Issue 28
By Gerard Henderson ~ September 18th, 2009. Filed under: Articles.
GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG - ISSUE NO. 28
18 SEPTEMBER 2009
NANCY‘S PICKS OF THE WEEK
Nancy leads a quiet, kenneled, life devoid of coverage in the print media and appearances on radio and television. Such is (canine) life. Nancy has no complaints - accepting, as she does, that she has little to proclaim of any moment. That’s why Nancy has enormous admiration for those individuals who manage to convince journalists and editors that they have something to say when an objective assessment would indicate that this is not the case. There were two such stunning examples of late.
▪ Better Broth Than Betrothal
Catherine Deveny is one of MWD’s favourite columnists. She was recruited by former Age editor Andrew Jaspan from the inner-city pub stand-up comedy circuit set to become a sit-down columnist each week at “The Guardian on the Yarra”. Ms Deveny is very much the embodiment of a thoroughly modern, Greens voting, Noam Chomsky admiring, ABC/SBS loving Age leftie. She lives in Coburg in what she terms “The People’s Republic of Moreland” and has loads of contempt for those who reside (and buy The Age) in the suburbs. She regards suburbanites as conservative, sport obsessed and not at all intellectual. The Thought of Deveny is analysed in The Sydney Institute Quarterly, Issue 32.
As a columnist, Ms Deveny has around four topics, which she recycles every month or so:
▪ God is dead - and believers are idiots.
▪ Marriage is out of date - and wedded types are idiots.
▪ Private schools suck - and parents who do not send their children to government schools are idiots.
▪ It’s week four - time to write about family life, the kids and the partner - in The People’s Republic of Moreland where fashionable sandal-wearing lefties have no time for (i) religious believers, (ii) marriage and (iii) private schools.
This week Ms Deveny gave her familiar anti-marriage diatribe another run. Her Wednesday column in The Age was headed “Weddings? I prefer funerals - they’re far more real” and she even recycled her “better dead than wed” joke. MWD is not a prophet. Yet you get the feeling that it won’t be long before “The Guardian on the Yarra”’s star columnist takes on Christianity (again) or perhaps private schools (yet again). Or maybe it will be the occasion to have another sneer at suburban dwellers - she calls them “bogans” - or to tell us what the kids are up to in The People’s Republic of Moreland. Still - as the saying goes - it pays the (Coburg) rent.
▪ Great Reviews - Pity About The Non-Publication
For authors seeking media publicity there is an accepted practice. First, write a book. Second, get it published. Third, do lotsa media. Fourth, wait for reviews. So you have to admire retired public servant Tony Roberts, the author of Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900 (UQP, 2006) who has managed to achieve lotsa media coverage for a manuscript of a follow-up tome which is yet to be published.
First up, Mr Roberts got a long gig on the ABC Radio National Breakfast program last Wednesday. Interviewed by Fran Kelly, Roberts alleged that senior figures in the colonial governments and police forces in Australia in the late 19th Century were linked to the murder of Aborigines in the Northern Territory. As the RN Breakfast blurb put it: “those names include former South Australian premiers Sir John Colton and Sir John Downer, grandfather of former foreign minister Alexander Downer.” In the late 19th Century, the government of South Australia was responsible for the administration of the Northern Territory. At the end of the interview, Tony Roberts used the content of his unpublished manuscript to criticise Kevin Rudd’s decision to continue the intervention in the Northern Territory.
That was Wednesday. On Sunday 13 September Roberts found himself on Channel 10’s Meet the Press, where he was interviewed by compere Paul Bongiorno and panelists Eleanor Hall and Mark Kenny. Bongiorno and Kenny accepted Roberts’ thesis without question - only Hall raised the issue as to what was new (read newsworthy) in his material. Bongiorno asked a Dorothy-Dixer to Roberts about whether he had evidence that Sir John Downer was “either complicit [in] or turned a blind eye” to the killings. He did, sort of - according to Roberts. Bongiorno seemed happy with the response.
Then, on Monday, Roberts went on the Radio National Late Night Live program. Interviewed by Phillip Adams, Roberts once again accused Sir John Downer - and some others - of murder without providing any specific supporting evidence. Alexander Downer appeared briefly at the top of the program, on the phone from New York. He accepted that his grandfather would have supported the dispossession of Aborigines but said that it was improbable in the extreme that he would have been involved in murder.
Alexander Downer’s comments to Phillip Adams on dispossession were run on RN Breakfast this morning. However, Downer was effectively verballed. The RN Breakfast program producer deleted Downer’s statement on LNL that his grandfather was not into murder and had acted to stop the killings of Aborigines in the Northern Territory when they were drawn to this attention. So listeners of RN Breakfast this morning got the (false) impression that Downer agreed with Roberts when this was not the case.
After Alexander Downer left the LNL discussion, Tony Roberts - with the support of Phillip Adams and Bain Attwood - again took up the allegation that Sir John Downer was into mass murder.
Roberts then conveniently jumped from killings in the Northern Territory over a century ago and stated his opposition to the Northern Territory intervention - which was commenced by the Howard Government in 2007 and which has been continued (with modifications) by the Rudd Government over the last two years. Roberts and Adams then commenced bagging Jenny Macklin, the Indigenous Affairs Minister in the Rudd Government, for supporting the intervention.
It is impossible to properly assess Roberts’ evidence on account of the fact that his book is not yet available. But he managed to get the likes of Fran Kelly, Paul Bongiorno and Phillip Adams to give him soft interviews about his yet to be published book. Quite an achievement, really.
JONATHAN HOLMES PULLS THE CHAIN ON PETER COSTELLO
Peter Costello’s (fortnightly) column in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald on 26 August raised special interest among journalists - primarily because the treasurer in the former Howard Government drew attention to the lack of political balance among ABC presenters. Crikey got so upset at Costello’s critique of the ABC that, the same day as Costello’s piece was published, it ran an editorial proposing that the Higgins MP should be sued for libel.
In its wisdom, the ABC did not report the fact that it had been criticised by one of Australia’s most prominent politicians. In fact, the ABC said nothing about Costello’s criticism. Until last Monday’s ABC TV1 Media Watch program, that is, when presenter Jonathan Holmes weighed into the debate.
Media Watch has been running for 20 years during which time it has had a succession of leftist or left-of-centre presenters. Namely Stuart Littlemore, Richard Ackland, Paul Barry, David Marr, Liz Jackson, Monica Attard and now the British-born Mr Holmes who has declared himself to be an opponent of what he terms neo-conservatism. Around the time he was the Media Watch presenter, David Marr declared that journalism is a “soft leftie kind of culture” and that any journo who could not adapt to this mindset should “find another job” (See The Sydney Institute Quarterly, Issue 35). Jonathan Holmes fits the Marr selection criteria for a position in the media - including the presenter’s gig on Media Watch.
Nevertheless Jonathan Holmes felt the need to defend his employer against the Costello criticism that “the ABC is hostile territory” to those on “the conservative side of politics”. Spoke Holmes:
On the ABC, according to former Treasurer Peter Costello, lefties rule…It’s hardly a new complaint, of course. But imminent retirement has given Mr Costello the freedom to join the chorus. As he put it in The Age three weeks ago: “I am not now at the mercy of the media so I can afford to say what everyone on the conservative side of politics knows - the ABC is hostile territory.”
The ABC has always denied that its output leans to the left - a denial greeted with hoots of derision by its Coalition critics. Coincidentally, just a few days later, a couple of academics from Melbourne Uni and the ANU published a study which attempts, using some impressive-looking mathematical formulae, to answer the question: “How Partisan is the Press?” using “Multiple Measures of Media Slant”. It finds that the answer is “not very partisan at all”. Most newspapers, radio and television, says the study, take a centrist line. But in a finding that must have amazed Mr Costello, the authors add: “The only media outlet that is significantly slanted is the ABC Channel 2 television station, which is significantly pro-Coalition during the period in question.”
Pro-Coalition! Well knock me down with a feather! Bias, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder - and just as hard to quantify.
So there you have it. Media Watch did not report Mr Costello’s views when they were first made. But Jonathan Holmes and his producer Jo Puccini decided to editorialise about the matter some weeks after the event. Holmes depicted Costello as joining a “chorus”, accused Liberal Party supporters of engaging in “hoots of derision” and editorialised that “bias…is in the eye of the beholder”. Get the picture? Why, Holmes even used exclamation marks to score points against Costello. Really! Yet he did!! Case closed!!!
It seems that Mr Holmes and Ms Puccini endorse the quite wacky report by academics Joshua S. Gans and Andrew Leigh titled “How Partisan is the Press? Multiple Measures of Media Slant”. This was analysed in Issue 26 of MWD. Joshua S. Gans is a professor at the Melbourne Business School.
Since the release of the report, MWD has been analysing the important contribution to human knowledge made by Professor Gans and his colleagues in Melbourne. On his website, Mr Gans has declared that, following the citation of his work by Jonathan Holmes on Media Watch, he has been able to tick-off one item on his “little list of life’s achievement”. Wrote Gans: “At long last, I got a mention on Media Watch.“ Wow. Or as Jonathan Holmes would say: Wow!!!
Here’s hoping that Mr Holmes and his Media Watch team will publish much more of Joshua Gans’ ground-breaking research in future editions of the program. MWD is particularly impressed by his work on, er, male urinals. Gans’ paper “Urinal protocol vulnerability” attempts to answer one of the key questions of our time. Namely: “When a guy goes to the bathroom, which urinal does he pick?” Good question, don’t you think?
MWD is particularly impressed by the learned professor’s attempt to analyse and graph what he refers to as the “International Choice of Urinal Protocol”. This is how Joshua Gans sees it:
The protocol is vulnerable to producing inefficient results for some urinal counts. Some numbers of urinals encourage efficient packing, and others encourage sparse packing. If you graph the packing efficiency (f(n)/n), you get this:
As Jonathan Holmes would say: ”Knock me down with a feather!!!”
For all you sheilas out there, Joshua Gans is after some clues as to how he can move from male focused research (i.e. urinals) to female focused research (i.e. something other than urinals). As Mr Gans has raised the matter on his website:
Can you think of any female-specific experiences that could benefit from some mathematical analysis, experiences which - being a dude - I might be unfamiliar with? Alignments of periods with sequences of holidays? The patterns to those playground clapping rhymes? Whatever it is that goes on at slumber parties? Post your suggestion in the comments!
Go on Jonathan Holmes and Jo Puccini. Post a comment. If you take Mr Gans’ wacky analysis on the ABC seriously, the least you can do is to help out his future research.
FAWN AGAIN - MR ELDER IDENTIFIES ESTEEM, PRAISES BRILLIANCE
Sydney Morning Herald book reviewer Bruce Elder is invariably a cynical type. So it came as some surprise when, reviewing the book Driven: A diplomat’s autobiography (ABC Books, 2009) by former diplomat and Radio Australia supremo Richard Broinowski last weekend, your man Elder went into superlatives. He described Richard Broinowski as an “esteemed diplomat” and referred to his “brilliant diplomatic career”. Mr Broinowski is something of a petrol head - hence the book’s title.
The author of Driven variously held the positions of Australian ambassador to Vietnam, South Korea, Mexico and Cuba. You wonder just what Bruce Elder would have written if Coalition or Labor governments had ever appointed the same esteemed diplomat as Australian ambassador to, say, such key postings as the United States, Japan, China, Britain or Indonesia. A super-brilliant career, perhaps.
HISTORY CORNER - FROM MUNGO TO THE FALSE PROPHET, HISTORY AS BONK
One of the enduring myths of Australian contemporary history is that Sir Robert Menzies, the founder of the Liberal Party, had an affair with Lady (Betty) Fairfax - the inaugural wife of Sir Warwick Fairfax. This rumour is much beloved of the left, who seem to see such behaviour as evidence of Menzies’ duplicity.
The penultimate moralising leftie to raise this matter was Mungo MacCallum. Writing in The Monthly in November 2006, MacCallum claimed that circa 1960, “Sir Warwick Fairfax belatedly discovered that his first wife had conducted an affair with Menzies”. This assignation is alleged to have taken place circa 1940 when he was Mr Menzies and she was Mrs Warwick (Betty) Fairfax. MacCallum made an identical allegation in The Age in July 2002.
Until recently The Monthly - editorial chairman Professor Robert Manne - refused to run a letters page in its print edition. So there was no way MacCallum’s claim could be challenged in print. However, the MacCallum claim was debated in Crikey in November 2006. Under pressure to provide evidence to support his claim, MacCallum came up with this “evidence” - for want of a better word. Wrote MacCallum:
The story was told by politicians, staffers, journalists (notably Ian Fitchett and Alan Reid, the gallery’s doyens) and Commonwealth Car drivers.
Fitchett and Reid died in 1988 and 1987 respectively. The remainder of MacCallum’s sources were anonymous. This is hearsay, upon hearsay, upon hearsay - and, consequently, totally worthless as evidence. Also Gideon Haigh has reported that Ian Fitchett told him over a decade ago that he (Fitchett) did not believe the Menzies-bonked-Betty-Fairfax rumour.
MacCallum’s claim was dismissed at the time by, among others, historians Bridget Griffen-Foley and Gavin Souter along with journalists Vic Carroll, Gideon Haigh and Brian Johns. Souter is an authority on the Fairfax family. Gerard Henderson demonstrated that there was no evidence whatsoever to support MacCallum’s claim and cited the late Allan Martin as making this point. Martin was an authority on the Menzies family.
Just when you might have thought that the Menzies-bonked-Betty-Fairfax myth was dead and buried, the notoriously fact-challenged Bob Ellis revived the claim in Crikey on 3 September 2009. Without citing any evidence of any kind, Ellis asserted that - along with some other named politicians - Menzies was an adulterer.
The fact is that Ellis would not know whether or not Robert Menzies had an affair with Betty Fairfax. It’s yet more undocumented wind from the Seer of Palm Beach. Publishing Bob Ellis on sexual innuendo is a bit like commissioning an alcoholic to review wine.
Until next time.