Janet Albrechtsen. Oh no!

The appointment of conservative Murdoch newspaper columnist and ABC critic Janet Albrechtsen to the board of Australia's public broadcaster is a disaster. You can hear it in her words: the ABC has an obligation "to present fair and balanced news and current affairs programs". How she can publicly use the classic Fox term "fair and balanced" without cracking up, or realising that the audience is pissing itself, is a complete mystery.

It's good that AM tackled her, although her words are disingenuous:

NICK GRIMM: Well, the ABC staff elected director, Ramona Koval, says your appointment is inappropriate because, she says, you're hostile to the philosophy of public broadcasting. Are you hostile to the concept of public broadcasting?

JANET ALBRECHTSEN: Not at all. I mean, I don't think that I have ever put that on the public record, and it's not a private view. I'm fully supportive of having a public broadcaster like the ABC, and provided that it's delivering the obligations that it has under the charter, then, you know, we are very lucky to have a public broadcaster."
Source: AM

Not interested

The producers of today's Perspective, on Radio National, would be advised to ask ABC management for an Oxford dictionary:

Uninterested: not interested or concerned.
Disinterested: not influenced by considerations of personal advantage; impartial.

This one's enough to give a primary school teacher conniptions. Unfortunately, Auntie's not interested.

Mailbox

Reference: The World Today, February 23, 2005

May we have postboxes, or letterboxes back please, instead of mailboxes? We aren't in America yet.

Rachael Kohn's 'Spirit of (Some) Things'

"The Spirit of Things is an adventure into religion and spirituality. It explores contemporary values and beliefs as expressed through ritual, art, music, and sacred texts."
Source: The Spirit of Things, ABC Radio National

In coming programs, Rachael Kohn will be presenting a wide variety of religious programs for the Australian audience:

Neo-Paganism in Australia: Why some people of the Jewish faith are turning to Nature-based religions
Religion and Humour: Laugh with the Stand-Up Rabbi
Aboriginal spirituality: Is there a connection between the Dreamtime and the Torah?
Ancient religions of Peru: Morty Feinstein's personal encounter with an Incan deity
The Still, Small Voice Within: Memoirs from the Holocaust
Catholic theology in turmoil: A view from Jerusalem
Buddhism and Sacred Texts: The Kabbalah

St Laurie Aarons: Beneath this sod lies another

Phillip Adams's (or as Geraldine Doogue would say, Phillip Adam's) program, Late Night Live, is, as far as I know, the best thing on Australian radio, but Tuesday's obit on dead Communist Party leader Laurie Aarons was sort of puke-making.

Picture a man whose main achievement was to head the one mob of Australians whose raison d'etre for decades was to do everything possible to support Adolf Hitler, and to attack, vilify and hinder every compassionate and honest soul in the world who stood for freedom versus Nazism and struggled to oppose the Nazi horrors.

OK, it wasn't Hitler and Nazism, it was Stalin (and Khrushchev, etc) and Marxism-Leninism, but the point is the same, except that during Aarons's (sorry, Geraldine: "Aaron's") heyday the Communists murderered and tortured many, many times more people than Hitler dreamed of, the Holocaust notwithstanding. Aarons kept up his dangerous, vile mission for many years after the anti-Communists that he and his cronies vilified were able to provide incontrovertible evidence that his utopias were enslaved nations. Phillip Adams and his guests did allow that Commissar Aarons "made a few mistakes" in all those years.

Mr Adams often speaks of his own membership of the Party in his youth, but never quite with beating of breast and rending of clothes one might expect. His distaste for the word 'sorry' is Howardian in magnitude. I suppose an apology to thousands of millions of people is a bit of an ask, but he and others in a similar situation could start with the Australian anti-Communists whose lives were made hell by the Aaronses, Frank Hardys and many others in the intellectual elites whose McCarthy-style influence from circa 1950 to 1990 excluded from the main Australian discourse, those who were so humanely right when they themselves were so dangerously wrong.

Bye-bye Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong and the rest, and may the name of Laurie Aarons become as risible and yet feared to posterity as the Oswald Mosleys, Unity Mitfords and Joe McCarthys of the world.

He isn't a Hick, he's a Hicks

I do hope Geraldine Doogue (February 19, 05) won't be joining the ranks of ABC journos who insist on saying things like "Alan Jone's show" and "New South Wale's history". Yesterday she gave us "David Hick's trial". Smart, sophisticated woman sounding like a hick.

Hobart ABC Radio ... grrrrr

Had a call yesterday morning from a producer at ABC radio in Hobart. Would I have an on-air chat to their presenter at 5.45 PM on the subject of blogs? Sure, I said. Will my website URL get a mention? My question either wasn't heard or was overridden, so I asked it again. I mean, I do plenty of interviews for free, often with the benefit not to me but to the program, so I don't think a plug is asking too much. These days I always request it. Yes, Jen will mention it. Cool, I said.

By the way, the producer asks, what is a blog, anyway? Well bugger me dead, I always thought I couldn't get a media job because I wasn't smart enough. Lord knows my resumé has been knocked back more than 300 times.

Took time out of my normally busy day to be interviewed by aforementioned Jen, whose attitude was "Why would anyone bother writing a blog? Why on earth would anyone bother reading one?" It sounded like she'd never read one either, and couldn't care less. "What's your blog about, Pip? Oh, Nature in your local neighbourhood. But why on earth would you want to write about that?" They had invited me to leave my busy day, make sure that I was at home at the right time, disconnect the Internet, plug in the phone and wait for their call, and enter their home (because I'm a "guest") ... to be trivialised in public.

After the interview ended I waited on the phone for the mention of my URL, but all I heard Jen mention was Aussie Blogs, which I had told her about in the interview. "Well folks, if you want to know more about blogs, go to Aussie Blogs". A few more seconds passed then the phone hung up loudly in my ear. Then I crawled under my desk and nearly slipped a disc, put the plug back in the back of my computer, and went back to work, or trying to get work, which amounts to the same thing.

It's turtles all the way down

Another blog? Well, I don't really want to blow off steam about the ABC and such things in the blogs that I already have, so, yes, another blog.

I will talk here about some of the things that bug me about ABC Radio National, which I like and listen to a lot. Most of the time it's impossible to get from them a reply to emails sent, whether you write in praise or criticism, requesting information or offering it. This despite frequent requests by them for their listeners to send them emails.

Obviously Media Watch is not interested in the punters on the ground, the ordinary people like me who listen to ABC radio but think that we're being treated like mugs. I think Media Watch wants big, sexy stories of corruption in the media and the like.

This blog is not about that. This blog is about my observations of the ABC, media in general, and anything else that takes my fancy.