It’s taken for granted that come the NSW state election in a few short weeks, The Daily Telegraph will be its usual unprofessional, non-journalistic, LNP propagandarist self.

The more interesting question for our Media Glass House compilers is this: how much further has The Sydney Morning Herald moved to the right since the last state poll.

Or put another way: is the Costelloitis – the sad incurable inflammatory precursor to a full-blown fatal Rupertfication of a media outlet – nearing its bitter end?

In an attempt to answer that question, the MGH has been casting its eye over the recent work of the SMH’s state political editor Alexandra Smith.

On face value, her piece last week – Labor dealt blow on pokies as poll needs – reeks of a reporter keen to show that the incumbent Perrottet LNP government is leading with a great social policy and with the labor movement’s help has brilliantly wedged a hapless Chris Minns Labor Opposition that has simply failed to see the great damage being done to the fabric of NSW society by pokie addiction.

Too harsh? We can’t blame Smith for the flamboyant heading but we can question the extent to which Labor has been dealt a blow over the issue. Minns has called for more analysis of whether a card would prove effective and suggested some trial to test its worth.

Either way, it’s a big call to say that Labor has been dealt a blow just because its industrial wing supports Perrottet’s call for a mandatory card. Labor might come out on Monday and support the concept and the issue would be dead in the water as an election-influencer.

Do we need to apologise upfront to Smith for a nagging doubt we have that she has enthusiastically grabbed an election issue that she deep-down believes would give Catholic family man Perrottet – a man brave enough to stare down the pubs and clubs lobby – a fresh, deserved, four-year-term?

We then turn to Smith’s startling revelation in Saturday’s SMH splash that Perrottet’s gambling card would have a spending limit! “Well, I never!” exclaimed more than one of our MGH compilers. One was lucky enough to have a feather to knock himself over with the very concept that a compulsory card designed to curtail tragic losses from gambling addiction would include a spending limit per period.

To be fair to Smith, her Saturday piece does open with news that retiring Transport and Veterans Minister David Elliott has criticised the reform of poker machines, saying it will simply push problem gambling elsewhere and that he wanted proof cashless gaming worked elsewhere before he supported the proposal.

Smith rightly explains Elliott’s stand indicates “the difficulty the premier will face shepherding changes through his cabinet”.

Still, the MGH is only giving Smith a B-plus so far. We await articles that talk about the fact that this four-term government has considerable baggage, including the ongoing stench of corruption that lingers over Australia’s largest workers’ compensation scheme, icare, introduced by Perrottet in 2015 when Treasurer. icare racked up $4bn in debt and was found to be mismanaged. Looming ICAC findings on whether Perrottet’s predecessor Gladys Berejiklian did some naughty things in her dealings with a former squeeze, the odorous Daryl Maguire, add weight to the government’s saddlebags.

These are real issues that a fair and balanced metropolitan newspaper might cover in the looming campaign, especially if it also finds plenty of time to pick apart Labor’s platform.

They are not some decade-old traffic accident or a pathetic little flight of holiday rental stairs that couldn’t hurt anyone, okay!

So the MGH will be keeping a close eye on Alexandra Smith.

We are keeping our fingers crossed that she can report the coming election with journalistic integrity, eschewing personal attacks on party leaders. Alexandra, we don’t need to know that Minns has really bad halitosis or wagged school as a child or failed to return a library book. Or is a tyrant and a bully as a party political leader.

Call us hopeless romantics clinging to the view our craft is not completely fucked yet – call us half-glass full optimists if you must – but we hope Smith during the first week on the hustings won’t be raging with the rest of her MSM colleagues over a Minns gaffe that has surely ended his dreams of becoming Premier.

That over the next two-and-a-half months she will block out of her mind what she thinks Peter Costello and other Nine Entertainment Co. board members would want her to write and simply gives her readership the information on party policies that they need to make a wise and considered choice as they cast their ballots.

It’s what metropolitan newspapers in particular used to do, although that sadly has long faded from memory.

Don Gordon-Brown