Journalism Lacks the H. L. Mencken Spirit
Something has gone missing from journalism, and it is not merely "objectivity." Objectivity was always an aspiration more than a clean achievement. What has disappeared is the temperament that once made the press dangerous to every orthodoxy at once.
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), remains the clearest example. He did not write to improve the public or to usher society toward better moral outcomes. He wrote to puncture pretension, to mock the democratic faith, to expose the gap between the high-sounding phrases of reformers and the actual behaviour of the people who uttered them. He treated politicians, clergymen, professors, and journalists themselves with the same cold amusement. The point was never to protect democracy from its enemies. The point was to refuse the sentimental lies that every side told about itself.
That figure has almost vanished from the mainstream, especially in Australia. The major outlets, ABC, the big newspaper groups, commercial current affairs,do not produce writers of that stamp. They produce careful professionals who understand the boundaries of the acceptable. Those boundaries have shifted Leftward over decades, but the more important change is temperamental. The modern newsroom rewards fluency in the moral language of the moment and punishes genuine irreverence. A journalist who treats progressive sacred cows with the same casual contempt Mencken once directed at the "booboisie" does not rise. He becomes a problem to be managed.
The result is a strange uniformity. On immigration, national identity, gender, climate, and the proper limits of the state, the mainstream speaks with a remarkably consistent voice. Dissent is not engaged so much as labelled. "Far-right," "populist," "threat to democracy," "anti-immigrant": these phrases do the work that argument once did. Positions that were ordinary centre-Right or even centre-Left a generation ago are now treated as evidence of extremism. The centre itself has moved, yet the language pretends the dissenters are the ones who left the reservation.
Robert Malone's recent essay on advocacy journalism describes the mechanism clearly. Once a set of political preferences is reclassified as moral truth, "balance" becomes a form of complicity. Why platform people who are simply wrong? Why give oxygen to ideas that cause harm? The journalist ceases to be an observer and becomes a participant who still claims the authority of the neutral reporter. The public is no longer a citizenry to be informed; it is a population to be guided.
Australia shows the same pattern. Surveys of journalists consistently find a strong Left-of-centre skew. The institutional culture selects for people who already share the worldview and then socialises them further. The few who operate with real independence tend to do so outside the legacy system, on smaller platforms, independent sites, or the margins of commercial media. Inside the institutions that still set the national agenda, the tone remains measured, risk-averse, and carefully aligned with the prevailing moral consensus.
This is not a conspiracy. It is a selection effect reinforced by career incentives, social pressure, and the economics of prestige. Mencken-style iconoclasm requires a willingness to stand alone and to accept the costs. Contemporary mainstream journalism does not reward that willingness. It rewards the opposite: the ability to stay inside the circle while sounding independent.
The loss is real. A press that cannot mock its own side, that cannot treat every orthodoxy with equal suspicion, eventually becomes an instrument of the orthodoxy it serves. Mencken understood that danger. Most of his modern successors do not. They are too busy protecting democracy from the voters who keep electing the wrong people.
