GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG – ISSUE NO. 40
5 FEBRUARY 2010
NANCY’S FIVE PAWS GONG
Great journalism from James Campbell and Mitchell Troy in the Sunday Herald-Sun on 31 January. They combed the reports of overseas visits filed by Victorian MPs who have travelled overseas at taxpayers’ expense in recent years. MWD’s favourite insights were provided by:
▪ Labor MP Judith Graley who declared that “Paris is quintessentially Parisian”. Right on.
▪ Liberal MP Nick Wakeling who discovered that “the White House is the home of the US president”. Quite so.
▪ Labor MPs Liz Beattie and Carlo Carli who (collectively) found that “the Syrian Government is progressive and nationalist and believes in Arab unity”. Go on.
[5 Paws to be inserted here]
NANCY TAKES UP DR O’BRIEN’S GO-NUDE EVOCATION
It all started with the gorgeous, pouting Jennifer Hawkins posing, sans gear, in the January 2010 issue of Marie Claire. Apparently Ms Hawkins was doing a favour to her gender by demonstrating that her body has “flaws”. This led to some discussion in the media – after all, it was the Silly Season. Then, lo and behold (or not behold, as the case may be), various News Limited and Fairfax journalists started de-robing.
First up was the nearly 40 year old Susie O’Brien (see below). She de-geared for an illustration which accompanied her article in the Daily Telegraph (6 January 2010) titled “I am woman see me raw with all my glorious flaws”. Yawn. Ms O’Brien commenced her piece by declaring her intentions:
It’s not often that you have to take your clothes off to make a serious political point. But in this newspaper I have bared all in the name of improving the body image of women. I’m not doing it to prolong my career as an Aussie supermodel, or to answer a calling as a table-top dancer. Instead, I am taking the gauntlet thrown down by model Jennifer Hawkins this week – but making it real.
Ms O’Brien went on to nominate her bodily flaws – including a “saggy butt and gut”. Truth is, she looked quite sassy to MWD. Especially since there was no showing (so to speak) of the O’Brien butt and a left-arm covered the O’Brien gut. Susie O’Brien also felt the need to tell Daily Telegraph readers that she is “a girl with a Ph. D”. Wow. Apparently she is a doctor of gender studies. Well done.
Dr O’Brien concluded her missive with a message to her gender:
…I am doing this because I actually feel strongly about this issue. We are never going to have body acceptance until people get used to seeing real, average, beautiful bodies. So I’ve shown you mine, and now I want to encourage the women of Australia to show themselves theirs. There’s your first challenge for 2010, Aussie girls. Love yourself first. The rest will follow.
Here is Dr Susie’s body – as depicted in the Daily Telegraph. And here is Michael Bachelard’s body as shown in The Sunday Age – when the Fairfax journalist decided to do a send-up of Susie O’Brien. And here is Nancy’s response to Dr O’Brien’s urgings for the girls of Australia to show themselves. Proudly.
NANCY’S PICKS OF THE WEEK
▪ Kerry O’Brien Turns On Dr Flannery’s Tap
Just when you thought Kerry O’Brien’s 7.30 Report could not get any more boring (see Issue 39), last Friday Mr O’Brien presided over a 30 minute discussion on “The Population Debate” – following up the very same topic which had been covered on the program the previous Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday.
The panellists – Tim Flannery, Brendan Gleeson, Bernard Salt and Heather Ridout – plus presenter Kerry O’Brien – talked and talked and talked for a full half hour. Some of the panelists had useful information. But the session was unrelieved by film or music – or anything, really. Seems like an early entry for the “Most Boring Discussion In A Calendar Year” for 2010 award. We shall see.
Nancy’s slumber on the couch was only interrupted when Kerry O’Brien asked Tim Flannery a question about water. This is the very same Dr Flannery who predicted in 2005 that the drought could leave Sydney’s dams dry by 2007 (ABC Online 11 June 2005) and who declared in 2004 that “there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st Century’s first ghost metropolis” – with the entire city abandoned due to lack of water (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 May 2004). In spite of his prophecy about Sydney, Tim Flannery moved to the city in 2007 to take up a position at Macquarie University. How about that?
During a discussion with the (then) Lateline presenter Maxine McKew on 10 June 2005, Dr Flannery declared that “something will need to change in order to see [Sydney’s Warragamba] catchment start accumulating water again”. How perceptive. All that was needed was, er, some rain.
▪ Red Kerry and Honesty
As part of the 7.30 Report’s “The Population Debate” series, Kerry O’Brien interviewed Kevin Rudd. It was a remarkably soft interview and Mr O’Brien seemed to enter an interruption-free zone as he posed easy questions to the Prime Minister. [Is this the same Mr O’Brien who once worked as a press secretary for the Labor icon Gough Whitlam but does not mention this in his ABC resume or on his Who’s Who in Australia entry? Haven’t I asked this question before? – Ed].
Kerry O’Brien interviewed Opposition leader Tony Abbott last Tuesday. This time there was no attempt at softness and Red Kerry soon entered his interruption zone. O’Brien commenced the interview – perhaps confrontation is a better word – with a policy assertion designed as a question, viz:
Why isn’t your new climate change policy a message to Australia’s big polluters [that] under an Abbott Government, taxpayers will pay you to reduce your carbon pollution, you don’t have to cop any of the pain yourself.
It was a poorly formulated sentence. But Tony Abbott got the drift and gave a brief response to the effect that “under Mr Rudd’s scheme, taxpayers will pay because they are consumers”. This is an accurate comment – since, presumably, such “big polluters” as power companies will pass their increased costs under an emissions trading scheme to consumers for your years and decades to come.
However, Kerry O’Brien did not like the answer and responded: “Mr Abbott, you know that is not true”. Three of the 7.30 Report presenter’s next four interventions asked the Opposition leader whether he was “honest” or “really honest”. Talk about a leading question. Clearly O’Brien was suggesting that the Opposition leader was dishonest. When O’Brien was not querying Abbott’s truthfulness, he was positing his own views disguised as questions – as is his wont.
There is considerable (private) dissatisfaction among 7.30 Report journalists and producers about Kerry O’Brien’s performance on the program – which he dominates from the presenter’s chair. Nancy’s conspiracy theory is that Mr O’Brien’s performances in his recent interviews with the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader were really a job application to return to his former profession as media adviser to a Labor leader. Or, perhaps, he wants to take his political advocacy away from television and run for politics as a Labor candidate. Just like Maxine McKew before him. As to Kerry O’Brien’s attitude to key Liberals when under the sway of truth syrup, see MWD Issues 11 and 12.
Meanwhile ABC management not only supports O’Brien’s lack of professionalism but continues to present him in puff-pieces on camera as the conscience of ABC News and Current Affairs. All of which demonstrates the utter failure of John Howard’s attempts of recent memory to reform the public broadcaster.
By the way, when was the last time – or, indeed, the first time – that the 7.30 Report broke a story during the Kerry O’Brien ascendancy?
MWD GONGS FOR 2009 (CONTINUED)
▪ Andrew Denton Mirrors Richard Dawkins
The need to photograph Nancy, bordello style, has resulted in the postponement of an award scheduled for Fran (“Last Word”) Kelly. Perhaps next week.
This week’s gong for last year is in the category of “Most Consecutive Asinine Questions in the Calendar Year”. And the winner is Andrew Denton, whose series Elders was recently re-run on ABC 1. The original series went to air in pre-MWD times.
MWD is not one of the fundamentalist atheists who follow the teachings of Richard Dawkins. But MWD sympathised with Dr Dawkins when he was interviewed by Denton on the final episode of the Elders series, which went to air on 21 December 2009. In a competitive field, MWD’s top five Denton asinine questions were as follows:
Is it possible to explain love?
What’s your definition of success?
How would you define wisdom?
When do you doubt yourself?
What do you see when you look in the mirror?
▪ John Hewson Mirrors John Hewson
It was great to see John (call me “Doctor”) Hewson back on the Sky News AM Agenda program this morning. Once again the former Liberal Party leader was matched up with former Labor Party Senator Stephen Loosley. And, once again, Dr Hewson demonstrated that he is just as critical of Opposition leader Tony Abbott as is Mr Loosley. What AM Agenda presents as a political debate invariably takes the form of a monologue as Hewson and Loosley agree with one another about the weaknesses of Coalition policy on climate change or whatever.
However, John Hewson’s gong for media performance in 2009 turns on his Australian Financial Review column rather than his Sky News appearances. MWD was particularly taken by Hewson’s column titled “Moral leadership lacking” which was published on 24 April 2009. He presented himself as a moral leader and used the words I/my/myself on more than a dozen occasions in the first five paragraphs in his comma-laden column:
I have been criticicised in these pages for speaking of the moral dimensions of some key policy issues. To my mind, issues like climate change, boat people/refugees, and even this global economic and financial crisis, are important moral issues or, at the very least, have a most important moral dimension, as much as they are economic, social and political issues.
I raise this not to promote myself as any sort of moralist, or even as particularly virtuous, but, perhaps because of my religious upbringing, I have a pretty clear idea of what I feel is right or wrong, ethical or unethical, good or bad, just far and so on, and I quite frankly despair at times at how these “value issues” are so easily ignored, or dispensed with, in the public debate.
John Hewson wins the 2009 award for the “Most Quotations Of Self In A Single Column”. Also, MWD just loved the commas.
FLASH BACK
In 2010 MWD will contain an occasional flashback segment on contemporary media moments which will ignite memories of a past event.
This week’s moment occurred when left-wing icon Professor Robert Manne received (yet another) soft interview on Phillip Adams’ Late Night Live program. The Professor used the occasion (once again) to defend himself against someone else and then went on to condemn Australia’s right wing commentariat.
Here’s a FLASHBACK. Believe it or not, two decades ago Robert Manne was a member of the entity which he now despises – namely the (so-called) right-wing commentariat. At the time he had a column in the (then) Melbourne afternoon paper The Herald. On 21 April 1989 Professor Manne (as he became) devoted his Herald column to depicting the left-liberal Liberal Party MP Ian Macphee as an “ideological wet”. Manne supported the conservative John Howard and suggested that Mr Macphee join the leftist Australian Democrats.
How about that?
HISTORY CORNER
The onset of the Silly Season invariably sees some silly history as various scribblers seize the opportunity of media gaps to place their stories.
And so it came to pass that on New Year’s Day 2010 The Age ran two big stories on Australian history – titled “Distressed Holt took ‘pep pills’, claims former GG” and “How one strong woman changed the course of Australian history”. The former piece was by Bob Wurth and Andra Jackson; the latter by Bob Wurth alone.
Both stories came from the National Library of Australia which released audios and transcripts of conversations between Clyde Cameron, who was a minister in Gough Whitlam’s Labor government from December 1972 until November 1975, and Sir Paul Hasluck, who was a Liberal party minister between 1951 and 1969 when he was appointed Governor-General.
Clyde Cameron conducted numerous interviews with former parliamentarians for the National Library. His conversations with Paul Hasluck took place in 1985 and 1986. It seems that Bob Wurth believes that the release of the Cameron/Hasluck conversations revealed two big stories. Here they are.
▪ Hasluck told Cameron that he believed that the incumbent prime minister Harold Holt “may have been taking a pep pill or two” when he entered the water at treacherous Cheviot Beach on 19 December 1967 and drowned.
But this is hardly news. Turn to Pages 189-190 of Gerard Henderson’s: Menzies’ Child: The Liberal Party of Australia 1944-1994 (1994). There Tony Eggleton revealed that Holt always travelled with a briefcase “full of pills of one sort or another” which he self-administered. Eggleton, who was Holt’s press secretary when he died, related how on one occasion during the 1967 Senate campaign Holt took so many prescription pills for a sore shoulder that he acted as if he were drunk. In other words, the claim that Holt took pep pills is no “big story”.
▪ Then there is Wurth’s “scoop” that Alexandra Hasluck’s disdain for vice-regal life changed the course of Australian political history. Oh yeah. Wurth revealed that Paul Hasluck told Cameron that he would have remained governor-general but for the fact that his wife did not want him to do so. Sir Paul did not seek a renewal of his term (which expired in 1974) and Whitlam appointed Sir John Kerr to succeed him. Kerr dismissed the Whitlam Government on 11 November 1975. The theory is that, unlike Kerr, Hasluck would not have sacked Whitlam – so Lady Hasluck’s unwillingness to let her husband remain governor-general changed the course of Australian history.
Interesting theory. But it’s not new. In his book The Real John Kerr (1978), Richard Hall wrote about a dinner discussion between Hasluck and Whitlam which took place in Spring 1973 where Whitlam raised the possibility of extending Hasluck’s term as governor-general. Let Richard Hall take up the story at Page 115 of The Real John Kerr :
That night Hasluck politely rejected the idea of staying on. He had some books in him and he wanted to get out and write. Lady Hasluck didn’t like the post and after an accident, found difficulty in using stairs….
So Bob Wurth’s big stories of 1 January 2010 were first written about some 15 and 31 years previously.
Until next time.