Seems ABC TV’s MediaWatch boobed on the Phil Gould plagiarism thing. They’ve posted an apology on their site titled, ‘Correction: Phil Gould is not a plagiarist‘ *scroll down to see it*. Looks like there was some sort of subbing error at the Sun Herald. Ah well. Funny being distantly caught up in a media squabble.
Media spats can be a little weird sometimes. One bunch of journalists flinging accusations around while others issue the outraged denials. Internecine warfare and journalistic rivalry is pretty common in the media thse days. Intense competiton inevitably leads to regular feuds between news organisations and, every now and then, all out media warfare. Fun to watch when it happens.
Journos spend ages competing for stories and can get carried away knit picking over rivals’ pieces (pun intended !). Their bickering and point scoring can be a bit incestuous. They do live in their own world sometimes.
ABC’s MediaWatch seems to be regularly under fire for reporting media screw ups and bias. Take a look at ‘How the ABC distorts the news on news’, a bitter little vendetta waged by The Australian against MediaWatch. It just proves MediaWatch are getting something right when commercial media get so worked up by their scrutiny.
It’s a bit like those ridiculous anti-BBC sites and blogs. They are obsessed with finding bias in BBC programming and take it upon themselves to expose what they see as a sinister left-wing agenda. Most are lunatics living in a right-wing fantasy world of conspiracy theories, liberal media plots, EU domination and ‘political correctness gone mad’. Amazingly, this kind of lunacy can still be found in the pages of the Daily Telegraph and Dail Mail. It’s old fashioned ‘reds under the bed’ weirdness. They really should know better…
So yeah... 