As I wrote in my series on How Not to Be Fooled, one of my iron rules for dealing with the mainstream media is: Never believe a headline.
Case in point, this bizarre piece of taradiddle published in the Sydney Morning Herald, claiming that Most Australians love the ABC and only tolerate politicians.
While the latter claim is well-attested by survey after survey, no evidence is given at all for the first. Indeed, the entire article ignores its headline entirely in favour of a rambling screed of self-serving smugness. One can only hope that the author broke a wrist from patting herself so ardently on the back, thus putting a stop to any further suffocating drivel for at least a week or two.
The inner city left-wing elites, in their various iterations around the world, are having an extended post-Brexit, Trumpian and Morrisonian moment that has segued from Manhattan to Carlton, from Dalston to Darlinghurst.
They are blamed for Brexit, the election of Trump, and for the inability of the Australian Labor Party to win a federal election in over a decade.
Um… what? In fact, they’ve spent the last four years screeching abuse and hurling bricks and fists at the very people who they do blame for all of the above.
Most recently they popped up in a staff briefing given last week by ABC news boss Gaven Morris, who reportedly told staff he would prefer “if we spent less time on the concerns of the inner city elites and more time on the things that matter to central Queensland”.
“If there is a perception in the community that we are more interested in the concerns and lives of inner city elites, then we need to work harder to make sure we are as relevant to people in central Queensland as we are to people in inner Sydney,” he told The Sun Herald and Sunday Age.
It is not clear which areas of ABC coverage might need roughing up. Many ABC employees probably do live in the inner urban areas, which would be typical of many journalists.
Whether or not they qualify as “elite” is another thing – the average ABC salary is about $81,000, according to job site Indeed, which is higher than the national average but about average for Sydney. They are probably likely to be university graduates and come from the middle class, I would guess.
As we see, self-awareness is not your average lefty journalist’s strongest trait. This vacuous bint answers each of her questions in turn: journalists are sequestered in a tiny bubble of the inner city, are highly paid and middle-class. But it remains a mystery to her why anyone would criticise them for being out-of-touch elites.
Even more bizarre is the effort to draw a comparison between parliament and the ABC
The idea that our Parliament – overwhelmingly male, white and of the professional political class – is representative in the sense of being like its constituents, is laughable
What’s laughable is the conceit that this is a sound argument. Our parliament is representative only in the sense that it is meant to be: elected by their constituents to represent them in parliament. The idea that a “representative government” should somehow demographically mirror its constituents is an idiotic conceit peddled by credentialled morons who would clearly fail a basic Civics class.
The ABC, on the other hand, is required by law to represent the whole of Australian society. Not just the inner-city left, not just the inner-city left’s favoured intersectional groups. All Australians – most of whom, to the obvious chagrin of our lefty scribe, are indeed white. About half of them are, horror of horrors, male and almost all of them are straight.
And as the ratings have shown for decades, bugger-all Australians watch or listen to the ABC. They’re just forced to pay a billion dollars a year for it.
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