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!

The Great Seducer

CAN THERE be a man anywhere in the world who has not entertained the thought of a threesome (or moresome)? Just as women are genetically programmed for nurturing, consensus and multi-tasking, or so the feminists tell us, so men are hard-wired to sow children over the broadest fertile acreage. For some reason this natural, sustainable and entirely organic urge is not celebrated with anywhere near the same enthusiasm as the feminine compulsion to form spontaneous sandwich-making collectives at amateur sporting events, launch book clubs devoted to novels featuring impractical footwear on their covers or advance help-a-sister employment initiatives -- surely the only reason Silly editrix Amanda Wilson persists in showcasing the likes of A Dill Horin, Jessica Irvine, Betty Farrelly and Mike “Butch” Carlton, the meanest girl of all.

Sadly, attempts at the Billabong to enlighten women about their suppressed sexuality have not been terribly successful. Many times it has been pointed out by way of argument that men’s magazines feature erotic pictures of naked women and that the gals’ glossies also feature erotic pictures of naked women, but the obvious conclusion that a few girlfriends and a scented candle need to be assembled moist and waiting in the Professor’s breeding box has never inspired a more encouraging response than giggles. As for nominating specific friends for recruitment, quite often that approach has seen eruptions of slaps and elbows even before potential aptitudes can be touched upon.

Still, one lives in hope, even after this morning’s gross disappointment, when  a little birds’ chorus of muffled, girlish voices rose from somewhere deep between the sheets to prompt dreamy reveries of four smooth legs bookending the Professor’s robust ones.

And then Jonathan Green opened his mouth and spoiled everything.

As full consciousness returned, it became clear the alarm clock was tuned to Radio National, where the Drum editor moonlights as the Sunday morning compere. And for those alluring voices? They were some of Green’s guests going on about feminism’s continued relevance, a favourite topic of those whose relevance, and radio appearances, depend on being identified as feminists. One of his guests sounded a lot like Eva Cox, by no means the carnal catalyst, but that disappointment was not the morning’s only blow to optimism and morale. Far more annoying was Green’s tossed-off warning that women have reached a particularly hazardous stage of their social evolution.

“In an age of acid attacks and Rush Limbaugh, what is the future of feminism?” he wondered, referring to an imminent report on the Pakistani sport of disfiguring uppity women.

By now the Professor was fully awake and more than a little annoyed. A conservative American radio host, one most Australian listeners know only by repute, being equated with sexist terror and disfigurement! The muttering was about to become a full-blown fulmination when a flash of insight revealed Green’s true genius. Golly gosh, the man is brilliance made flesh!

Since the direct approach to prompting threesomes (and moresomes) does not seem to work very well, the smooth Mr Green was trying the empathetic tack. One might quibble about Cox’s value in such a ménage, but give him credit for trying. Like drive-by smears of those on the right, it seems the male urge cannot be denied, even at the ABC.

A NOTE: While Green mentioned Limbaugh and his guests generally agreed that Margaret Thatcher was not a feminist, not one link was made between acid attacks and misogynist Musselmen. With ABC gals, dissing multiculturalism must be quite the turn-off.    

  

             

No Wonder We're Called "Deniers"

EVEN for The Drum this is a new low:

Various reviews of the CRU have found that the scientists did not mislead the public or corrupt the peer review process, and that the data was sound. The point is not that the researchers were flawless saints, but that the reality of scientific labour and consensus was too-easily swapped for a vision of devious deception. Like the Elders of Zion, these sneaky liberals were trying to hijack the economy from hard-working, ordinary volk.

So, if you have noticed that the Climategate emails are replete with evidence of unethical behaviour and violations of the scientific method, according to author Damon Young you are no better than a Jew-kicking Brownshirt.

And do you know the funny thing: The article purports to be about the need to banish caricatures and stereotypes.

Young has co-edited a book on philosophy and the martial arts, so it would be charitable to assume he was kicked in the head once or twice too often during the course of his research.

What is Drum editor Jonathan Green’s excuse?

UPDATE: Yesterday, on the thread below another Drum article, also about climate change, an old name resurfaced. Sadly, the late Sparkles, last seen surrounded by cashews and black bean sauce, continues to be denied the peer-reviewed recognition he deserves:

sandy composta :

08 Dec 2011 5:00:01pm

I believe my mother's studies of molting in climate-stressed cats leaves no doubt about the reality of climate change. Bowering's support for the UN is gratifying. The organisation has supported him in expanding his perspectives with a trip to frontlines of the climate conflict and it is only reasonable that he stand by it.

Purple People Feters

IT IS not an expression much used these days, “born to the purple”, but it seems the moment is ripe to bring that ancient signifier up to date. Quite a few years before Alice Walker collected a Pulitzer for her tick-the-boxes chic-lit tale of a young black woman’s oppression by sexism and racism (always a winning double), the colour purple was a very special thing indeed. Extracted with great effort from a Mediterranean mollusk, the resulting dye was restricted to trimming the togas and tunics of Roman and Byzantine emperors and their heirs. If you were born to the purple, you were special – starting with the flunkies and flatterers who played midwife to that sense of presumptive entitlement and extending to lesser mortals’ endurance of the most bizarre behaviour. Appoint a horse pro-consul, knock up your sister or send legions to spear the waves in a war on King Neptune and the common folk would know and understand how the purple flash authorized the beneficiary to be as weird, arrogant and contemptuous of reason as the imperial fancy of the moment dictated. Generations of consanguineous mating did nothing to promote sanity as a palace trait, but it certainly conferred an expectation of unquestioned indulgence. 

 

Little people need no longer defer to imperial lunatics, but there can be no doubt of the pressing need to see the re-introduction of some purple-trimmed truth-in-labelling. Once again it would alert observers that nurture, rather than nature, has produced an individual whose access to nice jobs and the opinionisers’ pulpit is owed to pedigree, rather than cogency. There are many potential case studies. Dan Cass, who swans sometimes at The Drum, where Jonathan Green plays court eunuch to many royal pains, is one example.

Andrew Bolt dealt some months ago with one of Gibbering Dan’s errors of fact, in that instance his assertion that the loony who shot US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (and many others, including a conservative judge) was “a right wing assassin”, rather than a dope-addled conspiracist with a bee in his bonnet about, of all things, the abuse of grammar. The Drum’s stable of writers produces a daily and endless ker-plopping of taxpayer-funded muck, so there seems little point in taking a further look at yet another specific example of its output. Much more interesting is Cass’ personal history, for it may help to explain one of the mysteries of the age: why those of so few gifts occupy such a secure place in the small, tight and forever incestuous world of the New Establishment.

It’s the purple, you see. Or rather, in this case, the green.

Start with young Adam’s paternal bloodline. He is, first of all, the son of Moss Cass, whom older readers will recall as the designated tree fancier in the Whitlam cabinet. Other clowns in Gough’s circus came to grief and saw their reputations suffer, but Cass the Elder was blessed with a kind portfolio, one that offered no temptations to confer with confidence tricksters in pursuit of Arab loans or, given that his personal secretary was not a Filpina hottie, for seeding the jojoba beans in another hubby’s paddock.

All Moss had to do was express his admiration for trees and tolerate being ignored by Tasmania, which kept right on flooding Lake Pedder no matter how hard he tried to pull the plug. Ineffectual and politically impotent, the then-Member for Maribyrnong’s only lasting achievement was to crank up the thermostat of alarm, which your proto-catastropharians and green fund-raisers found most congenial. Today, with the environmental movement so hot and bothered that a tax on exhaled breath is a pitched as essential to national survival, the current mood of righteous panic is Cass the Elder’s most enduring legacy.

All that tree talk and frustrated righteousness around the family table gave the adolescent Adam very little chance of growing up to be anything other than a scold. But the job opportunities, they were bonza. Who wouldn’t want Moss’ little boy on the payroll? All those family connections and political links! The kid’s swaddling clothes came hemmed with purple and a very royal green.

Barely in his twenties, he was, as the Drum thumbnail says, “the Australian Conservation Foundation’s official observer at the Earth Summit (UNCED) in Rio in 1992.” The bio doesn’t relate the rest of the story, that Brazilian authorities locked him up for being a pest – an option unavailable, sadly, to opponents of tortured writing. Still, it must have been a nice trip, and that jailhouse glamour can only have added lustre to his CV when dad’s great mate and ally Lee Rhiannon – yes, that Lee Rhiannon, then of NSW’s upper house – had a staff vacancy to fill.

So did Melbourne Museum, where the newly minted Melbourne Uni grad became, as Adam crows, “the youngest curator in Museum Victoria in 1996-7, appointed as Curator of Science and Society.”  

Onward and upward on the purple carpet our ardent Adam rose, perhaps never noticing that he was being borne on a billow of irony – the proletarian advocate who has nestled all his life in the bosom of the elite.

Not that Cass floats alone in that purpled firmament. Very often on Q&A, for example, there will be at least one panelist whose seat has earlier been warmed by a family connection. ABC and SBS favourite Waleed Ali shares his insights on one matter; his wife, Susan Carland, subsequently is invited to share hers on another. GetUp’s Simon Sheikh bangs the climate gong on Q&A; so does his shiksa, Children’s Climate Crusade careerist Anna Rose. The New Establishment, it’s quite the purple thing. Whether born into it or adopted, the happy few can rest assured that the stewards will never entertain an inquiry into the factors that grant so many of their favourites a rails run to microphone and bank.

It never ends. Indeed, the Drum, which often seems a crèche for kids of the well connected, is today helping another purple baby tap her birthright. This example is particularly arresting, not least because Parkville Asylum PhD candidate Mira Adler-Gillies’ reflections on the Arab Spring is a compendium of the empty clichés  that rattle around university common rooms and empty heads. (“structural challenge to a global dynamic” … “imperial crusades by the US” … “irreversibly altered the status quo”,   “worship at the altar of the free market” … “neo-cons steering the Bush crusade” … “the cult of the unfettered market” … “Cowboy intervention” … “the economic and political hegemony of the US” … “post-colonial imperialist interventions” … “there has been a paradigm shift” … “the future in the hands of the people”) Mira has youth’s excuse for scooping her thoughts from such a font of tosh. After all, uttering sacred mantras is a standard element of tribal initiations, and the delight with which she has assembled them speaks of a pride and eagerness to carry her spear in the Great Push Forward.

But how to explain The Drum’s decision to publish? Mark Scott’s bid to snaffle the Crikey demographic is, or alleged to be, run by adults. Upon receiving such a submission, did they not notice its hackneyed vacuity?  What they must surely have noticed, could not by any stretch have missed, was young Mira’s entry in the purple stud book.

The Adler part of her surname, well that is her mum, Melbourne University Press publisher Louise. The Gillies bit, that is the gift of none-too-funny John Howard impersonator Max. Well that is a prime purple pair right there, and their progeny’s intention to gain attention cannot have been hurt by a link that stands outside straight bloodlines. Ms. Adler’s deputy at MUP is Jonathan Green’s wife. Who knows, perhaps the Adler/Gillies and Greens chatted about their kids' hopes and opportunities at that "kill the pig" pinata-whacking on election night in 2007.

Some years ago, when the war in Afghanistan had a definite sense of mission and was going well, US intelligence experts rounded up many Taliban suspects and sympathizers by tapping sociology’s expertise to map networks of friends and family, clans and likely conspirators. Perhaps it is time for a similar to project to chart the links that bind the New Establishment – the former Labor flacks who preen on the ABC, the politicians’ partners (or siblings) who purport to provide unbiased commentary (or comedy), the sympathies that blind watchdogs to their cobbers’ errors.

It would make for quite a graphic, that finished chart – almost all the New Establisment’s purple arrows pointing very firmly to the left.

Newspaper Moose, er, Muse

YOU find gems in the strangest places, sometimes even in the words that follow Jonathan Green's byline. Give the man his due -- his analysis of the Fairfax papers' woes and his suggested remedy are spot on. There is certainly wisdom in this observation:

[Fairfax] may well be a media business that continues to publish newspapers. But they cannot be papers of the kind we see today. They will need to be papers that publish information of sufficient value to readers that their cover price goes a long way to recovering the costs of their production.

The key, as Green sees it,

The Age must move away boldly from a day-to-day news agenda - news that was being delivered better and more quickly elsewhere - and focus on the paper's strengths of intelligent contextualisation, analysis, and investigation. It must remake and re-imagine itself: a new kind of daily paper, one that was all about breadth rather than immediacy.

Easily said, but almost certainly impossible to implement with the current management and reporters. The Phage and Silly, remember, each neglected to make any mention whatsoever of Larissa Behrendt's notorious tweet until, finally, they published an opinion piece insisting that the affair was no big deal. Three weeks is quite a spell, enough time for even a skeletal news operation to scrape together a few words. But that didn't happen, presumably because editors did not want to burden one of their favourite people with more grief. Behrendt no doubt appreciated the kindness; readers (and Fairfax shareholders) have no reason to be grateful.

And there is one ingredient Green neglects to mention, possibly because he has never noticed its absence at The Drum: the need for decent, lively, compelling writing.

Eating And Beating

IN The Australian, Gavin Atkins writes of the Drum and its editor’s peculiar idea of balance. The article lacks an illustration, which is a pity because this picture of the spread Jonathan Green put on to celebrate Kevin Rudd’s 2007 election would have been perfect.

(Hat tip to Sophie Cunningham, who long ago flushed her Flickr snapshot of Green whacking a John Howard piñata at the happy gathering, but allowed the ABC editor’s celebratory chocolate cake to remain. Thanks, too, to Sophie’s life partner, Virginia Murdoch, for preserving the Howard pinata’s image in her own Flickr stream.)

UPDATE: Jonathan Green, what a class act! Not only a superb (and modest) pinata-whacker, the Drum editor puts Gavin Atkins in his place:

GreenJ Jonathan Green

@GavAtkins you're so right! commissioning you is scraping the bottom of the barrel!

3 hours ago

Funnier than a dead baby's doll.