Issue 5

GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG – ISSUE NO. 5

3 APRIL 2009

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NON-NEWS UPDATE

The big media non-news of the week is that Labor has appointed two Labor-friendly luvvies to the ABC Board – namely former Australia Council and Sydney Opera House supremo Michael Lynch CBE AM and former ABC executive and current Griffith Review editor Dr Julianne Schultz AM.  There they will join Dr Janet Albrechtsen and Dr Keith Windschuttle – two Coalition-friendly conservatives. This may make for some interesting Board meetings of the “Doctor in the (ABC) House” genre.  But no more than that.  

It is not clear who runs the ABC – but, certainly, the Board does not.  John Howard’s decision to put Janet Albrechtsen, Ron Brunton and Keith Windschuttle on the ABC Board was a futile gesture in what were said to be the culture wars.  All it did was to remove three ABC critics from the public debate – in so far as the ABC was concerned – and place them in a situation where they could not comment on matters ABC.

The Howard appointees were not able to reform the public broadcaster – which is effectively run by a number of staff dominated cliques, many of leftist dispositions.  Producers and presenters determine who will – and who will not – be heard on the ABC.  Criticise an ABC program and you risk being silenced by the public broadcaster.  This was the case before Brunton, Albrechtsen and Windschuttle arrived on the ABC Board.  And it remains the case today.  There is nothing that ABC Board members can do about this.

When it was elected to office, Labor set about what it claimed was de-politicising the ABC Board appointments.  It set up a new process which went something like this. The Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet set up a Nomination Panel for appointments to the boards of the ABC and SBS.  The four person panel appointed a recruitment firm to nominate a long-list of 25 from the hundreds who had expressed interest in a Board seat.  The Nomination Panel chose a short-list of seven from the long-list of 25 and conducted interviews with the Secret Seven.  Then the Minister chose two from the short-list to fill the vacancies on the ABC Board.

Arise Michael Lynch and Julianne Schultz – who could well have been chosen by Labor without the bureaucratic hoo-haa and the administrative, consultancy and travel costs involved.  Both appointees were busy talking to the media about their appointment even before the formal announcement was made by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy on Wednesday. Most ABC staff will welcome these appointments. Schultz’s Griffith Review is published in conjunction with ABC Books and promoted on the ABC – and she is an advocate of increased funding for the arts, including the ABC.  Certainly Deborah Cameron, the ABC’s leading eco-catastrophist, seemed happy that Schultz had the gig when she interviewed her on Wednesday morning on 702 – before the formal announcement of her appointment was made.

Michael Lynch was reported in The Age on April Fool’s Day as saying that he had no time for the accusations against the ABC of left-wing bias. He added:

I don’t see the role of the board is to be sitting there as lord high inquisitor on the politics of the individuals or the organisation.  I think the organisation needs to be made, and I think these appointments will probably make, the organisation feel more secure – that every decision or every announcement by an ABC journalist or a part of the organisation is not getting itself into unending scrutiny from the board.

This is a novel approach to accepting a Board seat.  Mr Lynch sees his role as making ABC journalists feel more secure about themselves – rather than of overseeing the governance of the ABC.  As soon as Lynch returns from his temporary abode in London, you can see him slipping into his sandals and joining Che Guevara tee-shirt wearing ABC Radio National staff in a mutual hand-holding exercise as he assures them that they will no longer be in the grip of a “Lord High Inquisitor”.  By the way, who precisely might this person be at the moment?

Meanwhile ABC chairman Maurice Newman – who sponsored the visit of the, wait for it, neo-liberal Milton Friedman to Australia some years ago – is busy taking the hat around in Canberra seeking more taxpayers’ money for the public broadcaster. Just when you might have thought that Mr Newman might be apologising to the Prime Minister for his (so-called) neo-liberal past, he is busy urging the Rudd Government to spend yet more money on the publicly funded organisation which looks after such self-declared leftists at Phillip Adams. Time was when Maurice Newman used to believe in expenditure reductions.  Time was when Maurice Newman was not an ABC chairman.

NANCY’S PICK-OF-THE-WEEK

Without doubt, the star media performer of the week was Glenn Milne. Last Sunday he turned up on Network 10’s Meet the Press in a dark suit, white shirt, red tie and matching red glasses.  Fair dinkum. It was as if Mr Milne had borrowed his optical aid from Edna Everage’s dressing room.  MWD was so focused on the Milne eye-wear that it was almost impossible to take notice of questions he asked of – or the comments he directed at – Meet the Press’s guests Tony Abbott and Clive Williams.

So MWD went to Milne-In-Print where, alas, his lesson for Sunday was no clearer than his Meet the Press appearance – as the following examples demonstrate:

▪ GM on why the Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon may not have been spied on by the Defence Department:

Senior ALP figures now fear the leak of the dossier on Mr Fitzgibbon could have come from internal critics and not directly from the defence department, as first thought. – Glenn Milne, Sunday Telegraph, 29 March 2009, Page 1

▪  GM on why Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon may have been spied on by the Defence Department:

We’re unlikely to ever know who leaked the allegations that the Defence Signals Directorate was investigating Fitzgibbon’s relationship with the increasingly mysterious Helen Liu, a wealthy Chinese national well connected to the Beijing government. The circumstantial evidence, however, is that the leak came from inside the Defence Department itself. – Glenn Milne, Sunday Telegraph, 29 March 2009, Page 39

So there you have it. Or not.

ROBERTSON QC’s EPPING ACCENT

What’s an Epping accent?  Well, it’s the kind of accent acquired by someone born in the Sydney suburb of Epping and now living in London who sublimally attempts to disguise the fact that they were brought up in Epping and sublimally imply that they were brought up somewhere else.  Such as Oxford, perhaps; or maybe Belgravia.

On ABC 1’s Talking Heads last Monday, Peter Thompson asked the Epping born – and London based – Australian human rights campaigner Geoffrey Robertson about his accent.  For eons, Robertson has sounded like he had Little Lord Fauntleroy as an old man and Lady Windermere as a mumsy.  Believe it or not, Robertson QC blamed the ABC.  Really.

Peter Thompson: I believe you blame the ABC for your vowels?

Geoffrey Robertson:  Well, in a way.  I didn’t speak at all until I was five – or not so that anyone could understand me.  No doubt I was having some interior monologue. But when I did talk it was in the rather strangulated English vowels of those ABC announcers.

Go on. He did.  Robertson expects us to believe that, growing up in Sydney’s north-west, his accent was not influenced by his mother, father, siblings, school mates at Epping Boys High or friends at Sydney University – but, rather, is all due to the fact that he listened to Michael Charlton’s cricket broadcasts on ABC Radio.

The highlight of Talking Heads occurred when Robertson reminded viewers that he was a Rhodes Scholar (well done) and that he had obtained a first class mark for a school boy essay on William Shakespeare (congratulations). He also quoted at length from The Tempest (groan) in a manner beloved of quite a few Sydney-siders who were educated in the 1950s and 1960s.  

Robertson QC is currently in Australia to flog his new book Statute of Liberty and to campaign for a bill of rights – or, rather, a charter of rights – in Australia. On 21 March he appeared at the Brisbane Festival of Ideas.  Like many such functions, it is more a festival of idea – since such taxpayer funded gigs are not noted for their plurality of views.

Robertson QC banged on to an adoring audience.  Highlights of the address turned on his claim that universal suffrage first emerged at the Putney Debates of 1647.  He neglected to mention that the Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell dominated the debates at Putney – and he was no democrat.

Robertson QC then referred to Britain in the late 18th Century and declared: “In those terrible days in Britain you were executed, you were hung, if you stole more than 40 shillings.”  Not so.  Portraits of the likes of Robertson QC are “hung”.  18th Century thieves were hanged.  The Epping born Robertson went on to use the word “we” in relation to Britain – as in “we lost the American colonies”. Fortunately someone found them again.

CONSPIRACY CORNER

For the best conspiracy theory of the week, let’s hear from Charlie Aitken of Southern Cross Equities who told Ali Moore on Lateline Business last Monday that Treasurer Wayne Swan could not be believed when he said that he had rejected the China Minmetals bid to take over Oz Minerals on national security grounds.  Mr Swan was concerned that Oz Minerals’ South Australian Prominent Hill mine is located in Woomera Prohibited Area.  Mr Aitken was not having any of this – as he told Ali Moore:

Well, I mean if you think about the national security.  I mean, Prominent Hill has been beside Woomera for all four months that this has been sitting on the Treasurer’s desk. I’m surprised that he only noticed on the weekend that it was there.  I mean, as some smart people in the market said today, the last thing, the last weapon, that was tested at Woomera was a water pistol.  I mean, it’s very hard to believe it’s a national security issue.  The market now believes that – is now concerned about the other China-related deals – and you can see they were marked down in the market today.

Well, if Mr Aitken were as smart as he believes he is, he would be aware that the Treasurer is prohibited from commenting on matters which are being examined by the Foreign Investment Review Board.  So Wayne Swan was well aware of the location of the Prominent Hill mine. It’s just that he could not raise the national security issue before the FIRB had completed its report to him.  And if Mr Aitken really believes that the only security concern with Prominent Hill turns on water pistols, well he should take his humour to the Melbourne Comedy Week and get a stand-up gig on the same platform as, say, Catherine Deveny. Re which see below.

FAWN AGAIN

Top fawners for the month of March were the audience at the Australian National University on 24 March who gave former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami a standing ovation – as reported on by Hayden Cooper on the AM program the following morning.  Mr Cooper supported the S.O.- editoralising that Mr Khatami is “the one Iranian leader preaching a message of dialogue, justice and peace”.  Oh, yeah?  This is not the view of Nosrat Hosseini, from the Iranian Women’s Association. She wrote to The Australian on 26 March in the following terms:

The media tags Khatami as “moderate” and a “reformer”, but his tenure as president, from 1997-2005, and in other positions of authority, made clear he is neither. Most notably he was the minister for culture and Islamic guidance during the infamous massacre of political prisoners in 1988, in which at least 30,000 people were killed. 

As president, he gave the order to suppress protesting students in 1998. When he went to the University of Tehran 10 years later, students there chanted “Death to Khatami”. Khatami approved plans to carry out terrorist and missile attacks on the bases of the Iranian opposition, the People’s Mujaheddin Organisation of Iran (PMOI). 

In 1998 there was a series of murders and disappearances of Iranians who had been critical of the regime, known as the “chain murders”. The victims were injected with potassium, shot in staged robberies, victims of deliberate car accidents or stabbed. They included more than 80 writers, translators, political activists, ordinary citizens and poets. 

Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian photojournalist was arrested, brutally raped, tortured and murdered by the Iranian regime in July 2003. Many newspapers were banned on Khatami’s orders. Religious minorities (including Jews, Christians, Sunni and Sufi Muslims, Baha’is and Zoroastrians) faced systematic harassment, discrimination, incarceration, torture and even execution. Reformers, students, labour activists and journalists were persecuted for “insulting Islam”. 

At a speech in 1999, Khatami said: “Whoever accepts the Constitution must also consent to the principle of the Absolute Supremacy of the Clerics. Such a person would then be one of us and a citizen of the Islamic system, and the system is obliged to defend their legitimate rights.” In other words, only those Iranians who accept the supreme authority of an unelected man should be afforded civil rights. 

The world has been so focused on Iran’s nuclear program and sponsorship of terrorist organisations, it has been effectively distracted from concentrating on and condemning Iran’s systemic human rights abuses. 

Decent people will find the very idea of receiving him in this country unacceptable; doing so under the pretext of culture and on university premises is inconceivable. 

Still, if Khatami is to receive a Standing Ovation anywhere, you would expect university intellectuals to be up-standing.

A HEWSON UPDATE

Did you read Dr Dr Dr Hewson’s column in the Australian Financial Review last Friday? It was a truly stunning effort.  The Doctor appeared to be channeling Green Left Weekly as he condemned “excessive liquidity, debt and greed” and called for the “transition to a low-debt, low-carbon society, not just an economy”. Alas, the Doctor did not say to what extent the collapse of Elderslie Finance Corporation, which went broke just after he stepped down as the company’s chairman, was due to excessive liquidity or debt or greed.  See Issue 3.  Perhaps Tony Jones might ask John Hewson about Elderslie when he appears on Q&A this Easter Thursday.

BRING BACK DEVENY (CONTD.)

MWD continues its campaign for The Age to bring back its inner-city leftist snob Catherine Deveny – so that she can provide content for MWD by continuing to sneer at Age readers who happen to live in the suburbs.  There is a precedent, after all.  On 15 March the Sunday Age put the following comment at the end of Paul Daley’s column, viz: “This is Paul Daley’s last column for The Sunday Age.”   But Mr Daley’s column appeared again in the same paper last Sunday.  Clearly, The Age believes in reincarnation for some columnists.  Bring Deveny home, MWD says.

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Until next time.

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