In recent weeks those in charge of American media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s national broadsheet The Australian appeared to have stepped up their ongoing campaign to destroy our national broadcaster, the ABC. The wizards of the weekday Oz and its sister publication The Weekend Australian have been looking for any excuse to bag the ABC as part of what seems to be a blatant effort to spook it out of media markets that the Dirty Digger wants all to himself.
In its May 28-29 edition The Weekend Australian’s Chris Kenny had a lengthy piece that recited News Limited’s usual complaints about the ABC – that it is elitist, promotes leftish causes, gives right wingers a hard time, is unaccountable for its biased coverage, and should therefore not be the recipient of taxpayer funds. It was the usual stuff we have come to expect from Rupe’s troops.
As part of his item, Mr Kenny described the now-departed host of The 7.30 Report, Kerry O’Brien as a “former Whitlam staff member”. Well, of course that is a fact. But let us stop to consider that Mr Kenny is a former chief of staff to former federal Liberal Party leader, Malcolm Turnbull. He was also chief of staff to former Howard government foreign minister Alexander Downer. He also has served in senior roles in Liberal state governments in South Australia.
Now, that is all fair enough. It would be wrong to suggest a professional journalist like Mr Kenny would now act as a blatant promoter of the Liberal Party’s cause. So why was Mr O’Brien described as if he spends all day singing The Internationale, The East is Red, and the It’s Time jingle just because he worked for a Labor Party government – one that left office almost 36 years ago!
In the same edition of The Weekend Australian another story lambasted the ABC for daring to have plans to produce and screen a documentary on David Hicks, the young chap who got involved with terrorists and confessed to charges laid by the US government during his stay in the notorious Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba where he claimed to have been tortured and left on the brink of suicide.
Apparently as far as The Oz is concerned that is not fertile ground for a doco. Supposedly it’s just another waste of taxpayers’ funds by those commos – if not terrorists – at the ABC. The Australian of 3 June attacked what it described as “cross-promotion” on ABC Radio’s morning program in Sydney.
Apparently the show’s host Deborah Cameron spent a good slice of time discussing comic actor Chris Lilley’s Angry Boys series now screening on ABC TV. Oh dear, how dare she discuss a popular TV show! Even from a distance it did not seem to be cross-promotion in the true sense of the term.
It was a pretty hollow and petty criticism, especially when you consider News Limited publications wrote the book on cross-promotion. The Weekend Australian of 4-5 June carried a yarn getting stuck into Sydney ABC Radio breakfast announcer Adam Spencer because he dared to make some laudatory remarks about the quality of journalism in the Fairfax publication, the Australian Financial Review. All of these attacks on the ABC have one aim in mind – to drive it out of markets that Rupert, as usual, wants all to himself. He is facing declining circulations for his hard-copy newspapers and at the same time is confronting the problem that people surfing the internet do not want to pay for online content.
That is not a problem for a publicly funded organisation such as the ABC, so Rupert wants to bully it into vacating the field or a big part of it in the hope he can turn a quid selling the type of content the ABC now offers everyone free.
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Speaking of our national broadcaster, it was somewhat annoying to see and hear a recent promotion for the 1982 US movie Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean that screened on ABC 2.
It said the movie starred “Oscar winner” Cher and “Oscar winner” Kathy Bates. The promo voiceover added that the movie also starred Karen Black who wasn’t an Oscar winner. She did, however, get nominated for her role in the 1970 flick Five Easy Pieces. It seemed odd to me that the “Oscar winner” tag was bandied about so freely, give Cher’s award was for her appearance in the 1987 movie Moonstruck and Ms Bates won hers for the 1990 film Misery. Both were awarded years after director, the late Robert Altman, had CDTTFADJDJD in the can.
Has journalism got a future?
There was some controversy recently when the Fairfax media group announced a round of proposed sackings to improve its bottom line and which included a large number of its sub-editors. Fairfax plans to outsource the work to an outfit called Pagemasters that already sub-edits a range of publications on a fee-for-service basis.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited has its own in-house version of Pagemasters through the creation of dedicated hubs where subs work on a variety of the group’s publications, not just a single newspaper. But even without outsourcing the work, Rupert’s Weekend Australian did manage to almost duplicate two headlines within two pages of each other in its motoring section.
