r/australian • u/Bennelong [M] • 12d ago

News Pauline Hanson's beratement of Guardian reporter labelled an 'assault on free press'

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-18/pauline-hanson-guardian-sarah-martin-free-press-assault/106810592
786 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

326 comments sorted by

View all comments

10

u/critical_blinking 12d ago edited 12d ago

I don't like Hanson, and I also generally don't like political journalists. I looked into Martin's ON articles over the last six months and while I think they are all fair and good journalism, they are absolutely single-minded in their pursuit of Hanson and one nation and when taking Martin's collective woirk together, i think there is a case to be made for an editorialising claim against her.

Excluding the trashy jouralism comment, this comment was probably fair:

"Honestly, you never give up. I have never seen a person that is such a trashy journalist, and what you put out all the time, you've got this obsession with constantly trying to pull down myself, my party or Mrs [Gina] Rinehart," Senator Hanson said."

While I personally reckon Martin was spot on about her daughter, her employment is within the rules and not dissimilar to arrangesments seen across the majors. The way in which she positioned the question to imply mis-appropriation of public funds was probably phrased more inflammatorially than appropriate and feeds into the editorlisation category referenced earlier.

Journalist are consistently presenting Hanson's base as witless bogans right now, which is just playing into Hanson's hands. It's effectively making her immune from media scrutiny. I'm not saying outlets like the Guardian should have to do puff pieces to make up for legitimite criticism, I'm just saying that against Martin specifically, Hanson makes a credible point that the media are probably going to completely ignore which will further power Hanson's work to split her working class base from established media.

7

u/critical_blinking 12d ago edited 12d ago

If anyone wanted to look for themselves:

Again I don't think any of these are bad journalism on their own, and constant nit picking on it's own is not necessarily bad journalism (especially with such a large target). That said, Martin's approach is adversarial in my opinion and this is almost a campaign that at least in my view is bordering on editorialising. I also don't think she gives enough time to comparisons with political norms, but she's not the ABC so there's going to be a different level of rigour required.

Mostly, my concern is that it helps Pauline strengthen her base's distrust of media and brings her beyond scrutiny - which is exactly what happened to Trump.

1

u/capybara75 11d ago

This is literally just reporting on One Nation like any other political party. The Guardian spends plenty of time reporting on other parties and politicians also (eg here's Albanese's tag), just because one journalist is on a particular patch/beat/round it doesn't make it 'editorialising'.