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SKY News apologises for Credlin comments

Comments linking South Sudanese community with a COVID spike were inaccurate.

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SKY News yesterday issued a statement online:

An editorial which aired during the Credlin program on Friday 26 June at 6pm AEST, incorrectly linked Melbourne’s South Sudanese community to a COVID-19 outbreak.

Peta Credlin and SKY News Australia accept these comments were inaccurate and sincerely apologise for any offence caused by the remarks which have been removed from all platforms.

Peta Credlin will also address this issue on her program on Monday 29 June at 6pm AEST.

During her editorial, Peta Credlin reportedly blamed Melbourne’s recent spike in COVID-19 cases on the South Sudanese community.

Pedestrian TV reports Credlin  claimed “poorly-assimilated migrants” from the South Sudanese community had ignored social distancing by having an “end-of-Ramadan feast”.

The comments were condemned by Melbourne-based Centre for Migrant and Refugee Health and Society of South Sudanese Professionals (SSSPA), which pointed out the 90% of the South Sudanese community in Victoria are Christian.

7 Responses

  2. Sky “news” was a decent news channel before Murdoch took full control. It’s just propaganda and conspiracy now like it’s sister channel, Fox News.

    1. Who owns the ‘Sky News’ brand these days? Surely Sky UK and Comcast can’t be too thrilled with their shared brand being used in AU/NZ to broadcast opinions as facts and so far removed from presenting anything that looks like news?

  4. Credlin was delivering an op-ed about the failure to ensure that migrant communities were getting the message and following physical distancing and hygiene measures, in particular the South Sudanese community having a lot of people who couldn’t read the material supplied in Dinka, and who would have been better served by English publications and better English literacy.

    Credlin falsely conflated this with the two large clusters spread by large extended family gatherings, in the North and West, which Andrews referred to. “Unconfirmed sources” said they were Eid celebrations. Credlin probably assumed they were linked because when Andrews goes to great lengths to avoid identifying people, it has often been the South Sudanese community.

    And while one spokesman today said that the two clusters had been linked by contract tracing, and as it was family transmission lockdowns and…

  5. The problem is that the toothpaste is out of the tube and no matter how many apologies you make you’ve sown the seed in peoples mind.
    Ms Credlin is extremely clever and I doubt that this was a mistake on her part – she would know full well that such an inflammatory statement would receive a huge amount of attention (which it did) and the “apology” would barely be noticed and so those remarks are still swirling and fermenting and causing divide unnecessarily.
    Sky is happy as they are being spoken about – they’re a bit like toddlers, any attention is good even if it is negative attention. And Ms Credlin will be able to speak about it again today, no doubt make another outlandish remark, and make another “apology” once the damage is done.

  6. Just a shame media companies think BLM is all about putting a warning in front of TV shows and films from last century and not about stopping giving a platform to people who have a chequered history of comments which are not appropriate.

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