One of the worst kept secrets in Australia is that the multinational Adani mining group, for reasons known only to its company board in India, wants to build a mine in the Galilee Basin but has no intention of building a financially viable mine.
And Adani really dislikes the media mentioning this fact......
But now let’s come back
closer to home to Adani, whose controversial Carmichael mine in Queensland’s
Galilee Basin gets ever closer to construction, despite this scathing piece in
The Sydney Morning Herald by Bloomberg columnist David Fickling:
The
numbers on Adani simply don't add up
Comparable
projects like Glencore's Wandoan have been mothballed for years.
-
The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 May, 2019
Fickling’s op-ed 10 days
ago argued that the Adani mine may never be built — even if it does get final
approval — because it’s currently much cheaper to buy coal than dig it out of a
brand-new coal mine.
And over at ABC Radio,
Saturday AM thought that was worth a story.
But after being worked
on by Isobel Roe, a young award-winning journalist in Brisbane, it never made
it to air.
So, why was that? Well,
Media Watch can reveal that Adani complained to the ABC in advance. And the
story was spiked.
So how did this all
unfold?
Bloomberg has confirmed
to Media Watch that David Fickling was interviewed by the ABC on the afternoon
of Friday, 24th of May.
And just over an hour
later, at 4.20pm, Adani say Roe contacted them for comment.
And not long after that,
at 5.50pm, the producer of Saturday AM, Thomas Oriti, told ABC staff he was
killing the story.
Now, newsrooms at the
ABC are open plan and not very private and four witnesses tell Media Watch that
Oriti made it clear Adani had complained.
Indeed, one claims he
told Roe:
‘Sorry.
It’s nothing to do with you, but we’re not going to be able to run this’.
-
Phone interview, ABC staffer, 31 May, 2019
While another claims he
said:
‘It’s
not my decision, it’s come from on high.’
-
Phone interview, ABC staffer, 31 May, 2019
The ABC denies this and
maintains his decision was taken entirely on editorial merit, because the story
didn’t stack up.
So what can we be sure
of?
Well, there’s no doubt
Adani did complain, both to the reporter when she rang and, shortly after, to
her bosses. A company spokesperson told us:
…
we raised concerns with ABC management when approached to comment on a story
that contained inaccuracies and was potentially biased ...
-
Email, Adani spokesperson, 31 May, 2019
Adani says it told the
reporter she should talk to an analyst more friendly to the mining sector.
And when she asked them
to suggest someone, Adani’s PR team cracked it and went over her head to ABC
management:
Adani
complained that it was not reasonable that the onus for ensuring that ABC news
coverage was fair and balanced should fall back onto the company and not onto
the ABC’s well-resourced newsrooms.
-
Email, Adani spokesperson, 31 May, 2019
A key feature of Adani’s
complaint was that the ABC had not given it enough time to respond.
But in fact by Friday
afternoon Fickling’s work had been up for more than 36 hours.
And Adani was
able to send a statement to the ABC almost immediately.
So, who at the ABC dealt
with the company’s complaint?
We’re told Adani went
straight to the top — ABC News boss Gaven Morris — who we understand is the
person they normally contact.
So to clarify what
happened, we asked Morris a series of questions, which included:
Did
Adani contact you last Friday afternoon to complain about the story?
What
was the nature of the complaint, and how did you respond?
Why
was the story pulled, given that it had been commissioned for Saturday AM only
hours beforehand?
Was
the decision to pull the story taken after Adani’s complaint?
Why
was this complaint handled personally by you?
-
Email, Media Watch to Gaven Morris, 31 May, 2019
We did not get a
response from Gaven Morris or answers to most of those questions.
Instead, an ABC
spokesperson told us:
There
was no complaint.
-
Email, ABC spokesperson, 31 May, 2019
Which is remarkable,
because Adani says there was…..
BACKGROUND
