Media Watch is supposed to be bringing us ‘a fearless critique of the week’s journalism’.

Instead, it has demonstrated the same bias in favour of the transgender lobby as other programs on the ABC.

On 6/9/2021, Media Watch gave a totally biased account of the Australian Press Council’s findings on the coverage of transgender issues in The Australian newspaper.

Bernard Lane of The Australian has been writing fearlessly for some time about the unnecessary medicalisation of children. The person who complained to the APC about The Australian was Dr Michelle Telfer. She is head of the gender clinic at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.

Telfer – due to her championship of transing kids – is an absolute golden girl at the ABC. She’s the star of two lengthy ABC programs, ‘Being Me’ (Four Corners, 17/11/14) and ‘A Balancing Act’ (Australian Story, 24/5/21), both available permanently online. She features prominently in another, ‘About a Girl’ (Australian Story, 27/8/16).

After using ‘A Balancing Act’ to broadcast Telfer’s sense of victimisation and the fact that she’d taken a week off work to make a 42-page complaint to the APC, the ABC then used ‘Media Watch’ to loudly bray that the APC had delivered a ‘damning judgment’ on The Australian.

The APC found that Dr Telfer refused to co-operate with The Australian‘s attempts to involve her

But was it a damning judgment?

It’s true the APC found 5 breaches – but it also found 7 non-breaches. Hardly a ‘damning judgement’!

Among the non-breaches, the APC found that The Australian ‘did take steps to try to achieve a measure of fairness and balance in an area of social uncertainty’ and that ‘the difficult issues connected with the treatment of gender dysphoria need to be debated to allow society to move forward’.

Media Watch made Dr Telfer the star of this segment, with extensive quotes from her sprinkled throughout. Not mentioned at all was the APC’s finding that she refused to cooperate with The Australian’s efforts to involve her. The APC found that The Australian ‘did repeatedly contact the complainant for comment during the series of articles and that the publication’s offer of an opinion piece was not accepted by the complainant’. 

In the eyes of the ABC, Saint Michelle can do no wrong at all.


(Image: Media Watch banner. Source: Wikipedia)