Thread by @GrayConnolly

I am generally unsympathetic to complaints from people in politics & media about criticism, but to the degree there is case for censuring trolls & for everyone to be more reasonable, Leigh Sales makes it quite well here.

abc.net.au/news/2021-09-1…

The issue that underlies the Leigh Sales piece is vehement responses made by partisans & trolls to reporting in the Covid era. I am reasonably sure that Australia has always had pretty brutal politics. We inherited the Westminster system, where parties sit 2 sword lengths apart.

At the same time, the Media should or must know that many Australians are in a trough of the Pandemic, regardless of getting or avoiding Covid. Families are in lockdown, jobs & businesses lost, children go uneducated, while politicians & media seem not to have suffered at all.

If anything, given the chasm-like disparity of experiences between Canberra politicos & media - paid in full every fortnight - and much of Australia locked down & in tenuous economic circumstances, the criticisms of our establishments have been, if anything, surprisingly mild.

None of the above is a criticism of Leigh Sales. She has been very fair, I think, in her criticisms of incumbents. It is unlikely that either Morrison, Gladys, or Andrews welcome LS at their press conferences. I do not know what her politics are (cf Laura Tingle's obvious biases)

In respect of Twitter as a platform, I obviously enjoy using it & have now met a lot of people I correspond with here. There are a lot of strange anonymous accounts (I do not understand anonymity & it seems pointless) but most people here have their own points of view & merits.

All of us could behave better here. I am sure I have written things I would reformulate now. One of many reasons I do not use a tweet deleter is I think 'poasting for posterity' means you force yourself to only say what you honestly think. Also, Twitter is a filing cabinet.

While I think some claims of 'cancel culture' are overdone, I do think the herd-like tendencies of politics force people to censor to avoid the pile-on. The Twitter 'back channel' is notorious for people too scared to say openly what they actually think esp on moral/social issues

Like many conservative people, for example, the run-up to the 2017 same sex marriage vote was full of 'back channel' dialogue with 'blue chekist' media, publicly having to get behind 'yes', privately much more sceptical of 'the party line' .... even at the ABC, dare I say.

The upshot of all this, then, is I think we would be much healthier if we accept that in a country of 26m people, there will be more tribes than a '2PP vote' suggests. Also, more importantly, everyone has more going on in their lives than any observer can ever possibly know.

TL:DR we are all Australians, there are only 26m of us on this massive island(s) continent, we agree on much more than we disagree on, and, hopefully when the Pandemic is over, whatever else we argue over, we will all look more sympathetically on those laid low these past 2 years