Gavin Atkins wrote a brilliant piece in the australian today.
the mistake the left make is they accuse those who are critical of it of being right wing. they can't see beyond their own propaganda and distortion. i am neither right nor left, i judge current information from a merit point of view, i believe in the individual and the right for people to be self determining. i don't like hearing one side of an issue. that's not right wing at all, that's just sensible.
the only show on the abc that offers this is a radio program called 'counterpoint' which presents the other sides point of view and i have to say when the other side get their view heard it's actually very enlightening, because the difference between these wings is the left is comprised of a collective mind while the right is individual. diversity wins all the time. how can it not the other side leads towards fundamentalism be it religious, political or scientific.
anyway here's the article...

FOLLOWING the recent anti-carbon tax protests, the editor of The Drum, the ABC's opinion website, contacted me looking to commission an article.

Jonathan Green had first gone to Twitter to try to find someone to write a story from the perspective of the carbon tax protesters but come up empty.

He eventually tracked me down, but it's telling that none of his regular contributors or 7000 Twitter followers could help him accommodate the views held by 60 per cent of Australians. I suspect the reason he was so keen to get the story is once my article had appeared he was off the hook.

The ABC opinion website is not compelled by editorial policies to demonstrate any form of balance but merely to provide a "range of subjects from a diversity of perspectives".

At The Drum, one conservative opinion is all it requires to legitimise a dozen from the Left.

Take, for example, the death of Osama bin Laden. Since his death, Drum readers have been provided with pretty much the same opinion every day from a total of nine writers: it was an extrajudiciary killing; the US was working outside the rule of law; celebrations of his death were disgraceful.

One of these writers, Greg Barns, went so far as to appear on The Drum's television show to express doubt that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11.

Two contributors were eventually published wishing good riddance to bad rubbish, enough for the ABC to claim it has provided a diversity of perspectives, and publish another brace of tales from the hand-wringers.

But it is ridiculous to assert, as the ABC's chief executive Mark Scott did following the launch of the ABC's editorial policies in 2006, that this fulfils an expectation that "audiences must not be able to reasonably conclude that the ABC has taken an editorial stand on matters of contention and public debate".

The real measure of bias at The Drum is not the range of opinion, it's the frequency. Until the end of last month, 98 writers had been published eight or more times at The Drum, producing a total of 1880 articles. Only eight of these contributors (one in 12) would pass muster as being on the right of the political spectrum: Glenn Milne, David Barnett, Chris Berg, Kevin Donnelly, Tom Switzer, John Hewson, Niki Savva and Sinclair Davidson.

Of these, Milne is first and foremost a journalist rather than an opinion writer, Hewson rarely expresses any conservative viewpoint, and others are specialists in areas such as education or economics rather than political issues of the day.

This means, for example, that of all the writers who are given a regular platform on the ABC website, I could find only four articles that were in some way supportive of Israel and none in favour of the war in Afghanistan.

By comparison, there are dozens of anti-Israel and anti-Afghan war pieces on the taxpayer-funded website, most of them accusatory and damning. For example, there are at least nine anti-Israel articles by Antony Loewenstein alone, 12 anti-Afghanistan war rants by Kellie Tranter, and many more from Labor Party speechwriter Bob Ellis scattered among his 110 contributions

Similarly, among the regular contributors to The Drum, there have been more than 20 articles critical of farmers on the Murray-Darling Basin, and none that I can find in support.

A few people were unearthed to write from the point of view of the farmers, so the ABC may now claim to have shown a range of perspectives but, like me, the editor would have had to search for them, and there will be no plans for these people to contribute again to The Drum any time soon.

Compared with a tally of at least 50 stories sympathetic to the plight of asylum-seekers, there does not appear to be a single article from one of the top 98 contributors advocating the border protection policies of the Coalition.

When asylum-seekers drowned at Christmas Island, there were no conservatives available at The Drum to question the policies that lured them here in the first place, only the usual queue of regulars writing from their default setting of confected moral indignation.

Think of just about any other issue that divides the Right and Left - say, David Hicks, nuclear energy or the National Broadband Network - and you will find reams of left-leaning group-think at The Drum. Thanks to its regular writers, this bias is structural and predictable. But it doesn't stop there. The Drum has started up a Twitter round-up on ABC online while question time is on in the House of Representatives. These efforts by a clubby group of left-leaning journalists, have been dominated by Green's former workmates at the Crikey website, including Green himself and Crikey contributors.

While the ABC's internet sites attract more than 25 million hits a month, a big concern is all of this frivolous online activity appears to be distracting our public broadcaster from giving us the news. The ABC is coy about exactly how much we are paying contributors to The Drum, saying only that the innovations division of which it is a part cost taxpayers nearly $10 million last financial year.

In the meantime, significant problems with the ABC's news have been exposed. ABC News 24 missed most of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on the day it occurred and ABC1 failed to cut into regular programming as the news broke about bin Laden.

Now here's a radical idea: if the ABC concentrated on giving us the news instead of this online puffery, it could help solve two problems at once.