Remembering Saumlaki.(Ryan)

IT WAS A TRUTH splendidly stated by Swift, that to blast another's character, not a sentence need be spoken, nor a word written; nothing is easier than to "Convey a libel in a frown, And wink a reputation down."

A satisfying character assassination may be achieved without opening the mouth, or taking the top off a fountain pen; "spin" doesn't need to make a sound or a mark.

Thus it is useless for Australians to pursue suggestions of "bias" in "their" ABC, simply by analysis of program typescripts and film. Senator Alston's recent efforts illustrated the futility of the method.

I admit, with pain, that my hero Doctor Johnson was sometimes a doctor of spin. He was for a time obliged by poverty to drudge as a parliamentary reporter. In those days, before the verbatim notes of Hansard, the records of debates were simply summaries of MPs' speeches, as compiled by the reporters. Johnson acknowledged his Tory tendency: "I took care that the Whig Dogs should not have the best of it."

As I don't own a television, my irregular glimpses of that misbegotten medium derive from the hospitality of someone else. I have, nevertheless, been able on a number of Sunday mornings to view the ABC's Insiders, the chat-and-panel program presented by Barrie Cassidy. One recent Sunday (by the time you read this it will be several weeks ago) the hot topic was the fourteen "asylum seekers" who, just days earlier, bad reached Melville Island from Indonesia; and Senator Amanda Vanstone was still learning the ropes in her new portfolio of Immigration.

I am not here concerned with the larger merits of that controversy--the bona fides of the asylum claims; whether the government's swift reaction lacked ordinary human sympathy; whether Immigration and its new minister had messed things up. So why does that particular episode continue to stick in my mind?

Because it seemed to supply an example, tiny in itself but diagnostically perfect, of the snide bias which washes in a silent, never-ceasing wave over our national broadcaster.