Media Watch host Paul Barry goes out on a moral high, dividing the media landscape

Media Watch host Paul Barry on the ABC program in May 2022. Source: Supplied

The departure of a beloved ABC television host is an incredibly moving occasion. In terms of gravity and enormity, it is up there with a royal coronation, although the latter has slightly less pomp and fanfare.

And so it was last week when an emotional Paul Barry made his final appearance as host of Media Watch. Any criticism of this theatre would be mean-spirited.

Barry has worked tirelessly during the past 11 years to produce a 15-minute program every week in between lengthy breaks, his only recompense being a taxpayer-funded salary upwards of $200,000. Aside from his dozen or so assistants, he did all this by himself.

It must be a demanding gig. Understandably we grieve over the great man’s departure and despair that he will no longer give us regular guidance as to who should and should not be believed. But it is also a time to marvel at his selfless devotion to duty. Journalistic exactitude, at least according to his truth, was Barry’s mission.

And true to the adage that it is about the story and not about the journalist, Barry spent much of the final program talking about himself and his many achievements in the face of adversity. 

Naturally, he made numerous disparaging references to conservative media.

It would best be described as Barry’s “With malice toward all, with charity for none” moment. Sky News Australia, he claimed, was a “prime-time line-up of right-wing barkers”.

Its commentators, he said, were “shock jocks”. Keen to reinforce the negative overtone, he twice referred to “Sky’s After Darkers”.

For all his disdain of the mastheads favoured by the great unwashed, Barry is not above resorting to tabloidism. So what are the terrible sins of Sky’s commentators? Brace yourself. “Bashing Labor,” proclaimed Barry.

I do not suppose it has occurred to Barry that the Albanese government has proven so abysmal it could well be the first in nearly 100 years to be voted out after only one term.

As the latest Newspoll revealed on Sunday, voters regard Anthony Albanese as the weakest prime minister in decades.

That is on top of his many other credibility issues, particularly his hopelessness in getting across detail and his inability to spell out Labor’s policies.

That much was painfully obvious during the election campaign.

Journalists, or should I say some journalists, rigorously questioned Albanese, repeatedly demonstrating the then opposition leader’s ignorance.

What was Barry’s response at the time? It was not “good journalism”, he said. “It’s cheap and nasty. And it’s done with one intent – to catch the leader out.” 

But the problem was not the journalists trying to catch out Albanese.

The problem was not enough journalists were calling him out. In fact some ABC journalists were all but running cover for Labor.

Paul Barry’s disparaging references to conservative media did not go unnoticed. Source: X

Fast forward three years and we have a cost-of-living crisis, skyrocketing electricity bills, a dearth of reliable energy supply, and a prime minister who is fiscally and economically illiterate. 

Even Labor’s win did not satisfy Barry.

“What News Corp did succeed in doing was help magnify doubts about Labor’s leader,” he complained in May 2022.

“And perhaps suppress the party’s primary vote”.

For good measure, Barry attacked The Daily Telegraph for its front-page story during the campaign that Labor’s energy policies would add $560 to the annual household electricity bill. This claim was a “hoary old scare about power prices”, he insisted.

Since then the home electricity bill has risen an average of $609.

A hoary old scare you were saying, Paul Barry? But let’s forget for now that inconvenient truth and move on to Barry’s next denunciation of Sky.

The channel, he claimed, was “denying science with a relentless campaign to hold back action on climate change”.

As Barry inadvertently demonstrated, the lazy accusation of science denial is remarkably selective.

Take, for example, his reaction in 2020 to the exposé by Sky presenter and then Daily Telegraph investigative journalist Sharri Markson that Western intelligence agencies were examining the possibility that Covid-19 had originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

“Clearly the lab escape story is one the Trump administration wants to be true,” Barry smugly observed, linking it to “conspiracy theories”.   

“Markson should have told readers that almost every virus expert had dismissed the lab escape theory,” he added. Imagine Barry’s chagrin when the following year US President Joe Biden, in response to this same theory, ordered an inquiry into the origins of the virus.

Asked to reflect on this Media Watch episode, he maintained it “reflected the overwhelming consensus among experts that Covid-19 had a natural origin”.

Since when was good journalism about falling in with the overwhelming consensus?

Last week, following a two-year investigation, the US Select Subcommittee on the coronavirus Pandemic found that “Covid-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China”.

Funny enough, this botched targeting of Markson did not get a mention during Barry’s bellowing rendition of ‘My Way’ last week. But he did find time to congratulate himself for his fearless objectivity. 

“It is remarkable that any broadcaster tolerates a program that rips into it as we have done,” he said, praising current ABC managing director David Anderson and predecessor Mark Scott for their support.

It is no coincidence Barry favourably singled out managing directors who proved totally inept at standing up to the ABC collective.

It is easy to castigate them in the manner of a shop steward instead of calling out the ABC’s pervasive, activist and anti-conservative culture as well as its contempt for the organisation’s statutory charter.

Barry’s token criticisms of ABC for bias were far outnumbered by his regular tirades against News Corp.

“I’ve never had a set of political views that could be described as left or right,” said Barry following his appointment as Media Watch host in 2013.

What was that he was saying about denialism?