It was great fun for many of us who work at the national broadcaster to see Stuart Littlemore skewer Paddy McGuinness on the show the other night. Paddy pontificated on the inability of ABC journalists to pronounce foreign names, then was caught by the Littlemore program's cameras doing exactly the same thing. The veteran columnist would argue, of course, that print journos only have to know how to spell, and it's our job as broadcasters, not his, to get things right. Littlemore, as you'd expect from a man who has a day job in the adversarial confines of the courtroom, did a good forensic hatchet job on the conference, revealing some of the critics' own ideological inconsistencies and muddle-headed thinking. The jury may well have delivered a not guilty verdict to the accused, the ABC, after watching Littlemore.
Generalisations are meaningless.
Take this example, gleaned from the eight papers published on the IPA Web site, which I read on Saturday night. This is from a man who bristles at ideological labels, describing himself as a gay ex-union delegate in favour of labour market deregulation and narcotics liberalisation. The conference's self-appointed critic from the Left, publisher Tony Moore, described the ABC as a captive of narrow class, generational and Anglophilic Australian interests, with a class bias towards the privately schooled. Presenter Richard Fidler contends it has a leafy, tertiary educated Anglocentric view of Australia, where non-Anglos are those delightful people in ethnic costume who've brought us all this lovely food. Publisher and columnist Michael Duffy said the ABC broadcasts for the cultured, upper middle classes.