The harrowing local news stories of the last week have confronted Australians with the limitations and opportunities of our contemporary media environment. Between the disinformation hurricane that absorbed the slaughter in Bondi Junction and the sober verdict of the Bruce Lehrmann defamation trial, Australians have been provided with an unusually clearcut choice between the media we have … and the media we may want.

It’s less than a week and an aeon ago that six innocent people – five of them women – were murdered by a knife-wielding man in a Sydney mall. At home in Victoria, I found out about it from my mostly-American group chat, who’d seen it in their news feeds and were trying to work out if I was nearby. I wasn’t, but the glib explanation that I give to overseas friends that “Australia is a small village with an entire continent to itself” was proved very quickly true. Within a couple of hours, I’d learned from social media that someone I knew was there, a deeply traumatised eyewitness to events. On Wednesday, I learned another friend’s beloved family member lay among the dead.

It’s a bizarre paradox that the same medium that delivered the direct, material and immediate news of the tragedy to the communities of those affected by it was also the place that platformed wild disinformation campaigns that........

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