Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Speaking of ABC Bias ...
Speaking of ABC bias (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, see below), nothing better demonstrated the huge problems faced by Mark Scott (the new chief of the embattled Australian public broadcaster) than the absurd article by Phillip Adams juxtaposed adjacent to Scott’s on the op-ed page of The Australian a couple of days back. Adams is a locally renowned left-liberal and the doyen of ABC Radio.
Here was Scott, to one side, trying to reassure the public that the ABC would endeavour to maintain high standards of political analysis. There was Adams, on the other, regurgitating as fact the already discredited Lancet survey that preposterously claimed 1 in 14 Iraqi adult males to have been slaughtered in fighting over the last 4 years.
Sadly for Adams, the Lancet survey had at that point in time already been grilled on the Internet for days.
The bias of the team conducting the survey (released, deliberately, just prior to US Congressional elections, just as the same team’s last Lancet survey had been released just prior to the last Presidential election) was not merely the stuff of educated speculation. It was evidenced by publicly available and specific statements.
The appalling figures put out by the team not only failed “the common sense test”, but exceeded by something like 90% all documented evidence of deaths in Iraq over the same period! Iraqis had already rejected the survey results. Even opponents of the war and other statisticians had rejected the survey results.
Not Phillip Adams, however. He chose to gleefully rant on and on about it in an influential public forum.
In Adams’ defense it might be said that he was merely following the lead of like-minded political commentators abroad.
The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall, for example, cited the “Lancet's politically damaging report” on the same day as Adams, while having the sense to mention that it “was swiftly dismissed by the White House”.
Yet that circumstance underlines the very essence of the pressure Adams’new boss Mark Scott is now facing: in an age when Australians are able to access The Guardian and the BBC direct, why should Australia’s ABC continue to exist? Why must hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars support an anachronism?
Further: why must hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars support an anachronism devoted to left-liberal causes?
Scott's mandate is to remedy at least the last point.
