SBS target of campaign
over Vietnamese news broadcast

by Bob Briton

A shrill but highly organised campaign has succeeded in forcing 
multicultural broadcaster SBS to suspend the airing of the 
Vietnamese news program Thoi Su. The program was introduced to 
the World Watch line-up in October alongside new Tagalog 
and Arabic programs. The channel carries 22 news bulletins from 
19 countries. SBS originally decided to take the VTV4 program 
from Vietnam to provide a service for the 200,000 Australians of 
Vietnamese background.

Thoi Su will remain off air until another round of community 
consultations has been completed. SBS had previously decided to 
keep airing the program after a series of discussions with 
community leaders and consideration by its community advisory 
committee had found that the program complied with the 
broadcaster's charter and codes of practice.

However, it appears that an unrelenting campaign against SBS by 
organisations like the Vietnamese Community Association of 
Australia has caused the regrettable back down.

Prior to the decision, station manager Nigel Milan said that his 
organisation had been subjected to "an organised campaign against 
freedom of speech and expression" that he had found "deeply 
troubling".

He told a Senate estimates committee that SBS has policies that 
prevent the showing of programs that incite violence or racial 
hatred but that programmers are not meant to make political 
judgements about content or to edit the World Watch bulletins. He 
also explained that it is SBS's practice to source news programs 
from national broadcasters.

None of these explanations were acceptable to Dr Tien Nguyen or 
the other organisers of two large demonstrations outside SBS 
Sydney studios in Artarmon. Thousands of protestors were bussed 
to the location and, at the demonstration held on December 2, 
forced the closure of Herbert St for three hours.

The organisers object to the fact that Thoi Su provides news of 
progress being made in education and the economy, for example, 
and that members of the Vietnamese Government and Party figures 
are referred to "reverentially". They dismissed the suggestion 
that they simply not watch the 6.30am broadcast; saying that it 
is disturbing that it is "there".

The Vietnamese Community Association has demanded that SBS take 
(and in that case, pay for) a news program from outside Vietnam 
without the "bias" contained in the VTV4 program. The question of 
bias against the government of Vietnam in the suggested programs 
would be, of course, irrelevant.

The Vietnamese Community Association has received encouragement 
from the usual reactionary quarters. Queensland Liberal Senator 
Santo Santoro accused SBS in parliament of broadcasting 
"communist propaganda". Herald Sun columnist and Liberal 
Party luminary Andrew Bolt used his column to attack SBS manager 
Nigel Milan.

Greg Sheridan claimed in a recent piece in The Australian 
that the program was offensive in the same way that holocaust 
denial program would be to the Jewish community. He added that 
its presence on our airwaves was an insult to the Australian 
servicemen that died in the Vietnam War.

The issue appears to have stirred a number of amateur revisionist 
historians like Mr Sheridan into action to absolve our Government 
of its guilt over the loss of those lives and to portray the 
invasion and destruction of Vietnam by the US and its allies as a 
noble undertaking in the name of "freedom".

It has also given them another platform to vilify those forces 
that finally achieved reunification and national independence.

Commenting on the protests at the SBS studios Federal Minister 
for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs Gary Hardgrave — 
representing a government not noted for heeding even historically 
large protests — had the following to say: "This is the 
Australian way — in Australia, we talk it out in a constructive 
way. This was a meaningful protest held in an orderly and 
peaceful fashion, and the protestors left the site exactly as 
they found it."

The Minister may well have been relieved that the protests did 
not cause more disruption than they did. At the October 28 rally, 
Dr Nguyen warned listeners of other actions to follow: "It could 
be a hunger strike.it could be more protests. But I can tell you, 
if SBS does not suspend the program and listen to the crowd and 
come to their senses, they will see more protests in different 
forms."

The campaign against the Vietnamese news program comes on top of 
another by the Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council 
against SBS. It has made 57 claims of bias, editorialising, 
selectivity and factual errors in news coverage over a one-year 
period that favoured the position of the Palestinians over that 
of the Israeli Government.

Elsewhere, there was the pursuit of the ABC by former 
Communications Minister Richard Alston. He kept pressure on the 
Corporation's appeals mechanisms until they upheld 15 of his 68 
allegations of bias in comment about the war in Iraq. Most were 
levelled at the AM radio program. The broadcaster's defence that 
it sought to represent the range of opinion about the war did not 
satisfy the Minister.

Last year the ABC had 44,000 complaints. Of these 291 were to do 
with bias about the war in Iraq with 144 alleging bias against 
the US and 147 claiming bias in favour of the US. There were more 
complaints about bias in sports reporting than in the treatment 
of the Iraqi events. It is a measure of the former Minister's 
well-resourced fanaticism that he pursued his perception of 
"bias" as far as he did.