"The ABC's senior management.... have unfailingly supported us however uncomfortable we sometimes make their lives and who've never once interfered in the choices we make." (Audio attached) So said Jonathan Holmes at the end of his last presentation of Media Watch on ABC TV on 1 July 13. I challenged him with the following email to mediawatch@your.abc.net.au. You might like to do the same.
Jonathan,
that's a barefaced lie for which you owe at least every Northern Territory Aboriginal person a most remorseful apology.
I'm talking about your refusal to pick up the proven expose of Lateline's false reporting of paedophiles rampant in the NT, which in its train has plunged Aboriginal people into worse-than-ever misery. http://tracker.org.au/2012/07/bad-aunty/. Even in 2009 when the CEO of the Australian Crime Commission, John Lawler, reported that his investigation had shown there were no organised paedophile rings operating in the NT, no formal apology was ever made to the Aboriginal men and their families who were brutally shamed by the false claims. How much difference it would have made, if you had had the guts to expose Lateline's grossly unethical, lying reporting.
The report knowingly picked up the posing of a Brough ministry official as a youth worker in a community claiming paedophilia was happening. One of many inaccuracies and distortions.
Several attempts were made to get the ABC to retract and for you to run the criticisam. You refused. Given your seemingly fearless attacks on other ABC issues, it has to be assumed in this case that "the ABC's senior management" leaned so heavily on you that you caved in.
The honourable thing for you to have done then would have been to quit Media Watch in a blaze of publicity.
From that time on I was skeptical of everything you did.
As a retired generally skeptical journo I still enjoyed the show very much.
Regards,
Diet Simon
Comments
Media Watch as hypocritical and dishonest as all media
he also said we should subscribe to one of the many so called news services.. all the while , while being totally incapable of saying how the official account of 911, is totally impossible.
NIST agrees begrudgingly, for they at least understand the implications, that building 7 fell at freefall acceleration for a period of ~2.5 seconds.
as we understand physics today, that means all structural support across the entire building, for several floors, had to be removed instantaneously and simultaneously.
that can not occur from the observed fires and structural damage alone, and the only possible explanation is some form of controlled demolition.
if they lied about that, they lied about everything.. media watch is as hypocritical and dishonest as the rest of the media
shame shame shame
A Walkley given for that piece of unmitigated journalistic shit
They even awarded Suzanne Smith a Walkley for that piece of unmitigated journalistic shit. And it followed hard on the heels of another bullshit, racist, defamatory interview she did with a lying NT prosecutor.
If that's what wins Australian journos awards it tells us all we need to know about Australian journalism.
Walkley wouldn't touch it
I tried to interest the journalist union's Walkley magazine in the story - they wouldn't touch it. I didn't even hear back from them. Talk about birds of a feather....
And the promo just added to the racist abuse
Did you see the promo Smith did for the program on PM?
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from http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2006/s1668694.htm
SUZANNE SMITH: There's definitely that too. And I think also there's a sense that it's too hard from all the participants in my story. I think there's been police who sincerely wanted to do something … but didn't have the resources or actually found other senior men in the community to be thwarting their investigations.
See, what the women have told me is it is a paedophile ring, but not in our sense, it's in an Indigenous sense. You have a predatory paedophile who then through his ceremonial and kinship relationships with other men and victims is protected.
So it's not a white paedophile ring in the sense that they've got computers and all that sort of thing.
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Could you imagine the response if Smith had suggested that *white* victims and relatives who don't report child abuse to the police are part of a pedophile ring?
After all, it's estimated that less than 15% of child sexual abuse is ever reported at all.
She must have been *way* desperate to validate Brough's unfounded claims of pedophile rings in the communities to have come out with something like that.