Yet that is precisely what any regular reader of the 'quality' press is constantly confronted with. Journalists can only seek to claim an authority they don't have by trading away the only authority that they can or should have. It was thus particularly disappointing to see The Australian's political editor, Dennis Shanahan, writing that a Government submission to a Senate inquiry that pointed out the facts that not all the removed Aboriginal children were stolen and that 10 per cent hardly constitutes a generation, represented 'a politically unnecessary and dangerous attempt to impose intellectual rigour on the debate'. The lack of critical analysis over the 'stolen generation' has shown that journalists have learnt nothing from their collective embarrassment in falling for the Hindmarsh concoction. But if journalism becomes an exercise in display of a common virtue based on having particular opinions, then views and truths awkward for those opinions become threatening to journalists.
Journalism becomes polemic and reporting becomes propaganda.
Worse, since elite status can only come from being different from the common herd, journalists are driven to parading how different their views are from common opinion, from those of the public they are supposed to be serving. The problem extends to far more serious journalists, such as the Nine network's political editor and Bulletin columnist Laurie Oakes. Oakes is undoubtedly a first-class journalist whose memory for political facts and events is simply terrifying. Nor is he an ideologically-driven soul. Yet he, too, is apparently infected by journalistic conformity.