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Howard demeans the ABC

It is often claimed that the Government would love nothing more than to clip the wings of the ABC [some would say emasculate] in whatever way possible.

The appointment this week of Keith Windschuttle to the Board of the ABC must rank as one of the more bizarre and outrageous appointments made by the Howard Government. Minister Coonan on the ABC's PM program the other night could not proffer any cogent reason by 3 members of the ABC Board were associated with Quadrant magazine.

Mike Carlton, in his weekly op-ed piece in today's SMH, describes the appointment thus:

"Never let it be said that John Howard has no sense of the absurd. The naming of the loopy polemicist Keith Windschuttle to the board of the ABC is the most hilarious appointment to public office since the mad Emperor Caligula threatened to make his horse a consul of Rome.

In his youth, Windschuttle was a bomb-thrower of the hard left. Now he is a bomb-thrower of the far right. Like so many who have made that almost circular ideological journey, he rails at his former fellow travellers with a born-again ferocity verging on paranoia."

Read the full Carlton piece here.

Meanwhile, this [read it in full here] also from the SMH:

"Keith Windschuttle is comfortable with controversy. He's made a career out of it. So it was no surprise yesterday that the newly appointed ABC director was unapologetic about his comment that the broadcaster was full of "Marxists and radicals".

Some senior ABC staff have demanded their new board member name those he is talking about.

But Windschuttle is unperturbed. "It's not just a group of individuals; it's about values, it's a wider claim than that," he said yesterday".

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