11/02/2020

(AU) Media Watch Host Paul Barry Fans Flames, Dodges Climate Change Facts

The Australian - Chris Kenny

Media Watch host Paul Barry.
The ABC’s Media Watch, hosted by Paul Barry, claims the high moral ground, declaring it exposes “conflicts of interest, journalistic deceit, misrepresentation, manipulation and plagiarism”. But the problem is that it is full of journalistic deceit, misrepresentation and manipulation itself.
It flouts ABC charter demands for objectivity and accuracy. Rather than be an independent arbiter of media standards, Barry uses it to target the ABC’s commercial rivals and wage ideological battles supporting political causes dear to the green left.
The program shows only occasional interest in revealing ABC deceptions and cannot bring itself to examine the organisation’s chronic political bias.
Instead, it entrenches them. Media Watch is Barry’s vehicle for preaching his climate change-obsessed views and trying to corral journalism within his jaundiced boundaries. Rather than measure reporting against facts, the program weighs journalism it doesn’t like against the opinions that dominate the green-left Zeitgeist.
Last week’s first program for the year was a classic of the genre because it misrepresented people and facts in order to promote global warming alarmism and denounce News Corp journalism.
Barry’s opening line was demonstrably untrue. “Welcome to Groundhog Day,” he said, “where the loudest voices at News Corp are adamant that the summer’s terrifying bushfires have nothing to do with climate change.”
Barry and his team must have known it was a lie when putting their program together. For instance, my repeated position on television and in print, based on public scientific and expert documents, was only that activists were grossly exaggerating the role of climate change.
On December 14 in this newspaper I wrote of bushfire and drought that: “The expert analysis shows that if there is a long-term influence from climate change on either of these blights, it will be to make each of them slightly more common in a land where they are common already. Whatever Australia does on carbon emissions can have no impact on any of this, at least for decades to come as global emissions continue to rise.”
Host of Media Watch, Paul Barry. Picture: Sam Mooy
On January 18: “The climate change debate should be part of the discussion but is marginal compared with the central fire management issues and has been ghoulishly fanned as activists exploit real-life trauma for politics … The science is clear, predicting that in the southeast of the country bad fire conditions will become more common because endemic summer heat and dryness are expected to increase, while regions such as northern NSW may have summer rains delayed more often, as they have been in this drought year. The reason these climate changes should be relatively marginal in the discussion is that they relate to making an existing catastrophic threat slightly more common.”
Naturally I made many similar comments on TV and radio. Barry also misrepresented my Sky News colleague, Australian Financial Review columnist and Spectator Australia editor Rowan Dean, who says climate policy in Australia could only have a small (1.3 per cent) effect on bushfire intensity.
Barry also created the impression Andrew Bolt, of Sky News and The Herald Sun, had referred to climate science as ­“lunatic stuff” when he knew Bolt was referring to climate protesters. This is the sort of misrepresentation that trashes ABC guidelines and journalistic ethics; and Barry and the ABC do this in pursuit of ideological goals.
Media Watch was full of other idiotic comments such as this: “Passionate denial that the bushfires should make us act on climate change runs right across the Murdoch media in this country reaching an audience of millions.”
Again it is based on a false premise — Barry and the ABC must know Australia is a signatory to the Paris climate agreement and is doing more to reduce emissions than most other nations — and it is also absurd to suggest a bad summer of bushfires should be the sudden catalyst in global warming policy. This is the rhetoric of climate activists, not a serious media watchdog.
Paul Barry outside the main entrance to the ABC building at Ultimo in Sydney.
Barry referred collectively and offensively to me, Bolt, Dean, Alan Jones, Peta Credlin and Paul Murray as “News Corp’s deniers” even though I have never disputed the science of anthropogenic global warming. Others also accept the science and have a variety of nuanced views, and the strongest opponents of climate action, Dean and Jones, are as closely or more closely linked to Nine Media rather than News Corp (guess those facts don’t suit Barry’s narrative).
Barry said we “all sing from the same song sheet on climate change”, when clearly we have differing views (perhaps from the groupthink of the ABC this diversity of views is hard to comprehend). What we do have in common is a thirst for facts, which we inject into the debate. But Barry’s critique avoided facts.
Media Watch focused on how some of us challenged and exposed claims made as far back as November that this season’s fires were unprecedented.
We did this through diligent attention to verifiable information and historical records.
Barry dismisses these assessments, not based on facts, but based on opinions he prefers.
Some of his preferred opinions were from authoritative voices but they were still just opinions — what matters are facts.
Barry’s case to establish a lack of precedent was emotive tosh: “Mass evacuations, homes and businesses destroyed, a billion animals dead, an area 1.5 times the size of Tasmania burnt to ashes, our big cities choking with smoke and fires still raging.” He completely dodged the fact that none of this was unprecedented.
I have demonstrated this through sharing of facts and historical records in this newspaper and on Sky News.
Other colleagues have done similar. Media Watch knows this but censors this reality in order to make its malicious, jaundiced and ideological case.
The ABC has not reported these facts. The ABC adopts the sinister approach of censoring these facts to mislead the public, and then has the audacity to build a farrago of lies in order to discredit journalists who research and share the facts. This is not journalism but its evil twin.
Barry gave the game away when he said: “There’s no doubt climate change activists across the world think the fires should be a tipping point.” Clearly his thesis, his whole show, is not about facts, fairness and reality, it is about distorting reality so he can share the vibe of the climate activists.
Media Watch is using the taxes of Australian families against their own interests. And no one at the ABC or in the government has the fibre to intervene.

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