Our Australian media has disgraced itself by putting Men’s Issues campaigner and film producer Cassie Jaye through the most hostile, unfair interviews she has ever experienced.
What is going on in this country? I’ve spent the last few days looking after Cassie Jaye, the filmmaker who produced the wonderful documentary on men’s issues – The Red Pill. As we have explained on Mark’s site before, Australia became the first country in the world to ban the movie last October. We then saw a series of screenings closed down due to protests from tiny groups of feminist extremists, with cinema owners even given death threats for daring to show the movie.
Cassie is in Australia to attend last weekend’s conference on men’s issues at the Gold Coast which was an outstanding success with people gathering from all over the world who are concerned about what’s happening to men and boys.
But our media has disgraced itself by putting Cassie through the most hostile, unfair interviews she has ever experienced. Last Thursday June 8 she appeared on Channel 10’s The Project (21.50 mark) which introduced her segment with the most appalling introduction video), which repeated many of the lies feminists have been spreading about the movie and included quotes from one of our most notorious man-haters, Van Badham, slamming the movie. Completely false information was included such as the claim the movie was funded by men’s rights groups. Cassie Jaye explained in her interview that she funded the movie with her mother and fiancé and only chose to launch a Kickstarter campaign in order to raise post-production funds needed. The Kickstarter backers had no stake or influence over the movie – as the producers had been told beforehand – but The Project chose to ignore the truth in order to attempt to taint Cassie’s credibility.
Then she was ferociously attacked by the entire panel with only about a third of her interview even being shown, denying any opportunity for this calm, intelligent woman to properly explain what the movie is all about.
Next on her media schedule was Weekend Sunrise and I sought assurance from the producers that she would not be given similar treatment and specifically that she was not to be interviewed by Andrew O’Keefe, one of the presenters who is on the White Ribbon Board and known for his feral attacks on anyone who challenges the misinformation White Ribbon promotes about domestic violence. When Mark Latham and Miranda Devine were on his show debating this issue he nearly blew a gasket. I was assured Cassie would not be interviewed by him.
Surprise, surprise, there he was, tearing into Cassie, not giving her any opportunity to answer his rude, ill-informed questions and his female co-host joined in. As to the presenters’ claims that they hadn’t been able to see the movie, here’s the proof that they were given the link a month in advance.
This is trite, tabloid journalism at its worst. Rather than look at the big story as to why Australia is proving itself to be one of world’s most repressive country when it comes to debates over men’s issues, these mainstream TV shows chose to buy into the distorted feminist narrative and attack the filmmaker rather than allowing her to explain the issues.
How come the producers feel that is what their big audiences want to hear? The reality is this movie is hugely popular, winning a series of awards including a recent Women in Film award at the Hollywood DigiFest Film Festival. It is currently the second best-selling movie on YouTube in Australia and last month was the number one best-selling movie on YouTube in the USA. Don’t you think Australian audiences deserved to hear from the filmmaker as to why it is proving so popular?
Weekend Sunrise received so much negative response to their appalling interview that they took down the link to the segment from their Facebook page. But we hope you will contact both these programmes and voice protests about how they treated Cassie. Here’s some ammunition ( some coarse language ) for you to use.
You might also like to sign this petition asking The Project to release the unedited version of their interview with Cassie.
Despite all that the conference raised many exciting issues which we will be discussing on the Mark Latham sites over the months to come. You might like to see the media stunt I pulled together to question why our society ignores male suicide. Please note the supreme sacrifice I made appearing in public so wet and bedraggled – but for a very good cause.
And a final treat – here’s the link to the great talk Karen Straughan gave to The Sydney Institute.
