A room of cowed journalists legitimised Pauline Hanson. It’s proof she’s muzzled the watchdog

Pauline Hanson walked into the National Press Club room armed with a brand of pathos that aimed only to incite anger, and without any ethos or logos to provide credibility or reason.

Among the key targets of her anger were the very people in that room: media professionals. She spoke to journalists like a mother who is fed up with her misbehaving children. “I’m sick and tired of…” is one of her favourite phrases. She also behaved like an enraged school principal doling out punishments, ultimately expelling the most unruly kids from school and threatening to send others to the naughty corner. She reminded her audience that she had banned both the ABC and The Guardian from her press conferences, and announced a plan to abolish the SBS.

When asked by Sky News presenter and National Press Club President Tom Connell whether she would start her next election campaign with a clean slate for all journalists, she said: “If you want to keep bashing me around, I don’t forget. I’m like a bloody old elephant.” She was effectively telling journalists that unless they start behaving themselves, they’ll remain in the naughty corner.

But perhaps a more useful analogy for understanding her relationship with the media would be to see her as a dog owner who is hell-bent on keeping her animal on a short leash, while yelling at it to stop yapping and be quiet — and seriously wishing she had adopted a lapdog instead.

Media scholars who study the relationship between the media and powerful institutions often resort to canine metaphors. For instance, “watchdog journalism” sees the media’s democratic role as scrutinising governments and other powerful actors. Its job is to hold those in power to account and expose their wrongdoings. The watchdog acts independently, in the interest of the public. Having a media system that functions like a watchdog is widely understood to be a prerequisite for a healthy democracy. Many Australian journalists take pride in their role as the “fourth estate” by scrutinising politics, churches, corporations and other powerful institutions.

Going beyond this model, I’ve argued in recent years that — especially in the context of foreign policy and national security reporting — Australian media outlets have in some cases become more like guard dogs for Australia’s security and defence establishment. In other words, they are vigilant about foreign threats, but largely fail to ask probing questions about the political motivations of the key drivers of Australia’s foreign policy, including security analysts at think tanks.

In this guard-dog model, journalists seem to be working at the behest of the national security establishment, and not primarily in the public interest — even if they may still believe they are being rigorously independent and critical. I’ve also argued that the watchdog impulse and the guard-dog impulse often coexist in one individual journalist, and also within a single media outlet.

The rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation further complicates things. What we saw at the press club on Wednesday was in fact a kind of “watchdog theatre”: journalists adopting a posture of vigilance while failing to bark, bite or even seriously disturb the speaker.

John Paul Janke from NITV/SBS can proudly claim that his watchdog instinct is alive and alert. He asked Hanson what she intended to do with the money that would be saved by her proposal to abolish programs and grants worth $4.5 billion — schemes that fund housing, essential infrastructure, water security, jobs, cost-of-living measures, and family and children’s safety centres for Indigenous Australians. Not happy with the answer he got, he fired off a follow-up: “You mentioned $30 billion there. Can I ask you where you get that figure from?”

Along with him, Sarah Martin from The Guardian and Anna Henderson from the SBS were among the few in the room who had the audacity to risk Hanson’s wrath.

But there were a couple of questions that conveniently gave Hanson yet another chance to vent her pet anger, as evidenced in the question from The Spectator: “How do you see a One Nation government managing its relationship with the public service?”

Even for those who did ask probing questions, most simply accepted Hanson’s answers at face value, politely said thank you, and went back to their seats. They appeared to be demanding accountability from her, but given the sheer scale and depth of the moral failure on display in her speech, their preprepared questions about specific issues felt ultimately inconsequential: a bit like throwing a handful of toothpicks at a mountain, to appropriate Paul Keating.

With the notable exceptions mentioned above, the vast majority of questioners produced little that came close to hard-hitting, head-on journalism. This was largely watchdog journalism reduced to a performative act.

Consequently, a wide range of claims that demanded immediate interrogation — including Hanson’s comparison of Islam to cancer, her invocation of a supposedly “monocultural” Australia, her dismissal of global warming as a hoax, and the uncertain costings behind her energy policies — were left unchallenged and uncontested.

And nobody seemed to think it fit to ask her why Welcome to Country is “divisive” while her own rhetoric is not. Nobody asked her how she reconciles her “Australian values” with her vehement intolerance of transgender and multilingual communities, or reminded her that many people who speak Arabic or Mandarin actually speak better English than she does. Rather than challenging the premises of her speech, many questions simply accepted her framing of the issues. In that sense, the Q&A did not merely fail to hold Hanson accountable; it helped normalise her assertions by treating them as legitimate claims rather than assertions requiring evidence-based rebuttal.

With the exception of the overtly right-wing media, which gladly operated as Hanson’s lapdogs, the journalists in the room were either aiming to appear impartial while privately finding much of her rhetoric abhorrent, or perhaps quietly agreeing with much of what she said. In either case, the profession failed to deliver what is expected of a watchdog.

At the very least, the media seems to have been caught off guard by One Nation’s sudden, meteoric rise, while its practitioners and institutions have yet to work out how to respond to Hanson’s new popularity and the ferocious, imperious authority it seems to confer on her. Clearly cowed by Hanson’s threats and abuse, many journalists seemed unable to decide how far they could go in challenging a politician who can no longer be dismissed as marginal, and who has made the media one of her nemeses.

Hanson delivered a 90-minute dressing-down to the journalists at the press club, leaving the Australian media collectively bruised, even concussed. What was on display this Wednesday was a profession that had become momentarily disoriented, if not paralysed. One hopes they will recover from the shock, regroup and start again. As Hanson said, “Let’s see what happens.” The media would do well to remember that it is not only Pauline Hanson who will be watching them. The public will be too.