The Australian's editorial today takes it up to the partisan ABC - falling over itself to act in concert with The Guardian on its Snowden leaks but incapable of reporting the local AWU action involving Ms Gillard, its funder-in-chief.

Without quibbling over the ownership of this story - it actually belonged to The Guardian but was gifted to the ABC for amplification - this claimed ABC disposition to publish and be damned deserves scrutiny. We don't need to look very far to see another ABC, where rather than act as a clearing house for information on national affairs, it acts as arbiter of what is worth knowing and what is not. Last year, the ABC tied itself in knots to avoid covering substantive revelations about the Julia Gillard/Australian Workers Union scandal. Even now, those solely reliant on ABC news would be unaware of police investigations. The ABC knew the then prime minister faced documentary evidence that opened up the possibility of charges over her dealings with a union slush fund before she entered parliament, yet it constantly found ways to avoid the story. Melbourne radio host Jon Faine, for instance, boasted about how he deliberately "pooh-poohed" the story.

When the government established a media inquiry and sought to regulate the print media (a move this newspaper was told in no uncertain terms was in retaliation for daring to investigate the AWU affair), the ABC did not champion freedom of the press. It supported the government's proposed intervention to appoint a public interest media advocate, empowered with legal sanctions, to oversee self-regulation. "This is not an attack on a free press," wrote Barrie Cassidy, "just common sense." "Broadcasters already regulated through ACMA," tweeted Emma Alberici. "What is wrong with PIMA ensuring press does what its own self-reg says it will?" Rather than investigate the prime minister's questionable behaviour as a union lawyer, or argue to preserve press freedom, the ABC busied itself by ventilating unsubstantiated claims about an alleged punch to a wall by Tony Abbott more than 30 years ago at university. This was the ABC's selective curiosity writ large.