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The thing is - it's also not always lying as such. Some of it is, but not all of it. And some of the lies didn't originate with the media organisations reporting them. Often they are passing on lies they've been fed.

A lot of it though isn't deliberate dishonesty - it comes from not understanding things about the country they are trying to write about. It may pain me to say it, but Australia isn't that important a country. We've only got 25 million people and a political influence that comes from being a fairly small country. Most of the time Americans have no particular reason to be all that interested in our politics, so American journalists generally don't understand a lot of things about the place. In this recent situation, I think a lot of the problems with reporting I'm talking about come from Americans not understanding how Australia's constitution makes the state governments more powerful than the Commonwealth government in areas of public health. So the conservative Prime Minister winds up being blamed in America for things he has no power to stop that are actually being done by socialist state Premiers. I also don't think a lot of Americans understand that Australia is eight separate jurisdictions which are radically different from each other in terms of how COVID is being handled. 90% of the bad stuff that is happening in Australia right now is happening in one state - Victoria. 99% of it is happening in two states - Victoria and New South Wales. Most of the rest of the country is largely open and pretty close to business as usual. These are the most populous states, so in terms of population it's about a third of the country - but it's still not the whole country - and if it wasn't for Daniel Andrews in Victoria, who has pretty much infected politics in New South Wales as well - well, we wouldn't be in this mess.