The ideological corruption of the taxpayer-funded ABC appears to have escalated over recent years.
The ABC News podcast this morning, Friday 14th October 2022, claimed that seven people died as a result of a demonstration at the US Congress on 6 January 2020. The demonstration turned into a riot that resulted in trespass of the Capitol building.
What happened at the 6th January riot is fiercely contested and politicised. The Left exaggerates the crowd’s motivations, violence, and number of deaths. And it seeks to incriminate ex-president Donald Trump. The Right seeks to downplay these factors, portraying the riot as largely peaceful, the Capitol police being understaffed and generally complaisant, and that the riot occurred contrary to the express wishes of Trump. Commentators such as Tucker Carlson assert that there was only one death, that of a demonstrator, and that more deaths have been caused by daily violent crime and BLM riots.
A close reading of Wikipedia confirms the conservative interpretation, despite the relevant entry pushing in the opposite direction. The entry reads in part: “Five people died either shortly before, during, or following the event: one was shot by Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, and three died of natural causes.”
In other words, one person died during the riot, and that was a female demonstrator whose only crime was trespassing. The ABC’s new claim, though made more than two years on from the event, does not improve on the ABC’s report just five days after the riot, which held that four people had died. The ABC’s claim that seven died can be taken to be misinformation, even if it comes from the mainstream American media.
It is remarkable, though by now hardly unexpected, that the ABC reports only the Left’s interpretation, and does so uncritically.
All this is relevant to the BAC because the ABC has been a leading exponent of Anglophobia, both home-grown and imported, often from the United States. The shift began in the late 1960s when Marxists such as Allan Ashbolt began to influence news and current affairs at the then commission. Ashbolt took aim specifically at Australians of British descent, and mocked their pride in that heritage.[1] (pp. viii-ix) The ABC has never looked back.
[1] Ashbolt, A. (1975). Nationalist contradictions. The floating world. J. Romeril. Sydney, Currency Press: vii-xi, pp. viii-ix.