The Australian corporate media have been an arm of Government Covid propaganda these past eighteen months.  The Murdoch press has been at the forefront.  One of its prominent journalists has been the pointy end of the propaganda spear.  His name is Peter Hoysted.  He even gives himself a pseudonym.  He talks rubbish.

Talking about the New Normal, the storied American playwright CJ Hopkins has pointed out:

So, the Great New Normal Purge has begun … right on cue, right by the numbers.

As we “paranoid conspiracy theorists” have been warning would happen for the past 18 months, people who refuse to convert to the new official ideology are now being segregated, stripped of their jobs, banned from attending schools, denied medical treatment, and otherwise persecuted.

Relentless official propaganda demonizing “the Unvaccinated” is being pumped out by the corporate and state media, government leaders, health officials, and shrieking fanatics on social media. “The Unvaccinated” are the new official “Untermenschen,” an underclass of subhuman “others” the New Normal masses are being conditioned to hate.

Hopkins also notes:

The vast majority of the Western world has been transformed into a pseudo-medical dystopia in which you have to show your “health-purity papers” to enter a café and get a cup of coffee. People who refuse to get experimentally “vaccinated” against a virus that causes mild-to-moderate symptoms (or, often, no symptoms whatsoever) in about 95% of the infected, and the overall infection fatality rate of which is approximately 0.1% to 0.5%, are being systematically segregated, stripped of their jobs, denied medical treatment, demonized as “a danger to society,” censored, fined, and otherwise persecuted.

Leading the charge into the Great Covid Dystopia has been the West’s corporate media.  They are now reduced mostly to being shills for the Covid State.  Hopkins’ example of the phenomenon is (naturally) from Australia, and the Brisbane Courier Mail’s recent front page headline: “Public Enemy No 1: Unvaxxed Border Jumper Puts State on Covid Alert”.  Along with a photo of the man.  The only surprise is that they didn’t include his address and phone number.

How to explain the (at best) utter submission of the corporate media to the Covid totalitarian state, and their (at worst) adoption of the position of lockdown/vaccine proselytiser-in-chief?  Let us focus on the absolute cheerleader, bar no one, of the Clot Shot and the New Normal, better to understand the phenomenon:

“Peter Hoysted is Jack the Insider: a highly placed, dedicated servant of the nation with close ties to leading figures in politics, business and the union movement.”

So says The Australian, owned by the ageing son-of-a-eugenicist Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, CEO of News Corp and one of Klaus Schwab’s Young Global Leaders who are driving us all towards a new world order, and using the “pandemia” to do it.  Murdoch Junior shares this distinction with Justin Trudeau, Emanuel Macron, Bill Gates, Stephane Bancel (CEO of Moderna), Gavin Newsom (Governor of California), Jacinda Ardern, Gay Mayor Pete (Buttegieg), now the US Transport Secretary, Jeremy Howard (founder of Masks for All), and other (cringe)worthy members of the global elite.  Oh, and Greg Hunt.  (Not a club to which I would choose to belong, but that’s just me.  Nor was I ever likely to have been asked.)  Among other things, the World Economic Forum is a massive evangelist for the zero Covid philosophy, which it sees as a huge opportunity for advancing its bigger schemes that have as their ultimate aim the enslavement of the underclass.  That is, us.  Net Zero Covid vies with the other net zero as being the most idiotic, pernicious and disastrous public policy in human history.

Such is the level of The Australian’s Big Pharma proselytising that it should really be called The Daily Vaccinator.  The depths to which this once moderately good rag have plummeted are indicated most clearly by the fact that Hoysted remains on the payroll.  That he remains in situ while Alan Jones – summarily dismissed by The Australian’s stablemate Sky News recently – does not, speaks volumes for the descent of News Corp into propaganda.  Jones’ consistent defence of freedom over medical fascism and his considered editorialising against the ravages of Australia’s Covid governance have constituted one of the very few high points of Australian mainstream journalism during the whole sorry Covid episode.

Peter “I-have-consumed-the-Covid-Kool-Aid” Hoysted, whatever his journalistic altitude, level of dedication to his country and whether he networks with the corrupt, self-serving, third-rate chancers who are our politicians and with the crony capitalist bottom feeders with whom our leaders associate, has abandoned any pretense of quality journalism.  He has turned his back on his craft.  However, he is also malevolent and, on the matters on which he endless pontificates, quite ignorant.  He has assumed the role of a Big Pharma spruiker, a bomb thrower who gets out of bed each day merely, it seems, to gaslight his fellow Australians who don’t wish to be instruments of the Covid State.  Who do not wish to submit themselves to taking a vaccine that isn’t a vaccine, an experimental, unapproved (other than for emergency use) therapeutic that is neither safe nor effective.  Simply because Big Brother has all but forced them to.  Simply to play the Covid theatre game. 

His one assertion, it would appear – let us not call it an argument – is that “it is your choice; you are the one who has voluntarily given up your freedom and the right to access basic services, so don’t complain”.  And, by the way, you are stupid.  This is, sadly for the unity of our nation, a common view.  A view largely now embedded in the psyche of the many Australians by the likes of megaphone men such as Hoysted.  But he never argues his case, never provides evidence for his assertions.  Nor does he bother to understand those whom he attacks.  He is simply an ideologue getting paid to be a journalist.  He belittles without having any foundation or substance to his own position.  He infantilises his opponents, simplifies and distorts their arguments, and rants without coherence or gravitas.  He appears to assume that everyone who resists the Covid State is also a rusted-on believer in a whole raft of ideas and theories held to be true by a minority of those who oppose medical tyranny.

Here is but one sample from the bulging file of Hoysted’s spittle-flecked tirades:

And now with huge numbers of Australians vaccinated, anti-vaxxers are left with dismal whinges not unlike that of one unvaccinated person in Sydney who complained on Twitter yesterday that she had to wait outside Kmart while a vaccinated friend ducked inside to pick a few things up for her, declaring her temporary ban (she’ll be allowed to wander Kmart’s aisles to her heart’s content in a little over a month) unAustralian.

Oh dear.

She didn’t use another more inflammatory term, but many others of her stripe have. ‘Medical Apartheid’ is casually bandied about likening an individual choice to go unvaccinated and its contingent consequences with a political system based on institutionalised racial segregation.

During one anti-vax rally in Melbourne this week, protest organisers were handing out yellow armbands for the unvaccinated. Hmm.

It is entirely predictable in a way. Anti-vaxxers lack imagination and historical insight. 

I am not sure why the term medical apartheid, used by eminent British Church leaders in a recent communication with the UK Government and by the heroic Fair Work Australia Deputy Commissioner, Lyndall Dean, is thought by anyone, even the inane Hoysted, to be “inflammatory”.  Who is inflamed by this?  Who is triggered?  Nor am I sure why a person of at least moderate intelligence cannot see that denying a defined group of people from freedom of movement, freedom of association and freedom to pursue their chosen career is not appalling discrimination.  As for imagination and historical insight, here is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.  Saying “hmm” and “oh dear” is a poor substitute for argument, when your points are far from self-evident and your case is wafer-thin.

Hoysted is out of his depth, clueless in relation to Covid vaccines and the so-called science behind them, hopelessly biased and lacking even a modicum of understanding of those against whom he rabidly rails.  He makes many serious errors in his journalistic endeavours.  Here are ten:

• Ad hominem attacks.  According to one definition, “… this fallacy occurs when, instead of addressing someone's argument or position, you irrelevantly attack the person or some aspect of the person who is making the argument. The fallacious attack can also be directed to membership in a group or institution.”  Let us start with “anti-vaxxer”, used as a coverall term of abuse to typecast, dismiss and belittle those with whom one disagrees.  This is a Hoysted favourite.  Another favourite of his is “cult”.  The anti-vaxxer cult.  A “nutty cult” at that.  The QAnon cult – naturally linked to the anti-vaxxer cult.  “Parasites”.  This is the anti-vax movement.  “Hobby cultists”.  “Idiot podcaster”.  That would be Joe Rogan, who I have found to be smart, curious and persuasive.  And with far more reach than you, Pete.  Or take the term “granny killer”.  Conspiracy theorist is a perennial favourite.  Once you have been so-labelled, you know straight away that you have won the argument.  Your opponent has defaulted.  For those who use these terms have nothing in the way of substantive arguments to offer.  They are bereft.  These terms are the currency of lazy journalism, and using them has no place in the respectable media.
• The straw man fallacy.  This has been defined as “…a form of argument and an informal fallacy of having the impression of refuting an argument, whereas the real subject of the argument was not addressed or refuted, but instead replaced with a false one.”  A good argument seeks to present an opponent’s position in its strongest light, then to bring it down.  Hoysted and his ilk seek to present the argument against vaccine mandates, or indeed against the Covid “vaccines” themselves, in a weak and misleading light.  Then to bring THAT argument down.  Mostly, debates against anti-vaxxers miss the point that many opponents of the jab are not actually anti-vaxxers, whatever the Merriam Webster Dictionary – which recently and conveniently re-defined the phrase anti-vax – might say on the subject.  What they object to is being forced to be jabbed.  The two positions are so clearly defined that we are in the territory of Blind Freddy.  See also under the following dot point. 
• The false alternatives fallacy.  On one definition, this consists of “… misformulating a problem as a choice between two (or more) alternatives, when there exist other alternatives that have not been considered.”  This has been a feature of Covid journalism for the entire period.  Anyone for ivermectin?  This is the problem of false binaries, for example the suggestion that there is a simple choice between lockdowns and vaccines.  In fact, several countries across the globe have demonstrated that other policy approaches do exist and have been successfully followed without people losing their fundamental human rights.  This error is ironic, given that it is government and government alone that has imposed BOTH on their populations.  Making false binaries part of the propaganda exercise has been a masterstroke by the Covid State.  Hoysted believes that Australia will pass some sort of intelligence test if we become the most vaccinated country in the world.  Only someone of monumental ignorance could not recognise that it would prove precisely the opposite.  Only an idiot nation would line up for boosters after the initial vaccines failed.  And line up again.  And again.
• A wilful lack of understanding of opposing positions.  The key word here is “wilful”.  This issue is, for Hoysted, essentially ideological.  It is also possibly a sign of intellectual laziness.  He has made the question of taking the jab a black and white proposition.  He doesn’t care for anti-vaxxers, nor does he take the trouble to figure out their position.  Or, more accurately, their positions.  This isn’t just Hoysted’s problem.  Just about everyone in the pro-vaxx media doing the bidding of Big Government and Big Pharma does the same.  The absence of any in-depth study of anti-jab positions has been a feature of the past eighteen months.  It speaks to the cosiness of the Big Pharma-Big Government-Big Media interconnections, and to the material rewards offered by each partner to the others.  This is a case of embedded journalism.  It is also activism on a scale that would make Louise Milligan and other ABC Squad members blush.  When you are a low information journalist like Hoysted, it behoves you to seek truth widely and deeply.  He does neither.  He doesn’t understand that non-vaxx arguments are grounded, reasonable, based on principle, reflective of broad research and nuanced.  There are also many of them, not just one.  He exhibits a total lack of empathy with many of his readers, who, whatever their views on vaccines, do understand that it is possible for a non-vaxxer to have serious arguments to make, that some of them might have merit, and that creating a two-tier society is a blight on our country.  And one might, just might, have expected a journalist at The Australian to understand the importance of freedom, and not to demean those who fight for it.  Freedom and rights.  Things about which the Murdochs were once said to be passionate.
• Poor research skills.  Hoysted doesn’t seem to be aware that the vaccines don’t work.  He doesn’t seem interested in finding out how and why they don’t work.  He speaks in cliches.  Has he not heard of Israel, the USA, the UK?  Where vaccines simply stop working against the Delta variant after about five months.  Doing the work to answer anomalies and difficult questions is the very stuff of Journalism 101.  You claim, with great affectation, to be “an insider”.  Well, show us your investigative skills.  Ask your mates, if you have any who are real scientists, about breakthrough infections.  About deaths after taking the vaccines.  About the peer reviewed studies regularly published by eminent dissident sites like The Daily Sceptic which reveal Covid “science” to be complex, open to debate and readily challengeable.  One such study noted the high rate of miscarriages among pregnant vaccinated women.  For Hoysted, saying this – as one of his pet targets, Monica Smit, did – is merely one of the many lies that the vaccine dissidents promote.  But it might be true.  It is, at least, a hypothesis to investigate.  Remember thalidomide, Pete?  Research protects against sloppy journalism.  We call it triangulation.  Testing hypotheses.  Seeking truth.  The politicians “must know” they are wrong on many things Covid.  This makes them liars merely concerned for their own political reputations and not the common good.  What should we say about journalists who wilfully avoid scrutinising even the most patently idiotic claims of the Covid class?  They should not be accepting their salaries.
• Attribution of characteristics and positions to opponents that they do not possess.  Like vaccine dissidents don’t believe the virus is real, and kills people.  I know many people who despise the Covid State.  I know no one who believes the virus doesn’t exist.  See, again, under “anti-vaxxer”.  Many of those who oppose vaccine mandates, who see the bullying tactics of the Covid class as a fundamental abuse of human rights, who see the forced vaccination of children as beyond wicked and totally unnecessary, have been having themselves, their children and their pets vaccinated all their lives, only in those cases with safe, exhaustively tested vaccines that work.  Misrepresenting views you wish to refute is the oldest trick in the book.  Hoysted and others of his sub-genre often refer to what some people say are the motives of the global pro-vaxxer movement, and label people who oppose vaccine mandates – whatever they might or might not believe about the origins of pandemia – as tin-foil hat brigade types.  Many of us who oppose vaccine mandates as ludicrous and ineffective (polls show that imposing vaccine mandates actually puts people off getting the jab) and who regard forced vaccinations (especially of young children) as evil beyond words have a whole range of views about “what (if anything) is really going on”.  From conspiracy theorists, or as I prefer to call them, people who simply do their research and who investigate hypotheses that appear best to fit the facts, to those for whom the phrase “convergent opportunism” is a more apt description of the current behaviour of the ruling class.
• Attribution of dark motives to opponents.  Instead of being selfish, evil granny killers who are also stupid and just plain weird, Covid dissidents might turn out to simply be reasonable, proportionate, principled people who have thought deeply about the relative risks and benefits of the jab, who are not stupid, who are not any more or less selfish than, say, someone who gets the jab so as to be able to go to the pub and get pissed and obnoxious.  See what can happen when you attribute motives to people that they might not have?  Anyone can play that game.  The underachieving and still sadly persistent ALP politician Tony Burke recently compared Lyndall Dean’s claim about medical apartheid to “the dark places on the web”.  The painting of vax dissidents as extremist is common.  There is nothing remotely extremist about this position.  (One might even gently suggest that the removal of freedom to leave the country, the shutting down of State borders, effectively locking up people in their houses for months at a time, and the rest, is a trifle extremist…).  It is perfectly sensible.  We expect Burke and his ilk to say such things.  He is a politician, after all.  We expect higher standards of journalists.  Or, at least, we used to.
• Total absence of curiosity.  This is linked to the fanatical, ideological.  I don’t know if Hoysted actually knows anyone who is a vaccine refusenik, or has attempted to speak to one.  He might find out that many of these people are not anti-vaxxers in the old, pre-Covid sense of that term.  They might actually object to the fact that materials used in developing most of the vaccines come from the cells of aborted babies.  They might have a medical condition that, if Australian doctors were doing their jobs and not bending to the will of Big Pharma and the Covid State, would lead to them getting an exemption from taking the vaccine.  They might be simply be flipping the bird at Covid totalitarianism.  They might merely be wanting to know the answer to the twin questions – if the vaccines work, why do you care if I have been vaccinated?  And if they don’t work, why would I want to get the jab?  Simple questions.  Unasked by the incurious.
• The misattribution of cause and effect.  Lazy, ideological journalists and others often confuse correlation with causation, indeed some do it deliberately.  Many have tried to say that one thing or another “led to” a spike or a decline in Covid deaths or cases.  Hoysted has a crack at assigning causation in relation to what he and others misdiagnose as “vaccine hesitancy”.  Most vaccine dissidents I know are far from hesitant.  A recent poll in the USA suggested that over half of the unvaccinated will never submit to the jab.  This suggests firmness of view and firmness of purpose.  His first error, of course, is to suggest that hesitancy is some sort of “problem” to be understood and (therefore) solved.  His assumption forms part of his conclusion.  This is a syllogism.  A circular argument.  Then he attributes the “misinformation” of anti-vaxxers as a factor in the slow take-up of the vaccinations by some.   Again, this is problematising slow vaccine take-up.  Definitely not confined to Jack the Insider.  The ultimate problem with Hoysted’s “analysis” is that he assumes non-vaxxers to be stupid, and that somehow bullying them into getting jabbed will prove that we are an intelligent nation.   As Julie Ponesse (a Canadian Professor of Ethics) notes: “Why,” as a nurse recently asked, “do the protected need to be protected from the unprotected by forcing the unprotected to use the protection that did not protect the protected in the first place?”  Who is the stupid one?  Again, a circular argument.  The problem with such arguments is that they, well, go around in circles, and prove nothing.  They say more about the personality of the one promoting the argument than they do about their targets. He claims: “And we can’t leave out our old friends in the anti-vax movement in Australia who have contributed to vaccine hesitancy by spreading a raft of misinformation and outright lies to the population, some from the seats of our parliaments”.  I am not sure that Hoysted has ever argued the case that what anti-vaxxers (for example) say are lies.  I would be keen to hear what these lies are.  That vaxxers can cause perfectly healthy people to die?  True.  That vaccines do not stop the spread of Covid?  True.  That, for most healthy people, the risk of getting Covid and getting sick from it is minimal?  True.  That the vaccinated die (regularly) from Covid?  True.  That treatments other than vaccines are effective in helping people recover from Covid?  True.  Every claim is true.  Not a conspiracy theory in sight.  Perhaps Hoysted is referring to other claims I haven’t mentioned.
• Fixation with anti-vaxxers.  Hoysted’s fetish (like all such fixations) is not healthy, and invites explanation.  It also means that Hoysted and his ilk are missing the real issues, for example whether the relentless, almost maniacal faith in vaccines as a silver bullet solution to the non-problem of the “pandemic” is misplaced, why vaccines which are ineffective, unapproved, experimental and dangerous – over 600 Australian have now died shortly after receipt of the shot (and these are the ones who died from the shot’s side effects, not those who contracted Covid despite being vaccinated) – are still seen as our only way out.  Why not investigate why the pro-vaxxers are so fixated on a solution which clearly isn’t a solution?  Why not ask why the vaccine manufacturers and those who administer the vaccines have all been indemnified against prosecution?  Why not ask politicians why they keep digging the hole deeper?  Why not investigate the claims about booster jab efficacy?  Rather than simply rolling with the narratives of vested interests.   And a hundred other questions that are begging to be asked by some intrepid reporter.  As Julie Ponesse asks: “Why do we shame the ‘vaccine hesitant’ and not the ‘vaccine adamant’?”  Indeed.  Why? It used to be that journalists asked hard questions that went against their grain.  Good journalists like Alex Berenson, formerly of the New York Times – the anti-Hoysted – still do.

Yes, these are the ten major problems for Hoysted’s journalism-as-invective.  And I didn’t even mention cherry picking.  He does this in spades.

At the end of the day, few individual journalists amount to a hill of beans in the large world of political analysis.  Certainly, Peter Hoysted doesn’t.  What is alarming, though, is the fact that reputable newspapers – read by the top ten percent of intelligent Australians, in the view of the respected Steve Waterson (who is also, it must be acknowledged, employed by The Oz) – can allow their high-profile journalists to abuse and insult their intelligent and principled fellow Australians who simply demand their medical privacy and some pretty basic human rights.  And allow this on an ongoing basis.  Day after day.  Week after week.  These are not tabloids, after all.  Like The Daily Telegraph which actually abuses Covid dissidents in its very headlines.  Broadsheets with aspirations to be journals of record are meant to be above this sort of gaslighting.

Well might Hoysted be called an “insider”.  He and his newspaper are part of the establishment, and of the establishment’s crisis, as I termed it in March 2020 when the pandemia was barely under way.  He is merely one of the loudest voices of the Covid class.  While the Murdoch press – unlike the Nine/Fairfax/ABC industrial complex – does have a few counter-voices, like the above-mentioned Waterson – it is corporately beholden to the vaccine-as-silver bullet game-plan that is, in turn, the vehicle of the Great Reset promulgated by Big Davos and executed by Biden, Johnson, Macron, Trudeau, Ardern and the rest.  This is the insiders’ war on the rest of us, and Hoysted, with his vitriol against the identified enemy, is a handy foot soldier.  The term insider could be taken to mean, “he has the good oil”.  In Hoysted’s case, it simply means “he is part of the elite class” that looks down upon the great unwashed, from a great height and with appropriate disdain.  But don’t ever call his metier “journalism”.

Hilariously, Hoysted has called the anti-vaxx movement a “racket”.  This is from someone who defends an industry that gets all the governments of the world to buy a product that does not work, makes entire populations (or as close as) buy the product, makes them keep going back for more of the product when it is found not to work past a few months, indemnify the industry from prosecution, gets all the relevant professional medical associations to bully their members into promoting the product, and gets friendly university professors to accept grants from it to then propagandise its merits.  No, THAT is a racket.  Hoysted also calls what he describes as anti-vaxxers “liars”.  Again, this is quite rich coming from one who religiously – as in a cult – defends the vaccine industry.  The big vaccine manufacturers, as Alex Berenson has noted, are either serial corporate criminals or have never developed vaccines before.  Big Pharma lie?  Never!

Clearly, Hoysted doesn’t get irony, either.  He claims, with what one might assume to be a straight face:

In times of great upheaval, the question is how many people will fall prey to cultism.

Hoysted is a paid-up member of the Covid cult.  He has paid his dues.  He turns out irrelevant, insulting garbage week after week that fills space and does little more, in a newspaper with pretentions to seriousness.  He has done the work of the Covid State – find enemies, isolate them, ridicule them, all in the cause of, what exactly?

He asks:

The point is, if influencers can make some people believe that Michael Jackson is going to moon walk his way down Main Street, Dallas 12 years after his death, then those people will believe pretty much anything.

Almost unbelievably, Hoysted claims:

People who might identify as vaccine hesitant or are outright opposed to receiving Covid-19 vaccines cannot be denied health care. They are merely the victims of a sustained propaganda campaign based on a for-profit business model from anti-vax activists.

The idea that anti-vax activists are deluded and ignorant is wrong. They lie because there is money to be made in feeding fear. Their activism is designed to create suspicion and doubt, so the cash keeps rolling in. Their business model fails when fear dissipates.

Just change the phrase “Big Pharma” for “anti-vaxx activists” in the quote above.  Unlike anti-vaxxers who ask for piddling donations, vaccine manufacturers make gazillions on the back of indemnity and compulsion.

And this:

Politically weaponised misinformation is the greatest threat participatory democracies face.

Just one more:

If the government is serious about social media reform the time has come to criminalise the reckless spread of misinformation.

As I say, the man doesn’t do irony.  Like the ostrich, his head is buried, firmly, in the sand.  Or somewhere.

Weaponised misinformation?  Like believing that boosters will work when vaccines didn’t, for example?  Like thinking that vaccines will rid the world of Covid?  Like believing that you are the rational one in this debate?  Like endless nightly TV propaganda?  Like wheeling out those with massive conflicts of interest to spruik the Covid State and pretend they are independent and expert?  Like claiming that PCR tests work?  Like calling “cases” sickness?  Like covering up the sleazy connections?  Like claiming people shot dead have died from Covid?  (Yes, they are still doing this in Auckland).  I agree with Hoysted on one thing.  Members of a cult will, indeed, believe just about anything.  GK Chesterton had something to say on this matter.

Jack the Ideologue is an immensely loyal cog in an immensely powerful propaganda machine.  He needs to be called out.  Here might be an apposite journalistic epitaph.  As per Lucy Davies:

You so proudly stand for everything.

Black?
‘I’m with you.’
Gay?
‘I’m with you.’
Trans?
‘I’m with you.’
Disabled?
‘I’m with you.’
Vegan?
‘I’m with you.’
Activist?
‘I’m with you.’

Not agreeing to the government injection?

‘YOU DESERVE EVERYTHING THAT’S COMING TO YOU, YOU TRUMP-LOVING RIGHT-WING SELFISH CONSPIRACY THEORIST ANTI-VAX REFUSENIK. I DONT CARE IF YOU’RE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM – YOU’RE A FASCIST! The Guardian said so.’

Jack the Brainwasher must be included among the gaslighting class that is pressuring people, in his case through his columns, to take a government injection that is, to labour the point, unsafe for many and useless for most.  Whether there is a Dantean circle of hell for his breed I do not know.  Whether, come Nuremberg Two, woefully and dangerously misleading journalist-proselytisers will be called to account, I don’t know either.  At best, he is signing up for dumb policy cheerleading.  It is not a good look for our national newspaper.

Peter, the people you abuse have (often) lost their jobs, and they have principles.  You still have your job, somehow, and you have lost your principles.  You should be ashamed of yourself.  More importantly, your employer should be ashamed of you.