I am supporter of GetUp, the social action group that rallies Australians to get together and make a statement about many issues that the Government needs to pay attention too.
GetUp organised to air a commercial urging our Prime Minister to not be silent about Tibet. GetUp raised support to produce and screen the ad during the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games. The ad was professionally produced, airtime booked professionally etc, etc but.…. it failed to air. Here’s what GetUp had to say about this.
Freedom of speech is alive and well in Australia, right? We thought so — until this weekend.
The Australian said it best yesterday: “Nothing has sucked the air from the lungs as much as Seven’s decision to drop an advertisement by GetUp… In a democracy, where freedom of speech is a given, Seven’s craven self-censoring efforts represent a gold-medal act of moral cowardice.”*
Ordinary Australians donated to put an ad to air featuring a Tibetan women asking the Prime Minister to raise the issue of Tibet when in China. The ad was booked, paid for and confirmed to air on either side of the Opening Ceremony — but it never showed.
In the Olympic spirit of fairness, we want to give Seven a chance to show they do support freedom of speech — by showing another GetUp Tibet ad during the closing ceremony. Click here to donate the funds needed to produce a brand new ad — now that the PM has left Beijing — that we will ask Seven to show during the closing ceremony:
www.getup.org.au/campaign/SevensDeadlySin
The Seven Network are having trouble sticking to a consistent story — first they denied GetUp had booked any ads at all, then, once we produced the confirmed booking sheets, claimed we’d booked another ad unrelated to Tibet. Now they’re claiming the ads weren’t shown due to time constraints. They’ve even accused GetUp of engineering this deliberately — check out evidence on our site that proves otherwise.
We have a great chance while the world’s eyes are on China to advance the cause of human rights — and Seven has a great chance to set the record straight on the issue of censorship, by allowing us to air another ad reinforcing the idea that once the Olympics finish the human rights issues remain. You can help make a stand by donating towards its production — and we’ll buy spots to air it on the other networks too:
www.getup.org.au/campaign/SevensDeadlySin
If we don’t speak out when one of the nation’s largest broadcasters puts its business interests before freedom of speech, we start down a slippery slope. Sometimes the human rights we thought existed as a given in Australia won’t be respected without our insistence on it.
Some of the media picked up on this grave error on part of Network 7.
Last night the ABC’s Media Watch featured the sad story of the censored GetUp ad — you can watch it here.
*‘Seven at home in a moral pollution’ The Australian, 11 August 2008
Ironically this is not the first time they have lied to us, the public. Their flagship current affairs program, “Today Tonight” has done so on a few occassions.
I do not trust Channel 7 news, nor do I trust anything that is portrayed on their news shows as being factual or representative of the truth. It is disgusting that in a democracy, the so called lynchpin of capitalism, one of our networks is terrified of it’s ratings and money over the lives and blood of people.
Shame, Channel 7, Shame.
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