The United States is no longer considered a liberal democracy.

According to the Varieties of Democracy Institute at Gothenburg University, which keeps track of these things, the US is now considered an ‘electoral democracy’ — which means it still has elections, but the individual civil protections we take for granted in Australia are no longer a tenet of US democracy.

Not only is the US democratic project crumbling, it is also rushing headlong into becoming an autocracy faster than Turkey and Hungary. And it only took Trump a year.

“The speed with which American democracy is currently [being] dismantled is unprecedented in modern history,” concluded the authors of this year’s report on the health of the world’s democracies.

In Australia, we have largely ignored this. The US is an ally and that is the acceptable, ‘neutral’ view. We report on US foreign policy as if nothing has changed, even as everything does.

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Just 7% of the world lives in a liberal democracy now and in 44 of the 87 democracies, freedom of expression is under threat. The UK has seen a massive drop in how democratic it is, driven by “a substantial decline in freedom of expression and the media”.

Australia has retained its 12th spot, and is still considered a liberal democracy. Not that we defend it. Democracy lives and dies on high expectations and we have become so conditioned to low expectations from our government and institutions, we largely expect them to let us down.

The media has helped create this environment of low expectations and disappointment, and the South Australian election result is a prime example.

You would be excused for thinking that South Australia had suddenly experienced a very conservative swing. The focus has been on who finished second and the groundwork is being laid for another culture war ahead of the next federal election — this time, on preferential voting.

This has been led by a media that loves the drama of the Hanson resurgence. This last happened ahead of the 2016 election, when Hanson returned to the Senate with great fanfare. That was off the back of regular breakfast TV slots and cushy puff pieces about her being flown around Australia by a staffer. Hanson doesn’t exist without Australia’s media and the media love her content. The drama is the point.

So Hanson and One Nation are treated largely with kid gloves — puff pieces and fauxrage pieces about what she has said, with minimum prosecution of her ‘policies’. Hanson is largely treated sympathetically by Australia’s mainstream media, which has decided her appeal makes up one part of ‘neutrality’. After all, it’s just offering up one side of the debate, right? And isn’t that the media’s job?

But as the focus on One Nation since the South Australian election has shown, that ‘neutrality’ is not the same as ‘objectivity’. Neutrality is a political act — you are pre-determining the conditions of the issue or debate before it happens, deciding what is and isn’t to be included. This gives rise to false equivalence and, by extension, lends credibility to the non-credible — Hanson and her ilk are immediately elevated as being equally serious on matters of policy debate, which gives disillusioned voters the permission to flirt with her party as a serious contender. When Hanson does well, she is presented as an unstoppable force. If support starts to dissipate, she is just parked until the next economic crisis, when she is re-inflated by the media, well versed in how the cycle works.

Because the story of the South Australian election is not the 20% or so of the primary vote that Hanson cannibalised from the Coalition. That’s just a reframing of conservative politics in Australia. It’s that most voters rejected conservative candidates. 48% of South Australian voters put Labor or the Greens first, compared to just 41% who went with the Liberals or One Nation. The just under 11% covered by ‘other’ are a mixed bag, but having looked at some of the independents, they fit the ‘not a conservative’ trend as well. While votes are still being counted, it is already clear that most South Australian voters rejected conservative candidates.

Not that you would know. ‘Neutrality’, when the story is decided, doesn’t allow for such facts.

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It’s rare in Australia for second-term governments to improve their positions. And yet, at the federal election, we saw that too. Voters set the foundation for higher expectations — but the media has mostly focused on One Nation, rather than why voters are turning to a populist party and what could be done to address their concerns.

Instead we get a self-serving echo chamber. And you can already see the seeds being planted to start challenging preferential voting in Australia, which the media is doing very little to take seriously, or push back against.

Because the antidote to institutional false neutrality is facts, which means taking a position. A factual one. It’s a fact that the world is backsliding when it comes to democracy. It’s a fact that freedom of expression is under threat. It’s a fact that democratic protest is rapidly being criminalised, in Australia and elsewhere. It’s a fact that the US is one of the greatest threats to global stability and peace. It’s a fact that the world order is remapping.

Yet the way these facts are framed says everything about how we got here. One Nation is not an unstoppable force and voters seem desperate to reframe the narrative.

That, though, isn’t ‘neutral’, and therefore is dismissed. Even as it means that voters who are trying to hold our democracy, and governments, to higher standards get dismissed right along with it.

The following is an excerpt from ‘Where It All Went Wrong: The Case Against John Howard’ by Amy Remeikis – out today in all good bookstores.

The US ‘shock and awe’ Iraq invasion in 2003 may have cost up to one million Iraqis their lives, and hinged on a widely disputed report that then-leader Saddam Hussein had been stockpiling nuclear weapons. Despite UN weapons inspectors finding no evidence to support the US and UK claims Hussein was stockpiling ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and planned to make more in early 2003, the US, the UK and Australia were all in and invaded just a couple of months after the UN report. By 2004, it was clear the reports were false.

Insert [John] Howard’s gasp face.

“I felt embarrassed, I did, I couldn’t believe it, because I had genuinely believed it,” he said in a 2014 interview.

“So, I felt embarrassed and I did my best to explain… that it wasn’t a deliberate deception. It may have been an erroneous conclusion based on the available information, but it wasn’t made up.”

Howard believed the claims so strongly that he sent Australia to war with just an oral submission to the Cabinet in 2003. The decision sent hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in February 2003, a month before the formal decision, in what was then one of the biggest national protests ever seen. The then-Labor opposition leader, Simon Crean, called the invasion decision “a black day for Australia”. Andrew Wilkie, who later became an independent MP, resigned from the Office of National Assessments in protest. The Cabinet papers released show there was barely any discussion of the decision, with most of the calls seemingly made in the National Security Committee (NSC) – a secretive committee Howard set up in 1996 to sit inside but separate to Cabinet, to limit transparency even further.

Howard, who in 2002 had declared the United States “has no better friend anywhere in the world” and who had accepted the “deputy sheriff” moniker from Bush (despite the unease it caused with Australia’s Muslim neighbours in the Pacific) had committed Australia to an open-ended war, with no goals in sight, without even requesting any advice on the pros or cons of the decision. The public service, well aware of the situation, did not offer any advice which either supported or cautioned against the decision. There was no cost-benefit analysis. The UN Security Council had not explicitly signed off on the decision, so Howard relied on a ‘Memorandum of advice to the Commonwealth government on the use of force against Iraq’ from two junior bureaucrats to assure the public that Australia’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq was ‘legal’.

When the Governor-General at the time, Peter Hollingworth, had asked to see legal advice from Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, on Australia’s involvement under international law, given the longstanding precedent that it was the Governor-General who declared war, he was told there was no need.

Instead, Howard used a clause in the Defence Act which gave the defence minister the power to give instructions to the heads of service.

All so he could be all the way with the US and strengthen an alliance with the country he had admired since childhood. In the early stages of Australia’s involvement in the US’s war, Howard also approached the US over signing a bilateral free trade deal, which, as Emeritus Professor of Politics Robert Manne pointed out, Australia had previously rejected three times, including under Howard, as not being in the national interest.

So eager at this point, or perhaps wildly miscalculating Washington’s actual gratitude at Australia’s subservience, Australia ended up with a deal that was, shockingly, not in the national interest.

We have never rebalanced the scales. Not even Labor dare criticise or distance Australia from the US, not in strategic and defence policy, and not in foreign policy, even as it becomes increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic. Labor had stood against Australia’s entry into America’s war (while still supporting the ADF), but by the time a young Mark Latham described the Howard government as a “conga line of suckholes” desperate for the approval of “the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory” in 2003, the relationship between the US and Australia was so enmeshed that the US ambassador to Australia at the time complained. Latham was denounced in the Australian media for a lack of civility, and so began Labor’s cowing on the US question. Latham was elected Labor leader less than a year after the controversy. He held a press conference shortly after with a US flag in the backdrop and very quickly declared, “I believe in the American alliance”.

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We still believe in the American alliance. No matter what, no matter who. Australia has signed up to deliver at least $360 billion in a strategic defence deal with the United States and the United Kingdom, in the hopes of receiving nuclear-powered submarines from the US that they are under no obligation to deliver.

Even as Donald Trump carries out extrajudicial killings, sacks public servants who try to uphold the law, goes after the judiciary, targets political opponents for retribution, uses his public office for personal wealth building, encourages the kidnapping of people from US streets, unloads tariffs on allied nations, sparks trade wars, insults world leaders and allies, starves his citizens, guts public services and spending, pushes for gerrymanders, declares himself a king and above the law, lies, appoints reality TV stars and cronies to senior ministerial roles, and openly discusses a third term, Constitution be damned, Australia is by his side. Literally. At a dinner held for APEC leaders in South Korea in late 2025, Albanese was sat at Trump’s side. His ‘right hand man’ as it were.

It doesn’t matter that America’s democracy is crumbling as it projects its political violence outwards in its attempts to violently rebuild its ‘empire’, or that the ‘shared values’ Australian leaders have long claimed we and the United States have in common are more nostalgic than reality – Australia is in lockstep with the US. Howard tied us to America so tightly, it would take a world-altering event to unshackle us. The tragic truth is, though, even then, we would probably be on America’s side, even if it meant our own destruction.

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If one thing became crystal clear over the summer it was this – the disconnect between the media and political classes and those they are meant to serve seems to have never been greater.

Whether it’s overt political calls and dictums surrounding the royal commission into what led up to the Bondi attack, or floppy justifications for cancelling Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’ appearance at the Adelaide Writers’ Week (AWW), or the faux-rage targeting cartoonist Cathy Wilcox over legitimate political commentary, there appears no end to the unrelenting campaign to paint genocide opponents as hatemongers.

But the enormous response to the self-flagellation South Australian Premier Peter Malinaukas and the wider Adelaide Festival Board inflicted upon AWW with the decision to cancel Abdel-Fattah might suggest the arts community has had enough.

The fall out has been well covered. Less discussed is that writers and artists – like Ren Wyld, Amy McQuire, Clare Wright, Melissa Lucashenko, Michelle de Kretser, Evelyn Araluen, Chelsea Watego and others – who withdrew were forced into once again becoming the moral and ethical culture heartbeat, while sacrificing livelihood and security.

Their steadfastness came on the heels of the Bendigo Writers Festival, where many had been forced into the same position after a similar destructive decision to limit criticism of Israel. They had warned their fellow writers and artists then of what was already here, but it took the wanton destruction of one of the nation’s most important cultural institutions and with it, the loss of AWW director Louise Adler, to wake up many in the establishment as to what was at stake.

As Abdel-Fattah herself said in response to being targeted for her identity:

“I think in this moment we must also pay close attention to some of the fault lines that are being drawn. We have to be very careful about the way the narrative is being framed to equate all speech as equal, undermining the right of marginalised people to call for the cancellation of those who incite harm in the name of liberal principles of the so-called marketplace of ideas – as we all know, Indigenous artists and writers of colour pay the price for.”

Because let’s be clear here, it was the solidarity among writers, academics and journalists across the political spectrum which saw most of the media treat Abdel-Fattah with open curiosity and fairness. A fairness that has been sorely lacking in most coverage dealing with those who criticise Israel – not the racism which sparked it.

Contrast the time and space given to people explaining this issue, to the media campaign for a royal commission. The campaign that had declarative sentences about media-agreed ‘facts’ – including, at best the implication and at worst outrageous accusation that anti-genocide protesters had contributed to the mass murder of Jewish Australians. Both approaches stemmed from the same impulse – the media class at large deciding it knew what was the correct take.

But when it came to covering Adelaide, all voices were afforded an opportunity to explain their position, something sorely lacking in the national ‘debate’ in the aftershocks of Bondi.

In trying to defend the indefensible, Malinauskas also gave us an insight into how those with power are pushing these decisions.

“Can you imagine if a far-right Zionist walked into a Sydney mosque and murdered 15 people?” he said in widely reported comments from his Tuesday press conference.

“Can you imagine that as premier of this state, I would actively support a far-right Zionist going to Writers’ Week and speaking hateful rhetoric towards Islamic people? Of course I wouldn’t. The reverse is happening in this instance, and I’m not going to support that either. I think it’s a reasonable position for me to have, it’s a view that I believe.”

It may be a view that he believes, but it is not based in reality. Or history. In creating his false equivalence – an absolutely delusional fantasy that criticising a political ideology like Zionism is akin to terrorism or hate speech – Malinauskas reveals just how little thought politicians like him have put in to forming their positions.

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Malinauskas’ view ignores history, experts and 78-years of evidence, but he believes it enough to destroy a major cultural institution, risk defamation, tar Adelaide’s international reputation and his own. That he seems shocked at the response shows he still refuses to learn.

And that seems to sit at the core of the disconnect we are witnessing growing between politicians and the mainstream media on one side, and the public on other – a refusal to learn, to evolve, to bend.

That rigidity in thought means they both can’t and won’t see the shifting sands in front of them. It also means disagreement, dissent and criticism will continue to be reframed into very narrow definitions of ‘hate speech’, ‘agitators’ and ‘social cohesion’.

That’s not going to make anyone safer. It will however, make it easier to target and crush those they don’t agree with. And you know who that will be.

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Young generations are locked out of housing, but let’s talk about an attention-seeking extremist dressed in a burqa. The planet is burning, but let’s keep allowing fossil fuel lobbyists to dictate our policies. Israel commits a genocide, but instead of holding the perpetrators to account, the UN signs off on Trump’s real estate plan for Gaza. Our greatest ‘ally’ is in the grips of authoritarian fever, but Labor somehow thinks tying our nation’s future to this sinking ship is smart strategy. We’re investing billions in the US military industrial complex while telling our public hospitals to ‘reign’ in spending. Children are apparently too young for social media, but old enough to be treated as adults in the incarceration system.

But hey - did you hear some Liberal right-wingers are burning down their own party?

The hyper-normalisation of crisis is by design. It’s not new - in Australia it’s been used by all sides of politics since the success of the Howard government to keep people in a state of overwhelm. But it has now reached the point where if you are not feeling like you’re going crazy, then you probably are.

The manipulation of power is so overt the manipulators are no longer even bothering to hide it. They brag about it. For example, the AFR recently reported on a bizarre event held by influential stockbroker Geoff Wilson – a distant relative of Liberal MP Tim Wilson – held to thank those he saw as being instrumental in the defeat of the Albanese government’s very modest superannuation tax changes that was originally designed to target rich retirees. It included an engraved trophy for Matthew Cranston, a journalist with The Australian – if ever we needed another reminder of mainstream media’s proximity to power.

But this is all so normal it barely raises an eyebrow, let alone an outcry at the hijacking of democracy.

It’s so expected that it becomes part of the debate. Peta Credlin admitted years later the Coalition knew the carbon price wasn’t a tax, but it didn’t matter because they convinced the public it was, helped by mainstream media that never called it out. Barnaby Joyce bragged about his $100 lamb roast lie in his book, Weatherboard and Iron, which again worked because the media dutifully repeated it. Children overboard worked. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq worked. All these lies have worked, which might explain why Nationals leader David Littleproud and the baby muppets continue to spout the fib of a $9 trillion transition to net zero.

Lies work in large part due to a media that repeats what it knows not to be true under the dubious cover of being ‘part of the debate’. Politicians worked out how to hijack this system decades ago. And they are still doing it – even Pauline Hanson is having a crack with her Islamophobic antics, aimed at spinning a lie about Muslim immigration to distract us all from the hoarding of wealth by a small clique up the top.

While the Labor government dithers and fills the space of Howard’s Liberal party, the right continue to see how far they can drag the ‘centre’ and have media sanitise it as ‘normal’.

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One of the reasons there has been so much work done to try and rehabilitate the mess that is the Coalition (when a quick glance of history would inform you that this incarnation of a centre-right/right party is done and will be lucky to last out the decade) is because that is how Australian politics makes sense to so many journalists.

It’s a story they tell themselves, and the nation, even if the shifting trends are clear as water. The Liberal party must be rehabilitated because we are supposed to have two major parties, one that is left of centre and the other right of centre. The two parties are considered two sides of a ‘sensible’ centre no matter what they do or how extreme their policies become (like Labor proposing life sentences for children). If the facts don’t play according to the script, then make it.

So while mainstream media tries to sell that message, the same forces that have controlled the narrative for the last five decades are rebuilding to do it again. The HR Nicholls Society – a group formed by John Stone, Peter Costello, Barrie Purvis and Ray Evans in 1986 with the main goal of destroying Australia’s union movement and industrial relations system (which they called a ‘focus on productivity and deregulation’) – were so successful in meeting their goals, they largely went dormant.

In 2023, in response to Labor’s industrial relations reforms, particularly multi-employer bargaining – which allows employees in traditionally weaker bargaining positions (like the care sector) to join with other similar employees and bargain as a group – the society was reinvigorated.

It held its annual conference last week, with speakers including MP Tim Wilson, former News Corp journalist Adam Creighton, former AFR editor Michael Stutchbury and a variety of other thought-aligned culture warriors.

After about a decade of mostly sleepy advocacy, having won most of the battles and succeeded themselves out of relevancy, these groups are roaring back, inspired by populist politics sweeping much of the western world and the addictive lure of winning. Because for decades in Australia, these groups have won. And they openly brag about it and use the media to position them as the ‘centre’, convincing Australians that their greedy pursuits for wealth and power are, somehow, in the interests of all.

These groups have won so comprehensively they have sucked the fight out of the Labor party, which governs in fear of what they could do in response. Labor has been beaten down into emulating the Liberal party of old, but without the gumption to use power. Labor doesn’t want the battle, and so the media calls that ‘stable’ governing.

Any push for reform in the public interest is ‘radical’ and so forces are mobilised, lies are told, facts are twisted and this is all put forward as one very sensible side of the ‘debate’.

And yet you have to wonder - why? Who is this serving? Because it’s not Australians who voted for something different. We have endured their f*** around era and we’re now finding out. It seems increasingly likely those who keep perpetuating this f***ery will do the same.

Following the announcement of Donald Trump’s ‘peace’ deal and the resulting ‘ceasefire’ there has been a lot of quiet commentary in legacy media circles about the future of the fifth estate.

“What are all these single-issue media critics going to do now that the issue is solved?” is the question being asked in newsrooms, as if now that the bombs have officially stopped dropping over civilians in Gaza (never mind that they haven’t), audiences will return to the legacy fold.

This question isn’t based in malice but a fundamental misunderstanding of what caused the schism in trust between audiences and media. It’s also not new. There has always been a level of distrust within newsrooms of people who undertake journalism away from the fold. It’s easy to dismiss renegades, even as the mainstream is forced to follow them.

Who gets to be a journalist — and who doesn't

Who ‘gets’ to be a journalist has always been set by the mainstream – you must work for a masthead, a network or an established broadcaster to be counted as a ‘proper’ journalist. With one of those behind you, then it follows that everything you do is ‘journalism’.

Without the overhang of an established brand, then you are not a journalist. You’re something else. An activist. A ‘citizen’ journalist. A blogger. A podcaster. An influencer. A content creator. Someone ‘masquerading’ as a journalist. It doesn’t matter if you once worked for an established media outlet. You left. Whatever you’re doing now obviously can’t be considered ‘journalism’.

You can understand why. Anything outside is a threat, and threats always have to be greeted with hostility, or manufactured indifference.

But the shift to the fifth estate (which has existed, in some form or other, since we started counting institutional ‘estates’) is not and has never been about a single issue. And that is what many have missed.

The idea that a ‘peace’ deal (that everyone knows is bupkis) is going to suddenly reverse people’s skepticism and cynicism in the media and return people to legacy sources also reveals the institutionalism at the heart of much of Australian media.

It has never just been one issue which has turned people away. It is legacy media’s inability to see how issues are connected — and indeed, how the bigger picture matters, which is what had people looking for different sources of information in the first place.

So much of what counts as ‘news’ now is the incremental, the horse race. XY said this followed by XX responds to what XY said. There is no analysis, no context. No acknowledgement that what they are reporting they know to be misleading or a lie, just that something has been said. And then, if someone else says something different, well then, we’ll report that too.

But they know a lie is halfway around the world before the truth leaves the starting blocks and they are relying on the same polarised emotions social media algorithms encourage to prompt someone to click on a headline, or stay on a clip.

Much of legacy media relies on the ‘debate’ itself. It’s not the substance of the debate or even the tangible damage the debate causes in the real world that matters — it is the debate itself that counts.

That’s how you get people arguing with someone who literally doesn’t believe some humans have the right to exist and ending on ‘well, we have to hear out all sides’ as if there is any legitimacy to someone who denies a genocide, or is advocating for trans people to be stripped of their rights. The ‘debate me bro’ culture that people like Charlie Kirk mined like an ideas cesspit and came up with grifter’s gold is treated seriously by members of the media who legitimise it because it legitimises their own role.

Chris Hedges, David Marr and ‘debate’ over substance

Most journalists will adopt the contrarian position not because of principle or evidence, but because it exists. They then become caught by their own trap — they play the ‘objective’ role of contrarian, receive backlash because of their lack of good faith arguments and deliberate obfuscation of the bigger picture, get defensive and then double down. Because in this form of journalistic analysis or endeavour, it is not the substance of the discussion, but the debate itself that matters.

We saw that most recently on Monday night, when David Marr ‘sparred’ with Chris Hedges on ABC Radio’s Late Night Live.

Marr has a long history as a champion of journalism, and causes, in Australia. His history as The National Times editor and host of ABC’s Media Watch, where he played a key role in exposing the Cash for Comment affair, as well as his demolition of anything Gerard Henderson has ever had to say, has made him a legend in Australian media circles.

Hedges is an international legend, whose reporting has won Pulitzer prizes and been a feature of almost every single modern war since the 1991 Gulf invasion, where he refused to take part in the sanitised military reporting pools. He was in Australia to deliver the Edward Said Lecture, along with additional speaking engagements, including at the National Press Club.

The Press Club cancelled his appearance, then tried to claim it had never been confirmed (easily disproven by emails to Hedges and a screenshot from the club’s own webpage) setting off a firestorm largely ignored by the mainstream media.

Marr had Hedges on his show to discuss the cancellation. But from the get-go it became obvious it was a debate. Journalists have let down their Gaza colleagues: Hedges, you are affirmative, Marr, the negative. Debate.

Hedges wasn’t there to debate what to him, and to those who have followed his reporting, was obvious. Marr seemed captured by the forum, rather than the substance. Hedges aptly made his case, but he shouldn’t have had to.

You can’t be ‘objective’ about fascism

At the same time, the ‘straight’ news adopts such a hands-off position from nuance and context that it can end up a parody of itself.

Trump’s AI-generated middle finger to the No Kings protests, which has attracted one of the largest groups of protesters in modern US political memory was described by The New York Times as “President Trump shared what appeared to be an A.I.-generated video on social media. It shows Mr. Trump wearing a crown and flying a jet that dumps brown liquid on demonstrators”.

You can imagine the discussion in the newsroom. “Well, we don’t know for sure that he gave the AI a prompt to drop shit on protesters from a fighter jet, it could have just been coffee. Better just say ‘brown liquid’ to be safe.”

Mainstream media seems incapable of calling out fascist behaviour or, indeed, fascists among Trump’s cabinet — one can only assume because geographical indicators mean that you can only be a fascist if you were grown in the National Fascist Party region in 1922.

But they will work overtime in telling you why someone isn’t technically a fascist using a definitional debate that would have killed it at the University of Sydney debating society. Just as it isn’t technically a genocide until the genociders agree, apparently. Or that it’s not technically shipping weapons to Israel because it’s just the parts that open the door for the weapons to fall. Or that it’s not technically unlawful to have automated cancelled welfare payments because a court hasn’t explicitly spelt it out yet. Or it’s not technically police brutality because it was against protesters.

The discussion in the mainstream media around Albanese’s meeting with Trump has largely centered on just how far Albanese should have prostrated himself in front of the US president, just how much of our national interests he should have signed over. “How far up Trump’s arse should the Australian prime minister have climbed? Our experts discuss.”

At the same time Queensland’s rainforests became the first carbon sink to turn into a carbon emitter (meaning they are no longer absorbing carbon, but now emitting it, which is a problem given their place as part of the earth’s lungs), media is focussed on whether one of the biggest climate wreckers in Australian politics has a point about Net Zero.

We could go on. Because it’s never been about one issue. It’s about moral clarity. You can’t be ‘objective’ about fascism. You can’t be ‘objective’ about genocide. You can’t be ‘objective’ about whether people have the right to live. You can’t be ‘objective’ about the climate crisis.

You can tell the truth. If existing media sources won’t or can’t do that, audiences will find those who do. And they aren’t going back.

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“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

The Roman poet and satirist, Juvenal, was talking about Roman emperors and the public who allowed them, trading their collective power for panem et circenses – bread and circuses – or food and entertainment.

Thinking of it in today’s context is not exactly an original concept – the capital in the dystopian Hunger Games series Panem was named for Juvenal’s second-century observations – but it is more often than not applied to politics, when arguably the media is one of the first institutions to fall victim to baser instincts.

We saw a perfect example of that in the media’s response to the death of Charlie Kirk – when rightwing media acted on behalf of the propaganda machines and identified public figures it didn’t believe were mourning correctly. By that, it was anyone who was not slavishly lionising Kirk, or who dared to point out his actual history in his own words.

Hannah Ferguson and Abbie Chatfield were favoured targets – both for their reach, and because they have become the lighting rod for any leftwing criticism, along with Cam Wilson (for tame comments made in a private group chat) and myself. Ferguson and Chatfield bore the brunt (despite not having criticised Kirk and lamenting the loss of life) with Sky News and News Corp (the Daily Mail is barely worth mentioning) then targeting others for having liked any of their posts they disagreed with.

Bread and circuses indeed. Keep them fed and entertained and no one thinks too hard about what is actually going on. And while Australian media has dedicated thousands of words to the cancellation of US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, outside of new media, such as Lamestream, Deepcut and Ette Media, there has been no acknowledgement of the very real danger of News Corp and its subsidiaries aiming its attack armies at people for the sin of not mourning one of their chosen ‘correctly’.

News Corp have always leveraged their cultural influence and, increasingly, their US audience, strategically wooed for their YouTube views and the money those eyeballs bring with them, into attacking those it views as enemies – progressives, politically misaligned, women, minorities, or influential in a way it doesn’t agree with. But it is now working to bring more of the US media culture to Australia. Australia’s rightwing politicians are more than happy to jump on the bandwagon – LNP senator Matt Canavan has gleefully taken up invitations to criticise Chatfield on Sky News previously with little, if any, pushback.

What is left of the legacy progressive media in Australia rarely defends journalists or commentators from public attack, either going silent or reporting on the backlash with a few lines dedicated to what the chosen target either did or didn’t actually say. But it’s mostly a head-in-the-sand strategy, focussed on ‘not feeding’ the attacks – which creates the impression there is just the News Corp take and that’s it.

As the Trump regime continues ticking off Umberto Eco’s 14 common features of fascism (we are through the list in just nine months of this second term), ‘disagreement is treason’ is becoming more and more normalised.

You could see that in the response to the very tame questioning of the ABC’s John Lyons to Trump, where the veteran reporter asked the US president about maintaining his business interests while sitting in the Oval Office. There was nothing wrong with the questions, but sitting Liberal senator Sarah Henderson demanded the ABC explain itself (for what, the crime of journalism?). Former Howard minister Gary Hardgrave demanded someone “needs to lose their job over this” and former Labor minister Joel Fitzgibbon questioned how it was in the public interest for the national broadcaster to ask questions of the US president.

Why? Because Trump declared that being questioned was “hurting Australia very much right now”. And right on cue, those willing to kiss the orange assinego jumped into line. There was pushback there, but that we have reached the point of even needing it shows how far we have slipped.

None of this should be a surprise – Australian media and politicians have allowed the Overton window to slip even further to the right by the refusal to call a genocide a genocide, or even de-centre Israel, so of course we are seeing slips in other areas. None of it is unrelated, as many have been screaming from the beginning.

But we risk slipping even further. Australian media, held captive by US security-bros who cannot see the new world for the defence contracts, continues to demand we kowtow to a panicked despot who is about as stable as an elephant balancing on a pencil. In these circumstances, defending journalists for doing their job, or commentators for accurately reflecting history seems brave, when really it’s the bare minimum.

But in a world ruled by bread and circuses, all we can be hopeful for is crumbs.

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There is a reason dystopian fiction often depicts the ruling class as attending balls while the world burns – it’s the easiest narrative tool to show the disconnect between society and those who rule it.

The day after Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador, the first time such an action has been taken since World War II, the federal press gallery held its annual ball.

The timing of the ball was pre-determined. The expulsion of the ambassador and his staff, and the shuttering of the Australian embassy in Tehran, was not.

That came after an ASIO determination that Iran was behind at least two antisemitic attacks, with more under investigation, having allegedly hired ‘cut out’ operatives (people unaware of who they are working for) to carry out the plans. This came, the ASIO director tells us, following an investigation since October led by ASIO and the AFP “in liaison with foreign partners”.

We don’t know who those foreign partners are. No one at the press conference thought to ask, and ASIO chief Mike Burgess isn’t exactly readily available for follow-up interviews.

The disconnect, though, isn’t in how the information was delivered, or even received. It’s in the seeming inability of both mainstream media and political leaders to see that the world has changed. Audiences have worked it out – following the Iran announcement the immediate reaction from the public was to ask the questions not immediately asked by the press gallery: why would Iran do this? Who assisted ASIO in its operations? If the Iranian ambassador can be expelled this quickly, why is Australia not acting to expel the Israeli ambassador, considering Israel’s breach of international and humanitarian law and the killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom? What are the red lines for Australia’s relationship with Israel?

Some of those questions were answered on Wednesday, at least in regards to why now for Iran.

“For us, the line was crossed when action was taken, orchestrated in this country against Australians,” the foreign minister, Penny Wong, said at a press conference.

“We cannot countenance that and that's why the ambassador has been expelled.”

The issue for people watching this all play out seems to be the complete disconnect between this and Israel’s actions. It wasn’t raised until Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer gave Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu credit for the decision to expel the Iranian envoy in a press conference covered by the ABC.

“Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu has made a very forthright intervention when it comes to Australia, a country in which we have a long history of friendly relations,” Mencer said.

“He made those comments because he did not believe that the actions of the Australian government had gone anywhere near far enough to address the issues of antisemitism. He made very forthright comments about the prime minister himself. We certainly see it from Israel that Australia taking the threats against Israel and the Jewish people, Jewish Australians living in Australia – for the Australian government to take those threats seriously is a positive outcome."

Tony Burke responded that was “complete nonsense” in an ABC radio interview, but there has been little acknowledgement that even if not true, many Australians feel Israel has too much influence over Australian affairs.

It has been part of the business-as-usual approach most media outlets are taking to the extraordinary shift in global affairs. America, supposedly the world’s most successful democracy, is about to celebrate its 250th anniversary as it slides into authoritarianism and fascism. But rather than report on this as the serious moment it is, everything Donald Trump and his administration does – from snatching people off the street and disappearing them; to declaring “capital punishment in the capital” after sending in armed military units to jurisdictions he views as hostile; to attacking the independence of the Federal Reserve; to arbitrarily applying tariffs and trade sanctions on allied nations; to attempting to bargain away the sovereignty of European nations – is viewed in isolation.

We are not supposed to draw motives from any of these acts or Trump’s own words – unless there is an authorised statement spelling it all out, it seems that motives are to remain fundamentally inscrutable, even as America slides further into the abyss. But none of this happens in isolation. Trump’s attacks on the Federal Reserve risk global financial stability. That impacts Australia, even as our media pretends that this is just a blip in the matrix and come the mid-terms, all will be corrected, rather than address it like the authoritarian takeover it is.

But American authoritarianism doesn’t look like what the history books show us, so the obvious lines are drawn. And Israel is an ally, so simple things become ‘very complicated’. And all of this is very normal and fine, which is why there is nary a thought as to how holding a ball in Parliament where journalists host politicians, lobbyists and corporate tsars behind closed doors – and choose who is allowed to fill the 640 seats on offer – looks to a public already losing trust in the media’s ability to hold power to account.

Our media is not fit for purpose in covering these moments. And history will judge us all harshly.

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In order to be good at reporting on politics, a journalist needs two main skills.

One, the ability to notice incremental changes. The tick-tock of policy, vibes and language changes that point the direction a government or issue is headed in. That requires zooming in, concentrating on the minutiae, making mountains out of the molehills.

The other is to see the bigger picture. Zooming out to see what all those small changes are pointing towards on the whole. Applying context, referring to history – seeing not just the molehills but the whole landscape, including the possible different paths.

In Australian political journalism, the first is where the rewards are. That’s the breaking news, the drops and the splashes. That’s where most of the focus is. It’s what drives media and the politicians they cover.

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The second skill is the more valuable one – for journalists and their audiences. Tick-tocks have their place, but they are just a piece of the puzzle. Journalism is supposed to help people interpret their world, to provide the necessary information – and crucially, put that information into context – so people can then make the decisions which help govern their lives.

But at some point, around the same time mainstream media became as centrist and corporate as the politics it covers, the bigger picture was mostly lost. Certainly de-valued. Now there is noise, with no clarity. Political journalism mostly operates from a position of assumed knowledge with an undercurrent of condescension. All of what we are talking about is just so complicated we just don’t have the time to explain it to you, let alone explain why you should care.

Better you just understand we think this is important and let that be enough. Sssshhhh – you don’t know enough to ask questions. That’s our job. Just trust us that we think this is the most important thing happening in Australia at the moment and let that be enough.

And then we wonder why trust in media is falling – while those who have already lost trust wonder how their governments are able to ignore so many issues important to them, and the world.

So much of our media is not fit for purpose. Journalists rarely get taught how to be fierce and fearless anymore – instead they learn how to survive in media.

Which more often than not means sticking to the centre and agreed ‘sensible’ positions. You can be ‘left’ and ‘progressive’ if you advocate for climate change action – even while advocating for market-led ‘solutions’ like offsets. Covering Israel’s war (slaughter) on Palestine and the Middle East is now OK, as long as you continue to centre Israel. Following and kowtowing to the United States is obviously in our national interest (have we considered giving them another Pine Gap? Pre-committing to as many wars as they want? Making Australia the 51st state?), while China must be treated with derision and scorn because, well, they have a different system of government to us! The only acceptable form of protest is to not protest, but if you must, make it a nicely worded email, as long as no one is made to feel uncomfortable in any way.

Oh but farmers dumping manure on the steps of a parliament aren’t protesters – they are farmers! And climate change deniers blocking highways and roads in their utes and trucks aren’t protesters – they are convoys. Minority governments are CHAOS and CONFUSION (except if you are in New South Wales where you barely even notice it, or the ACT, where it is business as usual, or Tasmania, where even after four state elections in seven years, people keep voting for it) so don’t even think about adding in some checks and balances to your democracy.

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Tax reform is bad if it means corporations and the wealthy have to pay more (or even just their fair share) but necessary if it’s lower and middle earners, who can’t expect a free ride. Governments can’t be expected to actually DO anything to improve people’s lives with their power – that would be hubris. No, no, no – but we should listen to the Coalition, even though they have been comprehensively rejected not once, but twice by the electorate, and now have their lowest representation (percentage wise) in the lower house in modern political history (and I predict will lose even more seats at the next election).

But hey – don’t worry, a leader with the support of less than half her party room, who needed intervention to save her preselection not once, but twice, is totally the person to turn it all around, not just in the parliament, but also the branches and the state and national executives, because she’s a woman, AND she used to be punk.

Australians are taught through their media and their politics that they can never, ever hope for more and should be grateful for the little they have.

We are told we shouldn’t look at our history, or even what is possible to learn from it, because things should stay exactly as they are, because that is what is sensible and anyone arguing for more is a radical, and therefore deserving of sneer.

What we in the media class largely haven’t noticed, and what Labor seems happy to wilfully ignore, is that people who don’t feel heard won’t just keep accepting same-same just because it’s what is being offered. They’ll choose disruption just to break the cycle. And that can be positive, as with what we saw in the New York Democratic mayoral primaries, but it can also be a Donald Trump. To think that Labor’s thumping majority translates to a thumping endorsement of Labor’s meagre election offerings not only misinterprets the election, but the Australian electorate.

Those still focused on politics as usual are blind to the bigger picture. Staring at all those pebbles means you don’t see the cliff’s edge until it’s too late.

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