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sincerest apology to you
THE Chaser funnyman Julian Morrow has urged the ABC not to give in to the ''short-term hysteria of media outrage'' because it risks damaging its independence and integrity.
Delivering the Andrew Olle Media Lecture last night, Morrow said he was not sorry for people offended by the ''make a realistic wish'' sketch that led to the comedy group's being taken off air for two weeks.
After the sketch, which portrayed terminally ill children being denied gifts, the Chaser cast issued an apology. But last night Morrow said it was directed only at those who had been personally affected by childhood cancer.
''If you are one of those people, I want to reiterate my sincerest apology to you,'' he said. ''But the next category - people who were offended by the sketch - is in my view different.''
He argued that ''the inevitable corollary to freedom of speech is that there is no such thing as a general right to not be offended. So to be honest, perhaps too honest, if you were just offended by that sketch I'm not really sorry.''
- By Gus Leonisky at 7 Nov 2009 - 2:03pm
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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2009 Andrew Olle Media Lecture...
The Chaser's Julian Morrow says he is sorry a sketch on the show hurt people whose children have terminal illness - but he does not apologise for causing offence to others.
Morrow delivered the 2009 Andrew Olle Media Lecture in Sydney last night.
He said there was no general right not be offended - and producing new content sometimes required program makers to put a sense of community reaction out of mind.
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Morrow also thanked the traditional owner of the place — Mr Murdoch...
of hurt and offends
10:15pm Sunday, 08 Nov 2009
will post link here when available in transcript and streaming.
http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/catchup
The link above is the general link to the ABC iView. In the list of program on offer go to the "Olle Media lecture". The program will be on offer for view for the next 19 days and after this I hope it will stay in some archived form. Please also go to Andrew olle.
no apology from sam...
On-air personality Sam Newman says he has got nothing to apologise for, after calling a group of AFL club directors "liars and hypocrites" on The Footy Show.
Channel Nine has paid a defamation settlement of $220,000 to Western Bulldogs director, Susan Alberti, after she took the network to court over Newman's allegations.
Dr Alberti says she feels vindicated by today's apology and settlement from Channel Nine.
But Newman does not see the settlement of the case as vindication of Dr Alberti.
Outside court, he was asked if he had apologised to her.
"No, I certainly haven't. I have nothing to apologise for," he said.
...
"time to drag a few Neanderthals into the 21st century"...
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Neanderthals? Sam has feelings too, er... hasn't he? See toon at top...
Is it right to apologise for the past?
Australia's PM Kevin Rudd has apologised to the children who were abused or neglected in state care. He said he hoped the national apology would help to "heal the pain" and be a turning point in Australian history.
Orphans and poor children were sent to Australia, Canada and elsewhere for a “better life”, but many were abused and ended up in institutions or as labourers on farms.
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Gus: If we don't apologise, we'll never learn... and we'll keep on destroying other people's lives with excuses full of our own self importance...
free apologies...
From Bob Ellis at Unleashed
Apologies work, it seems, to judge by the tears of the kidnapped, raped, enslaved and diminished children, now grown old, who came here to our orphanages from the UK in the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and sixties. Or they work in an emotional way for a month or two after the great, cathartic, impelling public occasion of tears, Prime Ministerial hugs and free drinks in Parliament House.
But they serve as well as a cover-up, a grey-wash, a kind of spin. None of the child rapists, child-beaters, child-enslavers, child kidnappers, child-traumatisers cursed on Monday will go to jail or, if now dead, be individually named. And not a dollar will go to their victims in reparation. Though the Prime Minister could have, say, put an impost of two per cent on the total annual income of the Catholic and Anglican churches for the next ten years and put the money in a fund for the Remembered Children who now, in their old age, could use it, or some of it, for emotional or medical emergencies, he, an Anglo-Catholic, chose not to.
Though $2.3 million went to Cornelia Rau for five months of inconvenience not a dollar will go to these smashed little souls, irretrievably shamed and shrunken by brutish medieval sadists unpunished still and unnamed.
.....
But for some less equal than others it thought an apology is enough. Or if not quite enough, all they are going to get, and they should count themselves lucky for getting that much. Free drinks at Parliament House. Wowee.
This contrasts with the billions corporate polluters will get for earning less money for a while and ceasing to destroy the planet. They are seen to be more deserving cases than the kidnapped, abused, enslaved and weeping ten-year-olds or the nightmare-harried teenage suicides, the mortally maddened, wretched and exiled little kids who did no harm to anybody and were brutalised for it by madmen still unpunished and (mostly) unnamed.
Not a penny. Words will have to do.
It is said the money isn't there. But the trillion dollars needed to pay out the prodigal Wall Street Meltdown bankers miraculously appeared when they were needed. Twenty thousand a year, say, to the 40,000 abused English orphans (40,000 little Oliver Twists, Tiny Tims, Artful Dodgers, Orphan Annies) for the rest of their lives would cost us, oh, maybe, $12 billion dollars, no more.
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see toon at top...