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July 29, 2003
Webdiary has picked up this article by Jackie Ashley in Media Guardian that I had linked to here. Margo has juxtaposed the Guardian piece with this one from the Daily Telegraph.
The juxtaposition gives you the media wars: both a power conflict between government and public broadcaster and an attempt by the Murdoch Empire to kneecap the public broadcaster to make space for its expansion in the UK through owning television stations. Jackie Ashley decribes the media power play in the UK this way:
"This time, with the communications bill soon to become law - even as amended - Murdoch has a chance of getting into terrestrial British TV. If he was able to curb the BBC in its funding and its journalism, shoving it into a narrow little box, from which timid establishment- style reporting and dreary documentaries were all that trickled out, he would be in business."
Same in Australia. You can see this from the debates over the amendments to our media bill. The Bill aimed to extend the power of Murdoch and Packer, but was blocked by the Senate. It was a close call. The amendments are due to come back to the Senate for further consideration, and no doubt will be become part of the Howard Government's double dissolution trigger.
As Margo rightly points out, there is less media diversity in Australia, and it would get worse with the duopoly of Murdoch and Packer. She says:
"There are a large number of newspapers with different viewpoints and owners in the UK. There's only Fairfax in capital city Australia to balance Murdoch's dominance. Without an independent Fairfax, nothing like the Telegraph or Guardian pieces would ever be written in the mainstream press. As I keep repeating, the only real accountability is that different newspapers groups keep each other honest. With a partnership of Murdoch and Packer as owners, democracy is all over. Dismantling the ABC's role as independent, dynamic, courageous scrutineers of government would be too easy."
Hence the importance of the public broadcaster for democracy.. As Robert Sheer from the LA Times puts it, shooting the messenger---the public broadcaster-
"...is a denigration of the core ideal of representative democracy — rule by an enlightened public — as are vindictive attacks on journalistic watchdogs and whistle-blowers who keep our representatives honest."
Contrary to what Gerard Henderson claims, bias is not the issue here. Why doesn't the Howard Government acknowledge that the frightening claims made about Iraq amounted to little more than cherry-picked snippets from intelligence reports that generally regarded Iraq's threat to the world as modest and shrinking? Truth and bias is not the issue. Bias is the excuse, or the way to open a battle front through payback.
The strategic aim of payback is to cripple public broadcaster. Henderson is doing his bit iin the campaign.
Why is bias not the key issue? The answer is suggested by this article from the Wall Street Journal by Robert Bartley. He says that:
"I think we're coming to the end of the era of "objectivity" that has dominated journalism over this time. We need to define a new ethic that lends legitimacy to opinion, honestly disclosed and disciplined by some sense of propriety."
The old objectivity ethos has gone. It is not practised by Linda Mottram on the ABC's AM; nor by Andrew Bolt, Piers Ackerman or Fox News. we have entered the world of opinion journalism. As Bartley points out:
"... journalists can't have it both ways. Since they're increasingly dealing with subjective opinion, they should stop wearing "objectivity" on their sleeves."
And that applies to the ABC.
The neo-liberals have found the instrument to cripple the public broadcaster. It is either privatise the ABC or shove it into a narrow little box. This gives more room for Murdoch and Packer to acquire more media assets.
Ultimately, the power play can be seen as an attack on democracy. An enlightened public has got too noisy and uppity for the elites: they are questioning the elite's justification for war. So dissent and criticism need to be dampened down so the governing elites are not challenged or criticised in running the country their free market way.
Hence the media wars.
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I am slightly amused at what you think my motives for my idea were. You give the impression that I am some blue-blooded North Shore lad snacking on caviar and washing it down with expensive wines, miffed at how someone dare challenge The Elite and the Howard Government, and hence filled with the desire to silence 'alternative' media. The reality is that I am the son of a steelworker-turned-schoolteacher, earn under $20kpa from three casual jobs, live in a cramped flat in Whyalla, think of the coalition as but the least of numerous evils, and came up with the idea of ABC-as-hansard over five years ago as part of an overall system of how a proper government should be constituted. Me, elite!? I'm bogan disestablishmentarian!
The most you could say was that I was opportunistic, taking advantage of a controversy to tout one of my own ideas. Oh, yes, I DO attack democracy, but not for the reasons you seem to think apply to me. I am certainly not motivated by want of shoving the ABC into a 'narrow little box' so as to hand more power to Fairfax or Murdoch - I couldn't be stuffed reading most papers and don't bother with a TV precisely because they're all full of crap. I get my news from a pile of sources online (including ABC) and glean the basics by reading between the lines - and it is not as though much of it were of actual use either. The Fairfax/Murdoch 'duopoly' doesn't hamper me any, and as it happens, for fun I have mused about starting my own media conglomerate in the future in competition to their stables. What I wanted with my idea for the ABC was to remove any trace of a system to provide government-sanctioned ideas of ANY kind, be they political, cultural, or otherwise. That I turn my nose up at the specifics of current content is totally beside the point - my advocacy of turning the ABC into little more than a glorified court stenographer wouldn't cease even were the ABC to start praising laissez-faire to the hilt.
I am more amused at your seeming to think that I speak for an entire wing of anti-ABC forces. The simple truth is that I get all of 20 hits per day, don't really have THAT much to say that will be of widespread interest, and I treat my blog as not much more than a place for me to think out loud as and when I feel like it. As far as I know, beyond a few good wisecracks in a post on Yobbo's page nobody else but you has even commented on what I had to say, never mind anyone having taken it up as a banner to rally troops behind. I am certainly not the leader of some right-wing vanguard! All you have done is temporarily increase the traffic to my admittedly boring little corner of cyberspace. For that, a 'thank-you' is in order.
JJM