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June 2, 2003
Judging by all the kerfuffle of late, the ABC as a public broadcaster is a big political concern for the Howard Government. It has been subject to a number of attacks over the years ranging from it being run by left wing staff, to political bias, to suggestions about the need to get rid of (privatising) the public broadcaster.
You get the distinct impression that the notion of government ownership of media (public broadcasting) went out with the passing of Pravda and the fall of the Soviet Union. A national broadcaster is no longer needed says Ross Cameron, a Liberal MP for Parramatta in Sydney's west.
Robert Manne gives a postcard history of the recent conservative attacks on the ABC as a public broadcaster here. An interpretation of this history would suggest that it is part of a broad-based political attack on public ownership, government control and public broadcasting. The new market discourse can be construed as liberating journalists from the shackles of government funding, government control and the trade unions. The aim of fighting the cultural war is to undermine the idea of the public in the realm of public policy.
Tim Blair disappoints on this. Its just a question of plagarism he quips. More is involved than this. And Tim knows it.
In his latest intervention Senator Alston, the Minister for Communications, defends this political campaign here by saying that "the right of any individual to publicly criticise a taxpayer-funded institution is surely a fundamental tenet of a democracy."
That is not the issue at all. Of course Senator Alston has a right to criticize. Just like any citizen in liberal democracy. The current core issue is the left-of-centre bias of the current affairs programs, such as AM. The Minister misleads here. He says:
"But under the ABC Act and its own statutory editorial charter, the ABC is required to report accurately and impartially. This surely requires any analysis to be based on the evidence, and should not be a licence to inject personal opinions unsupported by evidence."
"Inject personal opinions unsupported by evidence" is not the issue here. It is the left-liberal cultural bias through which particular political events are intepreted that is the core of the Howard Government's complaint. Michelle Grattan has a good contextual criticism of the Senator Alston's own example of bias.
Now Senator Alston knows that the core issue is one of political bias all too well. He actually quotes the following account of the mechanisms of the deployment of bias in the ABC from a former senior ABC insider. This says:
"....the constant and ongoing use of value-laden language and loaded questions to shape perceptions. Bias also appears in those stories that are chosen for broadcast and those that are not; the people who are chosen for interview and those who are not; the facts that are highlighted and those that are downplayed or ignored, and the analysis that crosses over into commentary."
It has nothing to do with injecting personal opinions unsupported by evidence at all. Its a red herring. Its cultural politics not personal opinions that is at issue here.
And so far the Minister is only saying that the Howard Government does not like the ABC's cultural politics. So what? That has been known for a long time. Its been a fact of political life in Australia for decades. The question at issue is: what is wrong with the ABC having this left-liberal bias in current affairs?
It cannot be the stories that are chosen for broadcast and those that are not; nor the people who are chosen for interview and those who are not; or even the the facts that are highlighted and those that are downplayed or ignored. Thats how the modern media works. It selects what it considers makes for a good story. Politicians have no control over that even when it works against them.
Nope. It has to do with 'the analysis that crosses over into commentary'. The Howard Government can accept analysis but it does not like the commentary. Judging by the Alston dossier it sees the commentary in the choice of words and the tone of the voice of the journalist.
Why the dislike of commentary on AM when the commercial media has oodles of commentary? Why cannot the ABC give commentary when the commercials can?
To his credit Senator Alston addresses this:
"News and current affairs has rightly always been a high priority for the ABC. But as a great national cultural institution, it should aspire to be the quality alternative to the commercials – an electronic journal of record, not a fierce tabloid-style competitor – and unafraid of scrutiny by the public, politicians and parliament."
Record is the key word. It denies commentary. So the ABC should not engage in commentary. Alston has a particular model of journalism the quality record model which is then counterposed to the tabloid style. It is a model that denies interpretation, political bias (anti-Americanism) and a questioning of the spin of the Howard government and the US military machine. This he says is the model the ABC should be following and be made accountable for.
What does it mean? Here's a stab. The ABC should state that events xyz happened and not interpret them. It should not engage with the intepretation of xyz in the texts (media releases, interviews etc) of the Howard government or the US military in order to help Australian citizens understand the significance of xyz.
Let's repeat that. The ABC should not engage with the Howard Government's commentary on xyz. It should simply record what the commentary is. No comment on the comment.
Why not? Because, the Minister says, "under the ABC Act and its own statutory editorial charter, the ABC is required to report accurately and impartially." Reporting accurately and impartially means no interpetration of the facts; no commentary on events; and no comment on the commentary (interpretation) of the Howard Government of the US military. What is out of bounds is a critique of public reason of the Howard Government outlining its reasons for going to war with Iraq. AM, in short, is an in-depth analysis of the news (reporting the facts) and not a commentary on the news.
Its a strange model of journalism isn't it. The ABC cannot comment on a federal election election campaign that was centred around a fiction about asylum seeker's children being thrown overboard. And the ABC cannot comment on the reason why the Howard Government took Australia to war--- that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It cannot comment even though none of these weapons have been found up to now, and one of its senior Minsters, Defence Minister Robert Hill, concedes that the intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons capability may have been flawed.
If the ABC current affairs presenters cannot comment, then what should the ABC do about the commentary provided by the Howard Government? Answer. The AM report should take the coalition's commentary at face value. That is what Senator Alston means by the ABC reporting accurately and impartially. The ABC's AM program should trust the Government and not be sceptical that its comments and interpretation re the reasons for going to war are not based on evidence. Those supicions that the Howard Government engaged in disinformation campaign to designed to encourage support for a war through the national security state playing up the fear angle to keep the population supporting the Coalition should be forgotten.
Nowhere does the Minister link this model of journalism to democracy, even though he talks about the right to criticize the media in a democracy. There is a marked silence in the Minister's text about the connection between public broadcasting, deliberative democracy and educating citizens about current events. Odd isn't it. I wonder what sort of liberal democracy the Minister has in mind?
The oddness is understandable. Mentioning terms such as deliberative democracy and educating citizens would give weight to the 'public' in public broadcasting. And we cannot have that can we? It would lead to the ABC scrutinizing the Howard Government's claims about Iraq's WMDs, the links to al-Qaeda, and the fact these claims by politicians were probably contrary to the advice from the Government's own intelligence community.That would undermine the legitimacy of the Howard Government's attempts to achieve political unity.
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There is no pint lumping all "right of centre" criticism of the ABC as being similar or homogeneous. The real problem as I see it is the link between providing news as record and providing commentary on the news.
The major issue with the ABC is that it provides commentary as news or as record. That is where the accusations of bias stick most.
If it attempted to provide inbiased news coverage as "record" and then clearly identified the commentary as being simply that - a commentator's opinion - then the accusations of bias in its news coverage would be capable of being shot down.
The issue this sort of division would then give rise to is the more vexed question of what commentary should the ABC carry. Curently such commentary by any objective standard is heavily weighted to the left of the political spectrum. As a public broadcaster it is funded by all Australians and the argument stands that it should reflect the plurality of views across Australia - possibly including obnoxious views of the extremes on all sides of the fence.
Your question as to what is wrong with the ABC being left-biased is then clearly answered - if it is funded by all it should reflect the broadest range of views, not an urban-left agenda.
We can leave the question of private versus public ownership to another day because as you point out this is not on the government's radar screen.
But on your key points: there is nothing wrong with the ABC providing commentary as long as it clearly distinguishes commentary from objective news (and before I am shot down I am not suggesting the commercial media have any better handle on this); objective news should, by its nature, stand up to scrutiny at any time; and, as for the nature of commentary unless it reflects the broad views of its funding source, the Australian people, it should be something that stops being a drain on the public purse and becomes reliant on the subscription, advertising or other patronage of those who welcome it. Let the commentary stand on its own two feet!
Fire away!