THE extraordinary ban imposed by Nauru on the ABC covering the Pacific Islands Forum – or visiting that country at all – has laid bare the raw and fractious fault lines in the Australian media.
Journalists and commercial organisations are split over how to respond, between those who believe there should be solidarity with the ABC, and those maintaining that what happens to the ABC is its problem alone.
News Corp is not unhappy to see the ABC, its perennial target, disadvantaged and intends to extract benefit for itself from the situation.
The federal parliamentary press gallery committee – which mostly looks after routine matters affecting its members – has taken a defiant stand, which has been endorsed by Fairfax.
The media contingent that was to cover Malcolm Turnbull’s trip had been restricted to a “pool” of three (because that’s all the PM’s plane had room for, although Nauru is confining the number of media).
The gallery had nominated an ABC cameraman, and a reporter and photographer supplied by the news agency AAP. Footage, reports and pictures would be shared with other outlets.
After the Nauru ban – which Tony Walker has suggested is likely driven more by the ABC’s coverage of corruption allegations than its stories about asylum seekers – the gallery committee decided that if the ABC couldn’t go, the pool would be disbanded.
It said in a statement issued on Wednesday by its president David Crowe, chief political correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, that if the ABC was banned, no one should go.
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