Or, the Coalition and Murdoch Conspiracy to Co-opt the ABC for their own ends.
This blog is a Call to Arms. It is time for all Australians of good conscience to act before it's too late. Like a wraith, Mr Murdoch moves stealthily but deliberately. His work is always in the background, but he is a piece of work to be sure. Thus it is for this reason that I believe it is about time to shine a bit of sunlight onto Mr Murdoch's machinations in Australia, in particular as it relates to our ABC, a national treasure, as the BBC is in England, but one which is under siege from the forces of Global Media Inc., otherwise known as News Corp. I'm not imagining it. The game plan was laid out for all to see in a speech given last year by James Murdoch in London. As the Murdochs think globally and act locally, there can be no doubt that the sentiments of James Murdoch are being echoed here, and our ABC has been laid siege to, as torridly as the Beeb now will be, seeing as how Mr Murdoch achieved his aim of getting David Cameron into 10 Downing Street, with the implicit promise that the BBC will be 'corporatized', we can only imagine what would happen to our ABC under an Abbott Coalition government.
So let's look at the evidence before us here in Australia:
Mark Scott: ABC Managing Director and former Liberal staffer.
Janet Albrechtsen: recently departed ABC Board member and wife of Malcolm Turnbull's best friend, John O'Sullivan, the chairman of his fundraising arm, The Wentworth Forum.
Keith Windschuttle: ABC Board member, current Editor of Right Wing polemical, Quadrant, Right Wing zealot and former Marxist (aren't they all these days?)
Maurice Newman: Chairman of the ABC Board, climate change skeptic and former head of the ASX (a bluest of blue-blood position for a member of the economic elite to hold), and great mate of, guess who - John Winston Howard, who it appears is no longer licking his wounds in Wollstonecraft but actively participating again in 'strategizing' for the removal of the Rudd government with his conservative confreres up and down the country.
So, does something smell fishy to you too? Well it should.
And those suspicions were confirmed when I read this little gem in the 'Tips and Rumours' section of Crikey recently: "Rebellion at ABC News? A staff rebellion is happening at ABC News about the way the ABC editorial agenda is being hijacked by News Ltd. A couple of people have threatened to go public..."
Bingo! I thought so!
So, might I just say, to the putative ABC whistleblowers, this might be your last best chance to do something about it. So how about you let us know about it in more detail! Come out of the shadows. Your 8c/day paying demographic desires it!
We, the people need the transparency that a full and frank disclosure of such matters would demonstrate. How can it be fair on the Rudd government for people in what is supposed to be OUR ABC to stay silent about this editorial coup by the forces of darkness? Why should we, in Australia, allow a megalomaniacal geriatric American media mogul, head of a corporate conglomerate that spans the globe, to insidiously dictate how we think and who our next government should be, by dominating all our sources of information? Especially that one which we have come to rely on as our trusted source of impartial and reasonable commentary, the Public Broadcaster.
I wouldn't be surprised, actually, if, at that infamous breakfast that Tony Abbott had with Rupert Murdoch at the beginning of the year, soon after he became Opposition Leader, you know the one, where Abbott, the Murdoch supplicant, said, “Oh, I just hope he liked me”, that at that meeting a similar undertaking was not made, to sell off the ABC in a forthcoming Abbott government, in exactly the same way that Murdoch is said to have reached agreement with the dough-faced David Cameron to sell-off the BBC, in exchange for his media empire's support in the run-up to the recent UK Election.
If Murdoch also achieves that aim in Australia, then it's 'All Over, Red Rover' for our National Broadcaster. After 'Corporatisation', or whatever bland, Orwellian managerialese they will use to style the media coup, even though we may still be presented with the same 'Talking Heads' that we are comfortably familiar with now, as the tip from within the walls of the ABC shows, we will know that they will have been nobbled by News Ltd., having infected the soul of the organization with a cancer which will be nigh on impossible to excise.
You just have to look at how the malevolent Andrew Bolt (who will hereafter be known as MAB, appropriately, I think), inserted himself onto last Sunday’s Insiders panel in place of the far more honest and reasonable Michael Stutchbury. Barrie Cassidy should have just refused to do the show with Andrew Bolt, and demanded that Michael Stutchbury be reinstated to the couch. An act that would illustrate, once and for all, that the cultural cringe that appears to be automatically assumed by former ALP staffers when they go to work at the ABC, is no longer going to be manifest in their behaviour. Now is the time, and now is the season, to come out and be proud of your Social Democrat heritage and links to the political party that embodies it, and be no longer willing to kowtow to the Bully Boys from Murdoch World Domination Enterprises. C'mon, Barrie, you know you want to.
So, what I would like to start now is the ball rolling; to start a Watchdog group on The Political Sword, to provide all and every scrap of evidence of ABC pro-Murdoch behaviour and echoing, or unfair anti-Rudd government bias.
Come one, come all, from inside the ABC (if must be, anonymously), and come out into the light. Bring us all the evidence you have of ongoing editorial bias and past misdemeanors. Let's show all Australians, and the world, that we're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!
After that, when we have the evidence in black and white, before our eyes, we might take it even further. I know I'd be willing to take whatever steps I could to get the information before the public and out into the spaces beyond the Fifth Estate, in order to snatch back OUR ABC, before it's too late and the 'Vampire Squid' of global media has sucked the lifeblood out of the real 'Right To Know' agenda.
What do you think?
Do you want to be a force for good, or do you want to let Murdoch steamroll over the top of the ABC and turn it into Fox News?
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