Uncle Watch XI
Procrastination makes the world go round, so here’s another instalment of Uncle Watch.
Linking to an ABC story about wild Kangaroos in Paris, he complains that “A real kangaroo expert would know [they eat] ‘buds, leaves, and roots’.” It’s a pretty weak indictment of the ABC as it is, but when you realise it’s a wire story that was News Ltd as well, it becomes even weaker.
He also whines that Radio National is “not left enough”. I guess it’s pretty hard to prove left-wing bias at the ABC when the ABC is so determined to include right-wing opinions…
Coverage of David Hicks vs coverage of Wang Jianping also perplexes him. Noting that the two Australian citizens have been locked in foreign prisons, he’s not happy that Fairfax and the ABC disproportionately reported on David Hicks’ plight. Interestingly, he ignores News Ltd’s Hicks:Jianping ratio, presumably because it’s very similar. I guess it’s more newsworthy when the great and benevolent United States uses an offshore detention camp to subvert human rights, than when a dictatorship locks up a suspected spy. At least China pretended to give Jianping a trial. America still hasn’t charged Hicks, but it has signalled that he’ll go to a dodgy military tribunal like the one in China.
And he takes a cheap shot at Justice Michael Kirby, who “hasn’t declared his right to escape from lawful Chinese custody”. If he had to rattle off a list of every degrading hellhole in the world, the High Court would have transacted very little business in the last week. He did mention Cambodia, though, so let’s not pretend Kirby’s complaint was Guantanamo-specific.
Last time I checked, Uncle remained blissfully unaware of your campaign in multiple installments! Maybe we should snap him out of it.
To be fair to Uncle (gasp!), I can’t see anything on the ABC News website to suggest that [the kangaroo story] is a wire story, so unless he read the News Ltd story and realised they were the same thing, then assuming it’s solely an ABC story is fair enough.
Although his complaint is basically that they included buds and leaves, but left out roots. At which point it might be helpful to point out “they reproduce in the month of August”. That’s surely enough roots to satisfy his hunger?
It’s right there at the foot of the page (and every other page): “This service may include material from Agence France-Presse (AFP), APTN, Reuters, CNN and the BBC World Service which is copyright and cannot be reproduced.”
Ah, a generic “don’t assume this isn’t a wire story” warning. C’mon, Rob, that’s at the bottom of the ABC-written stories too, isn’t it?
Mark, I know it seems like a petty rebuttal, but it was a petty point to make in the first place. I hadn’t read the News.com version when I realised it was a wire story — it pretty much goes without saying that the ABC would not waste the time of their correspondents on a quirky tale like that.