While I am complaining about the media, if you haven’t read this excellent article from Grog’s Gamut, I recommend that you do. Not only did sections of the media make up this anti-Gillard story, they continued to carry on with it once their sham had been revealed by Annabel Crabb who acted as we would expect all journalists to act and went to the primary source.
Maybe, if we’re being scrupulously generous, it might be only one journalist who made up the anti-Gillard spin, and all the rest just copied it instead of viewing the primary source material. Still doesn’t speak much of their ethics, does it?
Brickbats all round for Dennis Shanahan (The Australian), Jane Cowan (ABC Radio), Simon Benson (Daily Telegraph), Simon Cullen (ABC Online). Malcolm Farr (News Ltd),
Huge stonking bouquets for Annabel Crabb (Twitter) and Greg Jericho (Blogger).
I’m not sure if you intended to frame it as a MSM vs Non MSM reporting, but its probably worth mentioning that Crabb is the ABC’s Chief online political writer so she’s pretty much MSM as well. Although she mentioned it on twitter first, as a presenter of The Drum that evening she also discussed the erroneous reporting on ABC TV.
As an aside the ABC chairman spoke recently about how editorial control works very differently in the ABC versus News – although there is some overall quality control the various groups within the ABC have a lot of independence. It really comes out in cases like this where one arm of the ABC reports something quite different from another.
I didn’t mean especially to frame it that way, I just wanted to credit where each author first published on this. I wouldn’t be surprised if Grog/Jericho writes it up for the Drum online either.
Today the West Australian has published three virulently anti-Gillard letters on this topic. One of them claims that she has “done irreparable damage to Australia’s reputation abroad”. It does not say much for that newspaper’s ethics when it publishes these letters knowing that the story to which they were responding was not even a media beat-up; it was patently untrue.