GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG – ISSUE NO. 26
4 SEPTEMBER 2009
CORRECTIONS
Thanks to MWD readers who advised of the following errors in Issue 25. The fan of Castro’s Cuba is Gerard Noonan (not Newman). And Mary Jo Kopechne was 28 (not 19) at the time of her death at Chappaquiddick.
BORING MONDAY ON THE ROAD TO SYDNEY UNIVERSITY
It’s been a slow (media) week. To get a gist of this phenomenon, consider ABC 1 programs last Monday.
The 7.30 Report commences with a significant report on industrial relations de-regulation (read award modernisation) and a news update on the (then) missing Victorian minister Tim Holding. Followed by an interview with Jim Johnson the former chairman of Fannie Mae – who told viewers that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were not big players in the creation of the US housing bubble. Oh yeah. Followed by a report on the Australian wine industry. Followed by a report on the – yawn – future of Russia’s very own Lada car. Followed by viewers asleep on their couches.
8 pm. Australian Story takes a full 30 minutes to tell the story of a middle class young man. It’s called “Fly With Me”. He makes paper planes. Wow. It was believed that he had a malignant brain tumour. Sad. He didn’t have cancer and he’s still with us. Hooray. He still makes paper-planes.
8.30 pm. Four Corners takes 50 minutes to run a BBC program on the 7/7 murder/suicide bombings in London on 7 July 2005. It’s called “Conspiracy 7/7: The London Bombings”. The suggestion is that this might have been a conspiracy by British authorities until it is revealed that the principal conspiracy theorist is a Holocaust-denier nutter. More yawns. That’s about it, folks.
9.15 pm. Media Watch contains the usual critique of non-stories. This week Jonathan Holmes makes a devastating critique of the Geelong Advertiser which has printed hairsuit instead of hirsute. How about that?
For those ABC viewers/listeners there was little alternative but to take refuge in Radio National. But, at the top of Late Night Live at 10.05 pm, Phillip Adams even sent MWD to sleep when he commenced the week with yet another account of himself. Let’s go to the audio tape:
…before I talk to Laura [Tingle], I’ve gotta tell you I’ve had a very strange night. Because I can’t say “no” and because the invitation was so charming – I agreed to chair a debate, a discussion rather, on censorship organised by a Sydney University group calling themselves ‘Verge’. No, not virgin. Verge. So it was on at 6 tonight so at the appropriate time I ran out the doors at the ABC. There was a taxi available – nice young bloke driving it.
Little did I realise as I eased myself in and said “Sydney Uni” that he was a sociopath. He hurtled up the hill, changed lanes about seven times and then ran a red out of Harris Street into Broadway.
To do this at peak period is suicidal and I had a near-death experience right-off. I, you know, criticised him mildly and politely and asked him to sort of slow down to walk speed. And he then went charging up that sort of taxi, you know, public transport lane on the left and while I sort of pointed out we were about to collide with a truck he accelerated rather than braked and bang we hit the truck. We hit the tray of the truck which, had we hit it just a smidgeon harder, would have decapitated me.
Then he parks the taxi in the middle of this lane so within minutes there’s a hundred busses all tooting and blaming me. And he disappears. He goes off to remonstrate with the truck driver. And I’m sitting there absolutely wrecked, the meter is ticking away merrily. The trucks are hooting, the buses are hooting, people are shaking their fists at me and I’m paying for his prolonged absence. Anyway he comes back, I’ve brushed all the glass off, and I say: “Look, you know you’ve really got to drive more carefully for the next kilometre”. At which stage he starts abusing me, the most spectacular obscenities. So I get out of the taxi and decide to hoof it. And then he’s screaming at me, very loudly, that he’s going to call the police because I haven’t paid the fare. Oh my heavens. Then I get to the bloody university and I can’t find the place, it’s in some vast new complex. Finally find it and a very nice group of people meet me who’ve organised the Verge festival.
It so happened that virtually no one turned up to hear the Man in Black at the Sydney University discussion. Not even the sociopathic taxi-driver, it appears. Then the lights went out. And so on. Which raises the key philosophical question. Namely, does anyone really care?
LINDA JAIVIN’S PRECEDENT
If the ABC’s Man In Black really wants to say something of interest about his favourite subject – namely HIMSELF – he should follow the example of (gorgeous) writer Linda Jaivin. Reviewing Claire Halliday’s Do You Want Sex With That? in The Weekend Australian last Saturday, Linda Jaivin wrote about herself in a compelling way which is of interest to all. And certainly to MWD.
To be direct, Ms Jaivin believes that Ms Halliday is somewhat of a wimp – on account of the fact that she attended a swingers’ party without ever, er, really swinging. Linda Jaivin acknowledges that Claire Halliday got “her knickers in a slight twist” on this occasion – but the knickers remained on. Shame. Which led Ms Jaivin to regret that the author did not do as she did some years ago when doing a story for Rolling Stone. Wrote Jaivin:
When I visited the Hellfire Club in 1993 for Rolling Stone….I at least had the decency to get whipped.
Fair crack of the whip, when you think about it.
NANCY’S PICKS OF THE WEEK
At The Sydney Institute’s Annual Dinner last Tuesday a senior ABC executive suggested that, when it comes to matters Aunty, any decision by Nancy to award a bone to the public broadcaster for poor performance should be matched up by an award for good performance. Or something like that – after all, it was late in the evening.
The idea has been accepted. Wherever possible when judging the ABC, Nancy will deliver two awards. Namely, a 5 Paws gong for excellence and a Zip Paws for trash. Here we go.
5 Paws Award – Emma Alberici Remembers Nazi Soviet Pact
In the main ABC Radio news bulletins on Wednesday morning, Emma Alberici reported on the commemorations in the Polish city of Gdansk to mark the 70th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Poland and the outbreak of hostilities in the Second World War. Adolf Hilter’s decision that Germany invade Poland took effect on 1 September 1939. On 23 August 1939, the Nazi leadership in Germany and the communist leadership in the Soviet Union had negotiated the Nazi-Soviet Pact – sometimes termed the Hitler-Stalin Pact or the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact or the Berlin-Moscow Pact. This is rarely mentioned in the Australian media.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact divided Poland between Berlin and Moscow. The Germany Army invaded the west of Poland on 1 September 1939. The Red Army invaded the east of Poland shortly after. The Nazi-Soviet Pact lasted until June 22 1941 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. During the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Soviet Union murdered some 20,000 Polish leaders and intellectuals in what came to be called the Katyn Massacre.
In her reports for ABC Radio News, Emma Alberici mentioned the Nazi-Pact, commenting that: “As Poland remembered those who’d lost their lives defending the country from the Nazis, commemorations were tinged with anger as Polish leaders tried to extract an apology from Russia for its part in starting the war and in the slaughter of 20,000 Polish officials and intellectuals.”
Ms Alberici also filed for the AM program on Wednesday. She reported that the “Polish leadership today regards the Soviet Union as equally responsible, with Germany, for starting World War II and referred to the “Berlin-Moscow Pact to divide Eastern Europe up between them”. 5 Paws.
Zip Paws Award – ABC Runs Labor Spin On AWB
And now for some balance. On the ABC Radio News Bulletin at 7 pm last Friday and again at 9 am on Saturday, the announcer referred to something termed the “Wheat for Weapons scandal”. Certainly this was a slogan used by the then Labor Opposition against the Coalition Government in the lead-up to the 2007 Federal election. But it was a political ploy.
As the Cole Inquiry established, the AWB improperly made payments to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq in order to sell wheat under the United Nations administered “Oil-For-Food” program. No one knows what happened to this money. It could have been used by Saddam to build palaces, fund mistresses, purchase weapons or whatever.
It would have been appropriate for an ABC news reader to refer to the corruption of the “Oil-For-Food” program during John Howard’s prime ministership. However, to refer to this as a “Wheat for Weapons scandal” is merely to accept Labor’s political spin and run it as ABC News endorsed fact. Zip Paws.
THE SQUARE-ROOT OF MEDIA BIAS, A FULL MOON, SOME ACADEMICS AND SO ON
The normally insightful “Cut & Paste” section in The Australian got into something of a tizz yesterday when it covered an AAP report of an academic study on what was termed “media slant” as follows:
Newspapers are left-wing, television is right-wing, and the media as a whole tends to favour the Coalition, according to a study of coverage while John Howard was prime minister. And surprisingly, according to researchers from the Australian National University, the ABC Television news is the most pro-Coalition of them all. Researchers found journalists were “a centrist bunch”. The exception was ABCTV news which “had a significant slant towards the Coalition”.
Newspapers were more pro-Labor, while talkback radio and television were more pro-Coalition. Melbourne’s The Age newspaper had the most “slanted” pro-Labor headlines. The ABC’s Radio National was the only media outlet to score dead even when it came to favouring left-leaning or right-leaning intellectuals.
Needless to say, MWD was surprised by these findings. So it went in search of the ANU paper. It’s termed How Partisan is the Press? Multiple Measures of Media Slant and written by Joshua S Gans (Melbourne Business School) and Andrew Leigh (Economics Program, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU).
Now for a full disclosure. MWD read the Gans/Leigh paper when there was a full moon – or close to a full moon. This may explain MWD’s inability to follow some of the insights of those two insightful academics. Take this insight, at Page 9, for example:
To estimate the political position of each media outlet, we simply estimate a weighted OLS regression, in which the dependent variable P is the share of Coalition mentions by a given public intellectual i in media outlet j in time period t, and the independent variable is a vector of indicator variables for each media outlet:
So that’s pretty clear, then.
[Not really. Are taxpayers paying good money for this sludge or is this all a fake? Ed]
It turns out that Gans and Leigh – with the help of taxpayers – decided to measure media slant by assessing how many public intellectuals were quoted by Federal parliamentarians and how many favourable mentions were made about them in the media. There was also an examination of “editorial endorsements in the five federal elections from 1996 to 2007”. Confused? Not surprised.
In the lead-up to the 2007 election, a majority of journalists – in Canberra and elsewhere – gave the impression that they were opposed to the Howard Government on a range of issues and that, as a result, their coverage was slanted to a leftist or left of centre position. The list includes such subjects as Australia’s’ commitment in Iraq, national security, climate change and the WorkChoices industrial relations changes etc. However, the ANU paper does not even cover these issues. Indeed, at times, the analysis is so vague as to be incomprehensible. Take this you-beaut analysis on Page 10, for example:
We opt to use a weighting scheme that is the product of the square root of the number of parliamentary mentions and the number of media mentions. Where p is the number of parliamentary mentions received by public intellectual i in period t and m is the number of media mentions given to public intellectual i in media outlet j in period t, the weight w given to a particular observation is:
Using square root weights has the advantage that (unlike log weights), the weights are still defined for observations with zeros. It also captures the intuition that the standard error of the mean of a binomial variable is equal to the square root of the sample size, multiplied by the mean, multiplied by one minus the mean, ie.,
Go on. Unfortunately Messers Gans and Leigh did just this. And, unfortunately, The Australian thought that the results of this study – which commenced as an ANU seminar – were worth reporting. This, apparently, is what passes for scholarship in the groves of the ANU.
On 28 August 2009 ANU Vice Chancellor, Professor Ian Chubb, criticised Liberal Senator Gary Humphries’ opposition to the re-introduction of a compulsory service fee for university students. The Canberra Times reported that Professor Chubb had declared: “Sometimes politicians think they know better than the experts.
Fancy that. Come to think of it, MWD might be able to live under a Chubb sandal-wearing dictatorship. But only if Chubb’s researchers at the ANU ceased their analysis. It would be bad enough being ruled over by “experts” like Chubb. But it would be insufferable to be square-rooted by his minions with the equations and their computers.
ALL LEFTIST ON THE AGE FRONT
In any event it was good to see that among the weighted OLS regressions, the variables (dependent and independent alike), the square roots and the not so square roots, The Age – sometimes known as “The Guardian on the Yarra” – held its own as the flyer of the Red Flag. To keep up with “The Guardian on the Yarra” leftist agenda, you merely have to follow the opinion/comment pages each week. Including this week.
▪ Monday 31 August. The Age presents three left of centre critiques of Kevin Rudd and the Rudd Labor Government. Academic Dr Lindy Edwards runs a re-regulate or perish line and bags the Prime Minister, whom she dismissively calls “Kevin”. Veteran Canberra based columnist Kenneth Davidson returns (once again) from retirement to write a weekly column. Mr Davidson bags the Rudd Government on climate change, supports the Greens and predicts “climate apocalypse”. CMFEU left-wing union boss John Sutton criticises the Howard Government, the Rudd Government and employers on immigration.
▪ Tuesday 1 September. Leftist political theorist Tim Southphommasane rails against “the Howard years”, “patriotic kitsch”, “crass sentimentalism”, Australia’s (alleged) “racist narcissism” and “deluded neo-conservatism”. You get the picture.
▪ Wednesday 2 September. “The Guardian on the Yarra” runs Jonathan Steele, from the real Guardian in London. He criticises President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan policy.
Then Catherine Deveny runs (yet another) column bagging religion in general and God in particular. She quotes from her “11-year-old atheist” son. Wow. Some genius, surely. And she claims that God is not alone in suffering from narcissist personality disorder (as in NPD). Opines Deveny:
It has been suggested that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong-il, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama suffer from NPD.
Alas, Ms Deveny does not say who precisely suggested this. Could it have been the boy-wonder Master Deveny? Still it’s interesting to know that The Age’s atheist-in-residence equates such democratically elected politicians as Clinton and Obama with such murderous thugs as Hitler and Stalin.
▪ Thursday 2 September. Once again “The Guardian on the Yarra” runs a piece from THE REAL THING. This time it’s The Guardian’s leftist columnist George Monbiot. He runs the-end-of-the-world-is-almost-nigh line due to climate change and the like.
HISTORY CORNER – WHITLAM, KERR AND ALCOHOLIC VERBALLING
MWD was surprised to open the Australian Literary Review on Wednesday and read this in John Hirst’s review of the book Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia (ABC Books, 2009 viz:
…in the opening chapter…an attempt is made to link alcohol to significant events in Australia’s history. There is a clearer link in the forced exile of an administrator of the Northern Territory in 1918 after he would not allow a cargo of Melbourne Bitter to land. Then there is the alcoholism of governor-general John Kerr which, if Gough Whitlam had known of it, would have disqualified him from consideration.
MWD turned up at the Annandale Galleries for the launch of Under the Influence that evening. The book’s co-authors spoke. First up there was MWD’s friend Ross Fitzgerald – followed by Queensland University of Technology academic Trevor Jordan. A quick scan of the book revealed references to the one-time Governor General Sir John Kerr (1914-1991).
Page 5 of Under the Influence deals with the fact that John Kerr was tired and emotional at the 1977 Melbourne Cup.
Although John Kerr’s drunken antics as Governor-General on Melbourne Cup day in 1977 occurred two years after the event, alcohol also played its part in the dismissal of the Whitlam government, still regarded by many Australian Labor Party faithful as a virtual coup. Gough Whitlam would not have recommended Kerr for the position of Governor—General if he had been aware of Kerr’s galloping alcoholism[9].
Footnote 9 refers to an article titled “Old believer not easily dismissed” which is said to have been published in The Australian on 31 October 2002. In fact the article, written by Mike Steketee, was published on 7 November 2002 and does not contain any reference to alcohol.
Then at Pages 53-54 the following claim is made:
Alcohol also played a part in what became known as “Kerr’s coup” – the removal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam from office in 1975 by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr. With Kerr’s help, the Opposition, led by Malcolm Fraser, blocked supply and triggered a double dissolution, which led to elections in both Houses and victory to the Coalition. Giving an account of the events in 2002, Gough Whitlam observed that he would never have appointed Sir John Kerr as governor—general had he known Kerr had a drinking problem: “It is my fault that I didn’t check on his background because if I had asked any of the judges of the New South Wales Supreme Court, of which he was the chief justice, or any senior counsel that I knew, about him, they would have told me he had a drink problem. He never told me, but while he was governor-general under me, he twice went to the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney to be dried out.”
The source for former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam’s claim about Kerr is the documentary Gough Whitlam in his own words: In Conversation with John Faulkner which screened on SBS TV on 10 November 2002. Tony Stephens previewed the documentary in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on 1 November 2002. Faulkner’s documentary was a fine study of Whitlam. But Senator Faulkner has always been a Labor diehard and an admirer of Gough Whitlam. And Gough Whitlam is not a credible source for a claim that John Kerr was a chronic alcoholic.
The available evidence points to the following conclusions:
▪ Like quite a few men of his generation, Kerr was at times a heavy drinker who occasionally got drunk – including at the Melbourne Cup in November 1977.
▪ There is no evidence that Kerr was even an alcoholic or treated for alcohol abuse. Indeed, Kerr’s work ethic indicates that he was not an alcoholic. For example, he wrote his memoir Matters for Judgment: An Autobiography (Macmillan, 1978), while living in France and with limited source material. Much of Kerr’s account was based on his memory. An alcoholic could not have achieved this.
▪ John Kerr did not help Malcolm Fraser to block supply in 1975. He merely resolved a deadlock which resulted from the Coalition’s decision to block supply and the Whitlam Labor Government’s refusal to call an election. The fact is that Kerr wrote the Matters for Judgment himself and it stands up as a fine work of record. Nobody, including supporters of Mr Whitlam, were able to discredit Kerr’s autobiography or to challenge his factual analysis.
▪ The legal reasoning behind Kerr’s dismissal of the Whitlam Government on 11 November 1975 was privately supported at the time by both Chief Justice Sir Garfield Barwick and High Court Justice Sir Anthony Mason. It was also publicly supported by Murray Gleeson QC – who later became Chief Justice. Agree with Kerr’s decision or not, it had nothing to do with alcohol.
▪ Dr Ralph Blacket was John Kerr’s physician before he became Governor-General. On 6 November 2002, the Sydney Morning Herald printed the following letter under the heading “John Kerr was no drunk”.
Gough Whitlam is not correct in asserting that Sir John Kerr, while governor-general, twice went to the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney to be “dried out”. I was John Kerr’s physician before his appointment. At that time he was overweight and unfit. I had him admitted to Prince Henry Hospital. His response to a weight reduction and exercise program was extremely good. He worked vigorously around the adjacent 18-hole golf course for several hours each day. From memory, he lost more than 15 kilograms in weight and his blood pressure fell to 120/80. He didn’t have a drop to drink.
To my knowledge, he had no other admission to Prince Henry or Prince of Wales hospitals. At home in Turramurra, he walked for miles most days. He died in retirement of a cerebral tumour.
Gough Whitlam is a highly intelligent man. It’s a pity that he continues his intifada against his former friend. De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
Ralph Blacket, MD
Double Bay, November 5
It’s a pity that ABC Books did not engage a fact-checker.
Until next time.