GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG

ISSUE – NO. 603

2 September 2022

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  • A Q+A UPDATE – THE LATEST

Contrary to MWD’s expectations, ABC TV’s poorly rating Q+A  program has not improved much with Stan Grant as the permanent presenter.  Last night’s program, which was filmed in Sydney, contained the familiar overwhelmingly leftist audience.

Moreover, it appears that the program’s executive producer Erin Vincent made a conscious attempt to associate Coalition frontbencher Stuart Robert with the collapse of Greywolf Resources. Mr Robert totally rejected this proposition put to him by an audience member (via Zoom) and Mr Grant that he had got his money back when the company collapsed.  As MWD has said repeatedly, there’s little upside for a prominent Liberal Party or Nationals politician accepting an invitation to appear on Q+A.

Needless to say, Q+A’s visiting expert last night was another leftist – the British political philosopher Professor A.C. Grayling.

Given a free kick to beat his political opponents, the learned professor said that Britain did “an incredibly stupid thing” in leaving the European Union – Brexit and all that.  And he declared that there are “a couple of people trying to be even worse prime ministers than Boris Johnson”. The audience laughed at the cheap abuse about Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.

It was that kind of Q+A.

  • THE AFR’s PHIL COOREY NAILS THE DRUM AS BORING AS BAT DROPPINGS

Media Watch Dog has been in busy mode of late and has not had the time to follow the Jobs and Skills Summit in Parliament House, Canberra.  Consequently, MWD cannot provide a full comment on Phillip Coorey’s report in today’s Australian Financial Review in which the paper’s political editor wrote that the Summit was the equivalent of “a two-day version of The Drum”. [As bad as that? – MWD  Editor.]

As mentioned, MWD has no idea whether the Summit was boring.  Some commentators believe this, others disagree. But your man Coorey is correct about ABC TV’s The Drum.  It’s hard to imagine a more boring and less influential news or current affairs program. Sure, there are some worthy performances on The Drum. But, by and large, it is essentially an occasion where the presenter and panellists essentially agree with each other on matters over which they have scant influence – and, at times, limited knowledge.

There was a time when The Drum was lively. But then ABC management decided to introduce a kinder/gentler version of the program.  Some high-profile political conservatives were cancelled and some argumentative types were no longer invited to appear.  Meanwhile some conservatives declined invitations believing that they would not get a fair hearing.

And so it has come to pass that The Drum often resembles a collection of commentators who talk at length while agreeing with each other on matters concerning which they have scant expertise.  It’s amazing that your man Coorey has managed to stay awake long enough to realise that The Drum is as boring as bat droppings – as the saying goes.

[I note that on News Breakfast  this morning, MWD fave Samantha Maiden (political editor, news.com.au) confessed that she “did chuckle a little bit” when reading your man Coorey’s comment. – MWD Editor.]

Can You Bear It?

  • VIRGINIA TRIOLI RECKONS THE ABC IS NOT A CONSERVATIVE FREE ZONE BECAUSE OF, WAIT FOR IT, DAVID SPEERS

As avid Media Watch Dog  readers are well aware, it was Jackie’s (male) co-owner who first came up with the slogan that the ABC is a Conservative Free Zone.  The point is that the taxpayer funded public broadcaster does not have a conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its prominent television, radio or online outlets.  If such a person exists, none has been identified by ABC management, ABC staff or Friends of the ABC.  Until now, apparently.

It so happened that on 26 August Hendo turned on ABC Radio Melbourne 774 to hear someone who presented as “Hayden from Gisborne” using the term “Conservative Free Zone” on Virginia Trioli’s Mornings program.  Let’s go to the transcript:

Virginia Trioli: Hayden in Gisborne has been listening to that conversation [about Lachlan Murdoch’s decision to sue Crikey  for defamation].  Hayden, good morning. Where do you land on this?

Hayden: Well, I’ve got a bit of a concern…I don’t understand why the targeting of Murdoch. I don’t understand that. Because I believe in diverse views in the country. The ABC is known to be a Conservative Free Zone. That’s a – that’s a fact in terms of the approach to production, approach taken on all the political shows. A number of examples of that are many and varied. But –

Virginia Trioli: [interjecting] Oh, I know there are some who disagree with you; particularly David Speers –

Hayden: Well –

Virginia Trioli: – who is regularly called a conservative by critics here –

Hayden: Well –

Virginia Trioli: – on my show. You know that.

So there you have it.  La Trioli was able to name one prominent ABC (alleged) conservative.  To wit, David (“Call me Speersy”) Speers – who joined the taxpayer funded public broadcaster as recently as 2020.

However, MWD was surprised to hear Comrade Trioli describe David Speers as a conservative.  When he worked for Sky News, Speersy was not regarded by his colleagues as a conservative.  Moreover, he has not demonstrated conservative political positions at the ABC.  La Trioli seems to believe that Speersy is a conservative because some of her Green Left listeners regard him as such. But that means nothing.

Gerard Henderson AC (aka Always Courteous) decided it would be a you-beaut idea to ask your man Speers as to whether he regards himself as a conservative – and forwarded this (courteous) email to the man himself on 29 August 2022:

Good afternoon David

As you may or may not know, on ABC 774 Mornings last Friday Virginia Trioli argued against a caller’s comment that the ABC is a Conservative Free Zone by stating that you are “regularly called a conservative” by 774 listeners.

Can this be true?  More seriously, do you regard yourself to be a conservative?  Or are you in “No comment” mode?

Best wishes

Gerard

Gerard Henderson

As Hendo anticipated, David Speers was in “No Comment” mode. Which provides some evidence that he ain’t a conservative – because conservatives tend to be well-mannered types who answer legitimate questions.

And so it has come to this.  La Trioli could only name Speersy, among around 4000 ABC employees, as an ABC conservative.  But the presenter of ABC TV’s Insiders  program has not concurred.  What a fudge.  More importantly – Can You Bear It?

[Er, no. Not really, now that you ask. By the way, if you can put a surname to Hayden from Gisborne – perhaps you might consider him for your (most) prestigious Five Paws Award. – MWD Editor.]

  • ABC NEWS BOSS JUSTIN STEVENS BOASTS THAT HE DID NOT WATCH CHRIS KENNY’S ABC DOCUMENTARY

While on the topic of ABC personalities who do not acknowledge correspondence, did anyone read the “Lunch with Justin Stevens” article which appeared in Nine Entertainment’s Sydney Morning Herald and Age  on Saturday 20 August?  In this segment of Nine’s “Lunch with” series, Zoe Samios took the person she called the “ABC’s news boss” to lunch in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Chippendale, not far from the taxpayer funded public broadcaster’s HQ in Ultimo.

The restaurant was the Holy Duck!. Guess what? – your man Stevens and his host had duck pancakes “which require a skilled hand to pull the various bits together” – according to Ms Samios.  There was one Coke purchased along with one Coke Zero – alas, Ms Samios did not say who had which.  The bill amounted to a mere $96 – with no evidence of any tip left by the Sydney Morning Herald for the toiling masses who wait on tables.

But MWD digresses, again. Justin Stevens declined to reply – or even acknowledge – Gerard Henderson’s email advising him of the Fake News carried on ABC TV News on 24 August concerning Cardinal George Pell.  This was just the latest in the ABC’s ongoing media pile-on against Pell.  See the Correspondence section of MWD’s 26 August 2022 issue. [Could it be that Mr Stevens needs one or more sessions in Nancy’s Courtesy Classes? MWD Editor.]

Comrade Stevens was also in No Comment mode as he pulled the various bits of his duck pancakes together.  The ABC boss was asked whether he had found the time to watch Chris Kenny’s Sky News’ one-hour documentary Your ABC Exposed, which first aired on 26 July.  Here’s the reply delivered, according to Nine’s intrepid reporter, with a smile:

Justin Stevens: No, I haven’t had the time to watch it.  I don’t believe the managing director [David Anderson] has had time to watch it.

How about that?  The ABC’s management is known to be critical of the ABC’s coverage on Sky News. But the ABC managing director and editor-in-chief David Anderson – along with Comrade Stevens – could not find one hour to watch Your ABC Exposed in the three weeks or so between when the program aired and when the Stevens/Samios duck pancakes tango in Chippendale took place.

By the way, Karl Quinn (Nine’s senior writer, culture) conceded that Chris Kenny “did land some punches” when discussing the fact that the public broadcaster needs to be a lot more mainstream and accountable.  But it seems the ABC’s leaders turn a blind eye and deaf ear to criticism.

As MWD readers are aware, on 16 June,  your man Stevens was reported by the Sydney Morning Herald as having said that an internal report had revealed a significant amount of racism and bigotry within the ABC before he took up the job as the ABC’s Director News, Analysis and Investigations.  This has not been reported on the ABC.

The “Lunch With” segment concluded with Stevens saying this with respect to racism and bigotry within the ABC:  “I’ll be judged by what happens in six to 12 months”. But the ABC news boss did not say precisely by what criteria he will be judged.  Can You Bear It?

  • SHOCK, HORROR – PAUL BARRY REVEALS (BELATEDLY) THAT HE IS A SHAREHOLDER OF THE LEFTIST CRIKEY NEWSLETTER

As avid Media Watch Dog readers are only too well aware, ABC TV’s Media Watch program is a manifestation of the taxpayer funded public broadcaster as a Conservative Free Zone. For example, the prominent program has not had one conservative presenter in over three decades since it first aired in 1989.

You be the judge. Media Watch presenters have been Stuart Littlemore, Richard Ackland, Paul Barry, David Marr, the late Liz Jackson, Monica Attard, Jonathan Holmes and Paul Barry (again). Not a political conservative among this lot.

The MediaBuzz program on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, presented by Howard Kurtz, is a pluralist event which airs different views.  However, Media Watch in Australia consists of a weekly sermon – currently delivered by the Reverend (in a secular sense) Barry. No other views are heard and there is no right of reply on the program.

Comrade Barry’s weekly sermon is strong on ethics – particularly with respect to the need for journalists to declare any financial interest of any kind in order to avoid any perceived conflict of interest.

For example, as recently as 15 August, Paul Barry and his executive producer Timothy Latham reported that Samsung had paid for ten Australian journalists to travel to New York to cover the launch of its fourth generation folding smartphone. Paul Barry complained that, in reporting the Samsung event, Nine News and Sky News had not revealed that their journalists travelled to New York per courtesy of Samsung. Comrade Barry told Media Watch viewers that it was “not hard” to reveal such information – in the way that News Corp’s tech editor had done with respect to its journalist.

What a surprise, then, to learn on 29 August that Messrs Barry and Latham had found it very hard indeed to reveal Media Watch’s very own potential conflict of interest which extends back some years.

On 29 August, in covering the defamation case launched by News Corp’s co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch against Crikey, Paul Barry commenced his report as follows:

Crikey is a Melbourne-based news site with 11 journalists and around 25,000 subscribers — and I should declare I once worked for it and have a very small shareholding.  But its battle with the Murdochs is making headlines around the world as a fight for press freedom. So what is it about?

How about that?  At last, Comrade Barry has ’fessed up that he has what he calls a “very small shareholding” in the leftist newsletter Crikey – which he had not previously declared.

Now MWD does not believe that Paul Barry’s analysis of the Australian media has been influenced by the fact that he is a shareholder (big or small) in Private Media which owns the leftist Crikey newsletter.  But there is an unpleasant double standard in the fact that Comrade Barry lectures others about the need to declare real or apprehended conflicts of interest – while failing to reveal his own. Can You Bear It?

  • SYDNEY MORNING HERALD LETTERS EDITOR IN DENIAL OF THE SMH’s LACK OF DIVERSITY ON ITS OPINION PAGES

Nine’s newspapers – the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age – are not quite conservative free zones like the ABC and The Guardian Australia.  Sure, they are essentially organs of the centre-left – but, in recent years, have become somewhat pluralist.  However, the views expressed on the SMH’s Letters pages indicate that those who bother to write to the editor are overwhelmingly of the Sandalista Class. Despite the fact that Nine’s management likes to pretend otherwise.

Here’s an example. Writing in the Postscript segment of the SMH’s Saturday edition on 6 August, Letters editor Harriet Veitch had this to say about the controversy concerning whether what were called the Manly Seven should have agreed to wear the special Manly Gay Pride Rugby League Jersey the previous weekend:

Leading on from last week’s Manly jerseys was discussion about gambling, as promoted on the jerseys. Writers were (unusually on the Letters pages) unanimous – gambling is not a good thing and betting ads should go the way of cigarette ads.

Turn it up.  The Letters pages of the Sydney Morning Herald are replete with leftist or left-of-centre opinions. So much so that a reader would get the view that only sandal-wearing leftists bother to write to the paper.

Take the lead segment of the SMH’s Letters page on 29 August – headed “More weapons will not make the world any safer” – in which SMH readers expressed their views about the report in the paper about an interview given by the Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles to the SMH’s very own Matthew Knott and reported on 27 August.

The SMH published five letters in this segment.  All were hostile to Minister Marles’ position from a leftist “give-peace-a-chance” or “let’s-disarm-unilaterally” perspective. Except for one which mocked Richard Marles – it commenced: “Choking on my morning cereal”.  You get the idea.  Clearly, the SMH could not find any reader to support the Albanese Labor government’s defence policy.  Sounds somewhat unanimous, don’t you think?

Yet Harriet Veitch maintains that it is unusual for the SMH Letters page to be unanimous.  Can You Bear It?

BORING FOR AUSTRALIA

As avid readers will recall, Jackie’s (male co-owner) has always been a fan of British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-90) since he read Muggeridge’s 1940 book The Thirties. Writing in the New Statesman on 11 February 1956, Saint Mug (as he sometimes was called in later life) had this to say about the British Conservative parliamentarian Sir Anthony Eden: “He is a Disraeli hero who has moved into a service flat, or perhaps a deep shelter; a Bertie Wooster who has turned from the Drones Club to Toynbee Hall.  As has been truly said, he is not only a bore but he bores for England.”

This segment is devoted to those who – as citizens, residents or visitors – bore for Australia.

  • YAWN AGAIN JOURNALISM AS SARAH FERGUSON TALKS AT LENGTH TO VIRGINIA TRIOLI ABOUT SARAH FERGUSON

It was one of those many occasions where someone from the ABC interviews someone from the ABC on the ABC – on 26 August, Sarah Ferguson joined Virginia Trioli for her “You Don’t Know Me” segment on ABC Melbourne radio. It was only a month ago that Comrade Ferguson appeared on “The ABC Of” TV series to bang on about herself to host David Wenham. So, consequently, ABC viewers should be well versed in facts about the 7.30 ABC presenter.

However, there is never enough news about Sarah Ferguson apparently. So the Mornings program devoted a 25-minute segment to learning all about Sarah Ferguson. [25 minutes? It felt like 125 minutes. – MWD Editor.]

Trioli asks Ferguson about her experience hosting 7.30. She says she is very busy and compares the experience, variously, to skipping around sinkholes and developing twitch muscle fibres. Groan.

While commenting on doing shorter stories for 7.30 rather than long form journalism, Ferguson comments: “…The way that we exist as a society wasn’t made at the time of the Big Bang, it’s something that we’ve evolved as humans. And so to constantly ask – why is it that we form these groups and these ideas that we share?  – that I find endlessly fascinating”.

Whatever that might mean.

Listeners, if listeners there were, learned the following:

  • SF is very messy and prone to leaving fried rice around.
  • SF had a dog that sadly died. (Genuine condolences from The passing of a beloved pet is always a sad time).
  • SF once thought that she might be a playwright and she once wrote a dance drama crime play that she says wasn’t very good.
  • SF always has a fave bit of poetry on the go for dark moments and, as a child, corresponded with poet Philip Larkin. (If this sounds familiar, SF has previously shared this in an interview about herself with Deborah Snow for the And in a promotional interview with publisher Hachette for her 2020 book On Mother. And in yet another interview by the ABC on the ABC about the ABC in a 2019 interview by Natasha Johnson.)

La Trioli brings up the David Wenham interview and of course says it was “wonderful”. The pair talk about poetry, Charles Dickens, being in one place and not hankering for another place. Or something like that.

There is only one potentially interesting question – “Tell us about a time where you got something terribly wrong”. Comrade Ferguson says there are work errors that are “burnt into my soul”. But this is the ABC where no one admits to, or corrects, errors. So, Ferguson doesn’t say what they are. Avid readers will know there are quite a few contenders.

For the final question, La Trioli asks what Sarah Ferguson’s “guilty pleasure” is – and Ferguson goes into great detail about her love of profiteroles. Apparently, Woolworths does a decent profiterole.

Virginia Trioli ends the interview by praising the “splendid” job Ferguson is doing on 7.30. Quelle surprise! Sarah Ferguson tells La Trioli that she is “super generous”.

So there you have it. Another ABC yawn-fest. MWD could only recommend listening to the interview if an avid reader is struggling with insomnia.

  • IN WHICH PETER HARTCHER FORESEES THE POSSIBILITY OF ANOTHER AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

As avid readers are aware, MWD is the enemy of hyperbole. So MWD has asked Jackie to pick out the most egregious example of hyperbole, prophecy and the like during the given month.  Featured today is Peter Hartcher, Nine Newspapers’ political editor.

In his contribution to the Final Observations segment on ABC TV Insiders program on 14 August, Peter Hartcher – political editor of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald – had this to say:

David Speers: Let’s get some final observations –  Peter.

Peter Hartcher: Anybody who thought that removing Donald Trump as US President was going to save American democracy – I think this week’s developments with the raiding of his mansion, uh, and the possible prosecution of him for a criminal offence under the Espionage Act, uh, has shown us that that story has got a long way to run. And that American democracy remains fragile. The prospect of a mass uprising, maybe even an armed mass uprising if they go ahead and prosecute him, uh, should concentrate a lot of minds. And Australia’s got to keep an eye on whether the US remains a democracy or not.

David Speers: That show ain’t over….

As avid readers are aware, Media Watch Dog maintains that it’s unwise to make predictions – especially about the future.

Your man Hartcher is of the view that there may be an armed mass uprising if former President Donald J. Trump is prosecuted.  Well, this may be the case if such an eventuality occurs.  But, then again, it may not.

The American Civil War was fought between two armies – essentially the North against the South, with the greater force prevailing. It’s difficult to see how a mass uprising in contemporary America would occur. But, no doubt, in time the Prophet Hartcher may let us mere mortals know.

DOCUMENTATION

  • HAMISH McDONALD’S REASONABLE DOUBT DID NOT GET ON THE WALKLEY AWARD LONGLIST BUT PLAYED A KEY ROLE IN THE NSW SUPREME COURT ORDERING A REVIEW OF THE CONVICTIONS OF THE CROATIAN SIX

In his Weekend Australian column on 27 August 2022 (see here), Gerard Henderson described Reasonable Doubt: Spies, Police and The Croatian Six (Doosra Media, 2019) by former Sydney Morning Herald journalist Hamish McDonald as “one of the most important works published in Australia this century”. This despite the fact that the book did not even make it to the Walkley Award Longlist for 2019.  Lenore Taylor, editor of The Guardian Australia, was the 2019 Walkley Judging Board chair in 2019.

On 30 August 2022, in the NSW Supreme Court, Justice Robertson Wright ordered that a judicial inquiry be established into the 1981 convictions of the Croatian Six – Maksimilian Bebic, Vjekoslav Brajkovic, Ilija Kokotovic, Joseph Kokotovic, Mile Nekic, and Anton Zvirotic – for conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack in Sydney in 1979.

As Media Watch Dog  readers will be aware, the case of the Croatian Six has been analysed in previous issues of MWD as well as in Gerard Henderson’s Weekend Australian columns. In The Sydney Institute Review Online Issue 11, 3 July 2019, Henderson reviewed Hamish McDonald’s Reasonable Doubt – which was all but ignored by the Australian media at the time.  Including the ABC, which led the pile-on against Croatian Australians in the 1960s and 1970s.

At this time, the left in Australia – led by Labor parliamentarians Lionel Murphy and Jim Cairns – maintained that the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was hard on left-wing extremists while ignoring right-wing extremists among the Croatian community in Australia.

The left maintained that anti-communist Croatian Australian extremists were involved in terrorist attacks on the property of the communist Yugoslavian government in Australia. However, many believed that these were essentially false-flag attacks by the Yugoslav secret police aimed at discrediting Croatians living in Australia and elsewhere.  When the official history of ASIO, The Protest Years by John Blaxland, was published in 2016, the Murphy/Cairns case against ASIO and Croatian Australians was totally discredited.

There has always been doubt about the safety of the convictions of the Croatian Six – which were followed by a number of unsuccessful appeals and hearings.  A new hearing was put in place by the NSW Supreme Court following the publication of Reasonable Doubt – which revealed that ASIO at the time was not convinced by the convictions.  ASIO was of the view that the informant against the Croatian Six was not a Croatian as he claimed – but, rather, a Serbian working for the Communist Party of Serbia.

On 30 August, Justice Wright reported that he was “comfortably satisfied” that there were doubts about the 1981 convictions and ordered a review of the decision (see Stephen Rice’s report in The Australian here).

In his finding, Justice Wright said that additional important information about the Croatian Six had come to light since an earlier inquiry a decade ago.  He referred to the release of ASIO files and the publication of Hamish McDonald’s Reasonable Doubt.

There are very few books in Australia and elsewhere which have led to judicial reviews of the kind ordered by the NSW Supreme Court.  Hamish McDonald’s Reasonable Doubt  is one such work – even though it did not make the Longlist for the 2019 Walkley Awards.

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS

“You Must Remember This” is based on the chorus line in the song As Time Goes By which was popularised by the film Casablanca. It is devoted to reminding the usual suspects of what they and/or those they supported once wrote or said or did.

  • LOOKING BACK ON MEDIA FAVE PROFESSOR RAINA MACINTYRE’S COVID-19 PREDICTIONS

During COVID-19 pandemic UNSW Professor Raina MacIntyre was one of Australia’s most quoted health experts, reliably giving gloomy predictions about the trajectory of COVID cases and deaths if further restrictions were not introduced.

In the earliest days of the pandemic, on 27 February 2020, Professor MacIntyre informed The Guardian Australia that:

If 50% of Australians – 13 million people – became infected that is up to 400,000 people dying, almost 2 million people needing a hospital bed and 650,000 people needing an ICU bed. These are total numbers over the whole epidemic, which may last one year.

Needless to say, none of these predictions came to pass.

On 20 December 2020, Professor MacIntyre penned an article for The Sydney Morning Herald predicting the worst for the small outbreak occurring on the Northern Beaches of Sydney:

Forty new cases today may become 120 new cases by Christmas Day. Half of them will have no symptoms and the rest will have mild symptoms so will carry on as normal. The peak infectiousness of this virus is very early in the infection, before symptoms appear, making Christmas Day a ticking time bomb.

People infected today and tomorrow may travel halfway across Sydney for the family Christmas lunch and maybe to another household for dinner, possibly infecting a minimum of 360 new people. The 360 people infected on Christmas Day will be at their peak infectiousness on New Year’s Eve, and could infect more than 1000 others. We could be looking at 3000 cases by January 8. You could not plan a disaster more perfectly if you tried.

The total cases for the Northern Beaches outbreak came in well below the 360 infections Raina MacIntyre claimed were possibly the minimum for Christmas Day, let alone the 3,000 she said Sydney could see by early January 2021.  [What exactly is a possible minimum anyway? – MWD Editor]

In another article for The Sydney Morning Herald, published on 30 December 2020, Professor MacIntyre warned spectators attending a Test cricket match in Sydney to wear a mask in public toilets lest they be infected by “aerosolised faecal material after flushing”.

Memorably, on 8 January 2022 she was quoted in an ABC News article advising apartment dwellers to apply adhesive strips to the gaps around their front door if they can smell their neighbours’ cooking.

The following week, on 16 January 2022, Professor MacIntyre contributed a lengthy article to The Saturday Paper, titled “A Pandemic of Denial”. In the piece she claimed that “there is low awareness among the general public of the importance of ventilation and masks in reducing their personal risk”, which seems unlikely. While discussing the risk of COVID to children, the Professor compared the disease to measles and polio. And she claimed that “Very few people are now eligible for a polymerase chain reaction test (PCR)”.

In recent times, Australia’s state and federal governments have rolled back many restrictions and most Australians have learned to live with the realities of COVID. At the same time, Raina MacIntyre’s media profile seems to have been in decline, with newspapers and news broadcasts perhaps a little less interested in dire predictions.

However, on Thursday 1 September 2022 Professor MacIntyre was one of the recipients of the Eureka Prize, given out by the Australian Museum. The same day she was invited to appear on RN Breakfast with Patricia (“Call me PK”) Karvelas to discuss her prize and weigh in on the COVID matters of the day. Here is how PK began the interview:

Patricia Karvelas: Your research into COVID-19 has helped inform and really establish health policies both here and overseas. What has been the most challenging aspect of being a leader across this really, really long and difficult pandemic?

If any ABC listeners were concerned that PK might give any pushback to the learned professor, this fawning question surely set their minds at ease. Later in the interview the topic turned to the National Cabinet decision to decrease the COVID isolation period from 7 to 5 days.

Patricia Karvelas: What’s your view? Is five days enough?

Raina MacIntyre: No, it’s not.

And on the topic of the long-term impacts of COVID infections, Professor MacIntyre provided exactly the answer PK was looking for:

Patricia Karvelas: There is growing evidence that COVID-19 is leaving people sicker, generating a kind of epidemiological aftershock, which leaves people more susceptible to other conditions. Along with long COVID, do you expect to see an increase in other illnesses and disorders over coming years?

Raina MacIntyre: Yeah, I mean, that, we’re already seeing it.

As avid readers might expect, no mention was made of any of Professor MacIntyre’s false predictions or questionable health tips. While most of Australia’s political leaders and media – not to mention the public – have moved on, for some at the ABC it will always be the height of the pandemic. And doomsaying experts like Raina MacIntyre will always be welcome.

You Must Remember This.

  • ALL’S QUIET ON THE GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA FRONT AS AMY REMEIKIS GOES QUIET ON HER INABILITY TO OBTAIN A WAGE INCREASE

Media Watch Dog just loves it when The Guardian/ABC Axis is in full flight.  Such as the recent ABC Insiders programs of 31 July and 7 August when there were five comrades from the ABC or The Guardian on each program out of a total of six presenters or commentators.  It was a match-made-in-heaven get-together between the Conservative Free Zone (ABC) and the Australian branch of the avowedly left-wing Guardian. Manifestations of The Guardian/ABC Axis are much beloved by MWD.

Consequently, Jackie’s (male) co-owner just loves listening to ABC Radio National Breakfast at around Hangover Time on a Thursday morning.  That’s when presenter Patricia Karvelas interviews a Guardian comrade on the political analysis slot shortly before 8am.

Until recently, it was the case of presenter Comrade Karvelas interviewing The Guardian Australia’s political editor Katharine (“Malcolm calls me Murpharoo”) Murphy.  Recently, however, Murpharoo advised listeners (if listeners there were) that she was off to write another Quarterly Essay for the leftist publisher Black Inc, headed by Morry Schwartz.

As MWD recalls, Comrade Murphy’s previous Quarterly Essay was titled The End of Certainty – which bore a certain resemblance to Paul Kelly’s 1993 book titled, er, The End of Certainty. What a coincidence.  Which raises the question as to the likely “original” title of Comrade Murphy’s next Quarterly Essay. Could it be, say, “A Brief History of (Political) Time”. This could be a safe title, since the well-known author Stephen Hawking died in 2018.

In any event, the good news is that there’s always another leftist Guardian reporter available to take part in The Guardian/ABC Axis on Radio National Breakfast on a Thursday morning.

On the First Day of Spring, Guardian wage-slave Amy Remeikis stepped up to the ABC plate and spoke to Comrade Karvelas about something or other. As avid readers well know, MWD has been waging a – so far, unsuccessful – campaign to get the toiling masses at The Guardian Australia (editor, Lenore Taylor) a pay increase.  The motivation was Amy Remeikis’s revelation on Insiders on 26 June that she could never ask her boss for a 5 per cent wage increase and a subsequent tweet about the fact that her rent had been put up.

When Comrade Karvelas spoke to Comrade Remeikis on 1 September, there was an opportunity for the former to ask the latter about her fellow lowly-paid proletarians.  However, such is the nature of the chummy Guardian/ABC Axis that the matter was not discussed.

A shame to be sure.  But MWD will maintain its campaign to obtain wage justice for the wage slaves at The Guardian Australia. So, stay tuned.

 

 

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Until next time.

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