Australians hoping to get fair and balanced mainstream media reporting on political issues should look no further for inspiration – and, yes, total admiration – than veteran Newscorpse columnist Piers Akerman and a noble stand he has taken his entire professional life.
As the dust settled at the long Voice campaign – and by that we mean mainly the putrid bullshit dust the No campaign covered the issue in – Piers, God bless him, has finally confided in us how he has managed in a decades-long career to stay balanced, fair and objective.
To do this, Piers (pictured left, above) has felt it absolutely necessary to never, ever, join a political party while righting – sorry, writing! – for a living. And good on him for doing that! We know from his writings that should he have not taken that noble and principled stand, Piers more than likely would have joined the Liberal Party and as a result of that, his writings may have suffered from a pointedly right-wing bias!
In a Sunday Telegraph column as the referendum wound up, Piers appeared to be explaining that “offering No campaign leaflets to referendum voters outside a pre-polling station in Teal territory this week” was in no way inconsistent with his theory that not being a member of a political party was his best way of maintaining the fair, balanced and professional approach so much admired by his readers.
He seemed to be saying the No campaign was not so much a political party thing and that “pulling on the T-shirt with the Vote No to Division slogan was easy”.
But, golly, you couldn’t miss the reasons he was forced to take such a stand!
“The whole of the Yes strategy throughout this divisive process has been designed to keep the aims of the elite group that designed the Uluru statement hidden from the public.” Those grubby fucking elites – the whole 250 of them First Nations people – who penned the Uluru statement from the heart!
And here comes the crunch bit: “I’ve never joined a political party and won’t while I am a working journalist.
“But while I felt this referendum didn’t require me to join a party, I could not stand by and let others do all the heavy lifting in combating the might of the major corporates, the taxpayer-funded ABC and the rest of the Left-wing media and the government-funded Yes campaign.”
Okay, we’ll ignore what appears to be a rather simple flaw in his argument. The referendum didn’t require him to join a party but, what, some other issue would? We accept logic – any clear-thinking for that matter – has never been this writer’s strong suit.
Still, all the Media Glass House can say of his principled stand: bravo Piers! Maintain your balance, fairness and absolute professionalism. We can only image what the heading for his article – a direct quote from his words below – might have been if he had ever been stupid enough to join a political party and let that sway his judgement!
By the way, here’s a nice photo of Piers Akerman down in the Warringah electorate in 2019, wearing a Liberal Party campaign shirt and handing out Liberal how-to-votes while hanging out on the hustings with his bestie Tony Abbott!
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