Little More Than Fiction

It's an oldie, but a goodie.  People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.  And media watchdogs should be sure that their facts are right before attacking others for "deplorable journalism".

A couple of weeks ago, Stuart Littlemore used his program on ABC TV to put his boot into me.  He was obviously displeased with my recent and widely-reported Backgrounder, "Their ABC or Our ABC?", which he portrayed as an "Incredible Propaganda Achievement".

Littlemore put on quite a performance.  If nothing else, it provided the proof of bias that he wrongly claimed I couldn't produce.  But surely he did not intend to offer such powerful ammunition to the ABC's critics?  Why didn't he realise what he was actually doing?

Perhaps it was his stratospheric ego.  Or an organisational culture in the ABC that is too cloistered to appreciate how outsiders might see it.  Or confidence that ABC management does not care about implementing the organisation's charter, which requires it to present information which "is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism".

As Peter Charlton pointed out in the Courier-Mail a few days later, Littlemore does not attempt to present information in any objective and independent sense.  Rather, he follows the model of his day job as a barrister, smugly and sarcastically arguing what he thinks will be the best possible brief for his client, which in this case was the ABC itself.

So Littlemore conveniently neglected to tell his viewers that the Backgrounder included a politically and philosophically diverse group of speakers, half of whom were individuals currently or formerly employed by, or contracted to, the ABC.  Their presentations ranged from a call to break up and privatise the organisation, through to Quentin Dempster's claim that nearly all the perceived flaws resulted from a 15 year long "war of funding attrition against the ABC".

The speakers who found fault with the ABC did so for a variety of reasons, and offered appropriate evidence for their arguments.  A number specifically dismissed attempts to see the broadcaster's defects in terms of shibboleths favoured by "the left" or "the right", pointing to generational problems arising out of a "baby boomer" mindset, and a failure to genuinely embrace the diversity of today's Australia.

If all this was a Backgrounder designed to peddle "right-wing propaganda", as Littlemore wanted viewers to believe, the organisers made an appallingly inept choice of speakers.

Peter Charlton's criticisms focused on Littlemore's sins of omission and his hypocritical cracks at "capitalism", given the barrister's evident eagerness to build his own stash of capital.  Certainly, these sins were serious enough to transform a supposed program of media analysis into café latte society's equivalent of mud wrestling.

But this is not the whole story.  For Littlemore also did something that even Sydney barristers are not supposed to do.  He told some whoppers about me, my supporters and my work, even though the facts had previously been made absolutely clear to his research team.

In claiming that I was a hired gun for various unsavoury interests, Littlemore flashed various articles on the screen, clearly expecting his audience to take his word for it, as they could only read the titles, not the text.  Thus one of my Courier-Mail columns, called "Healthy concern a smokescreen for pushing a political point", was presented as supposed proof that I am doing the bidding of tobacco companies.

But if that is true, the tobacco industry is now happily promoting the message that "smoking greatly increases the risk of lung cancer, as well as other diseases", because that is what I wrote.  In fact the column criticised anti-cancer groups for not publicising apparent links between abortion and breast cancer.

In case anyone had failed to get the message, towards the end Littlemore gave us a photo of Adolf Hitler, together with a quotation from Mein Kampf stating that "the broad mass of a nation ...  will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one".  As offensive as this was, perhaps it should be cherished as revealing more of Littlemore than of anything else;  a little voice of conscience struggling to get out.