“Written and spoken Charles Croucher for the LNP”.
I’ll explain that soon. But first, a recap. A few Bugs back, we poked fun at a Nine News piece from Charles Croucher about a local community protest against one of Peter Dutton’s seven proposed nuclear power plant sites for Oz.
As a satirical device, we had Croucher’s story being highjacked by producers at the Nine studio and that Croucher as a fair, professional and balanced scribe (You BUGgers out there are now invited to insert prolonged canned laughter here or make as much noise as you can with clackers, kazoos, vuvuzelas and klaxon horns if you have them) had resigned in protest at his yarn being turned into sounding like a pro-LNP propaganda piece. The post is linked at the bottom of this rant.
Satire aside, the grim reality is the exact opposite of our pisstake: that Croucher was clearly central to how it was constructed and presented.
And it’s a classic early example of what we can expect from the unbalanced and unfair reporting from the mainstream mediocre in the lead up to next year’s federal election.
Before we dissect the Croucher segment, I just ask all you BUGgers out there to remember that Nine News is from the Nine Entertainment Co. stable that supposedly is a little bit fairer and more balanced that anything churned out by Newscorpse mastheads and electronic outlets.
Okay, the dissection of Croucher’s piece.
He begins with a fine little pieces of editorialising ….”A small protest in a medium-sized town…”
That one’s clearly for you, Dutts! Take that, you anti-nuke protesters and activists! Do any of you BUGgers out there seriously think that sometime down the track, Croucher is going to kick off by describing a protest in Newcastle against those wind-farms off the NSW coast that Peter Dutton has vowed to stop as “a small protest for a large-sized city”?
Croucher doesn’t name the Victorian town from his report the other night but a few protesters are quoted and the Opposition frontbencher Darren Chester then gets his chance to claim that Australians generally support the idea of nuclear power plants even though PM Anthony Albanese doesn’t.
In a second piece of unprovoked editorialising, Croucher then comes out with his own line that “modern nuclear has proven safe internationally”. That one’s clearly for you, Dutts! Take that, you anti-nuke protesters and activists!
Proven safe? I’m not so sure. Earthquakes aside, were we to go to war with China or anyone else in coming decades, I suspect that seven sizeable nuclear power plant sites with multiple reactors would be obvious targets and their destruction close to population centres would prove totally disastrous – many, many, times worse – than taking out renewable energy transmission lines and countless wind and solar panel farms dotted around this wide brown land of ours.
To be fair, Croucher’s piece the other night did show a semblance of balance by having some quotes from the Labor federal member for the Hunter region in NSW. A grab from both sides of politics? Who could find fault with that?
Well, we at The Bug could. Before the clip from the Labor chap, Croucher added this – “….as Peter Dutton previewed his own campaign on energy…”.
What followed was Dutton on camera scoring points over Labor’s campaign promise back at the 2022 poll to reduce power bills by $275. Take that, one-term Albo! Score one for Dutts!
But wait, there’s more! After the Labor chap’s offering, we’re back to Dutton on screen declaring that only a government led by him could provide clean and cheap and reliable power.
Can you start to see why we at The Bug reckon Croucher’s piece, to conform with electoral laws, should have had “Written and spoken Charles Croucher for the LNP” at the bottom of the screen? There’s no doubt that the right-wing powers that be at Nine News and the wider Nine Entertainment Co. management would have been delighted with what Croucher has achieved here. How nice of Croucher to give three bites of the political cherry for the LNP; one for Labor.
We’ll leave for another day discussion on whether or not reporters such as Croucher present these lopsided reports deliberately because they know that’s what’s expected of them, or is it done, as we at The Bug have suggested for decades, unconsciously as some form of message osmosis that seeps into their brains covertly from above? Like how Newscorpse editors know what Murdoch line to follow even if dear old Rupe says he never directly tells them the message he wants constantly massaged?
Dutton’s two grabs were, plain and simple, uncalled for and unprofessional. They came across exactly as our Bug pisstake exposed a few days back; nothing more than a platform for the LNP to test-drive campaign material for next March/April. A campaign preview, as Croucher said, having also declared “that power prices will be one of the key issues during the federal campaign”.
In that satirical pisstake, Croucher demanded as a fair, professional and balanced scribe (cue those clackers, kazoos, vuvuzelas and klaxon horns again) that his next federal politics piece – on nuclear power or any other election topic du jour – would have to contain two grabs from Anthony Albanese for the sake of balance.
If you BUGgers out there believe that’s going to happen, I have some bridges you might be interested in buying!
Croucher’s biased report with the totally uncalled for double leg-up to Dutton doesn’t bode well for how this nation’s woeful mainstream mediocre is going cover that looming campaign. Labor will rightly be fearing what’s to come in the months ahead, and not just from the Newscorpse shit rags and Sky LNPNews.
Croucher’s piece – and we suspect he thinks it was all fine and dandy and a solid example of superbly balanced and fair journalism and that’s very, very, sad – is a sobering reminder of how hard it is for Labor to win elections in this country. It is anything but a level playing field.
Don Gordon-Brown
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