Quadrant Online slams journalistic bias

Cartoon: by Chris Muir (Day by Day) 

Julia Gillard’s announcement of an election in September has tended to increase the aggression of ABC current affairs hosts in interviews with coalition figures. To their credit though, they have been a little less obsequious towards the PM and Labor figures during the last week.  The latter is possibly designed to give some appearance of balance.

The ABC, being the bought and paid for government broadcaster tends to be the voice of big government and the left, inhabited by ideologues and creatures of the state.  Doubling down on this is the Fairfax media, once a great institution but on its knees both financially and intellectually, which has become little other than Labor shills.

Merv Bendle over at Quadrant Online has made a good case as to why these need to be confronted and possibly overthrown before we slip irrecoverably into welfarism and authoritarianism: 

The media gatekeepers in the ABC, Fairfax, etc, will fight tooth and nail to retain the dominant role they have usurped over the past 40 years. Nevertheless, they must be overthrown if Australia is not to decline even further into the authoritarian welfare-state morass within which the ALP and the Greens so joyfully wallow. 

As a Coalition victory in the upcoming federal election becomes increasingly probable, and with conservative governments in the major states, the time will shortly be ripe for a showdown with the leftist media and the institutional infrastructure that supports it. Senior and influential conservative parliamentarians need to recognize and effectively support a campaign to restore balance and objectivity. 

This will be a campaign that must be fought on several fronts and may become bitter, but it must be undertaken. Otherwise the next coalition government risks being merely an interim administration, keeping the seats warm while the ALP spends time constructing some ‘values’ around which its various factions, apparatchiks, and opportunists can coalesce before returning once again to rort and sack the country.   

As has been repeatedly observed by numerous commentators, the media in this country are dominated by an extremely well-entrenched elite that long ago embraced a radical environmental, authoritarian, and statist ideology. This extremist worldview has become the default setting for much of what passes for thought amongst journalists and media operatives in the ABC, the Fairfax press, government spin merchants, and academic journalism courses. …

The Fairfax problem is well on the way to resolving itself, with the company going out backwards.  It will either go broke and be sold up or be taken over by someone else who has the business acumen to understand that a media group that only caters to one side of the political spectrum will lose the entire other side and be a loss maker.

The ABC on the other hand with its rivers of taxpayers money to support it needs to be addressed in the near future.  Given the wide availability of alternative media, both in the free to air and cable networks, there is little reason or need for a government propaganda network.  There is no reason why the public at large should have to provide a free service to those who are too damn snobby to accept the offerings from commercial networks.

It should be sold off.