GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG – ISSUE NO. 59
25 JUNE 2010
IN THIS ISSUE
● Softly, Softly with the Greens on RN Breakfast
● Nancy’s Pick of the Week – Phillip Adams Focuses on Prime Mates While Real Mates Axe Kevin Rudd
● Read All About It: Peter Fitzsimons, Josh Gordon and Michelle Grattan On Why Kevin Rudd Will Remain Prime Minister (Now Outdated)
● Thoughts On A Leadership Change: Peter Van Onselen Prophecises; Catherine Deveny Emotes; Bob Ellis Predicts and Robert Manne’s Advice on PM’s Office Design Neglected
● Nancy’s Five Paws Award: Lenore Taylor Tells It Straight About Her Press Gallery Colleagues
● Laura Tingle Detects An Absolute Stinker
● Maurice Newman Special (Continued): Why Everyone On PM Agrees With Everything That Ken Henry Says
● Michael Rowland on Alan Kohler’s Well-Earned Break
● History Corner: Daniel Ellsberg Throws the Switch to Mythology on Australia’s Vietnam War Commitment
● Cliché Corner: Tony Jones and Margaret Simons On the Camel’s Back and the Straw – Or Is It the Straw and the Camel’s Back
****
STOP PRESS
Fran Kelly’s Political Love-In with (Secular) Saint Bob
Media Watch Dog has long held the view that the ABC is not pro Labor – but, rather, tends to attack both Labor and the Coalition from the left. A senior Labor minister recently told MWD that this was very much the case during the 2010 Tasmanian State elections – where ABC presenters and producers tended to barrack for the Greens and tended to be overly critical of both the Labor and Liberal parties.
MWD was reminded of this phenomenon on hearing Fran Kelly’s oh-so-soft interview with Greens Senate leader Bob Brown on Radio National Breakfast this morning. It even ended with this “Dorothy Dix” style question about the Greens chances of winning the seat of Melbourne in the forthcoming Federal election, following Lindsay Tanner’s announcement that he would be retiring from politics:
Fran Kelly: Okay, Bob Brown. Thank you very much for joining us. And just very briefly – in ten seconds or less. I presume you think the seat of Melbourne is now definitely winnable for the Greens with Lindsay Tanner gone.
Senator Brown sure did – in no more than ten seconds.
NANCY’S PICK OF THE WEEK
THE ABC’S “LATE NIGHT DEAD ASLEEP” – OR HOW PHILLIP ADAMS MISSED THE BIGGEST POLITICAL STORY OF THE DECADE
Nancy was up late on Wednesday night glued to Sky News’ coverage of the unravelling Labor leadership challenge. The story had been broken by Mark Simkin on ABC TV News’ 7 pm bulletin and by Heather Ewart on the 7.30 Report. But then ABC News and Current Affairs appeared to have a siesta until around the time that Lateline was scheduled to go to air at 10.30 pm.
By then, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had completed his media conference, in which he advised that Julia Gillard intended to challenge for Labor leadership at 9 am on Thursday. Mr Rudd’s media conference commenced at about 10.15 pm and concluded at about 10.25 pm. Meanwhile, when Nancy checked, over at ABC1 Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton were banging on about films on At the Movies – until Chris Uhlmann made a brief appearance before introducing Lateline on which he was interviewed. Sky News, which has limited resources compared with the taxpayer funded ABC, had gone live on the leadership crisis hours before the ABC TV realised that it was missing a really big story.
And what about ABC Radio? MWD put this question to Jane Connors, the head of ABC Radio National. Is Phillip Adams’ Late Night Live program really live? MWD tuned into ABC Radio at around 10.15 pm on Wednesday It was business as usual on Late Night Live as well as on Metropolitan Radio 702 – and even on ABC News Radio (which usually performs well covering breaking stories). It may be that 702 and News Radio had limited resources that night. But Phillip Adams was presenting a supposedly live program on Radio National – and yet he missed one of the biggest news stories in Australian political history. How did this happen?
Radio National advised MWD yesterday that Late Night Live “was indeed live to air” on Wednesday. According to RN, Late Night Live’s executive producer “became aware of the looming situation in Canberra mid-evening and rang one of the program’s regular commentators”. According to RN, the regular commentator “declined to come on, as the situation was so fluid at this stage”. Really. Meanwhile over at Sky News the political demise of Kevin Rudd was already being reported.
On LNL last night, Phillip Adams identified the reluctant commentator as Laura Tingle. Okay. But there are many other commentators who would have seen the significance of this breaking story at the time. RN advised MWD that “the story only really broke after the program commenced”. This is a new approach to live radio. Before LNL commenced on Wednesday it was widely known that a leadership challenge was on and journalists were beginning to take their places in the media Blue Room in Parliament House. In any event, this was a huge story by at least 10.15 pm – yet LNL decided not to cover it. And so Phillip Adams ploughed on interviewing the primatologist Richard Wrangham. For the record, LNL has a production staff of six.
AND NOW A WORD FROM THE SOOTHSAYERS IN OUR MIDST
• Peter FitzSimons On Why Kevin Rudd Will Prevail
It’s about the Rudd thing. I just don’t get how a bloke who had nigh on record popularity only a short time ago can so suddenly be on the nose with so many voters when, to my eyes, nothing has particularly changed, apart from the mining tax. And I know, I know, the mining magnates are saying it is the end of the world as we know it if a larger chunk of the common wealth of the country goes to the Commonwealth of Australia to pay for schools, roads and hospitals, instead of into their pockets. But why do such a broad mass of people seem to be saying that, too? Particularly when they must know that if the money doesn’t come from the likes of the magnates then it will have to come from you, me and them. My bet is that if the government sticks to its guns, the electorate will realise exactly that, and Rudd’s numbers will rise again. [Peter FitzSimons, “The Fitz Files”, The Sun-Herald, 20 June 2010.]
That was on Sunday. The office removalists arrived at the Prime Minister’s office on Wednesday.
• Josh Gordon On Why Kevin Rudd Will Decisively Win the 2010 Election
No doubt about it, making predictions about the inherently unpredictable and chaotic world of politics is a fraught business. So here goes. The fashionable view in Canberra seems to be that Rudd’s leadership is moribund. The pack has caught a whiff of blood and is closing in. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph last week even went so far as to run a story quoting some bozo who thinks (but can’t be sure) that Rudd still owes him a beer after a late night drinking bout that took place in 2005. The horror.
With so much chest thumping, it would be easy to declare – as Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt did recently – that Kevin Rudd is “finished”. But I’m not so sure. My bet is that Rudd will decisively win the next election, even if Labor does lose some skin. [Josh Gordon, “Ringmaster’s Return”, The Sunday Age, 20 June 2010. The-Sunday-Guardian-on-the-Yarra’s national politics reporter made his prophecy at the weekend. What will he write this Sunday?]
At 4.30 pm on Wednesday, as the plotters were moving against Kevin Rudd, Josh Gordon appeared on the Sky News PM Agenda program and declared:
I actually took the plunge last week and sort rang every backbencher with my colleague in the Sun-Herald. And we found that there was actually very little support for a leadership spill now. I think the prevailing view was that it’d be madness to switch to Julia Gillard at the late stage in the electoral cycle…
• Michelle Grattan On Why Mare Gillard Is Not Even On the Racing Track
I don’t think there is any chance of a move against Kevin Rudd. And you do not have a willing replacement and clearly there is not another horse in the field. Julia Gillard has made it clear time after time that she doesn’t want to be in some very difficult coup. And I think that if the Labor Party did go down that path it would simply intensify its problems rather than help them. There’s no quick way out of this situation. [Michelle Grattan, The-Guardian-on-the-Yarra’s political editor, in her daily Radio National Breakfast commentary spot on Tuesday 22 June.]
Despite some over-the-top speculation in recent weeks, Kevin Rudd will fight his second election, his white-knuckled followers hanging on and hoping. [Michelle Grattan in The Age, 23 June 2010.]
THE LABOR LEADERSHIP CHANGE – SOME INDISCIPLINED THOUGHTS
• What Does It Prophet Peter Van Onselen?
Last night on Sky News, and again on this morning’s Australian, Peter Van Onselen used Julia Gillard’s defeat of Kevin Rudd to channel Malcolm Mackerras, perhaps even The (False) Prophet Bob Ellis. Today Van Onselen predicted:
Julia Gillard won’t just win the next election, she will increase Labor’s majority.
Maybe. Maybe not.
• Catherine Deveny’s Leadership Emotes
Catherine Deveny’s Twitter has been all-a-twitter over the last couple of days. Here are some examples:
“This is the first time in my whole life I have been proud to be Australian”. “Every time Julia Gillard says ‘as prime minister’, I can’t stop crying.”
How times change. After Kevin Rudd defeated John Howard in November 2007, Catherine Deveny went all orgasmic. See Issue 58. Now she’s emoting for Julia Gillard while bagging Mr Rudd.
• Bob Ellis on Julia Gillard
Still no update from Bob Ellis who on ABC’s The Drum Unleashed on 1 February 2010 predicted that, in her (then) capacity as deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard would lose the 2010 election.
Maybe. Maybe not.
• Robert Manne on Re-designing the PM’s office
Remember Robert Manne’s edited collection Dear Mr Rudd: Ideas For a Better Australia (Black Inc., 2008)? MWD wonders whether Professor Manne will arrange for the same advice to go to Julia Gillard as he arranged to forward to Kevin Rudd.
In her chapter titled “The Arts” in Dear Mr Rudd, Juliana Engberg recommended that Kevin Rudd could get Callum Morton to “redesign his entire office and turn it into an architectural conundrum” – with a “hotel corridor, lift lobby, West Wing”.
MWD’s view is that Kevin Rudd’s political failure can be directly traced to his failure to follow the advice professed by Professor Manne and Ms Engberg.
NANCY’S FIVE PAWS AWARD
Lenore Taylor Gets It Right on the Canberra Press Gallery
This week’s winner is Lenore Taylor, who, when speaking about her co-authored book Shitstorm on RN Breakfast last Monday, fessed up that there is a “pack” mentality in the Canberra Press Gallery.
Ms Taylor told Fran Kelly that, in the early years of the Rudd Labor government, the Canberra Press Gallery “all bought” the Rudd Government’s “story that the inflation genie is out of the bottle” and that there was need to “wage war” on inflation. All of them, apparently.
Five Paws.
TOP HYPERBOLIC MOMENT OF THE WEEK
Laura Tingle’s Most Exaggerated Statement That The World Has Ever Known (Really) – For This Week At Least
In a highly competitive week for hyperbole, the Australian Financial Review’s Laura Tingle stepped up to the task. While on-the-couch during last Sunday’s Insiders program, Ms Tingle asked the following (rhetorical) question about Opposition leader Tony Abbot:
How’s he [i.e. Tony Abbott] winning the debate, if everybody thinks he’s an absolute stinker?
Eh, just who is “everybody”? Abbott may not be the most popular politician who ever stood at the despatch box at Parliament House in Canberra. However, he does have a satisfaction/approval rating of around 40 per cent. So, according to the only scientific evidence available, at least 40 per cent of Australians do not happen to share Laura Tingle’s apparent view that Tony Abbott is an “absolute stinker”.
GROUP-THINK IN THE ABC – SPECIAL MAURICE NEWMAN SEGMENT (CONTINUED)
This (popular) segment is devoted to ABC Chairman Maurice Newman’s suggestion that a certain “group think” might be prevalent at the ABC – and to ABC 1 Media Watch presenter Jonathan Holmes’ certainty that no such phenomenon is extant within the public broadcaster.
This week’s support for the Newman thesis comes from the ABC Radio’s PM program. Last Monday Sabra Lane reported a speech by Ken Henry, the secretary of the Treasury, in which Dr Henry made the you-beaut suggestion that it would “certainly serve the national interest” if economists, particularly academic economists, stopped disagreeing with each other and lined up to support, wait for it, Ken Henry. He had in mind the proposed Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – but the principle could be extended to cover such areas as the Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT).
As Dr Henry put it:
There are occasions on which economists might, at least for a period, put down their weapons and join a consensus on an idea.
A controversial view, don’t you think? Here was the head of Treasury calling for an end to debate within the economics profession. So what did PM do? Well, it lined up two commentators who essentially agreed with Ken Henry to comment on Ken Henry’s proposal.
First up was Don Henry, chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation, who supports the proposed ETS. Declared Henry about Henry: “Well, I do agree with his views.” He went on to argue in favour of “concerted voices” – provided, of course, the said voices agreed with the Henry/Henry position.
Then Sabra Lane interviewed Professor John Quiggan. As she put it:
Queensland University’s Professor John Quiggan, who supported the ETS until it was defeated last December, also supports Ken Henry’s views.
In fact, Professor Quiggan’s only criticism of the proposed ETS was that it had been watered down too much. Sabra Lane reported that ANU academic Warwick McKibbon was not available for an interview. Okay. But surely there was at least one other economist in Australia who would have criticised Dr Henry’s call for economic consensus on his ETS advocacy? Well none appeared on PM – and so it came to pass that yet more ABC endorsed group-think aired on the ABC.
JOURNALISTS AND THE WELL EARNED BREAK (PART 93)
Michael Rowland Explains Alan Kohler’s Absence
As Nancy is very, very well aware – most Australian’s enjoy what are termed holidays. But journalists just go on “well earned breaks”.
For example, Inside Business presenter Alan Kohler went on a holiday – sorry, a well earned break – recently. This was announced by fill-in presenter Michael Rowland, who made the following statement at the commencement of last Sunday’s program:
Welcome to the program. I’m Michael Rowland – filling in for Alan Kohler who’s taking a well, well earned break.
Well, well, now.
HISTORY CORNER
DANIEL ELLSBERG’S BUNK HISTORY ON AUSTRALIA’S VIETNAM COMMITMENT
The inner-city, baby-boomer, khadi-clad, sandal-wearers were all a-twitter in the middle of the month when Judith Ehrlich rocked up in Australia to flog her documentary about Vietnam War protestor Daniel Ellsberg. Ms Ehrlich was in Australia as a guest of the taxpayer funded United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and received lotsa time on the taxpayer funded public broadcaster to flog her film titled The Most Dangerous Man In America about the State Department employee who leaked The Pentagon Papers to The New York Times around four decades ago. The documentary was all the rage at the taxpayer subsidised Sydney Film Festival earlier this month. Needless to say, Ehrlich’s documentary is in the lives-of-the-leftist-secular-saints-tradition and features only praise of its subject.
Nowhere on the ABC did Ehrlich or Ellsberg receive better coverage than on the ABC Radio National Breakfast program.
On 9 June RN Breakfast presenter Fran Kelly interviewed Judith Ehrlich about her film. It was a soft interview. Then, on 10 June, Fran Kelly interviewed the 79 year old Daniel Ellsberg about the current war in Afghanistan and the one-time war in Vietnam. Another soft interview which ran for close to ten minutes. For the record, Ellsberg has no expertise on Afghanistan.
“History Corner” was particularly interested in Daniel Ellsberg’s comments – as told to Fran Kelly – about Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
Fran Kelly : We’ve got two minutes until we have to go to the news, Daniel. But just to go to your experience, you were a respected member of the Defence establishment when you leaked The Pentagon Papers, when you made that decision all those years ago. Now you’re critical of people, perhaps in similar positions within the establishment, who don’t make public lies that they know are being told by the administrations, when it comes to war – or actions being taken that will actually hurt the counter terror efforts.
Daniel Ellsberg : Well, quite so. I am critical of myself in the years when I didn’t do that and there were a number of them. I wish, I’m really calling on officials to do not what I did – which was to wait too long really to put out the truth – but to do what I wish I’d done years earlier when the war itself might have been averted. It’s too late for that in Viet – in Afghanistan – but still more escalation could be averted if people put out in a timely way. And incidentally, I noticed that your – there’s a lot of controversy there about the causalities that Australians have already suffered in Afghanistan.
It recalls to me that, when I released The Pentagon Papers, I was accused of having hurt relations with Australia – specifically by revealing the embarrassing news of just how the Australian Government was induced and bribed and encouraged to send troops…from Australia to Vietnam. And when I learned, in that context, that Australia had actually instituted the draft in order to send men to Vietnam, I was shocked. I thought that disgusting. [Fran Kelly attempting to interject here, as the 8am News looms] And I was very glad to have embarrassed that Australian government for doing that –
Fran Kelly : Alright Daniel, I have to –
Daniel Ellsberg: I think the Australian Government should be just as embarrassed –
Fran Kelly: Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, I’m sorry to interrupt you mate, but we’re about to hit the news. Thank you so much for joining us on Breakfast.
This is historical tripe. The reasons why Australia committed the Australian Defence Force to Vietnam are quite clear. They were revealed by Professor Peter Edwards in the official history titled Crises and Commitments: The Politics and Diplomacy of Australia’s Involvement in Southwest Asian Conflicts (1948-1965).
As Professor Edwards documents, Robert Menzies’ Government was anxious to commit Australian forces to Vietnam in 1965 because Menzies and his colleagues believed that if Australia committed forces in support of the United States in Vietnam – then the US would be more likely to assist Australia if Australia became involved in a military confrontation with Indonesia. In the early 1960s Indonesia was led by the aggressive nationalist President Sukarno, who enjoyed the support of the powerful Communist Party in Indonesia – the PKI.
In other words, Ellsberg’s theory is bunk. Also conscription – or what Ellsberg referred to as “the draft”, – was introduced by the Menzies Government in November 1964 – i.e. before any decision was made about sending combat forces to Vietnam. When the announcement was made, Prime Minister Menzies spoke primarily about the need for the ADF to be able to handle “military situations” which might occur with respect to Indonesia’s confrontation of Malaysia.
In other words, the introduction of conscription for overseas service was not motivated by the need to provide troops for active duty in Vietnam. As Dr Edwards has documented, when conscription was introduced in November 1964 Menzies’ Government “ministers were only willing to make short-term commitments in Vietnam but they were looking seriously at the possibility of becoming involved in a major conflict between the United Kingdom and Indonesia”.
CLICHÉ CORNER (CONTINUED)
The Back That Broke The Camel’s Straw – A (Clichéd) Word From Tony Jones And Margaret Simons
It seems that any controversy over current or former political leaders invariably sparks a cliché. On Lateline on Wednesday, presenter Tony Jones interviewed AWU national secretary Paul Howes on the possibility that Julia Gillard would replace Labor leader Kevin Rudd as prime minister the following morning. Discussion turned on the decision of Kevin Rudd to send out his senior staffer Alister Jordan in recent times to check on whether there was a leadership challenge about to take place. Then Tony Jones popped the question. Here it is. Let’s go to the transcript:
Tony Jones: Is that the straw that broke the camel’s back?
As Nancy opines – if clichés did not exist, they would have to be invented. [Is this an entry for Cliché of the Week? – Ed].
And now a flashback to Margaret Simons’ appearance on the ABC2 News Breakfast on 26 May. The co-author of Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs (MUP, 2010) was discussing the decision of her co-author to resign from the Liberal Party. Once again, the image of the camel – any camel – came to the rescue. Let’s go to the video-tape. The interviewer was Michael Rowland.
All of which demonstrates just how tough Malcolm Fraser really is when compared to Kevin Rudd. In the matter of Mr Rudd, just one straw was sufficient to break the camel’s back (pace Tony Jones). However, in the matter of Mr Fraser, more than one straw was necessary (pace Margaret Simons).
Until next time.