While Australia’s media leaders are busy pointing the finger at social media in a “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” kind of way, the rest of us should be looking back to the point of manufacture. The right-wing media’s own outrage factories are at the top of the anti-journalism supply chain.
In court cases around the world, the factory doors are being flung wide open to show just how the right-wing tabloid-style assembly line feeds the vibe of “extreme online misogyny” the deeply serious traditional media are so concerned about.
The most remarkable takeaway from what we’re seeing in the forensic explorations of the anti-journalism process is just how top-down, how manufactured, it all is.
The Trump election interference case in New York, Bruce’s Lehrmann’s Seven-backed defamation case here in Australia, and the Dominion and Smartmatic cases against Fox in the United States are all, in lurid detail, setting out just how this anti-journalism — this anti-truth, anti-context, anti-news — is put together.
Sometimes, too, the ugliness of the process is being exposed by what we cannot see, as with Hugh Grant’s laugh-out-loud description of the settlement of his hacking claim against the Murdochs: “As is common with entirely innocent people, they are offering me an enormous sum of money to keep this matter out of court.”
In the New York election interference case, it looks like it’s anti-journalism that‘s as much on trial as Donald Trump, with all the ugly details from National Enquirer CEO David Pecker on how he colluded to pollute the news environment with an anti-journalism fake news feed from Trump about his primary opponents and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
In last year’s Dominion pleadings, we saw Fox News operating with a similar anti-journalism ethic, amplifying fake claims they knew to be false out of the mouths of Trump surrogates, driven by the fear that the coup-ready president would turn away the MAGA audience that the network was built to service.
In the UK, News Corp ducked testing the allegations of Grant (which the company denies) about the apparently necessary inputs to the anti-journalism assembly line: “phone hacking, unlawful information gathering, landline tapping, the burglary of my flat and office, the bugging of my car, the illegal blagging of medical records”. The related case by Prince Harry continues.
Here in Australia, the exposure of Seven Network’s conduct over a Parliament House rape — including amplifying the now proven (on the balance of probabilities) rapist’s point of view — showed that here, too, anti-journalism is prepared to pay top dollar for the material they need to feed the factory.
Traditional media elites (particularly in Australia) have been eager to brush aside these extreme ends of the anti-journalism spectrum. Shrug, the National Enquirer? It’s a supermarket tabloid. What do you expect? Commercial television current affairs? It’s a competitive space. What are you going to do? The UK hacking? Couldn’t happen here.
Ignore the dark, satanic mills of the outrage factory, they urge. Focus instead on our brightly lit artisanal workshops, turning out well-crafted, almost bespoke news.
Trouble is, that’s not how the modern media ecosystem works. The interaction of social media algorithms with right-wing media frees anti-journalism from the constraints of the analogue world where you had to actually read — or at least be somehow exposed in passing to — the physical paper or the broadcast.
Worse, the gravitational pull of anti-journalism through social media distorts journalism itself. It drives the vibe, particularly of political reporting. In Australia, for example, it’s how News Corp continues to set the political agenda, even as its actual products are largely sequestered behind tight paywalls that only a small minority ever cross.
But, wait. There’s good news: it looks like the spread of the right wing’s anti-journalism was driven by supply, far more than by demand. Now, as supply has been throttled with a twist of the Facebook algorithm, the self-destruction of what was once known as Twitter, and the all-advertising-all-the-time pivot of Google, consumption has slumped.
According to the US-based site, The Righting, which tracks right-wing media, audiences have collapsed since pre-pandemic and the January 6 MAGA assault on the capital, crushed, according to The Daily Wire’s co-CEO Jeremy Boreing, by “a capricious trillion dollar company” (he meant Facebook) moving away from news. So sad.
As at Fox News, right-wing media has suffered from legal actions driven by anti-journalism’s overreach. Late last week, right-wing site The Gateway Pundit, announced it had been driven into bankruptcy by defamation claims over its 2020 “stolen election” narrative. It followed the bankruptcy of InfoWars’ Alex Jones over his conspiracy-laden denialism of the Sandy Hook mass shooting.
And then there’s the generational change, as more progressive Boomers replace the pre-1945 born Silent Generation in the right’s target market (a process accelerated by the largely unreported excess deaths of COVID-19).
Now that most social media is cutting off distribution from the anti-journalism factories, maybe the journalism workshops should follow their lead.
Where does Australian media’s right-wing outrage problem truly stem from? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
