Pulp Fiction: The fantastical nature of Australian journalism

Journalists are woefully detached from the subjective narratives they spin, especially evident when they are drumming up war with China.

Senior ABC journalist Jane Norman looked incapable of understanding the subject matter she was offering on the ABC ‘Insiders’ program, including a poorly delivered rationale for an imminent threat from China. (Source: X)

Nine papers’ James Massola, ABC senior journalist Jane Norman, and Karen Middleton appeared before the ‘Insiders’ program on the ABC. The topic shifted to the arbitrary and magical defence budget, with Jane Norman, reading off notes provided by Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) Director Justin Bassi, outlining ASPI’s case for military budget increases for a fictional war with China. Clutching papers she didn’t write, Norman read the tea-leaves in a disposable cup, suggesting that a government which has a monumental majority post-election, which is dealing with the incoherent ramblings of a Trump administration, was facing a “problem” if it couldn’t give in to the demands of Washington, Keir Starmer, and ASPI. It all came across as subjective, and smacked of catastrophising, but more visibly, it was unsophisticated, unconvincing, and alarmingly incendiary considering the clear lack of subject matter expertise on display.

Norman read diligently and insistently from her stack of pages, echoing the fantastical claims made by Bassi that the Chinese were circling Australia and mapping out targets. “Wow,” said David Speers. “You wonder,” said romance novelist James Massola. Karen Middleton looked like she was trying to astrally project herself away from the chattering garbage of these drongo ponies. “It’s the way warfare is rapidly developing,” David Speers said, like he picked up the line from an Israeli fortune cookie, before then plugging the biggest war hawk in Australia, retired ADF officer Mick Ryan’s new podcast. Norman continued reading off her cheat sheet.

The media is so out of kilter that they can’t recognise that this little cycle of interaction exemplifies the rancour and rot in the trade of mainstream journalism. Norman, a senior ABC journalist, sitting on the ‘Insiders’ program talking with half a mouth of half-chewed China, someone who is meant to be informing the Australian public and researching stories around statements from merchants of the military-industrial complex and a drunken Trump Administration, extraordinarily quipped with the intellectual honesty of someone who lacks critical forms of intelligence, “we don’t really have anyone really telling the Australian public what these challenges actually mean.”

Anyone? Like the ABC? Like people who are supposed to be Jane Norman?

Turds smack into fan, mics drop, wham-bam-presto: “there you have it, the greatest strategic threat in our region is carrying out exercises like this,” said Norman, whose understanding of China seems to be reserved to her reading of ‘Tomorrow When the War Began’ at high school. She looked distressed—unmeasured, unreasonably, and performative so.

As the Sunday breakfast war talk lulled for just a second, Middleton, who has the humility to understand journalistic nuance and remembers how to do her job, reanimated the conversation, speaking out the side of her eyes at Norman as she reminded Speers that Albanese was furious at Marles, the incendiary nature of ASPI’s comments, and the partisan nature of its Coalition-linked Director Justin Bassi. Speers sidestepped, pivoted around Middleton, handballed to Massola, who used his romantic perspective to wax on how Labor and tax are shit.

Never mind Australia has been in and around the naval joyrides playing American Graffiti through the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait in Freedom of Navigation Operations for over a decade, or the AUKUS program that looks to obtain nuclear attack submarines with the sole aim of one day attacking our largest trading partner on command from Washington, or the increasing belligerence of US presence in a region that isn’t their own; these are not considerations in the version of Justin Bassi’s Australia that even the ABC seems happy to paint. That version of Australia is high military budgets, acquiescence of sovereign agency to Washington, and inevitable war with a country that has kept us rich and has never been militarily threatening towards us.

It’s embarrassing watching journalists who clearly don’t care for the matters with which they teleprompt so averagely, lacking basic information that could be used, if anything, to sell this lazily stitched wartime narrative, looking us in the eye and half-arsedly scribbling some incoherent case for war with China via Justin Bassi and the US-private arms manufacturer-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

This is a national disaster. Richard Marles, fresh with blood up to his ankles after ramming through his right-faction cabinet picks like Bruce Campbell in ‘The Evil Dead’, has taken his personal interpretation of our strategic future to US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and fresh from his coup, with blood on his clothes, some of it congealing in pools in Albanese’s camp, the Prime Minister openly shut him down on that interpretation, stating that Australia would act in its own interests. But the Insiders’ gang, increasingly full of white middle-upper career hacks with no lived experience, brushed over Marles’ transgression like it was the PM’s problem, like it wasn’t his call to make, like Pete Hegseth and Justin Bassi were rational actors, and the politically haemorrhaging Keir Starmer was a model to follow.

It’s exhausting enough watching Australian journalists posit and opine subjectively around domestic issues for the corporate interests of their paymasters, shooting the nation in the foot by trampling on the natural course of rational ideas. Saying things like ‘Peter Dutton says’ instead of ‘nuclear power is untenable, here’s why’, and ‘the government is in trouble’ instead of ‘taxing big earners is a fair idea’—is damaging enough—but witnessing even the ABC dumbly parrot poorly thatched wartime talk with China, the most consequential and important relationship to Australia in its region, is traitorous to the national interest.

Two years ago, Matthew Knott and Peter Hartcher penned the infamous Red Alert Series in the Nine newspapers, outlining the imminent threat of attack invasion from China, after visiting a US think tank and memorising their memo as gospel quoted in their articles. The series, which outlined an imminent threat from invasion by China based on a ‘Jack D. Ripper’-styled analysis, caused uproar in a public who don’t fear the Chinese like our journalists do. The action harmed the foreign policy credentials of the Nine papers, and the reputations of the journalists involved, permanently. Watching the ABC venture down this same path, gladly (and ignorantly) championed by those like Jane Norman, just after all the obstruction and censorship and lack of reporting in the 600-day genocide in Gaza, is hard to watch, and will further damage the estranged relationship between the Australian public and the ABC.

Australian journalists are broken by their own subjectivity, dawning every time they publish an article, or place an hour of panel discussion on the threat of the ‘yellow peril’, after 600 days running defence while mumbling ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ and glossing over the biggest human catastrophe in the genocide of Gaza. A depressing and embarrassing sight for journalists who seem disconnected from reality, appearing as proverbial mushrooms stored in the shit of Manchurian candidate former commercial media corporates who stack the boards of our public institutions like the ABC. It’s disgraceful watching these information necromancers patch together unholy strands of exhausted information and sensational phantasmagoria, raising half-cocked narratives out of the dry dirt, drumming up war and working against the national interest with the half-assured self-assured delivery that only a modern Australian journalist can offer.

We don’t need our ABC journalists reading ASPI articles in trembling voices off sheets of paper, nor do we need them elevating Pete Hegseth’s unreasonable demands as the word of God—we need them understanding key geopolitical issues and pushing back on narratives imposed on them from places like ASPI and the Coalition. We need journalists respectfully defining the stories they sensationalise, and we need them to realise that when they don’t, they look as obviously compromised as they do on ‘Insiders’ each Sunday morning, and how utterly damaging it ultimately is to the success of legacy media in the future.