The Pigpen Pundit

UP until yesterday afternoon, when Gerard Henderson's latest Media Watch Dog became available, it was the great Lennie Lower who laid pre-eminent claim to having penned Australia's most pithily poisonous paragraph. Jack Gudgeon, hero of Here's Luck, speaks of his mother-in-law:

In this description of my mother-in-law's mode of life, I think I have written with a certain amount of tolerant restraint. She is an old lady, and the age of chivalry is not dead while a Gudgeon lives. Perhaps a different son-in-law might have described her as a senseless, whining, nagging, leather-faced old whitlow, not fit to cohabit with a rhinoceros beetle. But I wouldn't.

Lower now has some competition. Henderson writes of scruffy Scott Burchill:

Then, when Dr Burchill gets really down and dirty on the News Breakfast set, this is a sign that his ute outside the Southbank studios is loaded up with a dysfunctional worm-farm, three pre-loved busts of Lenin which have been attacked by Maoists  and perhaps a dead cat or two. That’s how he presented earlier in the year.  The only time Dr Burchill wore a suit and tie was when he was heading off for a job interview – presumably for a lectureship position at Deakin University’s Department of Applied Garbage. [Do you mean Deakin University’s prestigious Department of Humanities and Social Sciences? – Ed]

Every tart word of the new Media Watch Dog is a gem, and don't miss the letter from Terry McCrann.

Woof!

MEDIA WATCH DOG is up and Gerard Henderson is in fine form, with items on Media Watch, self-described "eminent journalist" Margaret Simons, Q&A, the Finko & Rickety Review, and Bob Ellis, who has climbed back aboard the Labor gravy train and is once again advising Bob Carr in his capacity as foreign minister. No mention if Ellis is being paid for his insights, but as Carr is a good Labor man, Ellis a mate, and the public purse open and handy, to think otherwise would defy history.

Oh, and there is a note to Bruce Belsham, now head of ABC Current Affairs, to which the man who hired Jonathan Green and launched The Drum has yet to respond.

A bumper edition, with only one disappointment. Nowhere does Henderson mention that Green, having kept the ABC legal department busy with matters related to defamation, is now being moved to a compere's gig on Radio National. The question is, who will replace Green?

Reader suggestions on the best person to continue Green's brave legacy are welcome.

By the way, is it only the Professor who understands "drum" to be archaic Australian slang for a brothel? Perhaps Craig Thomson, the Kleenex Kid, would make a good editor.

UPDATE: It seems drum's use as a term for a house of ill repute goes back quite some way, according to one self-proclaimed authority.

How To Get Ahead At The ABC

FROM Gerard Henderson's latest Media Watch Dog, a disquieting insight into the workings of the ABC

GERARD HENDERSON TO JONATHAN GREEN – 8 MARCH 2012

Jonathan

Thanks for acknowledging my note.

You are paid a good salary (by the taxpayer) to edit The Drum and The Drum Online.

You should be able to check the facts yourself, from publicly available material, without seeking guidance from Robert Manne – whose memory is not the best these days and who seems too lazy to check his missives before forwarding them to you.

Gerard Henderson

The entire exchange is well worth reading. If all Henderson asserts is true, Bundoora Bob's article was wrong on the facts, grossly wrong, and Henderson has been slimed as a result.

Is the ABC prepared to publish a retraction or apology? Not your nelly! Bruce Belsham, Green's boss, attempts to explain why the national broadcaster does not live by the "quality journalism" standards so often advocated by the likes of Jonathan Holmes. 

Hi Gerard

This is just a quick note as Jonathan Green’s manager with responsibility for The Drum. I’ve had a look at your comments about the Robert Manne piece and reviewed further investigation by The Drum staff. To my mind the points you raise as factual errors are in fact strongly contested with disputed evidence. Some issues, such as defining your criticism of Bosch are matters of interpretation.  I’m therefore uncomfortable with any alterations or  editor’s note which adjudicates the contest.  This was after all an opinion piece in a clearly signposted opinion section of the ABC site. To my mind the appropriate course is to offer you a right of reply which the Drum will undertake to publish and in which you can make your points. I look forward to reading it if you choose to submit something.

I take your point about fact checking in opinion pieces. It’s something we do and take seriously, but you will also appreciate that on an opinion site the dividing line between comment and fact is blurred to say the least.

Regards

Bruce Belsham

Just so all of us who are obliged to support the ABC can be clear on this, Belsham's idea of his organisation's responsibility to do right by truth amounts to this,  "the dividing line between comment and fact is blurred to say the least."

That would be bad news at the best of times, a senior ABC journalist insisting his people can publish anything they wish so long as inaccuracies are able to be spun as "comment". But it gets worse.

If this tweet from ABC Managing Director Mark Scott doesn't chill you, then it is probable you also believe Marieke Hardy's constant presence on the ABC is due solely to talent.

 In case some readers' eyes cannot quite make out the message, this is the pertinent bit:

"Two major appointments .... Bruce Belsham - head of Current Affairs" 

Just to repeat, a man who regards facts as entirely subjective is now supervising Four Corners, 7.30, and Lateline.


Read the whole thing. And remember, when an Abbott government takes charge, it cannot be allowed to make John Howard's mistake and set about reforming the ABC with little more than good intentions, a bit of whining and a few limp slaps.

UPDATE: For some reason, and it may be no more than a technical glitch, the 747 reader comments at the foot of Bundoora Bob's article have gone walkabout. For those interested -- the idle, the curious, and, perhaps, libel lawyers looking for a brief --  they still exist in the cached version.

UPDATE II: This is the element of Bundoora Bob's article which Henderson says is false:

...we know that Henderson was funded generously by Larry Adler's FAI Insurance. When the National Companies and Securities Commission conducted a raid on its offices, Henderson used his column in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age to launch a vitriolic attack on its chairman, Henry Bosch.

There is no "opinion" there. They are assertions, nothing more nor less.

And Belsham has now been installed atop the ABC's Current Affairs unit!

No More Of That Old-Time Religion

AS a general rule it is good policy to dismiss any and all observations by women who appear to be wearing leg-warmers even when they are not, especially if they are holding forth on gender politics and the irredeemable wickedness of Liberal Party leaders. Having never observed academic Susan Mitchell at the beach, nor ever wishing to do so, it still seems safe to assume on the strength of the many errors in her profile of Tony Abbott that conservation authorities must seriously be considering an intervention to prevent her entering the water. Heaven only knows how many small shrimp, jellyfish and other innocent marine creatures might be trapped and perish in the organic monofilaments sprouting from her lower limbs. As for those armpits, the rising price of flake needs no further drift-netting to crimp the available, free-swimming supply.

Gerard Henderson, educated at a Jesuit school, is far too polite to make such an observation, but he stints not at all in noting the many howlers that pepper Mitchell’s new book on Tony Abbott, so enthusiastically announced by The Phage. As with most of Henderson’s demolitions, it is painstaking and well worth reading. There is one problem, however, and that is his summation, written in the third person, of those who these days constitute the Society of Jesus. He writes:

According to Mitchell: The Jesuits are the intellectuals of the Catholic teaching orders, open only to men of the highest intelligence.

This is arrant nonsense.  There is no intelligence test for admission into the Jesuits – i.e. the Catholic order formally titled the Society of Jesus.  Gerard Henderson spent most of his schooling at schools run by the Jesuits and he has known many Jesuits in his professional career.  Some are men of the highest intelligence – and some are not.

If there are indeed Jesuits of high intelligence, they hide their lights under a bushel. Indeed, one need look no further than Eureka Street, the Jesuit-funded magazine and web site, to comprehend how those who purport to honour Inigo de Loyola’s teachings violate the eleventh rule of their founder’s Spiritual Exercises, “to praise positive and scholastic learning.” Can such a mission statement be reconciled, to cite just one instance, with the publication of some 100 articles by spineless diplomat (“the Australian ambassador was in Kampot but immediately fled back to Phnom Penh … leaving his consul, me, behind”), SIEV-X fabulist ( “this almost certainly sabotaged boat” ) and Alene Composta intimate Tony Kevin?

By the light of Eureka Street’s fashionably modern Jesuit bankers, apparently it can. Nor does free speech figure in your contemporary Jack’s estimation of social good, with the site currently featuring no less than three celebrations of Andrew Bolt’s smiting by a Labor hack who gets about in the robes of a Federal Court judge.

Brian McCoy SJ laments a charity's rejection of his suggestion that it support a pale face’s progress through medical school. He was informed, he writes, that it preferred “ ‘to get involved with ‘full blood’ indigenous … our two current holders do not ‘look like’ aborigines’.”  McCartney then reveals that his proposed candidate subsequently graduated without assistance, a fact that rather supports the unnamed charity’s point of many, many others being in far greater need. Let us hope those dollars found them.

Andrew Hamiliton, Eureka Street’s contributing editor, takes it a little further, albeit with a nod to the individual’s still-indulged permission to voice unpopular opinions, by comparing Bolt’s ridicule of race-mongering careerists to a vulgarian’s farts during the quiet moments of a delightful symphony. Intellectual substance, at Eureka Street it is a bottom-up affair.

And finally, there is RMIT lecturer Binoy Kampmark, who takes the cake by trumping those other contributions with a digression about nasty Jews, of whom, apropos of nothing much, he writes of “figures in the American Jewish community who have trafficked in a currency of past suffering [the Holocaust] to obtain a position of worth and favours.”

On other topics, much more of the same. Pop on over, have a look, see if there is anything of intellectual substance to, say, Moira Rayner’s defence of Christine “Just Popping Out For Dinner” Nixon,  Fatima Measham’s exposure of climate sceptics as just few nasties with many, many online personas, or journalism academic Tim Dwyer’s suggestion that the Press Council needs more money, additional staffers and, perhaps, a greater authority to decide good free speech from bad free speech.

On that point it would be interesting to see if Eureka Street is leading by example, which its policy of refusing to publish reader comments critical of its writers would seem to suggest.

But just for the clincher, what would happen, do you imagine, if an aspiring contributor sent in an article arguing that the modern Church, and the Jesuits most of all, have surveyed their empty Sunday pews and decided that the business of saving souls is no longer a growth industry -- hence the switch to preaching the secular creeds of rights for illegal immigrants, the advantages of command economies, green animism, and the elevation of “inappropriate” speech and thought to highest and darkest ranks of the very worst  mortal sins.

One suspects such a piece would be given very short shrift indeed.

But don’t take a Bunyip’s word. Pop over to Eureka Street and try submitting some polite but critical appraisals of their writers’ intellect and arguments. Chances are most such comments will end up on the cutting room floor, along with all the other articles of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.