The government of Prime Minister John Howard is in a battle with the publicly financed Australian Broadcasting Corp, accusing it of "biased, and in particular anti-American" coverage of the war in Iraq.
Australia sent combat troops to Iraq, and the conservative Howard's battle with the well-regarded broadcasting system has focused public attention on the importance he places on Australia's relationship with the US.
The Ministry of Communications released a bill of particulars against a popular morning current-affairs radio program, AM, citing 68 examples of what it contended was biased coverage during the conflict in Iraq.
Among the complaints were that the program gave too much attention to accidental killings of soldiers by their own troops and to civilian casualties and that it gave too little prominence to successes, including the "strategic achievements" of the Australian troops, the ministry said.
The system, known to Australians as ABC or just Auntie, includes a radio network and a national television channel. It is patterned after the BBC, including a multi-tiered system to review complaints.
ABC's ombudsman, Murray Green, looked into the accusations and issued a report that rebuffed the government. Green found that only 2 of the 68 citations had merit: One story about the tenor of the daily Pentagon briefings veered toward sarcasm, he said; another dealing with President Bush's decision not to watch the televised first night of the bombing of Baghdad was too speculative.
Howard, like Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, is now waging political wars at home against both the public broadcasting system and against those who contend that the government exaggerated the extent of Iraq's inventory of weapons.
A parliamentary inquiry that opened in the capital, Canberra, last Friday somewhat mirrors the British inquiry into the intelligence dossier that the BBC charged had exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq to make a stronger case for war.
But statements by an Australian intelligence analyst, Andrew Wilkie, that Howard's office overstated the threat from Iraq's weapons have failed to raise anything like the firestorm that similar accusations raised in Britain.
Howard appears to be benefiting from the fact that Australians supported their soldiers in Iraq, even if they were not largely in favor of sending them. Also, unlike Blair, Howard brought almost all combat soldiers home once the war was over.
In his report, Green said he compared the 68 news reports the government found objectionable with reports on the same subjects filed by the international wire services, major American news outlets and statements by the Bush administration.
In some cases, the wording of the ABC radio reports was exactly the same as that of the wire services and the American reports.
For example, the ministry complained that the ABC had said the war was likely to result in "hundreds of thousands" of refugees. Green pointed out that wire services carried the same prediction based on public statements by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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