Sunday, May 25, 2014

Guardian Australia Gags Bob Carr

The following passage comes from a Guardian Australia report by Bethanie Blanchard on a Sydney Writers' Festival session focusing on former Labor Foreign Minister Bob Carr's recently published Diary of a Foreign Minister:

"An interesting admission was a conversation Carr records in the Diary, in which Rudd - knowing the election to be lost, the campaign in tatters, the Murdoch press savaging him every day - comments to Carr how few people actually control power in Australia: the Murdoch media, the head [sic] of Rio and BHP, a few bank chiefs and maybe a few property developers." (Bob Carr, political writing and the sovereignty of the mind, 23/5/14)

Now compare that with Carr's own words:

"He [Rudd] reflects on how few people run the country: the Murdoch media, the heads of Rio and BHP, probably the heads of the big banks, and 'that mob', by which he means the hard-line, Likud-aligned pro-Israel lobby in Melbourne." (Diary of a Foreign Minister, p 449)

You will, of course, have noticed that Carr's explicit reference to the "'that mob'... the hard-line, Likud-aligned pro-Israel lobby in Melbourne" has been replaced in Blanchard's version with the gross misrepresentation "maybe a few property developers."

Why?

Could this be anything other than a deliberate falsification of Carr's text?

I hasten to add that the alacrity with which Guardian Australia censors comments critical of Israeli apartheid only confirms me in my suspicion that we are dealing here with a particularly egregious case of self-censorship.  (See Gideon Polya's documentation at Mainstream Media Censorship - sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedia censorship/home - specifically Censorship by the Guardian Australia.) 

2 comments:

Peter D said...

Wow. I guess we should thank Blanchard (and MERC!) for drawing our attention back to this extraordinary statement made by Rudd. Should be a staple of every Australian political science course from here on in.

Anonymous said...

Yes . Good work Merc (no rhyme intended).
Stay alert , as un-industrious riff raff like me depend on you for information like this .