Windschuttle: the musical

My Meanjin essay on the Quadrant hoax is here.

Crikey correction

As published in today’s Crikey:

Most — if not all — journalists will at some time experience what social scientists like to call ‘recall bias’. And many will, despite their earnest attempts at accuracy, make the odd reporting blunder. Most have also felt that sinking dismay when they discover the sub-editor has hacked the nuances out their report — or worse, slanted it in such a way as to distort its original meaning.

But I don’t know if any of these scenarios can fully explain the whoppers in a recent Crikey article that claims to quote me. It’s a shame, because I’m sure the article’s author, the pseudonymous Lionel Elmore, is on the side of angels.

First, Elmore’s article claims that:

Crikey can now reveal that in April 2005 the Port of Melbourne Corporation paid for its staff to attend a workshop on how to spy on and discredit critics of massive development projects.

True — kind of, a bit. What “Crikey can now reveal” was based on a feature I wrote a few years back, published in Overland and already quoted in other media. It reported that one PoMC staffer, Liza McDonald, did indeed attend a dirty tactics workshop presented by the PRIA and the IPA — along with many other big business and government flacks I named in the Overland article.

But then Lionel Elmore — whom I have neither met nor been interviewed by — reports:

Speaking exclusively to Crikey, journalist Katherine Wilson, who attended the workshop, says that the PoMC’s Environment Effects Statement had just been savaged by a panel convened by the Victorian Government’s to hear submissions on the EES.

I said no such thing, and have no knowledge of this (if it is true). I did not speak at any time to Crikey about this, let alone “exclusively”. I did not write, as the article claims, that the workshop’s “adversarial and aggressive approach to activists was too much for even one of the PoMC staff.” The fiction continues:

Wilson’s frustrations stemmed from the PoMC spending $12 million on an environmental impact statement, that, in its own words, “didn’t get the result that we wanted”. Referring to the PoMC’s contentious plans to undertake test dredging, Wilson made the point that unless you go ahead and channel-deepen, “you can’t demonstrate entirely that nothing will go wrong”.

The article conflates what PoMC staffer Liza McDonald was quoted saying in my 2006 feature with my own views (which are certainly not these). This is a shame, because in the context, those words coming from the PoMC amount to a scandal. By attributing the quotes and views to me, Elmore’s article not only misreported — it buried the lead.

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