A Rum Lot At Media Watch

LATE ONE night in, oh, 1978-or-so, after a MiSex show at the London Tavern, a friend who was a junior journalist at Fairfax suggested a drink at his club. This turned out to be the Journalists’ Club, where they served something called Lemon Hart Rum, a memorably smooth drop and remembered all the more for having been repeated in far too many interrogative approaches to the barman. Eventually, too wobbly to walk and unable to find the car, the Professor’s companion volunteered the information that “his club” also offered accommodation for the weary. This turned out to be a little room named after Kenneth Slessor and rather like those sanctums the Scientologists reserve for the spirit of L. Ron Hubbard in each and every of their temples. It boasted a few books and two very comfy armchairs, in one of which a young Bunyip took his rest. Sometime later, a middle-aged gentleman sat on the Professor’s lap, which startled both of us in the dark. He expressed regret and said he would find another spot to sleep. The next morning found him curled up on the carpet with shoes for pillow and trousers about his knees. Ever since that night it has been very hard to think ill of the gentlemen of the press.

That shows how times have changed because contempt grows easier by the day. It is inconceivable that a decent man would get on the squirt with a scribe of the modern variety. Nod off somewhere dark and soft and it might a Media Watch researcher who wrenches you from the arms of Morpheus, and that would mean some extreme rudeness if the way Jen Marohasy is being treated is an indication.

Some nasty shrew, full of presumption, overflowing with arrogance and entitlement – that would be your midnight inquisitor. What right do you have to that chair? Who paid for those rums? Are you now or have you ever been a conservative?

And if you were to answer in truth and fully, that simply would not do, wouldn’t do at all! Being a Media Watch operative, your personal prosecutor would feel obligated to call business associates, friends and enemies, especially the enemies, to both collect and sow a little dirt. This is what publicly funded journalists do these days, apparently, as Marohasy has been experiencing and reporting on her blog.

Nor is that the limit of the ABC’s arrogance. If queried about their behaviour, the reaction is tp shoot off a patronising and condescending note that says, in effect, Media Watch has a charter allowing to do anything it damn well likes, explanations not required. This is what Marc Hendrickx learned from Media Watch executive producer Lin Buckfield:

Dear Mr Hendrickx

Thank you for your email, it is one of many Media Watch has received in relation to questions the program sent to Dr Marohasy last week. As you will be aware, Media Watch has not, as yet, run an item looking at the media coverage of the report “Plugging the Murray River’s Mouth” authored by Dr. Marohasy and commissioned by the Australian Environment Foundation.

Media Watch looks at how the media (all platforms) report and treat various issues. In order to do that we research many stories, telephone calls are made, emails are sent. Our hardworking team of 3 researchers cover a lot of ground in the course of their working days.

Ours is a controversial program, our investigations rarely please everyone but we are bound not only by our ethics as journalists but also by the ABC Editorial Policies to fair, honest and unbiased in our approach to our work. We are under no obligation to discuss correspondence or conversations with third parties done in the course of legitimate research.

Given that Media Watch has not yet put an item to air looking at the media coverage of the report “Plugging the Murray River’s Mouth”, may I suggest you get back to me with any questions you may have if and when the item airs?

Sincerely

Lin Buckfield
Executive Producer
Media Watch

Notice Buckfield’s slime and sleight of hand. The segment is not to be about Marohasy and her crusade to restore the Murray’s mouth. It is to be on “the media coverage of the report.” That would be why Marohasy’s interrogator has been demanding to know if she associates with certain people Media Watch evidently believes to be scoundrels, how she stocks her bank account and if she has dealt with (shudder) the Heartland Institute and other secular satans.

Then there are the blandishments – “we research many stories, telephone calls are made, emails are sent” – that float in an oil of self-congratulation. Media Watch’s investigators are “hard working” and “bound by our ethics as journalists” . You silly, silly man, Mr Hendrickx, to think the Smugger Show might ever be less than “fair, honest and unbiased.” Why, perish the very thought!

The last time the Professor heard anything resembling that tone, it was from the lips of a B-movie Nazi insisting that Germans were a civilised race and neither he nor his SS comrades should be mistaken for barbarians.

Stick with Marohasy, she needs support and if there is a tip jar on her site, bung something in it. And read Hendrickx, who also understands that Media Watch’s naked arrogance is more than rudeness.

Government-funded inquisitors baying at the heels of a scientist whose opinions and research inconvenience their mates in the Green Establishment? To tolerate that for very much longer is more than dangerous, it is stupid. How can we allow the public purse to pay the salaries of bullies? It is a question Prime Minister Abbott will need to resolve and quick.

In the meantime, Buckfield’s song of righteousness confirms the Professor’s moral certainty. If a Media Watch reporter were to be spotted on the floor of the Kenneth Slessor library, it would be remiss not to kick him on the way out.

UPDATE: After a round of correspondence, Hendrickx asks Buckfield:

... Should the program go to air I will assess it on its merits and ask questions if I think it is warranted.  In the meantime I draw your attention to the results of a Google search of the phrase "sent Friday" for your site http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/. It returns 400 results.  ("sent friday site:http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/")

Can you comment on what appears to be a very common Media Watch tactic of ambushing the subjects of its investigations with questions late on a Friday afternoon for reports that are due to be broadcast the following Monday. With this in mind I draw your attention to questions 13 and 14 in the list we provided. 

13. Why did Media Watch provide Dr Marohasy with such short notice to respond to questions? 

14. Does Media Watch consider the amount of time fair and reasonable given the number and nature of questioning?

Hey, Marc, don't hold your breath. It's Media Watch's world, everyone else just pays for it.

Your Taxes At Work

JEN MAROHASY reports that Media Watch's sleuths are still working the phones, still trying to mount their expose of a woman who dares to hold incorrect opinions about estuarine tidal flows. Here is how she describes her ongoing ordeal at the hands of the ABC:

Last week the ABC phoned around to get snips of fact about me that it could intertwine with lies with a plan for a national broadcast Monday night on its Media Watch program. I tried to head-that-off with full and frank answers to the many questions they asked me. Indeed I provided them with a lot of information that was none of their business.

But not content with all of that, this week ABC journalists and researchers continue with the same activity; they continue to phone about. And from the feedback I have received from those the ABC has phoned: they continue to peddle misinformation about me, and misinformation about the natural history of the Murray River.

These activities are undertaken at tax payer expense, but there is no way I can find out who specifically they are phoning, or what specifically they are telling people.

While Jen wonders when it will end, Jo Nova knows where it needs to end:

What is it when a government agency “questions” all your friends and acquaintances, digging for dirt and spreading untruths, because you criticize government policy? When state-funded psychologists like Lewandowsky call you crazy for disagreeing with the government’s policy to control the climate? What sort of state do we live in now?

There is no half-way measure worth taking. It’s time to ask for our money back. Let the ABC raise their own from voluntary consenting citizens, or give us a vote that counts so we can object when our tax dollars are used against us.

And the funny thing about all this? The people ginning up Jonathan Holmes' juvenile delinquents -- that would be the Australian Conservation Foundation, for starters -- detest Marohasy because she wants to see the Murray's mouth restored to the way it was when Matthew Flinders came upon sailed right past and missed it.*

Just to repeat, nature-loving greens are fighting to protect a dam. It is not about saving the environment and never has been. It is about money and power and, most of all, control of life's every aspect, from water flows to speech. 

* Thanks to reader Philby, who points out in comments that the navigator didn't notice the river's mouth, an oversight that supports Marohasy's insistence that the river was sometimes open to the sea and sometimes wasn't.

Holmes Goes Silent

AT AMBIT GAMBIT, more thoughts on Media Watch's attempt to smear Jen Marohasy:

Media Watch contacted Marohasy on Friday seeking answers to a list of questions with the intention of going to air tonight. If another program behaved like this they would run the risk of making a star appearance on Media Watch. Marohasy formed the opinion that the story had already been written. That seems a reasonable point of view.

Certainly the questions that Media Watch put to Marohasy indicated that they either had done no independent research about the lakes, or were incapable of understanding simple physical concepts. The questions about her sources of income were bizarre and mostly irrelevant, but obviously intended to frame her as a stooge for some group or another.

And while we're on Media Watch, several readers have suggested tweeting Jonathan Holmes to request the low-down on the Marohasy set-up. According to their reports, the ABC's high priest of the public's right to know isn't answering those questions. His tweets suggest they are telling the truth.

Perhaps he is just too busy at the moment instructing his young staffers on the right way to take  dictation and marching orders from green and leftard pressure groups.

Jonathan Holmes, Matchmaker

SHOULD a media watchdog really be referring publicists for activist organizations to journalists likely to be sympathetic to their cause – especially if the query concerns an upcoming “media regulation” campaign that, given the group's activities in the UK, will almost certainly be aimed at News Ltd?

Media Watch’s Jonathan Holmes appears to think it is just fine.

@amyabarry Amy Barry

@BernardKeane Hi Bernard Jonathan Holmes suggested I get in touch to talk about media regulation for possible @avaaz campaign in Oz.. DM me?

More on Avaaz here, here, here, and here.

UPDATE: How Avaaz works (scroll down to Hilton Hotels vs. The Rape Trade):

24 hours after 317,000 Avaazers called on the Hilton CEO to sign a code of conduct on the rape trade or face hard-hitting ads in his hometown, we got a frantic call from his vice-president. 'You're going to WHAT?', she asked. Hilton had dragged its feet for months. We gave them four days, and they signed. Now 180,000 hotel employees will be trained to spot and prevent the horror of of sex slavery of women and girls.

Why a hotel chain should be held accountable for rape is not immediately clear. Perhaps Jonathan Holmes can explain the connection next week on Media Watch.

Hywood's Hire Calling

WHEN declining to examine the media sins he regards as the merely venal  (Drum editors “nudging” elections toward the left, for example) or, on a more active day, suggesting with a wink that warmists should seek the authorities’ help in gagging those low sorts who deny all that settled science, the ABC’s Jonathan Holmes sometimes allows Media Watch to, well, watch the media. It doesn’t happen all that often, so last night, when a chat with Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood was billed as occupying  the entire show, it seemed there was a chance the sort of journalism found daily in the Silly, Phage and Finis might get just a little bit of attention.

Well, it did, sort of. Taking the line he has been throwing to other media outlets, Hywood swore that his company’s worst days were over – there is no more classifieds revenue left to lose, which is apparently a wonderful thing – while further promising Fairfax would be stepping up its investment in the words. Holmes nodded with approval at all this, but pointedly declined to pose the question that suggests itself most readily to many former Fairfax readers and ex-advertisers: What sort of journalism, exactly? From Holmes’ disinclination to further pursue the topic and Hywood’s passed-up opportunity to expand upon it, the immediate suspicion was that neither man sees any great need to embrace a broader diversity of opinion or, more to the point, to replace editors who believe it their responsibility to filter the news rather than examine and report it.

And thus they chatted agreeably for the remainder of the show -- Hywood’s composure never ruffled, for example, by any request for an explanation about the Fairfax press’ absolute refusal to report Larissa Behrendt’s preference for equine lust over the opinion of someone with whom she disagrees. That silence has been reigning for the past two weeks, ever since the infamous tweet, so it would have been encouraging to hear Hywood say he aims to recruit people who are prepared to look at and write on such matters, even if they must hold their noses while doing so.

And then there were the CEO’s thoughts on the Australian Financial Review, where he restricted his observations to the possibility of revamping the business model for the paper’s web site. All very well and good but, again, not a hint of a whisper of a suggestion that it might be the likes of Laura Tingle, Labor apologist and Alan Ramsay’s love slave, who might be driving away readers. Nor in regard to the paper’s opinion page was there any acknowledgment that it is a very silly policy to allow John Quiggin, week after week, to sing the praises of taxes, regulation and wealth redistribution to a readership that loathes the first, despises the second and lives in fear of the third. Wouldn’t it have been lovely to hear Hywood say that the Finis' opinion section was never better than when in the care of Tom Switzer (now running the Spectator in Australia).

The most optimistic gloss to be drawn from the Holmes/Hywood shmooz-a-rama is that, just maybe, the Fairfax chieftain, who is said to be quite sharp, understands there can be no future in alienated readers and that he declined to telegraph that conclusion for fear of prompting a luvvies’ revolt.

If that is not the case, if he really does intend to invest more money in the same old selective blindness, endemic bias and the insititutional affection for all things left, then there is no chance Fairfax will forsake its position as the market’s most-shorted stock. Hywood can put all the money his board will permit into boosting editorial budgets, but if it does no more than hire more of the same his company is finished. It really is that simple.

UPDATE: More on Fairfax, Hywood and the Finis from Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy