MEDIA SHAME FILE
Outlet: Sky News Australia
Headline: Donkey Vote
Summary: This weekend Sky News Australia had a bizarre meltdown over Senator Gerard Rennick asking whether parent company News Corp has been infiltrated by Mossad, and Rennick absolutely destroyed them in response.
News Corp in general, but especially Sky News, has become obsessed with anti-Semitism and the conflict in Israel in recent months to the point of completely alienating its loyal reader/viewership.
We don’t have access to their internal statistics, but we’d be willing to bet that they’re taking a huge hit in terms of views, clicks and subscriptions to their online metropolitan mastheads as a result of this obsession.
You can tell by the comments on social media that the average Aussie News Corp consumer – right-leaning, climate sceptical, anti-woke – is getting sick of having stories they don’t want to read shoved down their throats 24/7, and and polls show that most Aussies don’t care about either side of the conflict.
Of course, News Corp journalists and presenters aren’t being explicitly ordered to pump these stories out, that’s not the way it works, but they will all know what their bosses expect, and they are all very good at doing what they are told. We saw the same thing during Covid when the entire media ecosystem fell obediently into line and pushed lockdown and vaccine mandates.
And there’s no way this isn’t hurting them, which explains anti-woke presenter James Macpherson’s bizarre freak-out at Rennick, where he even admits that harping on about anti-Semitism and Israel gets “boring”.
But what did Rennick say that was so awful that it justified a five-minute response? You can read the whole tweet here and judge for yourself:
Interesting reaction from Mike Burgess the Head of ASIO when he called out the behaviour of the media as “mind blowing stupid” in trying to incite racism in Australia.
It begs the question whether Mossad has infiltrated News Corp and is trying to stir up division here in… pic.twitter.com/8WNrgYShG3
— Senator Gerard Rennick (@SenatorRennick) February 27, 2025
Rennick simply referred to a statement by ASIO boss Mike Burgess that the media had been “mind-blowingly stupid” when it came to inflaming community tensions, in response to a direct question about News Corp’s Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph sending a “undercover Jew” into a pro-Palestine café to try to manufacture a story about how hard it is to be Jewish in Australia in 2025.
Rennick then wrote: “It begs the question whether Mossad has infiltrated News Corp and is trying to stir up division here in Australia” before going on to say the media should be get back to “reporting the facts and stop stoking fear.”
This is a fair statement in light of recent events, laid out by Mitch Sutton in his three part series about the so-called anti-Semitism crisis, where police and ASIO are on record as saying foreign actors are responsible for a spate of incidents used by News Corp to drum up fear and anger about anti-Semitism on an almost daily basis, and by politicians and Jewish groups to ram through new hate speech and hate crimes legislation at the state and federal levels.
But the question clearly touched a nerve, because it prompted Macpherson’s fact-free rant full of strawman arguments.
Rennick, not one to allow himself to be bullied or smeared by some no-name News Corp hack, hit back superbly, and you should read his whole thread, not just the first post:
Check out this Sky journalist squealing because I called out Newscorp for inciting hatred at a cafe in Sydney in order to whip up more hysteria around anti-semitism.
They got busted fair and square and called out by the head of ASIO for it as being mind blowing stupid.
Why… pic.twitter.com/66pyr40lwV
— Senator Gerard Rennick (@SenatorRennick) March 2, 2025
Bear in mind that Rennick was one of the few politicians who not only got Covid right but made a principled stand on lockdowns, restrictions and vaccine mandates, so he’s no pushover.
Of course, he was rewarded for that by losing pre-selection for the Liberal Party, but has since created his own People First party, and is polling well.
Rennick’s response speaks for itself, and needs no analysis, while Macpherson’s monologue shows how shamefully stupid Sky News has become.
Take this quote for example: “Perhaps News Corp journalists are honestly calling out anti-Semitism rather than accusing Israel of creating anti-Semitism in order to win sympathy for themselves, the very suggestion of which, in my view, would constitute peak anti-Semitism.”
According to Sky News any suggestion that Mossad would act like Mossad (Rennick provides examples in his thread), is “peak anti-Semitism”, which is what they have been saying for months – criticising Israel is anti-Semitic, criticising Zionism is anti-Semitic, criticising Mossad is anti-Semitic, and questioning any of the above is also, you guessed it, anti-Semitic.
This is childish stuff from Macpherson, who seems to view himself as a serious person, and is the kind of argument you resort to when you don’t have an argument.
We won’t bore you by analysing the rest of the trainwreck monologue, except to say it’s no wonder Sky News Australia viewers are switching off in droves and the channel now depends on YouTube revenue from American users to stay afloat.
Key quote: “Perhaps News Corp journalists are honestly calling out anti-Semitism rather than accusing Israel of creating anti-Semitism in order to win sympathy for themselves, the very suggestion of which, in my view, would constitute peak anti-Semitism.”
