I’m so misanthropic I saw no positive news arising from the election. But that’s not true.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton, described by a former prime minister of his own party as a thug, and by a former premier of Western Australia as not very bright, lost not just the election, but his own seat in parliament.

Australia’s equivalents of national socialism polled so low a bunch of Wombats would have done better as candidates (as well as in character and integrity). The Neanderbogan party, One Nation, might not gain a single seat in the lower house, as is the case for millionaire Clive Palmer’s vanity project, Trumpet of Patriots (that’s not a joke: he funded a political party by that name).

And finally, it is fun to see the deranged media pundits who talked up Trumpism and Christofascism walk aback their ridiculous, sycophantic claims, or even to double down with even more conspicuously unhinged justifications for alleging that the voters of Australia got it all terribly wrong. As if Westminster style democracy is illegitimate, but totalitarianism is admirable.