Rita Panahi: ABC is hopelessly compromised by left bias

Left-wing activist reporters doing confused hit-jobs are making a mockery of the ABC’s claims of accuracy and impartiality.

The ABC kicked another own goal with an error-riddled, hopelessly compromised and thoroughly confused hit-job against its ideological foes.

When even lefties at the Nine papers call your cringe-worthy expose “overblown” and you’re forced to delete comments from your audience questioning the journalistic integrity and accuracy of your reporting, then it’s safe to say you’ve stuffed up royally. Again.

But don’t expect a single moment of reflection from the ABC; this is their modus operandi.

Taxpayer-funded activist journalists, all unashamedly left wing, have made a mockery of the ABC’s charter requiring the national broadcaster to be accurate and impartial in its coverage. It’s not enough for the ABC that the bulk of the media both here and the US leans heavily left, they want to attack any outlets that give a platform to conservative or centre-right voices.

The Herald Sun may publish a plethora of left-leaning columnists both on staff and contributors such as Theo Theophanous and Justin Smith, but the fact that it also employs conservatives like Andrew Bolt, Terry McCrann and myself makes its very existence unpalatable to the ABC.

Likewise, Fox News dominates the ratings partly because its mainstream media competitors are not only devoid of real conservatives but they are openly hostile to real conservatives.

The ABC, which receives more than $1 billion in government funding annually, could only dream of the viewpoint diversity News Corp provides.

It’s perfectly fine for The Guardian, The Age, Channel 10 et al to be dominated by the left; they are private companies who, unlike the ABC, do not have a legal obligation to be balanced.

As we have seen with the modern left, they do not want to debate their opponents they want to silence them by maligning opposing views as “dangerous”.

Both here and in the US and UK a number of media competitors obsess endlessly about News Corp and its refusal to kowtow to their demands of groupthink.

If Four Corners wanted to do a two-part special on democracy being undermined in the US then it could’ve focused on how CNN, MSNBC, New York Times and plethora of other influential outlets pushed crazy Russian conspiracy theories for more than three years without a scintilla of proof purely to delegitimise the 2016 election result.

But then the ABC itself was also pushing the same debunked theories of Russian collusion with Four Corners producing a discredited three part series on the Trump/Russia hoax it laughably called the “Story of the century”.

Now, the purveyors of partisan hit jobs want to be the arbiters of truth.

THE REST OF THE WORLD THINKS AUSTRALIA IS BARKING MAD

The rest of the world increasingly thinks Australia is barking mad. What else can you say about a country where dogs are shot dead in the name of Covid safety, where state premiers scold their constituents for watching a sunset on the beach or for wanting to enjoy the Sunday sunshine outdoors, and where the media relentlessly scaremonger to the point where the public is as hopelessly uninformed about coronavirus in August 2021 as they were in March 2020?

You know something is terribly wrong when a once sane people can rationalise council workers shooting dead dogs to prevent volunteers from a rescue shelter travelling to pick them up. We really have sunk to new depths of lunacy. This is precisely the time we should be hearing from our chief psychiatrists.

Read the opinion article in full here.

IN SHORT

Victoria is proving that the “go hard, go early” strategy will not guarantee a short lockdown but don’t expect our mediocre politicians to adopt any new, nuanced strategies. They only know one “solution” and they’ll deploy it no matter how destructive it is.