Reception
The show's presenters have taken some pride in the vehemence of the criticism it attracts; at one point, the opening credits were made up of a montage of such criticisms, prominently featuring a description of original presenter Stuart Littlemore as a 'pompous git'. In 2002, the then-editor of The Daily Telegraph, Campbell Reid, sent host David Marr a dead fish; a replica of it is now awarded as the Campbell Reid Perpetual Trophy for the Brazen Recycling of Other People's Work. Known as "The Barra" and bearing the motto Carpe Verbatim, it is awarded annually for bad journalism and particularly plagiarism (a practice for which Reid was frequently criticised).
No media organisation is entirely safe from Media Watch, and it has criticised its own network, the ABC. When David Marr was host from 2002 to 2004, the show often criticised Marr's employer John Fairfax Holdings. David Salter, a former executive producer of Media Watch, has suggested that it is "unwilling to subject Michael Brissenden, a journalist in the ABC's news and current affairs department, to the same level of ethical scrutiny it applies to others." Robert Manne, a supporter of the show, also believes it has historically had a left wing bias.
The Australian, which is regularly criticised by Media Watch, has been a long term counter-critic of the show. In August 2007 it editorialised that Media Watch "lacks journalistic integrity and conducts its affairs along the lines of an insiders' club that pushes its ideological prejudice at taxpayers' expense".
In June 2007, Media Watch strongly criticised The Daily Telegraph, among others, for failing to censor racist comments on their website forums, but then failed to censor strongly anti-Semitic comments on its own web forum. The ABC later launched an internal inquiry into Media Watch's reliance on IslamicSydney, "an Islamic website that peddle anti-Semitic and jihadi messages", for this story.
Read more about this topic: Media Watch (TV program)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
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“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
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