Dan Ilic and his climate message often faced a brick wall (top right) before he employed creative methods to try and thread the media needle. Images: YouTube, Unsplash (digitally-altered), YouTube, Farfetch.

“Investigative humourist” Dan Ilic is nothing if not imaginative. The headlines he generated this weekend – such as “Ilic gave Australia its 10 minutes of climate change shame” – made quite the impression in certain quarters.

“Ten minutes” was how long it took an electronic billboard in Times Square, New York, to cycle through nine electronic messages, including a kangaroo with a burning tail (above, bottom left) and a jab at Prime Minister Scott “Coal-o-phile Dundee” Morrison, courtesy of Ilic’s partners-in-scorn at the Chaser. The stunt cost $16,000, paid for out of a crowd-funded $150,000 war chest.

The latest in a series of increasingly expensive shenanigans in the lead-up to Morrison’s trip to the UN Climate Change summit in Glasgow, Scotland, a billboard in Times Square might – at first blush – seem like a waste of time, effort and money. Notwithstanding the spot Ilic’s antics earned on CNN, the fact remains New Yorkers can barely find Australia on a map, much less give a toss about rising sea levels on Botany Bay.

But of course the intended audience was right here at home: Australian voters who might throw our climate-obfuscating PM to the kerb at the next election if Ilic’s message (or, more likely, his unconventional means of spreading it) sparked the interest of our often-ambivalent mainstream media. To that end, Ilic enjoyed a degree of success, breaking through onto outlets like the ABC, Channel 10, The Guardian and Yahoo!:

He hit a proverbial brick wall with other mainstream media outlets, however. There was occasional coverage on commercial TV or News Corp outlets, and none at all in The Age or Sydney Morning Herald (SMH).

You’ll remember News Corp as the company which announced, to much scepticism under mastheads coast-to-coast last Monday, that it was now a ‘serious player’ on climate change. You’ll also recall The Age and SMH as publications which proudly proclaim they’re ‘Independent. Always’.

Faced with some serious self-censorship from mainstream media, satirical activists like Ilic and the Chaser (and their less humorous brethren, like Greenpeace and Black Lives Matter [BLM]) have often used visual impact to get their points across. In 2019, Greenpeace supporters famously abseiled off Sydney Harbour Bridge, unfurling banners calling on political parties to declare a ‘climate emergency’.

PLEASE HELP US CONTINUE TO THRIVE BY BECOMING AN OFFICIAL FOOTYOLOGY PATRON. JUST CLICK THIS LINK.

Last year, after the murder of George Floyd, BLM murals began springing up all over the US. Washington DC’s mayor got in on the act early, with an officially-sanctioned mural painted on the newly-named Black Lives Matter Plaza, opposite what was then Donald Trump’s White House. Not satisfied with the official version of their slogan, BLM added some provocative words to the mural:


Image: People’s World.

The act of producing massive, visually-spectacular, attention-grabbing signs and sticking them in world famous places is both fun (in that it’s cheeky) and stimulating to the creative centres of the brain. But how effective is it at generating groundswells of support?

Ilic broke through on CNN and The Project, and lapped up the affirmation on Twitter, but why couldn’t he break through onto the pages of The Age or SMH?

What’s that, you say? Those mastheads are owned by a parent company helmed by none other than former Liberal Treasurer Peter Costello? That can’t be a problem in the fair and equitable marketplace of ideas that Australia professes to be, can it?

The sad fact is we have anything but a level playing field when it comes to ideas. The ownership and management of just about all of Australia’s commercial print and television media, excluding Network 10, have links to the broad right in this country, while Facebook has been denounced as an “echo chamber” with a “conservative bias” due, among other things, to an algorithm that amplifies the angry voices you often find on the right.

Accordingly, much of the coverage consumed by viewers and readers occupies a band from the far right to the non-threatening, centre-left positions of Anthony Albanese’s ALP (or, in America, the US Democrats).

Thus, with a few honourable exceptions, Ilic’s and The Chaser’s attention-grabbing but inoffensive antics in Times Square were ignored at the weekend, while the earlier, more-provocative efforts of Greenpeace and BLM suffered a media backlash for, respectively, creating a public nuisance on Sydney Harbour Bridge and calling for the defunding of certain rogue US police departments (a scary, easily-distorted proposition for suburban white Americans).


Image: New Scientist

Global warming is a deadly-serious issue, yet – with Morrison set to play more word games in Glasgow and Albanese showing his hand with a “captain’s pick” pre-selection of a pro-mining Labor candidate for the coal-rich NSW seat of Hunter – there seems to be no-one in mainstream politics taking the issue seriously.

Little wonder, then, that Dan Ilic and others must, through no fault of their own, resort to attention-grabbing, “look at me!” antics in a (partially-futile) attempt to break through into mainstream consciousness. Ilic was ignored by a chunk of the media; he would’ve been attacked had his antics gone much further.

What an indictment that is of our politics, our media and our society in general.

Ilic is to be commended for trying to ‘thread the eye’ of our media but, with apologies to the Gospel of Matthew, it’s often “easier for a camel to go through” than it is for a lefty.