Terry McCrann: Attacks on Bolt by Media Watch misrepresent the truth

The ABC’s Media Watch host, Paul Barry, must be getting ready to step aside, judging by the number of leftists auditioning through their attacks on News Corp, writes Terry McCrann.

The word seems to have got about that Paul Barry — the host of their ABC’s Media Watch program — must be about to retire, as fellow far-left media types have been falling over themselves to write public applications for the cushiest job in television.

Over the last week, there’s been an almighty pile-on to slime, quote out of context and just utterly distort what this paper’s and Sky News’s Andrew Bolt has been arguing about the state and national lockdowns and protecting the most vulnerable to — and now, by far the most victims of — the virus.

In effect, they’ve all been saying: look at me; here’s my job application; I can do just exactly the same job that Barry and his Media Watch team have been doing week after week, after every week, with very rare exceptions.

That is to slime and attack, always maliciously, dishonestly and almost invariably through a completely biased lens, some part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation — this paper or one of the others in the group such as Sky News on Foxtel; and failing that, well, just the company or one of the Murdochs.

Pretty much continuously through his tenure as the latest iteration of the always far left Media Watch host, but with greater venomosity and dishonesty of late, Barry’s prime hate target has been this paper and Sky News’s Andrew Bolt.

Well, taking their cue, they’ve come from everywhere to join in

And why not, if indeed the cushiest job might be up for grabs: Barry gets paid $200,000-plus a year for just 18 or so minutes of TV a week — and for only 40 or so weeks in the year.

Media Watch host Paul Barry.

Indeed further, like the William Hurt presenter character in the movie Broadcast News, Barry could, if he chose, just spend the 18 minutes simply reading out words put on the autocue by any of the eight or so of the program’s producers/researchers.

That works out at an average of two minutes of TV time a week per Media Watch staffer.

Gee, the ABC must really be doing it tough.

The most “outstanding” example was the Guardian’s Amanda Meade leading off her — I’d say dishonest, but it’s always difficult to separate out the deliberate dishonesty from the unknowing and embarrassing stupidity and the usually hysterical bias — sliming with:

“Andrew Bolt has doubled down on his argument that Covid-19 restrictions should be lifted because they are destroying the economy ‘to save aged-care residents from dying a few months earlier’.”

Needless to say, but I will anyway, if a far-left hack writes something like that, you’d be well advised to assume the exact opposite is true.

No, Bolt did not demand that restrictions should be lifted because they are destroying the economy to save aged-care residents from dying a few months earlier.

Herald Sun columnist and Sky host Andrew Bolt.

It requires a breathtaking level of stupidity to write something like that: has Meade noticed that aged-care residents in Victoria are not being saved from dying a few months earlier? In fact, the exact opposite is happening: they are dying earlier?

At the most basic level what the Andrews and Morrison governments have contrived to achieve is destruction of the (Victorian) economy and depriving dozens — tragically, perhaps hundreds by the time this is finished — of what would have been, should have been the last months of their lives.

What Bolt was doing and has been doing for months, was detailing a much broader and complex series of trade-offs; that it is not the economy versus (old) lives as the vicious sliming would have it.

Further and critically, Bolt has been arguing, continually, consistently and emphatically for months — back to at least early April — that the first thing, the first thing, that governments should have focused their efforts on was protecting the vulnerable, like those people in aged-care homes.

The precise thing not to do — in Bolt’s argument — was to strangle the economy, with all the mental and physical damage up to and including death that it would do and was doing to people, apart from the financial brutality, and leave the door open for the virus to get into aged-care facilities and likely literally decimate the residents.

Sky News commentator Chris Kenny. Picture: Britta Campion

But this sort of sliming makes Meade prime Media Watch material. When and if Barry feels the exhaustion of his 15 minutes of infamy — I’m generous; there’s usually three or so minutes not sliming News Corp — she’s ready and waiting.

In passing you might reasonably conclude that self-awareness is not a major feature of Barry and his team at Media Watch.

Of late Barry has been tweeting — yes, I have to concede, he’s not just a pretty face on TV — that Sky News’s Chris Kenny has been obsessed with criticising Media Watch in his Sky News Media program.

Kenny’s program actually looks at media from a wide perspective as contrasted with Media Watch’s diet of, when it’s not sliming News Corp or President Trump — yes, as you would expect Barry and his team are full-on TDS sufferers — picking up little mistakes that publications/programs make.

But that aside: Kenny obsessed with Media Watch? How unself-aware can you be?

Media Watch has been sliming News Corp week after week, not just for years, but decades; Barry is just the recent and most virulent exponent?

And finally a News Corp program takes the forensic scalpel to Media Watch’s falsehoods? And Barry is offended?

I guess the truth hurts, even when you are sitting pretty in the cushiest job on TV.

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Originally published as Terry McCrann: Attacks on Bolt by Media Watch misrepresent the truth