Time to call a spade a spade.
One Nation’s rise is the media’s fault.
And Pauline Hanson being misunderstood is also the media’s fault.
Elements of the media have amplified the rise of One Nation over three decades, with outsized coverage normalising what is now a populist machine.
At the same time, Hanson treats the media as her enemy.
Can both things be true?
The first is a deliberately provocative statement. The second is an observation. Both lead to questions about the media’s role and responsibility in an era of information manipulation.
The phrases “fake news” and “enemy of the people” come to mind in these times when it appears that whatever the question is for Hanson, Donald Trump is the answer.
The latest example relates to her comments about violence against women in which she makes excuses for violent men.
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“It is wrong but it’s also a two-way street,” she told the Brisbane radio station 4BC.
“I’m not saying that it’s just men, women can lose their cool as well. Society is under so much pressure … Everyone is under so much pressure and it’s really hard.”
The facts are that intimate partner violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men.
She went on to say that women who are being abused should just leave: “If these women are getting abused by men out there, then don’t put up with it.”
The data also shows that leaving is the most dangerous time for women and children.
The remarks have caused an outcry which has provoked Hanson to again claim that her comments have been misrepresented.
“Here’s exactly what I said on 4BC about domestic violence, so you don’t get it twisted by the media or the Labor Party,” she posted on social media. “There is a concerted effort by some in the media to constantly take my comments out of context.”
It could not be more Trumpian as she plays the media and attacks the media, simultaneously.
In 2016, Trump was estimated to have received as much as US$5.9bn in free media coverage, more than doubling Hillary Clinton’s presence in the press, while underspending her official campaign on his way to victory in the 2016 presidential election.
At the same time, he dominated social media, simultaneously vilifying and bypassing the mainstream media to build an audience he could communicate with directly, while sucking the legacy media into temptation chasing the ratings he could command.
Sound familiar?
When I was the US bureau chief for the ABC in 2016, US television networks hung on Trump’s every word, broadcasting hours of live, unchecked diatribes.
By the time the factcheckers properly mobilised it was too late. The post-truth era was already upon us. Factchecking no longer landed with the average person.
Trump had become all but untouchable. The media had become the enemy of the people and anything remotely critical was labelled fake news. Eroding trust in the media was crucial to his strategy.
One Nation is now borrowing heavily from this playbook.
Hanson’s gaslighting over the White Australia policy, “no good Muslims”, paid parental leave and now violence against women mirrors Trump’s tactics; making statements then walking them back or denying she made them at all.
While she’s taken the predictable approach of arguing that the “left-wing media” has twisted her words in “false clickbait stories”, it’s not true.
Her recent remarks follow a long pattern of behaviour.
In her maiden parliamentary speech in 1996 she said: “I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.”
That was before she told the Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi to “pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan”, which led to a federal court finding of unlawful racial discrimination and vilification under the Racial Discrimination Act.
Yet parts of the media continue to facilitate her rise, while appearing surprised and disturbed that it’s happening.
Channel Seven’s Spotlight program was snookered by Hanson’s team when it either participated in or helped organise her trip around Europe, in which she met rightwingers and hung out in Italy with Gina Rinehart.
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Seven denies arranging the meetings while, surprise, surprise, Hanson has accused the program of misrepresenting its intentions.
That said, the network got the ratings. Conspiracy theorists might suspect that the argy-bargy was confected to achieve that.
Who knows?
The mainstream media is losing influence as consumers increasingly get their news from social media, which is forcing legacy organisations to feed the algorithm to survive.
But the more Hanson is freely platformed as clickbait rather than properly scrutinised, the more likely it is that One Nation will find its way to power.
And who will take responsibility for that?
