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Of all the programs on Their ABC, the 7pm nightly TV bulletin is the flagship. It must cost taxpayers a decent slice of the ABC’s billion-dollar-plus funding for the swarms of reporters, correspondents, presenters, editors, producers and enforcers of staff diversity. On the authoritativeness of the 7pm News rests the ABC’s credibility and the public’s trust. (Actually, Australians rate the ABC at a lousy 15th among “most trusted” brands). As I mentioned a week ago about ABC Gaza coverage, my household is a regular viewer of the 7PM News (Victoria). It’s a vice formed by 40 years of conditioning that would put Pavlov’s dog to shame.
Well, we missed the 7PM News on Wednesday (Nov 15) because a daughter came to dinner with her beau, a potential 
son-in-law and hence getting five-star treatment (pork spare ribs and fruit salad). I consoled my household later that we could catch up on the Wednesday ABC news via ABC iview. Not heard of iview? Here you go:
ABC iview is the 24/7, free video on demand TV streaming service from the ABC. It is available across Australia on Smart TVs, computers, tablets, smartphones, games consoles, and other media streaming devices. With ABC iview you can catch up on programs from ABC’s broadcast TV channels … Most programs on ABC iview are available for catch up 30 mins after broadcast for at least 30 days. New programs are added every day.
So I logged into iview on Friday morning and scouted the thumbnails for the 7pm News we missed. What!? Thursday’s 7PM (Vic) News is there, and Tuesday’s and Monday’s, but not a trace of Wednesday’s. Some mistake, surely, I reasoned, switching to the NSW version. What!? Same story. No Wednesday 7PM. Growing desperate to feed my shameful ABC addiction, I tried Queensland, SA, WA, Tasmania and even NT and ACT but not a trace of it.
Did something drastic strike the backroom iView management just as they were compiling Wednesday’s items? Ever resourceful, I checked instead the next program, Wednesday’s 7.30 with Sarah Ferguson. Despite her earlier misbegotten “stories of the century”, which treated as gospel every Democrat talking point asserting Donald Trump was Putin’s stooge, she’s been doing a better job on Gaza than the hundreds of other staff who are rooting for the Hamas Jew-murderers. So, I see Sarah is there on Wednesday iview large as life. Whatever meteorite, sinkhole or space alien struck the ABC iview compilers for Wednesday, the impact was limited only to the 7PM flagship news.
Our household resigned itself to going cold turkey on 7PM News consumption for at least that Wednesday evening, and it settled down Thursday night in its dressing gowns and slippers to watch, if not enjoy, the ABC’s regular Hamas-endorsed footage of purported Israeli atrocities. Then came the revelation, at 10.50 minutes in: News reader Tamara Oudyn put on her most sobering expression (no eye rolls) and announced in a gallop lasting 17 seconds,
Last night [Wed] we broadcast a story about Israeli military operations at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Due to a production error we inadvertently included incorrect footage of a hospital incident in Egypt ten years ago. We apologise for the error. [My emphasis]
Gosh! I’ve never seen such a grovel on Australia’s third-most trusted news (the ABC 7pm was behind Channel 7 the other day by well over a quarter-million metro viewers and behind Nine by 150,000). Who will be sacked for this taxpayer-funded 
exercise in incompetence? Maybe Justin Stevens, news director on $530,000? Who sprung the ABC on its fake news? Some external source, maybe Jewish, I’d say, otherwise the ABC would stick to standard operating procedure and pretend it never happened. Were the team members compiling the Wednesday news part of that 200-strong staff cabal wildly protesting on November 8 at the ABC’s allegedly over-favourable treatment of Israel? That meeting protested the ABC’s cruel slanders against Hamas, such as for allegedly beheading babies and cooking at least one other baby in the kitchen oven after murdering the parents. I doubt if even the ABC’s imported sleuth Vera could solve all these conundrums.
My first thought was to get hold of the ABC fake footage (Egypt 2013) that was so damning it forced the ABC to euthanise the iview version in all states. I tried YouTube, no joy. I tried reverse engineering it by seeking out actual footage of hospital wreckage in Egypt in 2013. I did discover that 2013 was the so-called “Arab Spring” era during which Egyptian youths and young men of a certain religion did a little rioting and looting and molesting of female Western reporters. But I couldn’t find anything about hospital wreckage. (Talking of the Arab Spring, Barack Obama got his $US1m Nobel Peace Prize purely for making a soft-soapy speech to Cairo University. As Mel Brooks might have said, “It’s good to be a US Democrat President of colour.”)[i]
My final attempt was to work on the theory that the ABC staff collective is so incompetent they left the 2013-Egyptian-
hospital fakery, aka innocent mistake, somewhere else among its rabbit-warren of programs. And I turned up Peter Hartcher on ABC via YouTube the same day (Wednesday, November 15) talking about Gaza hospitals as voice-over to vision of wrecked buildings (from 30secs). Could that vision be the missing link on iview, the ABC version of Piltdown Man? I can’t say. I can’t see the Pyramids of Cheops or Khafre in the middle distance. Maybe Quadrant readers can establish this scene’s provenance.
As a conspiracy theorist, I’m seriously tempted to guess that the ABC killed its Wednesday iview stream to escape adding a printed correction. To its credit, the ABC has indeed added a wrong-footage correction to its Corrections and Clarifications page, not that very many its 500,000 news viewers would wander there. From that page, I learnt the wrong-footage was also on its The World report on Wednesday. The World’s presenter, Yvonne Yong, repeated the same lugubrious grovel as Tamara Oudyn (at 4.07mins). But what do you know! ABC iview has omitted that Wednesday World item. The Gaza stuff-up has eradicated from history an entire day’s work by the news team.
There is one last speculation: perhaps it was all just “inadvertent” as the ABC now claims.
Consider this scenario: Visualise a hung-over archival librarian, quite possibly with purple hair and a nose ring, keying into the ABC mainframe the query, “Get me 2023 footage of Israeli war criminals wrecking Gaza hospital.” But she/he/they mis-keys 2023 as ‘2013’, and predictive text turns her “Israeli” into “Egyptian”. Stranger things have happened, even at Quadrant which I understand has less than a billion-dollar taxpayer annual budget. My main reason for withholding benefit-of-the-doubt is that whenever the ABC makes a mistake involving politics, the mistake is never in favour of anything or anyone right-of-centre.
Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here
[i] The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Barack Obama mere months after his inauguration for allegedly “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”.The Norwegian Nobel Committee cited Obama’s promotion of a “new climate” in international relations, especially in reaching out to the Muslim world.
Watching the ABC that’s your problem!
Tony, it was my xx birthday; many inadvertent things would have happened.
We arrived in Australia in 1988, quickly found the ABC and watched the 7pm News religiously for over thirty years. I even worked for the outfit for three years (engineering, not programmes!). Something seemed to change a few years back – there seemed to be a leftwards spin more overt than previously,
The crunch came a little later. On that occasion, there was a mass shooting in the USA. It was widely reported but not a mention on the 7pm News despite there being enough time in the programme to include a puff piece as a filler. It was not a ‘far right’ attack but rather the reverse so it obviously did not fit the ABC narrative.
That was it. We haven’t watched the programme since nor any of their Current Affairs stuff. Thanks, Tony, for keeping us up to date with what we are not missing.
“Not heard of iview? Here you go:
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And look what I found:
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An ABC Account is required to watch programs on ABC iview.
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No thanks!
Tony,
As a patriotic Australian I NEVAAA watch even the good imported programs on the ABC. If it was not for you, I would not have known about their continued existence. On some outback roads, only ABC broadcasts are available, so I use those stretches to contemplate and enjoy the silence or cosmic static.
I NEVAAA fly Leprecaun Air, and will continue that practise thanks to my remembering their covid-con crimes.
I remain healthily unpricked and uninTOXINated. I have prepared for the inevitable by drafting eulogies for the pricked and boosted and regularly encourage them to have more.
I avoid halal certified products as much as possible.
I voted NO, just once and resisted to temptation to do so many more times. It was enough for now.
Oz definitely needs a Great Reset, but not the UN, WHO, WEF, Davos, HAMAS, Green, TEAL, Totalitarian Digital, Post-Humanist or elitist one promoted by the ruling moronocracy, but a realistic one for the benefit of the many remaining, but powerless Australians of this formerly great country.
Oh, and Go Israel. The death and total destruction of as many HAMAS fanatics as possible is the first step on the road to Tehran and a lasting peace
Tony – why not give up on the ABC. Except for Landline and despite its occasional forays into love letters to all things indigenous, the ABC is a lost cause for anyone looking for honest reporting on anything. And the LNP will never find the spine to take any action against the ABC, in government or in opposition.
That’s because their ABC is the best campaigner the Liberals have got. Nothing motivates non-socialists more than 5 minutes of ABC agitprop.
The Australian’s report today (paywalled and slightly condensed) on the ABC’s program for schoolkids, Behind the News:
The ABC Ombudsman is refusing to review episodes despite receiving close to 100 complaints over its coverage of the conflict in Gaza.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry… had observed the disquiet building in Jewish circles among parents of school-aged children, who began writing letters.
Parents of Jewish children have written to the ABC, some even directly to managing director David Anderson claiming the series included “bias” and “harmful” information regarding the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
… a number of students have also put their concerns in writing, including a year 3 student, whose father wrote to the ABC on her behalf asking for BTN to show “all sides”. The letter was then signed by the entire class.
They did not receive a response.
Another complaint was from the father of a nine-year-old public school girl in Sydney who said she was confronted after BTN was shown in class recently.
“A boy came up to me. I didn’t know who he was. He asked: Are you for Israel or for this other place … I didn’t quite get it. I told him Israel, and he said to me ‘I hope you die’,” the letter from a concerned parent said, calling the show “Palestinian propaganda made PG”.
… the ABC has not replied or responded to that or any of the complaints.
Ombudsman Fiona Cameron on Thursday rejected a written request from Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Peter Wertheim to have the show reviewed.
“The ABC’s editorial standards for impartiality do not require that every facet of every argument is presented within a single discussion or piece of content. Rather, the ABC aims to present, over time, content that addresses a broad range of subjects from a diversity of perspectives reflecting a diversity of experiences, presented in a diversity of ways from a diversity of sources,” Ms Cameron wrote.
Executive Director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry Peter now believed the TV show was “feeding children intellectual poison.”
“The episode was calculated to trigger emotional responses among impressionable schoolchildren through a selective presentation of the facts, instead of following the weight of the available evidence. It was like feeding children intellectual poison.”
Chris Mitchell has a further article: ABC SHOWS ITS IGNORANCE OF THE MIDDLE EAST
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https://todayspaper.theaustralian.com.au/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=0daa96b9-f391-4957-8faf-195640ce38f7
This is not a defence of the ABC in general or BTN in particular, just a fact.
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The last paragraph in the article Tony Thomas cites is:
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On its website, BTN suggests that teachers of younger students preview stories to make sure they are age appropriate.
Now, there’s a novel idea–for teachers AND parents!
Don’t Australian governments have a responsibility to ensure that taxpayer funds are spent in accordance with the requirements under which such funds are allocated?
From the many reports that reveal the ABC’s lawlessness, the callous disregard for their charter, we can only draw the conclusion that the ABC has become an illegitimate, outlaw organisation.
Where’s the Sheriff?
Tony you fail to mention that an ABC board member writes in the AFR without any disclosure.
I haven’t deliberately watched ABC News in years. It’s only if I’ve missed all other local (SA) news sources. I never watch their current affairs and especially loath Q&A. As it turns out I was mostly watching BBC shows on the ABC and now watch the same shows on Fox. I will watch Tom Gleason give his nerdy competitors a rigorous humiliation, but have switched off and home grown local ABC attempts at humour, which for the most is conservative bashing. The Comanches knew when to stop flogging a dead horse; they stepped off and found another and that’s what I’ve done.
Unfortunately I have a wife who likes to watch either ABC News or SBS News. At 30 minutes duration the ABC News is only half as bad as the SBS version which takes a whole hour. But neither of them is worth watching. SkyNews has a good line up: As well as a better News programme, it also has Shari, Credlin and Bolt.