Kentan Joshi,
17 January 2021:
In
March 2019, an Australian white supremacist walked into a mosque,
armed with a shotgun, and killed 51 people, including a two year old
boy. The man who enacted those killings wanted to wipe out those he’d
been told were replacing white people, and erasing white culture. The
first thing on my mind when I saw that was this article published
only a few months prior.
Though
complaints were made to the Australian Press Council, no action was
taken to remove the article or punish the media outlet. The reason
this article prompted little outcry among the employees of News Corp
is because white supremacy, racism and the deadly ideology of the
‘Great Replacement’ belief system are viewed as harmless thought
experiments – rather than things that lead to children being
murdered by Australians with shotguns.
I
wrote,
a few days after the Christchurch attack:
“Politics
and media are each split into two factions: a large number of people
who are explicitly racist, and a large number of people who refuse to
accept that the other people could ever be explicitly racist.
Together, they create an environment necessary, (though, on its own,
insufficient) for the spawning of far-right terror and large-scale
massacres”
People
are already dying. Movements are coalescing. The broader media
feedstock into this system hasn’t changed enough, certainly not in
Australia. There are no more chances to fuck this up. Stubbornness
means lives are lost. A tin ear means innocents suffer. There are no
more chances, and there is no more time.
Bannon
in
2018, Australia’s national broadcaster aired a long interview
between Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson and alt-right,
Nazi-adjacent grifter Steve Bannon. Ferguson said she’d heard
others call Bannon racist, and declared that “there’s no evidence
that that’s what you are”. That’s the same Bannon who, prior to
that interview, complained
too many CEOs in Silicon Valley were Asian, and said
of black Americans being murdered by police, “What if the
people getting shot by the cops did things to deserve it? There are,
after all, in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive
and violent”.
The
problem with that interview is that it provided a stream of content
for Youtube
videos of Bannon ‘owning’ establishment media and gave him
legitimacy on Australia’s most trusted media outlet. Bannon’s
goal is not making a good argument – it’s prominence and
platform. The format of an interview simply gives liars a free
substrate in which to deploy their craft. But the criticism of that
interview was not received well by Australia’s
journalists…..
Much
of this problem comes from the simple fact that Australia’s media
landscape is mostly white, and therefore free to see racism as a cute
thought experiment. Seeing footage of police officers begging white
nationalists to spare their lives because they have children hasn’t
really changed that.
How
do we know it hasn’t changed? Charlottesville based activist Molly
Conger received a long direct message on Twitter from (at the time)
unspecified journalists seeking to “interview members of the
far-right”; right after Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson
announced her departure to the US along with Tony Jones, to cover the
white nationalist terrorist attacks. After some wry jokes from
Twitter folks, Conger confirmed that it was indeed Four Corners and
Sarah Ferguson asking to interview white nationalist terrorists. In
her original post she included her reply, pleading with the team not
to provide a platform.
“Don’t
lend them the legitimacy of your institution. Don’t publish their
words uncritically. Don’t’ publish them at all unless you have a
subject matter expert to dissect them and present them as the
falsehood they are. This is life and death for us”.
That
last sentence has a grave and terrifying reality to it, given Conger
lives in Charlottesville. “I get so many death threats I can
catalogue them by the gunmaker mentioned”, she wrote in 2019. Of
course, it’s completely baffling why they wouldn’t ask for
Conger’s perspective. More telling is that they expect her to
happily pass on the contact details of people who explicitly want to
kill her.
In
fact, many American anti-racist activists now refuse to speak to
journalists if those same journalists are giving a platform to white
supremacists (in much the same way climate scientists had to deny
comments if those stories also featured deniers).
A
smattering of Australian journalists are tuned into the tactics of
white supremacists, the alt-right and terror groups, and are figuring
out new approaches to dealing with the rising terror threat of white
supremacists…..
This
comes at a time when these terror groups are beginning to ramp up in
Australia: “Far-right violent extremism constitutes up to 40% of
the Australian domestic spy agency’s counter-terrorism caseload, up
from 10-15% before 2016″. A teenager from Albury in New South Wales
was planning a “mass casualty attack” just prior to being
arrested. Australia’s anti-terror regimes are failing to do much of
anything about it. An inquiry will focus on social media, but has no
mention of television, print or legacy digital media: Andrew Bolt is
free to write about the white race is being wiped out by dirty
ethnics, as much as he pleases.
These
terror groups aren’t growing in the widespread air of suspicion and
paranoia that surrounded Islamic terror in the 2000s. They’re free
and unhindered. They have the support of sympathetic voices in
police, political and media establishments, and they have the support
of people who can’t process that they’re a direct threat to our
safety. They have journalists hunting tirelessly to find ways to
elevate their voices to larger audiences……
Journalists:
please, don’t wait until a mass casualty attack in Australia before
you decide to stop playing directly into the hands of white
supremacists. There are no more chances. We are here now, and we are
in danger.
Read
full article here.
