Tag: abc

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More OTT political rhetoric

With the ABC’s new editorial guidelines announced yesterday, it’s given the right-wingers an excuse to engage in some over-the-top rhetoric — proving that hyperbole isn’t the preserve of the left calling everyone a fascist.

Best effort so far has to be this one from Murdoch-land:

With its poor performance, entrenched ideological bias and ‘Vietcong-style’ industrial strife, surely it’s time we sold the public broadcaster, maintains Rudi Michelson.

Yes, apparently ABC staff members have been creeping through the jungle at night, slaughtering villagers and setting fire to ammunition dumps…

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Yes, it looks like tabloid meth

So did Four Corners go all tabloid over methamphetamine last night? I don’t know yet, I’m catching the repeat on Wednesday. But a friend certainly found it “really disappointing”.

“The Ice Age was ‘the usual deal’,” he says, showing the extreme cases and linking it with heroin. It left his questions unanswered.

I was really hoping for an investigation of the weekend recreational culture, which so many people seem to be able to sustain…

I don’t know many that can afford 3 grams a day…

Well, no, given that 3 grams would cost about $2000. [OK, that’s retail, but even as a low-end dealer buying wholesale that’s still a very expensive habit.]

If there are 73,000 addicts as claimed, a lot caused by no heroin, how many recreational users are there? What is the damage? How do people juggle it and what [do you] do if you’re falling?

Predictable Response

The ABC program guestbook is mostly predictable.

There’s the usual bleating from the talkback radio herd who can’t stand their hard-earned tax dollars supporting these blah blah blah kill them like Singapore why when I was a lad my dad used to whack sense into me by golly jingo. Yeah, them.

There’s the usual stream of “shocked” and “horrified” townsfolk, for whom the freak show achieved its shock-horror aim.

But occasionally, though, there is clarity.

Linthi: There is an underbelly of society that exists to which we only pay cursory attention. If these advanced addicts were offered a choice of immediately going clean or a lifetime supply of Ice, I know which they would choose. As mad as it sounds, some people like this life, it’s a culture in which they are comfortable.

This “underbelly” has always been with us, of course, and always will be. There will never be a Utopia. Some will never fit in — because they’ve slipped and fallen, or were pushed, or were defective or were damaged.

Drug Porn Exploitation

Barbara Farrelly was “disturbed” by the program’s approach.

Barbara Farrelly: struck me that you offered no hope to addicts. The rooms of Narcotics Anonymous are full of people who have overcome addictions.

I feel you also exploited people who could hardly give informed consent to being exposed in their degradation. They seemed happy enough to clown for the cameras on their highway to hell. Touting this as “rare footage” is ingenuous. Taking pictures of these guys was like taking candy from a baby…

I felt like I’d been subject to drug porn…

And while you are talking up ice as a major problem, it is estimated that every year 70,000 Australians die as a result of alcohol abuse and a further 20,000 from the effect of smoking.

You failed to present both sides of the story: Addiction isn’t pretty but recovery is beautiful.

Billing the program as showing us how the drug is affecting Australian society, but only showing those enduring the worst addictions, is like promising us a documentary on the wine industry and only talking to sherry-soaked derelicts. For shame.

That said, the special broadband edition of the program has an excellent timeline documenting the drug’s heritage and what apppear to be longer versions of the interviews. Why wait until the repeat?

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Fed Police chief proposes “Reprogramming”

You probably missed it, but last week Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty actually proposed forcibly “reprogramming” people’s political beliefs.

Speaking on ABC TV’s Lateline on 8 March, Keelty says we should look at techniques which have been used “successfully” in such bastions of human rights as Indonesia, Singapore and Pakistan — even referring to it as “best practice”.

Keelty equates reprogramming people to convincing an informer to give evidence, and says this is the next step… to re-program somebody who has a belief or holds a belief. It has already been discussed with the government in the context of anti-terrorism control orders.

Commissioner Keelty, just in case you’ve forgotten Articles 18 and 19 of the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, here’s a refresher…

Continue reading “Fed Police chief proposes “Reprogramming””

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We Are At War!

“We are again locked in war,” says Roger Bell. “Locked in an ideological battle, locked in the language — very exaggerated language — of ideological conflict.”

Roger Bell, Professor of International Studies at the University of New South Wales, isn’t surprised that the debates and contexts of McCarthyism have resurfaced.

[These debates are] particularly about free speech, and in a broader sense also about — in the American case — about Americanism, and un-American activities, about traitors within, about evil enemies etc.

So when Bush speaks in my view in very exaggerated terms, about the evil of Islam, or the evil of terrorism, he, as it were, takes the political rhetoric to another level. And when acts such as the Patriot Act are invoked domestically to repress or to limit freedom of expression at home, then it’s to be expected that many of those traditional debates in a democratic society will re-surface.

Part of a much longer conversation in ABC Radio National program The Media Report last week. Worth a listen. (transcript) (podcast)