At what point will so much of Australia’s mainstream media, and the press gallery in particular, stop pretending what’s happening in politics is even remotely business as usual?

One of the lessons of the last four years in America was the struggle of a media class resisting the normalisation of Trump’s behaviour — the open corruption, the constant new lows of presidential misbehaviour, the trashing of institutions and centuries-old political norms, the attempts to intimidate the media, constant attacks on science and facts, indifference to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, culminating in his incitement of an effort to overthrow a democratically elected government.