This week I was introduced to Brandolini’s Law, also called the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, which says the amount of energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than the amount required to produce it.
That is what we are up against. A war on facts, on reality, on sanity – a war that it is impossible to combat because the magnitude of effort required to refute the bullshit is so much greater than to make it, and the never ending stream of bullshit just keeps coming.
A political operation can throw together an AI-generated smear in minutes that is read and shared gleefully across the world in seconds. A real newsroom can spend days checking documents, making calls, seeking responses, talking to lawyers, correcting details and giving people a fair opportunity to answer, and no one reads it.
We cannot win this war.
Populist radical-right politics has become one of the great engines of misinformation in this country (and the world). Not because the lies are always clever. Most are painfully stupid. But they are fast, cheap and emotionally satisfying. Facts are slow, complicated and, too often, just don’t give people the dopamine hit they’re looking for.
The latest weapon the red devil and her unhinged mates have dragged into the battlefield is One News Australia: a fake news service which the ABC has reported was previously called the One Nation Supporters Network on Facebook, runs strongly pro-One Nation content, and has used a fictional editorial byline. One News and One Nation deny any formal affiliation, but it’s clear as day. If you’re someone who still cares about the facts, read the ABC investigation.
It looks like journalism. It has headlines, categories, bylines, news-style graphics and the familiar shape of a media website. Has a lot of similar things to our own site – including a near identical donation prompt on their website to the one we have in our daily emails.
But putting on a newspaper costume does not make something journalism.
It is knowing what you do not know. It is calling people you would rather not call. It is reading the document. It is checking the number again. It is asking the hostile question, allowing the hostile answer, and putting your own name to the result.
It is being accountable when you get something wrong.
One News has even done the red devil’s bidding by turning its attention to the Journalism Assistance Fund, which provided small wage subsidies to publishers employing journalists to produce public-interest news.
Its story makes it sound as though the government has handed out enormous cheques to buy favourable coverage from compliant media outlets.
Bullshit.
The grant is capped at $13,000 per full-time-equivalent journalist, per year, over three years. It is not a giant cheque dumped into a publisher’s bank account. It is a contribution to wages, paid over time. It does not cover the full cost of a journalist, only about one-seventh of one.
The rest still has to come from somewhere.
That is the part the conspiracy merchants skip over. Journalism is expensive. Local journalism is especially expensive. Good local journalism crazy expensive.
The advertising model that used to support regional newspapers has been collapsing for years. Classifieds disappeared online. Local businesses have less money to spend. Facebook and Google took a huge share of digital advertising. Costs rose. Revenue crashed.
And news outlets, particularly in communities like ours, are being asked to keep doing more with less until there is simply no more to cut. And then they shut the doors – or in the case of many of our local papers, kinda pretend to still have a presence by leaving the website there but no journalists boots on the ground and no local stories.
People can reasonably argue about how such grants should be designed and who should receive it. But the basic proposition is brutally simple: employ journalists and produce core public-interest news in the interests of our democracy and national sanity.
That is all.
It is also not a secret fund for left-wing media. Nine, Seven, and ACM received more of the published fund allocation than anyone else. These are some of the largest commercial media businesses in Australia, not a hidden network of socialist pamphleteers plotting revolution between council meetings.
The irony is that H*nson has recently blamed job cuts at Nine newspapers for declining journalistic integrity. She is right about one thing: cutting journalists damages journalism. Fewer reporters means fewer checks, fewer court stories, fewer council stories, less scrutiny and more room for people with an agenda to fill the gaps.
But it works for the red devil (yep, I’m deliberately avoiding her name to avoid the bots) politically to pick fights with the “mainstream media”, positioning her as an anti-establishment outsider fighting against the system. It works for her to undermine the credibility of those who know she’s full of shit and have the job to prove it.
That is not principled concern about media independence. It is an attack on the very idea that there should be anyone left capable of checking the claims.
And I, like everyone else, really struggle to know whether the right thing to do is to call her or Barnabot out on their crap, or try and ignore them. The journalistic training says call it out. The strategist in me says don’t feed the beast.
It’s tough when it gets personal, and I suddenly have people in my inbox telling me I need to give back $300k in money I sure as heck do not have in my bank account.
For a very straight forward example of how they wantonly lie on their propaganda fake news site, One News Australia has an entry about my company in one of their stories attacking the credibility of legitimate news outlets that says:
“Kore Communication Strategy Research Pty Ltd — New England Times (Armidale) — Consultancy running the outlet not for profit; principals not named;
Again, bullshit.
The KORE CSR website has had the same biography under “Principal” for three years. Every opinion piece I write on this site has my name, photo and bio on it clearly identifying myself as the publisher – as it does at the top and bottom of this one. Click my name on any New England Times story I’ve written and the bio is there: RK Crosby is a broadcaster, journalist and pollster, and publisher of the New England Times.
I’ll conceed the team page was removed from the New England Times website earlier this year after I had to fire seven people, after the fuel crunch knock-on effect wiped out or suspended all our forward advertising bookings in less than a week. The grant did not cover the wages. The advertising vanished. The bills did not. I didn’t have much choice.
That is not a conspiracy. That is the cruel arithmetic of local journalism. And I didn’t have the emotional energy to delete from a page the good people I desperately want back on the roster, so I just hid the page. But the information about who publishes New England Times was still readily available.
One News could have checked the company website. It could have checked the bylines. It could have emailed or called. They could have sent Barnabot a text message. It could have taken 30 seconds to find the information it pretended did not exist.
It did not.
Instead, it chose to create an insinuation: who is “really” in charge? What are they hiding?
But there is no mystery here. There is just fake news, published by a propaganda slime machine because it is useful to the story they wanted to tell, to undermine me and the news my much depleted team work so hard to deliver for the New England.
It delivered a similar smear to a number of others, mostly women, who identified themselves as the publisher, almost like they don’t know what publisher means.
Which is probably the strongest evidence that these are not news people. They are simply political scum pumping even more lies into a world already saturated with them.
The avalanche of bullshit is drowning this country and suffocating our democracy, and both will die if there is no end to this madness.
Journalists may be the first casualties, because we are the ones in the vanguard, trying to drag claims back to evidence and the conversation back to sanity.
But we will not be the last.
Once people are persuaded that every reporter is corrupt, every newsroom is bought and every fact they dislike is “fake news”, the next casualty is the voter.
That’s you.
And when you’ve lost your job, your home, your community, your safety, and probably your sanity, no one will care. Because no one will know – there’ll be no real news service left to report it, only the fake ones that you know you can’t trust, but you’ll share their bullshit anyway.
I don’t want this war.
You really don’t want this war.
And it is totally within your power to stop sharing their bullshit.
End rant.
Dr RK (Kath) Crosby is the CEO of research and strategy company KORE CSR, former strategist for the Australian Democrats, and holds a PhD in political behaviour. She is also a well known migraine and health advocate, and the Publisher of New England Times and North Coast Times.