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Back to school for Tele editors after 'activist teachers' exposé

<span>Photograph: James Horan/AAP</span>
Photograph: James Horan/AAP

Days after News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch warned of an “awful woke orthodoxy”, the Daily Telegraph demonstrated the boss’s point with a front-page story about political correctness in education. “School of Hard Woke” was designed to stir anger in readers about the “activist teachers” who apparently penalised students for not giving “woke” answers in the HSC exams last year.

The report by Christopher Harris claimed students were marked down for using gender and cultural stereotypes.

“Education experts say the exams have been hijacked by ‘activist’ markers unfairly applying their own progressive judgments about what is culturally appropriate in students’ work,” it said.

One of these experts is Kevin Donnelly of the Australian Catholic University, a rent-a-quote conservative who pops up on Sky News and News Corp publications often to criticise Daniel Andrews, marriage equality or the Safe Schools program.

A former federal Liberal staffer, Donnelly refers to himself as a “cultural warrior” and is often heard banging on about a “neo-Marxist inspired, politically correct curriculum”.

“Things like cultural appropriation and gender stereotyping is the language of cancel culture,” he told the Tele. “As someone who taught English for 18 years it is very disappointing.”

But the Tele’s examples of this insidious cultural Marxism came up a little short. Apart from the English examples, the rest of the list was very traditional marking instructions that even Donnelly would have a hard time arguing with. Economics students were marked down for “confusing the World Bank with the International Monetary Fund”, German beginners were told to “avoid the use of English syntax and English words” and English extension students told to avoid referring to children’s cartoons and video games in their work. Very woke stuff indeed.

Dan of the moment

The announcement of a late night press conference by Victorian authorities on Wednesday took everyone by surprise. As the press pack waited for Daniel Andrews to emerge from the darkness at 10.30pm, ABC News presenter Beverley O’Connor said: “We’ll be crossing to a press conference with Dan Murphy soon”, before quickly correcting herself.

The tweet resonated due to an earlier slip by Peter Doherty, a Nobel laureate for his work on immunology and patron of the Doherty Institute, who inadvertently asked Twitter for the opening hours of the alcohol retailer Dan Murphy’s.

Death by a thousand (million) cuts

By 2023-24 the ABC will have lost $1.017bn in funding since the Coalition came to power in 2014 – unless funding is restored in upcoming budgets of course.

This is the bleak assessment by former ABC senior bureaucrat and PhD candidate Michael Ward, calculations he based on the forward estimates in the October budget.

The accompanying list of casualties at the ABC as a result of the budget shortfall includes: the axing of the 7.45am radio news bulletin; the closure or downsizing of ABC bureaux in Tokyo, Bangkok, New Delhi, Africa and New Zealand; the loss of 200 jobs in 2020 alone; the axing of Lateline and state-based 7.30; the halving of PM and the World Today radio current affairs programs; the axing of the ABC Life brand; shutting down TV production in Adelaide; the termination of ABC shortwave services; reduced programming on Classic FM and removal of music from Radio National; a drop in Australian drama of 25%; and the cancellation of the Australia Network contract.

All of this despite Tony Abbott’s promise on the eve of the 2014 election that there would be no cuts to public broadcasting under a Coalition government.

Ward told Weekly Beast the government would no doubt disagree with his figures as Scott Morrison had claimed there had been no cuts to the ABC but the figures were based on budget papers and Senate estimates.

The sobering facts and figures are laid in a new short film released on YouTube on Thursday, Morrison & Murdoch v the ABC, which documents persistent attacks on the ABC by News Corp Australia, Sky News Australia, rightwing thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs and members of the Coalition. Produced by the leftwing lobby group GetUp! the film argues the chorus of complaints is co-ordinated and has been effective in chipping away at the public broadcaster, which Murdoch and the IPA want to see privatised.

In November, ABC chair Ita Buttrose warned of an escalating campaign targeting the public broadcaster. “Lately the campaign against the ABC has become more strident,” Buttrose said. In December she said complaints about Four Corners “smacked of political interference”.

The figures Ward details align with a report last May that found the ABC had lost $783m in funding to 2021-22, a separate calculation by former Per Capita executive director Emma Dawson.

Jones’s very quiet apology

We told you this week about two corrections forced on Sky News commentators Alan Jones and Peta Credlin. The corrections were for misrepresenting research and making false statements, respectively, on their Sky After Dark shows. The big difference, however, was in the delivery of the mea culpa.

While Credlin had to apologise live at the end of her show, ensuring viewers were aware that what she had said was wrong, Jones’s viewers remain blissfully unaware statements he made in November about the efficacy of masks and lockdowns had misrepresented Covid research. That is unless they venture on to an obscure corrections page on the Sky News website or see a note belatedly added to the page where the uncorrected video is hosted.

Credlin’s apology was prompted by a defamation threat from Kevin Rudd while Jones’s was prompted by an investigation by the broadcasting watchdog, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which has far fewer teeth than private litigation with its financial penalties.

Frangopoulos builds up team GB

Former Sky News Australia boss Angelos Frangopoulos is busy building up his team of 140 journalists for the launch of GB News, the right-leaning rolling news channel led by Spectator chairman Andrew Neil. It hasn’t aired a single program yet but is already being touted as Britain’s answer to Fox News.

The first big hire is Sun journalist Dan Wootton, who broke the story of “Megxit”. Australian journalist and a former director of corporate affairs at News Corp Australia, Lucinda Duckett, has also joined. Duckett ran the free-speech campaign Australia’s Right to Know out of Holt Street in Sydney before she moved to the UK.

Frangopoulos has been busy defending the channel from barbs it will be biased, responding to a column in the Guardian by Marina Hyde which said GB News was an “anti-impartiality news channel”.

“GB News will be staunchly independent,” Frangopoulos said in a letter quoted in Press Gazette. “That is our point. Our investors know this, our journalists will know it and so will our viewers. We aim to serve British communities who feel poorly represented by mainstream television media, especially outside London.”

Q+A returns but Twitter in doubt

Q+A host Hamish Macdonald has revealed the ABC panel show is considering the role social media should play this year, as it moves to a new time slot and a new day on Thursdays at 8.30pm.

Macdonald quit Twitter last year, complaining about the abuse he got from both the left and the right: “I’ve never had more abuse for the interviews I’ve conducted than I had last year,” he told News Corp.

Thirteen years ago, under Tony Jones and Peter McEvoy, Q+A became one of the first TV shows to incorporate a Twitter stream on the screen. But Macdonald told Breakfast host Fran Kelly the involvement of social media in the show was now under review because in his opinion it did not “elevate” the conversation.

Macdonald: “The test has to be do these platforms contribute to [and] elevate the conversation? And from my experience … increasingly I can’t see it doing that. I can’t host a show about respectful, rigorous, robust debate and be on the platform where if you see something you don’t like you shut it down.”

Macdonald said the question of who was appropriate to interview came up again this week when Four Corners interviewed Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, for which Sarah Ferguson was criticised by some journalists.

“It reminded me of when I worked for Al Jazeera in Afghanistan and members of the Bush administration saying you shouldn’t interview with Taliban … these individuals are shaping the environment and the role of the journalist is to interrogate that.”

The great stayer

Phillip Adams has celebrated 30 years of Late Night Live on Radio National by replaying an excerpt from his first show, which included staunch ABC critic Gerard Henderson complaining about the ABC’s coverage of the Gulf War.

Henderson also claimed he had been barred by Andrew Olle and other ABC presenters, and he was rarely given a voice on the ABC. Fast forward 30 years to ABC managing director David Anderson, who joined Adams for a chat after the excerpt. After a little chuckle Anderson said drily: “I recognise that perspective that Gerard has, and that hasn’t changed, that’s 30 years ago.”