On Monday evening (16th May), the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Media Watch covered the story about Syria which I’d mentioned on this blog a few days ago: ABC uses bogus video to attack image of Syrian government
The MediaWatch transcript is here.
Thanks to MW Presenter Johnathon Holmes’ reporting (assuming the accuracy of his report), we now know much more about this story than I did last week.
It turns out the ‘misidentified’ video footage was initially sent out by Reuters. Presumably, therefore, the story went worldwide. Within Australia, in addition to the online news report that I’d seen, this phoney tale of atrocities by Syrian ‘security’ ran as a news report on both ABC and SBS television on 8th May.
Mr Holmes also informed viewers that Reuters sent out a blunt, capitalized retraction on the same day that it issued the misleadingly captioned video footage:
EDITORS PLEASE NOTE : REUTERS IS WITHDRAWING THIS VIDEO AS WE HAVE NOW ESTABLISHED THAT IT IS FILE FOOTAGE FROM LEBANON IN 2008, NOT SYRIA AS ORIGINALLY THOUGHT. PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGIES — Reuters, 8th May 2011.
MediaWatch noted this retraction was ‘missed’ by ABC staff . Mr Homes made much of the fact that the ABC didn’t make early use of the services of its staffer Jess Hill, who also featured in my earlier article. But that seems to me rather beside the point. Jess did a fine job tweeting for an answer – that’s true. In other words, when someone at the ABC actually inquired “is this story bogus?”, the answer came back fast. Maybe she could have helped out earlier. But I think more significant issues arise:
- The first is for Reuters. Which staff member/s issued the bogus story that cast such an unpleasant light on the Syrian Government? Why do they do it? They should be disciplined; should they be fired? Mr Holmes waxed lyrical about how Reuters is a ‘trusted source’. Many of us don’t share his generous-hearted faith. It seems to me Reuters should be trusted as far as it’s seen to provide honest, balanced reporting – and follow due process when things go awry. No more, no less.
- Other than the Media Watch report itself, what steps have the ABC (and SBS) taken to inform their viewers that the shockingly biased story they ran on TV and the web was bogus?
- Why did the Reuters retraction go unnoticed in the ABC. Why wasn’t it relayed promptly to staff managing the ABC website?
Mea culpa by Gaven Morris. So hard to know who to trust these days..
It’s certainly a positive that MediaWatch covered this story.
Congratulations to the observent anonymous tipster who initially spotted the suspicious footage – and to Johnathan Holmes for following up on the tip and ferreting around for the truth (it was presumably his inquiry that triggered the tweet by Jess Hill which I happened to stumble across via Twitter last week).
On the other hand, quite predictably, the MediaWatch story didn’t countenance the possibility of systemic, deeply-entrenched bias within the ABC organization as a whole (along with similar bias throughout the rest of the western mainstream media). In my view, that remains the big story. It’s the story that, in effect, MediaWatch tries to bury a little deeper..
In the case of Syria and Libya this year, this bias has led the western media to systematically misreport events in those countries, telling only one side of the story while ignoring or lampooning the other. The bias is egregious, blatant – and highly offensive to those of us seeking peaceful outcomes. Yet MediaWatch gives the impression this particular incident was just a rare anomaly – an unusual chapter of accidents.
If ’Accident Theory’ is to be believed, it strikes me as odd that that reports in the western mass media never ‘accidentally’ put a positive slant on the current governments of Syria and Libya. Media accidents all seem to come up heads, every single time. Funny that.
The ABC is so biased it appears not to bother to talk with people who don’t share its pre-spun version of events.
As far as I’m aware the ABC hasn’t interviewed a single pro-Gaddafi Libyan in all the time bombing has been underway (bombing that’s been carried out with Australian connivance, if not our direct involvement). I accept that such an interview may have occurred and gone to air.With luck, someone will dig an example out of the ABC archives. I hope so. But I haven’t noticed one – and I follow ABC news regularly. Nor did a quick Google search turn up an instance within the ABC website. By contrast, the same public news service has treated its audience to an incessant torrent of sound bites from Libyan ‘rebels’ and their spokespeople, always neatly packaged into one-sided stories that paint the ‘rebels’ as heroes’ and Gaddafi as the latest manifestation of Orwell’s Emanuel Goldstein.
Johnathan Holmes suggested that operatives like Jess Hill are a solution to making ABC news more reliable. I find that rather laughable. As far as I can see, Jess is very much part of the problem of the ABC’s entrenched cultural and political bias.
Because Jess Hill does at least some of her networking using the public social medium Twitter, it’s possible for outsiders like me to get an idea who she networks with and what they chat about. Reviewing several days of Jess Hill’ Twitter exchanges, I notice that when Syria is the topic of discussion, her networking seems to be almost exclusively with like-minded people in the media and anti-Government ‘tweeps’. It’s the same with Libya; Jess may do some networking with Gaddafi supporters – but I can see precious little evidence of it. Jess might respond that’s because there are no independent Gaddafi or Assad supporters – but I know that’s not the case.
Stop Bombing Libya! (plenty of info western media can't be bothered to cover)
Independent tweeters from Libya and Syria who oppose external intervention and are broadly supportive of their current governments may not match the numbers and have the abrasive English-language ‘social media skills’ of western-backed ‘tweeps’. However, I suspect they’re actually more representative of their societies as a whole than the twitaholics who chat with Jess.
The existence of that contrary opinion is the story the ABC prefers not to investigate – presumably because it doesn’t suit the war agenda it supports. Jess Hill, it seems to me, would be the last person to break that story. I doubt even the suave Mr Holmes would go near it. It’s not where the jam is.
Along with Reuters, the BBC and all the rest of the Zionist-dominated media in the ‘western world’, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation prefers to exclude from consideration the possibility that there’s another, very plausible narrative about current events in Libya and Syria – another side to the story. Instead it paints these conflicts as black and white – human rights v repression, democracy v tyranny – despite copious evidence to the contrary.
That’s not journalism. It’s propaganda.
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Australia’s ABC’s relationship with the British BBC is often akin to a diminutive sibling’s hero worship of big brother. The technical term for this is ‘cultural cringe’. CC has long been part of the Australian psyche and as far as I can see, it’s alive and well in our public broadcaster to this day.
Yet even where the BBC does shine an occasional light, the ABC seems reluctant to follow. In the case of Libya it would not go amiss if the ABC copied the BBC and actually interviewed a representative of the Libyan Government – at least once. I don’t mean quoting a few sentences – embedded in a report that’s generally hostile such as this Lateline story in late April. I mean a real interview.
The BBC did interview Moussa Ibrahim recently. HardTalk’s Stephen Sackur followed his usual practice of shouting down his guest (Sackur seems particularly rude to African interviewees, treating them with the practiced contempt of a senior Eton schoolboy for his fag). Even so, the articulate and spirited Mr Ibrahim managed to get a few good points across.
Watch the interview yourself and make up your own mind. It’s part of the story of what’s going on in the middle east and north Africa that ‘your’ ABC isn’t telling. Perhaps its management thinks the public is better off hearing only one side of the story – not only about 9-11, but also Libya and Syria?
Yet many Australians do prefer to make up our own minds. A growing number of us are also weary of paying the wages of disinformationalists, who make it harder – not easier – for the rest of us to find out what’s really happening regarding matters as significant as war and peace.
Moussa Ibrahim on HardTalk (Part 1)
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Moussa Ibrahim on HardTalk (Part 2)
On the subject of Syria, anyone wishing to broaden their view beyond the ABC’s blinkered horizons could do worse than read Professor Michel Chossudovsky’s recent article SYRIA: Who is Behind The Protest Movement? Fabricating a Pretext for a US-NATO “Humanitarian Intervention
Professor Chossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization is an informed commentator on international affairs with very different views about the middle east than the standard fare served up by media-promoted neocons and ‘liberal interventionists’. By ‘accident’, he also never seems to appear on Australian TV screens.
