Labor MP Andrew Leigh
What on earth is going on at the ABC? After the debacle of handing back its trove of cabinet papers, censoring its chief economic journalist for stating some simple truths about company tax, last night’s weird 7.30 interview with prominent golf choker and Trump enthusiast Greg Norman and publishing a bizarre encomium about the super-rich, its “Fact Check” unit has launched a peculiar attack on Labor frontbencher Andrew Leigh over the earth-shattering issue of … whether the Australian Public Service is larger than Woolworths.
In a piece on the APS more than a month ago during the sleepy holiday period, Leigh noted “there are more people working for Woolworths than in the public service.” It was an en passant remark in a piece primarily about the importance of the public service. But the ABC’s “RMIT Fact Check Unit” swung into action and, more than four weeks later,yesterday published a 1400 word rebuttal of Leigh — 500 words longer than the original piece.
The length is all the more peculiar because the piece admits that Leigh seems to be correct. “The public service employed 152,095 people at the end of June 2017… It appears the wider group [of Woolworths] employed around 183,500 people in Australia at the end of June 2017.”
But the indefatigable “ABC RMIT Fact Check Unit” decided that in fact Leigh was “unclear” about what he meant when he referred to “Woolworths”. You or I might think that a reference to Woolworths meant, well, Woolworths, but the ABC decided “Mr Leigh did not specify what he meant by “Woolworths”.” (Actually it’s Dr Leigh, courtesy of Leigh’s PhD from Harvard, but, hey, it’s only a fact-check piece striving to be as forensic as possible, right? Let’s not sweat the small stuff).
The ABC decided Leigh could have just been referring to Woolworth’s supermarkets, and they only employ 115,000 people. Not that Leigh mentioned supermarkets anywhere in his piece. But, true, if you or I refer to Woolies, we probably mean the supermarket. Equally, I suspect, few people think Woolies is composed entirely of autonomous supermarkets without any company that owns them, owns or leases the land where they’re located, or the logistical infrastructure to supply groceries, or the contracts with local and foreign suppliers, or might own other businesses as well like liquor stores or other retail outlets, or have partnerships with petrol companies or banks. Perhaps the “ABC RMIT Fact Check Unit” thinks Woolies supermarkets just pop out of the ground by themselves — they don’t specify that they don’t think that. If we’re going to fact check what you think people might have meant, then that’s a fair criticism, yes?
I also picked up the irony of a “fact-checker” getting Leigh’s title wrong, but this sort of mistake now happens time after time. They are hopeless.
Never been easier to defend the concept of a public broadcaster in principle; never been harder to defend the ABC.
Another strong whiff of Turnbull seeking to use the ABC to damage his opponents (some of whom actually have skills and talents, unlike his own team)?
And how the hell did Breheny get on the Q&A panel again?
Hard enough to tolerate Frydenburg drivel without having to listen to IPA hogwash as well.
Breheny also does ABC Breakfast & appears on The Drum – which is great as I take the opportunity to switch off the TV. Another IPA example of dubious talent on both these programmes is Georgina Downer whose skills are not obvious.
I agree, how did a dropkick like Breheny get there. The drivel that he espouses is ridiculous. His entirely outmoded idea for building several nuclear power stations is beyond belief. They would be astronomically expensive, even one would take at least 20 years to build, and the cleanup costs afterward would match the running costs over their lifetime, as the Brits are finding out. (A parliamentary enquiry about 10 years ago found the cleanup costs for six mothballed nuclear stations was around 70 billion pounds). Luckily Breheny had little else to add for the night.
“Never been easier to defend the concept of a public broadcaster in principle; never been harder to defend the ABC.”
Well said Mudge and worthy of a Carpenter Award in that you’ve nailed it.
……Given how Far Right the ABC has become, I really don’t bother watching it-outside of a handful of programs. Media Watch is still mostly good value….even if I don’t agree with everything Paul Barry says. Four Corners & Foreign Correspondent also still do excellent work, & Catalyst is still good as long as they avoid the pseudo-science nonsense. I also still enjoy Mad as Hell, The Weekly & The Last Leg. What I won’t watch, though, is their news broadcasts, 7:30 Report, Q&A, Insiders or The Drum.
Last night, on the censored Alberici tax article, was a shocker. Barry not only essentially took all his cues from the conservative press, he pulled a cheap stunt worthy of the pondscum-dwelling end of the fetid shallow pool of Australian ‘journalism’. After repeating their bleatings that Alberici made a bunch of factual errors without giving a single concrete example, he then gave an example of so-called opinion but which was an outrageously edited quotation taken totally out of context and incorrectly attributed to Alberici. MediaWatch presented this opinion as text like so: “the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Many viewers would have been (mis)led to agree that this was an outrageous personal opinion that an ABC journalist should not be giving.
But of course, as I am sure the average Crikey reader knows, this was not Alberici’s personal opinion but is a description of Goldman Sachs that has been repeated a thousand times by hundreds of journalists around the world over the past decade. It gets repeated because many find the phrase not only colourful (to enliven dry economic journalism) but with a certain je ne sais quoi ring of truth about it. Indeed, you can be sure that many alumni of Goldmans, such as Anthony (the Mooch) Scaramucci and our own PM (former head of GS Australia), revel in, Gordon Gekko style.
The full context of the shameful sentence in Alberici’s piece was:
Selective editing deliberately designed to reinforce a predetermined position on, and to smear, the Alberici piece? But this is Media Watch on our ABC, and surely they wouldn’t stoop to such a dirty low trick?
Seriously I think Uncle Barry has some on-air apologizing to prepare for next week.
Marcus me too, that is about the extent of my watching. Better value in SBS.
I agree with your shortlist and would add The Checkout. Plus I choose each day whether to persevere with The Drum depending on who the panellists are, and have Insiders on notice. Funny thing I am finding is that some msm journos are better on Insiders than when they write for their respective media houses.
“It’s their ABC” now?
“What’s going on at the ABC?” The conversion of an independent national broadcaster into a compliant state broadcaster. From now on, unless the Labor Party thinks an independent broadcaster is a good thing to have and legislates to make sure it stays that way, the ABC will emphasise what the authorities want emphasised and omit what the authorities want omitted as a matter of course. Like RT, VOA and CCTV. Where will we get independent news and commentary? Oh, most of us won’t.
Was Sales wearing bobby sox last night – to meet a mate of the pussy snatcher?