Can Their ABC get any more ridiculous? I ask this after reading a piece (nsfw) by ABC Lifestyle reporter Kellie Scott from Meanjin (she/her, and Brisbane office, I think). You might well ask, “Why am I reading it?” Because my weekly email from ABC Everyday took me to ABC Lifestyle, that’s why.

Kellie’s dilemma is how to stop using the word “women”, a word now frowned on by Team ABC at the $1.1b a year taxpayer-funded behemoth.

When we come together with chair Kim Williams (he/him) around the ABC’s “great national campfire”under the Southern Cross, remember that women can be men, men can be women, and every gender deserves to be revered (June is Pride month).

In her piece Kellie has to use “women” sometimes when referring to “women’s health centres” in Naarm or Gadigal, and sometimes she forgets and uses the triggering word “women” out of habit. But she finds a workaround 15 times by using the word “people”, as in

♦ “Young people aged 18 to 24 [who] feel anxious or embarrassed about their genital appearance”

♦ “People wearing tight-fitting or revealing clothing”

♦ “People with a vulva” and

♦ “People who have given birth”.

Personally, I haven’t given birth to anyone yet but it’s nice of Kellie to make me feel included.

I wondered how Kellie might update and improve that Lord Jim novel by Joseph Conrad aka Józef Korzeniowski about which I was examined in my UWA days. Maybe like this:

As the sun climbs to its zenith, the island steamer Jesteś Piękna glides through the glassy turquoise sea. It hits an unseen waterlogged wreck. 

[From the original: “The sharp hull driving on its way seemed to rise a few inches in succession through its whole length, as though it had become pliable, and settled down again rigidly to its work of cleaving the smooth surface of the sea. Its quivering stopped, and the faint noise of thunder ceased all at once, as though the ship had steamed across a narrow belt of vibrating water and of humming air.”]

The bosun, a giant of colour in a polka-dot dress and high heels, salutes: “Captain Krzyżyk! We’re sinking!”

Captain Krzyżyk: Thank you, Mr Brzęczyszczykiewicz. Permission to use the loud-hailer!

Bosun: To the lifeboat cutters, everyone! We have only five minutes! First, children and people who have given birth!

The crowd of passengers, terrified, mill back and forth in confusion. A differently-abled passenger (speech impediment) asks, “What about my grandpa, Mr Brzęczyszczykiewicz?”

 Bosun (infuriated): Do I have to spell it out for you? To the lifeboats, children and people with a vulva go first!

The crowd now gets it. The people who have given birth climb in plus kids, and the crew, largely LGBTQIA+, feminists and First Nations claimants, release the davits while holding back a stampede of the people without vulvas…

I began this piece by asking if the ABC could get any more ridiculous. Well, it can: Kellie Scott’s piece is just my warm-up. The ultimate absurdity is that the ABC is about to launch ABC News Verify, enforcing its version of truthiness on the Australian media landscape. This is the organisation that ran with the fake news of Trump’s Russia conspiracy for four years, and hounded the innocent Cardinal Pell into prison with vile and tricked-up tales of paedophilia.

I can find no announcement yet but two inadvertent leaks sketch the ABC’s impending Ministry of Truth.

♦ Late February – an email from News Director Justin Stevens leaks to Crikey!. Stevens tells staff the ABC is dumping its seven-year partnership with RMIT Fact Check from June 30. The ABC will instead will launch its own “ABC News Verify”. This will be a “team of specialists with the ability to scale up to support our special coverage in times of crisis. It will be part of the Investigative Journalism and Current Affairs team led by Jo Puccini.”[1] 

RMIT Fact Check, led by Russell Skelton, has suffered hammer blows, richly deserved[2], culminating in an expose by the Institute of Public Affairs of its Yes bias in the Referendum[3], and excommunication by Meta and by its global patron International Fact-Checking Network, later reversed.[4] The ABC, purportedly cash-strapped, has been flipping $165,000 a year to RMIT since 2020.

♦ Last week long-standing ABC presenter Michael Rowland, who once called me “Swearing Man” for directly quoting ABC comedians’ profanities, has jumped the gun on any Verify announcement while interviewing his departing executive producer, Lucy Carter, on ABCTV Breakfast.[5] The transcript goes:

Rowland: And Lucy, before you go, on behalf of all of us, it’s a sad day for all of us losing you. You, my friend, possess one of the sharpest editorial minds I know…You are heading to ABC Verify. You’ll play a very important role for the ABC in sorting through what’s real and what’s not in this age of disinformation…Thank you, my friend, and go well.

Lucy Carter: That means the world. It is an extraordinary team here at News Brekky, yourself included.

This exchange was in the grand tradition of ABC celebs smooching each other while their audience evaporates. Seeing the Puccini/Carter team will be helming ABC Verify, here’s some bio.

Jo Puccini has been 16 years with the ABC, starting with Four Corners and  moving to production at Media Watch, Lateline, 7.30, National Reporting Team, Investigations Editor and now top dog at Current Affairs. Interesting tweet history by the way.

Cricket tragic Lucy Carter started with the ABC 17 years ago as a triple j newsreader and Journalist in Charge, followed by a NSW Crime Reporter role and jobs with News, Radio Current Affairs, 7:30, Four Corners researcher (five years) and lately supervising producer, News Brekky.

Since facts about ABC Verify (even its name) are sparse, I’ll assume it’s a BBC Verify knock-off and pick up clues from there. But first let’s see the ABC’s track record as Australia’s beacon of media truth and ethics.

Traducing Pauline Hanson

The ABC, seeing Hanson from the outset as a popular threat to its leftist agenda, sooled its so-called comedians onto her with filthy parodies about “Pauline Pantsdown”. In Hanson’s successful lawsuits, the initial judge commented

There’s a political overtone to the whole exercise which seems to denigrate her personally by making assertions as to her sexual preference and her abnormal sexual attraction with respect to children and so on … I can’t imagine anybody listening to that production would not conclude that the assertion was that Pauline Hanson was a paedophile … or that she was a homosexual and rejoiced in the fact … I can’t imagine that one can avoid liability for injury to reputation … by simply prefacing it by saying, `Well, this is satirical, don’t take this seriously,’ and then playing it over and over and over again.

The ABC spent more of our taxes justifying its indefensible conduct, losing again on appeal before Chief Justice Paul De Jersey (later Queensland’s Governor), who said,

Before the Chamber Judge, [Hanson] contended that the broadcast material gave rise to imputations that she is a homosexual, a prostitute, involved in unnatural sexual practices, associated with the Ku Klux Klan, a man and/or a transvestite and involved in or party to sexual activities with children. The [ABC] essentially contended that the material amounted merely to vulgar abuse and was not defamatory…These were grossly offensive imputations relating to the sexual orientation and preference of a Member of Parliament and her performance which the appellant in no degree supports as accurate and which were paraded as part of an apparently fairly mindless effort at cheap denigration.[6]

Cardinal Pell

The ABC’s vendetta combined with the shameless prosecutions by the politically corrupt Victoria Police, resulting in the innocent Pell serving 404 jail days in solitary. It is Australia’s most high-profile miscarriage of justice since Federation. On the day the High Court ruled 7-nil in Pell’s favour, ABCTV’s flagship 7pm News failed to inform viewers that the decision — so embarrassing for the ABC — was unanimous. When queried, the national broadcaster told me next day that the omission was an oversight.[7]

Hunter Biden’s laptop: The ABC reporting (and non-reporting) on the 2020 laptop revelations was and remains disgraceful. The FBI and the US spy and tech giants conspired with the pro-Biden media[8] to prevent voters in the final fortnight learning about Hunter’s multi-million payoffs from Ukraine, China, Kazakhstan etc.[9] Twitter even censored Trump’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany.

The laptop was dismissed as a Russian plant, or not Hunter’s, or Trump propaganda and the ABC lapped it all up.[10] The New York Times and Washington Post a year later sheepishly admitted in their fine print that the laptop was authentic, but the ABC has still not corrected its fake news. US correspondent Barbara Miller, covering the recent Hunter gun trial, had an opportunity since the government prosecutors were themselves relying on the laptop contents, but she skirted it like other ABC reporters.

Gazan casualties: Night after night, flagship ABCTV News touts uncritically the latest Palestinian death tolls invented by the Hamas terrorists. Yet statistician Abraham Wyner showed last March that the tallies are faked — statistically incredible. Moreover, the Hamas-friendly ABC never mentions in the nightly reports that any such tally includes terrorists sent by the IDF to meet 72 paradisal virgins.

The ABC never mentions that the civilian toll would be far less if Hamas had used its donors’ billions to build Gazans bomb shelters, and refrained from using schools, hospitals, UNWRA facilities and kindergartens for firing-points and weapons storage.

The ABC style would be akin to an imagined BBC in 1939-45 giving a platform to Dr Goebbels claiming kindly treatment of Jews at the Theresienstadt holiday camp. ABC coverage of Gaza reflects management fear of the fifth column of hundreds of petition-signing Israel haters among its journalists.

There is plenty more material to list as ABC flagship misinformation — e.g. indoctrinating millions of schoolkids with Bruce Pascoe’s rubbish. But enough of the ABC for the moment. I need to move on to the well-established BBC Verify.

Only 44 per cent of Britons trust BBC journalism; 48 per cent don’t. The BBC launched Verify a year ago as a “disinformation unit” to combat deemed misinformation, conspiracies and fake news. (The Beeb has been caught out in its own significant conspiracy to stack the dice on its global warming coverage [11]).

BBC Verify has a vast team of 60 journos allegedly skilled in forensic investigations and open-source intelligence on so-called ‘bad actors’. According to BBC News CEO Deborah Turness, their role is to fact-check, verify videos, counter disinformation and “crucially, explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth.”

Its disinformation correspondent, Marianna Spring, got off to a bad start by creating fake “undercover accounts” on social media to track “far right” conspirators – she saw no “far left” conspiracies. In reality, BBC Verify’s sleuths simply go to the usual suspects and paste up their handouts as confirmation of any government-backed orthodoxy.

As an example of what can be expected from ABC Verify, the BBC Verify output went to town this month (June) smearing subsistence farmer Jusper Machogu, 29, at Kisii, Kenya, for supposed disinformation, climate denial and disrespect to the green agenda on his mobile phone. You can watch him hoeing in the fields here. His X hashtag has acquired 27,000 African fans. His messaging includes,

Do I and a billion and half other Africans deserve a good life? Bet ya! But can we do that minus access to life-saving Fossil Fuels? A big no! … Climate change is mostly natural. A warmer climate is good for life. Being anti Fossil Fuels for Africans is the most racist and Neocolonial thing to do!

BBC Verify from its Rolodex finds a Kenyan climate scientist, Dr Joyce Kimutai, to knock Jusper down. Despite her localised credentials, Kimutai’s higher education was entirely in Western-funded institutions such as Oxford, LSE and Carbon Trust, in other words she’s an extrusion of the green blob. Cutting to the chase, Verify shows that Jusper’s donors (who’ve stumped up $US9000) include small oil outfits and climate deniers. This from a global BBC unit whose own funding for 60 staff alone is over UKP2.5m a year, with indirect links to outfits like Climate Works (annual budget $US480m) and green billionaires like Bill Gates and the Rockefellers.

Jusper’s sin is to show the reality of fuel and electricity-poor farmers. It’s dawn-to-dusk back-breaking toil, with no respite even for elderly women, even in the afternoon heat. “It doesn’t matter if the sun is too hot, they have to do this. This is what Europeans refer to as ‘Sustainable’,” Jusper explains. “It’s a level of existence that would not be tolerated in Europe, and which has long been abolished by the use of fossil fuels and legislation.”

BBC Verify has close ties to the green billionaire-funded[12] Oxford Climate Journalism Network, which runs six-months courses for batches of 100 journos worldwide on how to spruik net zero emissions. Its extremist lecturers have advocated fining or jailing net-zero dissenters.[13]

To “hit closer to home”, course participants are told to pick a local fruit such as a mango and discuss why it wasn’t as tasty as the year before due to climate change.

Graduates from this Oxford University-Reuters-UN alliance go forth to write such essays as ‘Journalists should help audiences understand extreme weather – even when they lack climate data’, and ‘Newsrooms should develop a mental health strategy to help climate journalists cope’.

The Oxford group’s listed course participants include Perth ABC audio/current affairs reporter Isabel Moussalli in the current sixth batch (July-December 2024). ABC Canberra climate reporter Jessica Davisgot there in the fourth batch (late 2023).[14] In the third Oxford batch (early 2023) was Isabelle Lane, a Melbourne-based SBS data journalist and editor.

The ABC is already in green governments’ pockets through its membership of the global so-called Trusted News Initiative aimed at throttling on-line climate and Covid dissenters by depriving them of advertising. For brevity’s sake you can check on that here.

ABC Verify will hit the airwaves any day now. Maybe its truth blowtorch would best be pointed at its parent.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] I emailed ABC media liaison heads Nick Leys and Sally Jackson, ‘What will be the title at Verify of Lucy Carter? Is ABC Verify modelled on BBC Verify? What are the roles and functions of ABC Verify?’

In the words of The Walrus and the Carpenter, ‘But answer came there none’.

[2] Last August 10, FactLab slapped a “False” label on Sky News’ Peta Credlin’s revelations about the Uluru Aboriginal manifesto. She had found through FOI that it was not a one-pager but a 26-pager seeking reparations, sovereignty and much awful else. The “False” label caused Meta to restrict circulation of Credlin’s message, warning that “independent fact-checkers say that this information has no basis in fact.”[3].[4] 

News Corp Australia threatened legal action against FactLab for allegedly providing “misleading” information under Australian Consumer Law. Sky News master sleuth Jack Houghton ran a horrific expose of FactLab’s bias and malfunctions, under the header, The Fact Check Files. For example, Meta asserted independence from its fact-checkers, but Houghton reported that it was secretly paying RMIT up to $740,000 a year via a Meta subsidiary in Ireland.[5] Houghton also quoted Skelton and staffer Renee Davidson touting the Yes case on their social media while ostensibly referees of the debate. Ms Davidson’s re-tweets included likening Opposition Leader Peter Dutton to a “fear-mongering racist.”[6]

[3] IPA lawyer/historian John Storey and his research assistant, Margaret Chambers, catalogued and analysed all 80 referendum “fact checks” by RMIT Factlab and RMIT/ABC Fact Check from Labor’s election in May 2022 to the vote last October 14. Storey concluded that the referendum “likely featured the most unfair targeting and censorship of one side of a political debate—the No case—in Australian history.” For RMIT/ABC, 30 checks or 77 per cent targeted “No” claims. Of the 30, the unit rated 29 as “false” and one lone check as “true”. Of the nine “Yes” claims, the unit found five to be “true”, three “false” and one “neutral”. For RMIT FactLab, all 41 checks (100 per cent) targeted “No” and all (100 per cent) ruled the “No” claims to be “false”. 

[4] RMIT FactLab published a fact check of itself, rejecting claims that the organisation was being misused by Yes proponents.

[5] Hat-tip to Gerard Henderson’s Media Watch Dog

[6] This suit was decades ago, but the ABC’s tone ever since towards a politician commanding 5% of primary votes remains overwhelmingly negative, in contrast to the ABC’s perpetual fawning over Greens politicians (12%).

[7] ABC email 9/4/2020: “I am writing in response to your complaint regarding ABC News. I agree, the fact the decision was unanimous should have been in the top story on the 7PM News on Tuesday.  It was reported across other ABC platforms throughout the day and was included in last night’s 7PM coverage. I have spoken to the reporter and producer and they have assured me the omission was not in any way intentional. Kind regards, Georgia Spokes, Victorian News Editor.”

[8] The specifics of the Deep State intervention emerged only because Elon Musk bought Twitter for $US44 billion and released the documentation. Polling suggested this censorship could have tipped enough votes into a win for Biden

[9] Joe Biden’s lying about his non-involvement is now acknowledged even by US mainstream media.

[10] Paul Barry of Media Watch, 2/11/2020 :“Trump’s supporters in the media hoped that story would swing the election. But, again, the facts are disputed. The emails supposedly came from a laptop left at a computer repair shop last year by Hunter Biden, which somehow found its way to Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. But the repair shop owner can’t be 100 per cent sure it was Hunter who dropped it off because he’s “legally blind”. And some believe the emails were more likely hacked — with claims the Russians were involved again. The Murdoch-owned Fox News dismisses that idea…

[11] The BBC’s “28-gate” conspiracy covers 2006-18. The BBC pretended that a group of 28 external “best scientific experts” had advised the BBC not to give climate sceptics any coverage. After many years of FOI battles to drag out the names, and the BBC using three top barristers to keep hiding them, the 28 “best scientific experts” turned out to be just three scientists, and a mob of 25 Greenpeace and other activists, vested business interests and even someone from the US Embassy. In 2018 the BBC policy reaffirmed the policy of denying sceptics any platform on the BBC.

[12] Past Oxford funders include Google, Meta  and the European Climate Fund, backed by Extinction Rebellion funder Sir Christopher Hohn.

[13] Oxford’s climate hysteric Saffron O’Neill who advocated the jailings in Carbon Brief, is represented on the Oxford Advisory Board through Carbon Brief’s editor Leo Hickman.

[14] Davis has her own website https://jesskatedavis.com. She writes 7.30 pieces like “Climate change is already having devastating effects on our health.” I thought global longevity has jumped from 46.5 years in 1950 to 71.7 years in 2022 . It turns out that Davis’s report conflates climate with fire/flood/storm disasters, but even there mortality rates globally have fallen around 99% in the past century.