OhBehave and Sniffer Dog, you’re allowing your stance on this subject to colour your judgement. Think about what you’ve just said and how silly it really is. Substitute ‘promotion for a job well done’ for ‘kickback’ and you are describing all of the capitalist commercial world perfectly. If these journalists did what their superiors perceived to be an excellent job in covering a major story, they would deserve and rightly expect to be promoted, just as you would if you handled your job well.
In my opinion, (but you can bet your last dollar not in some other people’s opinion), Wiley is quite right. The Australian media, with only two or three exceptions, were highly partisan in their handling of the news regarding the Dispute, (whether from ideological commitment or in slavishly following the dictates of their bosses, I’ll leave for the individual to decide). I remember Heather Hewitt as well. I forget the other senior female ABC reporter who was so far in Hawke’s pocket she was in among the lint and small change, but she later became a Labor Member of Parliament, I think in one of the ACT electorates. (Was it Pru Goward? Apologies, Pru if you have not since gone into politics.)
Anyone who lived in Melbourne during those times will remember Neil Mitchell and I forget the other one, both presenters of prime time talk back radio shows on 3AW. Both had been giving the pilots a fair hearing, (to some effect, it would seem), which the likes of John Laws in Sydney and all the ABC presenters were definitely not after the first week or so). It would have been in October of November, (sorry, can’t remember exactly when), they were both sacked on the Friday – and when the ratings came out three days later on the Monday morning, both had secured the top ratings for their time slot.
This seemed very odd to me (and many other people who had nothing at all to do with the Dispute). A mate of mine who dealt quite closely with the media during the Dispute for the Feds told me that he called one of the producers at 3AW (who he’d got to know quite well) and asked her why the pair had been sacked when they’d both just got the top ratings. She told him that airline companies bought advertising time, airline pilots didn’t.