Thursday, February 21, 2008

ABC's Jon Faine and Leftwing Cleansing


Office Jokes, originally uploaded by ddbsweasel.

What ABC host Jon Faine today claims he said last week:
We were talking about the need for renewal after an election and the need for renewal that all sorts of individuals and particular organisations search for at this time of the year. Here on this radio station and on this radio program - in so far as I have some control - we ae looking for new voices and we say, well, “Who’s had a good run and who can we find that’s new and fresh and different” and we had a conversation about newspapers doing the same thing.
===
But here’s what Faine said last week:
I want to expand our discussion to another aspect of media which I think is quite intriguing as the Rudd Government is about to start it’s first session in the parliament, and that is whether or not the media needs to go through a bit of a rethink, as it would seem, according to last year’s election, the nation has. Have things moved on and have some of the staples of the media in the Howard era worn out their usefulness as we enter a Rudd era? ... I’m going to talk in particular about columnists… and Bruce you have some notorious ones of your own? Although I’m going to here, stick my neck right out, and say I think The Australian newspaper has perhaps the most loyal band of Howard supporters amongst its current crop of columnists. And you have to wonder how they’re quite going to adjust, and cope, and fit in when the people they are so well connected to, are no longer in office.

BRUCE GUTHRIE (Editor-in-chief of the Herald Sun): Yes, I’d probably take issue with the word notorious Jon, by the way. I’d say notable rather than notorious…

JON FAINE: But it’s more the columnists (on the The Australian), the sort of Christopher Pearson’s and Janet Albrechtsens and Mark Steyn was the American columnist who was used in the paper yesterday and so on. And you think, well, it kind of represents the thinking that’s out of step with the result of the election in a way, some of the material that those people are very much making their own and their own beat.

BRUCE GUTHRIE: I guess it comes down to whether you think newspapers need to be in step with the Government?

JON FAINE: Oh no, not with the Government with the electorates… But within your newspaper, rather than asking you to speculate about other things, within your own newspaper, does the result of the election mean you rethink any of the component parts that make up your weekly diet?…

BRUCE GUTHRIE: I think it’s very, very hard to contribute a column on a weekly basis over a long, long period of time and so we’re forever monitoring that.

JON FAINE: Very interesting, so you’re not going through a cleansing process?

BRUCE GUTHRIE: Definitely not.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Faine denies saying what he did
Andrew Bolt
What ABC host Jon Faine today claims he said last week:
We were talking about the need for renewal after an election and the need for renewal that all sorts of individuals and particular organisations search for at this time of the year. Here on this radio station and on this radio program - in so far as I have some control - we ae looking for new voices and we say, well, “Who’s had a good run and who can we find that’s new and fresh and different” and we had a conversation about newspapers doing the same thing.

Well, put like that, who could object?

But here’s what ABC host Jon Faine in fact said last week:
I want to expand our discussion to another aspect of media which I think is quite intriguing as the Rudd Government is about to start it’s first session in the parliament, and that is whether or not the media needs to go through a bit of a rethink, as it would seem, according to last year’s election, the nation has. Have things moved on and have some of the staples of the media in the Howard era worn out their usefulness as we enter a Rudd era? ... I’m going to talk in particular about columnists… and Bruce you have some notorious ones of your own? Although I’m going to here, stick my neck right out, and say I think The Australian newspaper has perhaps the most loyal band of Howard supporters amongst its current crop of columnists. And you have to wonder how they’re quite going to adjust, and cope, and fit in when the people they are so well connected to, are no longer in office.

BRUCE GUTHRIE (Editor-in-chief of the Herald Sun): Yes, I’d probably take issue with the word notorious Jon, by the way. I’d say notable rather than notorious…

JON FAINE: But it’s more the columnists (on the The Australian), the sort of Christopher Pearson’s and Janet Albrechtsens and Mark Steyn was the American columnist who was used in the paper yesterday and so on. And you think, well, it kind of represents the thinking that’s out of step with the result of the election in a way, some of the material that those people are very much making their own and their own beat.

BRUCE GUTHRIE: I guess it comes down to whether you think newspapers need to be in step with the Government?

JON FAINE: Oh no, not with the Government with the electorates… But within your newspaper, rather than asking you to speculate about other things, within your own newspaper, does the result of the election mean you rethink any of the component parts that make up your weekly diet?…

BRUCE GUTHRIE: I think it’s very, very hard to contribute a column on a weekly basis over a long, long period of time and so we’re forever monitoring that.

JON FAINE: Very interesting, so you’re not going through a cleansing process?

BRUCE GUTHRIE: Definitely not.

Hmm. That sounds like rather more than a mere search for the fresh, I’d have thought. What Faine seems clearly to be advocating is a political “cleansing” of the kind he’s never called for after a Liberal election victory.

He’d had done better to simply say his misspoke and did not mean what he’s been naturally taken to mean. But to so misrepresent what he actually said doesn’t seem to me like straight dealing.

As for his claim to be searching for “new and fresh and different” voices for his own show, would Faine really like me to recount what I know of that search, and the limitations he has put on it in the past? Perhaps one day, when I’m feeling indiscreet… But no! Resist that temptation!

Anonymous said...

BBC does a Lachlan Harris “sorry”
Andrew Bolt
The sorry:

In an uncommon act of journalistic contrition, the BBC has apologized for equating former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and Hizbullah terror chief Imad Mughniyeh as “great national leaders.”

The Lachlan Harris get-out:
The BBC issued a statement Friday acknowledging that ”the scripting of this phrase was imprecise.”

Imprecise? The original form of words, praising a terror chief as a great national leader, sounded precise enough to me. Was there anything else the BBC could find wrong with that statement?