Sky News host Peta Credlin has gone on-air and dismissed Kevin Rudd‘s petition for a Royal Commission into the Murdoch media’ dominance as nothing but a disguised data harvesting exercise, despite not actually having any evidence to support her claim.
Rudd’s petition, which was tabled in parliament and has even prompted a Senate Inquiry, amassed over 500,000 signatures, making it the biggest online petition ever presented to parliament.
“Now I know how these things work, this petition is a data harvesting exercise,” Credlin said on Wednesday, appearing not to know how these things work.
“Thanks to this petition, and with Turnbull’s connivance, just like his earlier work in brining The Guardian to Australia, Rudd now has more than half a million email signatures.
“You can be sure they’ll be used to bombard people with hard left propaganda and urge them to boycott the Murdoch media.”
This is a 100% lie from the Murdoch media’s Credlin. She accuses me of “data harvesting” from the petition. The truth: we chose the parliament’s own petition site which prevents any form of data harvesting. I await her apology on air. pic.twitter.com/j8aGg2lP7y
— Office of Kevin Rudd, 26th PM of Australia (@MrKRudd) November 12, 2020
While the idea of Kevin Rudd using emails to radicalise half a million Aussies is quite compelling, it’s simply not true.
“This is a 100% lie from the Murdoch media’s Credlin,” Rudd said on Twitter. Keep in mind Sky News Australia is one of the many news outlets controlled by Rupert Murdoch.
“The truth: we chose the parliament’s own petition site which prevents any form of data harvesting. I await her apology on air.”
It would’ve been fairly easy for someone with a huge profile like Rudd to set up his own petition website and hold on to all those precious emails.
However, by choosing to take things down a more official route, his petition has the potential to effect real change and so far, it appears to be doing just that.
According to the website of the Parliament of Australia, email addresses are only used to make sure people don’t sign an e-petition more than once.
“We will not use your email address for any other purpose, and will not disclose it without your consent,” the terms and conditions say.
In responding to a petition about the media spreading lies for political ends, it seems Sky News Australia may have done just that.
Perhaps the whole segment is a ringing endorsement of just how necessary some sort of scrutiny of the Murdoch media’s dominance in Australia really is.
