… and the ABC’s ‘finest’ gobble it up!

If these two shown above are among the very best of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s journalism pool, I’d hate to see the worse.

Here’s when these two dunces failed their ABC audience completely in their “interview” with shadow finance minister Jane Hume on News Breakfast this morning.

On the studio couch, Hume started out by admonishing Labor for their apparent sin of always trying to tell the independent Reserve Bank what to do about interest rates. It’s something the LNP would never, ever do, she said ever so adamantly; evenly sweetly maybe.

Here’s what I immediately expected this morning: that James Glenday or Bridget Brennan would come back quickly at that utter piece of hypocritical twaddle from Hume with something akin to this: “Hang on a sec, here! Didn’t your leader Peter Dutton just a few days ago counsel the Reserve Bank not to lower interest rates tomorrow?”

It would have been the perfect opportunity to put any politician of any persuasion on the backfoot from the get-go. It’s what good journalists used to do. And just think of the questions that should have quickly been put to Hume about Dutton’s self-serving observations. “Can you expand on Mr Dutton’s view that mortgagees didn’t deserve some financial help right now?” “Why doesn’t your leader want cost-of-living relief right now?”

Barrie Cassidy would have done it. Carrot Top – sorry, Kerry O’Brien – would have done it.

Any self-respecting journalist worth their salt would have had Dutton’s bizarre comments front of mind to ask the next LNP talking head they interviewed. Hume dropped her guard on exactly that issue and any decent journo would have punched straight through. That Glenday and Brennan let that nonsense from both Hume and Dutton stand is up there with the most egregious examples I’ve seen of journos completely missing the perfect gotcha moment. Isn’t that what they love; what they should strive for? GOTCHA!

Putting a politician on the spot – knocking them off their perch and their spiel by confronting risible bullshit the moment it’s uttered – is what journalism used to be all about.

And make no mistake, James Glenday and Bridget Brennan: if Anthony Albanese had uttered the tripe Dutton dished out the other day, he would right now find himself being savaged from pillar to post by the entire mainstream mediocre including, sadly, the ABC.

Oh, how I yearn for a time long gone now: before modern journalists started to believe that “what Dutton says” should be promoted/repeated/regurgitated, and rarely if ever challenged, as an integral part of balanced and professional journalism, especially when Labor is in power federally.

Don Gordon-Brown

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