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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
Great stuff Geoffrey. No other comment.
““Americans are tearing down the monuments to hate, but we remain oblivious to ours.”
Where can I find these monuments to hate in Australia?
One issue was that Lincoln wasn’t specifically trying to abolish slavery at first. He was against it, no question about it. But his platform was simply to not allow any more states to join the Union that allowed slavery. The Civil War was initially a secessionist war.
As for Grant. Does he suggest Cook enslaved aboriginals?
The war memorial in every country town in OZ is a monument to defending this country from hate, but no doubt the snowflakes will be calling them hateful soon enough.
Surely we must ask the question; Is a government funded broadcaster required in a pluralistic democracy?
Our democracy has been to date, a bastion for the free flow of ideas, generally without government interference and hindrance. Good ideas tend to float to the top when the pot is stirred and when those few good ideas are conscientiously applied we have the incremental evolution of an open, prosperous, free and up until now, reasonably civil society.
When government intervenes in the free flow of ideas, the tendency is towards an ever closing, poverty increasing, miserable and tribal society where the “tribes” are at war with each other (look at those two Melbourne Councils and the Australia Day fiasco currently unfolding – black on white; green on everyone else).
The funding of the ABC is direct government intervention in the ideas’ marketplace and because it is subsidised it ends up becoming an unethical behemoth. It stifles debate and puts other channels of debate out of business. It’s unethical because it “steals” from one constituency that does not support it’s political or philosophical positions (through the tax system) to support only the pet causes of what are often minority constituencies, producing elitist dictatorships. I’m not being hyperbolic. The fear of offending tribal and barely civilised Mohammedans (who make up no more than 2% of the national population) or changing the whole traditional fabric of human society to please the carnal peccadillo’s of less than 1% of the population are cases in point where we are being “dictated” to by an arrogant elite, supported by government funded sinecures.
It was not that long ago that I could read the “Drum” on the ABC and could freely comment. Surprisingly, many of the comments were against the held positions of the various “journalists” (useful idiots is probably a more appropriate nomenclature – with idiots being the operative term). That should not be surprising should it? There are as many varying opinions as there human beings. Then all of a sudden, the ability to comment on the “Drum” was taken away! No debate! No free flow of ideas – just the publication of tedious, boring and low quality opinion pieces by mostly mediocre “talents” (see tongue pressed in cheek) who all said the same, very predictable things….kinda lika matrix of responses to “trigger words”. For example, the trigger: “Tony Abbott” (click) “Spew, froth at mouth, cure constipation, Munchian Scream….head for the Gap” or “Malcolm Turnbull” (click) “Fawn orgasmically, drool, dribble, batter eyelids, ‘thaw and resolve oneself into a dew'”.
This is what their ABC has become – an organ of narrow neo-Marxist propaganda aimed at resetting societies’ button. I think it is time, if indeed this government believes in the ideals of a free, open and democratic society, to shut the monster down. The popular, good quality and audience attracting productions will find new homes because they are good and people want to watch them or hear them. The so-called journalists can go and work for the Socialist Weekly or Green Weekly. If there really is an interested readership, they can hit them up for some coin.
The ABC has become the bridge across what was once considered a chasm. It’s the bridge between freedom and totalitarianism. It has a pillar in freedoms’ camp to suck up funds and provide troughs for various unequal piggies to have their snouts in and a pillar with a large hole in it disgorging a new slave class into the ‘classless utopia’ that does not exist anywhere but deluded minds. Time for it to go!
The ABC and SBS should be sold off to private bidders and replaced with a Government station that shows Parliamentary debates and outcomes so that the community has access to real information instead of propaganda and fake or shallow “news”. Most people do not want their information on Government activity laundered through an ideological perspective or through vacuous “soapies”.
A “smoking ceremony” for the ABC would be in order?
A reality check for Stan Grant and the other activist mestizos: they would not exist had Captain Cook not “discovered this territory”.
Nice piece Geoffrey. Keith’s article in todays Oz nicely debunks Stan Grant’s drivel. Not sure why we persist with this model of Public Broadcasting. Over $1B would buy a lot more content if distributed another way.
On last night’s Lateline on the ABC Emma Alberici began the program with President Trump’s announcement of the revised US strategy for Afghanistan. She began by pointing out that Trump “flipped” on his campaign commitment to pull right out of Afghanistan and now advocates a “troop surge”, then continued with the true but trite axiom that it is madness to keep on repeating the same action and expecting a different result. Her guest via satellite from Denver, Colorado, was David John Kilcullen, the Australian strategy and counterinsurgency expert. She was almost certain of a response from Kilcullen supportive of the “madness quip” at the expense of Trump. To her obvious disappointment, Kilcullen replied in a measured, reasoned manner, lacking any sign of the bonhomie she was obviously expecting, and without the slightest criticism of the president. Throughout the rest of the interview she kept rephrasing questions in the hope of eliciting anti-Trump statements from her guest, who steadfastly refused to oblige her. Similar examples occur regularly when interviewees fail to satisfy the preconceived notions of high-profile ABC personalities, with their frustration blatantly obvious. It must be very difficult to always find “experts” with the “correct attitude”.
The ABC should be privatised or closed down. There is no rationale for a government-funded broadcaster in today’s media world. None. In any case the ABC is blatantly biased and should be paid for by its supporters, just like Quadrant! Love is love – and fair’s fair.