Having satisfactorily completed its role in the dispatch of a prime minister last week, News Limited has redirected its firepower towards another pesky adversary — the left-leaning, incompetent, over-funded ABC and its soon-to-be-launched 24-hour TV news channel.
In its main editorial today, The Australian lays into the ABC’s coverage of the Rudd downfall as the reason to ask “why the ABC should be allowed to take on another taxpayer-funded channel when the corporation plainly cannot manage the ones it already has
Meanwhile, on the opposite page, the paper’s Janet Albrechtsen has also unleashed on the ABC’s forthcoming news channel. Under the heading ‘Sky shames the ABC’, she asks whether the ABC “has the energy and team spirit that kicks in so readily at its poor cable cousin at Sky?”
No mention, in either of these attacks, of News Corp’s commercial interests — of its stake in Sky News or of its aggressive behind-the-scenes lobbying for Sky to take over the government-funded Australia Network, which beams Australian TV into the Asia-Pacific region and is currently run by the ABC.
What we are watching here is a powerful organisation deploying its journalism to pressure a government into bowing to its commercial agenda, not coincidentally at a time when the government is heading towards an election and needs all the supportive tabloid media coverage it can get.
The ABC is too important to Australia to be kicked around as a pawn in a power game designed to bully the federal government into toeing the News Limited line.
Quite frankly, the ‘attack’ by the Australian on the ABC’s coverage of the developing Rudd downfall drama is just another bout of nauseating self-congratulation by the Murdoch empire. Fact is, they didn’t break the story, the ABC did, and that’s what stuck in their craw.
Didn’t see the article but isn’t Janet Albrechtsen still on the ABC board? I suppose if she doesn’t like what they are doing then she only has herself to blame.
I hate to interrupt your self-rightous anger, but take a good hard look at the most recent Media Watch episode for a forensic analysis and disection of how badly ‘your’ ABC dropped the ball on the coverage.
http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2939110.htm
The analysis points out a litany of missed opportunities, technical stuff-ups and how the organisation that broke the story first then failed to adequately follow up, leaving it to Sky News to make the running on the biggest Australian political story of the year.
This is the organisation that already swallows a significant amount of our tax dollars and who is angling for even more, failing to deliver on their mandate to deliver news of relevance to all Australians, in a timely and accurate manner.
I think that Sky did a noteworthy job on a hot story, while the ABC couldn’t capitalise on a story that should have been theirs for the taking, but which they fumbled badly.
The ABC lately, appeared to have been following in the footsteps of the News Ltd empire, with their biased political coverage of the day to day happenings in Canberra and beyond. Many many bloggers have commented that the ABC seem to have taken a pro Opposition stance in their news and current affairs stories both on radio and TV.
Now the Murdoch press turn their barrels on the would be imitators.
Why the Govt has not terminated the services of the likes of Albrechtsen on the ABC Board doesn’t make sense. She has never been anything but a Liberal Party hack and her writings in the Australian, rarely are anything but attacks on individual Ministers or Govt policy. She had an obvious hatred of Kevin Rudd and I am amazed why he didn’t instruct the Communications Minister to sort the ABC Board out escapes me. Howard did and swiftly.
Untilthe election is done, News Ltd will be doing their utmost to ensure an Abbott victory.
@David I believe her fixed term on the ABC board has been completed. Terms were fixed to avoid as much as possible the unseemly appearance of interference your scenario of a swift firing of her would have resulted in.
She probably had no influence on operational matters, and so could be seen as the usual ineffectual duffer one likes on a board. Or was she as the employee of a rival organisation party to a raft of commercial in-confidence information about the launch of the news channel? Of course as a scrupulous person she would have absented herself from all such discussions.