Digital TV policy makes Alston friend of the ABC

The debate over Senator Alston's suggestions to the ABC board about benchmarking its services encapsulate all the problems inherent in public broadcasting.  If the Minister is not to act as agent of the notional owners, who is?

Answering questions before Senate committees is hardly enough scrutiny -- nor is a legislative body able to act as an effective executive agent.  Yet any Government clearly has massive self-interests in how it is scrutinised by the media.

To argue it is all up to the consciences of the ABC Board and staff is to enunciate a "trust us" philosophy which would not be accepted for a moment in any other area spending well over $500 million of taxpayer's money each year.

Then there is the problem of the fundamental purpose of public broadcasting.  If the ABC goes for ratings, why would not a commercial channel do as well?  If it goes for minority tastes, why does the majority have to pay for them?  And does not the minority tastes path eliminate any real element of consumer power by the taxpaying public?

There is real difficulty for accountability in public broadcasting.  Questions of bias are a matter of quality of output.  A public-sector producer with poor accountability can be expected to indulge its staff's prejudices, a staff which can also be expected to select new staff in its own image.

The ABC's standard argument that complaints are broadly balanced from "both" directions is not a powerful point.  Programs may not be able to self-select the size of their audience, but they can expect to self-select the balance of it.  Opinions amongst those who actually watch a program must be expected to tend to cluster roughly evenly around the "line" of a program -- those too much offended will cease being in its audience.

Nor is, despite recent claims to the contrary by ABC Managing Director Brian Johns, opinion polling a reliable indicator of balance in news and current affairs.  On the vast majority of stories, people will have little information on a subject beyond that provided by the programs themselves, so will have limited capacity to judge balance.

What is much more surprising than all this, however, is a Coalition government making digital TV decisions which continue to greatly restrict the number of players in the TV market, thereby leaving the ABC to dominate the quality end of the market.  After all, niche marketing behaviour to challenge the ABC can only be expected to develop if there is a much wider variety of TV stations.

The ABC may not see John Howard and Senator Alston as their greatest friends but, with their digital TV decisions "freezing out" new entrants, that is precisely what they are proving to be.