COMMENT: The Daily Telegraph struggles to retaliate ...

Poor Luke McIlveen from the Daily Telegraph today claims to have exposed ABCTV's Media Watch

... fighting claims of hypocrisy after its website published anti-Semitic comments mocking the Holocaust and claiming a Jewish conspiracy.

McIlveen says the offending comments were placed on the MW forums the day after the episode which castigated the Tele (and, to a lesser extent, the Sydney Morning Herald) for moderating and allowing racist and inflammatory comments on its blog.

It took McIlveen an entire 7 days to discover the comments. By that time, as McIlveen’s Opinion Editor Tim Blair notes on his personal blog, the comments have already been removed. Blair himself first published the comments on his blog on 18 June 2007.

I’m not exactly sure where the hypocrisy on MW’s part is. It’s not as if anyone at MW is suggesting that such views should be aired because they are “held by many Australians, especially in Sydney ”. Nor does anyone at MW suggest that only persons with “bourgeois sensibilities” insist the law be obeyed.

The anti-Jewish comments are appalling. But then, McIlveen quotes MW’s executive producer Tim Palmer saying “the posts remained on the website for a ‘few minutes’ before being taken down” (this is confirmed by Blair’s blog). Further, the removed comments don’t talk about turning Jews into compost or vilifying them for the colour of their skin or other physical features.
Tim Blair wasn’t a happy camper on Tuesday night, after MW was broadcast. Those commenting on his blog were complaining about their posts on MW’s forums not being published. Perhaps the reason for this is that Palmer believed (with good reason) that in fact the comments were posted by Tim’s blog fan club.

As if to underscore the amount of pain the MW expose has caused him, Blair made a highly personal attack on Tim Palmer. However, Blair’s attack on Palmer was nothing compared to his highly defamatory references to an up and coming Australian children’s author.

McIlveen goes to all this trouble to castigate the kinds of comments that his own editor would happily allow to be moderated on his blogs. Clearly, on the Tele’s past of the blogosphere, racism is only wrong when it’s against indigenous people or anyone deemed Muslim.

The Tele’s editorial asks:

Perhaps its opposed to the vilification of Arabs, but has no problem with the harassment of Jews.

The author of that editorial should read the blog of the Tele’s Opinion Editor and ask whether vice versa is true.

© Irfan Yusuf 2007



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Luke McIlveen - Making it up as you go?

There are a number of ways you can engage in sensationalist tabloid journalism. For instance, you can add your own prejudicial context to words otherwise quoted out of context. Then you can just make it up as you go.

What methodology does Daily Telegraph journalist Luke MvIlveen use? Who knows.

In today’s DT, McIlveen manages to find a non-Lebanese Australian mum with 2 seriously disabled children who has been waiting two years for “priority” public housing. The point being?

McIlveen contrasts the situation of this unfortunate woman to what he describes as

Lebanese Australians evacuated from the Middle East came home
to a welfare smorgasbord.

McIlveen repeats his claims in today’s story.

The Daily Telegraph yesterday exclusively revealed details
of a taxpayer-funded seminar at Rockdale, where senior bureaucrats told Lebanese
Australians how to maximise their welfare payments.

In fact, according to a senior member of the Australian Lebanese community who I spoke with, the seminar was NOT for Lebanese Australians in general. Rather, it was a networking program for government departments and welfare workers funded under government grants. It was not an open invitation for Lebanese community members in general.

Further, the three women photographed and described in yesterday’s article as ordinary members of the Lebanese community were in fact THREE WELFARE WORKERS. One was from the Melkite Church welfare agency, the remaining two from Shia Muslim organisations. All are employed pursuant to heavily regulated government grants.

But will McIlveen and his paper tell the truth about what the event was really about? I won’t be holding my breath.

And it isn’t just one rogue reporter in on the game. Today’s DT Editorial continues with the apparent lie. It claims that this networking seminar among workers was in fact something different.

Earlier this week, a NSW Government-sponsored "forum'' spelled out to a
group of around 60 Australians rescued from Lebanon the welfare benefits -
public housing, Centrelink, welfare support services and so on - to which
they might be entitled.

Even intelligent and respectable broadsheets can get things wrong. The DT owes it to its readers to clarify and tell the truth.

© Irfan Yusuf 2006