Tracy Grimshaw has got in on the ABC bashing over the Four Corners report on the refugee children detained on Nauru. In a weirdly gloating lecture, the Current Affair host had her say last night. Grimshaw berated the ABC for using old footage instead of ACA‘s own footage. “We don’t know why Four Corners didn’t use and acknowledge our up-to-date material in their report. We’ve certainly followed up excellent stories that they have covered in the past with due accreditation and will no doubt do so in the future.”
At the end of the report, Grimshaw awkwardly added “for the record we are not suggesting and have never suggested Nauru is a great place for children. It’s clearly not, and resolving their future has to be a priority for the Australian government.”
There is a very long history of gullible visitors providing comforting reports about conditions in unsavoury states. The Webbs, George Bernard Shaw, and the ‘Red Dean of Canterbury’, the Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, pioneered this kind of nonsense in the USSR in the 1930s, with active support from Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who wrote a string of reports denying the Ukrainian famine. Having access to a country offers no guarantee at all that one’s reporting will be reliable in any respect.