EXCLUSIVE
In a scathing interview with 6 News, veteran journalist Patrick Condren has revealed for the first time why he resigned as Seven’s State Political Editor in Queensland, saying he was “hugely disillusioned” with the mainstream media.
Condren has been “on both sides of the camera”, working as a journalist for 35 years before running for Brisbane Lord Mayor in 2020, when he said he experienced several character assassination attempts from the media.
While he never expected to “get a free ride” during his candidacy, Condren says an “agenda” was at play in The Australian and ABC.
“A group of former foreign correspondents who work at the ABC here in Brisbane would run stories and generate stories deliberately targeting me when I put my hand up to be Lord Mayor.
“The people writing those stories were friends of mine - friends I’d known inside journalism and got on the grog with in pubs outside journalism as well,” Mr Condren said.
Condren said “the fourth estate has no moral integrity”, as journalists “force-feed punters” their political views and resort to “gotcha” journalism in a “clamour for relevance.”
“When I was putting my stories together, I’d want something - a politician doing something stupid, saying something stupid.”
“They’d get 2 or 3 second grabs.”
“There was no policy as such to discussion on the news and so politicians - to get on the news - they knew that they had to play by that game, play by those rules.”
“So you end up in this sort of vicious circle, downward spiral if you like where we get to now,” he said.
Award-winning journalist and academic Dr Margaret Simons said Kerry Stokes’ The West Australian and 7 News are “currently showing enormous political bias.”
“Kerry Stokes is the Rupert Murdoch of Western Australia.”
“There’s really only Stokes media there now, and he too is prepared to use it in the partisan objectives,” she said.
Such is Condren’s dissatisfaction, he says he hasn’t watched an entire television news bulletin since quitting Channel 7 in 2018.
He now works as a media consultant, telling people “how to play the game.”
Watch more of his comments here.
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