Just two months after the ABC’s Four Corners dedicated a full program to nationalist and former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon, he’s back on high rotation at our national broadcaster.
ABC Europe correspondent Linton Besser scored another sit-down interview with the former Breitbart editor, who’s working in Europe ahead of the European Parliament elections. Bannon is trying to pull together a bloc of far-right leaders across Europe to work together on reforming the European Union. And the ABC hasn’t wasted any effort in giving the interview a good run.
It was played throughout the day on the ABC News channel on Sunday, then featured in the 7pm bulletin’s “special report” as a five-minute package, and made it to flagship radio current affairs program AM on Monday. The story has also been made up into a lengthy news story for the website.
Crikey asked the ABC how this most recent interview came about, what news value it added to the most recent (and prominent) interview, and whether it was responsible to be giving so much airtime to Bannon. A spokeswoman declined to comment.
The ABC was widely criticised both within and outside its own ranks for Four Corners presenter Sarah Ferguson’s interview with Bannon in September. Four Corners executive producer Sally Neighbour called the furore “hysteria”, and Ferguson responded with a photo on Twitter with the caption: “What’s wrong with this photo? NOTHING.”
High-profile journalists tweeted in support of the September interview, while others (mostly younger, and more diverse) didn’t think Bannon should be given a platform. Bannon helped craft Trump’s “Muslim ban”, and under Bannon, Breitbart pushed an anti-immigration and often racist agenda. In September, he was also uninvited from speaking at the New Yorker Festival after outrage over his presence on the bill.
Bannon’s latest ABC appearance is yet to create much of a fuss, perhaps helped by the fact that his interview was run as part of a story package, and it hasn’t been given as high-profile a slot as Four Corners.
What do you think about Bannon’s interviews on the ABC? Let us know by emailing boss@crikey.com.au.
It might be shocking to say but almost everyone is worth listening to. If we continue to use simple labels to compartmentalize people and then refuse to listen to them based only on these simplistic labels, we reduce our own tolerance of ideas.
Listen to the man and make YOUR OWN MIND UP.
Very Voltaire but useless in 2018. Some people do not deserve publicity.
Quite so RH, pretty much as I said last time. Like him or not he’s an important figure and represents in a quite articulate upfront manner the views of his ilk. I’ve just read the Woodward book on Trump and realise Bannon and Trump for all their real faults are fighting a worthwhile battle against the permanent war generals and their military industrial backers. But not very successfully especially having been duped by Israel and Saudi.
To equate Bannon with Hanson or Trump shows one is not paying attention. I will continue to think for myself and there’s plenty of left and other views on ABC and elsewhere for those who bother to search.
How many times does Bannon need to be given air-time and website space to promote the “views of his ilk” though? This is the armor-piercing question. Bannon has had plenty of airtime, why is it so necessary to keep giving him airtime over and over at the expense of giving that airtime to other people/
If Bannon represented a viewpoint which was suppressed in the media then despite it’s abhorrence I would be in favour of him at least getting to speak his piece. But he doesn’t, he represents a viewpoint that has been shoved at everyone ad nauseum, and every time he is given another platform and another megaphone, that is time and space NOT given to other views and policies as well as Bannon’s views being increasingly normalised through repetition.
Bannon is a has-been and I don’t know how you need any more time to form an opinion on him. At this point, what he thinks is not worth thinking about. I’d get more mad about the ABC wasting time and money on him, but he is hardly the only nobody the ABC has paid to say nothing of note.
“Publish, and be damned!”
In this dangerous period do we really want to ignore the uglies with fingers in our ears chanting “nyah, nyah, won’t hear you!”?
Oxygen & sunlight is the best antisepctic, in darkness things fester.
The intrepid reporters and their enablers at the ABC have done nothing to help us understand anything new about Bannon. He’s a con and they’ve been conned. He and his message are not new, he’s not nice and remains a dangerous demagogue. Keep an eye on him by all means but don’t flatter him with fawning interviews. Decent investigative journalism and critical analysis would be a better use of their skills and time.
I am with you Vasco…the ABC owes its audience a series of hard questions that stirs this bloke up and gets him to reveal his antisocial agenda in all its ugliness.
I hadn’t heard about it, but mostly it just reinforces my view that it is currently “their ABC” which gives outsize coverage to the right wing to spread their message under the ABC’s banner of respectability (and the Liberals continue to complain, since their complaints have been working a treat thus far).
The kerfuffle over the previous Bannon interview already helped draw a line between newer journalists who have a clue and old ones who still can’t see how they helped and continue to help the Trumps and Abbotts and Hanson of this world while continuing to hold back views on the left simply by not giving them anything like the air time or importance. “But we agree with Mr Turnbull and we don’t agree with Ms Hanson” they might say, missing the point that noone gives a shit what the interviewing journalist thinks except on the ultra rare occasions they uncover something new- the rest of the time, the platform to deliver their talking points is the most important thing. Also we know they all loved Mr Turnbull and that was another part of the problem, how easily smooth-talking pollies capture the media that’s meant to be analysing them.
Very Voltaire but useless in 2018. Some people do not deserve publicity.
Surely someone has misspelled his name.
Shouldn’t it be Bratbite