Mick Hall analyzes an Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s story — 11 months into a genocide — on the Israeli military’s use of the Hannibal Directive to kill its own citizens
Belated Reporting on Oct 7 Helps Justify Genocide
September 12, 2024
Tag: ABC
Yesterday, the Australian Senate voted 56-12 to condemn the use of the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, because it allegedly “opposes Israel’s right to exist, and is frequently used by those who seek to intimidate Jewish Australians via acts of antisemitism”. And yet there was no similar motion condemning (or even adequately acknowledging) the ongoing slaughter that stands in opposition to Palestine’s right to exist. If your suss-O-meter isn’t firing yet, it is well and truly broken.
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing”. Today, you will not find a clearer example of the phenomenon Macolm X was referring to than Israel’s wholesale slaughter of Gaza and the mesmerising cover provided by truth-discordant imperial apologia we sometimes call “the news”.
Reject it all. It is swallowing your humanity.
Source: Primetime genocide apologists and the annihilation of Gaza – The Shot
Rupert Murdoch is now a shadow director of the ABC, and has been for quite a while, with the proof being his propagandists are on most, if not all, ABC news and current affairs shows pushing his lies for his own financial benefit.
For five months now, our screens have been bombarded by images depicting Israel’s air and ground assault on Gaza. This extraordinary footage, this apocalyptic scene, shows just how widespread that destruction has been. Israel is still denying foreign journalists independent access to Gaza. We’re in Israel, about a kilometre from the border, reports the ABC’s John Lyons.
Australia’s old media companies and their propagandists the ABC, News Corp and Nine’s Neil Mitchell have joined forces to a attack and defame independent journalist Antoinette Lattouf.
What a cowardly act it was. A national broadcaster, dedicated to what should be fearless reporting, cowed by the intemperate bellyaching of a lobby concerned about coverage of the Israel-Gaza war. The investigation by The Age newspaper was revealing in showing that the dismissal of broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf last December 20 was the nasty fruit of a campaign waged against the corporation’s management. This included its chair, Ita Buttrose, and managing director David
“Accuracy and impartiality are core to the service we offer audiences,” Justin Stevens explained to staff. “We must stay independent and not ‘take sides’.”
This pointless assertion can only ever be a threat because it acts as an injunction on staff and a judgment against sources that do not favour the accepted line, however credible they might be. What proves acceptable, a condition that seems to have paralysed the ABC, is to never say that Israel massacres, commits war crimes, and brings about conditions approximating to genocide. Little wonder that coverage on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice does not get top billing on in the ABC news headlines.
Palestinians and Palestinian militias, on the other hand, can always be written about as brute savages, rapists and baby slayers. Throw in fanaticism and Islam, and you have the complete package ready for transmission. Coverage in the mainstays of most Western liberal democracies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as the late Robert Fisk pointed out with pungency, repeatedly asserts these divisions.
The ABC has succumbed
Once a reliable news source, the ABC has lately been relying on borderline plagiarism and clickbait to entice readers, diminishing its previously high standards. Rosemary Sorensen reports.
Source: ABC joins the charge against quality Australian journalism
Coming in at ninth in our most popular stories of the year is one by former ABC journalist and now star IA columnist Alan Austin – who always features in our top ten – with this incisive December story about his former employer and its growing relationship with the Murdoch media.
Source: #9 TOP IA STORY OF 2023: ABC complaint over Insiders’ collaboration with Murdoch’s News Corp
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?
This isn’t The Chaser. It’s a reflection of what the ABC was forced to become during those past 13 years of the LNP and now for Peter Dutton “Lets Humanise the @#$%$#. They are going to try to Normalise him Fuck you very much!!
Crabb is adept at using humour not to satirise, but to minimise. It can’t be so bad if we can have a good laugh about it together over lunch, can it?
The LNP more than any government before abused and misused its authority over the ABC and SBS. It began with a frontal assault by Tony Abbott in a quid pro quo return for favors provided by Rupert Murdoch the most dominant supporter of the Liberal, party, and its personal benefactor. It simply became policy to “Get the ABC” for free News Corp boosting.
A government review will attempt to resolve two long-running problems for Australia’s national broadcasters: How funding can be protected from government interference and how to avoid political “captain’s picks” stacking the boards.
Rupert Murdoch has been trying to force the government to privatise the ABC for years, which has failed, but he has done the next best thing by having his propagandists on various ABC shows on a daily basis which has had the effect of turning the ABC into a megaphone for Murdoch’s lies.
To ensure its longevity, the Albanese Government must pull recalcitrant public servants into line and take on the Murdoch media, writes Paul Begley.
Are we getting the best from the ABC?
It seems the automatic go to for the ABC on matters military is Major-General Mick Ryan. His opinion is usually presented as unbiased fact. Is that the case?
Source: ABC analyst Mick Ryan’s US government funded affiliations – Pearls and Irritations
In the same way Peter Dutton targeted Africans as if they were all cut from the same cloth Australia-wide pointing to Dandenong as being representative of why our immigration policies have failed the nation. Meanwhile, Dandenong hasn’t been a national issue at all. He’s gone to Alice Springs to declare Alice’s current indigenous issues reflect indigenous Australia and is in need of AFP policing and not a Voice. It’s exactly a mirror image of Trumpists in America
Dutton blows up 2800 cases as if they are representative of 3% 0f Australia’s 750,000k indigenous people that need policing. If that’s not the same racist argument we have heard for the past 250 years then what is. Particularly because it’s his reason for a “No” vote on the voice
If a reporter gets abused for simply asking “What is your evidence Mr Dutton?” The cop in Dutton reveals itself and The ABC blamed for not simply amplifying Dutton’s politics as Murdoch does. Is Dutton really a leader in control with his finger on the pulse? Is he there to help the people of Alice or simply there to help himself?
Weeks ago Dutton claimed he’d spoken to “authorities on the ground” and when it was pointed out he hadn’t left his office he generated this trip. He said he’d spoken to lots of people “on the ground”. He’s standing alongside Jacinta Price “the lots” remain unnamed and haven’t rushed to support him saying “We spoke to Peter and provided him with his facts” Peter Dutton has a way of manufacturing misdirection, and in this case, it’s look at Alice’s problem as if it were an Australia wide problem. It’s a distraction to the issue really at hand ” The Right of First Nation’s People. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to Constitutional recognition and a Voice” after 240 years.
Sincere appreciation must be extended to the Albanese Government for allowing Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead AO to be interviewed in some depth on the 7.30 Report (13 February 2023). Sarah Ferguson was up to speed again in her interviewing skills with a seasoned naval officer who was assigned to active service in the Persian Gulf in 2006 as Captain of HMAS Parramatta.
The secrecy associated with the formation of the Submarine Taskforce should be of great concern to Australians of all persuasions as our partners in France had no clues about what was happening behind the scenes as they made preparations to supply the contracted diesel submarines that more fully complied with commitments to the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone with the support of New Zealand and other island states. No wonder that President Macron had little respect for Scott Morrison. (The video and the news clip of the French President’s remarks are available here.)
Witness, written long before the Lehrmann trial. It was the issue about which she was invited to speak to the Women Lawyers Association of the ACT at their gala dinner on 21 October this year. It is a matter of obvious public interest. But Milligan has now found herself under attack, not only in The Australian and on Sky News, but in the Commonwealth parliament, for things she did not say and does not believe.
This is News Corporation’s version of “cancel culture” – a phenomenon it has so often condemned.
Its army of culture warriors see themselves as defenders of free speech – especially against the Twitter guerrillas and student censors who ‘cancel’ people of whose views they disapprove. For The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen it has been a favourite topic.
Source: Muzzling Milligan: free speech for some, but not for others – Pearls and Irritations
Australia created the ABC as an Independent Statuary Body yet the LNP has censured, beaten, and financially bruised the ABC to become a shadow of itself over the past ten years. They did it to gain the quid pro quo support of dominant private media and other corporately controlled sectors in this country and they will continue to do so should they regain power.
“In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.”
As Julie Bishop and Scott Morrison remind us why we’re better off without the Coalition, the ABC continues to forgive the crimes of the L-NP, writes Dr Jennifer Wilson.
I am not a fan of Rupert Murdoch’s subscription TV service, Sky News Australia. It is a low-budget, down-market clone of the reactionary Sky News in the UK, which was the major media booster of the Brexit calamity courtesy of regular promotion of windbag Nigel Farage.
Sky Australia takes some inspiration from the UK but more from its other toxic sibling, Fox News in the US, infamous for enabling Donald Trump’s appalling regime and his attempted coup.
I had my share of venomous exchanges with the Sky crew and their self-important ranters, the bottom feeders of the Australian media. Imagine my surprise when they asked me to participate in a documentary.
Source: Sky News is making a doco about the ABC. The host? Chris Kenny
The Publicly owned broadcaster of our media News and Information service is the conservative’s enemy as far Morrison, the LNP, the IPA and Murdoch media are concerned. They are a coalition in Australia that simply view the ABC as the enemy of government rule. As far as they are concerned the ABC as News and Information service shouldn’t exist. Morrison’s and Abbott’s relationship with the ABC has been fractious and so for the past decade, their primary aim has been to extract revenue via an annual “efficiency review” which translates to always breaking the LNP promise of no cuts.
Scott Morrison has shown an aversion to appearing in ABC interviews, preferring to be represented by the right-wing mainstream media, writes Jeremy Epstein.
Source: ANALYSIS: Morrison’s love of Murdoch has left ABC in the dust
How polite is Kevin Rudd? In simply calling this an “overcorrection” when It’s been a slow assassination by stealth to the tune of $1bn. In the LNP decade, the ABC’s budget has been reduced in real terms to that of 1984 when Australia’s population was only 15-16 million.
Under the Coalition, the national broadcaster has been domesticated to the point of overcorrecting for perceived partisanship
One might even be lead to believe Newscorp is actually doing Albo a favor by amplifying the money, the bullies, and pork-barrelling he’s up against.
While the prime minister was given free rein, the Labor leader faced the heat on Q+A.
Newspaper headlines about Anthony Albanese and his ‘blunder’ on the NDIS Patricia Karvelas asked: ‘Should leaders have an encyclopedic memory of every policy?
“It’s 16 days to save the country from the mad left,” was the war cry from Paul Murray leading in to his cosy pre-recorded chat with the prime minister on Sky News on Thursday night.
Source: Headlines go hardline on Albanese while Morrison looks to the Sky | Amanda Meade | The Guardian
Last week, the first week of the election campaign was dominated by Albo’s gaffe. It was a bit of a shocker, to be sure, but hardly deserving of blanket coverage when the Morrison campaign was flat-out pork barrelling with the taxes of ordinary Australians, simply buying votes with somebody else’s money. And what of the straight out lies, that the subsidies for logging companies would bring about 73,000 jobs, or that – having sold the Port of Darwin to the Chinese on a 100 year lease for just $510m – it was a good idea to build another port for $1.5bn with no consulting engineers or financial modellers involved to assure us it was even feasible. ABC has little choice but to listen to what people are saying on social media, not spurn it. Elitism will only ruin their credibility. That means recognising that its corporate media peers are institutionally biased and driven by commercial and political agendas. In other words, they will have to do their own work, ignore the clickbait. It won’t be easy. Who has really been lobotomised here?
Murdoch couldn’t save the LNP in South Australia the State that gave birth to his propagandist empire
The ABC had a choice this week: amplify Murdoch’s toxic “Mean Girls” coverage, or expose News Corp for exploiting the death of Kimberley Kitching for political purposes. It made the wrong choice. New management is in order. Michael West reports. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is the story, not the sad, sudden death of Senator Kimberly Kitching. And certainly not the grotesque narrative being peddled by News Corp’s rabid propagandists. Manslaughter, that is, manslaughter by Labor senators Penny Wong, Katy Gallagher and Kristina Keneally.
Source: ABC should expose News Corp’s agendas, not Labor’s “Mean Girls” – Michael West Media
By the systematic robbing of a constitutionally formed, Independent Statutory Body, Our Public Broadcaster, of its power to do what it was chartered to do the ABC has been intentionally, and conspiratorially neutered by the LNP. Made beige for the LNPs singular political interest, and that of the IPA’s and Murdoch’s, in a quid pro quo funded arrangement that will continue until it’s dismantled or completely privatized as a News source and agency. SAVE OUR ABC
“Relentless attacks” on the ABC from the Coalition have drained up to $600 million in annual funding from the national broadcaster and blunted its criticism of the federal government, according to a report released on Monday. The report is co-authored by the Australia Institute’s Fergus Pitt and veteran ABC journalist and board member – and The New Daily contributor – Quentin Dempster.
Source: ‘Self-censorship’: ABC veterans decry political interference
The Abbott/ Morrison Government had made a pact with the IPA and NewsCorp to rid Australia of ABC News. Abbott backed into a corner knowing the ABC was Australia’s most trusted media source found that direct task too difficult so he banned the government MPs from going on the ABC. Morrison did almost the same. The government has become a regular fixture on Sky News and 2GB their “cash for comment” propaganda arms . Even granting Murdoch a free unexplained $30M. Australia has never seen a concerted effort like we have in the past 8 years to turn Australian media into American with Australia’s Sky News a model of Fox News, without MSM diversity. Consolidation of our MSM into 3 privatized corporate arms run by Peter Costello, Kerry Stokes, and with Murdoch controlling the largest has seen our media metamorph into the Conservative Cyclops donor at the behest of the LNP, and the want of the IPA posing as a”think tank” but acting as the LNP’s mega- donor/lobbyist and even grooming politicians of the future.
Their aim to rid Australia of any organization designed to keep the bastards honest and Democracy the political system of choice for this country which demands the existence of at least two major parties both of which are prepared to lose an election but rule for all Australians. Unfortunately only one party today is prepared for that role and it isn’t the current government.
The year ended with the resignation of ABC news boss Gaven Morris and a public sledge by ABC chair Ita Buttrose, who accused the (LNP) government of political interference.
With a federal election around the corner, it is going to be a very busy and a very interesting 2022 for the public broadcaster.
The ABC’s year from hell
Source: From taming ‘Big Tech’ to News Corp’s climate shift: The media moves that mattered this year
Murdoch Media’s American Fox News complains it was attacked by our ABC. The Australian Media watchdog has no teeth and rarely if ever comments publicly on SKY or News Corp’s incessant trolling of the ABC. Nevertheless we hear Murdoch central crying “victim”. You really do have to laugh at the ridiculousness of Fox News, who as we speak is, being sued by Dominion Systems for $1.5 Bn. Fox staff have been the biggest and loudest, not reporters but, promoters of “The Big LIe” and lead up to Jan 6th. When they saw the result of that assisted incitement they panicked, and now post-riot are saying it was simply the right of peacefull protest. The world’s biggest anglo-media thug is crying victim why? Because the Murdoch’s want them to avoid any more lawsuits.
Fox News sent a formal complaint to ABC’s chair Ita Buttrose and ABC managing director David Anderson in September, arguing the program, which focused on the American cable TV network’s coverage of former US president Donald Trump and its role in the 2020 US election, was an attack on Fox News.
Source: Murdoch’s Fox News escalates Four Corners complaint against the ABC to media watchdog
Dominated by untrustworthy Murdoch agents
Over the year, guest journalists made 133 appearances on the 44 Insiders programs. If we count presenter David Speers, that is 177 contributions. Of these, 92 were current or former employees of Murdoch’s News Corporation, the most untruthful and discredited “news” organisation in the English-speaking world. That’s 52%. Another 32 journalists, or 18%, were from the pro-Coalition Nine Entertainment network. There is no need for the public broadcaster to engage employees of organisations with proven records of falsifying data, suppressing vital information and blatant political manipulation. Australia has many journalists with excellent credentials Insiders could have used.
Source: ABC’s Insiders doesn’t serve its viewers or the nation
We have seen the IPA’s and Murdoch’s influence when it comes to attacking the ABC. They had Tony Abbott their puppet on a string as far back as 2013 with a list of 75 demands. He promised: “No cuts to the ABC”. a lie that turned into Treasurer Morrison’s claim that $1Bn wasn’t a cut but an efficiency review. or improvement.
Yes, Kennedy wasn’t assassinated either his heart merely stopped. “Alternative Facts” have been finessed by the LNP and Morrison is the major practitioner of the art. Remember when he couldn’t reveal anything of refugees because those questions were “On the Water Matters”?
The Institute of Public Affairs is seeking to harm the ABC’s reputation, while questions linger over its own operations and purpose, writes Anthony Klan. WELL-HEELED secretive lobby group the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), which seeks to influence Australia’s public debate, sway government policy – and is running an aggressive campaign against the nation’s most trusted news outlet – is refusing to say who actually funds it.
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