James Delingpole: Freedom of speech is deader in Australia
Article Tags: Alan Jones, James Delingpole
Alan Jones: too popular by half
A few months ago I wrote that freedom of speech is dead in Australia. This was prompted by two incidents – the trial of blogger and broadcaster Andrew Bolt, who had had the temerity to suggest that white-looking Australians with only a tiny proportion of aboriginal blood in them might possibly be taking the piss by using their supposed “traditional owner” ethnic status to screw money, influence and sympathy out of Australia’s guilt-ridden welfare system. The other was the report on media regulation by Australia’s answer to Leveson – activist lawyer Raymond Finkelstein – which demanded stringent new codes of practice to ensure that in future all Aussie media outlets looked, sounded and read like the ABC and/or Fairfax group.
Now to this list of shame we can add a third item of gob-smacking imbecility: the consignment of Australia’s most popular broadcaster, Alan Jones, to a political re-education class for having got a factual detail wrong on one of his radio shows. (H/T Warren C Herrick)
The Australian Communications and Media Authority yesterday released a damning report on Jones’ show, finding he breached broadcast rules by falsely claiming Australians contributed just “1 per cent of .001 per cent of carbon dioxide in the air”.
‘The percentage of man-made carbon dioxide Australia produces is 1 per cent of .001 per cent of carbon dioxide in the air,” Jones told his listeners on March 15 last year. “Nature produces nearly all the carbon dioxide in the air.”
2GB told the media regulator Jones had done his own research for the claims, but neither he nor the station could provide any evidence.
Source: blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole
2012-10-22 11:37:06
Source:
