Asking if Australia’s taxpayer-funded media is biased is a bit like asking if water is wet. Everyone knows it is, but anyone who says so out loud is immediately hit with a barrage of “Define wet!” type challenges and assertions that, in someone’s distant memory, it was a bit dry, once, so there – and besides, everybody knows that the ABC’s wet water is necessary to counterbalance the wicked dry water of Evil Rupert Murdoch.
Besides, the ABC has proven that it’s not biased, again and again: mostly by ABC types asking each other, “Are we biased?” and immediately reassuring themselves that, of course they’re not. If one of them makes the terrible faux pas of suggesting otherwise, they’re immediately sent to Coventry – which is as far away from Ultimo as possible. Almost as far away as deepest, darkest Bankstown.
The ABC is a member of the Right-to-Know Coalition. But it’s oh-so-secretive when it comes to its own documents.
The ABC fought tooth and nail to stop Australian taxpayers from knowing how heavily they funded the lavish lifestyles of ABC luvvies. They also don’t want the great unwashed to know about findings of bias at the ABC.
Last night, the persistence of Senator McGrath (Liberal National Party, Queensland) forced the release of the ABC Editorial Review: Impartiality of the Federal Election 2019 by former BBC journalist and current Victorian public servant Kerry Blackburn. The document was released by Senator Scott Ryan, President of the Senate. ABC chair Ita Buttrose wrote to Senator Ryan on 10 December 2020 expressing the ABC’s “strong objection against its production on public interest grounds”. You would think that the Blackburn Report was akin to a top-secret national security document.
After each election, the ABC contracts out research as to the impartiality of its coverage. This is not a good test of political balance within the public broadcaster since – at election time – ABC managers take considerable care to see that political leaders and political parties get equal coverage in accordance with their estimated support base.
Yet, even the gentlest of probes by the friendliest of questioners, at the most opportune period for the ABC to parade its impartiality, found – goodness, gracious – bias!
As would be expected, Ms Blackburn found that ABC news and current affairs accurately reported Australian national politics during the 2019 election campaign. Not so such influential panel shows as ABC TV’s The Drum (6pm Mondays to Fridays) and ABC TV’s Insiders (9am Sundays).
Kerry Blackburn conducted an in-depth analysis of two episodes of The Drum (6 May & 8 May) and two episodes of Insiders (14 April & 12 May). In each episode, 45 to 53 per cent of comments were pro-Labor or anti-Coalition and only 13 to 18 per cent of comments were pro-Coalition or anti-Labor, with the rest neutral[…]
Ms Blackburn concludes that:
It [the news environment] doesn’t explain the almost total absence of positivity for the Coalition. They might have been behind in the polls, but the gap wasn’t so huge to render them irrelevant.
But the election was a foregone conclusion: just ask the ABC.
The reviewer noted two presenter slips which referred to Bill Shorten as the Prime Minister, with only one picked up and corrected. Many news stories on the ABC, and elsewhere, started from an assumption that Labor would shortly be in government; there was no other explanation for some of the angles taken.
To the ABC’s evident horror, Blackburn recommends that they start actually letting conservatives have a say, now and then.
One solution would have been to have secured more conservative-leaning political commentators as panellists. Those conservative voices could have articulated, with conviction, that there was a Coalition path to victory. Theirs would still have been a professional judgment, drawing on evidence, albeit they might have a particular starting point. Audiences are generally sophisticated enough if they are given adequate information, to make up their own minds about what weight to place on a contribution.
The very idea of allowing monstrous, blood-dripping, slavering conservatives anywhere near “their” hallowed halls of Ultimo has some ABC luvvies’ knickers in a right old twist.
Insiders host Barrie Cassidy declared that the very notion of seeking a balanced range of opinions is “dangerous”. Trying to implement a “quota system” of political perspectives is a mistake, he says.
Which is odd, considering the ABC has quotas for everything else imaginable, from race to gender to sexual predilection.
Apparently it’s ok to have quotas for everything except ideas.
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