Andrew Bolt: Media Watch shows the truth is dead on the ABC

The ABC’s Media Watch is so biased that far from exposing deceit and misrepresentation, it is guilty of both.

Media Watch now strikes me as perhaps the most dishonest show ever funded by Australian taxpayers. Why must we pay for such deception and bias?

No fewer than nine ABC staff work on a show that goes for just 20 minutes, once a week. In contrast, my Sky News show has three of us putting out four one-hour shows a week.

With its bloated staff, you’d expect Media Watch to at least have no trouble living up to its boast that it’s all about “exposing conflicts of interest, journalistic deceit, misrepresentation, manipulation and plagiarism”.

Yet twice on Monday it again showed Media Watch is so biased that far from exposing deceit and misrepresentation, it is guilty of both.

Example one. A couple of weeks ago, host Paul Barry joined the pack-attack on then Liberal MP Craig Kelly that drove Kelly on Tuesday to resign from the party that failed to defend him.

For background, Barry is a global warming extremist while Kelly is a sceptic.

Media Watch host Paul Barry.

Now Barry declared Kelly was spreading dangerous “misinformation” by “peddling dodgy COVID cures” — “discredited” ones, including the “head lice drug ivermectin”.

And Barry quoted a scientist he’d found who’d sneered “there’s no evidence that it works”.

As I wrote here days later, this was false.

Indeed, just three days earlier, the World Health Organisation announced it was assessing 11 studies on ivermectin that showed “promising” results.

Australia’s COVID-19 task force said it was examining five, all saying ivermectin had saved people.

Last Monday I asked Media Watch: when would it admit it was wrong to accuse Kelly of peddling “misinformation”.

The show’s executive producer, Tim Latham, was brazen in his denial: “We did not mislead our audience. Nor did we say ‘there is no evidence that it works’.”

No, Media Watch had merely quoted a professor saying that.

Wow. Caught out falsely accusing Kelly of spreading “misinformation”, Media Watch shoves all the blame on the professor. It won’t even tell its audience the “no evidence” claim about ivermectin was false.

Obviously, I now had to be punished for exposing Media Watch. And — what a coincidence! — last Monday it devoted a whole segment to me.

More background: the ABC has furiously promoted so-called “Aboriginal” historian Bruce Pascoe, and his ludicrous claims Aborigines, far from having been hunter-gatherers, were actually “farmers” living in “houses” in “towns” of “1000 people”.

Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe.

Not once has it mentioned Pascoe’s genealogy shows all his ancestors are of British descent, and Pascoe refuses to show proof of an Aboriginal ancestor.

What’s more, his claims of “towns” of 1000 Aboriginal “farmers” are not backed by a single account by any explorer.

Last week on Sky News I showed a clip from a documentary which the ABC had just repeated showing Pascoe make more preposterous claims.

Again, he claimed to be Aboriginal, but new to me was Pascoe claiming Captain James Cook had stolen a plant now called Cook’s Cabbage from the very roofs of Aboriginal huts at Botany Bay back in 1776, and used it to save his crew from “dying of scurvy”. Yet he was too stupid to see Aborigines were farmers.

Nonsense. In fact, botanist Joseph Banks was with Cook and kept a detailed journal. He does note he and some companions once dined on stingray with a “dish of the leaves of tetragonia cornuta boild”, but there’s no mention of having stolen this Cook’s Cabbage from an Aboriginal roof.

What’s more, Banks complains mainland Australia could not supply the crew their greens: “We could but now and then procure a dish of bad greens for our own table and never but in the place where the ship (ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef) met with a sufficient quantity to supply the ship.”

So, what did Media Watch, the ABC’s taxpayer-funded fact checker, criticise?

Not Pascoe, but me for not mentioning what I did not know, that this documentary run on the ABC had originally been commissioned by Foxtel, on which my show appears.

Big deal. But about Pascoe’s false claims, Barry said not one word. He didn’t even tell his viewers exactly what Pascoe had said, let alone my criticisms of him.

Don’t let the audience know! They might start asking questions, too.

Media Watch is paid to pick up untruths and “misrepresentations” in the media, but protects Pascoe’s, and even attacks a journalist who does expose them.

Truth is dead on the ABC, even on the show we pay to defend it.