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As Chantelle Baker recently wrote on X, “the ‘Disinformation’ experts [… are] nothing more than lying grifters profiting off creating propaganda.” Time and again, this adage is proved: Nina Jankowicz, the chief censor of Joe Biden’s short-lived, Orwellian, ‘Disinformation Governance Board’, joined in the chorus of official lies about Hunter Biden’s laptop, flatly declaring it ‘a Russian influence op’. Even after that claim was admitted to be false, she persisted in calling it ‘the alleged Hunter laptop’.
As for Australia’s taxpayer-funded leftist propaganda unit ‘national broadcaster’…
ABC chair Kim Williams has warned of the dangers of “fake news” and the threat it poses to democracy, less than a week after the public broadcaster was forced to establish an independent review when it emerged that it seriously misrepresented the actions of an Australian soldier during a 2012 operation in Afghanistan.
He actually said this with a straight face:
Delivering the keynote address at the annual Lowy Institute Media Lecture on Wednesday night, Mr Williams spoke of the “vital importance of trustworthy news coverage about international affairs”.
“A strong media led by people who believe in professional journalistic ethics is one of our most important democratic assets,” Mr Williams said.
OK, but then there’s the ABC.
Earlier this month, Channel 7’s investigative program Spotlight claimed the audio accompanying the video for the ABC report on the gunfight in Afghanistan in 2012 had been doctored to show that an Australian soldier had fired six shots from a helicopter at Afghan civilians.
Raw footage provided to the ABC before a defamation trial last year showed one shot, not six, had been fired, and it was also unclear whether the “civilians” were carrying weapons.
It’s not the first time the ABC has been caught out peddling misinformation as ‘news’, not to say outright lies. The lie that Australian Navy sailors ‘tortured’ people smugglers, for instance. Or its three-part flagship current affairs ‘expose’ of ‘Russian collusion’ in the Trump White House – a story it has never retracted or apologised for, even after it was long exposed as a farrago of lies. Or when it falsely claimed a five-year-old boy was ‘raped’ in the Nauru detection centre.
The ABC is so antithetical to ‘trustworthy news coverage’ that it was ultimately forced to disband its own, notoriously biased, ‘Fact Check Unit’.
Hoist on his own petard, Williams is on record attacking the very idea of impartiality – even though a strict requirement to adhere to just that is written into the very laws which supposedly govern the ABC. Clearly, though, the ABC these days imagine they’re a law unto themselves.
In a Q&A session, Mr Williams was asked about comments he made on a podcast in March that “if you don’t want to reflect a view that aspires to impartiality don’t work at the ABC”.
Oops, did I say that, he says…
On Wednesday, he said “many younger members of the journalistic fraternity … many of our younger journalists have a much more activist view of the role of journalism, and they have a much more policy-prosecutorial approach to journalism.
“And I’m sure that any of the editors in the room would readily confirm what I’m saying. In the case of the ABC, that is simply not available to those journalists.”
The evidence very clearly says otherwise.
Then he said this, again apparently with a straight face.
“Our devices are awash with this fake news. Every email, every news story comes with a fear that we might be a target of some attempt to rip us off or mislead us. People are on edge about what is real. And it is producing a radical mistrust of mainstream news sources too.”
Mr Williams said the antidote was “to give people confidence by employing professional journalistic ethics and by reaching out to those currently not listening and engaging”.
Okay, so that rules out the ABC.
“Australia has an interest and a duty as an affluent, democratic and former imperialist nation in our region to do all we can to promote a thriving democratic media and counter the spread of misinformation, disinformation and censorship,” Mr Williams said.
Agreed – and we can make no better start than by defunding the ABC.
