Poor old
Janet Albrechtsen is seriously out of her depth. Not being a journalist
herself and not appearing to have much regard for either the craft or
the ethics underpinning good journalism, she gets done over horribly
whenever she tries to take on journalists. This is the second time
she’s lost against Media Watch. The team at Media Watch is scarily forensic in putting a yarn together, Janet just has opinions backed up by shoddy leg work. This is why The Oz shouldn’t have her as a columnist and why the ABC shouldn’t have her as a director.

As for the mob at AM
editing out the embarrassing bits of Tony Eastley’s less than glorious
encounter with Amanda Vanstone, the problem with the rest of the ABC is
that it doesn’t abide by Media Watch’s standards. It brings to
mind something a former board member once told me about a very senior
and still serving figure at Aunty. This very senior person told the
former board member: “When I hear the word principle I want to reach
for a gun.”

If Janet Albrechtsen has a problem with Media Watch,
she should complain to management. I know from bitter personal
experience that it works. When Michael Kroger was on the ABC board, he
complained about an item on John Faine’s program on the old 3LO. The
program staff initially refused to run the clarification Kroger had
demanded. They argued that they’d given Kroger every opportunity to put
his side of the story. Management intervened and, under threat of the
sack, the 3LO staff caved in and ran the clarification. I brought
attention to this at the time with an op-ed piece in The Age.
Six months later, when my contract was up, I was sacked. It was a
different management in those days but it’s not like the current lot
have shown they’re any less disposed to caving in to outside pressure.