swindling along, again
Yet more on the Swindle film…
I was in the audience at the Australian International Documentary Conference when senior ABC staff unveiled the new diversity of opinion editorial policy.
I am kicking myself that I didn’t ask the obvious question: what stops you purveying a film on Holocaust Denial?
I thought it was too much of a juvenile debating trick, but I failed to remember that it leads to another question – if you wouldn’t broadcast a David Irving film, where do you draw the line? And that is interesting.
I’ve been told by loyal ABC staff that “the debate is over” about Holocaust denial and no-one seriously supports it. So how do we decide when the climate debate is over? When I began to suggest that there is no trained consensus against Global Warming any more, I was told the Prime Minister didn’t believe in it.
Hmmm … that reflects his bob-each-way duplicity, in which he is dragged reluctantly to accept it but his government has actively funded anti GW programs for at least five years. He supports a Greenhouse Office, for crying out loud.
A number of people, including Robyn Williams, science guru inside the ABC, are distressed about the descent towards claptrap in science. Broadcasting Psychic Detectives was not a good look. It is felt that this program provides yet more evidence of this trend. In a quick Screen Hub conversation, he confirmed this fact, and told me that he was particularly annoyed by the way in which the program accused scientists of lying, distortion and corruption.
The concern may seem like a storm in a teacup, until you spend some time watching cable TV, or perusing the catalogues of international companies actively trying to sell programs to the ABC. There is a lot of mendacious, credulous, superstitious, deceptive and anti-scientific shit out there, all offering to provide better ratings and younger audiences.
But if you are worried about the rise of anti-science, this kind of stuff makes you reach for a bludgeon.
Critics and libertarians would claim that people like me just want to censor television – an odd stance from people who have opposed censorship all our lives. I think we need to bite the bullet and admit that this is the case. Indeed, we are trying to nanny the audience, to prevent the transmission of culturally polluting material.
Let us imagine two programs. In one, a filmmaker travels with Noel Pearson to Alice Springs, to talk to the people in the Town Camp, and to the Central Australian Land Council. Provocative television, knee-deep in an important debate, on which lives depend. In another, a filmmaker travels with a group of White supremacists to Alice Springs, for a candid analysis of the innate inferiority of Aboriginal Australians. What is the difference?
In the Pearson case, we can expect some fundamental concern for truth, some debating rules, a conversation in which people listen to each other. In the other, racist garbage. But surely, with a panel show afterwards, this would be shown for what it is, and destroy the fascist case?
No. It would provoke hatred, and give encouragement to racists.
Climate denialism is not so apparently provocative. But it does undermine an extremely difficult change we are trying to make as a society, to accept that we are off the CO2 tango. There are a lot of people in our society who want a reason to turn on the pointy-heads, whole tribes who want to retreat from fear into denial. See, the boogy man doesn’t exist after all… pop your head back in the sand and let the sun warm your bum.
I don’t want taxpayers’ resources spent on unsupportable theses that are simply not true, let alone serious allegations of mass conspiracy. I am not interested in a scarce resource – time on the ABC – spent on dingbat theories about moon landings and conspiracies to blow up the World Trade Centre. Unless they are lively, funny but essentially sober-minded and honest debunkings of these grotesque notions.
They are, after all, just entertaining diversions from the real problems that people of good will are trying to work out – climate, Indigenous welfare, education, military expenditure, the retreat from Iraq, our relationship with Indonesia etc etc.
On the other hand, I don’t want Jeff McMullen’s Monday night porridge show either.
The fact that a documentary will get attention is not the point. Neither documentary nor the ABC exists to provide entertainment in a Coliseum.
(Don Arthur has a fine post on this
May 28th, 2007 at 3:14 am
No need for censorship or nannying the audience David – just leave the crap to the commercials.
Sadly, error does have the right to be heard – what it doesn’t have is the right to be treated as anything other than error.
May 29th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Yeah, it’s not censorship, just quality control. They are free to sell it and advocate the bs contained therein, just don’t expect us to pay for it to appear on national tv. No different from collection management in a library.
May 29th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
While simply laughable drivel to me – and comprehensively debunked since its release, I have no problem with it being broadcast by whoever wants too.
This sort of material is far more useful to polemecists when it is labeled as being suppressed, implying all sorts of mysterious values and cachet that it would never have in the light of day.
While I understand the arguement about ‘quality control’, this is TV we are talking about. 50 years too late.
May 29th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
The funniest thing I saw recently was ACA lambasting ppl that had appeared on some program about ‘The Secret’. I guess they kind of forgot their own channel was happy to hawk the same crap a few months earlier.
May 30th, 2007 at 1:20 am
The ABC has previously run ‘balanced’ debates on nuclear energy, GM foods, dams and other engineering developments in Australia, and more. These ‘balanced’ debates have been little more than an excuse to give equal weight to equally extreme, yet opposing, political views that occasionally make reference to scientific facts and research.
It’s a measure of the popularity of global warming theory that, whereas previously, this ‘balanced’ approach on the ABC has passed unremarked, but now has become the target of criticism. And yet, the discussion about global warming is more hopelessly politicised, and more extreme, than just about any of the other issues that feature prominently in the media.
June 4th, 2007 at 2:27 am
TimT, a lot of people would disagree with your premise that the ABC has achieved ‘balance’ in the past; Richard Alston and Senator Santoro are two who spring to mind. Are you implying that ‘the great leftwing conspiracy’ is a furphy?
June 4th, 2007 at 3:19 am
Neither of these two are objective witnesses to an unbiassed media, of course, being more than normally partisan members of the government Right.
It is probably not worth fighting this battle again, but I will say that it is not the task of the media in general to be balanced, In a democracy, it should be putting the blowtorch on the politicians.
It is a simple fact of life that it is the government which gets to do stuff, and to endure the great mass of the scrutiny.