Andrew Bolt: Coverage of Don Dale and George Pell proves ABC bias is now a menace

By Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
July 31, 2016

http://goo.gl/GoanNo

Cardinal George Pell.

First, the ABC falsely presented the restraint by detention staff of a violent youth as the torture of a near-innocent boy.

Next, it presented Australia’s top Catholic, Cardinal George Pell, as a sexual predator of children, based on the highly unreliable memories of people recalling ambiguous events more than 30 years old.

The consequences have been devastating.

In a knee-jerk response to the first report, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called a royal commission into the Northern Territory’s juvenile justice system.

Activists are already exploiting this to turn attention from the deadly dysfunction of Aboriginal society — the most urgent problem — to the inflammatory excuse of white cruelty to black children.

In response to the second report, Pell’s church is being vilified just as it prepares to speak against the planned vote on same-sex marriage — the ABC’s great crusade.

Let me go through both reports to show how the ABC abused its power.

In the first report, the ABC’s Four Corners program showed three examples of what it implied was the systematic abuse of children in detention in the NT.

One involved the teargassing two years ago of children, only one of whom had rioted, in a Darwin centre that’s no longer used. That was indeed appalling.

The second involved staff violently grabbing a boy, Dylan Voller. In fact, two officers were later cleared by courts when the full background was explained.

The third incident featured the iconic image of the “torture” uncovered by the ABC — and this is where the ABC played dirty.

The Four Corners report opened with Voller (again) being strapped into a restraint chair at an Alice Springs centre with what seemed a bag on his head.

No explanation was given. Rather, presenter Sarah Ferguson explicitly suggested Voller was being punished or even tortured: “The image you have just seen isn’t from Guantánamo Bay or Abu Ghraib but Australia in 2015 …

“It is barbaric. This is juvenile justice in the NT, a system that punishes troubled children instead of rehabilitating them …”

Only much later came a half-hint that there may be another side to the story: “Voller has been in and out of juvenile detention since he was 11 years old for car theft, robberies and, more recently, assault.”

Now for the facts Four Corners left out. Vollner, then a strong youth of 17, was not strapped in as punishment but because he’d eaten his mattress and threatened to break his hand and “snap my bone through my skin”.

The hood was actually a mesh “spit mask” to stop Voller spitting on officers, as he’d done hundreds of times.

Worse, the ABC’s claim that Voller was merely a thief who’d only “more recently” been violent was completely false.

Voller’s first convictions for assault actually date back seven years. Of his more than 50 convictions, 23 are for assault or other attempts to hurt people, including bashing a teenager unconscious.

Moreover, 11 attacks were on police and public servants trying to manage him, so detention staff had reason to fear he’d hurt them, too, if unrestrained.

To the second report — the vilification of George Pell.

The ABC’s allegations, furiously denied by Pell, boil down to two.

First, one man, Les Tyack, claimed he’d found Pell in a changing room in Torquay more than 30 years ago towelling himself for a suspiciously long time while naked in front of boys.

Second, Pell, then a popular young priest involved in education, allegedly fondled the penis and anus of at least two boys when horsing around in a pool more than 30 years ago, throwing hordes of children off his shoulders.

The first allegation is plainly a ridiculous basis for smearing Pell more than three decades later.

Can Tyack be sure it was Pell, who was not a Torquay priest? Can he know what was in Pell’s mind when towelling himself?

As for the second allegation, the ABC did concede that its main two witnesses both had police records. But it omitted more information that goes to the credibility of one, former drug addict Lyndon Mark Monument.

Monument also had a history of psychiatric illness and had been admitted to a psychiatric institution soon after being charged with numerous offences for which he served jail.

Nor did the ABC’s 7.30 interview any witnesses in Pell’s defence, including the wife of the then pool manager, who’d told police she’d never seen him do anything that raised her concerns.

Not surprisingly, this case against Pell is so thin that Victoria’s Director of Public Prosecutions reportedly returned the file to the police.

After a year of digging, police have still not asked to question Pell.

No, he’s just smeared instead by the ABC.

Let me draw a contrast. When Labor leader Bill Shorten was accused of rape by a woman three decades after the alleged event, how did the ABC respond?

It refused to name Shorten until the police concluded their investigation and ruled there was no evidence to prosecute.

So did I. I did not think it fair to smear Shorten over allegations so old, so strongly denied, and so damaging.

So why has the ABC treated Pell differently?

Now, I am not calling Pell’s accusers liars. Absolutely not. I can’t know the facts.

But I do know others have made claims against Pell — and to the royal commission into child sex abuse — to suggest he’d ignored warnings of abuse by other priests.

Those accusers were also relying on their memory of events of more than 30 years ago — but their memories proved false.

One claimed he’d left his school to knock on the door of Pell’s presbytery nearby to warn that his brother was being abused, and Pell had just chased him away. But it turned out Pell didn’t live at that presbytery. Moreover, at that time of day he’d normally have been at work at the theological college he headed.

Another Ballarat witness claimed he’d told Pell in 1969 he’d just been raped by a priest, but Pell last year produced his passport to show he’d spent 1969 in Europe, studying and working.

A third witness claimed he’d heard Pell tell a second priest at a memorial mass in Ballarat that paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale was “rooting” boys.

But church records showed no such mass took place then, and the second priest said his own parish was hours away so he would not have even served at a mass in Ballarat, anyway.

You see, memories over 30 years change. They get coloured and, after decades of media vilification of Pell, I’m not surprised he’s become the monster of some people’s shaky memories — especially the memories of people searching for scapegoats for their troubled lives.

Bad memory is excusable.

But how the ABC abused its massive state power can never be excused.