Selective reporting on the Union Royal Commission

Check out this very clever, funny satirical poem that cuts to the AWU slush fund scandal.

Listen to Kel Richard's poem [here] 

 

Kel Richards has been a broadcaster for a long time and up to when he shifted to commercial radio in August 2010 he had been with ABC for 30 years.

 

Also this week on ABC TV by chance I watched a show that I rarely view - Media Watch.

First of all The Australian newspaper was lambasted for its article on plain packeting cigarettes increasing tobacco sales. The Australian replied later in the week with the counter accusation that Media Watch used  "selec­tive quoting". See - What Media Watch package didn’t tell us  

 

Media Watch followed in their program with another story, Union Royal Commission story lacks prominence on ABC TV News where The Australian received some praise and the host station, Aunty no less was chastised.

 

"The story has allegations of
Fraud.
Corruption.
Political slush funds.
And lying to a Royal Commission.

And tangled up in the middle of it is former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who in the 1990s was lover and lawyer to this man, Bruce Wilson.
He’s a former boss of the Australian Workers Union in Victoria and a man who could be charged with fraud, according to counsel assisting the royal commission.

On Friday, Wilson’s evidence to the commission was front page news in The Australian and the Telegraph. But it was nowhere to be seen on the cover of these Fairfax papers. And amazingly it was missing entirely from the previous evening’s 7pm bulletins on ABC TV in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin.

The day before, when evidence was given about wads of cash being handed to Ms Gillard to fund her home renovations ... ABC TV’s 7pm bulletins in three of those capitals also failed to report the news.
While in Sydney it was down the bottom of the bulletin just before the sport.

The Australian’s Hedley Thomas has been leading the charge on this story for a couple of years.
The ABC has done little and has long been accused of refusing to investigate

 

Up till now, perhaps, one might have given the ABC the benefit of the doubt.

But with sensational evidence being given under oath last week to a Royal Commission there is surely no justification for ignoring it."
.

 



HOW THE STAFF CAPTURED THE ABC

Image source: How The ABC Gets Away With It

Interesting item by Keith Windschuttle  from Quadrant.







When the left's long march through the institutions arrived at the ABC, Allan Ashbolt was there to lead it. The national broadcaster as we know it today -- infused with a green-left bias and populated very nearly exclusively by the like-minded -- is his creation and his legacy

  Keith Windschuttle writes:

The Australian on January 31 had a long editorial arguing that Mark Scott, the managing director of the ABC, was a failure, a man ‘out of his depth who lacked the focus or strength to lead the ABC in a new era’. He was failing in his role as editor-in-chief, the editorial said, and failing to take responsibility for the news stories broadcast on the network. Instead, it argued that the ABC was run by ‘a collectivist inner-city clique of broadcasters, bloggers, latter-day Trotskyites and inked hipsters’.
All this is true enough, but it doesn’t explain how things got that way.

In 2005, I gave a lecture titled ‘Vilifying Australia’, published in Quadrant in September that year, where I discussed the phenomenon of staff capture of media organisations by leftists, which I said went back to at least the 1960s. I nominated Allan Ashbolt as the originator of this push at the ABC:

Ashbolt was a maverick broadcaster at the ABC, then a largely conservative organisation. Ashbolt managed to find jobs for a small group of Marxists and radicals like himself. In the ensuing thirty years that group, its appointees and values, have captured the organization. Ashbolt’s views have not only survived, they have built a house culture that even the appointment of a board now dominated by conservatives has been unable to displace

.....now is a good time to bring that evidence to light. It is to be found in one of the most insightful pieces of media analyses ever written in Australia. The author is Anthony McAdam who in the 1980s had a regular column on the media in Quadrant. The title of the article is ‘The ABC’s Marxists’ and it was published in the January-February edition of 1983. It might be old, but there is still much to learn from it today.

Read more:  How the staff captured the ABC

Related post previously published: GET OUR ABC BACK
.