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!

Media Regulation: What A Crew!

AFTER Martin Hirst, pride of Deakin, has trotted out before the Press Inquiry his rationale for applying the gag, the big show will continue with a trio high-profile witnesses, each with his own dubious motive. Stephen Mayne’s is, as always, to get some attention for Stephen Mayne, which might make for an interesting competition, as fellow witness Bundoora Bob has never been known to open his mouth for any but the same reason. If Wayne Swan hopes to preserve that highly unlikely move to a surplus he keeps talking about (and is today talking down), a quick tax on the first-person pronoun would see the budget pushed firmly back into the black by the end of tomorrow’s hearings. (For the curious, Andrew Bolt has more on Mayne and the mysterious bureaucrat who invited him and why.)

Crikey's Eric Beecher, by contrast, is likely to be singing for his supper. A keen advocate of the peculiar notion that incompetent and failing newspapers, like the Age, must be preserved at all costs, he is especially keen to see those costs borne largely by the taxpayer. The fact that Beecher is sometimes referenced as a potential acquirer of Fairfax, or parts of Fairfax, should not be allowed to colour his audience’s perceptions with suspicions of self-interest. If he argues for subsidies, it will be solely as a means to save such invaluable thinkers as Laura Tingle, Butch Carlton, A Dill Horin and blonde economics writer Jessica Irvine from doing their reporting to Centrelink.

The key witness, the one who really needs watching, will come at day's end. She is Professor of Law at the Parkville Asylum Adrienne Stone, another of those who believe free speech should not be, well, free. In talking to the ABC about the same law later used to lynch Andrew Bolt, here is how she summed up the need for authorities to keep the gag handy. Read it carefully and marvel at her circular argument’s hermetically sealed, self-referential logic:

Perhaps freedom of expression, a true commitment to freedom of expression, would require us to tolerate that material that freedom of expression means freedom for the thought that we hate.

I have to say that although I'm sympathetic to what I take to be the sentiment behind that idea, I think that there is a better understanding of freedom of expression available to us, and one that doesn't see a very strong philosophical kind of inconsistency between, on the one hand, a commitment to freedom of expression and on the other hand, an anti-vilification law. Because it seems to me that there's a good argument to say that this kind of highly offensive, untrue material—levelled at someone because of their race, ethnicity or religion, or some other like characteristic—that it's neither valuable in free speech terms...and indeed it might even undermine those values which freedom of expression is directed to. So in fact I think the best argument, our best understanding of freedom of expression would accommodate laws of this kind.

So they are the main voices likely to dominate the witness box – an old Trot, a short wanker, a tall wanker, a rent-seeker and an academic who supports freedom of speech except she doesn’t.

If you are not obliged to play golf on Tuesday, why not turn up? Up until now, we have not had too many show trials in Australia. Tomorrow will bring a little taste of what to expect if this lot gets its way.    

The Ascent Of Manne

BUNDOORA BOB’s “essay” on the evil that is Rupert Murdoch runs about $20 at any inner-city newsagent, a sum that will buy a packet of Camels if you can find a shop still selling them. Yes, the dhurries will kill you, but it just may be that Robert Manne has crafted with his Quarterly Essay an antidote of sorts to the weed’s longer-term ravages. If given to hospice residents, just a few pages will extend any few and fleeting final minutes into a seeming eternity. The heart will beat more slowly, sound distort and those not trapped between his pages will strike the reader as moving with the speed of deep sea divers. In Bunyip theology, hell is most often described as finding yourself locked up for evermore in the sole company of a truculent teenage male. Manne adds a mother-in-law’s scolding to that tight little room of torments. On second thoughts, it may not be such a good idea to hand Manne’s little effort to the terminally ill. They need no foretaste of purgatory.

Still, one has to admire La Trobe University’s most determined self-promoter. On and on and on he goes, the tedium of the author’s spites and score-settlings interrupted only by the reader’s need to wade every few pages into swamps of ambiguous pronouns. It is fortunate that the most tangled sentences can be skipped in their entirety, as the essay is not a chain of evidence but a long and screeching wire that unspools from a reel of endless grievance.

And, one suspects, from the depths of a second-rater’s jealousy. Of Imre Salusinszky – a writer who has mastered the use of pronouns – Bundoora’s leading Professor of Posture and Alignment offers this tossed-off description: “…the Australian’s resident right-wing intellectual smart-aleck” (page 22). A few pages on, it is Keith Windschuttle whose influence “would probably have been restricted to the ageing conservatives of the Quadrant circle” , without the benefits of The Australian’s patronage.. Yet Windschuttle is “not a fool;” and his Fabrication of Aboriginal History “landed some powerful blows”, although Manne rather tellingly declines to describe them. It is easy to understand the reluctance. Any admission that Windschuttle had nailed Manne’s mates for making up primary-source references out of whole cloth might have led to backstage recriminations at the next writers’ festival wank-a-thon. (“Just whose side are you on, Bobby, you snivelling little shit?”) Thus it is that hypocrite who presumes to lecture The Australian for its bias deep-sixes all reference to the black-armbanders’ fraudulent citations, misquotations and spirited misinterpretations. As his repeated references to the “historians of the left” make clear, Manne has no more respect for truth than does our for-the-moment PM. For both it is a relative thing, to be invoked only when it moves the ball a little closer to the home team’s goal line.

And so it goes, for another 20,000-or-so bitchy words, all of them highly selective in their outrage. He tries to mug Janet Albrechtsen for plagiarism and misquoting, but makes no mention of fellow hand-wringer Phillip Adams, who has borrowed an entire career. On global warming, he genuflects before authority, asserting that the fabled 97% of settled scientists must be left in peace, as no layman can possibly boast the expertise to question their findings. On matters of domestic politics, this little Manne fires his outrage by quoting The Australian’s celebrated editorial urging that the Greens be “destroyed at the ballot box.” That the democratic smiting of a party infested with aspiring central planners and totalitarian apologists might be a valid prescription appalls him. How deeply shocking that Comrade Cobber Bob Brown be subjected to scrutiny! As Manne notes with smug approval, that sort of thing does not happen in the Fairfax press or at the ABC, where such “political extremism” is simply not tolerated. His yardstick for fair, straight-arrow journalism is – wait for it – none other than David Marr!When Marr questions Manne at Glebe Books later this month, expect to see a little pile of very soggy biscuits between them by the conversation's conclusion.

As a literary exercise, Manne’s offering is inept. As a manifesto, ludicrous. As a call to action, however ….. well, wasn’t that an inquiry into the Murdoch media that Stephen Conroy announced only yesterday?

And therein, perhaps, resides the danger. With the inquisitors gathering, the temptation in the editor’s office at The Australian will surely to be to respond in kind. If so, it will be the wrong response. Argue with a fool, as the old wisdom maintains, and onlookers will have problems determining which combatant is the dill.

The correct response to Manne is not refutation but ridicule. Strutting and preening on the public stage, he has long been an absurd figure. So play the Manne and not the ball, Mr Mitchell, for to do the latter can only dignify the sophistry of his grievances. If The Australian has an ounce of sense it will deny him that respect. To do otherwise will allow a further selection of quotations to be twisted and shouted Streicher-like at witnesses dragged before the coming media inquisition, where you can bet Manne will be networking with all the other apparatchiks cheering from the sidelines.

A NOTE: While Manne adds a thin list of references to give his Quarterly Essay the patina of scholarship, not once does he cite the actual stories from which, throughout his narrative, he draws and quotes the apparently damning clause or phrase.

If anyone has a spare moment – anyone not heading to the golf course this afternoon, that is --  it might be worth hunting up the original stories in The Australian’s online archive. If the lifted quotes are accurate, it will come as quite a surprise.

 

Manne On The Move

ROBERT MANNE is stepping away from The Monthly, the magazine's eager young editor telling Caroline Overington that his mentor is keen to "start blogging on a daily basis, and he wanted to do so as his own man, rather than as chairman of The Monthly. He wanted to express his own views, freely and independently, and he was worried that people might think that his views were those of the magazine, if he stayed on as chairman."

That may prove to be the case, but a reasonable person cannot help but wonder if  Bundoora Bob might not have been tapped for another little project. As we all know, there is much talk at the moment about the need to examine the state of Australia's media, and the first priority of any government establishing such a panel will always be to produce the conclusions its backers expect -- in this instance that Rupert Murdoch is the spawn of Satan and the noble Fairfax press could do with a handout..

Who better to make sure the inquiry produces all the right findings than the LaTrobe academic (please forgive that contradiction in terms)? Now that he has severed his Monthly connection, we will probably see the announcement of Manne's involvement soonish.He will not need any riding instructions.

Contagious Clive

IF YOU ever inherit an office, desk and chair from Clive Hamilton, do make sure to have everything thoroughly sterilised and fumigated. Whatever strange virus drives Clive to see benefits in democracy’s suspension* and to know with every fibre of his being that global warming will kill us all, possibly as soon as Wednesday, it must be catching. What else but a brain-rotting infection of Hamiltonian virulence can explain the bug-eyed alarmist’s successor at the Australia Institute,  Richard Denniss, who has a phobia of white goods in general and refrigerators in particular.

"When billions more people in China, India and other developing countries decide they want a fridge, quite frankly we'll be in big trouble … but I don't hear many Australians saying that in order to reduce our emissions I'm going to give up my fridge."

Clive has cried wolf quite a few times in the Fairfax press, so that explains the condition afflicting Silly stenographer Matt Wade, who quoted Denniss and penned today’s column. Let Australia’s very own Typhoid Mary enter your building, perhaps just once, and the contamination will consume every ounce of grey matter it can find on the premises.

Some readers may doubt this diagnosis, rightly pointing out that there was precious little mental capacity inside Fairfax to begin with, so how to measure the erosion of the negligible. Fortunately there is a control, Clive’s admirer Robert Manne, whose diseased mental state led him not only to believe that his mate might replace Peter Costello as the Member for Higgins, but also to urge the Australian’s readers to believe it as well.  Manne shines in the pantheon of Australia’s Silly-designated public intellectuals, so no one is safe.

Watch as Clive's madness further infects Manne:

FOOTNOTE: Because Clive’s delirium now leads him to deny saying many of the bug-eyed things he does, here is the quote as published in the Courier-Mail: “This is because the implications of 3C, let alone 4C or 5C, are so horrible that we look to any possible scenario to head it off, including the canvassing of ‘emergency’ responses such as the suspension of democratic processes.”