Former journalist Zoe Daniel pans social media and ABC funding
Independent candidate and former ABC journalist Zoe Daniel says too many Australians use ‘unreliable’ social media platforms for news and the public broadcaster has been ‘defunded’.
Independent candidate for Goldstein and former ABC journalist Zoe Daniel says too many Australians use “unreliable” social media platforms for news and the public broadcaster has been “defunded”.
Addressing several hundred people on Sunday at a “Meet Zoe Daniel” event at Bentleigh, in Melbourne’s southeast, which was hosted by former ABC broadcaster Libbi Gorr, Daniel criticised the nation’s media, calling for an overhaul.
“A lot of people are now getting their news and information via Facebook pages, which can be really useful at a community level but also incredibly unreliable, so you get a lot of fake news and distorted information,” she told the audience at Bentleigh Bowling Club.
“Then you have these large media conglomerates who are controlling our national media with a defunded public broadcasting system, so that’s sort of overall view is not good for our society.”
These comments come despite the federal government earlier this year announcing it would commit $3.3bn over the next three years to the public broadcaster.
Ms Daniel, who worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, then referred to her time as an ABC correspondent in the US during the Trump administration.
“Harking back to the US, it’s very interesting when people start only consuming, watching and listening to or reading what they already believe and they go down a rabbit hole of thinking that’s the only set of perspectives that there is,” she said.
“When they are confronted with someone with an alternate perspective that’s an automatically combative conversation and then we end up in a situation where we can’t have reasonable conversations anymore with people who have a slightly different point of view.
“You also start going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories.”
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