Government goes troppo over anti-war media

By Martin Hirst

So it's not just the Tories in Britain who are huffing and puffing over what they see as pro-peace media coverage of the Gulf War. Our right-wing Labor government of Bob Hawke is pressuring the Australian Broadcasting Corporation over the use of academic commentators who have an antiwar "bias".

The campaign against Middle East experts Dr Robert Springborg and Ahmad Shboul began with a scurrilous attack in the Sydney Morning Herald (a "respectable" non-Murdoch paper) by right-wing commentator Gerard Henderson.

Hawke and his defence minister Robert Ray then got up in parliament and denounced the ABC's "pacifist" stance, despite the fact that this was not obvious to the peace movement, which has consistently complained about the pro-war stance of much of the ABC's coverage.

Members of the Australian Journalists Association condemned the inquiry announced by the government and refused to have anything to do with it. And since the government's threat to impose a watchdog on government-funded broadcasters, the AJA has moved to oppose this as well.

One unpleasant side effect has been that Gerard Henderson has been given almost unlimited access to every radio and television current affairs program on the ABC, and reactionary newspaper columnists have had a field day attacking the "left-wing bias" of the national broadcaster.

There's no doubt that the governments moves are linked to its fears that the ABC and SBS are hotbeds of antiwar sentiment. In the experience of Journalists Against the War and Censorship, most journos are opposed to the war.

Journalists Against the War and Censorship has taken its banner to antiwar marches in Sydney, and a group has been formed in Melbourne. Our next activity is a forum on war and censorship on February 28 [see page 23 for details].

From GLW issue 2