Random Note #187,642
The ABC just can’t help making the news for all the wrong reasons. Twice Thursday (25/5) on Abdel Magied’s future and the ABC’s own in house affirmative action and aboriginal employment quotas at senate estimates and now Senator Mitch Fifield has told a budget estimates hearing that as the Minister responsible for the ABC he wanted to make it clear a Quadrant Online article on the Manchester bombing “constitutes a new low in Australian public debate”.
In the minds of many the ABC has been plumbing those depths for a very long time and if Managing Director Michelle Guthrie wants to talk about “sick and twisted” then the resurrection of “Troughman” from the Sydney gay scene in the 1980’s by the RN program Earshot, would be a good place to start.Troughman’s trick was to visit gay bars and public urinals, lay in the trough and allow patrons to urinate on him. Not only did the ABC consider this some kind of weird high art or culture worthy of broader dissemination and ventilation in the Earshot program, “Searching for Troughman” but referred to him as a “Sydney superhero”.
Guthrie and Minister Fifield are obviously ok with this RN trash programming masquerading as art and culture or totally ignorant of what the ABC is up to. It’s one or the other. They preach the mantra of diversity and inclusion but on just about every issue there is no diversity in either opinion, presenters or guest commentators and alternative views are excluded. The Drum and Q&A in recent days are just two cases in point. It’s quite apparent that the ABC Board and management has some serious questions to answer.
If there are apologies to be made we can start with Fifield and Guthrie as the ABC is out of control and off the rails and has been pushing its own agenda on a range of issues from climate change, to indigenous affairs, Muslim affairs and terrorism, refugees, stolen children, gay marriage and just about every other fashionable and faddish left wing cause, for a very, very long time. ABC boss Michelle Guthrie demands apology from Quadrant.