The Trouble with Auntie

Your ABC is biased, answerable to no one, and doing damage to our democracy

There is an idea among journalists that the intrusion of proprietors, and concern for the bottom line and for audience reach, sully and diminish the journalist's craft.  That if journalists were just left alone, they would pursue their 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, the sneering at any current affairs program that is 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 because it provides us with a wonderful example of what happens when journalists do take over the asylum.  The record of the ABC shows 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, believe that narcotics should be legalised because adults own their own bodies.  These should clearly class me as a standard-bearer for the counter-culture.

But the ABC is cleverer than that, it can see right through me.  I am, in fact, an "ultra-conservative".  Or, at least, that is what it told Australia I am.  The second last occasion on which I appeared on ABC Radio News I was introduced as an "ultra-conservative" spokesperson for labor market reform which advocates the replacement of our arbitration system and adoption of a labour market system similar to many of our major trading partners, with freedom of association and contract.  I am reformist, certainly:  radical, maybe.  Yet, in ABC-speak, I am "ultra-conservative".

Now, when was the last time any of us heard an ABC announcer 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 given ideological labels by ABC presenters and commentators.

No doubt, this is in the interests of ideological hygiene:  to warn listeners and viewers of the inherently dubious nature of the opinions the ABC has deigned to appear, briefly, prior to normal transmission being resumed.

ABC staff live in a very narrow intellectual universe, one that affects both the products of the ABC and national debate.  The ABC is a staff-captured organisation.  It is biased as a result of this staff capture.  And this has an invidious effect on public debate.

One of the ABC's distinguishing features is how the biases one notices in political commentary are replicated in foreign coverage, in environmental issues, in religious broadcasts, in coverage of art and cultural events, even in drama series.

There is clearly a common outlook among ABC journalists, presenters, producers, researchers, writers:  an ABC culture.

ABC staff are human and will act in human ways.  If they are not accountable, they will act in their own interests.

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 because that 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 in a position to stick up for themselves.

Think of the so-called "dissident" women of the Hindmarsh Island affair attempting to stick up for historical truth against fraudulent misrepresentation of its for political purposes:  a fraud that the media in general, and the ABC in particular, were only too happy to accept.

On a whole range of topics -- the republic, indigenous affairs, the environment, migration, multi-culturalism, labour market issues -- there is a 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 breed social isolation and a deeply incestuous and stultifying media opinion-consensus.

Journalism, of course, has moved in a generation from a job dominated by bright, working-class types with limited education to the tertiary-educated middle class.

The opinion-consensus 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.

The ABC is crucial in this for various reasons.  First, it is disproportionately important in the amount of news, current affairs and documentary broadcasts 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.

It is, because of its lack of accountability, something of a developer and epicentre for the moral vanity games that have such an invidious effect in narrowing debate.

Both democracy and truth-discovery require flourishing debate and a clash of opinion.  If, on a wide range of the most contentious social issues, most of the media are going to line people up as "good" or "bad" depending on which side of particular issues they fall, then neither truth nor democracy is well served.  Ignorance and bias provide powerful mutual support.

Freedom of the press 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, become more important than a concern for truth and critical scrutiny, then journalists risk betraying their side of the bargain.

Because the ABC, at considerable public expense, is leading that betrayal, it should be privatised, broken up or massively reformed.