Odd shots, 03: The ABC hates the Labor Party

This is the third post in a series about the ways that people online blame the media for society’s ills. The trope is so common it’s unremarkable. The series title derives from an old expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” The first post appeared on 24 August but there was an earlier post on 18 February this year titled ‘Don’t shoot the piano player’.

My survey started on 1 September, ran for three weeks, and focused on the idea that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has it in for the Labor Party, a centre-left party that always receives a large part of the primary vote in Australian elections. This view seems to be a commonplace now for the simple reason that the federal government is controlled by the Liberal-National coalition (a centre-right party). However as I noted in the previous post in this series:

The Coalition also holds power in NSW, the country’s largest state. The Liberal party holds government in South Australia and in Tasmania. But Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia, the Australian Capital Territory, and the Northern Territory are controlled by the Labor Party.

But getting back to the main thrust of this article, an idea with currency in the broader community – or at least that part of it that uses Twitter, which skews heavily progressive – has Labor on the ropes with the country somehow in thrall to the far-right.

Left-wing luminaries regularly stoke this fear. For example, on Thursday 5 September at 9.38am, Sally McManus, the secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, tweeted, “Just imagine the response of whole sections of the media if Labor had of [sic] delivered the economic results [Treasurer] Josh Frydenberg did yesterday. Front page and wall to wall.”

The above chart derives from federal government data and shows, since 1991, the size of federal tax receipts as a proportion of GDP and the state of the national debt (surplus or deficit). The chart shows that the Coalition’s track record managing the economy differs from Labor’s in material ways, and many journalists are aware of this. 

To provide some context for the chart, some details are necessary. Labor was in power from 1983 until 1996, the year John Howard of the Liberals gained power. He was prime minister until 2007, when the Labor Party won government again. They saw the country through the Global Financial Crisis, spending heavily to prop up the economy, and lost power in 2013, when the Liberal-National coalition were elected again. These paragraphs are intended to give some background for the comments from McManus included earlier.

The ABC is the national broadcaster and, as even the most obtuse netizen knows, it has a corporate charter that mandates representation of the whole community on the TV channels, the websites, and the radio stations the company runs.

One ABC panel show that runs regularly, every Sunday morning, is ‘Insiders’, and it is being hosted by different people at the moment until such time as a permanent replacement for the previous host (Barrie Cassidy) can be installed. The program is very popular with people who use Twitter, and gets its own hashtag, which becomes very busy when the show airs. On Sunday 1 September at 8.31pm an account named Eddy Jokovich (with 10,274 followers when I looked at the profile page) tweeted, “Amazingly poor interview on #Insiders. [Host] Fran Kelly attacking [Labor Senator] Tanya Plibersek about education, as if she’s been the minister responsible. [The Labor Party] hasn’t been in government since 2013, but Kelly framing problems as if it’s all her fault.” 

In that case, a probing interview was perceived as evidence of bias. Other journalists get this kind of treatment as well. For example, on Wednesday 11 September at 4.11pm an account with the Twitter handle @fightingtories and 6755 followers tweeted, “So now we get @PatsKarvelas running protection for Gladys Liu[,] the same Karvelas who went after Dastyari. now even using liberal party [sic] lines and racism as an attack line.” Patricia Karvelas works for the ABC but used to be with News Corp. Gladys Liu is an embattled Liberal MP who had been caught lying on a radio show on another broadcaster’s frequency about her involvement with a front group for the Chinese Communist Party. Labor’s Sam Dastyari, a federal senator, had had to resign in January 2018 because of what was perceived in the community to be unwarranted influence from Chinese businessmen associated (as they all are, if they are rich) with the CCP.

It’s not just the ABC that hates the Labor Party, say some. The perception of bias to the disadvantage of Labor also extends to other news outlets. For example, on 12 September at 11.54am the government-run Special Broadcasting Service’s account tweeted, “Breaking: Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called the attack on Gladys Liu a 'grubby smear' and an insult to Chinese-Australians.” Retweeting this, at 12.02pm a Victorian resident with 8322 followers tweeted, “as expected, Main Stream [sic] Media supporting PM Morrison[,] Liberals, now if it was a Labor MP, the [shit; rendered by an emoji] would flow copiously and endlessly in the media.”

And it wasn’t only Gladys Liu netizens were targeting (although she came in for a lot of flak over a period of two or three days). On 13 September Denise Shrivell, who regularly complains about the media, tweeted, “Extraordinary mainstream media & the ABC is not asking why the National Party is so keen to roll out the cashless welfare card further when the reason is so easy to find. Just extraordinary.” A few minutes later, at 7.39am, Shrivell tweeted in reply to a progressive-minded journalist named Paddy Manning, “There’s a lot more to this card than mainstream media is reporting - costs involved, who owns it, actual trial results. Once you know all this - the reason the Nats are supporting it becomes obvious.” 

These comments related to the government’s plan to make unemployment benefits available only using a type of debit card that the government would commission a private company to issue to welfare recipients. People using the card would not be able to buy such things as alcohol or drugs with their welfare benefits. Previously, this type of card, called an “Indue card”, was only issued to Aboriginal people living in remote communities in order to prevent them spending their benefits on booze. Extending the Indue card to all unemployed living in cities had elicited a good deal of commentary in the media. The National Party is the partner of the Liberal Party, and as mentioned at the beginning of this post they share power federally. 

On Friday 13 September the attacks on Fran Kelly started up again. At 7.10am the ABC’s ‘Insiders’ Twitter account announced, “This Sunday on #Insiders @frankelly08 will be joined by Niki Savva, @vanOnselenP and @PhillipCoorey.” The same day at 11.21pm an account with the Twitter handle @krONik and 11,143 followers retweeted this tweet with a comment, “Good grief! Savva *AND* PvO? Throw Fran Kelly in and that's real @LiberalAus bias in defiance of the ABC Charter. Does #insiders actually believe advertising this line up of #rwnj @LiberalAus stooges will increase its audience? Seems I'm now freed up to go watch TVSN!” Niki Savva is a conservative commentator and a former adviser to John Howard, who was Liberal prime minster between 1996 and 2007. Peter van Onselen is a journalist with Ten Network (a unit of US broadcaster CBS) and Phillip Coorey is a journalist with the Australian Financial Review, which is owned by Channel Nine. TVSN is a shopping network owned by a company called Direct Group Pty Ltd.

Predictably, on Sunday 15 September on the morning the weekly episode of ‘Insiders’ screened, the verbal missiles aimed at the ABC started up again. I have only included a few of them here: there were a lot more than this. 

At 9.22am an account named Butus45 with 587 followers tweeted, “Pity Fran does not do a study on the LNP like she does on Labor or would that be doing you [sic] job look at this Fran #insiders” The “LNP” is the acronym people use to refer to the Liberal-National coalition, although they are separate parties apart from in the state of Queensland. The tweet came with an image attacking the Liberal MP David Littleproud for allegedly charging over $22,000 dollars as the cost for a journey of 84km. The image had been common the day before and had been held up by many on Twitter as an example of Liberal Party excess but the allegation had not been picked up by any reputable media outlet.

At 9.51am, an account named Bee (@belindsjones68) with 11,239 followers tweeted the following:

This week on #Insiders 

Labor
Labor
Labor
Labor
Labor
Labor
Liu
Labor
Labor
Labor
Labor
Labor
Labor
Labor
Labor
Labor
Labor 

Talking Pictures
End of Show

I want PK back, I liked it when the show focused on what the govt is doing, not what the Opposition is doing.  

‘Talking Pictures’ is a humorous segment on ‘Insiders’ that looks at political cartoons that have appeared in newspapers during the previous week. “PK” refers to Patricia Karvelas.

And at 10.01am an account named lachiemc with 443 followers tweeted, “The masters that run ‘our?’ ABC are telling us over and over that the only reason the opposition exists is to repeatedly bash in order to distract us all from just how awful the COALition Government really is. Unfortunately this works.”

The idea that journalists are just “stenographers” who blindly parrot the line the government gives them is also commonplace. Not a few regular media critics use this excuse when they want to attack the media for some perceived failing. An example of this appeared on Monday 16 September at 7.25am after the ABC morning show’s Michael Rowland tweeted, “Energy Minister @AngusTaylorMP says Australia's strategic oil reserve is closer to 90 days 'on our definition', and that it includes 'stock on water'. The govt has been criticised in the past for only having 28 days supply.” 

Later that day, at 11.11am, an account named Grunta operated by a man named Grant who had 4822 followers when I checked his profile, retweeted Rowland’s tweet and added a comment of his own: “So journalism is now just parroting Gov's blatant lies verbatim without challenge, then to play those lies on loop all day long, this is what the Abc [sic] do daily, those lies become the accepted narrative.” This despite the fact that a journalist reporting what a member of the government says about a topical issue is perfectly normal and reasonable.

When the prime minister visited Washington, DC, to meet the US president there was more reason, for some, to lambaste the ABC on the basis of a perception that it goes easy on the federal government. So on Friday 20 September at 1.27pm Ian Mannix (ironically, a former ABC employee) tweeted, “If you log onto @abcnews mobile page right now you get almost nothing of consequence about #ClimateStrike. This time the kids aren’t running the newsroom and they should be. Lift your game @abcnews hours watching plane land in USA. WTF?” The reference to “kids” related to the fact that the impetus for the climate strike action that took place in many countries on 20 September had been noticeably led by young people. Mannix’s comment was not entirely fair however as during that day I had noticed many segments about the climate strike protests on the ABC News TV channel; I usually keep the box on in the background when I am on social media.