A common meme is that the media is biased towards the political left. This meme was deliberately created to encourage well-meaning journalists to be more generous in their reporting of Neo-Cons in a misguided attempt at being fair and also as a mechanism for refuting criticism of any media reports that criticise Neo-Cons.
The ABC has been criticised for being biased towards the left as part of this attack on fair media and have recently demonstrated that they are in fact biased towards the Neo-Con ideas by airing a pseudo-documentary about climate change The Great Global Warming Swindle.
The fake documentary has been refuted by many scientists, here is one by George Monbiot published in The Age.
I wonder whether this blog post will get Google adverts related to Nostradamus and UFOs – I’m sure that the google search engine has worked out that cranks are interested in that fake-doco.
I don’t know what scientific background you have, but this is a interesting read if you struggle to read past the linguistics terms:
http://www.discourses.org/OldArticles/Discourse%20and%20manipulation.pdf
Claudio
I don’t know whether “bias” is a good choice of word here. One documentary doesn’t show the whole organisation as being biased.
Certainly, the ABC board has been stacked by the government; Janet Albrechtson has no broadcasting credentials other than being a right-wing writer for News Corporation’s highly biased newspaper, The Australian; and Keith Windshuttle is a revisionist historian.
I listen to an awful lot of ABC radio, especially the local Melbourne station, and it seems to me that they’re pretty good at asking difficult questions of all sides of politics. And this seems to be the issue with the neocons; according to them, /any/ criticism is bias.
They later changed their tune somewhat, when this was pointed out to them, complaining instead that “The ABC always asks questions from a left-wing point of view”. It’s hard to see how neocon policy could be criticised from a much /further/ right wing point of view than its own.
(It should also be pointed out that during the years of the Labor government, Paul Keating, too, was a vocal critic of the ABC. Seems to me that if you have both major parties complaining about them, they’re probably doing a good job).