The Australian Strikes Back

After Media Watch had a stab at The Australian on Monday night the editors must have decided that that's enough and decided to go out all guns blazing. Pieces were written for the opinion page, the media section, and the editorial to lambast Media Watch for it's crime. These articles did present many sound points, and many bad ones, but the efforts of The Australian just came across as sour grapes. Media Watch has picked up some of their journalists on some strange reporting, the editorial states:

'Or if Fairfax journalist and former Media Watch presenter David Marr had broken all the significant stories on the Australian Federal Police treatment of Gold Coast doctor Mohamed Haneef that Media Watch would have devoted half a program criticising him for one obscure point of his coverage, as it did with The Australian's Hedley Thomas?'

This incident was not an 'obscure point', it was a matter of Thomas removing a key sentence from a section of the first Haneef transcript to make it seem as though the Police had made yet another bungle. It's hard for anyone to look at what Thomas wrote, and what the transcript says, and come to the conclusion that it wasn't deliberate. This is exactly what Media Watch should be looking for. The editorial goes on:

'The Pachauri matter is merely symptomatic of a bigger Media Watch malaise where there appears to be an entrenched institutional bias of which the perpetrators may well not be aware. It is a bias that is quick to believe and reinforce a view that this newspaper is hostile to Labor and gives the Government favourable treatment. But this view is contrary to the fact that there are few complaints from senior Labor Party officials and politicians about the treatment they receive in our news pages. '

Note that it's careful not to include it's opinion page as this is where The Australian's own entrenched institutional bias resides. One only needs to look at it's pages throughout this week to note the imbalance. Yesterday, not one lefty, today, one, maybe one and a half, but this is typical. I'm sure they've heard complaints about this as I've listened to Labor politicians mention it myself during broadcasts of Parliament.

'The choice of items clearly demonstrates a political nexus exists between the ABC and Fairfax that in turn fosters a culture of lazy investigations based on taking pot shots at commercial television and News Limited papers.'

Because The Australian simply never takes pot shots at the ABC and Fairfax.

The fact is that The Australian has a point in that Media Watch suspiciously dodged some important issues this week and went after some banal events. But their efforts at payback are ridiculously over the top, three pieces on three different pages? Just one article in the media section would surely suffice. Poor babies.