It’s not just us. And it’s not just Peta Credlin and Rita Panahi. The
ABC’s allegiance to ACON’s gender-identity zealotry is causing
disquiet amongst women and men throughout the land, including
amongst Aunty’s loyalest of followers. Ex-Argonauts, even.
Here’s a random sample of what we see on any of our dips into social
media, or hear in any dinner table conversation anywhere or any time.
- Loyal ABC watcher switches channels for the sake of her mental
health:
- Another loyal follower ends a longstanding household tradition after
receiving a frustrating response from Insiders:
- A Friend of the ABC resigns — how many others, we wonder, have done the same?
- Women Speak Tasmania’s Isla MacGregor calls for a Federal Parliamentary Inquiry after an infuriating experience trying to get redress through the right channels:
- Literary critic David Free relates how he had to brace himself to watch the ABC News on the night of Barry Humphries’ death:
- A particular cause of indignation, but emblematic of so much more: Shane Jenek appearing in drag as Courtney Act as a panellist on current-affairs program The Drum:
Even a Courtney Act fan thought it wasn’t on:
• Podcaster Paul Dye slams the ABC’s reportage of a drag queen story time he went to at Thirroul:
(Incidentally, the ABC’s campaign to mainstream and normalise drag queens is relentless, including in its children’s programming.)
In an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald in May, Stuart Littlemore and David Salter rightly note that ‘a significant segment of the traditional ABC audience is unhappy with much of its current output’ and ‘attempts to make the ABC flashier – and trashier – only alienate its loyal and mature audience’.
Why are audiences turned off?
How much of this unhappiness and alienation has been caused by the ABC’s wholesale gender-identity dogmatism? An enormous deal of it, we’d say.
We, and the people we talk to about their dissatisfaction with the ABC, have got no objection to the ABC including indigenous commentators in their coverage of the coronation, in fact we applaud it. (Not happy, though, with Stan Grant’s hosting of Q+A, in particular the episode on men in women’s sport and the segment about Moira Deeming on 3 April.
Nor do we have any probs with either of the specific examples of ABC broadcasting practice raised by Littlemore and Salter: we like it that presenters tell us which Aboriginal land their program’s coming to us from, and we enjoyed ABC Classic’s week of music by LGB composers (though they could’ve done without the TQ addition to the acronym in the promos, as there weren’t any in the broadcasts).
No, what gets us upset – and plenty of other left-leaning people as well – is this endless propaganda for an ideology that harms women, gays and lesbians, and gender-nonconforming children. The ABC could solve a huge amount of its audience woes if it just ditched ACON like the BBC ditched Stonewall, and adopted the ‘honest broker’ approach to covering gender-identity issues – as Paul Barry has recommended on Media Watch – instead of trying to ram unacceptable doctrine down our throats.
It’s about time the ABC realised this. And about time respected commentators like Littlemore and Salter realised it too, and said so.