Perhaps our readers can help us work out what the following events have to do with one another. High-profile ABC journalist Louise Milligan delivered a speech at a gala dinner for the Women Lawyers Association in the ACT in late October. According to a column in The Australian by Janet Albrechtsen on November 1:
Some women at the gala dinner were in tears, many more were hurt and upset, as they sat through an address they say shamed female barristers and lawyers who defend people accused of sexual crimes. Female defence lawyers who attended that evening, from senior members of the profession to more junior ones, claimed to The Australian they felt under attack by Milligan’s address.
Milligan responded on Twitter that it was “(typical) misinformation by The Australian“, listing the good feedback her speech had gotten and claiming that Albrechtsen “put to me multiple inaccuracies about the speech, including phrases I never used. I replied they were demonstrably untrue. She ran inaccuracies anyway, without my individual denials”:
Of course, even if the initial piece was 100% accurate, it would have nothing to do with Milligan’s abilities as a reporter. But that didn’t stop the Oz spinning out the tale for several more days — Milligan has said, pointedly, that a young female journalist writing one of these follow-ups said she was simply acting on the instructions of her editor: “She’s the 4th young woman at News Corp who has told me this”.
Just when you thought the matter could waste no more of our time, the ABC leadership had to attend Senate estimates to be grilled by culture warrior Liberals (the main kind still in Parliament after the teal wave). Senator Sarah Henderson used her unique access to important and highly paid public servants, such as ABC managing director David Anderson, to continue to drag the speech story out. It was only thanks to South Australian culture warrior and ice cream fantasist Alex Antic, who accused the ABC of “grooming children” (they had a drag queen on Play School once), that Henderson’s line of questioning was the second-dumbest thing to happen at estimates that day.
The ABC, for its part, put out a press release that was simply a list of Milligan’s achievements as a journalist. Impressive, but if we’re being consistent it doesn’t particularly prove that she’s not capable of a tone-deaf speech. Of course, we draw no false equivalence between the Oz having several reporters attempt to spin nothing much into a major story, which was then picked up by politicians and the ABC simply copying Milligan’s storied CV into a press release, but it contributed to some of the drearier elements in Australian journalism. Most particularly the sense that at a certain level, a lot of time and money that could be spent holding the powerful to account are instead directed towards published correspondence between high-profile rival media figures, the public interest barely factoring in.
