Media scrutiny can take surprising forms, as One Nation and Pauline Hanson are now finding out.

It can take the form of a National Press Club lunch at which Hanson is asked only one hard question and receives a round of applause from her table of supporters for abusing the journalist who asked it.

It can take the form of a slow burn ignited by a single word – monoculture – that she used at that same lunch and which lodged in the communal memory, a touchstone for what she and the party stand for.

It can take the form of an apparently friendly approach from a commercial television current affairs program anxious to push a common agenda with her on the issue of “uncontrolled immigration”, but which then backfires spectacularly.

It can take the form of paparazzi-style pictures of Hanson at a luxury resort in Italy in the company of the billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart.

And it can take the form of spontaneous combustion, as when her star recruit, Barnaby Joyce, yells aggressively at his dog while live-to-air nationally on ABC television.

But somewhat paradoxically, the lunch seems to have been a turning point.

Up to and including that occasion, the media herd, on the whole, had been content to let Hanson get away with shutting out journalists she did not like, or from organisations such as the ABC and Guardian Australia that she did not like.

This occurred, for example, on the eve of the Farrer by-election in May, and again a couple of weeks later at a chamber of commerce meeting in Perth. Hanson orders the ABC out and the........

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