Remember: however much you hate the legacy media, you don’t hate them enough. For all their pious babbling about ‘speaking truth to power’, all too often they’re vigorously engaged in telling lies for power.
That is, when they’re not egregiously abusing their own power.
No surprises that we’re talking, in this instance, about Australia’s taxpayer-funded left-wing propaganda behemoth ‘national broadcaster’. Last year, the ABC posted on its news website and social media about a minor neighbourhood fracas, over a disputed boundary fence. Why on earth was the ‘national broadcaster’ getting involved in the sort of trivial stuff that’s normally the province of commercial tabloid TV?
Because what the ABC didn’t say was that one of the parties to the dispute was one of their star celebrities.
The ABC has now been accused of breaching its editorial guidelines and wasting thousands of taxpayer dollars after publishing a withering take-down of mother of three Karla Martinez on its website and social media last May while failing to even disclose its star presenter – best-known for her recurring role on the ABC’s music/comedy quiz show Spicks and Specks – was a central player in the vicious neighbourhood feud.
The whole thing was a drearily typical neighbourhood barney.
The furore first began when Myf Warhurst’s then partner, architect Brian Steendyk, started tearing down a 26m stretch of the disputed dividing fence they shared with neighbour Ms Martinez with “a chainsaw and grinder” at their North Warrandyte home, on Melbourne’s northeastern fringe in late December 2022.
A heated row broke out before rapidly devolving into an aggressive stand-off, rival triple-0 calls and allegations Warhurst’s boyfriend had been hit on the head with a length of agriculture pipe allegedly wielded by Ms Martinez, a claim she denied.
But the ABC will clearly go to any lengths to protect its own – even breaching their own rules and ruining someone else’s life.
The fracas eventually spilled into the public domain after the ABC published an article on its news website and social media about the heated dispute on May 5 last year as Ms Martinez was preparing to face court for the yet-to-be-dismissed assault charge.
Ms Martinez has now accused the ABC of flagrant bias after picturing and repeatedly identifying her – both under her full legal and professional names, and position as a senior architect at a leading Melbourne firm – throughout the article, while completely suppressing the identities of Warhurst and her then boyfriend […]
Ms Martinez said her livelihood and career had been left in tatters in the wake of the story and she had sent an email to ABC chairman Kim Williams further accusing the broadcaster of deliberately “humiliating and defaming me through malicious content which Myf (allegedly) orchestrated”, and demanding “Myf be stood down from participating in any programs connected with the ABC” pending a full investigation.
The only time the ABC came even close to any kind of disclosure was a single mention that the unnamed “neighbour” she had allegedly assaulted “lives with an ABC contractor”.
This from the same ABC management who instructed their reporters not to publish photos of Erin ‘Mushroom Lady’ Patterson, even after she was convicted of triple-murder, because it “might impinge on [her] privacy”. Even though the photos were taken at a public courthouse.
Despite such a clear breach of editorial guidelines, not to say such an egregious abuse of its power, the ABC is still going all-out to protect its own.
In correspondence sighted by The Australian, Mr Williams declined Ms Martinez’s request to meet and discuss the matter “without prejudice” before the ABC’s senior lawyer, Corey Jankie, advised her that her “assumptions and assertions … are inaccurate”.
“On this basis, the ABC does not agree to comply with your request,” Mr Jankie told her. “In any event, we note (without admission) the article in question has been removed from websites controlled by the ABC.”
The ABC also declined to respond to a series of questions from the Australian regarding the story, its provenance and the reasons it was eventually taken down from its websites […]
Although her dispute started with Warhurst, Ms Martinez said she held the ABC wholly accountable for the way it mishandled the situation.
“This was an unethical abuse of the ABC’s power from start to finish – and they’ve taken absolutely zero responsibility for what they have recklessly done to me or my family,” she said.
This is what we get for our billion dollars a year in taxes.
