The Murdoch media makes its move
Now, the gloves are off. With the ABC buffeted by the consequences of their calamitous responses to political pressure, the Murdoch media appears to have seized the moment to move into full campaign mode against them.
Stephen Drill is leading the charge. His opinion pieces attacking the ABC have been taken up as front page news across the NewsCorp empire. In my local Murdoch daily this week, Drill’s latest effort was accompanied by a column from Des Houghton calling for a ‘biased’ ABC to be defunded.
In that most recent piece, Drill claimed that the ABC costs Australians more than a Netflix subscription, that it fails to reach 10.6 million Australians, and that it luxuriates in a $1.1 billion dollar budget. Previously, Drill has also called out the broadcaster’s ‘fat cat’ salaries, and accused the organization of tolerating widespread ‘waste’.
Drill’s article was riddled with so many inaccuracies and misrepresentations that the ABC’s Chair, Kim Williams, was moved to issue a full throated and detailed set of corrections in response.
Correcting the record
Williams tells us that, on a monthly basis, the ABC reaches 80% of Australians, and on a yearly basis ‘fewer than 3% of Australians don’t use the ABC’. As for the luxurious budget, Williams argues that the ABC has suffered an accumulated budget cut of 13.7% over the last decade, and that its proportional share of government funding remains tiny — just ‘0.13% of today’s outlays’.
Williams also makes the obvious point that Drill’s comparison with Netflix is not only inaccurate (on Williams’ calculations, the basic Netflix service actually costs more than double the ABC per month), but it is also ludicrous.
Australian taxpayers get much more from the ABC than a video entertainment library. They get multiple national radio and television broadcasting networks, an online video streaming platform, a national emergency broadcasting service, 24 hour news services across radio, television, podcasts, and online, staffed international news bureaus and more.
Correcting one particularly egregious claim — that the ABC paid sports broadcaster Bruce McAvaney ‘thousands’ to locate in Paris for the Paris Olympics — Williams points out that McAvaney never left town at all. He actually covered the Olympics from Sydney.
There is much more, at least for those who might bother to visit the ABC’s website and read Williams’ corrections.
Our ‘biased’ ABC
Regrettably, however, given how little regard our political and media culture has for accuracy these days, these corrections aren’t likely to shift the needle. And the Murdoch media certainly won’t be passing them on. They will more likely double down and come back even harder, and perhaps even more ‘inventively’.
The ‘biased ABC’ formation has been repeated for so long now it is starting to generate the kind of blind conviction that ideologies create. It has become a standard component of the conservative culture wars attack on ‘out of touch elites’ and it has the political aim of discrediting an institution it regards as an enemy. For the Murdoch empire, it has the added commercial benefit of wounding a competitor.
Unfortunately for the ABC, the timing for this current campaign is well chosen. The ABC has repeatedly shot itself in the foot over this last twelve months. Issues with personnel, both on air and off, have fed into a simmering concern about the covert commercialization of the institution’s values alongside questions about its ethical judgement in its delivery of news and current affairs.
The return of the ‘pre-emptive buckle’.
The most damaging self-inflicted wound, though, has been the controversy around Antoinette Lattouf. The court case has exposed a lack of due diligence in her appointment, while as well as the strong likelihood that a risk-averse management had simply buckled under the pressure of an orchestrated political campaign against her. The decision to expose the whole farrago to the inspection of a court case is inexplicable. And then there is the disgraceful choice of the ABC’s initial defence argument — that Lattouf could not claim that her treatment was racist because she had not proved there was a Lebanese, Middle Eastern or Arab ‘race’.
Even hard-core supporters of the ABC could see how this had taken the institution to a new low. Internal pressure on management from hundreds of staff led to that offensive legal argument being withdrawn but the damage was done. The ABC’s management had demonstrated just how loosely it was attached to the institution’s core values and principles. This, while desperately defending a decision that looks to many observers as not worth defending.
Whatever the ABC says, this plays out as a clear case of caving in to political pressure. This is not what we should expect from the ABC, but a pattern is beginning to form. Their own behaviour is telling us that the campaign against them is working.
A better way
Lately, in so many areas of our public life, we have been saddled with leaders who lack the courage to directly confront political attacks on their core principles. In that context, it is good to see that Kim Williams, at least, is not prepared to just wear this stuff. Principled defiance won’t be enough, but it is a step in the right direction.
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