ABC Chairman Kim Williams bears a remarkable similarity to Mr Magoo, the elderly cartoon character who gets into endless scrapes because he refuses to put on his Coke-bottle-sized spectacles and look where he’s going.

Trying to explain why the world’s most popular podcaster – Joe Rogan – commands such a huge audience (14.5 million listeners on Spotify), Williams said that maybe he wasn’t the right person to answer the question as he was ‘not a consumer or enthusiast of Mr Rogan and his work’.

If only he’d stopped there he wouldn’t have revealed that the resemblance to Magoo is more than skin deep, but no. On he blundered, launching into his view that Rogan and his ilk were people who ‘preyed’ on ‘people’s vulnerabilities’, ‘on fear’, ‘on anxiety’, and ‘entrepreneur fantasy outcomes and conspiracy outcomes as being a normal part of social narrative’. He rounded off his character assassination accusing Rogan of ‘treating the public as plunder for purposes that are really quite malevolent’. Having conjured up a pantomime vampire feasting on the ears and eyeballs of his bovine herd, Williams declared, ‘I personally find it deeply repulsive to think that someone in the United States has such remarkable power’.

Back in the real world, Rogan’s background as a comedian and martial arts commentator explains his appeal: his quick-witted, in-depth, no-holds-barred interviews go fearlessly and yet humorously where other interviewers fear to tread. And can last for several hours. Those who accuse Gen Z of not being able to concentrate on anything longer than 140 characters should take note. Rogan is particularly popular with young men who elsewhere are mercilessly accused of the crime of ‘toxic masculinity’ by the high priestesses of woke and their eunuchs.

Rogan’s guests come from all walks of life and across the political spectrum from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump to Elon Musk and Lance Armstrong and lest you think they are all men, Abigail Shrier, columnist at the Wall Street Journal and author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

‘I’ve never spent, to be perfectly frank, a lot of time thinking about Joe Rogan,’ Williams said. Perhaps he should. With an annual budget of $1.2 billion, which Williams of course claims isn’t enough, the ABC’s top TV program – the news – gets around half a million viewers.

Williams says he wants the ABC to ‘go after younger viewers, listeners and readers on every platform’ because young Australians are ‘drowning intellectually in the polluted tide of disinformation and misinformation swamping their screens’. Like a latter-day Grace Darling, he says, ‘We must give them a rudder and engine so they can steer a course of safety and help us construct a future that is safe for democracy.’

Perhaps he could start by stamping out fake news in his own organisation. Last month, the ABC chose 5 November – the day most Australians were watching the outcome of the US presidential election – to finally issue an apology for sexing up footage of a soldier who fired only a single warning shot from a helicopter as it flew over an Afghan compound by ‘inadvertently’ adding five extra shots. The program, which aired in 2022, alleged that Australian troops committed war crimes. The fake footage made the soldiers look like the sort of cowboys that commit war crimes. But don’t worry. The ABC appointed a former staff member to perform an ‘independent review’ who has exonerated the broadcaster of any editorial crimes.

If two years seems like a long time to correct the record, try six. The ABC still calls a series of Four Corners reports on the completely debunked allegation that Trump colluded with Russia to ‘steal’ the 2016 presidential election ‘the story of the century’. It remains on the website without so much as a note to inform viewers that the Mueller investigation cleared the Trump campaign of any collusion with Russia and Mueller said his finding ‘deserves the attention of every American’.

When news of Chairman Kim’s phantasmagorical rant reached Rogan, he responded with a good-natured ‘lol’ (laugh out loud) and WUT (what)? Others were mostly embarrassed that the head of the national broadcaster – Australia’s Pravda as Elon Musk aptly put it – would vilify someone he had just admitted he knew nothing about.

Not Williams. ‘What fascinates me,’ he said, ‘is you say something negative about Joe Rogan – and I have been swarmed with the most unbelievably vicious responses.’ In reality, the comments sounded pretty tame. Someone told him he should stay in his lane and ‘watch out’. Williams couldn’t figure out what it meant. Clearly, the possibility that it was simply sound advice of the ‘stick to your knitting’ variety didn’t occur to him.

‘Where is this super sensitivity deriving from?’ Williams asked. ‘You make a comment in response to a legitimate question from a journalist. You answer it concisely and give an honest answer in terms of what your own perception of Mr Rogan is,’ he said, as if calling someone you knew nothing about a revolting, malevolent plundering predator was nothing unusual.

‘And suddenly I get this huge pile-on from people in the most aggressive way, saying that I have a warped outlook on the world, that I am an embarrassment to our nation, that I am in some way unhinged, that I am a supreme example of arrogance and disconnection with Australian society.’

One can’t help thinking of the old joke about the man who complains about being called Joseph the Donkey Fornicator. ‘You fornicate with one donkey,’ he sighs shaking his head at the unfairness of it all.

Williams real beef with Rogan is that according to Williams, Rogan did ‘an enormous amount of damage back in 2020 and 2021, when he was particularly virulent in many of his remarks about vaccinations’. Perhaps William should take a look at the just released Final Report of the US Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic which vindicates Rogan including that the vaccines didn’t stop the spread or transmission of the virus, their approval was rushed and warnings of adverse effects ignored, vaccine mandates were not supported by the science and caused more harm than good, natural immunity was ignored, healthy people were coerced into vaccination without sufficient evidence to support the policy, the public was not informed about vaccine injuries, and compensation for the injured has not been fair, efficient or transparent. None of this will be news to Speccie readers.

‘We must perform to higher standards. We must perform to standards that have regard to facts. We have to perform the standards that actually have scientific validity,’ says Williams. That’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. That would require Williams and the ABC to break free of their ideological bubble and start reporting the rising tide of scientific evidence being published that illuminate the problems with the Covid vaccines. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, ‘You’re very well read, it’s well known, but something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, Do you, Mister Williams?’