Senator Roberts smear campaign well organised and orchestrated across media

BY GEORGE CHRISTENSEN

THE media attacks on Senator Malcolm Roberts picked up in May after he was questioned about the Bondi terrorist attack. Through June, the coverage widened to his views on abortion, America, and foreign policy. By July, reporters were trawling through years of material and producing one damaging story after another.

The Guardian was involved. So were the ABC, SBS, Nine’s newspapers, the Daily Mail, and News Corp outlets such as news.com.au and The Australian.The timing is hard to ignore.

For years, the media treated One Nation as a fringe party. It might win a few Senate seats, make noise, and annoy the major parties, but it was never supposed to become a genuine contender for power.

That picture has changed.One Nation is now polling first or second on primary votes in a number of national surveys. It has repeatedly polled ahead of the Coalition.

If anything close to those numbers were repeated at a federal election, the party could move from the edges of Parliament into the centre of Australian politics.It could become the official opposition and hold the balance of power.

With the right result across enough seats, it could even find itself in the contest to form government. That makes Malcolm Roberts a much bigger target than he was a year ago.

He is one of One Nation’s most experienced senators. He is diligent, persistent, and good at turning dry bureaucratic failures into issues ordinary Australians can understand.

He has spent years questioning COVID policy, Net Zero, Snowy Hydro 2.0, defence spending, NDIS fraud and waste inside the public service.

Damaging Roberts weakens One Nation and forcing the party to defend him keeps it off other issues. Pressuring Pauline Hanson to distance herself from him, or even remove him, would take one of the party’s strongest parliamentary performers out of the fight. That is the wider purpose of this campaign.

The individual stories matter, but the real power comes from repetition. Each new article adds another accusation and drags the earlier ones along behind it. Before long, the reader is no longer judging one statement in context. He or she is being handed a rehearsed description of Roberts as strange, reckless, and dangerous.

Much of it is guilt by association.One of the clearest examples involved Eustace Mullins, an American writer most Australians had probably never heard of. Mullins wrote about the United States Federal Reserve and the power of private banking interests. He was also known for antisemitism and Holocaust denial.

Years ago, Roberts referred positively to one of Mullins’ books about banking.The Australian turned that into a headline saying Roberts had promoted a Holocaust denier.That headline suggested Roberts knowingly supported Mullins’ antisemitism.

Roberts said he did not know about those views and had been interested in the book’s arguments about banking.That should have been central to the story.

People read authors for one subject all the time. They may agree with one argument and reject everything else. They may not even know what else the author has written or believed.

Journalists, academics, and politicians do this every day. The proper question was whether Roberts knew about Mullins’ antisemitism and shared it. Roberts said he did not.

The Australian still chose the most poisonous label for its headline. The damage was done before most readers reached the explanation.The Alex Jones story followed the same pattern.

Jones is an American broadcaster who became notorious for falsely claiming the Sandy Hook school shooting had been staged. Twenty children and six adults were murdered in that attack, and his claims caused terrible suffering to their families.

He later faced enormous defamation judgments. Roberts had appeared on Jones’ program and praised some of his work.

News.com.au published a story connecting Roberts to Jones and spent a large part of it recounting the Sandy Hook scandal. Yet it showed no evidence that Roberts had ever supported Jones’ claims about Sandy Hook.The intended connection was obvious.

Roberts had praised Jones in one context. Jones had said disgraceful things in another. The stain was then transferred to Roberts.That is a cheap way to do journalism. I know. I was also on the receiving end of the same attack by the mainstream media when, in 2021, I was interviewed by Alex Jones while then serving in the federal parliament.

The media response was practically the same as that being dished out to Roberts now. Reporters interview criminals without endorsing their crimes. Politicians meet with people who hold objectionable views without agreeing with everything they believe.

Speaking well of one part of someone’s work does not make you responsible for every other statement that person has made. The media know this. They simply chose not to apply it to Roberts. The attack around Bondi was similar.

Roberts was asked whether the Bondi terrorist attack might have been a “false flag”. That term refers to an event carried out, manipulated, or presented in a way that hides who was responsible or what really happened. He said he doubted it and later called the proposition absurd. He still refused to make an absolute declaration about evidence he had not personally examined.

The media treated that caution as support for the proposition.The Guardian said he had “failed to rule it out”. Other outlets repeated the line. Journalists kept demanding a categorical answer even after Roberts had already said he doubted it and thought the suggestion absurd.

There is a difference between supporting a claim and refusing to pretend certainty about evidence you have not seen. Roberts was doing the latter. Politicians are often criticised for bluffing and acting as though they know more than they do. Roberts was criticised because he would not play that game.

The same thing happened with the chemtrail story. The term “chemtrails” is used in discussions about whether aircraft, governments, or military bodies have released substances into the atmosphere without full public disclosure. It overlaps with real areas of activity such as cloud seeding, weather modification, atmospheric testing, and geoengineering proposals, while also covering a much wider range of disputed claims.

Roberts said he remained open to the possibility that the United States military had conducted atmospheric trials. The Australian used that as another exhibit in its case that he holds “fringe views”.

It did not seriously examine the exact claim he made, the history of atmospheric testing, or the different ideas being lumped together under one label. That would have required work and calling him a conspiracy theorist was easier.

This is now a common media habit. A politician raises a disputed question, and instead of examining the evidence, journalists attack him for being willing to discuss it.

Roberts keeps asking anyway. He has questioned the cost and reliability of Net Zero policies. He has gone after the massive delays and cost blowouts at Snowy Hydro 2.0. He has challenged waste and fraud in the National Disability Insurance Scheme. He has pursued public servants over defence failures, COVID decisions, and the use of taxpayers’ money.

You do not have to agree with every conclusion he reaches to recognise that this is useful work. Parliament has no shortage of politicians who read from speaking notes, accept whatever the department tells them, and avoid anything likely to upset the press gallery. Roberts is not one of them.

That is precisely why the current pile-on matters. Nobody expects The Guardian to give One Nation a fair run. The publication is openly left-wing and hostile to much of what the party stands for.

The ABC and SBS are taxpayer-funded broadcasters whose political coverage regularly treats conservative dissent as a problem to be investigated.

Nine owns The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Brisbane Times, and WAtoday, publications that have become increasingly leftist in tone.

The Daily Mail is a clickbait tabloid built around sensational headlines. News Corp is the more serious betrayal. It has spent years building an audience among Australians who are fed up with the ABC, progressive groupthink, and the sneering tone of much of the media. Its flagship paper, The Australian, sells itself as a home for serious conservative argument.Yet when the pile-on against Roberts began, News Corp joined it.

The Australian ran the Holocaust-denier headline despite Roberts’ explanation that he had been discussing a book on banking and knew nothing of the author’s antisemitism. It followed with the chemtrail story, presenting it as another entry in a growing list of supposedly fringe views.

News.com.au revived the Alex Jones interview, surrounded Roberts with the Sandy Hook controversy, and later published reports about One Nation’s polling problems as “scandals” mounted.

SkyNews Australia has also had a shot at Roberts over the Jones interview this week.There is something rotten about that news cycle. A media company helps create the controversy, amplifies it across several outlets, and then reports that the controversy has damaged the politician or party it targeted.

The coverage becomes evidence for more coverage. Readers are expected not to notice.The Australian once had a reputation for standing apart from media herd behaviour. Even when its writers disagreed with someone, there was at least a chance the argument would be treated seriously.

That reputation takes a hit every time it joins the same chorus as The Guardian, the ABC, and Nine. For a media empire that presents itself as right-wing, its role in this campaign is pathetic. It has taken the money and loyalty of conservative readers, then helped lead an attack on one of the country’s most effective conservative senators.

There is also the question of where all this material came from.Roberts has been in public life for years. The interviews, videos, and writings now being treated as urgent scandals were already available. They did not suddenly appear in May. Someone had to search through them, select the lines, and put them in front of journalists.

Political parties, lobby groups, and campaign organisations often compile opposition research. They collect old speeches, interviews, social media posts, and personal associations, then pass the most damaging material to reporters.

Has one group been supplying the media with every item used against Roberts? The timing and the similarity of the coverage deserve scrutiny. The stories accelerated as One Nation rose in the polls. They appeared across rival media companies within a short period.

Each article repeated the same earlier claims and added another layer, and whether that involved formal coordination or journalists simply running with material supplied by the same political interests, the effect was the same. Roberts was turned into a symbol of supposed extremism.

That symbol could then be used to frighten voters away from One Nation and pressure the party to throw one of its best senators overboard. As a politician, Malcolm Roberts is not beyond criticism.

For the mainstream media, his willingness to consider unpopular ideas makes him easier to attack.That does not justify the methods being used against him. He has not been accused of stealing public money, abusing his office, or betraying his voters.

The case being built against him is that he has read controversial writers, spoken to controversial broadcasters, and refused to shut his mind on command.Australia would be worse off if every politician responded to this sort of pressure by becoming timid.

Questions do not become illegitimate because journalists dislike them. Speaking to a controversial person does not make you responsible for everything that person believes. Refusing to claim certainty is not proof of madness.

One Nation should not reward this campaign by sacrificing Roberts and Roberts should keep doing what he has always done: turn up, read the material, press the bureaucrats, and ask the questions other politicians avoid. That is the real reason they want him discredited.Until next time, 

God bless you, your family and nation.Take care.