The ABC: You Pay, They Twist

That the ABC is Fake News is not new. What’s new is that the ABC’s fakery is now entrenched. Unashamedly and blatantly, Australia’s largest news-gathering and publishing organization lies by omission, distorts by selection and excludes inconvenient truths. ABC News is now the mouthpiece of a progressivist, sentimentalised cadre of activists dedicated to the destruction of the pillars of Western society – free speech, modern history and Christianity. Its reporting of events unfolding around the world feed audiences a deliberately blinkered, but subversively coloured interpretation.

Nowhere is this more obvious than its protection of Islam. No discussion of the vicious expansionist objectives of the Islamists is allowed in programmes; news coverage successfully suppresses facts on which viewers and listeners might draw conclusions unfavourable to Muslims.

Exhibit 1: This last week’s coverage of the attack on pedestrians in Barcelona. The ABC sent two senior reporters from London to cover the aftermath of the atrocity. Over several days they managed to avoid mentioning the ideology energizing the perpetrators.

Ten hours after ISIS had claimed responsibility for running down men, women and children with a truck, the ABC’s 7pm TV news bulletin aired this exchange:

News anchor Jeremey Fernandez: “What more do we know about who carried out this attack?”

Senior reporter James Glenday: “Police are focusing on the 17-year-old driver of the van, but they believed that as many as eight people have been involved in the planning of the attack here.”

A deliberate avoidance of the direct question.

This refusal to call out Islamic terrorists, ISIS, the Caliphate or other extreme muslims is now endemic. Ever since the first Paris attacks, when correspondents Barbara Miller and Lisa Millar danced cleverly around the question of responsibility, ABC News has worked hard to avoid naming Islam. When challenged, denial has been based on early uncertainties: the lack of official confirmation, or the possible  confusion of local political issues.  Often, social deprivation, unemployment and racism have been blamed for atrocities.

Exhibit 2: The Charlottsville riot was a heaven-sent event with which to beat the Alt-Right. And when President Trump dared to suggest that there was violence from both sides in the streets,  he gave new cause to attack his “white supremacy”. So we were served by the ABC with replays of the mother of Heather Heyer, killed in a deliberate car crash: “She went to the demonstration to make the world a better place.”  This sanctimonious gush encapsulates the ABC’s policy of replacing facts with sentimentality.

Exhibit 3: And have we heard from our national broadcaster’s many North American correspondents the full story of the statues?  This has been an Alt-Left campaign building for months, if not years, to remove all historical traces of the South’s part in the Civil War, its flag and its champions. Ignoring the incitement of the hard-left Southern Poverty Law Centre, the ABC has deliberately characterized the events as an upsurge of Nazism and white supremacy.

The facts: After years of argument, the Charlottesville Council voted in June to rename Lee Park (which contained the Robert E Lee statue) as Emancipation Park. A permit to hold a Unite the Right rally in Emancipation Park on August 12 was first granted by the city, then revoked on August 7.  On August 9, the city granted two permits for counter-protests to the Peoples Action for Racial Justice, to be held only a mile away.

On August 11, a U.S. District Court judge granted the “Unite the Right” organisers injunctive relief – permission to hold their rally, on freedom of speech grounds.  Judge Conrad ruled that the City had no legal right to prohibit the rally on the basis of “content” – i.e. because it feared what might be said. The stage was set for two opposing groups to confront each other.

Before that could happen, and twenty minutes before the Emancipation Park rally was to start, Virginia’s governor declared it an unlawful assembly. He made no such declaration on the two protest rallies. Those at the park were expelled into the streets where they were confronted by the counter-demonstrators. Virginia national guardsmen and state police stood by and watched.

Exhibit 4: The ABC’s Aboriginal propagandist, Stan Grant, has now picked up the torch from his American anti-statue heroes. He has taken aim at the James Cook statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park, objecting to the inscription saying “Cook discovered this territory.”

Grant’s unsubtle stirring divides Australia by perpetrating the myth of Aboriginal cultural equality. He dares not admit that, for the civilised world, Australia and its stone-age inhabitants simply did not exist. He will not acknowledge that, as the skilled navigator mapped the east coast of Australia, he was meeting nomadic peoples who culturally, socially, economically and technologically had merely marked time for fifty thousand years.

In his column on the ABC website, Grant reports that some indigenous people would like to see the Cook statue removed, but he disagrees. Nevertheless his comments are incendiary:

“Americans are tearing down the monuments to hate, but we remain oblivious to ours.”

The fierce protestations of the Alt-Left in America will soon be replicated here by those who do not care for the civilisation that British colonisation brought. The ungrateful spites like Grant pick away at symbols such as Australia Day now, but they are not far from tearing at the deeper foundations of our modern society. Grant’s spurious call for an end to what he terms the “great silence” about our indigenous history is merely self-promotion, via a coded call for hate.

Good work if you can get it — and, until the national broadcaster is reformed, the ABC will make sure those who promote the messages of which it approves are never unemployed.

Geoffrey Luck was an ABC journalist for 26 years