Australian journalists are increasingly alarmed that Pauline Hanson no longer appears intimidated by them—assuming she ever was. More concerning, however, is the question of why so many Australians have lost faith in journalists.
Concern is mounting across the Fourth Estate after One Nation began excluding certain journalists from its events.
At a press conference at Crown Melbourne last week, reporters from the ABC and The Guardian were told to leave and escorted from the venue by hotel security. The Age has also been refused entry to One Nation events.
Some newsrooms have warned that barring journalists establishes a dangerous precedent in an otherwise healthy democracy. One Nation’s strategy may indeed be misguided. Hanson is certainly capable of facing tough questions, even if she responds in a way that differs from the standard approach of a conventional politician.
If One Nation hopes to replace the Coalition as Labor’s principal alternative, it must accept the greater scrutiny that ambition brings. Yet there is another aspect of the dispute that journalists seem far less willing to examine. The media is calling on Hanson to reflect on her conduct while showing little inclination to do the same itself.
Take the event from which the ABC and The Guardian were excluded. One Nation’s Victorian leader, Warren Pickering, used the occasion to publicly acknowledge that he had taken illegal drugs and had lost his licence several times for drink-driving offences when he was younger.
Regardless of one’s view of Pickering or his disclosures, it is hard to portray a press conference focused on revealing the most humiliating chapters of a politician’s past as an effort to evade scrutiny. The Australian, which first reported the story, was permitted to attend.
The excluded outlets were not prevented from reporting on, investigating or criticising One Nation. They continued to cover the matter extensively. Calling their exclusion “censorship” pushes the term well beyond its proper meaning.
‘The press is demanding self-reflection from Hanson without displaying much of its own,’ writes Daily Mail political editor Peter van Onselen. (Hanson is pictured)
Censorship stops journalists from publishing. It involves the state using its authority to suppress information or punish those who disclose it. Refusing entry to a privately organised media event is something else entirely: it withdraws privileged access, but does not remove press freedom.
Nor should anyone pretend that political parties do not routinely manage media access. Politicians offer exclusives to preferred reporters, leak material to sympathetic outlets and give selected journalists advance notice of announcements. Embargoed briefings, background discussions and carefully timed “drops” are all used to influence coverage. I know because, over the years, I have experienced every one of these tactics.
Reporters who cooperate with the system are rewarded with access. Those who create difficulties may find that calls go unanswered, interviews vanish and stories are handed to rival outlets.
The threat of freezing out journalists has been a feature of politics for decades. Governments are especially well placed to do it because they control such a vast supply of information. They seldom need to impose an official ban; the punishment can be delivered quietly. I have encountered that as well, on several occasions.
The ABC itself has previously characterised political “drops” as a familiar media-management technique—one journalists often accept and even welcome, despite the hidden agendas and conditions that can accompany them.
When the major parties ration information in this manner, it is described as media management. When One Nation does the same thing openly, it is presented as an existential danger to democracy. That is difficult to take seriously.
The major parties use a velvet glove; One Nation uses hotel security guards. In large part, the distinction is simply how discreetly the pressure is applied.
That does not make One Nation’s conduct more or less acceptable. It does, however, expose the media’s reaction as selective and inconsistent.
ABC and The Guardian were excluded from an event where One Nation’s Victorian leader, Warren Pickering (pictured) admitted publicly that he had taken illegal drugs and lost his licence for drink driving several times when he was younger
Some journalists hold an idealised view of the Fourth Estate that no longer reflects the way the industry actually operates.
Thomas Jefferson is frequently cited as a champion of the press. In 1787, he wrote that if forced to choose between “a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government”, he would choose the latter.
It’s a magnificent endorsement of press freedom.
But Jefferson didn’t regard newspapers as inherently virtuous. Twenty years later, after experiencing their excesses, he wrote that ‘nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper’. He understood something that is often lost in the present debate: a free press is essential, but that doesn’t make it infallible.
The modern media bears little resemblance to the institution journalists evoke when defending the sanctity of the Fourth Estate. It is fragmented, financially under pressure and increasingly driven by outrage, clicks and ideological affinities. That’s fine, but it means that the boundaries between reporting, analysis and activism have become blurred.
Social media rewards speed and fury rather than accuracy or proportion. Newsrooms increasingly speak to narrow audiences whose political instincts they already understand. Too many journalists mistake the prevailing opinions inside their own professional and social circles for the settled views of the country, and they couldn’t be more wrong. Especially gallery journalists confined to the Canberra bubble.
Trust in the media has declined accordingly. The 2025 Digital News Report found that only 43 per cent of Australians generally trusted the news. Yet when politicians reject the authority of the media, many journalists respond as though their own conduct couldn’t possibly have contributed to the breakdown.
No Australian political figure has more reason to distrust the press than Pauline Hanson. For three decades, Hanson has faced legitimate and often necessary scrutiny. She’s made offensive remarks, promoted questionable candidates and advanced policies that deserved rigorous examination. But that isn’t the whole story.
She has also been subjected to relentless ridicule, exaggeration, selective reporting and personal contempt. Misquoted and taken out of context. At times, journalists have appeared less interested in understanding her support than in displaying their moral superiority to it.
Her voters have routinely been depicted as ignorant, racist or stupidly incapable of recognising their own interests. Every controversy has been presented as the event that must finally destroy her. The possibility that Hanson might identify genuine community concerns (even when her prescriptions are sometimes flawed) has too often been dismissed without serious examination.
She was even sent to prison for three months before her convictions were quashed. Whatever the media’s role in that saga, Hanson’s suspicion of powerful institutions didn’t emerge from nowhere.
The media has spent so long treating Hanson as beyond the bounds of respectable politics that many of her supporters automatically discount almost anything reported about her now.
Hanson has recognised that she no longer needs the mainstream media as she once did. Social media allows political parties to speak directly to millions of voters. Interviews can be live-streamed, announcements published in full and hostile coverage answered almost instantly.
Yes, that creates genuine dangers. Politicians can evade difficult questions, construct self-serving narratives and communicate inside closed ecosystems wherein they are rarely challenged.
But it also means journalists are no longer indispensable gatekeepers. Access is not an entitlement bestowed by membership of the profession, it has to be justified by the value journalism provides and the trust it earns.
In my view, One Nation should probably lift its bans. A party seeking national power should be prepared to face unfriendly journalists, and Hanson is strong enough to do so. But the media should resist turning this into another sermon about its own democratic virtue.
After three decades of helping create the distrust on which One Nation now thrives, many in the modern media should be willing to answer a few questions themselves.
