ACMA, media watchdog, says lies by omission at the ABC are OK

This story of Beliaik’s is making waves, cross-posted already at Catallaxy. Through letters and FOI’s he shows that the ABC won’t publish expert stories that don’t fit their personal political beliefs (specifically on climate and corals), and that the main industry “watchdog” is such a puppet they don’t even mind.
 
In February Beliaik tipped off the ABC about breaking news that showed the Karl et al “pausebuster paper” was hyped, broke rules. A former NOAA scientist (Bates) was blowing the whistle on unapproved key datasets, which weren’t archived properly. He also talked about how the key software had conveniently disappeared when the one sole computer it was on, crashed.  Unlike other leading news services around the world, the ABC didn’t report this, even though they had pushed the Karl paper when it came out. Effectively, they hid the counter story from their audience.

When he complained to the ABC the first thing they mentioned was that the story wasn’t covered by other media in Australia. Now I thought the point of a $1b public broadcaster was to cover important things other media don’t, but the ABC (which is the only media outlet here with a dedicated science unit) won’t report on corruption in climate science. Quite probably, other media would have reported it if the ABC had led the way. Can we get that billion dollars back, thanks?

Tellingly, the geniuses at the ABC also effectively claimed that they knew more than Dr Bates and could dismiss his opinion.
Here iJohn Bates bio:

John Bates, Ph.D. in Meteorology, spent the last 14 years of his career at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (now NCEI) as a Principal Scientist, where he served as a Supervisory Meteorologist until 2012. He won the NOAA Administrator’s Award 2004 for “outstanding administration and leadership in developing a new division to meet the challenges to NOAA in the area of climate applications related to remotely sensed data”. He was awarded a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2014 for visionary work in the acquisition, production, and preservation of climate data records (CDRs).

So faced with an expert whistleblower the ABC found a couple of scientists who disagreed, and then admitted  that their job was to robotically repeat what government funded scientists say without question:

Overall, the ABC’s coverage reflects the weight of scientific opinion in this area, which favours the view that global warming is happening and that human activity contributes to this warming.  

So if the government employs 99% believers in a bizarre theory that we can control the weather and they produce meaningless, incompetent and repetitive papers, with code that “disappeared” you won’t hear about it from the ABC. Remind me what we pay them for?

Beliaik reported the ABC to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) whose core reason for existing, they say,  is ” Making media and communications work for all Australians”. 

You might think our publicly funded broadcaster might not be “working” for all Australians if it won’t publish stories telling views that fit with half the population, but you’d be wrong. According to Beliaik that “ACMA ruled that I can’t complain about something that didn’t happen.” Thus lies by omission, and selective, biased editing, is permitted by a network of government funded agencies. It starts with scientists being funded to find a crisis, who selectively don’t publish inconvenient papers. Then that bias is spread by a media outlet that won’t publish expert whistleblower complaints. Then that bias is protected by a media regulator that, by definition, will never rule against overt, unarguable bias by the public broadcaster.

I say whatever we pay ACMA, we want that back too.
– Jo

PS: ACMA Budget here, is that $108m, see p79?

Source: joannenova.com