Anti-ABC bias unmasked

In The Australian yesterday, Christopher Pearson writes regarding the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ill-fated commissioning of Chris Master’s book Jonestown (in the event, published by Allen & Unwin):

It’s obvious that commissioning Masters’s book was a misjudgment, but a brief survey of ABC Books’ list of titles goes to show that it was by no means an isolated lapse. Among the feistier agitprop there is Margo Kingston’s Not Happy, John!, described as “a gutsy anecdotal book with a deadly serious purpose: to lay bare the insidious ways in which John Howard’s Government has profoundly undermined our freedoms and our rights”.

Oh for crying out loud, Christopher, take a valium and chill out. Kingston’s book was commissioned and published by Penguin books. The ABC merely sells Kingston’s book, as it does many other titles.

Another sinister publication on the “ABC Books’ list of titles” cited by Pearson is Anne Summers’ The End of Equality, which is published by Random House.

This kind of bloody-minded, reflexive pillorying of the purportedly ‘biased’ ABC is getting extremely tiresome. Worse still, when it is downright misleading like this effort by Pearson.

(Via Harry Heidelberg)

UPDATE

Here’s a listing of all the books Pearson reckons were published by ABC Books, shown against the name of the actual publisher.

Margo Kingston	Not Happy, John!	Penguin Books
Anne Summers	The End of Equality	Random House
Barry Jones	Coming to the Party	Melbourne University Press
Helen Caldicott	Nuclear Power is Not the Answer	The New Press
David Marr & Marian Wilkinson	Dark Victory	Allen & Unwin
Mungo MacCallum	How to Be a Megalomaniac	Duffy & Snellgrove
Frank Brennan	Tampering with Asylum	University of Queensland Press
Paul Collins	Between the Rock and a Hard Place	ABC Books
John Shelby Spong	New Christianity for a New World	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
John Marsden	I Believe This	Random House

As can be seen, the one title actually published by ABC Books is Paul Collins’ Between the Rock and a Hard Place, a critique of Catholicism that, no doubt, will bring down right-thinking Australian society as we know it.

UPDATE NOVEMBER 6

A reader’s letter in The Australian today succinctly makes the same observations I made above. Further, Mark Rubbo (of Readings Books and Music, Fitzroy, Vic) notes that “the author John Marsden, who Pearson claimed died last year, is very much alive ... or at least he was when I saw him last week.”

In other words, not only did Pearson misattribute the book’s publication, he also incorrectly attributed its authorship to John Marsden, the Sydney solicitor (whom Pearson, correctly for a change, says died in May). The actual author is John Marsden, the Australian writer.

Mr Rubbo concludes: “Pearson makes nonsense of his whole argument.”

Indeed. Nice work, Christopher.