Rupert Murdoch’s top executive in Australia has defended News Corp’s reporting of the ABC’s coronation broadcast and denied it played a part in Stan Grant’s decision to stand down from hosting Q+A after becoming the target of racist attacks.
News Corp Australasia chief executive Michael Miller responded to an interview on Monday in which the ABC news director Justin Stevens accused News Corp of targeting the ABC because the public broadcaster threatened its business model.
Stevens said the excessive coverage was “amplifying and giving agency” to the racist trolls on social media.
But Miller said Stevens was making “misleading” and “unsubstantiated” claims about News Corp journalism and called on him to “correct the record”.
“The ABC needs to stop passing the buck and blaming others for its own internal problems,” the executive chairman said on Tuesday.
Much of the commentary across News Corp characterised the ABC coverage as dominated by Grant’s “successive tirades” and the “black armband” view of history when the panel was just one hour in an eight-hour broadcast.
“And the culprit, in Grant’s steam-bath of emotion, was the Crown,” Henry Ergas wrote in the Australian.
Many of the articles published on the Australian’s website and on Sky News’ YouTube channel are followed by reader comments that contain racist criticism directed at Grant.
Most are too offensive to repeat but commonly they accuse Grant of “promoting Indigenous activism”, of being a “complainer about racism”, of “playing the victim” and of inventing his Indigenous heritage.
The Australian’s editor-in-chief Michelle Gunn was forced to defend her own readers from accusations of racism in the Weekend Australian after the director of Cape York Partnership, Noel Pearson, said the readership was “of course antipathetic to recognition” and pointed to the comments section.
“They are mostly obscurant and borderline casual racists in their views,” Pearson wrote in the Weekend Australian. “Just read the comments at the bottom of this piece.”
Gunn added a note to the article with the disclaimer: “We reject [Noel] Pearson’s characterisation of our readers as ‘borderline casual racists’.”
News Corp has tried to distance itself from the accusation that it played a part in Grant’s distress, by emphasising the Q+A host was subjected to vile social media commentary, and initially ignoring Stevens’ suggestion it was a “concerted campaign” by News Corp.
The Australian “vehemently” denied an accusation from Stevens that the newspaper asked questions about an Indigenous ABC journalist after they had “pored over their social media”.
“The Australian put questions to the ABC on Sunday about a post on one journalist’s social media account, and an ABC spokesperson responded that the reporter in question had been reminded to adhere to the public broadcaster’s social media guidelines,” the Australian reported. “This masthead chose not to publish a story.”
The managing director of the ABC David Anderson will face Senate estimates on Wednesday, where the Grant incident is likely to be raised.
Grant, 59, was given a standing ovation after citing the “poison” of the media as the reason he had decided to step away from the show on Monday night.
In an emotional piece to camera, Grant said he was not leaving because of racist abuse that he had received, but because he felt he was “part of the problem”.
“I’m not walking away for a while because of racism,” the Wiradjuri journalist said. “We get that far too often. I’m not walking away because of social media hatred. I need a break from the media. I feel like I’m part of the problem. And I need to ask myself how, or if, we can do it better.”
