The PNG front in the history wars.(Letters)(Papua New Guinea)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: One should never look a gift horse in the mouth. In his regular columns Frank Devine does a pretty good job on our behalf in keeping the national broadcaster's deficiencies in focus. But he has rather let us down with "Wham! Crunch! Kapow! Take That, Russell Balding!" (July-August 2005). This was a scrappy piece, and surely he could have found a more significant example of error to take into the ring for his first round. It was no knockout punch.

Tony Eastley succumbed to the temptation to be flippant with Amanda Vanstone--not clever! She quickly saw the chance to win the round. But even a diehard ABC critic like me smiled as I saw that Eastley was speaking metaphorically. Those low-grade DIMEA officials castigated in your editorial couldn't get Solon (Alvarez) out of the country quickly enough, was what Eastley was saying. Right on! Now to hinge a charge of falsifying the on-line transcript (transcript, not archives) on this petty event only proves that Frank needs to invest in a tape recorder so that he can nail the ABC properly on some of its really significant transgressions. More of this later.

Frank's borrowing from the Sydney Institute's Quarterly Review gave a little more ventilation to the ABC's humiliating defeat in the Alston Affair--something which the Australian media in all its forms has worked hard to ignore or excuse. Errol Simper of the Australian has proved himself a particularly worthy public relations officer for the ABC in this regard. But the final count of complaints upheld was merely the icing on the cake. A conclusion of shameful bias and personal vituperation in the AM program's Gulf War coverage under Linda Mottram's anchor role was possible long before the last appeal to the ABA. Eighteen months earlier, the Quarterly Review had published my detailed analysis "Bias in the ABC". This reported Alston had already achieved a success rate of 26 per cent of his complaints upheld, compared with a mere 2.5 per cent historical average in the ABC's own listing of complaints in the category of "Fairness, accuracy or independence matters".

But important though Alston's complaints were, they were almost an aside in my article, which gave a case study of political bias and distortion in a Foreign Correspondent report. This showed not only lack of balance, incompetent and incomplete research, but also a journalistically unforgivable juxtaposition of a film clip to give a false and completely misleading impression in support of the skewed storyline. That was really something to get excited about! The article followed the twists and turns of the ABC as it wriggled on the hook of my formal complaint over ten months until it ended with the curious finding of "imbalance" but "not serious bias".

In that case the ABA managed to avoid giving a critical finding by deciding that my complaint invoked issues that fell under the ABC's Editorial Guidelines, which were outside its jurisdiction. (Amazingly, its interpretation was different with Senator Alston's complaints which were based on similar grounds.) I regret to have to report that the Sydney Institute published the article after this august journal declined it, the editor telling me that "we all know about the ABC".

Frank might have got bigger calibre ammunition for his attack if he had been listening to a recent series of hour-long programs prepared under the Hindsight label of the Social History and ...