On Monday morning, Sunrise host David Koch took Pauline Hanson on.
“Pauline, this terrorist manifesto almost reads like One Nation immigration and Muslim policy. Do you in any way feel complicit in this atrocity?”
After a “please explain” from Hanson, Koch, his anger obvious, said that her constant anti-Muslim rhetoric, such as that Muslims “don’t deserve to be here” and that “they will take over our country” could be a call to arms for white supremacists like the man accused of murdering at least 50 people praying in a Christchurch mosque on Friday.
It was a relief that Hanson’s views were directly challenged, not as just misguided and racist, but for feeding a toxic atmosphere that vilified all Muslims. Not that Hanson was to blame for this particular atrocity, but she could not walk away from her inflammatory language, could not pretend it had no consequences.
Yet Koch never asked himself the question he put to Hanson, whether he and his program were, while not in the least to blame for the deaths in Christchurch, also complicit in some way for giving someone like Hanson the priceless platform of a regular gig on a mainstream commercial television program.
It’s a question being asked not just of Koch, but to all of us in the mainstream media. We are quick to point the finger at politically motivated inflammatory comments by politicians – rightly so – but with few exceptions we seem incapable of reflecting on our own responsibility not to amplify the bigoted, not to coarsen the “debate” to the level it has now reached.
Someone at Sunrise made a decision years ago that a person who has called Islam “a disease”, that has said we were being “swamped by Muslims”, called for a ban on Muslim immigration (now “modified” to extreme vetting) and a royal commission into Islam, has said there was no way to tell the difference between a “good” or “bad” Muslim and that Islam was “not compatible” with Australia, was suitable to be a regular guest to talk about whatever was in her head.
The odious senator Fraser Anning has become the focal point for disgust, but Hanson’s views on Islam are all but identical. She chose him as a One Nation candidate (he is now an independent) and she too argues endlessly that terrorism is caused by Muslim immigration. She will not vote for his censure in parliament because she relies on the same voter base.
So, what is Sunrise’s responsibility here? None, of course. “We never shy away from debates,” the executive producer, Michael Pell, told Guardian Australia. “We canvass both sides and the viewer is left to make up his or her own mind.”
I’m sorry. The “both sides” argument has rung hollow for years, but at this moment it is disgusting. There is no “both sides” to Hanson or Anning’s brand of bigotry. The media has to report the news and to offer different points of view, and not everyone will agree with editors’ decisions, but only the disingenuous would argue that journalists have no choices and no responsibility for those choices. Amplifying and publicising Hanson’s views, again and again, is a choice.
Sunrise is an easy target. There are complicated issues here, but even Michael Pell might accept there are limits to “both sides”, seemingly reached in Australia only last year when Sky broadcast a friendly interview with the far-right extremist Blair Cottrell, convicted for inciting contempt, revulsion or ridicule of Muslims, to offer his views unchallenged on immigration.
Sky apologised and banned Cottrell from future appearance, but this was just another low point in a steady but inexorable normalisation of extremist views, especially on Sky’s opinion programs, and more generally at News Corp.
For this is not a “both sides” debate, no matter how hard it is being spun that way. There has been zero reflection from politicians who have used fear of Muslims for political purposes. But equally, there has been zero reflection from commentators whose sweeping remarks about Muslims over many years have all but echoed Hanson’s. If anything, they have doubled down, blaming – you guessed it – the “left” for causing the divisions that they are mostly responsible for.
Andrew Bolt’s response has been stunning. He has condemned Anning’s blaming of the victims for being murdered as they prayed, yet his primary criticism is for those demanding – sometimes angrily – deeper reflection, accountability for anti-Muslim rhetoric that has proliferated at least since the September 11 terrorist attacks.
On his Monday night program, Bolt bemoaned “the use that some people are making of this tragedy to make even more division, to silence their ideological opponents, to spread even more hatred and fear”.
According to Bolt, everyone is now being accused of complicity in this atrocity – anyone who questioned immigration, or who argued for free speech, or had criticised Islamist extremism. He for one would not fall for such division. “This reaction is dangerous, it is in itself hate speech likely to lead to violence or I fear no speech at all.”
But the demand for reflection is not about questioning immigration or free speech, although at times it is true that the “racism” charge has been too easily thrown about on social media. At this moment, that’s a deliberate distraction. The question is about things like Bolt’s column after the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice: “The more Muslims we import, the more danger we are in. Isn’t the next step now obvious?”
Or the column last year headlined “The foreign invasion”, where he wrote that a “tidal wave of immigrants” was sweeping away our national identity, and that “we should resist this colonising of Australia while there is still an ‘us’ who can”.
Who exactly is this “us”, Andrew? And who, really, is dividing “us”?
Why does Sky have Hanson on almost every other night to spout her band of intolerance, but rarely anyone who challenges her, even in a Koch-lite way? Why did the Daily Telegraph publish a cartoon earlier this year during the medevac bill debate that showed a snarling, predatory Arab refugee chasing a white woman?
The Australian’s editorial on Tuesday echoed Bolt’s distortions, with its claim that “Left and Right extremists are using the latest tragedy for base politicking”.
The editorial twisted its way into somehow comparing Anning’s remarks to those of Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi, who called for politicians and the media to reflect, and who criticised mainstream politicians, including Peter Dutton, for “contribut(ing) to creating an atmosphere where hate is allowed to actually incubate in our society”.
The Australian threw in Jason Wilson as comparable to Anning, too, for writing in the Guardian that the 28-year-old Australian had grown up in an atmosphere where “racism, xenophobia and a hostility to Muslims in particular” were rising in Australia to the point that hate speech against Muslims had been normalised.
This is false equivalence taken to extremes – blaming the victims of terrorism for their own deaths is not comparable in any way to questioning a coarsening culture that has left Muslims vulnerable to such attack.
I am a regular guest on The Bolt Report, and Bolt has always treated me politely and allowed me space to put my views. I still believe it is vital to debate people we don’t agree with at a time when media is fragmenting into “left” and “right” silos. But I wonder if I was right to argue on his program that on free speech grounds, far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos should have been allowed to visit Australia, no matter how odious I find his views. I was glad the government banned him after he said, just hours after Christchurch, that Islam was a “barbaric, alien” religion.
Was I too cavalier in thinking Yiannopoulos an attention-seeking fool, better to ignore? Did I not recognise that someone who could say such a thing after 50 people were slaughtered was not just an idiot, but dangerous? Did I not see it because he was no threat to me personally?
This is the moment to reflect. We mourn those murdered and support survivors. But for those of us in the media, all of us, this is a tipping point, for if we do not think hard now, when will we?
It’s late, but not too late to do more to ensure greater diversity in our ranks, to expand those offered a platform to take advantage of our lauded “free speech”. And to recommit to our responsibility, not just to our commercial survival, but to our community. To have controversial debates with respect.
On the evidence so far, such reflection won’t happen. Little will change. Those who need to reflect most of all, refuse.
We’ll go on, pointing fingers, but never at ourselves.
Gay Alcorn is the Melbourne editor of Guardian Australia
