GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG

ISSUE – NO. 781

3 July 2026

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The Latest

  • Niki Savva’s BIG story lasts for only a few hours

Wasn’t it great to see Niki Savva’s occasional column in Nine’s The Age and Sydney Morning Herald back in both newspapers on Thursday 2 July? Well, Comrade Savva invariably files great copy for Media Watch Dog – so Ellie’s (male) co-owner appreciates all the material he can use.

The online version of Savva’s column on Thursday 2 July was headed “Bending the knee: Why Andrew Hastie is on the brink of abandoning the Liberal Party”. Particular attention was focused on this big story:

Despicable threats to Hastie’s family incited by his opposition to One Nation and his appearance in court against accused war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith have understandably had a profound impact on Hastie’s thinking and approach. Those two issues have won him admirers outside the Liberal Party, however they have undoubtedly cost him support internally, to the point where if he feels abandoned by the Liberal Party in this fight to the death, he will abandon the Liberal Party.

What a Savva scoop!!! High-profile Coalition frontbencher Andrew Hastie might abandon the Liberal Party. Alas, the media coverage of Savva’s BIG STORY lasted only a short while. On Friday 3 July, Nine newspapers carried this report by Brittany Busch and Natassia Chrysanthos:

Hastie, who has emerged as one of the Coalition’s strongest critics of Hanson’s party, on Thursday vowed to contest the next election amid competing views within the opposition about how best to tackle the surge of One Nation. Hastie denied suggestions he was reconsidering his future, after this masthead reported he could leave the party if he felt abandoned in his fight with Hanson. He said on Thursday morning that was “not at all” on the cards. “I intend to contest the next election as a Liberal,” he said.

So Savva’s BIG STORY was, in fact, a non-story. How fortunate then that Nine merely referred to the report as being on “this masthead” the previous day and did not name Savva as the source of, yes, the misinformation.

  • In late 1939 Robert Menzies was a fighter against Nazi Germany not an appeaser

Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy claimed at the National Press Club on 2 July that former Coalition Prime Minister Robert Menzies was a “Nazi appeaser”. And that former Labor Prime Minister John Curtin was his hero in so far as the Second World War was concerned. This attracted significant media attention. Not all journalists appeared to understand the error involved. Pat Conroy is a very competent minister but not so hot on history when it comes to his Labor heroes.

It’s true that in the 1930s conservative prime ministers Joseph Lyons and Robert Menzies were appeasers of Nazi Germany. But so were the Labor Party leaders John Curtin and Ben Chifley. It was a worldwide trend in the Western democracies.

Indeed, as Anne Henderson points out in her book Menzies at War (UNSW Press), on 9 May 1939 Curtin attacked individuals who were “more concerned with fighting Hitler than with establishing peace”. Sounds somewhat appeasing, don’t you think?

In any event, when the one-time appeaser Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Menzies also declared war. By early 1940, Australian forces arrived in the Middle East. The second AIF took part in important battles in North Africa against Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Vichy French forces.

The Curtin-led Opposition supported Australia’s declaration of war against Germany. But Curtin opposed the dispatch of Australian forces to the Middle East and North Africa.

Menzies was once an appeaser. But he despatched Australian forces to fight Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. On the other hand, Curtin did not support the deployment of Australian forces in the Northern Hemisphere.

Gerard Henderson has discussed this on many occasions – including in his column in The Australian on 1 December, 2017 – see here.

  • La Tingle spruiks for Logie votes for Speersy on Insiders

There was enormous interest in last week’s segment titled “Vote for Speersy: Tops for Humility”. It reported that, when interviewing David Speers on ABC TV’s News Breakfast on Friday 26 June, reporters James Glenday and Emma Rebellato had urged viewers (if viewers there were) to vote for the ABC TV Insiders presenter to win the 2026 Logies in a Silver Logie category. Namely, most popular News & Public Affairs presenter. For the sake of convenience, News Breakfast screened a photo of “Speersy”- as he likes to be called – on a “Vote for David Speers” banner containing a QR code.

That was on Friday morning 26 June. On Sunday morning 28 June, ABC TV Insiders continued the “Speersy For A Logie” campaign. Let’s go to the transcript when ABC TV’s Insiders panelist Laura Tingle urged a vote for ABC TV’s David Speers during her comments in the “Final Observations” segment:

Laura Tingle: …On indulgence from your executive producer Speersy, I’ve just been, like to mention to voters –

David Speers: Oh no. How embarrassing – alright.

Laura Tingle: That if you’re interested in voting, there’s a QR code here where you can vote for David Speers as most popular –

David Speers: Well, thank you. Uh –

Laura Tingle: You know, you did a great job on “Home and Away” as well. [That is a joke, I think. – MWD Editor.]

David Speers: Thank you very much.

Phil Coorey: Is there one for the panellists?

[Unintelligible]

Anna Henderson: Do we all get to go?

David Speers: You all get to share [Unintelligible] Exactly.

Laura Tingle: Vote One Speersy for The Logies…

David Speers: Thank you. And thank you to the executive producer and the team for embarrassing me at the end of the program. Thank you all. Thanks. Thanks, no really genuinely appreciate it. Thanks for joining us this morning….

As Comrade Tingle spoke, Insiders executive producer Chris Bendall arranged for an online hoarding of Speersy to appear. Here it is – replete with QR code.

Well, at least on this occasion Speersy didn’t claim this time he was “humbled” by the nomination. Not at all. This time he was just “embarrassed” by the publicity. That’s all. In which case why did he not stop La Tingle in her tracks? And here’s another question: Can You Bear It?

[No. Not really – now that you ask. I note that this is the case of ABC presenter versus ABC presenter. After all, ABC TV 7.30 presenter Sarah Ferguson has also been nominated for this gong. I wonder whether 7.30 will campaign for Comrade Ferguson. I will keep you posted. – MWD Editor.]

  • Pauline Hanson described as mad woman on SMH Letters Page

Last week, Media Watch Dog discussed the decision of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Letters Editor to publish a letter calling Senator Pauline Hanson’s One Nation supporters a “cavalcade of cacophonous cretins”.  It was penned [Don’t you mean typed? – MWD Editor] by a certain Peter Hayes of Port Macquarie. Currently, One Nation is running at between 25 per cent and 30 per cent in the opinion polls. Consequently, it would seem that Peter Hayes Esquire regards up to a third of his fellow Australians as idiots.

Lotsa thanks to the Penrith avid reader who found a similar expression of intellectual snobbery on the Sydney Morning Herald’s Letters Page – published on 24 June. Here it is:

Pauline Hanson’s comparison of Japan and Australia being monocultures is the notion of a mad woman. Japan has never really wanted or needed migrants. Australia’s very development depended on them, the first of which were convicts from Britain….

John Rome, Mt Lawley (WA)

How about that?  The SMH now publishes letters which refer to a female with whom it disagrees as a “mad woman”.  Whatever happened to the end of sexism?  And can you imagine that the SMH Letters Editor would publish a letter which referred to a female Greens senator as a “mad woman”.  Not on your nelly – as the saying goes. Which raises the question: Can You Bear It?

[It’s surprising that the Sydney-based SMH had to go all the way to the fashionable inner-city suburb of Mount Lawley in Perth to find an intellectual snob like John Rome Esquire to write to its Letters Page. He described some sheila with whom he disagrees as a mad woman. By the way, I seem to recall that Taylor Swift has composed a song “Mad Woman”. – MWD Editor.]

  • Ross Gittins describes Pauline Hanson & Barnaby Joyce as unintelligent

While on the topic of the Sydney Morning Herald – which boasts that it is “Independent. Always.” – it appears that intellectual snobbery has spread to the newspaper’s Opinion Page.

On 1 July, the SMH’s  economics editor Ross Gittins wrote this in a column titled “I’m in two minds about climate change. But not like Hanson”. Here’s how Comrade Gittins’ piece commenced:

I confess to being in two minds about climate change. On one hand, I’ll be dead before it gets really bad. On the other, I do care about the potentially unliveable lives we’re leaving for our grandkids. When I decided to check on our progress in limiting climate change, I discovered the news wasn’t good. But then I realised we’re not dead yet. We haven’t missed the bus; we’re just running to catch up with it.

The first shocking thing I was reminded of in my literature search (a flash name for looking at a bunch of newspaper cuttings) is that it’s become permissible – even fashionable – to be out and proud about being a denier that the climate is worsening and this needs to be prevented.

It probably won’t surprise you that Pauline Hanson is in denial, as is Barnaby Joyce. Anything strike you about this pair? They’re not the sharpest tools in the drawer. It’s hard to imagine how anyone who’d completed high school could be stupid enough to just wave away all the scientific evidence that global warming is real.

What Gittins is saying – without evidence – is that both Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce are dumb. He fails to understand that there is a difference between intelligence and education.  Not all educated people are intelligent and not all intelligent individuals are well-educated.

Take Gittins, for example.  He has an economics degree but believes that the end of the world is almost certainly nigh due to climate change. Moreover, it’s nonsense to state that no one who has completed a tertiary education degree is intelligent.  By the way Joyce, like Gittins, has a university degree.

Sure, not so long ago, your man Joyce decided in February 2024 that it would be a you-beaut idea to ring home while lying, after dark, on a footpath in a Canberra restaurant area. There are, after all, better ways to phone the missus late at night. Not an intelligent move. But no sillier, surely, than the decision of Comrade Gittins to provide the SMH with a selfie of himself in intensive care with a tube stuck up a nostril. Re which see MWD passim. After all, at least Joyce could say that he was on medication which, it would seem was washed down with the wrong liquids. Whereas, on the other hand, Comrade Gittins seems to believe that SMH readers could be able to manage breakfast after looking at his hospital selfie.

In the same column, the SMH’s economic editor had this to say:

With the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, this latest crisis was all about moving fossil fuels around the world without obstruction. Coal and oil and gas are concentrated in particular parts of the world. Although some countries – including Australia – may have better access to sun and wind than others, every country has its own sun and its own wind, which should greatly reduce the need for, and the cost of, shipping energy around the world.

What a load of absolute tosh. Your man Gittins overlooks the fact that until renewable energy can be converted into plastics, lubricants, asphalt, fertiliser and the like, it will be a long time until oil ceases to be shipped around the world.

Ellie’s (male) co-owner reads the Gittins column because he has to. At times Hendo looks forward to Gittins’ prophecy about the end of the world taking place. It will at least remove this burden. In the meantime, Can You Bear It?

  • RN Breakfast’s Melissa Clarke falsely believes that the Teals are important in the House of Representatives

The ABC, particularly ABC Radio National, devotes considerable time to interviewing the Teal Independents – including the Teal Zoe Daniel, who lost her seat of Goldstein at the last election. But Comrade Daniel is showing signs of running again at the next election.

Last Monday, RN Breakfast presenter Melissa Clarke interviewed Monique Ryan, the Teal Independent for Kooyong, about various pieces of proposed legislation.  And then on Thursday 2 July she interviewed Teal Kate Chaney about the Albanese government’s proposed legislation with respect to advertising by the gambling industry. The following exchange occurred:

Melissa Clarke: And of course, if there is to be this process, it needs to be a strong oversight.  If you were to bring in this kind of digital duty of care, is the eSafety Commissioner the right body to do that, in your view?

Kate Chaney: Look, I think it can be. It can be.

Turn it up. Comrade Clarke overlooked the fact that Kate Chaney – the Teal MP for Curtin in Western Australia – has one vote out of 150 votes in the House of Representatives. Just one. Consequently, she cannot legislate for anything without the support of the Albanese government.

Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall have conceded that for the Teals to have real political influence, they need to form a party – the proposed (oddly worded) Community Strong Australia – capable of winning seats in the Senate where minor parties and Independents matter. But RN Breakfast’s  presenter and executive producer seem unaware that the Teals have scant influence  in the House of Representatives. Can You Bear It?

  • Radio National presenter sneers at Ted O’Brien

While on the topic of RN Breakfast and Melissa Clarke, on 30 June she interviewed Ted O’Brien, the Opposition’s shadow minister for foreign affairs. He spoke about Australia’s relations with Pacific nations until Clarke turned to the Liberal Party leadership. Following this, O’Brien made the point that the Coalition should be focusing on economic matters – especially tax.

Shortly after, ABC journalist Tom Crowley took up his familiar role of commenting on interviews, as indicating the program’s apparent belief that listeners are not capable of working things out for themselves. The following exchange took place.

Melissa Clarke: And Tom, just briefly, what did you make of Ted O’Brien’s comments there about the position of the Liberal Party, and really wanting to focus on hip-pocket cost-of-living issues?

Tom Crowley: That was the shadow treasurer, Ted O’Brien [Melissa Clarke laughing] – the shadow foreign affairs spokesperson. I found myself forgetting I think, it was clearly a man who would like to still be talking about tax….

So there you have it. Melissa Clarke had ended her interview by inviting Ted O’Brien to talk about domestic politics. And when he did, Clarke dismissed his contribution with a sneering laugh with the support of Crowley. Can You Bear It?

  • Media Watch criticises the ABC for censoring Sall Grover but goes soft on his ABC colleagues who made the decision to do so

As a general rule, the ABC TV Media Watch program refrains from criticism of the ABC – particularly with respect to the fact that it is a conservative free zone which lacks viewpoint diversity. After all, current presenter Linton Besser is one of eight men and women who have fronted Media Watch since it commenced in 1989. The others are Stuart Littlemore, Richard Ackland, David Marr, the late Liz Jackson, Monica Attard, Jonathan Holmes and Paul Barry. Not a conservative among this lot. All are either left-of-centre or leftist.

On Monday 29 June, Linton Besser turned his attention to the decision by the ABC not to publish an article by Sall Grover. Grover was critical of the decision by the Full Federal Court which found that, under existing legislation, a biological man can transition to a woman and be entitled to use facilities with biological women. The article submitted by Grover was in response to an article in the ABC Online by Professor Paula Gerber supporting the Federal Court’s decision.

As documented in last week’s Media Watch Dog, there was an exchange of 37 emails over two months before Scott Stephens advised Grover that the ABC had decided not to publish her piece – referring to its “pervasive inaccuracies” and “overstatements”. But he did not say what they were. Stevens – writing in his role as the ABC’s Religion & Ethics Online editor – made it clear that the decision had been made following checking with a number of ABC editors.

Presenting Media Watch last Monday Linton Besser found in favour of Grover – declaring:

As challenging as Grover’s arguments might be to sections of the community, we really see no reason why a version of her article could not have been published in the first place. Not least because the businesswoman had made very plain her willingness to do what was necessary to meet the ABC’s standards. Indeed, her campaign to change the law is now a public conversation and the ABC should not deny its audience the opportunity to hear from its central player.

That’s all very well. But Besser failed to identify the senior editors, in addition to Stevens, who made the decision. Moreover, Besser made no attempt to ask the ABC what were the alleged “inaccuracies” and “overstatements” – in spite of the fact that Grover had specifically asked for this. Media Watch viewers did not get to know this information.

In short, Besser made the correct decision. But he went soft on his fellow ABC comrades by not criticising the reasons for the decision that they made. Moreover, apart from Scott Stephens, the names of the other editors involved in the decision-making were covered up.

A Late Night Left Moment

As avid readers know, ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live (aka Late Night Left) program – currently presented by David Marr – reflects the taxpayer funded public broadcaster as a conservative free zone. For example, its regular commentators on Australia (Anna Henderson), Britain (Ian Dunt) and the United States (Bruce Shapiro) are left-of-centre types. In short, there is scant viewpoint diversity.

  • Late Night Live’s David Marr allows his (Murdochphobia) guests a free kick against Janet Albrechtsen

On 25 June, David Marr interviewed Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson on their book Getting Murdoched: How Murdoch Media Wields Power and Punishment (Hardie Grant, 2026). All three are left-of-centre types. All are critical – to a greater or lesser extent – of media proprietor Rupert Murdoch.

Media Watch Dog will return to this 423-page over-written book in future issues. Both authors once worked for Murdoch’s News Corp – in this instance The Australian – quite some time ago. Comrade Dodd is a professor of journalism at the University of Melbourne and Comrade Ricketson is a professor of communications at Deakin University. Both show symptoms of the leftist condition which presents as Murdochphobia.

On LNL, the co-authors, specifically criticised The Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen for her coverage of the Brittany Higgins/Bruce Lehrmann case. Ricketson said this.

Matthew Ricketson: She [Albrechtsen] operates more like a barrister who has a brief, and the brief is to argue the client’s side of the case….The question here is, is it appropriate for journalism? Especially when, for a start, it’s a really complicated case. For a second, it’s a really sensitive personal case for Brittany Higgins and those around her. And third, it ignores the slew of other kind of competing issues and complications and so on. And what you end up with is this picture of Brittany Higgins, a questioning of her claims to begin with, and then a piling-on of any particular aspect of what she has done and said over the past three or four years that is open to question or is wrong.

Ricketson, Dodd and Marr focused on the finding of Justice Lee in the Federal Court that, on the balance of probabilities, Brittany Higgins was raped by Bruce Lehrmann while she was working for Linda Reynolds in the Coalition government. This finding was made in a civil case concerning defamation.

Having accused Albrechtsen on LNL of engaging in a pile-on against Higgins, the co-authors engaged in a pile-on against The Australian columnist on LNL. It was a case of no one covering Albrechtsen’s criticism of Higgins with respect to the claims she made against her employer Linda Reynolds.

Neither Ricketson, Dodd nor Marr mentioned that Justice Lee in the Federal Court found that Higgins had made statements that were contrary to the facts. Or that Justice Tottle in a defamation trial in the WA Supreme Court found that Higgins had defamed her former employer Linda Reynolds and had “demonstrated an indifference to the truth”.

In view of this, it was good journalism to critically analyse Higgins’ comments about her former employer. Yet, Professor Ricketson asserted that Albrechtsen’s reporting on Brittany Higgins was either questionable or wrong. And David Marr concurred.

While Marr made some challenging points, the fact is that the learned professors received a free kick to plug their long book in a boring discussion. It could have been more interesting if the co-authors had been involved in a discussion with, say, a critic of their book. But, then, this was a segment of Late Night Left taking place on the taxpayer-funded conservative free zone.

Verily, a Late Night Left moment

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Until Next Time.

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