Channel 7 bow to Bush, Howard interests

The admirable Mr Melrose.

Businessman Ian Melrose is funding a $500 000 advertising campaign during APEC to highlight abuses by the Indonesian military in West Papua and East Timor. Ads will be running on SBS, Channel 9 and in the SMH. Melrose also paid for advertising time on Channel 7, who then turned cowardly and refused to run the ads, calling them 'repetitive'. Like Howard's $60 million WorkChoices workplace relations (or whatever they're calling it now) ads aren't repetitive. Like Harvey Norman and Super A-mart ads aren't repetitive (and loud!). All ads are repetitive if they're run more than once. Why are Channel 7 weeing their pants over a single $500 000 advertising campaign? Are they hoping to curry favour with the Howard government so they'll be blessed with more of the billions of taxpayers' dollars in advertising that Howard feels are his to throw around? Are they hoping to be number one choice for Liberal party advertising during the election campaign?

Pathetic.

Also pathetic are all the TV stations who refuse to run lines that are entirely, if uncomfortably, truthful, featuring scenarios such as the following:

Spurred by reading about the death of a young Timorese girl from worm infestation, he has run ad campaigns against the Howard Government's tough negotiations with East Timor over seabed oil and gas resources.

Commercial TV stations and even SBS have baulked at stark lines such as: "When you steal from Third World countries, you kill their kids."

Cowardly. If the TV stations don't like the truth, maybe they should devote themselves to doing something about it, rather than refusing to acknowledge the consequences of Australia's actions.