The biggest public announcement of war with the ABC has been announced with Tony Abbott being appointed to the board of News Corp by Lachlan (Rupert) Murdoch. Abbott took the LNP to war with the ABC with his promise to Murdoch that he would eliminate it in a quid pro quo arrangement for his support. Every effort was made from the moment Abbott came to power. His No Cuts promise broken Abbott went directly for the heart of Australia’s Democracy. Our access to News and Information is the very reason why the ABC exists in the first place. A Statutory Independent Body was created to ensure governments were held to account. Abbott began neutering the ABC with budgets and banned his government Cabinet ministers from appearing on the ABC. He cozied up to Murdoch as we saw in their faux photoshoot in Atlanta even after having lost the leadership of his own party in order to show he was still relevant. Now he’s been appointed a general on the board of Australia’s worst Democratic enemy News Corp. For how long can News Corp and the Murdochs provoke us before we retaliate?
Why Australians would be concerned with the ramblings of an unknown conservative politician halfway around the world whose main obsessions are pot-holes and fighting the “woke disease” is anybody’s guess, but don’t discount the desperate research moles at the ABC, ably assisted by their research assistants at the right-wing IPA, who helpfully and regularly plant stories and suggest suitable guests to the ABC like dogs laying down beloved bones.
Because a few weeks after the obscure radio interview with Nick Fletcher-Who? where he raised the subject of a UK Minister For Men, Nick’s little issue had remarkably travelled across the world and become a major talking point on the ABC’s alleged premier panel show, QandA. Never mind that QandA has morphed into that 1990’s white trash Jerry Springer Show; the bigger question is why and how this became an issue for Australians at all?
The problem is, by shifting to that model, the ABC just wallows down in the gutter with the rest of them. Murdoch is already doing gutter journalism; his worldwide media outlets do ugly well. Why compete with them? If the ABC’s audience, and by that I mean their audience everywhere on all platforms, if they wanted to observe fabricated culture war bullshit, if they wanted to have relevant facts obscured from them, if they wanted an obvious lack of research or care, if they wanted the endless lies of the Vote No campaign re-framed as some sort of credible truth – if they wanted all of that, they’d simply consume Murdoch 24 hours a day.
Murdoch already does that better than anybody else on the planet – why not choose the higher ground where quality and facts exist instead?
olddogthoughts 