Rudd & Turnbull doco another Sky ad hominem attack

A promotional slide from the Sky News documentary on former PMs Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, “Men in the Mirror”

“Play the ball, not the man”. It’s gospel for just about everyone who pulls on a footy boot, and handy advice for other walks of life. When it comes to reporting current affairs, however, the talking heads at Sky News Australia have flipped the script.

Ad hominem (against the man) attacks on opponents’ personal flaws, not their arguments, are a go-to Sky News smokescreen when their stance on the issues just isn’t cutting it. When your primary function as a news channel is to fend off attacks on an LNP coalition currently lurching from the “wank desk” to “where’s my vaccine?”, it’s no surprise that, in recent weeks, the ploy has become a Sky News staple.

Sunday night saw Sky’s Chris Kenny, the Carl Ditterich of ad hominem attacks, shirt-fronting former Prime Ministers Malcolm Turnbull (LNP) and Kevin Rudd (Labor) as host of a hit piece on the two, “Men in the Mirror”. This followed their call for a Royal Commission into the near-monopoly News Corp, Kenny’s employer, has over sections of the Australian media.

This time, the ad hominem stuff was a “two-fer”, with Kenny and a succession of guests summarising the spooky similarities binding Turnbull and Rudd. If it wasn’t their narcissistic drive to be number one, it was their obsessive self-promotion. Self-defeating drawbacks such as their fatal inability to work with others were underscored, as were, incredibly, their shared comb-over haircuts:

“Both of them were brought up in an environment … where they were told they were special,” former Senator Nick Minchin told Kenny, alluding to Turnbull and Rudd’s narcissism. “They … weren’t balanced in their characters, and that can be a very destabilising thing when you’re introduced into what is a team sport, that is, politics.

“Kevin (was always interested in) how you get authority, how you keep authority, how to rise through systems and become a leader”, Rudd’s older brother Greg told Kenny. “(He had) the absolute belief that if he got there, he would make the world a better place, (and) I’d say Malcolm’s similar”.

“They were both brilliant enough to actually get the leadership of their own parties, twice, to both become Prime Minister,” Kenny told Sharri Markson. “But neither of them could keep their own parties, their own Cabinets, their own people, on board with them for the ride”.

The point of it all was to portray the two former PMs as their own worst enemies, poor team players brought down by their own hubris and incapable of acknowledging responsibility. It couldn’t possibly be News Corp’s fault, as Turnbull and Rudd claim; its journalists only reported these facts, and men this flawed only have themselves to blame.

There’s no doubt both Turnbull and Rudd are flawed individuals. They’re opinionated, arrogant, self-obsessed and pathologically ambitious: perfect character traits for aspiring political leaders.

Aside from their inability to play well with others, Turnbull and Rudd’s personalities could be assigned to just about anyone on the current Front Bench and not make an appreciable difference to how we’re governed. Does anyone seriously believe that, say, Donald Trump – a man vigorously promoted by News Corp’s US arm – isn’t significantly more flawed than either of these two?

Personally, I don’t care if Turnbull and Rudd are both flawed (aren’t we all?) if they sucked up to News Corp editors on their way up the political ladder (they did) or if their parents locked them in closets for that matter (I’m sure they didn’t). I want to know just one thing: are their criticisms of News Corp on the mark?

The answer to that lies in their other shared experience: having their careers as Prime Minister derailed. Was it solely due to their character flaws, or did a certain media organisation play a substantial role, as they claim?

Both Turnbull and Rudd are convinced that villainous vilification by News Corp outlets (Sky News included) was critical to their demise. By portraying both men as broken, “Men in the Mirror” implies any coverage of their flaws was fair, balanced and evidence-based.

Kenny’s credibility hinges on whether the ‘fair and balanced coverage’ thesis checks out.

In fact, analysis of News Corp coverage showed that it turned on Rudd well before he lost the support of his Labor colleagues. In 2009, its outlets attacked Rudd’s school building stimulus program and the National Broadband Network, part of what The Guardian described as an attempt to portray him as “a big-spending lefty who was openly hostile to markets”.

Then there was “Utegate” (aka the OzCar affair) when News Corp outlets amplified allegations from a Treasury official that Rudd or Treasurer Wayne Swan had acted improperly on behalf of a Queensland car dealer seeking financial assistance. The ‘scandal’ fell apart when the official, Godwin Grech, admitted forging critical email evidence.

The sustained attacks finally bore fruit when Rudd was deposed as PM in mid-2010, whereupon News Corp’s The Australian published what The Guardian described as a triumphant, 5000-word “demolition job [which included] every conceivable nasty anecdote linked to Rudd”. The comprehensive attack, ironically entitled “Rudd Undone by the Enemy Within”, strongly suggests that, in fact, an external enemy – News Corp – was as much to blame.

In Turnbull’s case, it was hard to draw a line between News Corp warnings of turmoil within coalition ranks in 2018 and the suspiciously synchronised far right disruption which made them a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Daily Telegraph warned of “a toxic brawl” over energy policy and that Peter Dutton was preparing to challenge him. On Sky News, prime time talking heads Peta Credlin and Andrew Bolt ramped up their negative coverage of the national energy guarantee and Turnbull’s performance, seemingly echoing the far right’s disruption.

As a result, it’s widely believed Liberal backbenchers were convinced the only solution was to cave into the pressure and replace him as leader. The resulting, eventual ascendancy of Scott Morrison was described in The Guardian as “A Very Australian Coup”.

In short, both Turnbull and Rudd’s attestations check out: far from “fair and balanced”, News Corp launched an orchestrated assault on both, ushering in two right wing PMs (Tony Abbott and Morrison) with massive repercussions for the country. Little wonder, then, that Kenny and the producers of “Men in the Mirror” prefer to play the man, not the ball: without such shenanigans, their case collapses.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to play the man. I myself was sorely tempted to shit-bag “Men in the Mirror’s” lengthy list of “iffy” interviewees: the News Corp-affiliated Chris Mitchell, Peta Credlin and Warren Brown, the sibling rival Greg Rudd, the Turnbull factional enemy Nick Minchin, the ideological turncoat and known Rudd-hater Mark Latham.

Kenny – News Corp’s star columnist, editorial writer, broadcaster and all-round attack dog – is in no position to report objectively on those threatening the hand that feeds him. Was his loathing of the broad left (into which he undoubtedly lumps Turnbull) aggravated by a Chaser sketch involving him and a dog?

I won’t go there: we don’t play the man here at Footyology.

Instead, I’ll stick to the facts: News Corp can (and, in the two abovementioned cases, did) destroy governments that threaten its interests or didn’t garner its ideological stamp of approval. This should scare the shit out of Australians.

On the flip side, it can operate what Rudd calls a “protection racket” for approved incumbents (see Morrison, Scott). “The most powerful political actor in Australia is not the Liberal Party or the National Party or the Labor Party, it is News Corporation,” Turnbull told a Senate inquiry last month.

Kenny insists “Men in the Mirror” isn’t payback against Turnbull and Rudd for their wanting a Royal Commission into News Corp, his employer and big time benefactor. “Not at all,” Kenny told The Guardian. “This is just a fascinating story. Nobody needs to pay anybody back for any criticism. They can say what they like.”

Pull the other one, Chris. Most moguls in our emerging oligarchy can’t weaponise a media empire to fend off threats to their commercial interests; the Murdoch family, owners of News Corp, is yet again tearing down Turnbull and Rudd because it can.

The evidence insists Turnbull and Rudd are right, so of course Chris Kenny played the man on Sunday night’s show. It’s what he does: a “dog act”, if you will.