Daily Telegraph's attempt at humour tanks with Nauru v Auschwitz graphic

The Daily Telegraph gave the paediatrician Paul Bauert a huge slap for likening asylum seekers on Nauru to Jews at Auschwitz – but the tabloid made a rather tasteless comparison itself along the way.

“The main problem these people have is a lack of meaning, a lack of any end to what’s going on, a lack of certainty,” Bauert had said about the asylum seekers on Nauru. “Even those that finally knew they were about to be condemned to the gas chamber at least found some sense of relief in knowing what was happening.” The medico later apologised.

To illustrate the story the Daily Telegraph ran a large graphic featuring a photo of sunny Nauru superimposed with a list of all the reasons the island is better than Auschwitz. The comparison was made more stark by an inclusion of a black-and-white photograph of children liberated from Auschwitz in 1945.

Clearly a failed attempt at humour, the graphic said the offshore processing centre was better because, unlike the Auschwitz prisoners, the asylum seekers have television, air conditioning and can even open businesses.

All right at the ABC

Regular ABC consumers aren’t surprised to hear the free-market views of the Centre for Independent Studies aired regularly, and it’s not just because the Radio National presenter Tom Switzer is the executive director of the conservative thinktank, as well as the host of Between the Lines. Like the Institute of Public Affairs, the CIS has a significant footprint at Aunty.

On one recent weekend three representatives of the centre were on air, in three separate Radio National programs.

The Right Rev Robert Forsyth, a senior fellow at the CIS, appeared on God Forbid, a religion program hosted by James Carleton; Carlos d’Abrera, a psychiatrist and research associate at the CIS, was on Amanda Vanstone’s Counterpoint to discuss the libertarian view on homelessness; and the John Bonython lecture hosted by Switzer at the centre last year was featured on Big Ideas. The lecture by the Brexit supporter Daniel Hannan was titled How Identity Politics Are Undoing the Enlightenment.

Nick Cater, a former editor of the Weekend Australian and now executive director of the Menzies Research Centre, also made an appearance on the show.

This week Eugenie Joseph, a senior policy analyst at the CIS, was a panellist on Big Ideas.

A few months ago Wayne Swan said the right had invested “huge sums of money” on getting a seat at the table of ideas. Labor’s federal president said the Institute of Public Affairs had revenue of $6.1m in 2016-17 and had raised $29.9m since 2009, and the CIS had revenue of $3.9m in 2016-17 and had raised $25.9m.

“Which means that since the global financial crisis, those two organisations alone have raised over $55m to argue for less government, less financial regulation, less power for working people, less equality and less action to combat climate change,” he said.

An RN spokesman said the network’s program teams “ensure they follow the ABC’s editorial policies”.

Fatal attraction

After our story last week about the veteran Canberra commentator Paul Bongiorno being targeted by Gerard Henderson in his Media Watch Dog column nine times in 2018, we smiled at this image and headline of Hendo on the Australian’s website.

Supplementary questions

ABC employees who walked into work at their Ultimo headquarters on Wednesday could be excused for thinking they were at a pharmaceutical trade fair. “The future of personalised medicine is here,” said one banner.

In the lobby staff were accosted by marketing material for the nutritional and therapeutic supplements company BioCeuticals, which is owned by Blackmores. Staffers told Weekly Beast there were billboards, flyers and offers of seminars and DNA testing. What was going on? Had the ABC lobby been sold off to commercial entities?

Well, partly. The ABC’s commercial arm rents out studios and other spaces to corporate types for functions – but in this case the company rented a studio then spread out and took over the lobby too.

An ABC spokeswoman said: “It was a standard arrangement by Studios and Media Production, which hires out spare studios and other production resources. In this case a company hired the space for a corporate presentation to its own staff. It had an allocated area just outside the studio entrance to serve tea, coffee and lunch, and, of its own accord, set up signage and a product display. When the ABC became aware of it we contacted the company and they arranged to have the signage and display removed.”

Fairfax’s furniture sell-off

The old Fairfax Media is being dismantled bit by bit. This week came news the regional and rural newspaper division had been put up for sale by its new owner Nine, and the signage at the front of the Pyrmont offices of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review was being redone. The Nine Entertainment company has commissioned Macquarie Capital to find a buyer for the papers, which include the Canberra Times, the Newcastle Herald, the Examiner, the Border Mail, the Courier and Illawarra Mercury, the Land, Queensland Country Life, and Stock and Land. Suffice to say, staff on those papers are worried.

After-dark confession

The Sky News AM Agenda presenter Laura Jayes, who also hosts First Edition with Kieran Gilbert, was frank in her assessment of the Sky After Dark lineup when she appeared on a panel at an Online News Association event at the Twitter headquarters in Sydney. Sitting alongside Nine’s Chris Uhlmann, BuzzFeed’s Alice Workman and the New York Times’ Damien Cave, Jayes admitted that opinion was the lifeblood of Sky News Australia, and it didn’t pretend to be balanced.

“I think the people watching our opinion shows already have pretty firm ideas,” she said. “They’re watching opinion to have their own views reinforced, not to get a full, healthy diet of opinions across the political landscape. But that’s part of what we do. From 5am to midnight you’re going to get a whole bunch of different perspectives.”

This week Jayes showed that there are different opinions on Sky – before 6pm – when she said it wasn’t true that the medical evacuation bill allowed rapists and murderers to come to Australia.