On Saturday night, I began to watch the coronation broadcast on the ABC. Hoping against hope that the ABC wouldn’t, well, be the ABC. Of course they were. They can’t help themselves.
We turned off after five minutes and switched, first to Channel 7, then, when the ads got too annoying, to a livestream from the BBC.
It turns out that we were far from alone. In fact, most of our fellow Australians chose to endure the twin annoyances of ads and Kochie, rather than put up with the ABC’s puerile, bitter finger-wagging.
The ABC’s coverage of King Charles III’s coronation “totally misread the mood” and it was inappropriate that the public broadcaster spent the lead-up to the crowning at Westminster Abbey bagging the “living daylights out of the monarchy”, Melbourne’s 3AW broadcaster Neil Mitchell said.
The warning signs were obvious from the beginning. The ABC’s London correspondent, like a cut-price Dr Evil, repeatedly made the ludicrous claim that the ceremony would cost “100 billion pounds”. After a few iterations, and presumably a frantic note from producers, he amended that to the correct estimate of 100 million pounds. That the ABC repeated an error of three orders of magnitude without a blush was only the beginning.
Then they rolled out the panel discussion. That’s when I flicked off.
I didn’t miss much.
Speaking on his program on Monday morning, Mitchell criticised the public broadcaster’s coverage that featured an unbalanced panel discussion, led by presenters Jeremy Fernandez and Julia Baird, from 5pm Saturday (AEST) with a panel of guests, including Q+A host Stan Grant, discussing the historic event.
“They had a four-person panel in the lead up, three of them republicans,” Mitchell said.
“They are talking over this footage of this grand ceremony being prepared, souring the mood, so a lot of people turned off.”
The panel discussion focused on colonisation and the damage the monarchy had caused Indigenous Australians in the lead-up to the coronation.
Well, I didn’t miss much… if you don’t count the billion-plus dollars a year of our taxes that goes to fund this sort of garbage.
Mitchell said […] “I really wonder sometimes why we feed these ABC people, I don’t blame the people on air, it’s whomever in management decides, “ah, here’s a good idea, let’s use footage from London while we bag the living daylights out of the monarchy”,” he said.
“Somebody in the ABC needs to be accountable for this, as the national broadcaster it should have been the place you go to see the coverage of the coronation, instead you see all this bitterness about our Indigenous history.”
Here’s a challenge for Stan “The Tan” Grants and Nova “I was oppressed all the way to the Olympics and a cushy politics job” Peris: hand back every cent you’ve ever received from the Commonwealth, ditch the “whitefella” clothes, medicine, and technology — then we’ll talk. But only in your “traditional” language — none of this colonisers’ jabber.
The chair of the Australian Monarchist League, Eric Abetz, said the ABC’s panel discussion was “completely unacceptable” during the historical event.
“This was a celebratory event, it would be like covering somebody’s birthday or funeral and then picking on all the possible negatives rather than celebrating the person’s life and the good they did,” he said.
“Australians are willing to accept there are negative aspects of Australian history but there’s a huge bucketload of positive things in Australian history to celebrate and it’s a pity people like Stan Grant can’t celebrate those things.”
The Australian
The vast majority of Australians, like me, chose to switch off the ABC. As we regularly do.
If only we could so easily turn off the billions the ABC hoovers from our pockets every year.