‘Purest star in the Murdoch firmament’: Miranda Devine does us ‘proud’

Given the way our media greedily imbibe far-right talking points and conspiracy theories from the US, it was probably inevitable that we would send back a cluster of those preoccupations knotted together in human form.

As the Dominion/Fox lawsuit looms, our very own Miranda Devine has been singled out by the Semafor Media column as “the newest, purest star in the Murdoch firmament … [who’s] emerged as perhaps America’s most important pro-Trump columnist at a moment when Murdoch is, allegedly, moving on”.

We’ve long followed Devine’s work in and about the US, and it’s true — even before she moved there, none of the Sky News after dark carnival could match her zeal as Trump’s most committed Australian adulator, and she stuck by him after most of the others had belatedly found their moral centre.

Halcyon days

It’s easy to forget, given her unswerving loyalty to News Corp talking points, but Devine was a columnist at then-Fairfax papers for many years, which is where she argued “it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lampposts but greenies” after Black Saturday, almost like she was auditioning for her next role.

Duly, in 2010 she was the beneficiary of the hereditary principle at News Corp — her father was longtime News vet Frank Devine — she joined the crowded ranks of outrage merchants at The Daily Telegraph, where she fit seamlessly into the climate sceptic, anti-marriage equality, anti-PC, George Pell-defending commentator ranks, who would rise, in unison, to curse lefty groupthink.

During this time she perfected a technique of logic looped back on itself and meeting at an ultimately predictable centre like a lemniscate. The repeated argument that bushfires have nothing do with climate change but are the fault of “green ideology” was just the most basic demonstration of this talent. The ideology of “Black Lives Matter” was responsible for police shooting an unarmed woman and the “jihad against ‘carbon pollution'” leading to poorly lit streets and thus more rape, and “marriage equality campaigners are basically ISIS” is her at intermediate level.

For her true A-game you need to read the 2011 piece in which Devine argued that then-finance minister Penny Wong’s decision to have a child with her partner was not something that the Australian public should celebrate. Then, via some glorious pretzelling, she linked the riots happening in London at the time to gay marriage: “You only had to see the burning streets of London last week to see the manifestation of a fatherless society.”

In 2019, Devine followed the footsteps of longtime Murdoch lieutenant Col Allan, joining the New York Post, where Allan had returned as a consultant.

Just the facts

As Semafor notes, Devine is distinct from many Trump loyalists in that she turns her hand to a bit of journalism from time to time.

She’s most recently published “leaked documents from the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings” and landed scoops such as when the “Trump campaign gave her the exclusive on an FEC complaint complaining about a letter from intelligence officials in 2020 labelling Hunter’s laptop as disinformation”.

But assiduous journalism hasn’t always been her strength. As part of her long-running opposition to advances in LGBTQIA+ rights — be it in the form of marriage equality or anti-bullying programs — she has made some notable errors. She has relied on the American College of Pediatricians, a fringe group of somewhere between 60 and 200 healthcare workers who spread discredited and false claims including attempting to link homosexuality to pedophilia. Plus she incorrectly claimed that terms such as “girl” had been banned at a high school as part of a proposed implementation of the Safe Schools program.

Perhaps the most costly error came when Devine responded to a video of Murri boy Quaden Bayles weeping and saying he wanted to die after being bullied, by asking aloud whether Bayles had been “coached” to say things that “no nine-year-old would say”, eventually leading to an apology and $200,000 as part of a settlement.

Donald Trump

Vanity Fair reported Allan’s role at the Post was partly to keep the pro-Trump crowd onside in a way that didn’t alienate its relatively liberal New York readership. According to VF, Allan understood that “if you’re talking to a New York audience, you can’t go full MAGA … You can’t just be all Fox News.” Apparently no-one told Devine.

She has been unwavering in her florid devotion from the very start, arguing before his 2016 victory “compared to Clinton, [Trump] is a paragon of virtue,” and after it that “a great force has arrived to rescue Western civilisation and its name is Trump, Donald J Trump”.

After his coronavirus diagnosis, she wrote in the New York Post: “If the president bounces back on to the campaign trail he will be an invincible hero who not only survived every dirty trick the Democrats threw at him, but the Chinese virus as well” which earned a retweet from Trump himself — along with Devine’s email address, exposing her to a volley of absolutely shocking abuse from the so-called tolerant left, like “you are dumb”, which she promptly turned into content.

She’s maintained this loyalty since, repeating the baseless election fraud theories, defending Capitol Hill rioters and obsessively covering Hunter Biden, US President Joe Biden’s son.

Hunting a story

It may well be after the fall of Trump that Devine truly earned that “purest star” tag, reaching its apotheosis with the book Laptop from Hell.

The book purports to tell the story of the laptop a “drug-addled” Hunter Biden abandoned at a Mac repair shop in 2019, thus telling us “what China knows about the Bidens” and illustrating a vast conspiracy by big tech and the media to suppress the shocking truth.

This was the same yarn that then Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani had shopped around in 2020. After Fox News (?!) passed on it due to “credibility issues”, he went to the Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out”. The original reporter was so embarrassed they took their name off it.

The media covered it plenty, largely to point out the many issues with the story. None of this stopped the book selling while Jim Comer, leader of the House Republican investigations into Hunter Biden’s business relationships, has said Devine is a “top-notch reporter who continues to reveal the full extent of the Biden family’s influence-peddling schemes and shady business dealings overseas”.