Did you hear about Scott Morrison giving Labor and the Greens $1 billion to fund their election campaigns?
Well, not quite: not even ScoMo is that incomprehensibly stupid. But he’s done the next most idiotic thing, handing the ABC and SBS $3 billion over the next three years.
Making the decision even more incomprehensible is that the government clearly knows exactly how the money’s going to be used. When Communications Minister Paul Fletcher all but begs the ABC to “resist the siren-call of the Labor Party”, he’s tacitly conceding what we all know: the ABC is the media wing of the Australian left. Wringing his hands and whimpering that there are “expectations” of “impartial journalism” is like cowering in the corner and begging the bully to please not hit you again, or at least not so hard and not in the face, pretty please.
It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic and demeaning to Australia’s democracy.
Just how “impartial”, let alone fact-based, the ABC really is can easily be judged by its tantrums and lies when its funding indexatin was frozen in 2018.
Despite no reduction in the base funding to the ABC – in fact, funding increased in real terms each year in the last triennium agreement between 2019 and this year – executives at the national broadcaster branded the indexation as an $84m funding cut over three years, a claim staunchly rejected by the Coalition.
Federal budget papers show government funding of the ABC was $1.062bn in 2019-20, $1.065bn in 2020-21 and $1.070bn in 2021-22. Funding for the next triennium agreement will begin at $1.077bn in 2022-23, and rise to $1.094bn in 2023-24 and $1.113bn in 2024-25.
The Australian
And the government wonders why even the ABC’s most senior economics reporter submits “analyses” that are so badly flawed that, for once, ABC management intervened and retroactively spiked the whole thing.
If Morrison wonders what an ABC powered-up on another $3 billion worth of red cordial at the taxpayer’s expense will be like, he need only cast his mind back to last week at the National Press Club.
Journalists at National Press Club functions in Canberra with Scott Morrison last Tuesday and Anthony Albanese the previous week gave viewers a rare insight into the pack mentality of some political reporters[…]
As so often since Morrison won the unwinnable election in 2019, the ABC’s reporters were worst and its coverage the most juvenile. Press Club chairwoman and ABC 7.30 chief political correspondent Laura Tingle set the tone for both events.
Tingle hit Morrison with the sort of “gotcha” question that journalists think makes them look terribly clever, spouting their own conclusions as a rhetorical question that puts its target in a Catch-22. By demanding to know if Morrison was going “to actually say sorry for the mistakes you’ve made as Prime Minister”, Tingle is merely putting out her own assumptions (that there’s anything to actually apologise for in the first place, along with the implication that Morrison hasn’t adequately done so already) and setting Morrison an inescapable Kafka-trap.
The ABC current affairs edifice followed like lemmings. That night’s PM program and 7.30, the next morning’s AM and RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas straight after early AM, fell into line with the “refused to apologise” angle.
It was meaningless. Imagine if Morrison had accepted Tingle’s invitation to apologise. The entire ABC would have led news bulletins for days with the PM admitting he got the pandemic wrong.
The Australian
It gets worse. Morrison is taking a leaf out of Jacinda Ardern’s playbook.
Mr Fletcher on Monday will also outline a raft of reforms to the media sector, including a $10m journalist fund to support public interest journalism in the regions, and a $7.3m TV development program to improve free-to-air television services across the country.
The Australian
But if Morrison thinks that throwing money at the mainstream media is suddenly going to turn them into fawning sycophants like the NZ media, he’s even more deluded than we thought.
