Tuesday, August 30, 2005

End The Suffering - Turn Off Media Watch

After watching last night's risible effort on the publicly funded ABC's Media Watch program, it became apparent that the poor little show has finished its fight for life.

Now it is time to do the decent thing and turn off its life support.

Once the must-see show on the ABC (occasionally it was worth suffering through 4 Corners first), it has become a ventilated corpse, utterly brain dead, only being kept alive by the drip feed of public funding.

Undoubtedly there is a need for a outlet that covers media outrages and faux pas and for the first few years of its life Media Watch under the wry humour of Queens Counsel and one time journalist, Stuart Littlemore fill the role perfectly.

However Media Watch got run over by the runaway phenomenon known as the Internet and, more specifically bloggers. All of a sudden instead of the host-de-jour, the producers and a handful of administrative staff keeping an eye on the Fourth Estate at taxpayer's expense, thousands of bloggers are doing a more comprehensive job. For free!

As a result, in last night's feeble attempt to show signs of life, Liz Jackson and the producers put metaphoric defibrillator by having another go at Canadian columnist Mark Steyn.

Earlier this month the columnist wrote about the evils of multiculturalism.

Media Watch was outraged. Follow the story here, here and here.

Yesterday when Steyn wrote a column about the attempted mugging at the hands of Media Watch, the producers were determined to get the last word in.

Enough already.

Face it ABC, we don’t want or need Media Watch anymore, we can research and disseminate information all by ourselves now to a much larger audience and achieve some real results.

Anyone see Dan Rather lately?

-- Nora

No comments: