He said, he said

James Delingpole, conservative writer, The Australian:

I had a run-in with prickly ABC talk radio host... One of the things that has always puzzled me about the Left is that for all its fine talk about the virtues of free speech, it's often at least as eager as any authoritarian Right regime to close it down. Nowhere is this tendency better exemplified than by the behaviour of those two gruesome siblings, the BBC and the ABC: despite their pretensions of even-handedness and social responsibility, the way they abuse their near-monopolistic domination of their country's broadcast media owes more to statist tyrannies than free democracies.

Mark Scott, ABC Managing Director, Senate Estimates:

It struck me that there are a number of these international people, mainly climate change sceptics, who come and are interviewed on all our programs, and before they leave they drop a diary column to the Spectator and a piece in the Australian and leave. I am sorry that he did not feel that the robust questioning he got on the ABC was the kind of questioning he wanted. But he does present himself as contrary and running against conventional wisdom, and that is what you get. I would say that in his final paragraph he describes the ABC, talking about the way we abuse “the near monopolistic domination” — talking about us and the BBC — “of their country‘s broadcast media.” I thought that if he really has come to Australia and appeared on all these outlets and believes that the ABC has a near monopolistic domination of the country‘s broadcast media, then quite frankly I do not think we need to hear much from him anymore, if that is the level of insight that he really has.

That just about wraps it up for . . .