Price is not right on ABC bias

Liberal senators Concetta Fierravanti-Wells (NSW) and Michael Ronaldson (VIC) were mocked, scoffed at and derided by Australian columnist Matt Price in his 4 November 2006 column. A year before, almost to the day, Price had similarly lambasted Queensland senator, now minister, Santo Santoro. Why? Essentially, because these government members have been performing a task that the Australian liberal-left would rather not be done.
Their “crime”, to use Price’s own word, has been to question the performance of Australia’s taxpayer-funded ABC and SBS media networks in relation to their charters and obligations. Which, after all, is one of the express purposes of the Senate Estimates Committee apparatus of which Senators Fierravanti-Wells and Ronaldson are members. As Price well knows and, in passing, acknowledged in his recent column, there’s nothing unusual about that. It’s part of the system, mate. Even the flippant suggestion that questioning the ABC is a “crime” isn’t so flippant these days – we have seen the crazy left wing notion that questioning climate change is on a par with holocaust denial, and should be classified as a crime against humanity. Be careful, Matt, someone may take you seriously.

Over successive Estimates sessions, government committee members have provided more than 1,000 examples of occasions when ABC journalists have violated the corporation’s own news and current affairs editorial style guide. The guide, as stated in the document’s introduction, “sets out the standards by which our work will be judged” and notes that “[c]onsistency and responsibility in editorial procedure are further hallmarks of our professionalism.” A reading of the rules suggests that they are there to provide, among other things, a framework for the production of fair and impartial journalism.

The style guide violations, and the absence of credible explanations for them from the ABC bosses, along with other documented cases of slanted reporting, loaded language, double standards, conflicts of interest, passive editorial mismanagement and so on, reveal a pattern of left-liberal social, cultural and political bias within the ranks of the public broadcaster.

In other words, over the past 18 months, the government Senate Estimates Committee members have been able to provide exactly what the ABC’s defenders have always demanded of those who claim that much of the corporation’s output is biased: specific and detailed examples.

Consider the practice of addressing a news subject by first name, as ABC news and current affairs staff have done when referring to David Hicks as “David”, Kim Beazley as “Kim”, Osama bin Laden as “Osama”, to name just three. Over 200 instances of first name usage have been tabled in estimates. The ABC style guide warns about the practice because, it says, such use “evokes a sense of ABC sympathy for the person”. And so it does. A fact that becomes even more obvious when, in a political interview, a government member is referred to by surname and his or her opposition counterpart by first name.

When the Estimates sessions commenced at 9.00 am on 30 October, the government members applied the same kind of forensic analysis to SBS that they have used successfully to make a case against the ABC. The government members provided examples of how an anti-Israel bias has characterised the SBS coverage of the Middle East.

When questioned by Senator Ronaldson about the station’s refusal to use the word “terrorist” to describe terrorists and their organisations, SBS managing director Shaun Brown declared that the network preferred to use “neutral labelling”. Yet, in a magnificently eloquent double standard, while refusing to use the term “terrorist”, preferring the softer term “militant”, SBS is quite prepared to adopt and use the language of Hamas, describing that organisation as the “resistance”, despite the fact that Hamas is classified as a terrorist organisation by a number of western governments, including our own.

Rather than consider the whole context of the SBS coverage of the Middle East in terms of its selective labelling, use of experts and overall anti-Israel bias, Matt Price preferred to distort and misrepresent the government members’ line of questioning.

For example, Price wrote that Senator Fierravanti-Wells had described the Arab nationalist al-Jazeera network as “a kind of godfather organisation for terrorist groups”. In fact, the senator made that remark in relation to the Muslim Brotherhood.

While quite prepared to verbal Senator Fierravanti-Wells, Price completely ignored an assertion by another member of the Estimates Committee that was clearly wrong. In an exchange about the captured Islamic jihadist, David Hicks, Democrats leader Senator Lyn Allison disingenuously declared that “no charge has been laid” against him. Senator Allison and journalists like Price might find the fact inconvenient, but charges were laid against Hicks. He was charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes, attempted murder and aiding the enemy. However, a US Supreme Court decision voided those original charges, but fresh ones are expected to be laid soon.

While ignoring such obvious dissembling on the left, Price unleashed an extraordinary attack on Senators Fierravanti-Wells and Ronaldson. In doing so, Price revealed a total reluctance to engage with all the facts and deal with the overwhelming body of evidence presented in the Estimates sessions. Instead, Price took a couple of examples out of context and tried to lampoon them.

Once upon a time, accusations of ABC of bias were met with demands from ABC defenders for examples of the alleged slanted reporting. In the face of all the evidence, ABC and SBS apologists like Matt Price no longer ask for examples. How could they? The Estimates Hansard is full of them. So public broadcasting advocates like Price resort to name-calling and ridicule in an attempt to trivialise the serious violations of the ABC’s own rule book that the Estimates sessions have revealed.

When Matt Price labels as partners in “crime” a couple of senators who are asking the questions that need to asked, we should all be concerned that left wing intolerance is once again attempting to silence a legitimate and important debate.