To the surprise of absolutely no one except a few grey-bearded Greens voters in Melbourne’s affluent inner suburbs, “Australia’s most trusted news source” once again turns out to be less-than-trustworthy after all. The only real surprise is that, for once, the ABC is actually admitting one of its mistakes.
The ABC has admitted it breached its editorial standards last month when a segment on its flagship 7pm news bulletin referred to the “the deadly Fukushima nuclear disaster”, with the public broadcaster upholding a complaint that the story misrepresented the cause of the widespread loss of life.
This is astonishing enough, in itself. The standard ABC procedure in dealing with complaints is to bury the complaint for six months before announcing that the ABC’s management has absolutely cleared the ABC of ever doing anything wrong, ever, and that it’s probably Scott Morrison’s fault if they did, anyway.
The ABC’s website posted the following statement on its Corrections and Clarifications page on Wednesday: “On 11 March, television news stories reporting on the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster described it as ‘the deadly Fukushima nuclear disaster’. This was incorrect.
“The ABC acknowledges that it was the earthquake and tsunami that triggered the nuclear accident which overwhelmingly accounted for the loss of lives; no one died directly in the nuclear reactor meltdown.”
Although more than a few died in the panic that followed. In fact, one survey attributes slightly more deaths to the evacuation than were killed in Fukushima prefecture by the earthquake and tsunami.
But hey, everyone at the ABC knows that nuclear is the scariest, deadliest thing ever. Well, apart from climate change, that is.
The unit upheld the viewer’s complaint, writing to him on Tuesday to inform him that ABC News bosses agreed that “the introduction to this report included an inaccuracy”, and that a correction should be posted on the public broadcaster’s website.
Of the estimated 18,500 people who died in Fukushima, almost all either drowned when the tsunami hit the Japanese coast or were killed in the earthquake.
In 2018, the Japanese government announced that one worker at the Fukushima power plant had died as a result of radiation exposure, but that claim has since been disputed by a number of scientists.
In the immediate aftermath of the incident in March 2011, about 165,000 people fled their homes.The ABC declined to comment further on the finding of its Audience and Consumer Affairs unit.
The Australian
Of course, like the lawyer who makes a statement in court that the judge rules as inappropriate and to be struck from the record, it is already in the heads of the jury – in this case, the ABC audience who long ago made up their minds about all things nuclear.
It also hasn’t escaped the notice of critics that, like the correction buried in a tiny square of the fifth page of a newspaper, the ABC isn’t going out of its way to draw attention to its mistake. Unlike the false statement, broadcast on its flagship news program, the correction is squirreled away on the ABC website, in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”.
This is what Australia’s taxpayers get, for their lazy billion a year.
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