Back in the saddle
One of the good things about travelling is that it breaks you out of your normal habits of media consumption. This was made vivid to me when I tuned back into good old Radio National this morning. The 6:30 to 7:00 slot consisted of the following three items: someone from Medecins Sans Frontieres complaining about the evil Big Pharma companies not devoting enough research to unprofitable Third World diseases, someone from Amnesty International complaining about evil First World democratic governments and their woeful human rights records, and then just to take us up to the news and weather...an interview with Cindy Sheehan!
The actual 7:00 bulletin was no better. A recap of the latest Amnesty International report, someone from the Law Institute complaining that current reporting of Aboriginal social problems is serving to 'demonize' customary law, but the cake-taker was their item on PM John Howard addressing the Irish Parliament. This was reported solely in terms of the 'boycott' of his address by various Sinn Feiners and Greens. I'd been waiting for something like this, being able to remember how eager our media were to report, when Howard addressed the US Congress in 2002, that various office staffers and gofers were rounded up to fill an otherwise underpopulated chamber. Interestingly, one of the things that the Irish boycott group, which included Sinn Feiners, held against Howard was his contribution to global terror. Boycott is an Irish word, but obviously 'irony' is not. The psychics of the ABC were also able to inform us that Labour party members who did not show up for Howard's address did so due to 'lack of interest'.
As a seasoned RN listener, I seem to detect a small but distinct ratcheting-up here, if it isn't just a statistical blip. If I were really paranoid, I might even wonder whether this is a tree-pissing, territory-marking exercise for the benefit of the new Chair of the ABC, i.e., 'Don't even think of trying to pull us into line'.
These bulletins also suggested a new 'thought experiment', to be used in case I ever find myself in a debate over ABC leftwing bias. Let's just suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is a parallel universe, in which there is the kind of flagrantly leftwing ABC that David Marr thinks is just a figment of the rightwing imagination. OK, now that you're imagining that other ABC, answer one question: how would its programming differ from the kind of bulletin described above?
One of the good things about travelling is that it breaks you out of your normal habits of media consumption. This was made vivid to me when I tuned back into good old Radio National this morning. The 6:30 to 7:00 slot consisted of the following three items: someone from Medecins Sans Frontieres complaining about the evil Big Pharma companies not devoting enough research to unprofitable Third World diseases, someone from Amnesty International complaining about evil First World democratic governments and their woeful human rights records, and then just to take us up to the news and weather...an interview with Cindy Sheehan!
The actual 7:00 bulletin was no better. A recap of the latest Amnesty International report, someone from the Law Institute complaining that current reporting of Aboriginal social problems is serving to 'demonize' customary law, but the cake-taker was their item on PM John Howard addressing the Irish Parliament. This was reported solely in terms of the 'boycott' of his address by various Sinn Feiners and Greens. I'd been waiting for something like this, being able to remember how eager our media were to report, when Howard addressed the US Congress in 2002, that various office staffers and gofers were rounded up to fill an otherwise underpopulated chamber. Interestingly, one of the things that the Irish boycott group, which included Sinn Feiners, held against Howard was his contribution to global terror. Boycott is an Irish word, but obviously 'irony' is not. The psychics of the ABC were also able to inform us that Labour party members who did not show up for Howard's address did so due to 'lack of interest'.
As a seasoned RN listener, I seem to detect a small but distinct ratcheting-up here, if it isn't just a statistical blip. If I were really paranoid, I might even wonder whether this is a tree-pissing, territory-marking exercise for the benefit of the new Chair of the ABC, i.e., 'Don't even think of trying to pull us into line'.
These bulletins also suggested a new 'thought experiment', to be used in case I ever find myself in a debate over ABC leftwing bias. Let's just suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is a parallel universe, in which there is the kind of flagrantly leftwing ABC that David Marr thinks is just a figment of the rightwing imagination. OK, now that you're imagining that other ABC, answer one question: how would its programming differ from the kind of bulletin described above?
posted by cuckoo at
8:49 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home