We were wondering how Linton Besser would go when he took over from Paul Barry as the host of Media Watch at the beginning of last year. Paul Barry had shown himself, on a couple of occasions, prepared to tackle the ABC’s bias on transgender issues, and weather the flak he caught from both his own colleagues and the gender-identitarian ideologues who unfortunately dominate Australia’s intelligentsia.
Would Besser be so courageous?
On 17 November we got our answer. His program that evening examined allegations that the ABC had the same problems of bias as the BBC, which was then in the spotlight following disclosures by veteran journalist Michael Prescott. The main focus of Prescott’s disclosures was a misleading video edit in a BBC doco about Donald Trump and the 2021 Capitol Hill riots; however, he also identified other areas of concern, one of which was the BBC’s reluctance to file reports critical of the trans agenda.
Besser found – rightly so – that the ABC hadn’t engaged in misleading editing in its own Four Corners doco about Trump and the Capitol Hill riots. But Besser then went on to say that in regards to the criticism ‘that the ABC, like the BBC, is failing to report critically on transgender issues, we fear there may indeed be grounds for concern.’
He referred to ‘significant gaps, beginning three years ago with dramatic news that the prominent Tavistock Clinic in London was to be shuttered’; and cited three more recent instances where the ABC has kept silence on significant developments:
- the findings about enthusiastic kid-transer (and former ABC golden girl) Michelle Telfer in the Strum judgment
- the change of heart announced by Diana Bryant, lead judge in the 2013 landmark re Jamie kid-transing case
- Sall Grover’s appeal against the Federal Court decision that she’d engaged in unlawful discrimination by kicking a man-who-says-he’s-a-woman off her women-only networking app.
So then he ended up:
All true, and all needing to be said.
What’s more, we think Besser’s criticism was actually effective in bringing about a bit of a welcome shift in the ABC News Dept. For a long time, we suspected that the ABC was treating Paul Barry’s efforts as what Abigail Shrier has described as a ‘pawn sacrifice’, where a media outlet uses an occasional airing of ‘token dissent’ from gender ideology as a ‘tactical pivot’ to derail general criticism and avoid genuine reform of its captured institutional approach.
However, just a couple of weeks after the 17 November broadcast, Editorial Director Gavin Fang publicly admitted that the ABC ‘should have provided more coverage’ of Justice Strum’s findings about Michelle Telfer.
Quite a change for Fang, who in September 2024 told a bunch of feminists and LGB groups who’d complained about the ABC’s links with trans lobby ACON that he couldn’t see ‘any evidence of selective non-reporting’. Now he’s admitted to at least one, and we think it’s largely down to Media Watch.
So well done, Linton! And keep it up!