MEDIA SHAME FILE
Outlet: News.com.au
Headline: ‘Go to Hell’: Thousands rally against Pauline Hanson
Summary: High school and university students held protests against Pauline Hanson and One Nation around Australia today, which despite being hyped up by the left-wing media and political class didn’t attract that many people.
But undeterred by the poor turnout in Sydney, Australia’s biggest online news site, News.com.au, tried to fool its readers on social media by using an image of a much bigger crowd from 2002.
Thousands of school and university students are rallying in cities across the country to protest against Pauline Hanson as One Nation surges in popularity. Full story: https://t.co/VTayUAvWG1 pic.twitter.com/MqNUHD0GFh
— news.com.au (@newscomauHQ) August 13, 2026
We’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt and write this off as an accidental photo misuse, but it is unlikely to have been an inadvertent error by a moronic social media monkey.
The picture was not used in the story about the protests, is visibly old due to the widespread use of Covid masks, and would have had to have been pulled out of a photo library for use in the thumbnail, which appeared on Facebook and X.
It’s pretty clear by looking at the choice of photo and the phrasing of the headline that whoever chose the photo was trying to make the protest look much larger than it was, and give the impression that there is a much larger groundswell of opposition to Pauline Hanson and One Nation than there really is.
The story also seems sympathetic to the protesters and repeatedly emphasises the supposed size of the crowd, using phrases such as “deafening chants” and “swamped Town Hall”, and repeatedly quotes protesters accusing Ms Hanson of racism.
This is disappointing, but not surprising from news.com.au, which regularly publishes left-wing propaganda despite being owned by the “right-wing” Murdochs, although it does employ a couple of decent journalists.
And it’s not the first time a major corporate media outlet has been caught using photos to try to turn Australians against Pauline Hanson, with The Guardian’s picture editor admitting earlier this year that the publication used editing techniques to make her look “more ominous”.
Subtext: “Everyone hates Pauline Hanson, you should too”.
