Tuesday, June 19, 2007
"LIKE WATCHING SOMEONE DIE OF PROSTATE CANCER"
Media Watch online moderator (and executive producer) Tim Palmer didn’t mean to cause no trouble:
Media Watch holds no particular view on the appropriateness or not of the laws [of vilification and discrimination] in question. They were simply presented to assess the potential legal position of those who published some of the comments shown on last night’s program.
Keep going, son:
If someone believes in the absolute right to cry out “fire” in a crowded cinema, that’s one extreme of the free speech argument. Other viewers might see comments such as those on Tim Blair’s blog, suggesting ways of killing and disposing of the bodies of Muslim taxi drivers as exceeding reasonable free speech.
Call me cynical, but I’m not buying Palmer’s claim - seeing as he’s such a screaming law-protection pansy - that Media Watch merely wanted to assess my “potential legal position”. It’s interesting that Media Watch feels so much more strongly about comments at my site than about blind people being denied taxi rides:
He allowed this vicious discussion about Muslim taxi drivers supposedly knocking back passengers with guide dogs.
I know; as if that would ever happen. In other highlights arising from Monday night’s Media Watch Palm-o-rama:
• One or two readers noticed that Media Watch’s voiceovers presented American commenters as grotesquely exaggerated Australians. This error may have been avoided if Media Watch had bothered to contact me prior to broadcast.
• This pre-approved, MW-moderated comment appeared yesterday at the Media Watch site:
The only understanding I can make is that MediaWatch carries the torch for Globalism and maybe even Zionist groups as they are known to push Hate Speech laws so they can’t be questioned themselves in crime. ABC is starting to show a disproportionate number of Jews in the places of power in the ABC.
It was subsequently removed:
EDIT
• Another comment also briefly appeared, but was cut within ten minutes, despite not breaking any ABC rules:
At 1:47:00PM on 19 June 2007, you posted a comment from me about the Media Watch program of the previous evening. It was published in its entirety, so presumably passed your moderation process. The post did not mention any person, web site, group, race, religion, sexual orientation or disability. It contained not one solitary word that could be considered “bad language”. It was merely a post that attempted to point out that what some people may find offensive, others may not and I gave a personal example of my father’s death. I also gave my opinion that sites that are not moderated need not be visited by anyone who is offended by the content. The post was by author, “Perplexed” and the subject was, “A champion for censorship”.
That post was presumably cut because it slyly - too slyly for forgetful moderator Palmer, until he detected mockery in comments here - referenced this Tim Palmer email criticising the work of blogger Professor Bunyip:
It’s more like watching someone die of prostate cancer. It’s tedious, the viewer may die of something else in the meantime and in the long run you just don’t want to know about it anyway.
regards
Tim Palmer
Sensitive fellow, isn’t he?