THE ABC OF TELLING TALES
ABC chair Kim Williams reckons the Corporation should focus more on hard news than lifestyle fillers. While purging the pap he might also look at how some stories get told, particularly to international audiences.
This is a competitive market, with the US, Brits, French, Russians, Chinese, Qatar, South Korea, Japanese and others telecasting in perfect English and jostling to tell the world how the world should see them.
Much is propaganda, but usually watchable.
Seldom seen Down Under is our flag-waver ABC Australia. Stories on this site haven’t always shown the best available, as outlined on this website earlier this year.
The latest is the coverage of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fleeing the nation she's ruled for 20 years as mobs raided her palace.
Presumably using the weird theory that an Asian story should be given an Asian treatment, the report based on wire services was delivered by the Indonesian correspondent Bill Birtles from a street in Jakarta.
The capital is 3,780 km from Dhaka and Indonesia had no involvement in the regime change. The clip could have been shot on a roadway anywhere in Oz.
On 14 August another Jakarta skyline was used when Thailand's Constitutional Court sacked Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin. Bangkok is 2,325 km from the Indonesian capital which had zilch relevance to Thai politics.
Bangladesh is tough to penetrate (I’ve been trying), but Bangkok has scores of competent English-speaking reporters with insights and authority through being at the spot where it was all happening. An academic appeared later to explain the situation, though not from Thailand.
On the ABC’s Just-In news site available anywhere, a story about nuclear waste disposal described the Sandy Ridge location as ‘outback WA’. No further ID. It’s 240 km northwest of Kalgoorlie and the company involved makes no secret of its geography - only the ABC.
Sloppy reporting or indifference to viewers and listeners with no influence? Take your pick.
This one’s tragic, so all the more reason for care. It was about Megan Jayne Somerville who allegedly stabbed her kids alongside a motorway in 2022; a court was told drugs were a major factor in her alleged offending.
The court had heard that she was suffering psychosis when she assaulted her two sons, then aged three and eight. She has pleaded not guilty and the case will continue to be heard in October.
What we also wanted to know was the fate of the little boys. The story didn’t say. A search on other sites reveals they survived.
The woman came from Modbury Heights. It’s a well-known suburb to those who live there though not to this reader or the millions of others unfamiliar with South Australia. Would the line '16 km northeast of Adelaide' have been too hard to add?
A big yarn here about the Australian navy firing a missile, something which is happening hourly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, but fortunately rare for the Oz armed forces in our neck of the oceans.
Yet the test was launched near the US state of Hawaii, too far away to defend our nation should the need ever arise, may the deity forbid.
The story didn't come from a journalist's diligent sleuthing but a Navy hand-me-down, aka media release. Australian taxpayers might have been interested in the cost, how far the weapon went, what was the target and whether it hit.
The military didn’t say, the ABC apparently didn’t ask, or even say it tried to ask. That’s its job.
US singer Katy Perry got herself on ABC news “for possible environmental damage of protected dunes following her latest Ibiza-set music video”.
This tabloid sniff included a "supplied" photo of the barely-clad lady and her video to help us ponder the despoliation and whether this might warrant extradition, jail time or worse.
It was left to The Guardian to reveal the crime was not the ruthless trashing of the landscape to look like the Gaza strip, but filming on an uninhabited island without authorisation. By then the harm to the beach and the ABC’s credibility had been done.
Selection could have been deliberate, a clever ploy to get the indifferent young to watch a snippet and maybe hang around for some real news. It probably drew more clicks than an Albanese and Dutton presser combined whatever the topic.
To this cynic, it should have been flagged as a free promo stunt and left to commercial media which has little reputation left for impartiality. Ms P's previous video release apparently hadn’t done well, so her career needed a boost.
Come in, sucker.
This website has previously alerted Australian viewers that news for overseas audiences gets shoved aside three nights a week to make way for hours of AFL. League is not played in any Southeast Asian state that gets ABC Australia.
It would be good to report that these flawed samples are rare. They’re not.
Saucepans calling kettles sooty is to invite a dash to the files to reveal the critic’s hypocrisy. Don’t bother; this writer has made enough errors in the ABC and elsewhere to power a studio with his blushing. But he’s survived thanks to alert colleagues who have edited with care and managements that supervised seriously.
Mr Williams might want to read and watch his Corporation’s exported products with the same scrutiny. In manufacturing it’s called quality control and essential to keep shoppers returning.
Then he could let offenders know of his disquiet, as Jo and Joe Public’s complaints won’t make a frame of difference.
Viewers near and far concerned about the way the world is heading need the ABC as a trusted, balanced, honest news provider. It would be good to believe the ABC respects us. On its present performance it doesn’t.
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First published in Pearls and Irritations, 21 August 2024: https://johnmenadue.com/the-abc-of-telling-tales-x2-links-b/
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