Mark reflects on media driven character assassination.

Author:  Mark Seymour.

Date: 25 October 2020.

Original URL: https://www.facebook.com/MarkSeymourOfficial

Article Text

There are always hot topics to get the bots squawking..

Anyone can jump on board. Elevate you’re profile, brand or whatever.

So here goes..

Watching a Dan press conference..

Journalists, all sitting in the same room..

A question: What’s the point of a road map? A plan? If you’re not going to stick to it?
Then someone else asks the same question. Again.

Dan repeats the same answer.. because there is only one. Two thousand tests. We’ll know by Tuesday. Thirty-six hours. The plan’s still there. Repeat.

And they’re all hearing it.

So why doesn’t reporter B twig that reporter A just asked it? And goes right on ahead and asks it again anyway?

This goes down a few times and suddenly it dawns on you..

It isn’t collective stupidity. It’s a carefully constructed character assassination.

Someone’s building copy around a preconceived idea they want their readers to think..

About Dan.

‘cos it’s not about the plague anymore. Even though that’s why he’s there. Giving them the facts.

It’s about Dan being an arsehole.

But just in case I get accused of missing the point right? People are suffering. Badly. For lots of reasons. Grisly death at one end. Joblessness at the other.

And I’ll be honest. I can only speak rhetorically of this.

I’m not suffering particularly. Things could be better. I could be gigging. But I can’t.

Then again, my own condition isn’t the point.

But neither is it the point as to why the journalists who are there keep pressing him. Ostensibly speaking on behalf of those who are as they say, suffering. Really? Peta Credlin?

No matter how patiently the science is explained.. by the arsehole..

See, it’s a balancing act. How best to set the marker of social judgment? Public health versus the economy.

And there’s ideology right there.

The free marketeers versus the Socialists.

Some bloke asked me on the street. “You know he wants to be prime minister don’t ya?”

Now, I have no idea where my little mate read this tasty snippet. But you know what?

I don’t particularly care.

Right now I’m a lot more interested in making sure I don’t ever hear some van coming up my street with a P.A. speaker calling

“Bring out your dead!”

See, in time of plague, facts help a lot.

Sadly, heres’ one: In the U.S. right now: there are more than 41,000 people in hospital with… the plague.

Now I’ll admit, I read this in New Daily. And you can call my choice of journal some lefty’s confirmation bias because for some obscure reason known only to myself, I WANT to be scared.. or I LIKE wearing a mask..

But it’s still a fact. A number.

New Daily quoted Reuters. Reuters quoted WHO.

Here’s another. Also in the U.S.. If punters don’t start wearing masks all the time there’ll be half a million dead Americans by February.

And yet, what could be simpler than a good old culture war right? Get ‘em revved up with paranoia and lies.. Right now!

And there are some journalists who are only too happy to stoke one up. Because it could swing an election. Some will rise. Others will fall. The contest will come either way, so you may as well enhance your own virtue on the way there.
Fair enough. The contest for power. It’s in most things.

Music, football, mining, war. Religion. Fine art. Nothing’s sacred right? Whatever we can get our grubby hands on. He or she.. who dies with the most toys wins. Or votes.

But maybe, just maybe, some forms of human behaviour are beyond the reach of politics?

Like you know.. Funerals?

Or the Plague?

Nah.

What was I even thinking?

See, if you READ the Herald Sun, and some people do I’m afraid,

There is no light at the end of tunnel.. right now there’s just fear, doom and Daniel Andrews.

As my mother would’ve said: ‘T’was forever thus’.

But see, here’s the trick. The closer Dan gets to medical eldorado.. like really low numbers, the more of an arsehole he’s become. Got that? And it’s not an accident. The safer we are, the more political headroom the nuff nuffs are given..

To go hard. And appear blameless.

So, these days, if someone asks me a question I don’t know the answer to, I say “I don’t know.”

Best to be honest.

But here’s a good one. What is life really like, on the streets.. in say, the Czech Republic?

Chances are, you won’t find the answer in the pages of the Herald Sun.

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