Our bushfire-ravaged regions have suffered enough without the ABC’s insults of an “imminent” domestic violence surge, writes Miranda Devine. Smearing decent men with half-baked crusades only makes everyone angrier Miranda Devine
Greens Senator Larissa Waters, who stood benignly alongside Moody when she maligned the honour of firefighters at a press conference, later apologised for the insult.
But it seems no lessons were learned.
On Sunday, the ABC went one better with a speculative story claiming that “a new bushfire crisis is emerging as experts brace for an imminent surge in domestic violence”.
An “imminent” surge, as in one that has not happened and probably will never occur.
You’d think at least you’d wait until there were some actual facts available before you started maligning men who are still trying to get their lives together.
And how do we know that the adversity won’t, in fact, bring bushfire-affected families closer together?
Always expecting the worst of men can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The same misandrist mindset led to the dishonest pile-on against Queensland cop Mark Thompson, forced to stand aside last week from the investigation into the dreadful deaths of Hannah Clarke, her three young daughters and her estranged husband Rowan Baxter.
Baxter reportedly ambushed Clarke on her way to school drop-off, doused her car with petrol and set the whole family alight. She died later in hospital.
But a few words twisted out of context at a press conference were all it took for paranoid misfits on social media to make Detective Inspector Thompson look as if he had excused Baxter’s actions.
He did nothing of the sort, as any reporter at that press conference knew. Kate Kyriacou, The Courier-Mail’s crime editor, later went to the trouble of publishing a transcript of Thompson’s remarks which show simply a careful professional doing his job, keeping an open mind about what had happened.
Cops are not meant to prejudge cases the way self-appointed twitter “experts” do with zero information.
“He did not say what you think he said,” wrote Kyriacou, in a rebuke to the keyboard warriors who went off half-cocked.
In any case, how is smearing decent men supposed to reduce domestic violence?
It’s simply narcissism dressed up as altruism and the world has had just about enough of that.
Instead of assuming the worst of men, let’s try to assume the best and bring an end to this punitive era of half-baked crusades which only make everyone angrier.