CPS Union spokesperson Graeme Thomson blames “a large number of very stupid ABC managers” for the “stuff up” over Religion Report presenter Stephen Crittenden.
Crittenden was suspended last month for writing an opinion article for the Sydney Morning Herald without written authorization, and ABC staff are threatening to strike if any punitive action is taken against him.
Today was the deadline for Crittenden to make a final submission on his case before ABC management makes a decision about his continued employment. Crittenden faces dismissal unless he can convince management to reverse the findings of an internal investigation which found he had engaged in “serious misconduct” because he did not get approval for the article from his network head before publication.
300 ABC members this week attended a joint stop work meeting in Sydney to defend Crittenden, who is currently stood down on full pay while the case is being investigated.
Thomson says “it has been common practice for ABC broadcasters to publish articles and books and engage in public speaking.”
He told radioinfo: “This is a gross waste of taxpayers money. It could have been avoided if some ABC managers bothered to stop and read their own guidelines that enshrine the right of ABC employees to make public comment.”
A Tandberg cartoon portrayed the dispute with two ABC staffers walking into a vacant Religion Report studio saying: “God acts in mysterious ways,” and the other responds: “Not by comparison with ABC management.”
Asked if it was a conspiracy Thompson told radioinfo: “If I had the choice of a conspiracy theory or a stuff up, I would choose stuff up any time. There are a large number of very stupid managers there.”
The CPSU wants the suspension lifted and an apology.
The article, published in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Spectrum section examined a controversial 1996 book on the growth of Islamic unrest by Samuel Huntington.
Published on 19 August, the Crittenden article, called “Clash of the century,” said in part:
The events of the past two years have shown us that the world’s great faultlines are religious rather than economic. The “clash of civilisations” is too real to ignore…
The former Yugoslavia was built on the faultlines between three civilisations Western, Orthodox and Islamic and 40 years of communist rule failed to do anything more than paper over divisions that stretch back through centuries of Ottoman rule to the Great Schism of 1054, and even further to the Roman emperor Diocletian…
It is exactly 10 years since Professor Samuel P. Huntington first theorised this new era in The Clash of Civilisations? one of the most controversial and hotly debated articles ever published by the US journal Foreign Affairs. The director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, Huntington sees international conflict after the Cold War as characterised not by traditional rivalries between nation states or by arguments over ideology or economics, but by cultural and civilisational differences…
Since expanded into a book, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1997 ), the Huntington thesis seems to have been remarkably prescient in the light of recent world events: al-Qaeda, President Bush’s “crusade”, the Taliban, Kashmir, Nigeria, Bali, the “axis of evil” and even the division between Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds that threatens the unity of postwar Iraq. Although perhaps it doesn’t explain the recent admission by Paul Wolfowitz, US Deputy Secretary of Defence, that the main reason behind military action in Iraq was oil…