A Speech at a Dialogue
Whose ABC?: The ABC, Staff Capture and the Obstacles to Accountability
in Melbourne, 29 September 1999
One of the few sadnesses about the fall of the Soviet Empire is the demise of the Soviet joke, those acute and revealing sociological observations delivered in the guise of humour.
A classic Soviet joke asked: what is the difference between capitalism and socialism? In capitalism, man exploits man and, in socialism, it is precisely the opposite. To shift the antinomy a little, public ownership is supposed to increase accountability: in reality, it is precisely the opposite, as the ABC shows particularly clearly.
There is an idea abroad amongst journalists that the intrusion of proprietors, and concern for the bottom line and for audience reach, are all features which sully and diminish the journalist's craft. That if journalists were just left alone, they would pursue the journalist's craft in a pure and unsullied form, to the great benefit of free speech, open debate and democracy.
The obsessive focus on the doings of proprietors -- discussion of media policy in the media seems to be almost entirely driven by analysis of gains and benefits to particular proprietors -- the sneering at any current affairs program which is actually popular and worries about editorial policy being affected by those with responsibility for profitability, all indicate this belief.
Well, we can be very grateful to the ABC. We can be grateful because the ABC provides us with a wonderful example of what happens when journalists do take over the asylum. And the record of the ABC shows quite clearly that journalists freed from effective constraints of accountability are not fearless prosecutors of free speech and open debate.
Let me start with a vignette from personal experience. I have no problem with same-sex marriage or adoption, and believe that narcotics should be legalised because adults own their own bodies. This should clearly class me as a standard-bearer for the counter-culture. But the ABC is cleverer than that: they can see right through me. I am, in fact, an ultra-conservative. Or at least, that is what they told Australia I am. The second-last occasion on which I appeared on ABC Radio News I was introduced as a spokesperson for the "ultra-conservative" H.R. Nicholls Society. The H.R. Nicholls Society is a labour market reform body which advocates the replacement of our 94-year-old arbitration system and adoption of a labour market structure similar to that of many of our major trading partners with freedom of association and contract. It is reformist certainly, radical maybe. Yet, in ABC-speak, it is "ultra-conservative".
Now, when was the last time any of us heard an ABC announcer to refer to the "radical" Greenpeace, the "militant" CFMEU, the "left-wing" Australia Institute or the "ultra-left" or "ultra-radical" anything? Only those deemed to be on the right of centre are automatically given ideological labels by ABC presenters and commentators. No doubt, this is done in the interests of ideological hygiene: to warn listeners and viewers of the inherently dubious nature of the opinions the ABC has deigned to allow to appear, briefly, on its airwaves prior to normal transmission being resumed.
I doubt that anyone in the ABC will see any problem in this. They would not even see the nature of the complaint being made, the inappropriateness being pointed to ("of course the H.R. Nicholls Society is ultra-conservative, what is the fuss about?"). Which is precisely the point -- that ABC staff live in very a narrow intellectual universe. A narrow intellectual universe that affects both the product of the ABC -- for which taxpayers pay $630m a year -- and national debate.
I am advancing three propositions here.
- First, that the ABC does represent journalists taking over the asylum -- that the ABC is a staff-captured organisation.
- Second, that the product of the ABC is biased and biased as a result of this staff capture.
- Third, that this has an invidious effect on public debate.
What do I mean by "the ABC"? After all, any large organisation usually has a range of perspectives. It is true that the rural services of the ABC are somewhat distinguishable in outlook from the rest of the ABC, and that there are some ABC journalists and presenters who, whether due to prominence or whatever, do not replicate the general pattern. Nevertheless, one of the ABC's distinguishing features is how the biases one notices in political commentary is replicated in foreign coverage, in discussion of environmental issues, in religious broadcasts, in coverage of art and cultural events, even in drama series. There is clearly a common outlook amongst ABC journalists, presenters, producers, researchers, writers: a common ABC culture.
STAFF CAPTURE
What do I mean by "staff capture"? What I don't mean is that the ABC is therefore a happy organisation. On the contrary, I argue in the Backgrounder that there are pressures resulting from staff capture which would incline the ABC towards being an unhappy place to work. Universities suffer a similar problem -- the absence of real ownership, of a commercial focus with concern for asset values, means that politics and factionalism rule, leaving many staff unhappy.
What I mean by staff capture is that the ABC lacks a real owner, and the result of lacking a real owner -- and its nature as a large and powerful media organisation -- is that it is, in practice, unaccountable to the general public. Furthermore, this lack of accountability makes the interests of ABC staff the dominant interest in determining its behaviour. (I am told that there is an ample theoretical and empirical work exploring perverse behaviour in cooperatives due to exactly the same problem of lack of real owners leading to capture, internal politicisation and factionalism.)
THE PROBLEM OF UNOWNED CAPITAL
Who owns the ABC? The ABC's PR says we do: it's "your ABC". Legally, this is incorrect. The Commonwealth Government owns the ABC. It is, in some sense, our agent, but it is the legal owner.
What power over the ABC does our indirect ownership give us? Effectively, none. Our personal wealth is not invested in the ABC, we have no power to elect or sack the Board or management of the ABC, we cannot sell our notional stake in the ABC. In fact, we have none of the prerogatives of real ownership.
We can, and do, elect the Government. But this is something which we do once every three years or so in an election where many issues are more important than the ABC and where holding politicians to their promises is a standing sick joke. Moreover, governments are often elected on quite slender majorities, and majoritarianism can be quite careless of the interests of minorities.
So, if we have none of the prerogatives of ownership, how about the Commonwealth Government? In theory, it has all the prerogatives of ownership. In theory. In practice, any Commonwealth Government which started to seriously exercise the prerogatives of ownership would be subject to deafening shrieks about attacks on the "independence" of the ABC. And, there is indeed a real point here. Governments are players in the media: they have obvious and massive vested interests. We want media organisations to be independent of the Government.
But, if the ABC is independent of the Government, it is independent of its legal owner. So the role of owner of the ABC is rendered effectively an empty one. And if nature abhors a vacuum, power arrangements in human societies do even more. Whose interests move into the vacuum left by the lack of an effective owner? The staff's, of course.
This is a general problem with government ownership. The problem operates particularly intensively in the case of the ABC because of the aforementioned vested interest, but it applies to other government-owned bodies as well. Which is precisely why corporatisation -- having the government act more like an owner -- and privatisation -- creating a genuine owner -- typically lead to staff cuts. The importing into the pre-existing state of affairs of the interests of an owner concerned with asset value and return on capital leads to removal of rents previously going to staff.
There is, of course, a claim that this is a nonsense point because ABC staff are all publicly-spirited types who would not abuse their position. This is simple, self-serving arrogance justifying privilege and need not detain us. The staff are human, and will act in human ways. If they are not accountable, they will act in their own interests. The ABC of all institutions is not in a good position to argue for accountability for everyone else except itself. But, as I can testify, the contemptible hypocrisy of public broadcasting -- where its denizens can comment (often quite intrusively and censoriously) on others but treat as completely illegitimate critical outside scrutiny of themselves -- is one of the more regrettable features of contemporary public life.
Government ownership has the further problem of having the body responsible for regulation also being a major producer: the conflict of interest involved is quite serious and does adversely affect performance, as anyone who has followed the fortunes of public education can testify. The fact that, for example, average LAP scores are not published by school is a classic avoidance of accountability flowing quite straightforwardly from this conflict of interest.
BIAS AND MORAL VANITY
That the product of the ABC does tend to be biased there is little doubt. In the Backgrounder, I adduce various comments from a range of commentators, mostly centrists or on the left, to that effect. I have assembled evidence to the same effect with its studies of coverage of the 1998 Federal Election and the 1998 waterfront dispute. Perhaps the most powerful evidence is from Professor Henningham's survey of journalists, where journalists rated 7.30 Report, ABC News, Four Corners and SBS News (in that order) as the most pro-ALP media outlets. Personally, I am less concerned with party-political bias -- though that is a genuine issue in a taxpayer-funded broadcaster -- than bias in coverage of issues and public debate: partly, no doubt, because that is the game I am in; partly because that then feeds into the behaviour of political parties but, far more importantly, because of its potential to disenfranchise whole sections of society and to harm people who are not otherwise in a good position to stick up for themselves. As a writer in the Australian Left Review observed in criticising Richard Rorty's post-modernism, truth is the only weapon the powerless have. A biased media is a media which rates other things more highly than truth. That is good neither for democracy, nor for the cause of the less powerful in our society. One thinks particularly of the so-called "dissident women" in the Hindmarsh Island affair attempting to stick up for historical truth against fraudulent misrepresentation of it for political purposes: a fraud that the media in general, and the ABC in particular, were only too happy to accept and, even after exposure by the subsequent Royal Commission, are very reluctant to face to this day.
But why would staff capture lead to a particular type of bias? One can see that people in a staff-captured organisation would recruit in their own likeness, but why should there be a particular likeness?
Michael James has pointed out to me that ideology can provide a useful sorting function. It's a way of sorting recruits who are likely to fit in and not threaten existing power structures. It is also a substitute for genuine performance indicators and so protects mediocrity and established rent-seeking activities of the existing staff. All the ideology needs to do is to make it plausible for the ABC to present itself as working in the public interest. Hence, Michael argues, the combination of leftism and nationalism at the ABC, even though the two are strictly in conflict.
Which, I agree, explains quite a lot, except for the specific content of the bias -- almost any ideology would do, after all. The simplest answer for why a particular outlook is dominant is because they get something out of it. More to the point, because they jointly get something out of it.
What they get out of it is shared social status and a signalling to each other of their moral "worthiness".
WHY SO LITTLE HAS CHANGED
It is striking how little effect the fall of the Soviet Empire and the collapse of socialism as a serious project of social transformation has had on Western politics. It is a case of how much has changed, yet how little has changed. David Gress, in his excellent book From Plato to Nato, argues that there has long been a struggle between two Enlightenment traditions. On one side is the sceptical Enlightenment -- the tradition of Locke, Montesquieu, the Physiocrats, Hume, Smith, Burke, most of the American Founders, Mill when he is not letting his rhetoric run away from him, Friedman and Hayek: the tradition which takes human nature as largely a given and works within that. Opposing that is the radical Enlightenment -- the tradition of the more radical French philosophes, such as Voltaire, Condorcet, d'Holbach, D'Alembert and Rousseau, of Marx -- when he is looking forward -- and modern American figures such as Dworkin (both Ronald and Andrea), Galbraith and MacKinnon: the tradition which sees human and social transformation as a serious project. These are the two visions that Thomas Sowell outlines in A Conflict of Visions.
The socialist collapse has demonstrated that socialism was not, in fact, central to the project of human and social transformation: it was merely a manifestation of it. A manifestation that could be, with startling ease, displaced by alternatives -- certain forms of feminism, "hard" multiculturalism, environmentalism, certain characterisations of indigenous rights and so forth. This is a process which has been going on for some decades, but has been accelerated by the Soviet collapse. What is even more striking is that these manifestations -- or at least certain characterisations of them -- have become far more protected from serious criticism in polite circles and public debate than socialism ever was -- even though many of them are also forms of collectivism: indeed, environmentalism is able to re-package policies which failed miserably, and at considerable environmental cost, in liberating workers as the way to preserve the planet. These opinions form a hegemonic -- to use Gramsci's term -- constellation of opinions in public debate.
The problem with socialism is that it was, to use contemporary terminology, a modernist project. It was concerned with logic, evidence, cause-and-effect, with consequences. It was based on certain specific claims about what one could achieve if one re-ordered society in particular ways. It was therefore subject to practical refutation: and systemic collapse in country after country is as great a refutation as one could hope for. Not only did serious prosecution of the socialist project of social transformation turn out to be tyrannical, massively environmentally destructive and with a worrying penchant for mass murder: in some fundamental sense, it didn't even work. Even its lesser forms in the West -- most notably nationalisation -- were subject to similar practical failure.
But what if you adopted political causes that were genuinely "post-modern"? Causes which were not worried about logic, evidence, cause-and-effect or consequences. Causes where the intention and the crusade itself was all that mattered. What if one could offer strong adherents purpose and meaning, and both strong and weak adherents a sense of moral worthiness and shared status, without requiring any serious concern for consistency or effect or any genuine renunciation of interests or pleasures and only the most cursory concern for evidence? What if one adopted causes, in other words, of pure moral vanity? Why, then the vistas are endless. All those within a certain social and intellectual range can play, without cost -- except that of social ostracism and loss of status if you refuse to play. And issues of consistency provide no constraints: one can be as inconsistent as one likes.
There are certain obvious social costs from this, of course. The entire outlook is hostile to genuine inquiry and to debate, because to accept certain propositions as contestable undermines one's moral assets -- hence a shared attitude that certain positions are beyond the pale. This hostility to genuine inquiry also means a hostility to truth, since serious search for truth -- facing what Derrida calls "stubborn and inconvenient facts" -- might upset the moral-status apple-cart. Still, the game is very rewarding, and very low cost, for the players.
But, to whom would such a game of mutual awarding of status particularly appeal? That is not a difficult question. In fact, it is an elementary matter of sociology. It would particularly appeal to those suffering the pangs of upward social mobility via mechanisms which involved separation from their family and social origins.
Welcome to modern higher education. The mechanism and consequences are discussed at length in Katharine Betts' book The Great Divide. Now, which profession is going to both find such an approach particularly congenial AND be especially targeted for such appeals? Journalism, of course, which has moved in a generation from a job dominated by bright working-class types with limited education to the tertiary-educated middle class.
It is a huge advantage being able to sell moral vanity to journalists. And journalists are eager buyers, particularly in the Fairfax press, the Australian, the Canberra Times, the Canberra Press Gallery and the ABC. It offers to participants membership of a moral elite, one requiring no effort apart from agreeing to certain attitudes. Failure to join, however, offers the prospect of exclusion, abuse and reduced opportunities. One thinks of the ostracism Chris Kenny suffered from exposing the Hindmarsh Island fraud -- particularly the way his book disappeared down the memory hole -- and how much more important, in that case, appearing to uphold indigenous culture was than actually doing so.
This opinion-hegemony has the advantage of a much greater ability to target moral vanity appeals to journalists than opposing positions. On a whole range of topics -- the republic, indigenous affairs, the environment, migration, multiculturalism, labour market issues -- there is a clear narrowing of debate. Interpretative journalism has come to mean not much more than the same, narrow, set of values being broadcast across much of the media: particularly by the Canberra Press Gallery, where weird hours and confinement in an isolated building breeds social isolation and a deeply incestuous and stultifying media opinion-consensus.
The opinion-hegemony has another advantage: it rests on, and appeals to, the powerful influence of very primitive anti-liberal, anti-economic ideas, as I have outlined in The Changing Fortunes of Economic Liberalism.
WHY THE ABC MATTERS
The ABC crucial in this for various reasons. First, it is disproportionately important in the amount of news, current affairs and documentary broadcasting it produces -- AM effectively sets the news agenda for the day. Secondly, as a staff-captured organisation, it is far more dominated by the moral vanity games of journalists than any other media organisation, even the Fairfax press or The Australian (which the late Paddy O'Brien memorably described as The Daily Keating). It provides, because of its lack of accountability, something of a developer and epicentre for the moral vanity games which have such an invidious effect in narrowing debate. As I said previously, such an approach is both inherently intellectually sterile, since it is hostile to genuine inquiry, and destructive of democracy. Both democracy and truth-discovery require flourishing debate and clash of opinion. If, on a wide range of the most contentious and difficult social issues, most of the media and most commentators are going to line people up as "good" people or "bad" people depending on which side of particular issues they fall -- or even worse, whether they characterise those issues in a particular way or not -- then neither truth nor democracy is well served. Ignorance and bias provide powerful mutual support.
The ABC, far from counteracting the worst aspects of contemporary journalism, intensifies many of them precisely because it is a staff-captured organisation. Which is to say, its journalists are more unconstrained, and less accountable, than any other journalists. Naturally, this lack of accountability magnifies faults. (When it comes to accountability journalists are, typically, deeply hypocritical: demanding that they have a freedom from outside scrutiny and accountability they would be the first to sneer at if demanded by any other profession.)
One of the problems is, where do you have the debate over the ABC's accountability? Their electronic media competitors have an obvious interest in not mentioning them. Tabloid newspapers are generally not very interested because their readers generally don't watch the ABC. As for the "quality" press, they tend to be protective of the ABC, partly because of the operation of the Old Mates Act and simple fellow-feeling as journalists, partly because they don't want to close off career options and partly because similar comments could be made about them. As for the ABC itself, it does little beyond propagandising on this matter. This problem of where do you have the debate? again indicates the problems of government-owned media: though it is, in this case, but a symptom of a deeper problem of media accountability. An edited version of this speech is being run in tomorrow's Sydney Morning Herald and in The Age: it will be interesting to see if it leads any further.
I am not arguing against bias in media. A media without people with points of view would be boring. Passion can often drive comment and journalism in very productive and revealing ways. What I am arguing against is a biased media -- against an "opinion-cartel" amongst journalists affecting their output.
Nor am I arguing that we should not expect most journalists to be left-of-centre in their personal views. The question is: whether that feeds into their journalism and how: in particular, whether and how an "opinion-cartel" operates.
Moreover, some degree of staff capture in any knowledge/information organisation is inevitable. The question is: what countervailing forces and accountability act to ameliorate its effects?
Freedom of the press and the media is based on a deal, an implicit social contract: freedom for journalists greater than those given to other professions in return for open debate and application of critical scrutiny to all ideas and interests. If proving to their peers that they are "kosher", that they have the "right" attitudes, becomes more important than a concern for truth and critical scrutiny, then journalists are betraying their side of the bargain.
It is because the ABC, at considerable expense to the public purse, is leading the charge in that betrayal that it should be privatised, broken up or massively reformed.
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