Their One-Sided Conversation: Government-funded PC Propaganda, by Tony Thomas.
Drawing its sustenance on the public purse, the [Conversation] website has become quite an empire, with international outposts and an ever-expanding staff nominally pledged to present the latest in academic research. What visitors get is an overload of green-left waffle and censorship if they dare to disagree. …
Funded out of the public purse:
[T[he Abbott government declined to extend the Gillard government’s $1m a year grants (PM Gillard also provided a $1.5m startup grant). Abbott’s education minister, Christopher Pyne, said the previous funding was conditional on the site achieving viability by mid-2015. “It had a shelf-life of three years, at which time The Conversation is meant to be self-sustaining…They were given $3.5 million — in that time they’ve expanded to Africa, the United States and the UK, and I expect that they are in a position where they will be self-sustaining, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to expand overseas in the way they have.”
[Andrew Jaspan, 64, co-founder and executive director of The Conversation] claimed that the target date “was never achievable and The Conversation told the government that last year.” He put viability forward to at least 2017. He professed to be baffled why the conservative government was declining to fund green/left academics to undermine the conservative government on issues ranging from asylum-seeker policy to Muslim terror and continuance of coal mining.
Jaspan then had to resort to a crowd-funding appeal, which raised a remarkable $400,000 before Victoria’s Labor government came to the party in September, 2015, with $1m a year for a further three years.
Here at the Wentworth Report we could do with some funding. No one who isn’t PC gets any funding from government.
The Australian arm of The Conversation has $5m revenue and costs about $3.8m a year, leaving a $1.2m surplus. What happens to that surplus is unclear but Mark Day in The Australian last November said the US operation costs $1.2m, “giving the entire enterprise an annual budget of $5m”. …
Australian salaries last year totaled about $3.3m. The financial report shows “key management” on a total $525,000 pay. …
Staff now total 34 in Australian operations, 20 in the UK, 14 in the US, 11 in Africa, 9 in France and 5 in Global, plus 8 in Global Technology for a total of 101. The board is 12 and editorial board 10.
One could run a pretty influential website with that much money. Dream on. See what we are up against in the climate “debate” and more broadly in the culture wars? The disparity in resources is awesome.
Speaking of diversity of voices, The Conversation is now formally and intricately entwined with their ABC. The love-in began a year ago with The Conversation purportedly fact-checking statements on QandA (followed by fact checks on election statements). Last month the ABC officially plugged itself into The Conversation’s daily output, ready to amplify and cross-promote the academics’ tergiversations [evasions of straightforward action or clear-cut statement].
Note that both the ABC and The Conversation are using taxpayer funds to compete against commercial news operators. The Conversation is also pumping its output into the schools sector, where kids are already drenched with green/left propaganda from the likes of Greenpeace.
Tony Thomas’ book of essays, That’s Debatable, is available here.
