Pauline Hanson is ‘making statements then walking them back or denying that she made them at all’, Zoe Daniel writes. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP View image in fullscreen Pauline Hanson is ‘making statements then walking them back or denying that she made them at all’, Zoe Daniel writes. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP Opinion Pauline Hanson Like Trump, Pauline Hanson plays the media and attacks the media simultaneously. Who’s using who? Zoe Daniel One Nation is borrowing heavily from the Maga playbook. But constant claims of being misquoted predate the US president’s
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And Pauline Hanson being misunderstood is also the media’s fault.
Elements of the media have amplified the rise of One Nation over three decades , with outsized coverage normalising what is now a populist machine.
At the same time, Hanson treats the media as her enemy.
The first is a deliberately provocative statement. The second is an observation. Both lead to questions about the media’s role and responsibility in an era of information manipulation.
The phrases “fake news” and “enemy of the people” come to mind in these times when it appears that whatever the question is for Hanson, Donald Trump is the answer.
The latest example relates to her comments about violence against women in which she makes excuses for violent men.
“It is wrong, but it’s also a two-way street,” she told the Brisbane radio station 4BC.
“I’m not saying that it’s just men, women can lose their cool as well. Society is under so much pressure … Everyone is under so much pressure, and it’s really hard.”
The facts are that intimate partner violence is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men .
She went on to say that women who are being abused should just leave: “If these women are getting abused by men out there, then don’t put up with it.”
The data also shows that leaving is the most dangerous time for women and children.
The remarks have caused an outcry, which has provoked Hanson to again claim that her comments have been misrepresented.
“Here’s exactly what I said on 4BC about domestic violence, so you don’t get it twisted by the media or the Labor Party,” she posted on social media. “There is a concerted effort by some in the media to constantly take my comments out of context.”
Read more It could not be more Trumpian as she plays the media and attacks the media, simultaneously.
In 2016, Trump was estimated to have received as much as US$5.9bn in free media coverage, more than doubling Hillary Clinton’s presence in the press, while underspending her official campaign on his way to victory in the 2016 presidential election.
At the same time, he dominated social media, simultaneously vilifying and bypassing the mainstream media to build an audience he could communicate with directly, while sucking the legacy media into chasing the ratings he could command.
When I was the US bureau chief for the ABC in 2016, US television networks hung on Trump’s every word, broadcasting hours of live, unchecked diatribes.
By the time the factcheckers properly mobilised, it was too late. The post-truth era was already upon us. Factchecking no longer landed with the average person.
Trump had become all but untouchable. The media had become the enemy of the people, and anything remotely critical was labelled fake news. Eroding trust in the media was crucial to his strategy.
One Nation is now borr…