Channel Nine Smear is “Not OKKK”
Channel Nine sent a reporter to the United States, sat down with Thomas Robb of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and asked whether it was "heartening" to see "anti-immigration Pauline" doing well in Australia. He said yes. The clip went into a documentary about Trump's divided America. Pauline Hanson called it disgusting and a new low. Barnaby Joyce said they pulled the story out of their backside. The Spectator called the method what it is: not guilt by association, but guilt by third-party endorsement. If a poisoner praises your recipe, you did not become a poisoner.
The tactic is old. You do not have to prove a party shares an ideology. You find the ugliest person on earth who likes one overlapping sentence, usually about borders, and you let the hood do the rest of the argument. The viewer is meant to feel the contamination without inspecting the product.
It will mostly fail here. Not because Australian media is too noble to try it. Because the imported symbol does not land.
The KKK is a real American organisation with a real history of terror. That is not in dispute. It is also a foreign costume drama for a country that did not have Reconstruction, Jim Crow, or burning crosses as a domestic civic language. Australians under forty who can name a Grand Wizard are a rounding error. Plenty of older voters have the movie version, white sheets, the South, bad men, and then they go back to fuel prices and the waiting list.
So the smear has to do two jobs at once. First it has to teach the audience who Robb is and why the letters KKK should end the conversation. Then it has to transfer his nod onto Hanson as if it were a membership card. That is a lot of pedagogy for a Tuesday night package. If the viewer never completes lesson one, lesson two is just an American oddball saying an Australian name.
Nine can defend the journalism as "we reported what an extremist said." Fine. Reporting is not the same as the frame: flying a correspondent to Arkansas to harvest a quote that exists to be played against a domestic opponent. You do not need a Klan interview to explain Australian immigration politics. You need it if the point is the stain.
Smears that work in Australia tend to use Australian furniture: a protest photo, a preference deal, a quote from a candidate in Dubbo, a fight outside a suburban hall. Those things sit inside the voter's map. A man in Arkansas who thinks Hanson is "encouraging" does not. He is as relevant to a Boothby or Flynn booth as a Mississippi sheriff endorsing the Socceroos.
The people most likely to care about the Klan clip are already in the market for a reason to despise One Nation. They did not need Robb. The people Nine might have hoped to peel off: the soft conservative, the fed-up Labor voter, the "I don't like her but the boats" type, do not organise their morals around Reconstruction-era American fraternities. They organise them around whether the country feels like theirs, whether the rent is insane, and whether the person on the screen sounds like a try-hard.
Hanson has been called every imported epithet for thirty years. The law of diminishing slurs applies. Each new foreign monster has to be worse than the last one, or the audience treats it as weather.
Hanson pointed to more than $16 million in federal journalism assistance landing at Nine, part of a wider pot to dozens of outlets. That is a legitimate argument about state money and perceived capture. It is not proof that a producer in Sydney was issued a work order to collect a Wizard. Conflating the two is the mirror-image dirty trick: if they took the grant, the segment must be a Labor op. Maybe the grant colours the climate. The clip still has to stand or fall as an editorial choice. Stand it up as a choice. Don't pretend a subsidy receipt is a smoking hood.
Newsrooms that live inside American discourse think American symbols travel. Twitter/X thinks they travel. A Klan hit is high-arousal, legally safer than alleging an actual organisational link, and flattering to the reporter who "went there." It also flatters a certain viewer who wants politics to be a morality play with costumes.
Australian elections are still decided by people who could not pick Thomas Robb out of a lineup and would not stay for the explain-er. They will remember the price of diesel. They will remember whether a party sounds obsessed with them or obsessed with a feud. A hood in Arkansas is noise.
Dirty tactics fail for a boring reason. They require shared homework. This one assigned a chapter most of the class never opened. The Wizard can keep talking. The vote will be about something closer to home.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/09/not-okkk/
