Editor:
Harold Hark
Editor: |
Letters to the dailies: In case you missed them, here are a selection of letters written to The Australian and The Age newspapers on Richard Alston-Goebbels McCarthy-cum-Stalinist attack on the ABC. Letters to The AustralianI'M with Richard Alston. The public shouldn't have to pay for wrinkle-nose pinko takes on the Private Lynch thriller, the orchestrated statue-toppling footage, or the children overboard shocker. They don't want to know about squalor in Baghdad, vanishing WMDs, or the Three Stooges incompetence of the US occupation. They want positive stuff. If the ABC can't get a handle on the sort of objectivity Alston expects, they should at least be able to appreciate what happened to the Reuters office in Baghdad. Australia's new management in Washington has little patience with unbelievers. Invasion has failed and anarchy reigns in Iraq, in spite of the PM's jovial triumphalism. No WMDs have been found, nor any terrorist links. Afghanistan, beyond Kabul, has been abandoned to the warlords. Howard's personal G-G has made history by resigning. Serious claims of mismanagement and abuse in detention centres and taking bribes confront Ruddock. CEOs get huge redundancy packages. Telstra employees get the sack. I wonder why suddenly the ABC has become so important. In these times of blatant ABC bias and anti-Americanism, at least those decent young chaps at Triple J radio are doing the "right" thing to explain our Government's attitude to Uncle Sam. Just yesterday Carmen Spade was heard to say: "Coming up next, some Machine Gun Fellatio." Our foreign policy in a nutshell, I'd say. Born in the US, I immediately detect the odour of male bovine faeces in Communications Minister Richard Alston's attack on the ABC for anti-US bias in reporting the Iraq War (29/5). His threat to further cut funding to the ABC reminds me of US senator Joe McCarthy's vicious campaign against the "liberal" American media. It was the courageous head of the CBS TV network news, Edward R. Murrow, who exposed McCarthy's corrupt accusations as lies. I was at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, when McCarthy accused those at the communications base of being "subversives". It's an old trick to attack the innocent to entrench one's own power. There's something about Alston and his coalition of conservatives that we must remember when they pursue the ABC news people if we are to preserve Australian democracy. Truth here will not be suppressed as it was by US intervention in Chile, Nicaragua and so many places where neo-conservatives forcibly change governments and imprison or kill dissenters. An ABC news listener for 42 years, I compare its excellence to the US Public Broadcasting System as the best in the world and the Australian source I will most trust. Senator Alston's bullshit claim of the ABC's anti-US bias is contemptible. Well done Max Uechtritz for getting up Richard Alston's nose again. It just goes to show how juvenile this Government can be. The 14-page "dossier" Alston's office compiled is ridiculous and so out of context that it's meaningless. This is a blatant case of political interference and Alston's motive, in my view, is no more than trying to distract attention from the mounting problems of the Howard Government. There is no substance in the minister's allegations of bias. The situation on the ground in Iraq was very fluid and many things were said by reporters that later proved false. Let's not forget that in the last 24 hours, the US has admitted they found no weapons of mass destruction and that they probably never existed. So the propaganda that the coalition had to invade Iraq to get rid of the WMDs was a lie. It is the duty of independent journalists to question everything. The senator seems to think the media's duty in time of war is to fall meekly into line with the Government. This is not the media's role and it is not what the public would expect. As a former journalist and now as a lecturer at the University of Queensland, I know that journalists must report without fear or favour. I'd like to ask Alston what he'd like me to say to my students about this incident. What kind of example is Alston's half-arsed whingeing setting for a new generation of journalists and reporters? It would appear that short-term political gain is more important to the Government than any long-term respect for the media as an institution with a public duty to be critical in its reporting of those in power. We all know about abuses of political power and the senator's comments rank up there with the worst of them. I have read upwards of 40 student essays on the Australian television news media's coverage of the Iraq War and in each of them the conclusion drawn by the students is that the ABC did a better job than everyone else. If any complaints can be levelled, it is against the gung-ho patriotism of commentators like The Australian's Greg Sheridan. And what about Steve Liebman's classic conflict of interest the paid mouthpiece of the Government's ridiculous panic-inducing anti-terrorism publicity campaign and then fronting Channel Nine's news coverage. He should be publicly flogged for this ethical lapse. Richard Alston (Opinion, 29/5) writes that the ABC's AM coverage of the Iraq war "could be characterised by the following themes: constant questioning of the motives of the coalition and US military; repeated claims the war was not going as planned; assertions the coalition's military action was despised by the Iraqi people; and implying there was a looming humanitarian disaster". Well, almost two months after the invasion, I would give AM gold stars for highlighting such themes in its coverage. Let's examine each of them: • Supposedly Iraq was invaded because its "weapons of mass destruction" posed such a threat to the rest of the world - and especially the US - that the regime had to be removed. Now even Donald Rumsfeld is admitting that Iraq had probably destroyed its WMD arsenal. So the WMD claims were just one of the many lies used to justify the war. • Clearly, the invasion did not go as the US had planned - and in the wash-up, the Americans have already had to replace their proconsul in charge of the occupation. • While the Iraqi people clearly were glad to see the end of Saddam Hussein, there is very little evidence of an ecstatic welcome for the invaders. Instead, all we've seen have been major demonstrations and US troops shooting Iraqi civilians. • Given that most of Iraq is still without water, power and other basic facilities, that all services have collapsed, that there is little or no law and order, not to mention the rampage of looting, I think Iraq more than qualifies as a humanitarian disaster. Indeed, Iraq threatens to go down the path of Afghanistan - a complete disaster that gets worse every day. So if Alston is unhappy with the ABC coverage, he clearly does not believe in free, independent and critical reporting. No doubt he'd prefer our ABC to be an Australian version of the North Korean News Agency, spinning out whatever the Government decreed to be the approved line on events. With all the funding cuts to our ABC since the Coalition came to office, no doubt that's been the plan all along. This just takes it one step further. Richard Alston is an informed and intelligent man. He now knows, as we all do, that the dramatic "rescue" of Private Jessica Lynch in central Iraq was a piece of theatre created by the US military to boost morale at home. He knows, too, that the scandalous failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is due either to the complete incompetence of the Western intelligence services, or to the pressure exerted on them by their political masters to produce something that could be sold to the world as a just cause for the invasion and occupation of a sovereign state. Since the former is impossible to believe, he must also accept that the latter is the true explanation. That is, Senator Alston must accept that the world was misled about the fundamental justification offered by the "coalition of the willing" for waging war on Iraq. In the face of propaganda from the coalition on this massive scale, the senator's attack on the ABC's coverage of the war should be named for what it is: a hypocritical and self-serving attempt to muzzle one of the major organs of free and open debate in our community. Senator Richard Alston's call for an inquiry into bias in the ABC's reporting of the Iraq war would be amusing if he were a talkback announcer on commercial radio. That kind of nonsense is, after all, their stock in trade. Unfortunately, Senator Alston is the Minister for Communication - probably the first one in Australian history whose brief is: to damage or destroy his charge by funding cuts; intimidate its staff; make totally inappropriate partisan appointments to the board; and offer absurd public criticisms (of which this latest effort is a prime example). Perhaps the good senator could demonstrate how the ABC's reporting of the war differed from that of other world-class broadcasters such as the BBC, Deutsche Welle and Radio Nederlands, to name a few that are not US-based. He might then be able to let us judge whether the bias is the ABC's - or his own. Dear Senator Alston, thanks for your impartial analysis of the ABC coverage of the war. I look forward to your analysis of the coverage provided by the private media organisations. No doubt this analysis will show they all acted with the highest integrity and upheld journalistic standards to the letter. Or do you only analyse those players who don't toe the party line? ...who cares if the ABC is biased? At least we can complain and have the matter dealt with. Try that with a commercial station. |