The media is still screaming

about the raids conducted by the AFP.  Someone else had a shot at me yesterday for not being sympathetic. 
No, I am not sympathetic. If you use illegally obtained information then you can expect to be prosecuted for it. 
I know there are all sorts of arguments about "freedom of the press" and "in the public interest" but I would be a good deal more willing to listen to those if the media was actually consistent in the way they handled these things.
Let me give you some examples. They are well documented but have not been well handled.
One of  our former Prime Ministers, Julia Gillard, trained as lawyer. Before she entered politics she was employed in one of the largest law firms in the country. She left there under rather curious circumstances and never renewed her registration as a lawyer. That is a very strange thing indeed. Someone else, one Ralph Blewitt, was charged for the serious criminal offences she was involved in but the matter was never taken any further. Why? Put simply she interfered when she was Prime Minister and nobody in the media was prepared to take the matter any further - for fear of what the government might do in retaliation.
Then there is the case of the man everyone thought would be the next Prime Minister. The media made very little of rape allegations against Bill Shorten. His party had also demanded the resignation of a member of the Coalition from his position as Deputy Leader when it was found that, while still married, he'd had an affair resulting in a child. Bill Shorten did that too - if anything even worse because the affair was with a married woman and he broke up not one but two marriages. The media barely mentioned those things while making headlines of the other incident.
There is another former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, about whom the press had almost nothing good to say even though his moral code with respect to marriage has no questions hanging over it. He volunteers - and did so long before he became a politician. They are still making fun of him. Apparently that's fine even though it destabilised the country at one point - and a lot of what has been said about him is simply untrue.
And then there is the case of Cardinal Pell, found guilty of sexual abuse. The judges are yet to consider their verdict with respect to the appeal in that matter but it would be fair to say that the media gave him a negative press for years. I don't think I'd like him but there are aspects of the case and the way it was reported that I find deeply disturbing. Anyone suggesting he might not be guilty has also been castigated.  His chief sins, apart from the very serious charges of sexual abuse, seem to be allegations that he was a conservative and didn't act when he should have done so. The problem with those is that he apparently believed in what his church had taught him and that he did ask for action to be taken on a number of occasions but the police simply didn't take the matters up. Those things don't get mentioned.
I think we have double standards here, serious double standards. It seems it is fine for the media to break the law and protect their sources in order to tell a story - however inaccurately - but when they are asked to meet the same standards of accountability they cry press freedom is being threatened.
The raids were conducted with a search warrant issued by a judge - and they are not given lightly. One of the stories being investigated was being reported in a way that was deliberately designed to cause alarm. There was nothing balanced about it. The media simply didn't like the proposal because it could have impacted on them.
I find it difficult to sympathise with that.