Scene: Sydney 7pm ABC television news. About 10 minutes in.
Item: A new report strongly indicates that fluoride in water improves dental health. Interview with author of the study. Discussion on how to increase the percentage of Australians whose water is fluoridated. Queensland is the worst offender. Brisbane does not have fluoride in water. Cut to interview with federal health minister Tony Abbott, who says ‘you have to wonder what Kevin Rudd was doing when he was a director-general in the Queensland public service.’*
What the *#@*…???!!!
What, specifically, does Kevin Rudd’s job in 1992 have to do with this 2007 study of a crucial public health issue? What does a public servant who is director-general of the office of Cabinet have to do with political policy on fluoride in water?
Why did ABC journalists and editors give space in a report about a pressing public health issue to a government minister attempting a totally irrelevant pot-shot at the leader of the federal opposition? Why did the ABC, which aspires to high standards of journalism, allow themselves to be used in what is clearly an orchestrated government campaign to try and discredit Kevin Rudd by calling into question everything he’s done in his entire adult life (not to mention his childhood)? Why did the journalist who put together this report not include footage of Tony Abbott saying something relevant to his health portfolio**? Didn’t they ask him any questions about federal responsibility for the appalling state of dental health provision in this country?
* This is a paraphrase, to the best of my recall. I don’t have a transcript of what Abbott said and was so taken aback that I didn’t have the presence of mind to write it down.
** This was the only thing Abbott was shown to say.
Indeed. Looks like a job for Media Watch – why not send them an email?
I’m verging on drunk, and it all makes sense to me. This is what is meant by the ‘conversation’ about bias: if you don’t let the government take any and every ridiculous shot that it sees fit at the opposition, then you’re being ‘biased’. The ABC management and staff have been ‘educated’ with respect to this important issue, and so all of those questions you asked, suz, are irrelevant. I’m sorry to say this but they actually sound a little bit ‘maoist’.
At least the ABC are complicit with government because they are funded and interfered with by said government. Now what excuse does the SMH have for giving Abbott column space?
Kevin Rudd is in danger of becoming the greater scapegoat for everything wrong in the country than Bob Brown.
Sorry Abbott, no dice. As any Quincelander knows, these particular decisions are made at council level; and Brisbane has had at least one rabidly anti-fluoride mayor in office for a decade.
Another non-starter for coaliton in QLD.
Im waiting for news to break tomorrow that Santo holds shares in fluoride.
Snap! I too saw/heard that and could not believe my ears.
Technically dental health is a state issue. Nonetheless it wasn’t nice of the Libs to abolish the federal dental health program.
But at least the state Labor Governments have their priorities right: in Melbourne we’ll soon have million dollar flag poles on the West Gate Bridge. Yipeeee!
Pavlov’s Cat:
Ah yes …. but Abbot knows that thousands of gullible mugs will believe it. [Now there's a plausible arguement for making the current random disenfranchisement of thousands of Australians idiot-specific and official].
Steve Munn:
Once again, they have shown that an obsession with “cost cutting” makes no economic sense whatsoever.
Adam Gall:
Now you are talking about one of the reasons Australia is fast becoming a laughing-stock in the Asia-Pacific region every time Australia mentions Freedom of Speech, Freedom of The Press, ….. and Human Rights, Rule of Law, Habeus Corpus, etc,. etc.,
in other circumstances abbott has been quite blunt that public servants do not make, promote or defend policy
except if kevin rudd’s the public servant of course.
abbott couldn’t lie straight in bed if he tried.
he’s a carbon copy of howard. as someone in the press recently pointed out, most australians would be shocked by the extremism of howard’s personal views. these people simply cannot be honest, because they know most people would be repulsed if they were.
as howard said of santoro this week, ‘no one would believe’ santoro’s stories about not being corrupt. that pretty much summarises howard, perception (deception) is everything. thats his code of conduct.
but in any case to paraphrase downer, the time is fast approaching when no one in the country will need to care what these sinister rightwingers think.
God I love to see the dirty Abbott squirm. I can only conjecture (with glee) about the disastrous tidings being fed to him by the Liberals’ “internal polling”. Hehehe.
Pavlov, I’m so glad you snapped it. I woke up this morning fearing I must have dreamt it as surely he couldn’t have said that – and surely he couldn’t have been allowed to say that on the news. Perhaps it’s an ABC journalist’s idea of “injecting controversy” but I wonder how the study authors feel about their work being used in that way.
Suz you don’t understand. Journos aren’t supposed to ask questions about issues. To do that they might actually have to learn something about the issues so they could ask intelligent questions about them (such as “But isn’t water a local council responsibility in Queensland? And wasn’t the Brisbane City Council under the control of your party Mr Abbott in the period leading up to Mr Rudd’s employment as a public servant, i.e. one who did what he was told by the government? Actually wasn’t the Brisbane mayor Sallyanne Atkinson and what happened to her anyways Tony, wasn’t she supposed to be prime minister by now?”)
No, journos don’t ask questions about issues, they ask a politician to comment on what somebody else has said. As in “What’s your reaction to Mr Howard’s statement that ….? How do you respond to Mr Rudd’s criticism …?”
Contemporary journalists are just professional shit-stirrers, providing endless opportunities for pollies to slag off at each other.
Yeah, I saw it too.
The Government must be in full panic mode to trot out crap like this. Next theyll be trying to lay Baby Azaria’s disappearance on him.
If they haven’t already woken-up to the fact that their smear campaign is hurting them, the next News Poll ought to do the trick. Whaddya reckon, Labour at about 63 or 64% 2pp?
At the rate they’re going, the Libs will have made themselves about as popular as syphillis by election time.
I think Ken Lovell sums it up best.
So is it wrong to use the very machinery the Govt has set up – against them?
ie. write/email the ABC citing every single fuck-up like this one – and asking for an explanation in relation to either their sheer incompetency and/or potential Govt. bias and/or even right-wing bias etc.
Is it time we used it? – or is this legitimising a process which shouldn’t be in operation in the first place?
To Mr Paul Chadwick / Mark Scott etc
http://www.abc.net.au/corp/audience/complaints_how.htm
It really wouldn’t be hard to clog up their inboxes with hundreds of incidences where ABC journalists:
have failed to ask any pertinent questions within a legitimate public interest framework
have failed to question a Minister’s response at the time – which is known by common consent to be misleading or factually incorrect
have failed to understand the issues at hand
have asked Ministers only for their comment on Opposition comments, and not questioned the Minister in respect of the issue (see above)
have not commented on each instance a Minister avoids answering a direct question etc.
Premier Pete reckons it’s always been up to the local councils to flouridate their water supplies and he is happy to supply the funds to do so.
Ken Lovell:
The free circulation of ideas based on demonstrable fact and reality is oxygen for democracy; without it, democracy withers and perishes.
Journalists who don’t toe the Party Line, or in Australia’s case, the Corporate Line [which is much the same], sooner or later find their career prospects “disenhanced” ….. unlike John Pilger and his ilk, not every Australian journalist can just pull up stakes and build a career for themselves in countries where the news media may be pro-government – or not – but are still reasonably independent.
Cross-media ownership laws and the imaginary solid-brick-walls between proprioters’ interests and government compliance are a sick joke in Australia. Hence …. Abbot’s Communist-regime-style propaganda on the dental care crisis and the “channel-tenning” of SBS ….. to give just two examples..
I hope Abbott and company keeps going. It is their credibility that’s being eroded and at a rapid rate.
BTW, Beattie will soon move to take over the ‘whole’ water problem including supply, treatment, distribution, costing etc.
Jim Soorley was completely opposed to putting fluoride in water. Soorley and Beattie don’t agree about anything so Beattie will probably use the fluoride issue as an additional reason to take over responsibility for the lot.
You can’t blame Rudd – didn’t Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confess to stopping the flouridation of Queensland’s water supply?
Anthony:
He did. See Transcript of Interrogation #962 Page 435 Line 69 Words 20 and 21 ….. it’s all there in black-and-white.
suz and jo you are absolutely correct to bring up this crap and go for it by official written complaint or publicising it. Not bad also is the phone, when it comes to Aunty.
Sometimes it’s quite surprising who you might catch in a newsroom or office if you are friendly and inquisitive. Especially good to start off with your local radio/tv office… they control lots of buttons.
Truth is, we can’t let them get away with this creeping bias when all other media is pretty much unaccountable.
But what’s so deliciously sweet is that by virtue of Rabbott having raised the who as who is responsible for my teeth falling out, will of course, lead to further inquiry as to the appalling role that the Feds have had in the last 15 years regarding the state of your fangs.
& why is Costello suddenly so quiet on the Rudd front? Must be very very busy drawing up the
pork-barrellingnext Fed budget…Surely, Kevin Rudd’s cheesy smile must now become an issue of personal character and requires forensic examination to establish his worthiness of high political office.
Thanks Graham. I see Khalid’s admission regarding Queensland flouridation wedged between the attempted assasination of John Paul II and the plot to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower. No woner the press missed it.
Jo, really good point about using the ABC internal complaints processes. It’s really important that a lot of people make use of them as a means of letting the ABC know we are not going to take it lying down, and as a way of pushing back against the kicking from the right. Otherwise the risk is that the ‘pre-emptive buckle’, as Quentin Dempster calls it, will become all pervasive.
That said, having made a few small complaints, I put in a very detailed one last year regarding a Four Corners which seriously misrepresented clean energy prospects – talking up the potential of coal with geosequestration while completely dismissing renewables. I submitted a fully referenced document explaining the errors of fact.
Unfortunately, the complaints process was revealed to be a knee-jerk defensive mechanism designed to protect their own at all costs. In the first instance, i am convinced that the original reply was written by the journalist concerned and simply repeated the original mistakes. The second instance, the Complaints Review Executive, clearly had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. The reply from him was purely political, with no attempt to address the facts at issue.
Now, I was deeply disappointed by that process, but I still believe that it’s worth putting in the effort of doing it every now and then. If they’re going to treat it as a political game, so can we.
It was a pardonable miss, Anthony – a couple of the the blood spots obscured it.
I read the KSM fluoride confession in the transcript. It was right in there between the “Aaaaaargh!” and the “Eooooowwwwie!”
Little point complaining to the ABC. I wrote last year when the Sydney newsreader summed up the 2006 Budget with the tabloid headline:
My complaint pointed out that the polls had actually tanked for the government from the week after.
First they deny: the ABC flunkie replied (2 months later) that their reporters were “experienced” and made their best assessment. I pointed out that their assessment was wrong, and that it would have been best not to make it until they had proof. Certainly it would have been better not to have put their wrong assessment in such tabloid terms.
Then they rabbit on: about how there are many shades of opinion on the matter. I referred again to the polls, which at this stage (2 months later) had been running 5-to-1 against the government. My suggestions was that most “shades of opinion” disagreed with the ABC’s instant assessment.
Next, the dump the Code Of Conduct in your in-tray and tell you the matter’s closed: it’s a big tome and takes a long time to read, and of course you’re none the wiser after you’ve read it. There’s something for everyone in it.
Then they ignore you: No further correspondence will be entered into. You’re obviously just a crackpot who doesn’t know anything about national affairs and should leave it to the Big Boys, even though they were wrong in fact and wrong in emphasis.
And this was before the new regime.
Forget about it. They will never admit a mistake.
I see that Santo will be replaced by Pyne. Fantastic! Another brilliant move that will shore up the Rodent’s political stocks here in Queensland. Not!
But then again, there aren’t too many local Libs who are free from taint.
As Howard once said about Pyne when he made a goose of himself again (someone will provide the detail).
“they are all god’s children”.
FGS, the preadolescent Pyne as Minister for Ageing.
Perhaps, it is an attempt to make him grow up?
Aussie Bob:
Sadly, you are probably right. Added to the occasional bit of bureaucratic arrogance …… there is now fear …… they might agree with you 110% but nobody in their right mind is going to utter a word if the cost of doing so is not having their employment contract renewed, or worse.
Anthony and Aussie Bob:
Off-topic a bit but ….. KSM knows he’ll be executed no matter what so he carried out a standard Resistence tactic on his captors and interrogators: that of eventually admitting to everything and more ….. and they fell for it; hook, lime and sinker. He’ll be laughing at them from beyond the grave.
Graham Bell wrote:
Fear, yes.
I rang up the week before last to find out when the Keating interview would be available for downloading.
Inter alia, I remarked that it was funny. Silence. Hello? Ah, yes, it was funny. Who was the poor bunny who copped the interview? [Gave name]. She didn’t know what she was walking into, did she? Silence. Hello? I wouldn’t know. Yeah, but it was funny. We were all laughing. Silence. Did you think it was funny (it’s all over the on line papers already). I can’t really comment any further. Is this conversation being recorded? I can’t comment. Aren’t you supposed to tell me if it’s recorded? I can’t comment, sorry… would you like to speak to my supervisor? No, no matter. Thanks. OK, thanks. Bye.
Why? Because there are no independent journalists left in mainstream media. They all have hidden adgendaa but one thing is that both Labor and Libs agree that a dose of Industrial grade Sodium Silicio Fluoirde gives you a pearly white smirk…and thats just what fluorosis looks like.
The Greens and Nats have no policy at all re fluoridation…its called fence sitting.
As far as I am concerned Abbott is an obvious sleaze bucket… but if you are in either Labor or Liberal at any degree of power, there is a fair chance they are also sleaze buckets as well, because they have ceased to represent the wishes of those who support them with our taxes, and give their adulation over to the party and the cushy job at the end.
Did you know that it is in only the english speaking countries that fluoridation is still pushed by Government, every single country in the world apart fropm Singapore has rejected Fluoridation…
But then we are a nation of lickspittle suck ups… and always have been, kowtowing to anybody and everybody ” what will the world think of us?” we muse…the world doesn’t give a fig either way.
Here are some links on my blog… the ones to the lefthand side when researched prove beyond any doubt the dangers of Fluorides
http://fluoridationisforcedmedication.blogspot.com/
I wondered when someone would show up who wanted to argue about fluoride…
Here’s the SMH article on the dental health survey – you’d think the ABC would have canvassed some of these issues.
So did I, Suz — only a matter of time. Do people with Causes spend half the day (probably on their employers’ time) doing random Googling of Cause Keywords so they can turn up and commit a drive-by? Or what? How is it done?
This is an aside. What I was actually going to say was, don’t necessarily blame the journos and reporters for what turns up on the news; don’t forget how large a part editing also plays in the MSM, especially television. Who knows what’s ended up on the ABC’s cutting-room floor lately?
Is anti-fluoride hysteria all that different from anti-nuclear hysteria?
As a born-again Freudian, I think they could all benefit from nasal cauterisation.