Whose Australian?

Finding articles to criticise in The Australian is like shooting fish in a barrel, all too easy. It is also usually eminently resistible, like the paper itself. While the so-called national broadsheet and its weekend equivalent continue to outdo each other in paroxysms of confected right-wing rage, they are usually best ignored. However occasionally the paper publishes a particular egregious piece that so obviously serves no purpose other than the publisher’s own ends, it needs to be called out for the hyperbolic sham it is. Such an article appeared in the Weekend Australian this Saturday called “whose ABC?” penned by journalist and former Alexander Downer media adviser Chris Kenny.

The long piece appeared in the Inquirer section giving it a veneer of investigative journalism it did not deserve. This was 2,700 words of News Ltd propaganda, with complaints from a few politically motivated but unnamed sources and only one source on the record, former ABC board member Ron Brunton who despite being ideologically motivated as a member of the IPA, was only identified as an “anthropologist”. The self-serving article had a companion piece, an even more pious anti-ABC editorial that drove home the message from Kenny’s talking points.

The articles take as their starting point a piece in the Guardian (coyly described as a “progressive newspaper" by Kenny and “a left-of-centre newspaper” according to the openly more hostile editor) about ABC boss Mark Scott and his well-documented stoushes with News Ltd. The enraged Australian was anxious to do a gotcha on Scott, particularly on his use of the phrase “market failure broadcasting” which Kenny said was code for a political and cultural counterpoint to the commercial media.

Kenny achieves his aims with a remarkable leap of logic. Rather than go through the tiresome process of proving his points, he asks the readers “to assume, just for argument’s sake” the ABC critics are right. This assumption allows him to airily dismiss flaws in his argument and immediately swing into action rectifying the “problem”. Without a shred of evidence, Kenny suggests the organisation is unaccountable and then gets to the nut of his complaint, the ABC “caters for an inner-city progressive elite”. Apart from the breathtaking arrogance of ignoring how many people in the bush enjoy the ABC, it also brings in the familiar right-wing weasel words “inner-city” and “elite” which are conflated to mean “other” (never mind that it insults the paper's own demographics) in opposition to equally imprecise but culturally loaded phrases like "battlers". According to the editorial, the ABC had the temerity to turn to Qatari Al Jazeera for its Osama news instead of the less well-informed but racially more acceptable BBC or CNN. What this proves is Auntie has been the victim of "a left-wing coup" where a “coterie of like-minded inner-city” staff members “commandeered” the airwaves to broadcast to “the vocal minority that share their prejudices”.

Both editor and Kenny were keen to share their prejudices too. Kenny's ones are dated and rehashed from the culture wars of the John Howard era. There is a tired argument about Counterpoint, a program seven years old, and a tedious diatribe about David Hicks, who has not been a newsworthy citizen for over four years. He also reheats the coals of the long-forgotten Brissenden/Costello affair (which also embroiled two non-ABC journalists) from 2007 and has a moan about The Drum, the ABC’s public opinion site.

Kenny’s and the editor’s central argument is their fury over market failure broadcasting: that of “taxpayer’s funding” serving a “small audience”. The ABC audience remains a lot larger than the Australian's audience but more to the point it has always been a market failure broadcaster. Scott denied making the politically sensitive market failure statement and the actual words in the Guardian was that Scott “thinks of the ABC modestly as a ‘market failure broadcaster’”. The use of “thinks” rather than “said” suggests the Guardian is paraphrasing rather than quoting but Scott need not back away from it.

From the start of radio in the 1920s, there was a strong tradition of public ownership of broadcasting medium (except in the US where market failures are anathema) both as an information service in the service of democratic debate and decision making and also as a counterpoint to the partisan and usually right-wing press. The ABC was founded in 1932 along these lines but it also had a cultural aim inherited from the BBC. As its boss in 1934 WJ Cleary put it, the ABC’s task was to promote “the finer things in life” in order to teach people to “find interests other than material ones to live by more than bread alone”.

This paternal Reithian philosophy was conservative and hypocritical at the time - the BBC refused to cover the 1926 General Strike - and it still exists in some parts of the ABC but today’s market failure broadcasting is not about bringing ballet to the hoi-polloi. It is about defending the public’s supposed right to have free access to news in digital platforms, and this is where the ABC steps on News Ltd’s commercial toes. Whether ABC should have that right is an economic argument well worth having, though the Australian studiously avoids it in its sanctimonious stance. Perhaps they don’t want anyone looking too closely at their own market failures. One could argue given several full page ads from Telstra in the same edition, your telco bills are subsiding the Australian's own small, elitist audience.

Why Media Watch is wrong about journalists and Twitter

Australia’s most important watchdog on all matters media made a rare lapse last night. ABC’s Media Watch got its message badly wrong in a segment where they warned off journalists from making controversial statements on Twitter. Little-known journalist Adam Turner was the scapegoat new host Paul Barry (no relation) chose to pillory to prove a badly flawed point.

According to Turner’s bio he is an Australian freelance technology journalist who was formerly Melbourne deputy editor of Next and the business IT sections of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He left The Age in 2005 and has been a freelance journalist ever since providing “news, features, reviews, blogs and podcasts to various business and consumer technology publications.”

Turner is a regular user of Twitter with over 2,000 tweets to his name. Like many involved in the media he was online on 21 August as the federal election results were coming in. Turner was an avid contributor to the #ausvotes tag with at least 50 tweets on the day (including two mentioned by Media Watch that have since been deleted). Like most people in this particularly conversation, Turner had an opinion and was not afraid to share it on Twitter.

It was obvious Turner was no fan of Tony Abbott. There were tweets like “If Abbott wins, New Zealand will be swamped with boat people on Monday” and “If Abbott wins, helicopter waiting to fly Kerry O'Brien off the ABC roof as coalition forces close in”. His tweets were clearly partisan but hardly noteworthy. They were also little different to hundreds of other similar tweets that night from those supporting the left of centre parties.

Turner's turning point came as Tony Abbott emerged to address his party and the country on live TV. According to the program transcript, Turner tweeted “Listen to this c-------er gloat when he hasn't even won” which he followed shortly by “this a---hole is trying to make a victory speech, complete with cheersquad”. I suspect Turner spelt out the words cocksucker and arsehole in his tweets though I can’t be certain as they have been deleted. On the night they would have been lost in a swathe of tweets with the same hashtag, many of whom would have had much harsher words to say about Abbott, an extremely divisive public figure.

But someone had it in for Turner and informed the ABC. Media Watch made it seem like the pinnacle of investigative journalism tracking him down as Barry announced “I think we have our man”. All they did was count his number of followers (as if that had any meaning at all in this age of Twitter mass marketing) and then grab the text off his bio that I’ve reproduced above. Both the bio and the tweets are openly available to anyone who looks at Turner’s Twitter page or follows him. There was no suggestion Turner had anything to hide.

So where is the problem? It seems as if Media Watch wanted to save Turner from himself. “Luckily Turner's not a political correspondent or he might now be unemployed,” Barry said. “But even so, why on earth did this seem like a good idea?” He compared Turner’s fate to that of Catherine Deveny who was sacked for breaching the taboo of discussing child sexuality with her tweet "I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid”. Leaving aside the sanctimonious outcry from rival media, the furore ignores the fact The Age probably wanted to shaft the troublesome Deveny anyway. More importantly it fails to acknowledge her tweets had nothing to do with her work at the Age.

Similarly with Turner. What he got up to on election night with a few bourbons on board may or may not have been a good idea but it was hardly unethical. It also had absolutely nothing to do with his work. Yet Media Watch felt the need to ask The Age’s editor Paul Ramadge about his freelancer. Ramadge’s reply was succinct “[Adam Turner] has received an official first and final warning.” Media Watch’s verdict was that it was an “embarrassing mistake”. Neither Barry nor his team seemed to understand the openness and conversation that underpins social media tools like Twitter.

This became blatantly apparent with Media Watch’s second target in the same segment. ABC WA journalist Geoff Hutchison was forced to delete his Twitter account after he too had a go at Tony Abbott during a Q&A program in the week before the election. Hutchison tweeted "Tony, why are you frightened of intercourse with Julia? Is it because we will be watching and measuring?"

This sarcastic offering offended someone enough to contact ABC management who ordered him to delete his account. ABC Radio spokesman Warwick Tiernan said the comments had breached the ABC's social media policy. "Geoff's comments, posted on a personal Twitter account, do not meet ABC social media guidelines and do not represent the views of the ABC," he said.

Media Watch claimed the problem with Hutchison’s tweets was it interfered with his job which is to be objective. Under ABC’s social media rules staff are directed not to mix "the professional and the personal in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute" and not imply the ABC endorses personal views. But Hutchison was not working when he attacked Abbott, he was most likely at home on the couch. No reasonable person could imagine his personal comments could bring the ABC into disrepute. It is also an insult to Hutchison to think he could not be professional enough to leave his personal opinions to one side when interviewing politicians.

Media Watch inadvertently let slip the real reason why he was forced to take the punishment of deleting the account. “Stupid comments like that make it harder for him to do that job properly... and they're a gift to the ABC's critics.” What Barry is really saying is that this has nothing to do with left-wingers putting their gripes on the Internet and everything to do with not giving ABC’s right-wing enemies the opportunity to make tired claims about bias.

Typically Andrew Bolt (who like Hutchison is an able interviewer of politicians despite his own well-known political biases) was quickest off the mark lumping Turner and Hutchison together in a rogue’s gallery with Deveny, Marieke Hardy and Daniel Burt. “Yes, only five,” Bolt admitted in his final sentence, “but all attacking from the Left, with the ABC and barbarians [Fairfax] strongly represented.” Bolt avoided drawing any conclusions from his post allowing his audience do the dirty work for him.

If Barry and his cohorts are frightened off by streams of invective from "ABC’s Critics” like Bolt and his audience then we really do have a problem. Silencing Turner and Hutchison achieves no purpose. We desperately need more robust views not less. We need to know what our politicians and our journalists think, not frighten them off into platitudes. Guiding the social media policy should be an underlying philosophy of publish and be damned. There will be those who will damn the ABC no matter what they do or what their policies say. Media Watch should be standing up to them not for them.

ABC News Twentyfour Seven Eleven

In 20 years time when they ask the trivia question “in what year did ABC start its 24-hour television news channel?”, I hope we will not remember the answer with a sense of nostalgia for something we’ve lost.

I certainly have no idea what television will look like in 20 years but I suspect whatever medium it transforms into it, its content would still include 7 x 24 news with some kind of local slant. The ABC “News 24” stationed launched today despite the grumblings of Sky News Australia’s owners (and there is no reason in time it cannot become the Al Jazeera of the Asia Pacific, especially if it can nail overseas broadcasting.

There are plenty of misgivings of course, and Sky's is not the limit. As far back as the 1840s Henry David Thoreau noted our inventions are pretty toys which distract attention from serious things. At time, the US was rapidly linking itself up by magnetic telegraph to Britain and also internally from Maine to Texas.
But as Thoreau reminded us the first news on these newfangled tubes may well have been that Princess Adelaide had the whooping while Maine and Texas, may have nothing important to communicate to each other.

Thoreau was right to sound his warning about the blandness of news into the “broad flapping American ear” but completely wrong in his guess - Maine and Texas had plenty of important things to communicate as they shared in the national imagining of a greater America. The ABC News 24 channel can fulfil a similar role here.

Visionary Managing-Director Mark Scott has no doubts about its raison d'etre. He told his own reporters there should be a 24/7 news channel on Australian free-to-air television and the public broadcaster ABC was ideal to run it “given our history, given our experience, given our resources given our integrity, given our independence.” He says News 24 will ensure the ABC's future in broadcasting.

Others are not so sure. Jason Wilson said the public is entitled to be sceptical about its long-term expansion. He said the broadcaster is already overstretched and no new resources have been allocated for the channel. It means the station must reuse content for other media, poach staff from other departments and expect the journalists to work longer hours.

Wilson wonders whether ABC are straying too far from “core business” and should be looking at more innovative ways of delivering content in the post-broadcast age. “There's no convincing case for creating yet another one-size-fits-all continuous news broadcaster when cheap, plentiful bandwidth will allow for the distribution of a plethora of niche, on-demand or streaming audiovisual content,” Wilson said.

As usual Wilson makes astute points. However this long tail approach leaves the audience feeling fragmented which leads to yearning for a more centralised delivery. ABC has a role in providing informed news across Australia. When the national broadcaster was set up in 1932, the newspapers at the time (led by Keith Murdoch) fiercely resisted moves for its radio station to include news. But by the end of World War II, it was increasingly clear the ABC had a mandate to produce despite Murdoch’s best efforts in his wartime role of Director-General of Information.

Keith’s son Rupert is still making his displeasure known about public broadcasting unfairly impinging on his turf, but that to me seems more of a reason to treasure the ABC. But taxpayers should not be expected to pay additional dollars for this new service. Working harder, repurposing content and shifting staff are all reasonable demands when the money is not there up front. For now, ABC News 24 may have to “fake it till it makes it” but with broad public trust and time on its side, the oily rag can one day turn into a silk coat. I welcome its addition to the public sphere.

BBC strategic review is useful template for the ABC

The BBC Strategy Review of March 2010 (pdf) is an important read not only for those interested in the future of Britain’s premier broadcaster but also for those who follow the fortunes of its antipodean cousin the ABC. Given the tagline “getting the best out of the BBC for licence fee payers” the 79-page document is the BBC Trust’s attempt to steer a course for the public-funded organisation in the likely event of a Conservative win in the forthcoming election and a corresponding serious reduction in government expenditure. (photo: The Guardian)

The Trust said its reference points were the audience and the market. It said its audience is proud of the BBC and willing to pay for a strong and independent voice that delivers original and high quality content. The market meanwhile is more ambiguous. It wants the BBC to fulfil its public service charter but questions where the boundaries lie with private enterprise and also its genuineness in its proposals for partnerships.

The Trust said the time was right to look at its future direction and possibilities of expansion in the framework of four key questions. These were: Is its portfolio of services still appropriate in the digital age? Has its near 24 x 7 expansion caused a dilution in quality and distinctiveness? What is the best distribution model for content? And finally how should it react to the problems of commercial media?

These questions in turn raised five lines of enquiry the Trust put to BBC management. These were: How can the BBC best maintain quality and distinctiveness? Where could it narrow focus and scale? What will a fully digital BBC look like? Can the BBC better define the public space it provides? And finally how can the BBC create the most value from its scale?

The response to all these questions from BBC management called “Putting Quality First” is in the same document. The Director-General’s vision was to create “a BBC focused on quality content and enduring values, keeping open a public space for all”. This would be achieved by five central principles: putting quality first, doing fewer things better, guaranteeing access, getting better value from the licence fee, and setting new boundaries.

The BBC mission statement is worth repeating because it has relevance also in the Australian context. It says, “[the mission] is constant and enduring: to inform, educate and entertain audiences with programmes and services of high quality, originality and value. It strives to fulfill this mission not to further any political or commercial interest, but because the British public believes that universal access to ideas and cultural experiences of merit and ambition is a good in itself. The BBC is a part of public space because the public themselves have put it there.”

The BBC is part of an independent public space that include other media, public institutions, libraries, museums, parks, universities, monuments and voluntary bodies. And while the digital age should be a “golden age” for public space, fragmentation of audiences is destroying business models causing public space to diminish. The BBC say their role is to be a main guarantor of public space and its technological underpinning and should also be a catalyst and connector within that space.

Its mantra, says management, should be putting quality first. It will have five content priorities: world-class journalism, inspiring knowledge, music and culture, ambitious local drama and comedy, outstanding children’s content, and events that bring communities and the nation together. That means changing £600m of priorities a year (a fifth of the BBC’s cost base) over the next four years and committing to 90 percent of licence fees on high quality content (though it will be interesting to see how ‘high quality’ will be defined and measured).

This also means doing more with less. Spending on the BBC’s website will decrease by a quarter each year to 2013 and its number of sections will be halved. There will also be more external links with the intention of doubling monthly ‘click-throughs’ to external sites. Other services to be closed will be Radio 6 Music, Asian Network and teen offerings BBC Switch and Blast! In order to guarantee access to all, BBC management want to make internet-connected television a reality, continue free access to news and also to open its archives and program library and work with its partners such as the British Library and BFI to bring their public archives to a wider audience.

To pay for all this, the BBC is proposing to reduce costs, reduce senior management numbers, freeze pay and suspend bonuses. They will also reduce spend on overseas content, cap sports rights spending, defer to commercial radio and other broadcasters in area in areas of popular music and serving teenagers and to not go more hyperlocal than they already are.

Opponents of public broadcasting here in Australia such as Mark Day have seized on this report as a rationale for trimming down, if not totally removing, the ABC from the media landscape. While this goes too far, the BBC Trust document does ask some very good questions and opens up a debate on public broadcasting and its platforms and contents we do need to have in Australia. Particularly as there is no licence fee, it behooves us to question the direction the ABC is headed (and also ask where SBS fits into the picture). All too often media policy here is reactive. As we stand on the cusp of the death of the analogue age, we could do worse than examine the BBC document. It is a template for honest and mature discussion into what we might want from “our ABC” in the coming years.

Mark Scott’s year of living dangerously

Woolly Days' Australian media personality for 2009 is the CEO of the ABC, Mark Scott. Scott has led the ABC for the best part of five years but it is only in the last 12 months that he has established himself as one of the major figures in the Australian media landscape, and is proving to be a formidable opponent to older players.

Scott is a former Liberal Party staffer who was appointed ABC boss in 2005 aged just 42. He resigned a role as editorial director at Fairfax to take the ABC job. At the time Scott was forced to deny he is a creature of the Howard government saying “I have a cordial, nodding relationship I suppose with the [then] Prime Minister and the minister, but no more than that.”

Scott has proved an able non-political servant. He effortlessly survived the transition to Labor Government in 2007 and now seems to have an important ally in Communications minister Stephen Conroy.

The media landscape now looks very different to how it appeared when Scott first took over the ABC. Kerry Packer died and his beloved television channel was sold off to anonymous private equity firms. The alliance with Conroy has seen significant increase in funding and an end to government distrust of the ABC. The gradual ubiquity of broadband is seeing ABC take an important lead in the rollout of digital services. Scott himself was in the vanguard of ABC take-up of Twitter most notably used to give out Victorian bushfire information in February.

Scott was also able to put in place a structure underneath him he could trust. His two new trusty lieutenants were Kate Dundas and Kate Torney. Dundas was appointed head of radio while Torney was the new head of news. Torney’s role would be to carry out Scott’s vision for ABC News as “the seeds of a 24 hour news channel”. Dundas’s job would not only mean looking after the five stations (Radio National, NewsRadio, JJJ, Classic FM and local radio) but also making sure their content was available as a media-rich service together with podcasting, user-generated content and other integration with the internet. Dundas also picked up digital radio which went online on 1 July. This was in line with Scott’s statement from April: “No other media organisation is doing more with user‐generated content or using the web more to encourage robust local content.”

Possibly the most important action of the year was the renewal of ABC’s triennial funding. The 2009 federal budget gave an additional $185m to the two non-commercial stations, the lion’s share going to the ABC. It included $15 million to set up 50 regional broadband websites linked to local radio stations to create “virtual town squares for communities”.

Digital television is also a crucial piece of the jigsaw. ABC has set the pace with ABC2 around since 2005. This year finally saw the challenge of the other operators with One, SBS2, Go and SevenTwo all debuting on air. But ABC hit back in December launching ABC3 as the nation’s first children’s channel.

Also at the end of the year, Scott consolidated ABC online opinion into a new site called The Drum (a symbol also used in marketing by JJJ). He headhunted Crikey.com.au editor Jonathan Green to run it and populated it with articles from ABC’s stable of political journalists. The new star in the crown was Annabel Crabb whom Scott poached from the Sydney Morning Herald. Scott had long cherished the wry and shrewd sketchwork of Crabb as part of his vision to make the ABC a quality destination for digital journalism.

Scott made many notable public speeches this year but two stand out. In April he gave a remarkable Annual Media Studies Lecture at La Trobe University in Melbourne in which he showed how the global economy, the shattering structure underpinning the business model, and business blunders were forever changing the nature of media in Australia. The second, near the end of the year was the so-called “end of empire” speech. It was a direct challenge to News Ltd from a powerful man at the top of his game, in response to James Murdoch’s MacTaggart lecture in August which complained about the growing power of the BBC, and Rupert Murdoch’s China speech about the end of the age of the Internet free ride being over. Scott’s view was that News “empire” no longer has the power to dictate terms over the cost of the ride.

Scott was proving to be a tough negotiator as well as having a silver tongue. He reneged on a pay agreement with the CPSU citing the GFC as a factor and he took ABC into a cost-cutting partnership with WIN to build a shared TV presentation and control centre in Western Sydney. He also went to China in September to lobby the government allow the ABC to be carried on Chinese pay TV. Though there has been some criticism about the lack of investigative journalism in his vision, Mark Scott is proving to be a top media performer who seems to have mapped out a useful and exciting future for “your ABC”.

Media140 and Mark Scott

I’ve just finished watching ABC boss Mark Scott display his fine sense of humour for the second time in four days. Tonight I watched his flagship ABC1 channel where Scott was justifiably praising the wonderful Andrew Olle lecture given by Chaser executive producer Julian Morrow. Scott said Morrow and the Chaser team were the reason why the ABC legal team had quadrupled in size. He said Morrow was the reason for his grey hair and letters he gets from Gerard Henderson and also suggested that Morrow could afford a Lachlan Murdoch-like $23 million Sydney mansion if he was prepared to rely on his ABC salary for a thousand years. (photo of Mark Scott at Media140 by Neerav Bhatt)

The self-deprecating wit hides a very sharp brain of a man who is now probably the second most important media player in Australia (behind Lachlan’s Dad). He acknowledged Morrow's important points about primary and secondary audiences and how the ABC should react to them. He also endorsed Morrow's points about the importance of new media. The head of Australia’s foremost public broadcaster has used a number of key speeches to throw his weight behind the new media revolution and he was in zealot mode again on home turf at Ultimo on Thursday when he made the keynote speech for day 1 of Media140 Sydney. Scott’s introduction to Twitter is typical of many people’s experience (including my own) with an initial period of scepticism, followed by silence and then eventual acceptance. Scott said he signed up in late 2007 and followed just one person: Ana Marie Cox (the American political blogger who founded Wonkette).

Scott said he quickly became “bored and confused” and his interest in the tool faded away. He quoted co-founder Biz Stone's statement that "if there were two or three sentences I'd use to describe Twitter, one of them would be 'I don't know'". It wasn’t until February 2009 that he re-engaged with Twitter and “came to understand it”. Scott’s epiphany was due to the Victorian Bushfires emergency. As the scale of the devastation started to emerge on Black Saturday, the ABC local radio station 774 Melbourne’s twitter hashtag became an increasingly vital hub of information using the hashtag #bushfires. Scott praised ABC staffer Wolf Cocklin (@wolfcat) who manned the Twitter feed for three days solid passing information to and from the broadcaster, the CFA, the police and members of the public.

Inspired by WolfCat, Scott returned to Twitter and quickly became enamoured of its possibilities. But while he joked about his assiduous management of the number of his followers, he said Twitter was just a technology and it was communication that counted. He reminded the audience of the famous Henry David Thoreau quote: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

But Scott did have important things to communicate in his speech. He used the occasion to announce two new ABC online initiatives. Firstly he was commissioning 50 digital media producers help local communities to create their own content and secondly was the launch of “ABC widgets” to allow people run broadcaster news feed content from their own blogs and social media pages. As Margaret Simons noted, the issue will be whether commercial media organisations selling ads would also be allowed to use the widgets.

Scott also provided a set of four guidelines for ABC staff using social networks. These were 1) do not mix professional and personal conduct in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute 2) do not undermine work effectiveness 3) do not imply ABC endorse personal views and 4) do not disclose confidential information. The guidelines are straightforward and encourage journalists to engage with social media rather than be afraid of them.

With Murdoch-led paywalls on their way, it is crucial that ABC journalists have the right tools available to them to provide a useful free-to-net alternative for those unable (or unwilling) to afford to buy their news. As the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism notes, social media, blogs and user-generated content are not replacing journalism, but they are creating an important extra layer of information and opinion. Most people are still happy to rely on mainstream news organisations to sort fact from fiction and provide a filtered view. But these people are increasingly engaged by this information, particularly when recommended by friends or other trusted sources. With Mark Scott at the helm, it appears the ABC are well placed to become leaders in this new exciting field.

Is Rome burning? Murdoch picks a fight with the ABC

“You want sensitivity training? Don’t hang out in a newsroom, that’s your sensitivity training."
(From Overheard in the newsroom #1979)

Everyone know the media is a harsh business full of oversized egos and a well defined sense of self-importance. So when there is substantial disagreement on a major matter of media principle, it likely the bruises will be public. No noses have been bloodied yet in the big private v public access battle is playing out at the moment but it is only a matter of time. This fight is serious. Corporate media led by Murdoch want to charge for content but are aware they will leak substantial audience to publicly-owned media companies who have no intention of charging directly for content. Public enemy number one in Australia is ABC boss Mark Scott who is fast becoming a talisman for the power of new media.

The charge of Murdoch and his formidable empire is public corporations are inherent anti-competitive institutions whose funding power gives them an unfair advantage. The ABC undercuts private companies’ ability to provide content on the Internet, says Murdoch. Last week, ABC boss Mark Scott took up the cudgels and compared the empire of The Sun King to the Fall of Rome. He ridiculed News Corporation’s plan to charge for Internet content and provided a spirited defence of the national broadcaster’s right to provide "free" news to the masses.

It didn't take long for the Empire to strike back. Today a couple of News big guns took to the columns of its Australian flagship newspaper to defend their turf and attack Scott's assumptions. It was no surprise ABC’s own Media Watch would cover the “conflict” in its program tonight. As an ABC product, Media Watch is not entirely bi-partisan but it is considered an Internal Affairs watchdog and therefore usually not afraid to put the boot into its own employers.

Scott’s speech took on the challenge provided by paid content head on. His theme was end of empire. Taking his cue from Gibbons, Scott charted the progress of the media giants who are now struggling in these “desperate days” to cope with the new realities of Internet. According to media writer Margaret Simons, the Internet’s revolutionary intent is comparable to the printing press which changed religion, democracy and the organisation of societies.

Big Media still has a role to play in the revolutionary new world of the Internet but is hamstrung having has been subsumed into Big Business. There are very few people in the banks and private equity companies that understand how the media business works. In a time of crisis, they are all waiting for Murdoch because he is the only “newspaper man” left. And he is on the defensive. In Beijing he hammered the philistine bloggers and plagiarist aggregators that feast on News’s content. He also condemned the search engines that make their money from pushing around other people’s content without giving anything back to the creators. Murdoch’s son James went further and warned the public their ways must also change. It was essential for the future of independent digital journalism, he said, for a fair price to be charged for news “to people who value it”. The message was the Internet free ride was over.

But Mark Scott said that News “empire” no longer had the power to dictate terms over the cost of the ride. The audience has the power now he says, and media providers must engage with those audiences on their terms. For 15 years people have gotten used to the idea of not paying for online content and are unlikely to start wanting to pay now, he says. News Digital CEO Richard Freudenstein retorted today in Media Australia that Scott was “shielded from the commercial reality”. Freudenstein says people are willing to pay for journalism online but advertising alone won’t work on the Internet. People will pay for online content if it is relevant and delivered in ways they want, he says.

His article was accompanied by a Kudelka cartoon which shows an appreciative Prime Minister Rudd hugging Scott for thinking he had come up with a way not to require government funding. “Wayne's(Treasurer Swan) beside himself" gushed the wonkish and delighted PM, always thinking about red lines that might disappear from the $53b budget black hole. The cartoon Scott is increasingly distraught as the PM "misunderstands" what he means about free content.

But misunderstandings or not, the ABC is an important part of the culture and not likely to disappear anytime soon. News Corp can try to undermine its authority but will also have to be creative in their pay offerings. In the same edition of today's paper as Freudenstein and Kudelka's barbs, The Australian's media analyst Mark Day inted how News might implement their paywall. It would not be an old newspaper-model, he said. “They'll be more akin to social networks, a hybrid of news, services, commerce, information and entertainment designed for like-minded people or communities,” Day said. They will not be providing old content for “like-minded people” but new content. Basic news will still be free.

Simons said paying will work for some things but people will not pay for general news in countries that have strong traditions of public broadcasters (eg Australia and the UK). James Murdoch calls this issue the “dumping” of free state-sponsored content which makes it difficult for journalism to flourish on the Internet. Murdoch notes that the distinction between broadcasters and newspapers is irrelevant on the Internet and what we have now is an “all media market” (Keating’s “Princes of Print and Queens of the Screen” looks very dated 15 years later).

And if commercial organisations need to charge people for content in this new converged environment, they should not face competitors who provide the same content free courtesy of the taxpayer. James Murdoch says it is fundamental for journalism and the creative industries that public media “exist on a far, far smaller scale”. Or as the Times put it to the BBC in Chinese-fashion, they should get its tanks off our lawn.

Mark Scott says the public pays the ABC to provide distinctive content to them which they are entitled to view “free of charge”. Free to the user but not to the taxpayer. The ABC has a guaranteed $844.6m budget (2007 figures) that insulates Scott's decisions from his audience’s actual wants. The private companies must however live or die by their paid content. Media Watch says the signs are we won’t be asked to pay for what we are currently getting for free, but for new content.

Scott says one of the reasons the ABC is required is because of the abdication of news in commercial companies citing Channels Seven and Nine’s attenuated coverage of current affairs. ABC should not be crippled just to make private concerns wealthier, he says and crucially, he adds “there is no political sentiment to make this happen". Media Watch cited the $14m ABC got over four years to provide websites for regional Australia.

It interviewed APN Media boss Brendan Hopkins which questioned this strategy. APN is in direct opposition to ABC Regional as it owns 14 regional newspapers in northern NSW and Queensland (disclosure: this journalist has worked for APN and is hoping to do so again) and Hopkins says he cannot see the government supporting a model of the ABC where the cost “keeps going up”.

He says if APN think ABC is getting unfair treatment they will talk to Graeme Samuels at the ACCC and “hold them to account”. When asked whether after 75 years the ABC should even exist, Hopkins said “now is a good time to have that debate". With Margaret Simons agreeing that the ABC is now in a serious position to hurt the commercials’ business model, this argument has a long way to go. Maybe it is, as Hopkins says, time to honestly re-evaluate what is meant by “your ABC”. The Anglosphere has tended to scoff at Sarkozy’s 600m euro press interventionism in France, but how is our public broadcasting funding much different?

Australian Press Council losing friends and not influencing people

Australian broadcasters have reacted coolly to the Australian Press Council’s proposal to expand its remit to regulate broadcast and digital media. Margaret Warner, the head of peak body Commercial Radio Australia said her industry already has a government regulator and does not need any assistance from the press watchdog. Meanwhile, ABC boss Mark Scott has also rejected a role for APC in monitoring the public broadcaster, claiming the council was deficient in its complaints procedures. "The council's workings are opaque and its judgments given precious little display," Scott said last month. "It has no power to order corrections."

The rejections complete a bad week for the publisher-funded body. Last Monday The Australian announced the APC was facing the loss of one third of its budget and the biggest structural shake-up in its history. The publishers which finance the council (including News Limited, Fairfax Media and APN News & Media) issued a joint submission which propose major changes to its membership and functions to cope with the proposed cuts. The publishers will slash industry contributions to the council from $880,000 this financial year to less than $600,000 in 2009-2010. The cuts are required, say the publishers, because of a mix of the global financial crisis and so-called “structural problems” (presumably, collapsing revenue) in the industry itself.

In response, Press Council member Alan Kennedy made a counter-proposal to expand the organisation's remit in an article published on the journalists’ union site Alliance Online last Thursday. Kennedy called for an expansion to give the council unfettered right to police online news sites, television and radio news. The downside is that the new members would have to fund the council pro rata, but in return would gain credibility for the quality of their products. He said that slashing funds would seriously hamper the APC’s “vital work” in handling ethics complaints and lobbying Government on press freedom issues. However, he acknowledged the model under which publishers funded a percentage based on circulation is flawed and needs to change.

Kennedy said the council’s main selling point was turnaround time. He described the procedures of Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), which regulates the broadcasting industry, as “prescribed and clunky” While ACMA can take six months to make a complaints decision, the APC usually gets a judgement out in six weeks or under. This is because complainants must waive their legal rights when they engage the APC and therefore lawyers are not involved. An win at the Australian Press Council entitles the complaint only to a public apology.

The APC was established in 1976 with two main aims. These were to help maintain the traditional freedom of the press and ensure the press acts responsibly and ethically. At the time, the press barons were worried the government might try to licence newspapers if there was no self-regulation. The APC has grown into the role. It has made over 1,400 adjudications and now sees itself as a bastion of a free press. Their annual State of the News Print Media publication is an important document that looks at key trends and issues that affect newsprint in Australia.

The council has 22 members comprising of ten public members, ten members from the publishers, and two independent journalists. This panel currently deal with 400 to 500 complaints annually. About 90 percent of these complaints are successfully dealt with by mediation using sub-panels and the other ten percent go to the full committee. About 47.5 percent of complaints were upheld last year. As I heard Press council member Adrian McGregor say today, the APC's ability to deal with such a large number will be severely compromised by the massive drop in budget.

It is a shame then that other media will not subscribe to the service. The “get-your-tanks-off-our-lawn” message (as Mumbrella neatly put it) from Commercial Radio Australia and the ABC is unhelpful. Given that many media complainants simply want an apology, explanation or an acknowledgement, the APC's version of the ombudsman provides a useful means of getting a cheap, quick and fair result.

Mark Scott, the ABC and the future of Australian media

On Good Friday, Melbourne documentary maker John Safran went to the Philippines and emulated the feat of a more famous Jew when he had himself nailed to a cross. As well as making headlines, the stunt will also make good television for the ABC in a new series, John Safran's Race Relations to be aired later this year. It brought predictable howls of protest from vested interests in the crucifixion business. Catholic priest Gary Rawson hopes Safran did the stunt for the “right reasons” though did not specify what those reasons might be (dying for our sins? rebellion against the Romans?).

It is unlikely ABC Managing Director Mark Scott cared about those reasons (unless they were TV ratings) or indeed had Safran in mind when he gave a remarkable Annual Media Studies Lecture at La Trobe University in Melbourne on Wednesday. But perhaps Safran was reacting to one of his boss’s opening remarks: “Each month brings a new twist on this revolutionary road”. Scott’s lecture may not have been aimed at the extreme tendencies of his employees, but it was a wide-ranging and insightful look at how the “digital revolution” in the Australian media industry is playing out.

The Melbourne Age saw its own crucifixion in the speech. They said Scott’s speech painted “a bleak picture” as it predicted the death of newspapers in Melbourne and Sydney (with the Fairfax mastheads likely to lose out). And Scott should know, he worked for The Age for ten years before taking over the ABC in 2006.

But Scott’s speech was no more about The Age than it was about Safran. Scott saw three factors affecting commercial media in Australia. These were the parlous state of the global economy, the shattering structure underpinning the business model, and business blunders. The faltering economy has badly affected the media’s lifeblood: classified advertising. Normally in a recession media companies cut costs and ride out the tough times. When the good times returned, said Scott, “the staff came back, the travel plans were dusted off and the long lunch returned.” But he does not think this will happen after the current crisis ends. And that is because of the second problem: business structure.

In the past the commercial broadcasters were “remarkably lucrative oligopolies” with exclusive access to large audiences. Scott says the old style owners such as Murdoch and Packer could afford to sacrifice some profit in return for influence. Packer subsidised the Sunday program while Murdoch ran the loss-making London Times and The Australian. The trade-off was the political and cultural influence they brought to the owners. But now the moguls have lost exclusive access to the audience and fragmentation is rapidly eroding profits. “And that profit,” said Scott, “kept cover prices low, funded international and investigative journalists, cranky columnists, eccentric cartoonists…all the things that made papers great.”

The changing paradigm has led to the third of Scott’s market failures: business blunders. Private equity companies began buying up media entities when prices were still high. Fairfax has been loaded up with debt after its purchase of Rural Press. Poor media acquisition decisions have occurred overseas too. Billionaire Sam Zell purchase of The Tribune group saddled it with massive debt leading to savage cost‐cutting at iconic papers such as The LA Times.

But despite the “triple whammy” of the cyclical crunch, shattering structure and business blunders, Scott saw several grounds for optimism. He said there never has been more active debate around the future of media, the path ahead for journalism, and the search for sustainable business models. He noted initiatives such as Jay Rosen’s “Flying Seminar in the Future of News” and the ABC’s own recent Future of Quality Journalism seminar as examples as “active concern and engagement” in media issues.

Scott also says there is plenty of “bold and creative thinking” but it is happening beyond the mainstream where they are too busy “putting out fires”. But Scott was reluctant to predict too much. Newspapers face further rationalisation, he said. The fate of News Ltd may depend on the plans of Lachlan Murdoch. The proposed National Broadband Network will impact media delivery (media writer Mark Day agrees, calling it a “television killer” today) but says that Telstra will remain a major player. “It pays to watch the organisation that is set to dominate IPTV, owns half of subscription TV, and has the cash to buy a free to air channel at the drop of a hat,” he said.

Scott then spoke about his own organisation, the ABC. He described an organisation in rude health with iView, high ratings, digital channels, user-generated content and leading the way in podcasting. He pitched for further government money ahead of the ABC review and Triennial funding round later this year. “Everyone I meet in government speaks with optimism and enthusiasm about the ongoing importance of the ABC and stresses this in light of all that is happening to others in the media landscape,” he said. “I hope the dollars follow the noble sentiments.”

Scott concluded by praising the way Web 2.0 has transformed the media experience. Audience expertise is now being “injected” into the news process via Youtube and Twitter. The technological revolution means that users can exercise media choices anytime they like or on any device they want. Scott says that things may be lost as media organisations adapt to the revolution, but the effect will be “profound and transforming and empowering”. Scott ended his speech by calling the journey “a remarkable ride to an extraordinary place”.

Turn ABC and SBS into hyperlocal content hubs, says review submission

Yesterday, I wrote about Pay TV’s submission to the government review of the two national broadcasters, ABC and SBS. Today I want to look at another of the 2,400 submissions; this time a less self-interested but no less well argued one from four prominent Queensland academics. The submission is called “Social Innovation, User-Created Content and the Future of the ABC and SBS as Public Service Media” and was written by Terry Flew, Stuart Cunningham, Axel Bruns, and Jason Wilson.

The submission calls for both ABC and SBS to focus on user created content and redefine themselves as media organisations rather than broadcasters. The latter call is timely as The Inquisitr reveals that a 2:1 majority of Americans watched the Obama inauguration on the Internet rather than TV. The public service remit, argue the authors, should not be confined to specific technology like radio and television but to the services they provide – regardless of platform. They go even further and suggest that now is the ideal time for the ABC and SBS to change their emphasis and become participatory public media harnessing the power of citizen journalism.

The authors are making these recommendations from personal experience and research. Since 2007, all four have been intimately involved in an Australian Research Council Linkage Project called “Investigating Innovative Applications of Digital Media for Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement in Australian Public Communication”. The title is a mouthful but in a nutshell it is an investigation into the possibilities of citizen journalism using established industry partners such as SBS and Cisco. The project’s aim was to devise prototypes for “emergent forms of political citizenship and public communication in 21st century Australia".

The project began by creating an aggregated citizen journalism site called youdecide2007.org for the 2007 federal election. They provided tools and resources to enable hyper-local citizen participation in partnership with national organisations and then set to work documenting their findings in the wider international context of citizen journalism and web 2.0 developments. The project also researched attitudes (see attached pdf) within SBS about user-created content, a subject the authors saw as a crucial development for both national broadcasters.

According to the submission, the question of how SBS and ABC respond to changes in the media environment due to technological and cultural reasons is a matter of ‘social innovation’. By this they mean the application of a new idea (or a new application of an existing idea) that delivers lasting social value. The two areas driving social innovation are the technological revolution (as exemplified by the Internet) and cultural activity (increasing the number of voices in a democracy). The two areas are blurring as innovation increasingly comes from the margins and a network economy emerges that is both distributed and co-ordinated in a many-to-many fashion. The often non-commercial aspects of these activities deliver social, cultural, and public value and are mirrored by the public service aspects of the charters of ABC and SBS.

The challenge for the public broadcasters in the 21st century, say the authors, is to continue delivering unique and compelling content while also being conduits for user-led social innovation. To that end, the charters need to redefine the organisations as media rather than broadcasters, providing media services. They should then make the leap to become ‘participatory public service media’ to harness and encourage social content creation. In effect, they want to see ABC and SBS become an Australian digital commons.

Both ABC and SBS already have a strong digital presence and bring considerable strengths to a web 2.0 environment. They are trusted brands with informed audiences, they have access to large networks of media professionals, have good reputations as innovators, and large archives that could be digitised. ABC has already taken some small steps in collaborative culture with its Pool initiative which allows users to share and remix content. ABC has also allowed public feedback in long form in forums such as Opinion and Unleashed. But the authors say they could do more to encourage participation without harming their traditional public broadcasting function.

On the contrary, the authors say that enabling citizen journalism will allow organisational resources to be harnessed better in the traditional functions. The benefits will be in the areas of expanding direct participation in democratic processes and providing local communities, particularly remote ones, with a means of communication. The authors say the ABC should transform its national network of local bureaux into hyperlocal hubs for content created by local communities. As the experience with youdecide2007 showed the researchers, citizen media provided an outlet for the stories of remote communities, disadvantaged groups, and minority political opinion in a way “more traditional media sources could not match”. Flew, Cunningham, Bruns and Wilson’s submission is one of the more radical, imaginative and exciting visions for Australian public media among the 2,400 voices and deserves some serious merit. If ABC and SBS won’t provide the platform, it will simply go elsewhere. But if it does, the nation will be the loser.

Twitter and public broadcasting issues under one mumbrella

A real breath of fresh air on the Australian blogging scene is Tim Burrowes at Mumbrella. The former editor of B&T magazine is one of the few bloggers who actually breaks stories and he broke two good ones today. Just minutes ago, he revealed that the viral Twitter messages that a plane on fire caused Melbourne airport to close this evening were a gross overreaction. While it was true that a passenger reported seeing fire from the left wing of a Boeing 767 this evening, the plane was cleared after eight minutes and there were no further consequences. But while Burrowes confirmed there was no fire with a quick phone to the airport, the Twitter world was happier just to repeat the "plane on fire" news ad infinitum in an Australian version of the Hudson plane landing incident. But in this case, the airport press office was justified telling Burrowes that “unfortunately the Internet is full of gossip.”

In scotching the rumours, Burrowes exemplified the remarks of Jason Wilson’s provocative post at Gatewatching last week by showing that “journalists use telephones”. Burrowes was also on the phone earlier today after he read one of the more contentious entries of the 2,400 submissions to the review of Australia's two national broadcasters, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). The government will review the submissions ahead of the broadcasters' next funding review in July this year.

Burrowes’ interest was in the submission by Astra, the peak body representing Australia’s subscription TV industry. In their submission, Astra were critical of the plan to give six new digital channels to ABC and SBS. Astra picked on the point made by ABC’s managing director Mark Scott that the new channels (in areas of news, children’s entertainment and foreign language programming among others) addressed a “market failure”. Astra denied there was a market failure and said they were (or will be soon) delivering similar products to what ABC planned to deliver. It was a persuasive argument if you leave out the fact that just two million Australians subscribe to pay TV and that leaves a potential market failure for 19 million others.

Nevertheless the newsworthy element that Burrowes noticed was an Astra comment that the public broadcasters are doing aggressive deals that lock out pay TV from showing up-to-date content. They claim “ABC and SBS have included pursuit of commercial terms which seek to ensure longer than industry standard ‘hold back’ clauses in production and acquisition deals, and in some instances the ABC in particular has been willing to pay more for content to ensure this happens”. The result is that pay TV has to wait longer to get content for re-run and Astra says this is contrary to ABC 1983 charter goals (a charter Astra says is out of date as is the 1992 Broadcasting Act).

Once again Burrowes picked up the telephone and spoke to both SBS and ABC today for comment on Astra’s accusation. SBS firmly denied the claims and gave examples where SBS and Pay TV have cooperated in acquiring broadcast rights. Their spokesperson also told Burrowes that they often allow World Movies Channel and other pay TV channels to run content first. The ABC spokesperson was similarly dismissive: “The ABC is not sure how ASTRA can justify such claims of warehousing when there are many examples of rights sharing of programs between the ABC and the subscription channels” he said. But this controversy is not likely to go away and Burrowes may have reported on what is likely to be the opening salvo of a long running debate between the public broadcasters and the Pay TV industry for hearts, minds and control of the digital spectrum.

National broadcast wars: ABC refuses to provide footage to SBS

Last Monday’s Media Watch reported a stoush between its host station ABC and fellow national broadcaster SBS. Australia’s two public television networks are involved in an ugly squabble over the rights to footage for separate documentaries on John Howard’s time in government to be aired on either channel in the next 12 months. The footage required belongs to ABC who have reneged on an earlier deal to supply SBS in order to protect the ratings of its own product. Given that the taxpayer pays for both channels, the stoush is all the more ludicrous and counter-productive, and the fault is almost entirely that of the ABC.

The SBS project was conceived in 2006 when Sydney documentary filmmakers Nick Torrens and Frank Haines approached the broadcaster to make a make a three part series called “Liberal Rules” on the Liberal Party over the last 30 years. The documentary would be presented by Gary Sturgess, journalist, lawyer and a fellow documentary maker. They then attempted to secure funding and approached ABC in April 2007 to acquire archival material for their show.

Media Watch obtained the email correspondence which showed that ABC offered to provide 60 minutes of footage at a discount price of $160,000. While the generous offer was half of ABC’s normal going rate, Torrens and Haines had not fully secured their funding. They thanked the ABC for the offer and promised to get back to them. Fast forward one year to May 2008 and the SBS team had their funding in place and were ready to activate ABC’s offer. But something had changed in the interim. Haines’s email to order the material encountered only a deafening silence from ABC library sales.

Finally weeks later, they responded. And the response was brief and to the point: “After discussion with our News and Current Affairs division we have decided that we cannot supply footage for your production at this time.” A stunned Haines wrote to ABC Managing Director asking for an explanation on the change of heart. Scott responded sticking to the line that the ABC maintained it had not agreed to licence the footage. The ABC library manager followed up with another email with a softer line that suggested ABC would be prepared to licence the material on the condition that the use of the material “would commence on date not before January 2009”.

As David Tiley points out in his excellent and scathing article on the stoush, the production company had no power over that question, which is the province of the broadcaster. And SBS were unhappy with the embargo, planning to show the series later this year. Torrens and Haines followed up on this point with Media Watch stating reasonably that as the ABC archive is a publicly funded resource it had no justification for placing an embargo on the use of its material by independent documentary producers.

When Media Watch addressed their questions to Scott and the ABC board, they were referred to ABC’s head of national programs, Alan Sunderland. Sunderland began his response by talking about the ABC’s own documentary called The Howard Years which ABC was now scripting and editing. He said the ABC would require exclusive access to the archive and claims no agreement was reached in 2007 with the SBS team. It was his idea to put in place the embargo. He claimed the use of ABC footage by outside parties was always of “secondary importance” and said SBS had its own extensive archive. According to Sunderland, the ABC was under “no moral obligation” to make the material available.

Sunderland’s reply was incorrect on many counts. Firstly he did not accurately state the nature of SBS’s reply to ABC’s offer (though in fairness, Haines email was ambiguous and he should have explicitly agreed on the spot, pending finance). Secondly SBS’s archive is nowhere near as extensive as ABC’s (as Sunderland would well know as an ex-SBS employee) and the broadcaster itself did not exist prior to 1980. Thirdly, it makes no reference to the fact that SBS is also a public broadcaster, whose primary responsibility is also to make programs for the Australian public. Tiley called the response “arrogant horseshit” and said the ABC has a responsibility to make available the heritage of its program making, as part of the Australian cultural fabric.

The SBS filmmakers were equally unimpressed and are now scrambling to find the material they need from the commercial broadcasters (at probably much higher cost). They released a statement saying the ABC had no justification to place the embargo, and turn down commercial opportunity of archive recoupment in the process. “For us, this is a clear and salutary reminder of Australia’s new and commercially competitive public broadcasting environment,” said the filmmakers. “The implications for filmmakers, audiences and taxpayers of these decisions and events are dire and of great importance.”

ABC turns 75 today

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation celebrated its 75th birthday today by opening the doors of its Sydney studios to the public. Roads around the Ultimo studio were closed off to accommodate large crowds with concerts, talks and tours planned for the day. Many of ABC’s personalities, real and invented, will be on hand for this rare open day.

The ABC began as a series of radio stations in 1932. Australia was in the middle of the Great Depression with unemployment close to 30 per cent. Radio was a cheap entertainment for the masses. The medium itself started in Australia ten years earlier with ‘sealed set’ (pdf) radios tuned to only the frequency that consumers paid for. Unsurprisingly, this closed system proved unpopular and was quickly scrapped. In any case, it was quite easy to avoid the licence fee by building a set or modifying one to receive more than one station. A 1927 Royal Commission followed a similar enquiry in Britain (which led to the formation of the BBC in 1926) and recommended a national broadcasting service. In 1929 the Government nationalised the transmission facilities and contracted the provision of programming to the Australian Broadcasting Company a consortium of entertainment interests. This company was nationalised in 1932 by the Australian Broadcasting Commission Act. Although only a third of Australians owned radio sets, the new medium quick took off.

At 8pm on 1 July 1932, Prime Minister Joseph Lyons launched the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Lyons said the purpose of the ABC was to “provide information and entertainment, culture and gaiety ... to satisfy the diversified tastes of the public”. It began with 12 radio stations inherited from the semi-private Australian Broadcasting Company, who began transmission under the new banner. Sydney and Melbourne had two stations each and the others were at Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Newcastle, Corowa, Rockhampton and Crystal Brook (SA). The ABC was funded by radio listeners' licences (TV and radio licence fees were finally dropped in the 1970s).

The opening day programs included a children’s program, horseracing from Randwick in Sydney, British Wireless News received by cable from London, weather, stock exchange and shipping news, the ABC Women's Association session (topics were 'commonsense housekeeping' and needlecraft), a talk on goldfish care, morning devotions, and music.

Unlike goldfish, local news was not high on the new stations agenda. The press barons led by Keith Murdoch (Rupert’s father) had enormous power at the time. Murdoch’s Herald and Weekly Times also had significant commercial radio interests. Newspaper owners were initially wary about the impact of the new public medium especially fearful of its potential news coverage. Murdoch lobbied Lyons to stop the ABC from setting up an independent news service. Throughout the 1930s, the press maintained a stranglehold on local news while the ABC took a feed from the BBC.

However the ABC slowly began to grow its news expertise. It hired its first journalist in 1934 and its first federal news editor in 1936. When World War II started, strict censorship was imposed and even weather forecasts were stopped for several months. In 1940, the Department of Information, under the control of the ABC’s old foe Keith Murdoch took control of the nightly news. But listeners complained and the ABC regained control of the news after three months. The ABC bulletins had gained a reputation for authority and independence, and from 1942 onwards they were broadcast nationally. The ABC was now recognised as an essential part of the nation's infrastructure. By the end of the war, the ABC had a string of local correspondents in the Asia Pacific region. These included ABC journalist John Elliott who was killed in action in Borneo by friendly fire.

In 1947, the ABC's independent national news service was inaugurated. It was expanded further with the beginning of television in 1956. It is now the largest, most comprehensive, independent news gathering body in Australia with full-time staff correspondents around the world. The organisation has a reputation for accuracy although has often been accused of bias by governments of all persuasion. The current government have been particularly active in accusing the ABC of ‘left wing bias’. It has abolished staff board position while stacking the board with its own supporters such as Ron Brunton, Janet Albrechtsen and Keith Windshuttle.

The board’s chair is Mark Scott. Scott is a former Liberal Party staffer and was appointed chair in 2005 aged just 42 after resigning as editorial director at Fairfax. Scott denies he is a creature of the Howard government saying “I have a cordial, nodding relationship I suppose with the Prime Minister and the minister, but no more than that.”

Although not overtly rating conscious, he leads an organisation that remains healthy. ABC prime-time household share is 17.5 per cent (up from 16.3 per cent for the same period last year). Scott’s main task now is to meet the challenge of the coming digital age. He believes the ABC is already a player in this sector. "Nobody in Australia or even the world produces as much original podcasting content that is regularly updated as the ABC does," he said. "We have two million downloads every four weeks.

Bias in the ABC?

Bias is a cultural affliction and political bias is historically of two flavours, right and left. In Australia the national broadcast, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is at the forefront of the battle of cultural and political bias in Australia. On one side stands its accusers, generally of the political right, arguing that the ABC is guilty of news filtering, poor journalism and hostage to left-wing agendas. On the other side are its defenders on the left arguing for the independence, idealism and bias-free role of the ABC.

The discussion concludes with a brief look at what bias is in terms of television, how the government acts and how the ABC reacts.

The ABC was set up in 1932 as a cultural body but found its political feet through the creation of a news service on the young medium of radio. They presented the first independent challenge to the conservative press ‘as the most powerful shaper of public consciousness and consent in Australia’ (Petersen, 1993, p 259). Ever since then, the ABC has been a major political player, one which attracts passionate supporters and critics alike. The battle lines today are drawn between those on the right who see the ABC in thrall to the left and those on the left who believe the real issue is the right’s desire to seize control of the medium.


The 18th century author and politician Edmund Burke said ‘man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest'.Most Australian right-wing individuals and organizations are convinced that the ABC is not acting relative to their interests and need some sort of ‘correction’. This is despite the official stance of the Howard Government which commissioned the Mansfield Report. That report said  an independent ABC news should remain enshrined in its charter (1997, p9). Nonetheless Howard himself, quoted in an interview with Peter Cole-Adams in July 1996, bemoaned the fact that the ABC “doesn’t have a right-wing Phillip Adams” (Henderson 2005, online).

Greg Sheridan (foreign editor for The Australian) is typical of those who accuse the ABC of systemic bias towards the interests of the left. To him, it is nothing less than a full scale assault on Western-Capitalistic values:
“The ABC’s political culture has a pervasive left-liberal bias. Sometimes the bias is unconscious, the baby-boomer staff in thrall to the tired pseudo-radicalism they acquired as undergraduates decades ago. The central contention of this radicalism is that Western societies are corrupt and oppressive and Western power is to be opposed at every turn” (Sheridan 2005).

The pro-government neo-liberalist think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) is another vigorous critic of the ABC and its ‘pseudo radical’ news policy. The IPA's Michael Warby claims that ABC sets its own ‘virtuous’ agenda. He argues that the ‘marks of this virtue are its standpoints on republicanism, multiculturalism, pro-immigration, reconciliation, anti global warming and anti-economic rationalism” (Warby 2005)

Gerald Stone (ex-producer of 60 Minutes and SBS board member) argues from a slightly more subtle perspective. He said journalistic practices such as sarcasm in tone of voice or facial inflection are among the techniques that  impose a judgement at the ABC that is ‘large cocooned from the community’s values' (Stone 2005, online).

Defenders of ABC independence and impartiality are found within its supporter base as well as members of the Labor movement and Fairfax print media. Their argument revolves around the need for a strong, independent ABC in an age of concentrated media ownership and commercial dictates. They also state that there is no empirical proof of bias emerging from either the complaints tribunal or from viewer input.

Media academic Stuart Cunningham refutes the Warby ‘virtuous agenda’ argument by noting  “to even discuss some of the great international issues is to be unacceptably radical according to the Institute for Public Affairs” (Cunningham et al, 1994 p53).

Pru Goward (federal sex discrimination commissioner) pushes the idealistic line when she argues that ‘the ABC is a crucial vehicle for the dissemination of ideas and information that ultimately does affect the lives of all Australians (Goward online).

Errol Simper (The Australian and ex ABC journalist) attacks the motives of the right in their search for bias. He argues that their definition of “fair is an item they want to hear or see. If it’s something they don’t want aired then, by definition, it’s unfair (Simper online, 2005).

David Marr (Sydney Morning Herald journalist and ex-ABC Media Watch presenter) likens the search for bias within ABC to the ‘hunt for the Tassie Tiger’ (Marr 2005, online). Quentin Dempster, the ABC journalist are argues that looking for bias is fruitless: “The ABC Board says there is no systemic bias” (Dempster, 2005, online).

The Age columnist Ross Warneke argues that the right wants to eliminate bias against their side of politics, “the sort of bias that former communications minister Richard Alston railed against after the Iraq war but, generally, failed to prove” (Warneke 2005, online)

Walter Lippman once wrote that stereotypes were "the fortress of our traditions and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the positions we occupy." (Lippman, 1922, p64). Lippman was
writing about the press in 1922 but his argument holds well for television values.

On the on hand TV is a dumbed-down medium, the “drug of a nation” where humans amuse themselves to death (Postman 1985). Yet as Herman and Chomsky note, TV is also an immensely powerful communications tool in which a propaganda model of systematic lying snd deceptioncan be fed to mass populations (1988, p31-35).

Though the government cannot influence the make-up of journalists in the organisation, it influences power in other ways – primarily through the make-up of the board. Right-wing commentator, Janet Albrechtsen is the latest poacher turned gamekeeper appointed by the Howard Government in 2005 on a five year assignment. She will have a fight on her hands if she wants to effect real culture change – ABC staff have their own elected member of the board of directors so their power is strong for now (although Communications minister Helen Coonan is acting to abolish the position).

Ramona Koval commenced serving her second two-year term in January 2004 and she is a strong voice for continued independence despite having powerful enemies. The Murdoch Sydney Daily Telegraph accused her of working to have Stock Exchange chair Maurice Newman removed from the ABC board. Officially he quit the boarding due to leaks about Newspoll monitoring ABC coverage of pre-election bias. He accused Koval of undermining his position by authorizing the leaks and said that he could no longer work with her. (Daily Telegraph 17 June 2004).

The battle for control may just be commencing in earnest. In the meantime, the Charter sets the official course. Paul Chadwick makes no apology for using an idealistic stance to state that ABC has a role independent of “propaganda, entertainment and advertising” (1996 pp 39-40).

The only certainty ahead is that the ABC news direction will continue to oscillate in the middle of the tug-of-war of political stereotypes that define our traditions.


References

ABC web site, 2005, ABC Board as at February 2005

Chadwick, Paul, 1996, Why the ABC matters to journalism in Australia, no 66 23-35

Cunningham, Stuart, Rowe, David and Miller Toby, 1994 Contemporary Australian Television, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney
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