GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG

ISSUE – NO. 763

20 February 2026

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THE LATEST

  • ABC TV’s News Breakfast celebrates the holy month of Ramadan but overlooks the Iranian Muslims

The evening of Wednesday 18 February commenced the Holy Month of Ramadan. Last Wednesday was also Ash Wednesday in the Christian calendar which commences the holy season of Lent. Both are occasions where believers in one or other faiths are expected to fast in the lead up to Eid al-Fitr and Easter Sunday respectively.

ABC TV News Breakfast ignored Ash Wednesday this year. It has ignored various Jewish feast days along with notable dates of Hindus and Buddhists. But on Friday 20 Feb, News Breakfast devoted large segments to Ramadan – even to the extent of sending James Glenday and Emma Rebellato to Western Sydney to present the show.

In the lead up to the 7AM News, the program interviewed Jasmine al-Zoubi of the Sydney Muslim Run Club followed by the owner of the Lebanese Yum Yum bakery. He was asked this question by the program’s weather man: “What should people who aren’t Muslim know about Ramadan?”.

Then it was time for the Newspapers segment. Amal Whebe covered the Andrew Mountbatten Windsor scandal plus online interview shows plus a Guardian article about Ramadan.

Media Watch Dog did not notice any of the News Breakfast presenters wondering about Iranian Muslims in the lead up to Ramadan. Or drawing viewers’ attention to the estimated 30,000 Iranians – many of whom were young – who were murdered by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for protesting the brutalist Iranian Islamist theocracy.

  • The Age’s false allegation about an Angus Taylor “dog-whistle” against Liberal women

On 18  February, The Age’s deputy state topic editor Katy Hall wrote a column on The Age’s Opinion Page titled “Australian women turned their backs on Ley but they won’t forgive Taylor for this assassination”.

In a contradictory article, Hall  blamed  new Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor for assassinating Sussan Ley – even though Hall acknowledged that “Ley may not have been the right person for the times”. Here’s how Comrade Hall’s column commenced:

So this is how the Liberal Party’s first foray into female leadership ends. Not with a bang, but with an underwhelming sense of inevitability. Sussan Ley is out after nine months, and the architects of her downfall are wasting no time in telling anybody who’ll listen that there was no choice, they had to do it. “We must change, or we will not continue to exist,” senator James Paterson said last week.

It’s not as if people were betting their life savings on the good ship SS Ley making it to the next federal election. But in appointing Angus Taylor as leader and Jane Hume as deputy, the Liberals have once again shown that their version of generational change bears a striking resemblance to the past. And watching a group of men wheel and deal in the shadows until they got their way doesn’t feel like an evolution so much as a return to regular programming.

The truth is, though, even without the industrious efforts of her colleagues to undermine her, Ley was never going to be the solution to the Liberal Party’s women problem because serious women never took her seriously.

Confused? Well, MWD is.  According to one of The Age’s senior editors, Sussan Ley was due to die of natural cause if she hadn’t been assassinated first. How about that?

Then Comrade Hall endorsed Malcolm Turnbull’s claim that Taylor is a “best qualified idiot”.  In fact, the Miserable Ghost (re which see the hugely popular Five Paws Award segment) said that “a lot of people say about Angus, Angus Taylor is he [sic] is the best qualified idiot they’ve ever seen”.  Turnbull didn’t say who these (alleged) people are. It would seem that Hall believes what she wants to believe.

And here is the penultimate paragraph of the Katy Hall rant:

Taylor says he’s a Liberal in the traditional sense, and his supporters say his success meant the party averted the crisis of a more right-wing leader in Andrew Hastie. Maybe, but Taylor’s treatment of Ley, unintentionally or otherwise, was a dog whistle to the far right that the party’s brief foray into at least pretending they were interested in new-age woke politics like letting women have a go and earning back the trust of women is over.

That was published on 18 February the very day that the new Liberal Party leader announced his shadow cabinet.  The following Liberal Party women are in Taylor’s shadow cabinet – Claire Chandler, Melissas McIntosh, Jane Hume, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Michaelia Cash, Anne Ruston and Sarah Henderson.

There never has been so many influential women in senior positions in the Liberal Party cabinet or shadow cabinet.  And yet one of The Age’s senior editors claimed that Angus Taylor has delivered a “dog whistle” to the party’s “far right” that the party is “not interested in giving women a fair go”.  How ignorant can an Age senior editor get?  And here’s another question: Can You Bear It?

  • Nine’s Cathy Wilcox attacks NSW Labor premier & NSW Police while laughing at her own jokes

It is not long ago that Sydney Morning Herald and Age cartoonist Cathy Wilcox was criticising her employer for apologising for a cartoon she had drawn which was regarded to many as anti-Semitic. In that it implied that Australians who supported a royal commission into the Bondi massacre were controlled by Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Comrade Wilcox put out a post suggesting that the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age lacked integrity due to their apology for the cartoon rant. However, despite Wilcox’s recent apparent disgust with her employer she is still taking Nine’s moolah.

Cathy Wilcox was on ABC TV’s Insiders’ “Talking Pictures” segment last Sunday commenting on the political cartoons – including her own. “Talking Pictures” has been presented by the left-of-centre photographer Mike Bowers since Moses was a boy. He – Comrade Bowers that is – once worked for the left-of-centre Sydney Morning Herald, then worked for the leftist The Guardian Australia before settling at the leftist New Daily. You get the picture.

On 14 February, Bowers chose to discuss with Cathy Wilcox cartoons on the Liberal Party’s leadership change, anti-Herzog protestors regarding Israel’s president Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia and NSW Police’s handling of the protestors. Let’s go to the transcript:

Mike Bowers: Cathy, amidst all the calls for social cohesion, there was a fair bit of division as the Israeli President, Mr. Herzog, visited Australia. Megan Herbert [The Age and Sydney Morning Herald] has drawn the social cohesion daisy being watered by the tears of Bondi and then trampled on the freedoms of expression here.

Cathy Wilcox: [laughing] Black booted riot squad of New South Wales stamping over while laying out the red carpets. It’s an extremely poignant cartoon.

Mike Bowers: Yep. Lovely cartoon by you [Cathy Wilcox] here, that should socially cohere them nicely. Have you been cohered enough?

Cathy Wilcox: Yeah, that’s right. No, we want, we want more repression.

Mike Bowers: What do we want? Cohere.

Cathy Wilcox: What do we want? To be stopped from saying what we feel. When do we want it? Right now.

Mike Bowers: Right now….

As the program documents (see here), Cathy Wilcox likes to laugh at her own jokes [Interesting. But does anyone else laugh? – MWD Editor]

Below is Wilcox’s so-called pro-free expression cohere. It depicts NSW Police murdering anti-Israel protestors with the support of NSW Labor premier Chris Minns. And Comrade Wilcox reckons that The Age and Sydney Morning Herald lack integrity. Can You Bear It?

[I note that the Bowers/Wilcox Insiders politburo did not discuss Johannes Leak’s cartoon in The Australian which put a different view. – MWD Editor.]

Media Watch Dog’s Five Paws Award was inaugurated in Issue Number 26 (4 September 2009) during the time of Nancy (2004-2017). The first winner was ABC TV presenter Emma Alberici. Ms Alberici scored for remembering the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939 whereby Hitler and Stalin divided Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. And for stating that the Nazi-Soviet Pact had effectively started the Second World War, since it was immediately followed by Germany’s invasion of Poland from the West (at a time when the Soviet Union had become an ally of Germany). Soon after, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East. Over the years, the late Nancy’s Five Paws Award has become one of the world’s most prestigious gongs – rating just below the Nobel Prize and the Academy Awards.

  • Tom Switzer on Malcolm Turnbull as an anti-Angus Taylor miserable ghost

These days Tom Switzer writes articles for The Australian, presents the podcast Switzerland (covering politics, modern history and international relations) and is the author of the recently published monograph Events, Dear Boy: How Any Government Can Be Derailed (Centre for Independent Studies). When working for Opposition leader Brendan Nelson in 2007, Switzer had dealings with then Liberal Party frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull. On Monday 16 February, The Australian published a Switzer article titled “The enduring ghastliness of Malcolm Turnbull”.

The fact is that Malcolm Turnbull would never have become prime minister of Australia without the Liberal Party of Australia. A number of NSW Labor Party operatives have said that Turnbull expressed interest in joining the Labor Party some decades ago – but was advised that he was not wanted.

Turnbull contested Liberal Party pre-selection against the sitting Liberal Party MP Peter King in 2003 and won after what some described as a branch-stack. He became the MP for Wentworth in 2004. Following the Coalition’s defeat in the November 2007 election, Brendan Nelson defeated Turnbull to replace John Howard as Liberal Party leader. In time Turnbull successfully defeated Nelson to become Liberal Party leader in September 2008.

Turnbull subsequently lost support of the Liberal Party room in December 2009 and was replaced by Tony Abbott as Liberal Party leader. Turnbull replaced Abbott as prime minister in September 2015 after a party room ballot. Having lost 14 seats to Labor in the August 2016 election, Turnbull was replaced by Scott Morrison at a Liberal Party room ballot in August 2018. And he has been whinging ever since.

Tom Switzer reminded readers that, despite stating after he stepped down as prime minister that he would not become a Miserable Ghost – meaning a former political leader who kept commenting on politics – he did precisely that. As Switzer wrote in The Australian:

Ever since losing the Liberal leadership in 2018, he [Turnbull] has repeatedly lashed out at his former party, reserving particular fire for the internal opponents he faced while prime minister after succeeding Tony Abbott. Turnbull remains the only federal party leader to have lost the leadership twice in party room ballots, and he is widely known to attribute both downfalls to conservatives who resisted his positions on the emissions trading scheme in 2009 and the National Energy Guarantee in 2018.

Turnbull’s interventions are too often cheap and unbecoming of a former leader of a great political party. Instead of reasoned argument, he defaults to abuse and denigration. The judgment may sound severe, but no former prime minister has descended so readily to this level. Hardly a week passes without him airing his grievances in public. From The Guardian to the ABC, he delivers poisonous and deeply personal broadsides against Liberal leaders and the party he once led.

At times, his bile borders on the comical. Consider his March 2019 interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil, when Turnbull claimed his party defenestrated him in August 2018 because colleagues knew he would win the next election. An incredulous Neil replied: “You’re telling me your own party didn’t want you to win the next election? That’s not credible.” He then reminded Turnbull he had lost 40 consecutive polls in the lead-up to the coup.

Malcolm Turnbull’s comment to Andrew Neil was delusional. What he said was that fellow Liberals in government were so desperate to depose him that they wanted the Coalition to lose office and were willing to forego the job satisfaction and high salaries that go with being ministers and backbenchers.

In recent times Turnbull has fanged his successors as Liberal Party leader. In Turnbull’s view (i) Scott Morrison is “deceitful”, “duplicitous” and a “liar”, (ii) Peter Dutton is a “thug” and (iii) he said this about Angus Taylor in a response to a question from Patricia Karvelas on the ABC TV News Channel on 13 February:

Malcolm Turnbull: Well, I mean, Angus, that’s – that the direction Angus is going to take, that will just condemn the Liberal Party to further irrelevance. I mean, the curious thing a lot of people say about Angus Taylor, is he is the best qualified idiot they’ve ever met…

Malcolm Turnbull was not asked – and did not say – who are the “lot of people” who say that Angus Taylor “is the best qualified idiot they’ve ever met”. Or did Turnbull just make this up?

Tom Switzer, who used to know Turnbull well, ended his article with this insightful remark:

Before the 2024 US election, Foreign Affairs magazine ran Malcolm Turnbull’s character sketch of a presidential contender: “Like most people, he is often wrong. Unlike most people, however, he is never in doubt. A powerful narcissistic self-belief has given him the strength to defy not just his many enemies but even reality itself.” He was describing Donald Trump. But the description lands with the force of irony, for it doubles as a precise study of Turnbull himself.

Tom Switzer: Five Paws

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A person in a suit and a ghost AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Media Watch Dog’s “You Must Remember This” segment 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 – or, indeed, what they failed to write or say.

GARETH EVANS NOT THE ORIGINATOR OF THE PHRASE “RELEVANCE DEPRIVATION SYNDROME” – OR A SIMILAR EXPRESSION

As covered in this issue’s Five Paws Award segment, Tom Switzer has won MWD’s hugely prestigious Five Paws Award for his article in The Australian on 16 February titled “The enduring ghastliness of Malcolm Turnbull”. Well done Mr Switzer – and so on.

However, Ellie’s (male) co-owner has reason to question one aspect of Switzer’s piece where he wrote that former Labor minister Gareth Evans had coined the term “relevance deprivation syndrome” to describe some former political leaders who found it difficult to live a life away from the attention they received, and the influence they had, when running a country.

Not so, according to Ellie’s (male) co-owner. In newspaper columns which Gerard Henderson wrote in 1993 he referred to a condition which he described as “Limelight Deprivation Syndrome”. He attributed this term to an article written by Christa D’Souza. In The Sunday Times in London on 17 January 1993, D’Souza commented that “LDS…can strike at any time but the trigger is always the same: a taste of fame”. She added, “Like every other addiction, fame has its withdrawal symptoms if it is not fulfilled; LDS is that dreadful downward spiral to nowhere that every once-famous person dreads”.

Henderson used the term to describe former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke and a Greens senator. He referred to D’Souza’s LDS theory, among other places, in a column he wrote in the Courier Mail on 30 July 1993 and in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on 5 October 1993. When The Age/SMH article was published, a staffer working in the Keating Labor government’s media unit at the time requested a copy of D’Souza’s article – which Henderson provided.

After Labor lost office in 1996, Gareth Evans commenced talking about “Relevance Deprivation Syndrome” with respect to himself and others – without reference to Christa D’Souza.

Media Watch Dog believes that avid readers would like to know – and remember – this.

Since the ABC TV’s Media Watch program commenced in 1989 it has consisted of presenters laying down the (media behaviour) law as if they were a modern-day Moses descending from the mountain, commandments in hand. All of them have been left-of-centre types as befits a Conservative Free Zone.

  • Quelle Surprise! The ABC’s Media Watch defends ABC’s Four Corners while dismissing ASIO operatives as mere “spooks”

Last Saturday Gerard Henderson criticised the ABC TV Four Corners’ program titled “Bondi: Path to Terror” (which aired on 9 February) in his Weekend Australian column see here. The program was presented by Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop and produced by Kylie Taylor with Matthew Carney as executive producer.

“Bondi: Path to Terror” presented itself as asking questions about whether Australian intelligence organisations failed to prevent the attack by radical Islamists on the Jewish community at Bondi Beach on 14 December 2025. In fact, Comrade Rubinsztein-Dunlop and his colleagues effectively accused the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), headed by the director-general Mike Burgess, of doing just that. Despite the lack of compelling evidence of reliable sources and in the face of advice from ASIO that the program contained serious errors.

As avid readers know, the ABC is a Conservative Free Zone without one conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its TV, radio or online outlets. So it came as no surprise that ABC TV’s Media Watch essentially came to the defence of ABC TV’s Four Corners and was critical of ASIO.

This is how Linton Besser commenced the Media Watch segment which the ABC titled “ASIO vs ABC”:

Linton Besser: And now, an extraordinary broadside against this country’s most prestigious public affairs television program launched by Australia’s security service.

Australia’s intelligence agency has issued a rare public rebuttal ahead of ABC’s Four Corners program …- The Australian, 8 Feb 2026

Linton Besser: Eight days ago, before the airing of a Four Corners episode about the Bondi attacks, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation warned it had “grave concerns about its accuracy” and said: “If the ABC chooses to publish claims it cannot substantiate – particularly ones it has been told are untrue – we will reserve our right to take further action.”  – ASIO statement: Four Corners, 8 Feb 2026. What further action precisely was left to our imagination. But what was it that had the spooks so spooked? A program which would go on to pose this critical question:

Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop: … we ask whether the Bondi massacre could have been prevented.

– Four Corners: Bondi (Part 2) Path to Terror, ABC, 9 Feb 2026

What a load of tosh. In fact the Four Corners program did not merely ask whether the Bondi massacre could have been prevented – it implied that it should have been prevented.  And effectively blamed the ASIO for its failure to do so.

Note that Comrade Besser referred to Four Corners as Australia’s “most prestigious public affairs television program”. Whereas the ASIO operatives were described by Besser as “spooks”  who had been “spooked”. ASIO is led by its highly qualified director-general Mike Burgess and is staffed by intelligent male and female operatives. They are not spooked spooks. That’s mere abuse.

The ABC ran the program in spite of ASIO’s view that it was seriously flawed.  Besser made a number of criticisms of “Bondi: Path to Terror” but concluded as follows:

Linton Besser: It is entirely conceivable that later this year the Royal Commission will identify errors in this Four Corners and errors in ‘Marcus’s’ recollections. But in the face of what was in fact improper hostility from ASIO, Four Corners seems to have done everything possible to avoid them. This program was a vital and extraordinary piece of journalism which was honest about its weaknesses and it also served the highest of public interests, getting to the heart of what is clearly the worst possible failure of Australia’s security apparatus.

How about that? Comrade Besser described Four Corners’ “Bondi: Path to Terror” as an “extraordinary piece of journalism” in “getting to what was clearly the worst possible failure of Australia’s security apparatus”. Note the word “possible”- which suggests that Four Corners is not sure whether its fanging of ASIO’s (alleged) spooks will stand investigation by the Royal Commission into the Bondi massacre. Moreover, Besser and his comrades seem to hold the view that they can criticise ASIO but if ASIO publicly rejects their position it is engaging in “improper hostility”. An unpleasant double standard, to be sure.

Media Watch asked two former senior Four Corners’ executive producers – Marian Wilkinson and Sally Neighbour – to comment on the program.  Guess what? They both backed the program presided over by current executive producer Matt Carney.  Despite the fact that even Besser conceded that could be discredited by the Royal Commission which is due to report in late 2026.

Comrade Wilkinson asserted that the Four Corners program “revealed arguably Australia’s greatest ever intelligence failure”. Which means that, arguably, this is not the case. [Good point. The word usage of “arguably” in this context reveals the person making the claim is not really sure of their position. – MWD Editor.]

And Comrade Neighbour referred to “the terrible events of December 14 and the failure of intelligence and policing that preceded this”. She provided no evidence to support her assertion that the Bondi terrorist attack was an intelligence failure.

John Howard said some years ago that ABC journalists were invariably hostile to institutions such as ASIO and the Australian Defence Force. “Bondi: Path to Terror” was an example of this. For its part, MWD will not rush to judgment on this issue and will await the report by the Royal Commission headed by the former High Court judge Virginia Bell. In the meantime MWD understands that there are so many potential terrorists in our midst that it would be all but impossible for all of them to be under constant intelligence surveillance.

[It appears that the ABC is in defensive mode on this issue. On 12 February ABC Radio National devoted its ABC News Daily program to a defence of Four Corners. This was a one-sided case for the (ABC) prosecution. – MWD Editor.]

JOHN-LAWS-STYLE DELIBERATE MISTAKE

The late Sydney radio presenter John Laws was wont to say that he did not make mistakes when broadcasting – only “Deliberate Mistakes” to entice corrections, comments and so on. Ellie’s (male) co-owner Hendo is something of a disciple of Mr Laws – and has adopted this practice when he needs to.

  • Karen Middleton’s brilliant career misrepresented

In last week’s MWD, Karen Middleton was referred to as working for The [Boring] Saturday Paper. Lotsa thanks to the avid reader who advised that this is no longer the case. It would seem that Ellie’s (male) co-owner has lost track of Comrade Middleton’s brilliant career. She moved from the leftist The Guardian Australia to the left-of-centre The Saturday Paper and then to nothing much so far.

When David (“Please call me Speersy”) Speers introduced his colleagues on ABC TV’s Insiders on 8 February, he referred to Ms Middleton as an “author and journalist”. Speersy got that right. What he got wrong was in not correcting Middleton’s false claim that there has been a recent terrorist attack in Australia on a Muslim preacher. Not so. The only terrorist attack on a religious leader in Australia was the knifing of a Christian bishop during a religious service of an Armenian Christian group.

[It’s great that, unlike the taxpayer funded broadcaster, you correct mistakes in a prominent place. – MWD Editor.]

HISTORY CORNER

  • ABC’s Saturday Extra refers to Joseph Lyons as a former Labor prime minister

ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra, presented by former BBC journalist Nick Bryant, is one of the taxpayer public broadcaster’s leading programs.  Yet Comrade Bryant and his producers seem not to correct errors.

On 14 February, Bryant interviewed Fiona Scott, the federal Liberal Party vice-president, who had this to say, among other things:

Fiona Scott: When Robert Menzies formed the Liberal Party back in 1944, he actually pulled together eight different parties. And, you know, some of it included the suffragette movement. I mean, Dame Enid Lyons was the first member of – female member of parliament. She was a member of the Liberal Party. She was the first woman in cabinet. She was also the wife of a former Labor prime minister.

Joseph Lyons has been a Labor premier of Tasmania.  But he was elected to the House of Representatives and split with Labor over economic policy during the Great Depression. He became the United Australia Party prime minister of Australia from early 1932 until dying in office in April 1939.  Lyons won three elections for the UAP, the predecessor of the Liberal Party. He is one of six Australian prime ministers to have won three or more elections – along with Billy Hughes, Robert Menzies, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke and John Howard.

Nick Bryant, who has written a book on Australia, should have picked up and corrected Ms Scott’s misstatement. Likewise his producers.  After all, Joseph Lyons was a successful prime minister throughout the 1930s. The only long-form biography of Australia’s 10th prime minister is Anne Henderson’s Joseph Lyons: The People’s Prime Minister (NewSouth, 2011).

 

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Until Next Time

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