Drawing its sustenance on the public purse, the website has become quite an empire, with international outposts and an ever-expanding staff nominally pledged to present the latest in academic research. What visitors get is an overload of green-left waffle and censorship if they dare to disagree.
In November, 2015, Islamist gunmen massacred 130 young Parisians. Academic authors at the taxpayer-supported The Conversation were quick off the mark with the site’s trademark ‘Academic rigor, journalistic flair’.Here’s a sample, from Folker Hanusch at Queensland University of Technology. It was headed: “Disproportionate coverage of Paris attacks is not just the media’s fault”.
He mounted a case straight from cloud-cuckoo land that the media ought to give equal treatment to death-dealing catastrophes no matter where they occur, e.g. in the African interior or Syria. He concluded that “journalists are not the only ones to blame for the disproportionate coverage” in Paris – audiences must “share the blame”. He suggested that if only the punters’ mindsets and empathies could be brought closer to the refined sensibilities of academics, “disproportionate” coverage of the Paris massacres could be corrected.
This patronizing PC bilge suggests why sensible people give academia a wide berth and news organisations staffed with journalism graduates are going down the gurgler. It also doesn’t say much for the nous of The Conversation’s editors. These are the same people who this month put ludicrous captions on stock pics of military mayhem:
Aftermath of a bomb attack in 2014 in Jos, Nigeria by the militant group Boko Haram. Analysts have linked Boko Haram’s rise to climatic shifts and resource shortages.
Destroyed tanks in front of a mosque in Azaz, Syria, 2012. Climate scientists have identified the 2006-2010 drought in Syria as a factor in the civil uprising that began in 2011.
Andrew Jaspan, 64, co-founder and executive director of The Conversation, was sent on forced leave last month, according to the Guardian, but not because of his site’s bizarre news treatments.
Two other factors were involved:
Letters of complaint to the board from some of Jaspan’s Australian and overseas editors about Jaspan’his style and strategy – a reprise of the Age staff revolt against Jaspan in early 2008
Top-level concern about Jaspan’s hell-for-leather expansion overseas, despite The Conversation’s shoe-string finances and dependence on taxpayers’ largesse.
As Jaspan put it with aplomb in his 2014 annual review, “Each year takes us by surprise. There’s no road map, and we are making our future as we go along.”
A few months later, the Abbott government declined to extend the Gillard government’s $1m a year grants (PM Gillard also provided a $1.5m startup grant). Abbott’s education minister, Christopher Pyne, said the previous funding was conditional on the site achieving viability by mid-2015. “It had a shelf-life of three years, at which time The Conversation is meant to be self-sustaining…They were given $3.5 million — in that time they’ve expanded to Africa, the United States and the UK, and I expect that they are in a position where they will be self-sustaining, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to expand overseas in the way they have.”
Jaspan claimed that the target date “was never achievable and The Conversation told the government that last year.” He put viability forward to at least 2017. He professed to be baffled why the conservative government was declining to fund green/left academics to undermine the conservative government on issues ranging from asylum-seeker policy to Muslim terror and continuance of coal mining.
