GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG – ISSUE NO. 42
19 FEBRUARY 2010
STOP PRESS
Nudity – A Journalistic Update
Can you believe it? First it was The Daily Telegraph’s Susie O’Brien and then The Age’s Michael Bachelard (see Issue 41). And now Nova presenter Michael “Wippa” Wipfii has de-trousered for last Saturday’s Herald-Sun. Just as Dr O’Brien and Mr Bachelard attempted to channel Jennifer Hawkins – so “Wippa” sought to channel Miranda Kerr’s recent GQ pose.
Nancy was not available for a comment – but she kindly forwarded an illustration of her in “LOOK AT ME I’M A (CANINE) JOURNALIST” pose. Regrettably this pic was rejected by GQ for being too explicit.
NANCY’S BONE OF THE WEEK
Das as Farce
What a star performance by Satyajit Das, who describes himself as a risk consultant, on Q&A last Monday. Das (pronounced with a long “a”), as he likes to be known, , usually gets a soft run when interviewed by ABC house-leftist Phillip Adams on Late Night Live. However, on Q&A this week Das had to engage with a panel which did not want to sit at his (sandalled) feet – so to speak.
Nancy could not find a Das website or Das office so assumes that he works from his home kennel.
Nancy was just so impressed with Das’ ability to place himself in the middle of the debate on Q&A – and how he was able to adopt a look-mum-no-facts stance on most issues. Your man Das is highly articulate and seems to be saying plenty even when he is not saying much at all.
Early in the program, Q&A presenter Tony Jones noticed that Das was shaking his head following an exchange between Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner and Shadow Finance Minister Barnaby Joyce. Let’s go to the transcript:
Tony Jones: Das, I saw you shaking your head. Tell us why.Satyajit Das: I’m just absolutely staggered at the facts. You know, we had so many facts in such a short period of time. You know, once you get the facts straight, then you can distort them to your heart’s content basically.
Lindsay Tanner: Would you like to do that?
Satyajit Das: I’m about to do that. I’m about to do that. Look, fundamentally, Mr Joyce, I need to correct one thing. It’s very difficult for Australia to default on its debt. It can print money.
Barnaby Joyce: But that’s hardly a solution, Das.
Satyajit Das: I agree with you, it’s hardly a solution. . .
Good grief. Apparently Das believes that Australia’s international creditors would accept Australia paying off its debt by running the printing presses at the Canberra Mint overtime. Fortunately Rebecca Huntley stopped Das’ articulate monologue just as he was depicting the international financial crises as a game of pass-the-parcel.
Das’ next intervention on Q&A was to make yet another holier-than-thou utterance with reference to his fellow panelists. Declared Das:
I just love sitting next to these people. You know, firstly, if the facts are on their side, they pound the facts. If theory is on their side, they pound the theory. And if the facts or the theory are not on their side, they just pound the table.
You got the impression that Das has run this line before. Alas, it came unstuck when Lindsay Tanner interjected “I didn’t hit anything.” Quite so. And nor did the other three panelists – Rebecca Huntley, Barnaby Joyce and Melinda Tankard-Reist. In fact, no one pounded the table. Das then proceeded to yet another “look-mum-no-facts” diatribe which concluded:
Fundamentally I think we should get beyond partisan politics and start to address the fundamental question of how we are going to change the economy to be able to keep the debt under control. That’s what we need to do. Having this dialogue about 5.8, 2.2, 3.4, 7.2 – I’m sitting here going: “Where did these numbers come from?”
Answer – the numbers came from Das. Nobody else on the panel mentioned 5.8 or 2.2 or 3.4 or even 7.2.
Then Nancy’s highlight. It took place when Melinda Tankard-Reist mentioned the term skanky-ho. Let’s go to the video tape:
Melinda Tankard Reist: What would have been controversial would have been if Tony Abbott had said: “I want my daughters to be skanky hos.” Then you might have had a controversy.
Satyajit Das: Sorry, what is a “scanty ho”?
Melinda Tankard Reist: Skanky ho. Whore.
Satyajit Das: What is that?
Rebecca Huntley: I’ll show you after.
Satyajit Das: You’re on.
Rebecca Huntley: We’ll just go out.
Barnaby Joyce: It’s a derivative.
Satyajit Das: It’s a derivative?
Lindsay Tanner: It’s a family show.
Satyajit Das: It’s a family show?
Lindsay Tanner: It’s a family show.
Melinda Tankard Reist: It’s a rough term for a loose woman. Skanky whore.
Satyajit Das: Oh, right.
Yeah, right. In fact, Das did not know much about quite a few issues. He asserted that Australia is “being converted to a quarry for China”. How fresh. MWD first heard this Australia-as-a-huge-quarry hyperbole some four decades ago. Then Das declared that the Labor Party’s vision “at the moment seems to be 2050” and that the Liberal Party’s vision “at the moment seems to be 1950.” Das proudly added: “I’m in 2010”.
Well done. Except that most blokes and sheilas in 2010 know what a skanky ho is. Including Nancy – who heard the term when she first walked the streets.
Das went on to misinterpret the thesis of Donald Horne’s 1964 book The Lucky Country. Then he bagged Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens, Lindsay Tanner (again) and Treasurer Wayne Swan for allegedly being “quite blithe and happy that we’re going to hitch a ride on China”. In fact, neither Stevens nor Tanner nor Swan have ever expressed such an attitude. Das’ last significant comment on Q&A was to suggest that Australia should encourage investment from, wait for it, China.
Nancy says – give Das another go on Q&A as soon as possible. She still recalls his performance in April 2009 when the risk consultant mocked the suggestion that financial regulation in Australia had prevented the collapse of Australian banks during the Global Financial Crisis. Opined Das: “Basically it’s because Australian banks were so boring they missed the bus. That’s basically what happened.”
MWD says – that’s basically bulldust.
GUY RUNDLE UPDATE
Guy Rundle’s Joke on Christopher Hitchens Back-Fires
The Sydney opening night of Godzone – created by Guy Rundle and Max Gilles – takes place on Wednesday night at the Seymour Centre’s York Theatre. MWD is quite a fan of Mr Gilles and wishes the function well – or in theatre terminology – hopes Mr Gilles breaks a leg.
However, MWD was surprised to note that the advertising flyer for Godzone does not contain the usual endorsements which accompany such productions. As in: “A terrific night, I laughed till I cried.” Or: “Wonderful: Max Gilles is outstanding.” Or: “Guy Rundle’s best work since his brilliant Marxist editorials in Arena Magazine.” Or some such.
How could this be? Alas, it seems that Godzone was not all that well received when it first showed in Melbourne – the home town of writer Guy Rundle and actor Max Gilles. Consequently, there are no available endorsements for the Sydney production.
Here’s what Cameron Woodhead wrote in The Age on 12 December 2009 under the heading: “Satire founders in Godzone territory”:
How could Max Gilles and Guy Rundle serve up something as lame as Godzone? Fans of their previous evenings of political satire – Your Dreaming and The Big Con – will flock to see the show, expecting to see the sharp impersonations and excoriating wit they brought to the Howard years reworked into a satire of life under Kevin. They’ll be disappointed. Godzone is lazy and unfunny, a sugarless custard that doesn’t hold a candle to an upper-level university revue, much less Gillies and Rundle at their best.
Cameron Woodhead went on to describe Godzone as possessing a “patchy script”. He also complained that the depiction of Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard is “insulting” and “verging on misogynistic.” Other than that, it’s a great production – apparently.
And this is what Alison Croggan wrote in The Australian on 14 December 2009:
Godzone … seems like a 1980s television skit that expanded to the stage. It is as if theatre is where television goes to die… For those who have enjoyed the Gilles-Rundle combo before, this is a disappointing outing. It’s a bad sign when the program is funnier than the show.
Unfortunately, MWD can’t make the opening night on Wednesday – since MWD would really like to know how Guy Rundle’s top joke at Opening Night in Melbourne goes down in Sydney. It is the very long skit about the British born Trotskyite Christopher Hitchens who became a born again neo-conservative. Guy Rundle’s punch-line is that Christopher Hitchens supported the Coalition of the Willing’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 because he was raped by one or more Arabs sometime after meeting Osama Bin Laden and was seeking revenge on all Arabs. Funny, eh?
Rundle Forgets Hitler But Not Stalin
Guy Rundle is currently in Europe from where he is filing his enema-in-reverse stories for the Crikey newsletter. Last Tuesday, Rundle wrote to Crikey in an attempt to refute claims made about the Afghanistan and Vietnam commitments by Neil James and Charles Richardson. Wrote Rundle:
Neil James, replying to both myself and Charles Richardson on Afghanistan and Vietnam, asks whether I would defend Stalin and Pol Pot?
Would that be the Stalin who was our ally in the war against fascism, the one whom Churchill remarked was clearly preferable to Hitler and Nazism? (or the ally some of us – Bob Santamaria had a preference for Franco and Mussolini as I recall).
Would that be the Pol Pot whose Khmer Rouge was recognised as the legitimate representative of Cambodia by the Fraser and Reagan governments, after its auto-genocide had been wound up by the Vietnamese invasion – for which they were punished with a decade of sanctions? Funny old world. I guess, with the West/Pol Pot hook up…
Funny old world, indeed. This is the very same Guy Rundle who, in his period as editor of the left-wing journal of opinion Arena Magazine, was wont to mix with many a one-time admirer of the communist dictator Joe Stalin – and with many a one-time barracker for Pol Pot who (unlike Malcolm Fraser and Ronald Reagan) had rejoiced when the communist Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia in April 1975.
It is true that Stalin became an ally of the West in June 1941 – following Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union. In August 1939, however, Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact. This meant that, for the first two years of the Second World War, Hitler and Stalin were allies. This was welcomed at the time by members of the Communist Party of Australia – some of whom later hung around Arena, and wrote – or helped to write – boring editorials for that boring journal of boring Marxist opinion.
For all his faults, B.A. Santamaria supported the war effort in Australia in 1939 – unlike many of Rundle’s comrades at Arena. For all his many faults, General Franco kept Spain neutral from August 1939 until the end of hostilities in Europe in May 1945. And for all his extraordinary faults, Benito Mussolini did not drag Italy into the Second World War on Nazi Germany’s side until June 1940. Rundle did not mention this in his piece in Crikey.
Rundle conveniently overlooked the fact that, if events had gone according to plan, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would have shared victory sometime around Christmas 1940. In which case, Winston Churchill would have been shot at dawn around Boxing Day 1940. Forty-something lefties like Rundle, who have associated with those leftist sandal-wearing types who were once Stalinists and Pol Pot fans, should not lecture-at-large about 1939 and all that.
MEET THE BONGE – SANS PASTRIES IN SEATTLE AND SANS TOUGH QUESTIONS IN SYDNEY
As promised, over the next couple of editions MWD will delve into Niki Savva’s So Greek: Confessions of a Conservative Leftie for some insights about the Canberra Press Gallery. See Issue 41.
MWD was wondering why Paul Bongiorno gave Kevin Rudd such a soft interview on Meet the Press last Sunday and turned to the index in So Greek. There are two references to Channel 10’s Canberra based political editor which provide a helpful guide.
The first relates to the APEC meeting in Seattle in November 1993 where a Bongiorno question to Prime Minister Paul Keating about Malaysian leader Dr Mahathir lead to a media beat-up orchestrated by Savva and Bongiorno. Savva, who was then working on the Sun News-Pictorial, reveals that she and her colleagues were upset on this occasion because – wait for it – they were excluded from morning tea. [That’s quite shocking. Ed]
This is how the sorry Savva describes the occasion – in all seriousness:
Prime Minster Keating attended the Seattle meeting of APEC in November 1993. The meeting went well enough, and the next day Keating was scheduled to visit the Boeing aircraft factory. It was a cold day, and we journalists were first ushered inside the building and then quickly ushered out again, even though there were snow flurries. With our noses pressed up against the windows like so many Orphan Annies, we could see trolleys of pastries and hot coffee wheeled past for the dignitaries. We were kept outside in the freezing cold, and offered nothing.
Shucks. Little wonder that Bongiorno, Savva and various members of the Canberra Press Gallery vented their pastry-deprived spleens at Paul Keating. It’s just awful being pastry-less in Seattle.
By the 2007 election, Savva was working in the Howard Government’s Cabinet Policy Unit. In So Greek, Savva reflects on the anti-Coalition feeling in the Canberra Press Gallery circa 2007 – with your man Paul Bongiorno playing a star role. [For an analysis of Paul Bongiorno’s coverage of the 2004 election campaign see The Sydney Institute Quarterly, Issue 24, December 2004, page 15. Ed]
As Niki Savva writes in So Greek:
The media was only too willing to take up anti-Howard stories and there were too many people willing to supply them. Paul Bongiorno, for example, was one of the senior people in the gallery who made clear his distaste for the government, and who couldn’t wait to see it booted out…
Ten’s news menu always seemed to be laden with anti-coalition government stories and its 2007 campaign coverage was, if anything, worse than in the past… It was hard enough getting good people to spruik reliably on the government’s behalf, and in my view there was little point in serving up ministers for Meet the Press. Hardly anyone watched it, and people could make more headway with a doorstop on Sunday.
Bongiorno was furious that he was having trouble getting anyone senior on his show, and worried about what his superiors in Sydney would think. He warned me that there would be “grief” if we did not field senior people for his programme during the campaign.
“Is that a threat?”
“No, it’s a promise.”
To my mind, it made no difference where they went on or not; there would still be grief.
Writing in The Australian last Monday, Niki Savva complained about the Canberra Press Gallery’s double standards in how it reported Howard compared with how it reports Rudd:
If four people had died either directly or indirectly as a result of a Howard government policy, the lynch mob would have been out not for the minister responsible for the program, but for the prime minister himself. In the Howard years, if Indian students were being regularly assaulted and sometimes murdered, it would not be a premier forced to make groveling apologies on an almost daily basis and trying to repair relations with an old friend, it would be the PM. And whether it was true or not, the PM would be blamed for fostering latent racism.
If John Howard had been prime minister when the Sri Lanken refugees were holed up for weeks on the customs vessel, Oceanic Viking, churches and humanitarian groups would have launched an all-out war against him.
Now, back to Paul Bongiorno and Meet the Press – and, in particular, Mr Bongiorno’s interview with Kevin Rudd last Sunday.
Did Bongiorno ask the Prime Minister to express sympathy to the families and loved ones who have died in implementing the Rudd Government’s roof insulation policies? Nope. Did Bongiorno raise the issue of crimes against Indian students in Melbourne? Negative. And did Bongiorno (who campaigned for asylum seekers during the Howard years) mention the plight of Sri Lankan asylum seekers currently on a boat at the Indonesian port of Merak. Not on your nelly. Enough said, really.
NANCY’S FIVE PAWS GONG
Well done Rebecca Wilson for the following perceptive column in the Herald-Sun about Kerry O’Brien, the 7:30 Report and all that – which was published 4 February 2010 and which has just come to Nancy’s attention. Wrote Wilson:
The host of The 7:30 Report, Kerry O’Brien, seems barely able to disguise his political leanings. The man who has put himself on an interviewing pedestal, working for the allegedly independent national broadcaster, is quite happy to throw Dorothy Dixers in the direction of Kevin Rudd or Environment Minister Penny Wong. The lead-up to the Copenhagen climate summit was cringeworthy. You might have thought, watching O’Brien, that he was actually on the ALP’s payroll as Wong and Co droned through 20-minute interviews espousing their emissions trading scheme and the virtues of what turned out to be the car crash that was Copenhagen.
So it was with much interest that I tuned in to watch O’Brien on Tuesday night in his first big interview with Opposition Leader Tony Abbott… Abbott was… grilled mercilessly by O’Brien. There were no easy pickings, no allowing Abbott to settle into the interview hot seat and there was no quarter given when Abbott defended his new plan. Those in my lounge room commented that O’Brien showed his leaning very early and that he was unnecessarily tough on the Opposition Leader about a policy he had only just read.
Once again, enough said.
REPORT FROM THE INNER CITY
Jill Singer Bags Mere Accountants and Fisherpersons
MWD is quite a fan of the gorgeous Jill Singer who writes each Thursday in the Herald-Sun and used to appear analysing the daily newspapers on the ABC2 News Breakfast program. Let’s hope Ms Singer gets another go.
Sad, then, that Jill Singer of late seems to have become yet another more-educated-than-thou inner city leftist. Perhaps this reflects her day job as a lecturer at the RMIT University in Melbourne.
In her Herald-Sun column on 11 February 2010, Jill Singer thundered away in a diatribe against National Party Senator and Coalition Shadow Finance Minister Barnaby Joyce. Wrote Ms Singer:
There is nothing wrong with being an accountant, farmer or fisherman – but these are insufficient credentials to, say, run a nation’s finances, which is what Joyce aspires to do.
How elitist can you get? According to Singer, accountants, farmers and fishermen are not qualified to hold the positions of treasurer or finance minister. The RMIT lecturer must have forgotten that Paul Keating, one of Australia’s best treasurers, left school at 15 and has no formal qualifications. Moreover, Jim “Call me Doctor” Cairns – who was a disastrous treasurer in the disastrous Whitlam Labor government – had a Ph. D. from the Melbourne University Commerce Department.
La Brett’s Influence
It seems that Jill Singer’s elitist views are all the rage in academia – especially in MWD’s hometown of Melbourne. In her chapter in Robert Manne’s edited collection The Howard Years, Judith Brett bagged opinion polls and talkback radio and declared:
Opinion polling brings the one vote – one value democracy of the ballot box into the determination of any issue… The opinions of the ignorant or uninvolved are given equal weight to those of the passionate and knowledgeable.
MWD has a modest proposal. Why not junk representative democracy altogether and appoint Jill Singer as finance minister, Judith Brett as prime minister and Robert Manne as governor-general. It would be government of the knowledgeable, by the passionate, for the inner-city luvvies.
THE “CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?” – NEW SEGMENT
Can you believe it? Last Wednesday, Ross (“The Himalayas May Be Melting”) Garnaut appeared on Lateline. Asked about the Coalition’s recently released climate change policy under new Liberal leader Tony Abbott, Professor Garnaut replied:
I did not take seriously the possibility that it would become part of the Australian policy discussion. I thought that debates over government taking huge decisions about resource allocation ended with the fall of the Soviet Union.
Professor Garnaut did not say whether the Rudd Government’s National Broadband Network proposal also amounted to a Soviet Union style resource allocation decision. Pity.
The next morning Ross Garnaut was interviewed on Radio National Breakfast and said that Greg Hunt, the Shadow Environment Minister, had sent him a “nice message” after the Lateline program. In other words, Mr Hunt apparently said something nice about the Coalition being compared to the totalitarian dictators in the Soviet Union. Can you believe it? Is such weakness in the blood of many a self-proclaimed Liberal Party moderate?
HISTORY CORNER
Lawrence Money: Off-the-Money on John Wren, Raheen, Daniel Mannix and all that
You’ve heard about Old Money – and New Money. Then there’s The Age
gossip columnist Lawrence Money who writes occasionally in his “Money’s Melbourne” column about Old Money and New Money – and, of course, Lawrence Money.
For some reason or other, Mr Money has an obsession with the late John Wren (1871-1953). John Wren was a successful businessman, a Catholic and a supporter of the Collingwood Football Club. It seems any one of these associations would be enough to irritate Lawrence Money – formerly of the Spencer Street Soviet which has relocated closer to the Yarra River. This was done, apparently, to fulfil MWD’s prophecy that The Age would become “The Guardian-on-the-Yarra”. Why, these days, “The-Guardian-on-the-Yarra” even prints a large amount of material which originates from the real thing in London.
On Wednesday “Money’s Melbourne” commenced as follows:
One of the most enduring legends about Raheen, the Kew mansion currently owned by the wealthy Pratt family, is that the infamous tote tycoon John Wren bought it – or provided the Catholic Church with the cash for it – in 1918 as a home for Melbourne archbishop Daniel Mannix, who lived there for the next 45 years. Whatever the truth, the Raheen story provides a stark contrast to the recollections of 74-year-old Jenny Kurg, one of Wren’s granddaughters.
It seems that “the truth” about this matter was resolved at the bottom of “Money’s Melbourne” column on Wednesday – where the caption to a photograph of Jenny Kurg outside Raheen read as follows: “Jenny Kurg outside the Raheen mansion bought by her grandfather, tycoon John Wren.”
There is no evidence that John Wren purchased Raheen for Archbishop Daniel Mannix. The property was bought in 1917 (not 1918) from Lady Wrixon – the widow of Sir Henry Wrixon – by the Catholic Trusts Corporation. Bev Roberts’ book Raheen: A House and its People (Pola Nominees, 2007) cites a letter written by lawyer Peter Norris to Archbishop Frank Little in 1981 – in which Norris wrote that the allegation that Wren had given Raheen to Mannix was “not verifiable from any documents presently available”. There was no such evidence in 1981 – and there is no such evidence today.
In the early 20th Century, the Catholic Church in Australia had considerable financial resources and purchased many fine properties. The Church would have had the money to buy Raheen and no one has been able to prove that it did not do so. The caption in The Age was inaccurate and Lawrence Money’s beat-up that a myth is really “a legend” is misleading.
Like all of us, John Wren had his faults – including his support for Collingwood. However, he was not the embodiment of evil as depicted in the then Communist Party member Frank Hardy’s 1950 novel Power Without Glory. When Power Without Glory was shown on ABC TV in the late 1970s, Hardy’s allegations against Wren were upgraded to wilful murder. Without evidence, of course.
Sure John Wren ran an illegal tote in Collingwood around the turn of the 20th century. This seems to upset Lawrence Money. Or is Mr Money merely recycling The Age’s long-running anti-Catholic sectarianism?
Hungry Beast and ASIO’s Non-History
Still no jokes about Islam and the Prophet on the ABC’s Hungry Beast to balance the program’s mockery of Catholicism and Christ (see Issue 41). This week’s Hungry Beast contained a predictable left-wing attack on ASIO which was replete with historical errors and omissions. It will be analysed in the next History Corner.
Until next time.