More ABC Bias Revealed

A quick trawl of last Firday's AM archives turned up this example of anti-American bias that Senator Alston may have missed. At the end of a report on the latest Chinese government initiative to control the spread of SARS, John Taylor said:

JOHN TAYLOR: China knows a lot about executions. It leads the world in killing its own citizens. Many human rights groups say it annually kills more people than the rest of the world put together, and not only people convicted of capital offences are executed.

This is scurrilous. As we know, there are plenty of State Governors, District Attorneys and Judges in the US who are proud of their willingness to execute some of the citizenry to discourage the rest from killing each other. But, according to John Taylor, rather than the world's greatest democracy being the world leader in this area, it's one of the world's few remaining communist regimes. This is not merely anti-American: it's anti-democratic.

Of course I may be wrong about this. It may be that we currently have a round of trade negotiations going on with the Chinese. If so, I'm prepared to withdraw the charge of anti-American bias unreservedly: Taylor's endorsement of China's leadership in this area of human rights is consistent with the nation's best economic interests and probably just the sort of responsible reporting that the Federal Government wants to see more of from the ABC.