Many are disenchanted with ABC's Correctness

If anyone should be a natural defender of the ABC it is John Howard (and if that makes you laugh, that is revealing in itself).

After all, like myself, he comes from a middle-class family where ABC was part of the furniture, a respected part of life.

In the Wood household, commercial TV barely existed.

"What's on TV?" was a question which applied only to the ABC.  The first commercial series we watched with any regularity was Dynasty:  apart from that it was the ABC (mainly in its role as the local BBC relay station) all the way.  One doubts it was much different in the Howard home.  John Howard is traditionalist and a conservative.  The ABC of the Argonauts, of quality and of quality (overwhelmingly British) TV should be one of those Australian institutions and traditions he is keen to defend.

It is a sign of the deep and longstanding problems of the ABC that many middle-class people such as the PM have become very much not fans of the ABC.  The source of John Howard's disenchantment is obvious enough.  According to The Bulletin, when in Opposition he used ask his family regarding ABC News "shall we watch Labor's home video?"

It is only a very naïve viewer who would think that the ABC has treated John Howard in a similar way to, say, Paul Keating PM.  It was always willing to have Howard on -- he has always been good on-air -- but that is not the same as being balanced:  particularly considering who is chosen for comment, what they are asked and what comments the journalists make.  Under intense scrutiny during the 1998 Federal Election campaign, the ABC's efforts (in the last three weeks of the campaign) to be balanced were so studied as to be almost painful.  One could see this was not their natural, or preferred, state of affairs (though, to be fair, the effort was successful).

My process of disenchantment with the ABC lacks the depth of bitter personal experience of John Howard.  It was international affairs and American-Soviet rivalry which led me down the path of questioning the ABC's culture and approach.

The more I learned about such matters, the more shallow and sneeringly one-sided the ABC's coverage and commentary seemed.  As I become more involved in public-policy issues, I noticed the same pattern in other areas of public policy -- though you had to build up a certain depth of knowledge before the pattern of what was left out became blindingly obvious.

Recently, I was on Neil Weise's 5ADN Adelaide program to talk about the Telstra-ABC deal.  The discussion quickly turned to ABC balance.  Mentioning this to a friend who also appears periodically as a commentator, he immediately laughed and said "What, you were outnumbered five-to-one?".  That was not the situation, it was just me and a woman from Friends of the ABC, but his reflexive comment bespeaks a phenomenon many of us are well experienced in.  You are invited to speak on a subject and find that the numbers are three, four or five to one, with you the lonely voice.  You are both outnumbered and clearly labelled as an ideological fringe-dweller the ABC has deigned to allow on to show its "balance".  (Though I can report being in a majority on Radio National a couple of times recently).

Alternatively, you are put with real fringe dwellers.  Hence the experience of being on 3LO Melbourne to discuss ABC balance when it was me, the presenter, the show's media academic, the national Head of ABC Radio and an anarchist.  The voices of respectability and two "nuts".

There are issues where, to quote John Howard, there clearly is an ABC "line":  immigration (opposition is wicked), multiculturalism (ditto), indigenous issues (more money, more special arrangements), global warming (impending disaster), industrial relations (deregulation wicked), privatisation (wicked), welfare (more spending is always required, restrictions are nasty miserliness), economic rationalism (wicked) and so on.  This is not to say every ABC person always parrots every element of this, but you can tell where most of them are coming from most of the time, particularly when you look at the balance of commentators and at the documentaries run.

Unfortunately, some of the most revealing vignettes of this sort of thing cannot be made public, because the sources could be identified and would be punished -- the ABC disposes of a very large amount of patronage:  in funding, publicity and retail access.

To be sure, many of the sins of the ABC in this regard they share with the journalistic profession in Australia more broadly.  A lot of journalism is conducted, particularly from the Canberra Press Gallery, particularly on totemic issues like indigenous affairs and the Republic, as if there is only one possible correct view.  But the ABC does so more intensively than the wider profession:  and it is not a productive use of well over $500 million of taxpayers' funds a year to intensify broader journalistic sins.

One of the sillier ideas brought up to defend the ABC is that, as a public broadcaster, it is free of conflicts of interest.  As a tax-funded body, low-tax political agendas are not in its interests.  As a public sector producer, privatisation agendas are not in its interests.  As the dominant purveyor of quality broadcasting, liberalisation of the broadcasting market -- generating greater capacity for commercial exploitation of niche markets -- is not in its interests.  As an exemplar of political provision, pro-market agendas generally are not in its interests.  The ABC does not come disinterestedly to many of the central policy questions of our time.

Moreover, the obvious conflict of interest in having the government own a major media outlet is one of the biggest barriers to an accountable ABC, since we want media organisations to be independent of the Government of the day, yet such independence makes the ABC independent of its legal owner and of the only effective executive agent of its notional owners (us).

This lack of an effective owner makes the ABC very prone to staff capture.  We live in an age of status-mongering, where people use the parading of approved opinion to demonstrate their superior moral status -- which is what political correctness is all about.

A staff-captured national broadcaster is an ideal venue from which to engage in this status-seeking behaviour, which is why the ABC is so relentlessly PC.  Writer and former ABC program host Robert Dessaix says the political correctness of the ABC is extraordinary.  There's no leeway in anything to do with race or gender or politics.  There is only one attitude you can have to Aborigines, to multiculturalism and to feminism.

As Katharine Betts has explained in The Great Divide:  Immigration Politics in Australia (Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999), a style of language and approved opinions can be used to make a distinction between insiders and outsiders.  The point about being PC is being seen to be a member of the moral vanguard.  Such use of opinions as status-markers is deeply inimical to free debate, since if the opinions are merely arguable they are not status markers.

And if they are status-markers, then the opinions become moral assets to be defended, so disagreement must be a sign of moral inferiority, and thus illegitimate.  Hence the term "conservative" (and particularly "social conservative") is loaded with implications of intellectual vacuity, moral cretinism and base self-interest.  Any anti-PC commentator is automatically labelled as "conservative".

Which brings me to Norman Abjorensen's piece in The Canberra Times on July 4.  If it is so debatable that there is not, as I claim, "a single conservative, libertarian or even classical liberal voice" on the ABC, why did he not simply nominate one?

Of course, if such a person was so publicly "outed", they could find themselves in some bother, as the ABC has been notably intolerant of dissent.  As for being a "discredited plagiarist", I have now published more words apologising for my error and negligence than were in the original article, which was the only such case in my published works.  The use of personal attack is not a sign of someone confident in the facts of the case.

It is true that market-reforming ALP figures (such as Paul Keating Treasurer and Bob Hawke PM) are also likely to run foul of the ABC's preconceptions but can always use social progressivism to get back into the good books (such as Paul Keating PM did).

That ABC viewers are more likely to be Coalition than ALP voters makes the problem worse as far as the Coalition is concerned.  One Coalition figure pithily summed up the Coalition's alienation from the ABC:  "the ABC is our enemies talking to our friends".  And using taxpayers' money to do so, no less.

Any political party can fall afoul of ABC investigative reporting (ask former NSW Labor Premier Neville Wran).  But even here, the reports that don't get done are revealing.  Where is the hard-hitting program on the Hindmarsh Island concoction?  The insightful revelations of the misuse of science by Greenpeace and other environmental advocates?  The use of spurious or exaggerated health scares to promote donations and support for advocacy groups?  The frustration of accountability for education performance by unions and bureaucrats?  The vast exaggeration of civilian deaths in East Timor and Serb-held Kossovo?  Why the periodic discovery of mass graves in the former Soviet Union is a non-event?  Where is the evidence now available of covert Soviet support for the peace movement which helps explain its one-sidedness?  All far too non-PC, or critical of the media itself.

Last year, the ABC's Independent Complaints Review Panel (notice the oxymoron, the panel is appointed by the ABC) upheld a complaint by David Bennet QC about the ABC's use of "stolen generations" in reference to the PM's statement of regret (which was about the past experience of indigenous Australians and made no specific mention of stolen generations).

According to subsequent newspaper reports, ABC staff were unhappy both at the decision and that then Managing Director Brian Johns had sent out a memo directing that they be more careful in the use of language.  (At this point, we remember Bertrand Russell's definition of a pedant:  a man who prefers his statements to be true).

ABC staff objected to being told to be careful (use of language for moral display unhindered by ratings being an ABC perk) and argued that it was perfectly OK because other media outlets had also used the term in the same context.  (Such display is hardly a monopoly of the ABC).  The ABC had argued before the Panel that the link "could be made".  Indeed it could be.  The question was, should it have been?

That it was simply untrue that the statement was about the stolen generations apparently moved them not at all.  And that is what is wrong with the ABC.