Also published in the Adelaide Review, May 1999
If it's our ABC, can we vote to sack the management? And, if we can't, in what sense is it ours?
That is always the prime problem with public ownership -- the legal owners have no personal incentives to keep track of the value of "their" asset and control is exerted only through the intermediary agent of the elected government, which, due political pressures and breadth of its responsibilities, tends to be a comparatively poor commercial manager.
Actually, the situation is even worse than that, as the role of government as both regulator and producer generates a major conflict of interest. Is the Minister for Education, in his role as regulator, likely to tell you that the Minister for Education, in his role as primary provider of schooling services, is doing a bad job?
These problems operate with a vengeance in the case of the ABC. Any attempt by an elected government to enforce quality control on the ABC is going to be very easy to characterise as rampant political self-interest. Any tendency within the wider media to be leery of outside scrutiny of fellow journalists further shields the ABC.
The ABC has also perfected a litany of stock responses to deflect any criticism about quality of its product -- specifically, allegations of bias. If you criticise any particular program -- even prime-time TV News -- you are told one has to look at the whole of the ABC's coverage: it apparently being perfectly reasonable to expect viewers to be consumers of everything the ABC produces. So even serious studies of ABC's performance are implicitly expected to examine its entire output, or none.
While the ABC strenuously denies having a point of view, it is quick to claim that other people's having a point of view undermines the credibility of their criticism, no matter how well-documented their criticisms might be. People are to be judged by their standpoints, not the quality of their work. (Hmm, sounds like an ideological viewpoint to me ...) Outsiders aren't independent -- unless they are commissioned by the ABC, in which case they must be independent.
The ABC can also count on a very loyal audience, for understandable reasons. The ABC is a good relayer of quality British programs (eight out of the ABC's top 10 rating shows are British, 60 per cent of its top 100 programs are produced overseas), its ads are congenially located between, rather than within, programs and it deals with matters in a more in-depth and comprehensive way than is generally done on the commercial channels (though Nine's Sunday remains the best current affairs program on TV, mainly because it is more likely than the ABC to take genuinely iconoclastic viewpoints).
Managing director Brian Johns used all these defences in his reaction to my recently released study on ABC TV News (Sydney)'s coverage of last year's waterfront dispute from 8 April to 6 May 1998. He informed us that the Board and the ABC's audience was well-satisfied with the coverage, that my study was less comprehensive than the report the ABC had commissioned from Professor Bell on Sydney TV News, 7.30 Report and radio coverage in response to allegations of bias (particularly from the Minister responsible for the ABC, Senator Alston), that my study came from "their point of view" and it added "no independent value".
As one of our main findings was the ABC coverage had been flawed because it failed, in 69 reports over 27 days, to put the waterfront dispute in context by asking the obvious question: why did Patrick take the drastic step of locking out its entire union workforce?, this alleged satisfaction is highly dubious. It is the old Jim Hacker (the hapless Minister in Yes Minister) problem when he wailed "how do I know what to ask, when I don't know what I don't know?" How can the audience know, and thus judge, what they are not being told?
Prime-time TV News is, or should be, a stand-alone product. It should give viewers, within the limitation of TV News as a medium, the crucial information on the news stories of the day. ABC TV news provided over two and a half hours of coverage of the dispute, an enormous amount by normal news standards.
There was plenty of opportunity to give viewers the historical context: indeed, ABC coverage was prepared to pursue historical coverage when -- in the case of the Dubai exercise or companies restructuring to facilitate mass sackings -- it put Patrick or the Government in a poor light. Patrick had been subject to a massive campaign by the MUA in retaliation for challenging, via the leasing of Webb Dock to P&C Stevedores, the MUA's labour monopoly. A campaign that had seen 43 days of strikes in the 96 days of 1998 that had passed by April 7. Chris Corrigan himself described the lockout as "the desperate act of a desperate man".
This campaign was a non-subject in the ABC TV News (Sydney)'s coverage, despite MUA official Mick O'Leary being shown on the ABC's coverage saying (on the night of April 8) "when we started this over ten weeks ago ..." But to examine the history would have cast doubt on the ABC's implicit casting of Patrick as the aggressor in the waterfront "war".
There were other signs of problems in the coverage: despite opinion polls being evenly divided, ABC journalists were twice as likely to report opinion poll findings favourable to the MUA as to Patrick or the Government and were twice as likely to report MUA legal arguments as Patrick's.
The really worrying thing, however, is the ABC's concept of accountability. The Bell Report is a very flawed exercise -- it is far shorter than our examination of the TV News coverage and contains far less quantitative data. Almost the only empirical data it does contain is a count of "soundbites".
The Bell Report found that there was only a 6 per cent advantage to the MUA in soundbites. The count failed to include various categories of people -- such as ordinary wharfies, and various third parties. When one does a full count, the MUA had a 25 per cent advantage in soundbites and, when one takes duration into consideration -- since the pro-MUA soundbites averaged nine seconds to eight for the pro-Patrick/ Government soundbites -- pro-MUA speakers actually got 36 per cent more air time. The ABC coverage was not balanced, particularly given that ABC journalists made 33 per cent more MUA-favourable statements than Patrick/ Government-favourable statements.
The ABC thus offered up as alleged "accountability" an intellectually slight and empirically flawed report released a mere three weeks after the end of its reporting period. One is left wondering what the point of such a hasty exercise was, other than to provide the ABC with bureaucratic cover? It looks very much like a "Sir Humphrey Appleby" exercise in avoiding accountability. It is certainly not a satisfactory example of practising it.
But why should Johns worry? The owners can't vote to sack the management, and the Government would be accused of blatant political self-interest if it did. So, in exactly what sense is the ABC accountable for the $560 million dollars worth of taxpayer funds it gets each year?
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