by Piera Akerman
LIKE John Cleese’s famous ex-parrot, a long-dead possum - possibly kept ina fridge by a group of green activists - has returned to haunt “our’’ ABC.
Recycled footage of the deceased marsupial has provided yet more evidence of the manner in which “our’’ ABC applies one rule to itself and its friends, and another to those who don’t follow its politically correct agenda.
Not only do a number of “our’’ ABC’s announcers side with the counter-culture, they also exhibit an unhealthy tendency to attack private enterprise - particularly if they can give rabid environmentalism a boost.
The shots of the rigid, frigid possum provide a compelling example of this institutionalised culture and the manner in which the ABC clumsily attempts to distance itself from its own complaints procedures.
The original footage of the dead possum was apparently provided to the ABC for a news story produced with the help of the green group Doctors for Forests, which the ABC claims was “a credible source of information’’.
ReplyDeleteThe ABC has long regarded environmentalists, terrorist organisations and spokesmen for alternative cultures as more reliable sources than legitimate business or government figures.
But after making a series of false assertions, and subsequent retractions, the ABC has admitted breaching its own guidelines - although it will stillnot air an apology to thelogging workers’ body TimberCommunities Australia.
TCA thought something was smelly after the ABC’s Tasmanian news broadcast a story on April 26 about the alleged negative impacts on native wildlife of an investment company’s tree farming.
The story was supported by vision of the now-notorious dead possum lying in a creek, allegedly killed by 1080 poison about 10 days before the broadcast.
After receiving TCA’s concerns, the ABC said its use of the possum footage was in line with its code ofpractice, under which every reasonable effort must be made toensure that factual content is accurate.
The ABC did acknowledge, however, that the footage wasn’t taken on the day of the broadcast.
It said it had been shot in late 2004, and that while it wasn’t ABC file vision, it had been received from a third party (Doctors for Forests) for this story.
“The ABC ... was satisfied that on this occasion Doctors for Forests was a credible source of information,’’ audience liaison manager Denise Musto wrote.
She also said the original source believed the animal had been poisoned, “baits had been laid in the area and the discovery of the animal was the subject of a complaint about the use of 1080.’’
Unfortunately, Section 6.10.1 of the ABC’s editorial code is explicit: file footage and images in news or current affairs reports should be clearly identified as such, when not to do so would confuse or mislead the audience.
It also states that video and audio media releases must be clearly identified if used.
The footage was very familiar to TCA, because it had previously appeared in the ABC’s totally discredited February, 2004 Four Corners program Lords Of The Forest, which was found by the ABC’s Independent Complaints Review Tribunal to contain serious bias, lack of balance andunfair treatment.
When TCA put this to the ABC, “our’’ organisation apologised - the green group had admitted the footage was shot in 2003 - and said it would let the ABC board know, although it didn’t see any need for a public correction.
But the pesky TCA, still unhappy with “our’’ ABC, sent in another letter seeking coherent answers to its questions.
Whoops! The footage of the former possum was even older than the ABC had acknowledged.
Murray Green, director of corporate strategy and communications, submitted: “It is apparent that the ABC hasagain supplied incorrect information to you in its previous responses on this matter.’’
“This is highly regrettable and, indeed, embarrassing,’’ Green wrote. The footage was “actually filmed in 2000, not 2004 or 2003, as previously advised’’ and the late possum was filmed in Savory Creek, not Ford Rivulet.
However, a senior Tasmanian game management officer who investigated an alleged 1080 poisoning incident advised that he couldn’t determine the cause of death of wallabies and a deer shown in a video provided.
Nor was there a shot of the possum, but the officer did advise that animals poisoned by 1080 do not typically seek out water beforedying. The much-viewed dead possum was proof of absolutely nothing.
Last week, Four Corners interviewed a green activist who advised it was common practice tokeep road kill in a fridge for presentation “to make it, sort of, real to the public’’.
“Our’’ ABC has now shown this false and dishonest footage at least three times, but still no public apology has been aired.
Its own pathetically jaundiced Media Watch program hasn’t said a word. This is an absolute disgrace, but par for the course asfar as “our’’ ABC goes.
New CEO Mark Scott has to make his mark - fast - before he, too, is counted as yet another tool of this dysfunctional collective.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/hello_wasnt_that_the_ex_possum_again/
It took a lot of complaints before Dan Rather was disgraced over his attempt to undermine President Bush with a falsified document during an election campaign.
There had been numerous complaint regarding bias in his reporting over the years, many substantial and substantiated. Ditto for his news group he fronted.
It is hard to judge when the public will act over the blatant bias, if ever. Were the same standards applied to a court .. ?
Menzies created the ABC as an attempt to overcome bias, but it merely created another rat-hole for the cowards to sustain themselves .. ALP’s WW2 administration didn’t help either.
Dixie Chicks decided to ‘express an opinion’ similar to Latham’s (or Brown’s) parlaimentary outburst. In the US, they are on the nose, but in Australia, they can trade off such outrageous celebrity.
What changes an Angel of mercy into an Angel of death? Some of the worst serial killers in recent years have been nurses, quietly and methodically killing patients for whom they were supposed to be caring. A Berlin hospital said yesterday it was reviewing more than 130 deaths following the arrest of a female nurse who admitted to having murdered at least two seriously ill patients. Another German nurse is awaiting trial for killing 29 patients and in February a third German nurse was sentenced to life in prison for killing nine female patients in a nursing home in Wachtberg, near Bonn. In the United States a nurse was sentenced yesterday to life in prison for injecting 10 Texas hospital patients with lethal drug doses. Vickie Dawn Jackson, 40, pleaded no contest to capital murder. According to FBI special agent David Burns, her motive for the killings was because the patients made demands. “In general, they were the kind of patients who needed more care,” he said. “I think that’s probably why. They’re verbose. They want this. They’re thirsty. It seemed to make her angry.” The disturbing thing about the Angels of death is that in most cases they killed successfully for months or years before arousing suspicion because deaths were common where they worked. And that raises the question of how many more might be out there waiting to be discovered.
ReplyDeleteHere are other Angels of death:
• Charles Cullen received 11 life sentences in March this year for killing at least 29 mostly elderly patients in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He escaped the death penalty after making a deal with prosecutors to tell them which patients he killed with hard-to-detect drug injections. Cullen worked in 10 nursing homes and hospitals over a 10-year career as a nurse, being fired from five jobs because of suspicions about his practices. When he was finally arrested in 2003 he said he killed ``very sick’’ patients, and described the slayings as mercy killings. He admitted to killing as many as 40 patients and delighted in telling relatives of their deaths.
• German nurse Stephan Letter admitted during a court appearance in Bavaria in February that he had killed 29 patients at the clinic where he worked, but claimed they were mercy killings aimed at relieving suffering. Letter faces 16 murder counts, 12 manslaughter counts and one count of killing on demand. The nurse was arrested in July 2004 following a police inquiry into missing medication at the clinic in Sonthofen, where he worked. Investigators found unsealed vials at his home containing enough medicine to kill 10 people. Most of Letter’s victims were more than 75 years old, and their deaths raised no suspicions at the time.
• Michaela Giersberg was found guilty of four counts of murder, four counts of manslaughter and one count of killing on demand in February this year. She killed nine female patients in a nursing home in Wachtberg near Bonn in Germany in what a judge described as a malicious abuse of her defenceless victims. The nurse, who was sentenced to life, suffocated eight of the women aged between 78 and 93 years with cushions, towels and washcloths between November 2003 and April 2005.
• Kristen Gilbert, a 33-year-old mother of two, was convicted in March 2001 and sentenced to life for killing four of her elderly patients at a veterans hospital in Massachusetts in March 2001. She murdered her victims, injecting them with overdoses of the heart stimulant epinephrine, which made their hearts race out of control. Gilbert also was convicted of trying to kill two other veterans in her care. She was caught after her colleagues reported that an abnormal number of patients were dying from cardiac arrest and noticed a shortage of epinephrine.
• Beverley Allitt was jailed for life in 1993 are killing four young children and severely injuring nine others in her care at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in Lincolnshire in England. One family lost a daughter to Allitt who injected insulin into the baby as she slept and her twin sister was brain damaged when Allitt unsuccessfully tried to suffocate her with a pillow. In another case she volunteered to work overtime to care for a child she killed. The judge at her trial described her as “cunning and manipulative” and showing no remorse. Allitt was found to be suffering from a rare personality disorder known as Munchausen’s Syndrome By Proxy which led her to go to hospitals with false illnesses. Injuries to her hands suggested she had been hitting them with a hammer and once she went to hospital with glass in her feet which it seemed she had pushed in herself. She had scalded herself with custard and had also put glass in her mouth.
• French nurse Christine Malèvre was charged with the murder of seven patients in 1997 and 1998 at a lung hospital in Mantes-la-Jolie. She was sentenced to 10 years in jail (later increased to 12 years) in January 2003. Malevre claimed the patients asked her to help them die, but a number of relatives claimed the victims had never expressed such a desire.
• Genene Ann Jones was sentenced to 99 years jail in 1985 for the murder of one child and the attempted murder of a second, although its feared she actually killed as many as 46 infants at Texan hospitals and clinics where she worked as a pediatric nurse. She used injections of heparin and later of succinylcholine to kill the babies. In one hospital intensive care unit where she worked she sang to the corpses of dead children as she prepared them for the morgue. Jones visited the grave of one of her victims and left flowers. She has successfully applied for parole six times.
• Nurse Benjamin Green was convicted in a British court in April this year of two counts of murder and fifteen counts of causing grievous bodily harm to patients. Green took 15 other patients at Horton General Hospital, in Banbury, Oxfordshire to the brink of death to revel in the thrill of trying to revive them. He injected his victims, often frail pensioners, with morphine, other anaesthetic drugs and muscle relaxants to make them suffer respiratory failure and require emergency resuscitation.
http://blogs.news.com.au/news/crime/index.php/news/comments/angels_of_death/
My grandmother was fit for most of her 98 years, only getting sick towards the end. She went to a nursing home aged 97. I visited once a week. Working there was a youngish man (early thirties) who was quite conscientious. He made a point of talking to me, as she’d been in the habit of talking about me.
I was very poor, holding down several jobs, moving around rental accomodation. She was blind in one eye, going deaf and had no amusements, like cards. My mother exerted some pressure on me, and I snapped, not seeing my grandmother for a few months. Family had placed her four hours round trip away, and I felt I’d been the only visitor, but felt helpless too.
When I went to visit her again, I promised her I wouldn’t stay away again. She was bed ridden, and in constant pain. I met the nurse. I asked if there was nothing that could be done for her pain. He assured me it was only bed sores, the hospice was treating her. She’d had few visitors. She died that evening.
At the funeral, the nurse attended. I think he was worried that I might think him an angel of death. I don’t. She’d lived a long, virtuous and healthy life, and I think she felt she’d wrapped up the loose ends.
I think my anecdote highlights the difficulties authorities have with identifying angels of death. I think that those who find killing tempting, gravitate to such easy prey. But I don’t think many in the world are such killers.
Anne Summers, Greenpeace chairman and Fairfax columnist, mocks the US for taking basic precautions to save its president from assassination:
ReplyDeleteRecently I was in Washington DC, the first time since September 11, 2001, and was startled to see that Pennsylvania Avenue has been blocked so that traffic no longer passes the White House. Lafayette Park, long the place where the vagabonds of democracy exercised their rights with all types of crazy creativity, is now dotted with police cars and free of protesters.
It smelt like surrender.
Other famous signs of surrender from the Anne Summers playbook:
* The locks on her door.
* The central locking on her car.
* The bank that keeps safe her cash.
* The fence around her house.
* The security staff in the Sydney Morning Herald lobby.
* The security pass to get into her office.
Anne Summers - it smells like surrender.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/summers_daze/
Who exactly was most blind that we now have this intolerance brought to Melbourne’s streets?
ReplyDeleteMUSLIM taxi drivers are refusing to carry blind passengers with their guide dogs or anyone carrying alcohol.
At least 20 dog-aided blind people have lodged discrimination complaints with the Victorian Taxi Association…
Victorian Taxi Association spokesman Neil Sach said the association had appealed to the mufti of Melbourne to give religious approval for Muslim cabbies to carry guide dogs.
There are about 2000 Muslims among drivers of Melbourne’s 10,000 taxis. Many are from countries with strict Islamic teachings about “unclean” dogs and the evils of alcohol.
Neil Sach’s take on this?
Muslims are good people and the community has to realise that the days of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant are well and truly over.
Were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants quite this hard on the blind, the boozers and the worshippers of other gods?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/a_taxi_to_trouble
Harbhajan Singh grabs a beer and lets his hair down and all hell breaks loose:
ReplyDeleteIndia off spinner Harbhajan Singh apologised on Saturday for offending his Sikh community by appearing in an alcohol advertisement with his hair down.
Australia stands ready to offer asylum to a man persecuted like this for his religious beliefs. After all, drinking spinners are gods to us.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/turban_or_not_turban
The Bracks Government’s Water Minister and chief Green Guru, John Thwaites, says through a spokesman:
ReplyDeleteIf the (Melbourne’s water) storage levels don’t get above the trigger levels, we’ll act accordingly.
Here’s the competition for blog readers. A signed copy of still not sorry goes to the reader who can predict to the closest day when a lack of water forces this Government to finally “act accordingly” - by dropping its neo-pagan line that our remaining undammed water is “being used by the rivers” and announcing plans to build the new dam we clearly need.
To aid you in your calculation here’s the latest news of this growing crisis:
IN FIVE weeks’ time, the delivery and quality of water from Thomson Reservoir (Melbourne’s main water supply) will head into “uncharted territory”, as the water level drops to a record low and continues to steadily fall away.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/a_prize_for_closest_to_the_plughole
And it goes to a South Australian, I’d say.
ReplyDeleteThe story:
The owner of Four’N Twenty, Herbert Adams, Nanna’s and Patties Pies, says it’s time for its 40-year family ownership to end. It will offer 58.7 million shares at $1.75 each, to raise $102.7 million.
The headline:
Get Ready for the Pie Floater
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/headline_of_the_week
The Australian‘s front-page headline on February 22:
ReplyDeleteEveryone in Canberra knew of kickbacks
Did they really?
The Australian‘s headline of February 25:
Whole world knew about kickbacks
Did it really?
The Australian now:
EVEN AWB Ltd’s board members - except former chairman and key figure in the $300 million scandal inquiry Trevor Flugge - were misled about the kickbacks to Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to the confidential submission of the Cole inquiry’s counsel.
The final secret 1200-page submission, including sealed sections for the Director of Public Prosecutions, details various areas where Australian laws and UN sanctions may have been broken…
(T)he submission concludes that AWB staff and former staff misled the Federal Government, the UN and even their own board about the kickbacks to Saddam through phony trucking fees.
That sounds more likely.
Apologies no doubt will be issued shortly.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/not_the_whole_world_after_all
Putin’s Russia:
ReplyDeleteRUSSIAN journalist Anna Politkovskaya, an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, was shot dead overnight at her apartment block in central Moscow, police said.
I guess that suggests there won’t any investigation into, say, the failure of the Russian authorities to investigate the bribes Saddam Hussein paid to President Vladimir Putin?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/russia_still_of_the_despostic_east
Thursday’s news:
ReplyDeleteNew figures reveal Victorian workers are becoming less likely to report discrimination, sexual harassment and racial and religious vilification.
As I asked yesterday, what will it take for our discrimination police to realise we’re not actually that evil, and can be left alone?
Today’s news:
PRU Goward, the retiring sex discrimination commissioner, believes Australia needs sex vilification legislation...
Professor Robert Manne must have thought my line was so good it was worth adapting:
ReplyDeleteIf I asked Gerard to name one person in Australia who is a supporter of Osama bin Laden I’d be surprised if he could name one.
The original version, as used in my Melbourne Writers’ Festival debate with Manne on the “stolen generations”, actually goes like this:
(T)he reason I am here is that I challenged Robert in a radio debate - and in writing – to name just some of these 25,000 children he claims were stolen from 1910 to save them from their Aboriginality. To name not, say, 2000 of them, or even just 200 or a mere 20.
No, I asked him to name just 10. Just 10 children truly stolen just to save them from being Aboriginal.
Only 10, Robert.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/mannes_challenge_just_name_one
The outrage Jack Straw has “inflamed“ among the too-easily heated would be more than outweighed by the silent approval of people with more sense:
ReplyDeleteA senior British cabinet minister said it would be better if Muslim women did not wear full veils, inflaming anger among the country’s Islamic community and sparking heated debate on social integration.
Leader of the House of Commons Jack Straw provoked a mixture of anger and derision on Thursday after he said the wearing of veils made community relations “more difficult” as they acted as “a visible statement of separation and difference”.
“I’m not talking about being prescriptive,” Straw, Britain’s foreign secretary at the time of the Iraq war in 2003, told BBC radio on Friday. “But with all the caveats, yes I would rather (women did not wear full veils)."
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/straw_is_no_burka
Your favorite books to recommend to an intelligent teenager desiring to be become civilised:
ReplyDelete(In order of number of mentions)
The Bible
Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
1984 - George Orwell
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Illiad - Homer
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
Hamlet - Shakespeare
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Still Not Sorry - Andrew Bolt, whose readers tend to believe flattery works
For the Term of his Natural Life - Marcus Clarke
A Fortunate Life - A.B. Facey
Catcher in the Rye - JD Sallinger
The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
Many readers also recommended lots or anything by Shakespeare. Mark Twain, Henry Lawson and Solzhenitsyn also had several recommendations for various works, or their work generally.
Summing up? Readers here are remarkably well read, and in love the the great canon of Western literature. And you tend to like or recommend works suspicious of the benefits of revolution and political utopias - such as A Tale of Two Cities, Animal Farm, 1984, the works of Solzhenitsyn (Gulag Archipelago particularly) and even, I’d argue, War and Peace and Lord of the Rings.
My own list some other day.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/your_vote_what_the_well_rounded_teenager_should_read/
Reporting under Saddam, as the ABC’s PM describes it:
ReplyDeleteKATHRYN ROBERTS: Journalism has never been an easy career for an Iraqi but it’s become increasingly dangerous since the country was invaded in 2003.
Although reporters faced restrictions under Saddam Hussein, Baghdad journalist Samir Al Dadri says at least it was safe.
Let the then chief news executive of CNN news, Eason Jordan, describe some of those trivial “restrictions” that stopped CNN from reporting the truth from Saddam’s Iraq:
Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.
We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails)...
A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for “crimes,” one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family’s home.
If George Bush imposed such “restrictions” on reporters, how would the ABC describe them?
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/abc_declares_reporters_were_safe_under_saddam/