AUSTRALIA: ABC and Fairfax Media "out-to-lunch" when Royal Commission Conducted Public hearings into the Uniting Church Last Friday (after lunch)
The Australian - Media Watch - Gerard Henderson - Friday 17 March 2017
MEDIA WATCH: ABC and Fairfax Media "out-to-lunch" when Royal Commission Conducted Public hearings into the Uniting Church Last Friday (after lunch)
Here’s some news which the ABC and Fairfax Media do not regard as fit-to-print. Over the past four decades, a child in Australia was much more likely to suffer sexual abuse at a school or institution run by the Uniting Church than at a school or institution run by the Catholic Church.
...The statistics available to the Royal Commission with respect to the Uniting Church cover the period from 1977 to the present. That is, unlike the Catholic Church and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the allegations do not relate to a period going back to 1950.
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Yet you would not be aware of any of this if you followed only the reporting of the Royal Commission by the ABC, Fairfax Media, The Guardian and The Saturday Paper. It seems the likes of Samantha Donovan, Philippa McDonald, Louise Milligan, Joanne McCarthy and Rachel Browne did not come back from lunch on Friday 10 February and simply missed the coverage of sexual child abuse in the Uniting Church in the four decades since 1977.
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This is of special interest since Mark Scott, a one-time editorial director at Fairfax Media’s Sydney Morning Herald and a one-time editor-in-chief at the ABC, joined the board of the Uniting Church’s Knox Grammar in late 2007 and was deputy chairman between mid-2013 and 2016.
