Two members of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet traveled to Australia last month to warn the Southwest Pacific nation about possible coercion from China.
Three Australian reporters were speaking on a hot mic before a press conference with Biden’s secretary of state.
A high-profile journalist, Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Stephen Dziedzic, admitted to being too soft on China’s current administration… and he also admitted to belittling a skeptical colleague for reporting on the lab leak theory.
One reporter, Matthew Knott of the Sydney Morning Herald, struck up a conversation before the press conference. He asked the others about newscaster Sharri Markson and her coverage of the lab leak theory.
Knott asked, “Did you see Sharri’s latest?”
A second reporter, Ben Packham of The Australian, responded, “Amazingly, she is looking more and more like she’s right.”
Then, Stephen Dziedzic of Australia’s ABC chimed in… and was caught on a hot mic.
“She’s like a pit bull and she’s so unhinged but yet she might still be right,” Dziedzic said.
“I feel like I remember being super dismissive of that, not even very early on, for a good while, I was just like, ‘That is the most unhinged thing ever.’ And I reckon it was overly influenced by the fact that there was some truly nasty and crazy people who were already deep down the rabbit hole. I probably didn’t look at it dispassionately enough.”
Sharri Markson herself responded to these confession.
“Nice to hear my colleague Ben Packham defending my coverage. But calling me unhinged? And a pit bull? I’ve interviewed hundreds of people both on and off the record… I’ve spent hundreds of hours of my time… I felt and I still feel that it’s incredibly important to know the origins of the pandemic,” Markson said last month on Sky News Australia.
“But more importantly, did you hear astonishing admission about why Stephen Dzedzic, the ABC foreign affairs reporter, why he didn’t look into this story because of ideology?… The ABC is meant to serve the public interest and public interest journalism. And the origins of the pandemic, what was unfolding in Wuhan, was absolutely in the public interest, with 7 million people who have now died.”
Dziedzic bashed colleagues other than just Sharri Markson. She also slammed his employer’s decision to lay off political editor Andrew Probyn, a journalist well-known in Australia. Dziedzic described the layoff as “personal” and called it “the worst decision we have ever made.”
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The three reporters made these remarks around the time of a press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
Blinken had traveled to Australia for annual bilateral meetings focusing on a deal to provide Australia, a defense treaty partner, with a fleet of submarines powered by U.S. nuclear technology.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also attended. He shared Australia’s concerns about China’s break from international laws and norms that resolve disputes peacefully and without coercion.
“We’ve seen troubling P.R.C. coercion from the East China Sea, to the South China Sea, to right here in the Southwest Pacific,” Austin told reporters, referring to the People’s Republic of China.
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.