re: bob brown / mopom
I presume Shock Jock is referring to Media Watch and David Marr., ollie.
Not surprised you presented Crikey.com to give another "unbiased" review of the story.
No matter what spin you may wish to put on it, even the most incorrigible liar wouldnt be able keep a straight face if answering "no" to the question "Is the ABC /Media Watch left wing...
Bit like using Beria to holding a "Truth , the whole truth and nothing but the truth " investigation into Joe Stalin...lol
But we know where youre coming from, you have plenty of company.
Australian Bias Corporation ? By Stephen Barton One of Margaret Thatcher's ministers once complained that,
'The word conservative is now used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose political views differ from the insufferable, smug and sanctimonious, naive, guilt ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of that third-rate decade, the 1960s.'
One cannot help wondering if this eloquently bitter diatribe is equally applicable to Australia. Is the word conservative used by the ABC as a term of abuse ? Well it probably depends upon who you ask, certainly some Coalition ministers would be inclined to agree and Richard Alston has been very vocal in saying so. The question of media bias in the ABC is one worth exploring.
If you tune into Triple J you can almost instantly detect the sometimes blatant bias. Sarah McDonald, Sarah Landau and Jen Aldershaw lead the charge of bright young women, for whom whatever is fashionable is correct, the Left is good, the Right is the epitome of ignorance and evil. The promotion of the 'Howard's End' concert and the 'Rock Enrol' campaign are demonstrative of the youth network's bias.
For the past few weeks prominent Australian bands have been telling Triple J listeners if they care about multiculturalism, the environment, Jabiluka national park, gay rights etc, they must enrol to vote. The implicit assumption was that the Howard government was launching a full scale assault on these sacred cows and that to save Australia they must vote Labor and or Greens or Democrat. They just stopped short of mentioning names and parties, that is all except the 'Whitlams' Tim Freedman, who gleefully predicted the end of the Howard government and actively promoted the 'Howard's End' concerts. Senator Alston complained, then Richard Ackland of the ABC's Media Watch complained. In suitably smug and sanctimonious tones Ackland informed viewers that Alston was merely kicking the ABC can, Peter Costello had lent his support to the Rock Enrol campaign, so what's the fuss ?
The blatant bias of Triple J is probably unique in the ABC, but bias exists nonetheless. The 7:30 Report's Kerry O'Brien worked for Whitlam and Lionel Bowen, his colleague Barrie Cassidy served as Bob Hawke's press secretary and Jennifer Byrne's sympathies are well known. So what ? Does this mean their bias permeates their work ? Not necessarily and not all the time. But it could be that these journalists are indicative of a left of centre publicly funded corporation, headed at various times by Labor sympathisers like David Hill, who just lost his bid for a NSW Labor seat, and Brian Johns. This might be guilt by association, but given the intense criticism of the ABC's election coverage there is cause for concern. The left leaning bias of the ABC is usually seen in the content of news or current affairs, but it also manifests itself in the broadcasting of certain programmes.
To name a few examples from recent history, the ABC has broadcast a sympathetic documentary on 'Red Ted' Theodore, a Queensland Labor Premier and Treasurer in Labor's Scullin Government. A vivid and devastating description of Theodore in Frank Hardy's Power Without Glory renders Brian Burke the model of propriety in comparison. Then there was the sympathetic documentary on Labor Leader H V Evatt, who was mentally unfit for his office. Then the documentary on Manning Clark, in which his Soviet links, the lies and the awful history were glibly dismissed by sympathetic historians and family and friends. No critical witnesses were present, only passing reference was made to Peter Ryan, Manning Clark's publisher.
Ryan, in a series of articles in Quadrant, expressed regret for allowing Clark's exuberance to go unchecked. Detailing gross inaccuracies in Clark's History of Australia, Ryan lamented the fact that Clark behaved more like a political pamphleteer than a historian. The contents of Ryan's authoritative and incisive critique were ignored. A smudged photo was shown depicting Ryan as a man of diminutive status. The programme documented the response at the time to Ryan's criticism. It was a parade of a Australia's cultural Great and the Good, like Robert Hughes, who condemned Ryan's attacks as cheap, and implied that he was a coward for publishing his criticism after Clark's death. Hughes later admitted that he never read Ryan's piece.
So what ? Three left leaning documentaries surely don't condemn the whole corporation to the charge of bias. Not exactly, however last year the ABC screened a fly-on-the-wall style documentary on Graeme Campbell's 1996 election campaign. It was a relatively objective account of Campbell's campaign, and for some reason, perhaps Campbell's initial support of Hanson, the ABC deemed it fit at the end of the programme to provide a disclaimer and an apology.
Then there was the apology and disclaimer after the ABC screened two episodes of a British series Against Nature. The series endeavoured to expose what it saw as environmental myths and fallacies of the environmental movement. The series had caused a fuss in the UK with shrill cries of bias. An independent report into the television series found that the programme was not overtly bias, but it had had unfairly edited some interviews.
After the screening of the second episode the complaints rolled in. Triple J squealed and those associated with the programme were labelled 'revolutionary Marxists.' Greenpeace was particularly cross that the programme had drawn a theoretical line from National Socialism to Environmentalism. It was used as evidence to cite the delusional nature of the programme. And yet anyone who knew anything about the theoretical basis of national socialism and fascism could see the legitimacy of the argument.
All told, the fault that the ABC sees fit to offer disclaimers and apologies after these programmes, but not for the left leaning documentaries ? Whatever the reason it indicates the left leaning bias of the corporation, a hangover from the Whitlam era.
As someone once said of one of the Hanover Kings, 'he was a man of much wit, but little judgment.' The comment was tailor made for Gough Whitlam, but his charisma made up for his lack of judgment and made people who should have known better lose theirs, including Stuart Littlemore. In his 1996 work, The Media and Me, Littlemore writes how
'The ABC had a slavish belief in "balance"...In one of my bulletins as chief sub, I "balanced" twenty lines of a Whitlam speech on the defects in Australian foreign policy with twenty lines about Billy McMahon being pelted with flour bombs...'
Littlemore was not alone. Many other senior journalists including Alan Ramsy, Kerry O'Brien, Milton Cockburn, Laurie Oakes and David Solomon were keen supporters of Whitlam, and his successors Hayden and Hawke. The attraction of these journalist to Whitlam was indicative of the dominance of the left among the educated middle classes and cultural elates. Undoubtedly many of these journalists have changed political colours since the 1970s, but in the ABC old loyalties, or more accurately, old influences die hard. Some are prepared to justify or tolerate bias on the grounds that it counter balances that of the commercial stations.
Undoubtedly the quality of journalism on the ABC surpasses anything on the commercial stations. The ABC, unlike the commercial stations, presents serious news and current affairs, providing quality where quality is lacking. But people forget that commercial stations are neither Left nor Right. They are populist, demagogues in the hunt for ratings, appealing to prejudices of the lowest common denominator; sensationalising, trivialising and forever dumbing down. The fact is that populism, when ratings are involved, is not exclusively of the right or the left. The ABC represents the serious against the superficial, not Left against Right.
Chairman of the ABC, Donald McDonald, had argued that there is nothing wrong with bias so long as there exists competing bias. He is obviously correct. The treatment delivered to McDonald for exposing his personal liking for John Howard, be it inappropriate or not, illustrates that the ABC has little tolerance for the chairman's variety of bias. Are we to expect an apology or disclaimer ?
