Reason #83,582 Why We Must Dump the Wretched ABC

Hot on the heels of the sodomy love fest in which poor Fred Nile was the sacrificial lamb, the ABC’s Q&A managed to outdo itself once again. Its appalling episode in which they invited a Muslim terrorist on to spring a gotcha question on a Liberal MP is about as low as it can go – and that’s really saying something, given their long track record here.

The entire Zaky Mallah affair shows us how dysfunctional, dishonest and disconnected from Australian society our national broadcaster is. It is simply the umpteenth reason to put it out of its misery, and at the very least, defund it altogether.

abc 4If it wants to be nothing than a mouthpiece for the radical, secular left, then let it do it at its own expense, or at the expense of secular lefties. Why should I as a taxpayer be forced to subsidise this reprehensible network which has not the slightest interest in fairness and balance, even though that is what its own charter demands?

And yesterday we had the managing director, Mark Scott, who also claims to be a Christian, actually defend the ABC in all this, and lash out at the critics. Mark Scott, you are part of the problem, and in answer to the question of whose heads should roll, we should begin at the top.

Tony Abbott was absolutely right to ask, “Whose side are you on?” The fact that this IS sympathiser was actually invited on to Q&A, chatted with head honchos there, had his transport costs covered, and was used to attack the government, shows what a despicable and hopeless network this is.

That these ABC lefties would have known full well of his earlier remarks but invited him on anyway tells us all we need to know about the ABC. Earlier this year Mallah had tweeted: “Australia has two decent whores Rita Panihi and Miranda Divine [sic] Both need to be gangbanged on the Sunrise desk.”

Where does one even begin to comment on this pure evil? How can one even express the outrage one has at this shameless and scurrilous national broadcaster? While the Labor party has been predictably silent on all this, and while all the usual suspects on the left defend it, some voices of sanity – almost entirely from the right – have spoken out on this. Let me cite a few.

Political scientist and commentator Jennifer Oriel said this about the misogyny:

It is little surprise to find support for misogyny among men who enthuse about an Islamist caliphate, where the unequal status of women and girls is enshrined as a rule of law and a cultural right. But it should be a surprise to find self-declared progressives of the Western Left endorsing Islamist misogyny against any woman, let alone parading its advocates as paragons of sound citizenship.
In its response to the public furore about Mallah on Q&A, the ABC acknowledged his tweet about female columnists — in a single sentence of the last line of the final paragraph. The message could not be clearer. As a female political commentator who leans conservative, my right to free speech and bodily safety may not mean much to the ABC. But I did not spend my formative years fighting for women’s rights in the 20th century only to submit to an Islamist-Left alliance of misogyny in the 21st.
I expect a public apology from the ABC for its outrage against women, female columnists and the basic security of Australians. Until such an apology is given, I will not consent to appear on Q&A.

Speaking of boycotts, one senior Liberal MP, Kevin Andrews, has already said he will now refuse to appear on this abominable show. Well done Kevin.

Tim Blair commented:

Zaky Mallah’s idiotic extremism not only won him a prominent audience position on Monday night’s Q & A but also gave him a platform to question panellists, including Steve Ciobo, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs.
Host Tony Jones treated Mallah with obsequious respect for several minutes, until eventually the ASIO-threatening, Syria-visiting, YouTube-poisoning radical went too far even for Q & A, saying that “the Liberals have just justified to many Australian Muslims in the community tonight to leave and go to Syria and join ISIL.”
That was “totally out of order”, according to Jones. But during Mallah’s exchange with the panel, this tweet was selected by the show’s producers and presented on screen: “The actual government has stopped believing in the rule of law. Get a gun.”
This might be the first pro-gun message ever broadcast by the ABC. It’s just another breakthrough for Q & A, which continues to set the standard for ABC bias and blundering. Yesterday the billion-dollar per year broadcaster’s television director Richard Finlayson admitted that “the Q & A program made an error in judgment in allowing Zaky Mallah to join the audience and ask a question.”
He continued: “As has been the case in the past on Q & A, circumstances will happen that are not anticipated.” Oh, really? Anybody with the faintest awareness of Mallah’s social media antics would have immediately been alert to the possibility of “circumstances happening”.

Andrew Bolt highlights the intractable leftism of the ABC:

The ABC is out of control. Is there a single journalist in that vast workforce that has the wit or courage to say it was wrong for the ABC to give such a platform for a Muslim radical jailed for threatening to kill and capture ASIO officials? Instead, we get ABC 774 host Rafael Epstein telling my editor, Damon Johnston, there seems little difference between the ABC giving a platform to Zaky Mallah and the Herald Sun giving one to me.

Paul Sheehan says this is simply the latest in a long line of ABC outrages:

It should have been no surprise that Mallah then used Q&A to blame the Abbott government for turning young Muslims into supporters of Islamic State. Nor has he backed away from his call for gang rape. On Wednesday he was asked on Twitter to “explain that tweet”. He replied: “its self explanatory. They are both idiots – all for ratings and yes, islamophobes. Newscorp whores.”
A few minutes later he added: “I stand by my gracious words of wisdom: @RitaPanahi and her counterpart Miranda D are News Corp whores. Yours truly.” He also tweeted after his Q&A appearance: “I would pay to see that [Coalition] Minister dumped on ISIS territory in Iraq.”
This violent language is entirely consistent with his conviction for threatening to kill government officials. He served two years in prison on terrorism charges, for which he was acquitted, but was sentenced to time served for making threats. The real problem with his appearance is that it is the latest in a string of stunts while Q&A‘s executive producer, Peter McEvoy, has been running the show since 2008.

James Allan also chronicles this dismal record of incessant leftist moonbattery:

For some time now I’ve been saying that the ABC is failing to adhere to its statutory obligation to be impartial. Not a single right-of-centre presenter or producer on any of its big ticket current affairs shows, including the biggest of all, Q&A. It’s lefties, lefties and more lefties as far as the eye can see. This in a media organisation that sucks more than one billion dollars a year from taxpayers of this country it was established to humbly serve.
When a visiting English journalist can say that ‘the ABC swings so far to the left that it makes the BBC look like Fox News’, then I used to figure there was a problem with that little thing called its ‘legal obligation to be impartial’. And so for these sort of reasons I railed against Managing Director Mark Scott, on his three-quarters of a million dollar annual salary, sitting in his office and inanely telling the 53% of us who voted for the Abbott government that a producer and presenter’s pre-existing political proclivities in no way at all affect their ability to be impartial. ‘No! No!, No! The ABC is even-handedness incarnate’, has been Herr Scott’s basic defence. We never got to test that claim by seeing what he would say if everyone were from the right, because he wasn’t about to test the claim in those circumstances, now was he? (editor’s note: That ‘visiting English journalist’ is James Delingpole, whose on-air encounter with an ABC archetype, Jon Faine, is not to be missed.)…
So the appearance of bias and lack of impartiality seemed pretty clear to me. The attempted defences were lame beyond belief. And don’t mistake my views. I have no problem at all with people getting as much and many lefty views as they can stomach. I just want them to pay for it themselves – rather than all of us taxpayers forking out for what has seemed to me to be the propaganda arm of the Greens Party, because, truth be told, the Labor Party is criticised from time to time. It’s just that the ABC criticism comes from further to the left. The non-Keynesian, stop-the-boats, don’t-waste-money-on-carbon-tax policies, well those views pretty much aren’t allowed to exist, let alone be heard, on the ABC. At best they are framed as no more than off-the-wall minority views to be trotted out in the form of one panellist against four or five acceptable others.

Finally, Steve Kates rightly takes Scott to task:

The political side of the ABC is a wasteland of vacuity. It is an empty shell of green-left ignorance and the greenest and most left of them all appears to be its CEO. But the most disgusting part is this, from the opening para of the article:
ABC managing director Mark Scott has compared extremist Zaky Mallah’s right to appear on Q&A with the campaign for free speech that flowed from the jihadist murder of 12 journalists from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
To even mention Charlie Hebdo in such circumstance is beyond maddening. If I follow this analogy right, Zaki, according to Scott, is like those poor journalists who were murdered by jihadi gunmen, in that he is being deprived of his right to free speech (really, how? when? where?). And the jihadi murderers at Charlie Hebdo are likened to the people who object to Zaki, a former jihadist himself, being brought in to confront a government Minister on national television. This is so warped that really, it is time for the board at the ABC to ask for Scott’s resignation and set the Corporation off in a new direction. He is a mouthpiece for the left and is too blinded by his prejudices to understand what he is saying and why what the ABC did was so fundamentally wrong.

Let me finish by noting one of the more idiotic things Scott said last night: “I hope no one seriously wants the ABC to be a state broadcaster.” Oh puh-leeese. You utterly and completely miss the point: It is exactly because of the ABC’s unrepresentative leftist swill that it should not be treated as a state broadcaster – chop its state funding immediately.

The ABC has no right to waste our tax dollars in this way. Let it fund itself, or, if it has so many supporters as it claims, then let them subsidise it.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/jihadis-and-leftists-united-in-misogyny/story-e6frg6zo-1227413376037
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/when_the_abc_was_worried/
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/abc_attacks_critics/
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/zaky-mallah-is-the-latest-in-a-string-of-stunts-that-have-backfired-for-qa-20150624-ghwlnt.html
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/06/balance-abc-eyes/
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2015/06/26/what-an-insufferable-hypocrite/

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17 Replies to “Reason #83,582 Why We Must Dump the Wretched ABC”

  1. I love this headline: “Queensland Senator James McGrath has called for the sale of the ABC amid allegations of its bias to the left.”

    “The former Deputy Federal Director of the Liberal Party used his maiden speech this evening to advocate for a change to the national broadcaster’s ‘inner-city leftist views’. ‘As someone who grew up in regional Queensland, I grew up with the ABC but the ABC has left people like me and my constituents behind,’ he said.”

    http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/07/16/sell-abc-and-its-inner-city-leftist-views-senator-says

  2. Dear Bill

    Thank you for raising this most important issue.

    Something that bothers me is the manner in which Rev Fred was treated on Q & A. I am surprised that someone as intelligent and compassionate as him would allow himself to be put in such a hostile and loaded situation.

    If he knew he was going to be the lamb to the slaughter, why would he go there?

    Surely refusing to appear would have made a greater statement.

    Please help me understand this.

    In Christ.

    Toby.

  3. Hi Bill,

    The complaint I sent to the ABC Q&A has been forwarded to the Prime Minister Tony Abbott. It is time for Q&A to be silenced. Trisha

  4. Thanks Toby. There are two views on this, both of which have merit, and I have been in the same situation often, and have had to prayerfully decide how to proceed.

    On the one hand, it may well seem like a waste of time, and worse. It may be a case of casting pearls before swine. It is such a stacked deck that it is just ridiculous really to even consider going on sometimes. So refusing to go on may make a statement of sorts.

    On the other hand we have a responsibility to get biblical truth out into the public arena – that may be a more important statement to make. That is why I have done these sorts of things hundreds of times. As unpleasant as it may be, as biased and unbalanced as it may be, we need people to be willing to stand and proclaim truth in the public arena.

    If Fred was not willing to go, then no truth would have been heard that night. And while the activists of the secular left would not want to hear him and would likely not be persuaded, it is the unconvinced and unpersuaded majority in the middle who we are trying to reach. So even if some folks heard some truth that night, and perhaps some had a rethink, then it was well worthwhile.

    As Scripture says, even planting seeds is worthwhile. Who know how the words of Fred will be used, now or in the future?

    Thus we must prayerfully consider such opportunities. Sometimes the wise thing is to say no. Sometimes the right thing is to go on, put up with the bias and abuse, and proclaim much needed truth.

    That is why we all need to keep people like Fred and others who are at the coalface in concentrated prayer.

  5. It makes sense considering the lefties inability to put two and two together to hear them talking about freedom of speech but then in reality minimise any resistance to their lefty agenda, which is obvious almost weekly on Q&A. It’s only free speech for whom they choose. Why they let Zacky Mallah speak when he’s clearly not plying with a full deck is inexcusable. Talk about state sanctioned terrorism.

  6. A good article and discussion on this appalling situation.

    Have written again to Malcolm Turnbull and hopefully it will be amongst hundreds of thousands telling him something very constructive must be done.

    It hard to imagine but one day we may be able to turn the ABC on and be part of an intelligent debate/discussion on the many issues Australia needs to deal with.

    Until then we only have social media to vent our frustrations on.

  7. I’m reminded of a Q&A a few years ago when Archbishop Peter Jensen was seated next to an infantile woman introduced as a “comedian”. That woman was permitted to interrupt Dr Jensen in a very rude way and of course the unbiased audience clapped when anti-Jensen views were expressed. The ABC obviously learnt nothing from the criticism that followed that episode.

    I think Tony Jones has a salary of about $300,000. How can he take the money in good conscience?

  8. Keith,

    Malcom Turnbull is a Sydney Grammar Oldboy like me. He supports gay marriage. The majority there are a bunch of social misfits or worse. I didn’t get into Design and Technology with a “High Distinction” Speech Day Honors 3rd in the School in 1994 end of year grades. But a gay kid named “Loftus” who failed ranked 120th something in the school got into the select class in Form 3, because he shared the same sexual preference as the teacher.

    Don’t expect mountains moved by him. Save your story for someone who shares your frustration. Make sure Tony Abott gets a copy.

    I thank Turnbull for Free Ozemail Internet all through the 90’s when I was a kid. Don’t ask how I did it 😉 He used to own that, and now he’s going to destroy what he helped established with censorship worse than Facebook’s on EVERYTHING.

  9. The message on the ABC is very simple (with perhaps the exception of some rural radio) In an age of easy access to news, information and entertainment, it’s totally unconscionable for the Australian taxpayer to fund just another source of it to the tune of 1200 million dollars a year.

    I’m not stopping people listening to it or watching that kind of stuff if that’s what they want to consume, but I don’t want to pay for it when so many alternatives exist. Any questions of bias or programming are moot points as far as I’m concerned.

  10. And it keeps getting worse:

    The facts about Grenoble have been clear for quite some time now, yet the dhimmi ABC refuses to use the I word, M word or T word.

    -One man decapitated and several others injured in terror attack in St Quentin-Fallavier, France
    -Reports of loud explosion after men drove into gas factory at around 10am local time
    -Police find victim beheaded and head impaled on fence covered in Arabic writing

  11. Who is surprised when someone can defend the appearence of that terrorist on Q and A with the unchallenged assertion that “Fred Nile said some objectionable things and nobody got upset about that” on the ABC religion and ethics report this week.
    Bill, I thank God that you and Fred and others often make the “right” than the “wise” choice of speaking out rather than bneing silent. Even weak Lot spoke out in Sodom and protected the visitors. We are responsible before God to do so even if it costs us dearly. Thank you and God bless and strengthen you. We need more courrage like that. I wish we could raise our young people with such strong convictions of the reality and the goodness of God that they would confidently obey Him in the sure knowledge that obeing His commandments is good for them and all human beings. Let our young people stare these people down in their strength of purity and trust. Nothing much else other than the Lord’s return is going to save even a remnand of the next generation. I fear for Tony Abbot. He was attacked after the Irish referendum, how much more so after this recent stroke of the supreme court of america? He is not as strong or at least not as quietly diplomatic as John Howard was who may have resisted this battary more successfuly.
    Many blessings
    Ursula Bennett

  12. I think Malcolm Turnbull is the biggest escapee here. It is in his interest to see Tony Abbott dragged through the mud by the ABC since he will probably be the main beneficiary. Turnbull has had plenty of time to sort out Green Communists at the ABC but has failed to do so. A slap on the wrist with wet toilet tissue won’t stop Mark Scott and his mercenaries.

  13. Hi Bill
    I felt incensed at one of the comments made my Str David Lyenholm who defended this Islamic fellow’s right to free speech! Where is the defending the right to free speech for anyone speaking out against SSM and the like? Such obvious double standards!

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