The Four Corners interview with Steve Bannon appears to be having the opposite effect than it should on the Fake Left at Crikey:
“The ABC hit a wall last week when it tried to glide past criticisms of the Four Corners interview with US ethno-nationalist Steve Bannon, with its traditional nothing to see here, tweeted out as: “What’s wrong with this? NOTHING!”? Instead, the ABC got push back. And we got a debate about the responsibility of media to challenge ethno-nationalism through a journalism that reflects Australia’s diversity. And, in private chats around the country, many journalists came to the conclusion: it reflected poor journalistic judgement.”
And more from Helen Razor:
“Massive kudos.” “Interview of the year.” “Legendary.” Such were the gifts from the workers to their queen. The Monday night buzz in legacy media was for Four Corners and its majesty. Sarah Ferguson’s “match up” with Steve Bannon was not “gobsmackingly” good. It was a smack to the gob of good sense. Still, some journalists saw “strength” in Ferguson. Me? I saw a soft-tissue massage.
This cannot be “current affairs”. Surely, this was not praised by other journalists as “world class”, “masterful” or as anything short of a horror. A horror that has mistaken itself for a romantic comedy in which Meg Ryan is the lead. Meg meets her fiery “match” in a book-shop parcel mix-up. He has her Margaret Atwood novels. She has his Milo Yiannopoulos.
Well, perhaps I was watching a different interview. It looked to me like Sarah Ferguson did a good job and pushing back on Bannon’s racial politics. But she also let him tease out why he has been so successful (ie taking the White House!).
It wasn’t poor journalistic judgement. It was very good journalism because it helped reveal not only what is wrong with Steve Bannon but what is wrong with his detractors. Andrew Bolt has a useful quote (though he doesn’t link it):
The Four Corners interview with Steve Bannon this week has caused a deep rift at the ABC between those who believe holding figures like Bannon to account is exactly what the flagship program should be doing and those who are unhappy the former White House adviser and Breitbart editor was given an ABC platform.
Those in the first camp include, of course, the interviewer, Sarah Ferguson, and her executive producer, Sally Neighbour, and established ABC stars Leigh Sales and Virginia Trioli.
Those in the other camp tend to be the younger, more ethnically diverse journalists including ABC Life’s Osman Faruqi and digital news producer Jennine Khalik.
The post-structural Fake Left believes that if it controls language (discourse) then it creates reality. This used to have a different name: propaganda. Thus losing control of language is a fundamental threat to Fake Left power in its eyes and it will fight it.
This bogus paradigm blinds practitioners to the key insight offered in the Four Corners interview. That is, that the pursuit of the Fake Left’s global agenda of everywhere equal peoples (a noble notion) has economically marginalised Western working classes while disenfranchishing them from power as well. Globalsim has opened immigration flood gates to crush wages, raise house prices and crush-load cities while also promoting unmitigated de-industrialisation. It is these folks that are now putting Steve Bannon and friends (UKIP, One Nation) into power because the alt-Right is much better at sympathising with this working class plight than are the linguistic tyrants of the Fake Left.
Sadly, this has resulted in the same working classes being subjected to still greater heights of trickle down economics under the aegis of populism (which is elites pretending to care about deplorables).
The lesson of Four Corners is not that we need some whacko new journalism that seeks to fashion reality to fit some preconceived ethno-Nirvana. It is not a question of race at all but one of class. In its confusion of the two, the Fake Left is exacerbating the plight of its traditional support base and if it does not turn back it will drive it permanently into the jaws of the wolf.
