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If the Albanese government was a business, the receivers would have been called in long ago. Most likely, the entire board would be facing charges.
And, if their most fanatical legacy media cheerleaders, the taxpayer-funded Marxist propaganda unit ABC, were a commercial broadcaster, they’d have collapsed in ignominy faster than Quibi. Who, you ask? Exactly. Despite raising $1.75 billion, the streaming platform shut down after just six months in business.
Unfortunately for Quibi, they couldn’t rely on a no-strings-attached billion-plus in funding, every year, courtesy of the Australian taxpayer. What, exactly, do we get in return for having our pockets so thoroughly rifled by the Ultimo luvvies? The ABC likes to brag that it is ‘Australia’s most trusted news source’ – but, trusted by whom, exactly? Because hardly any Australians actually watch or listen to the ABC.
ABC Radio stations in Sydney and Melbourne have suffered a dramatic collapse in their listenerships, with the national broadcaster recording one of its worst ever ratings results in the key metropolitan markets in the latest audience survey.
ABC Radio lost market share in every single timeslot in the nation’s two biggest markets, with the breakfast and morning shows the most notable failures in both capitals, according to the latest ratings survey conducted by research company GfK.
But never underestimate the taxpayer-funded lobster pot that is the ABC. Like the public servants they are, no matter how badly these people perform, they are never, ever sent back to the dole queue where they belong. Take, for instance, just one of the Chaser ageing manlets. These guys have almost never worked in a private company in their lives, probably because the private sector expects results.
In Sydney, ABC’s breakfast program, fronted by Craig Reucassel, commanded just 5.9 per cent of the city’s overall breakfast radio audience, down 1.2 percentage points on his audience share in the previous ratings poll.
Then there’s the likes of Hamish Macdonald, who, fresh from presiding over the last, embarrassing gasps of the unlamented QandA, has gone on to fail even more miserably on radio.
Reucassel’s colleague, ABC morning show host Hamish Macdonald, fared even worse, registering an audience share of just 3.9 per cent (down from 5.5 per cent).
Macdonald has now fallen to ninth position in the mornings timeslot, with a lower market share than ABC Classic (4.3 per cent).
Macdonald was appointed to the role in January last year, after previous host Sarah Macdonald (no relation to Hamish) was dumped as part of a wider shake-up at the station championed by ABC chair Kim Williams.
See? ABC failures can be sacked… only all too rarely. The rest of the time, they just bob around in the taxpayer-funded punchbowl.
The list of ABC radio failures just keeps growing faster than the ABC’s ever-spiralling budget.
In Melbourne, the new breakfast pairing of Bob Murphy and Richelle Hunt (who replaced Sharnelle Vella when she took maternity leave in early March) failed to fire, dropping from 6.6 per cent market share in the March survey to just five per cent in this poll.
ABC Melbourne morning show host Rafael Epstein slipped from 6.4 to a 4.3 per cent slice of the audience […]
ABC Brisbane failed to finish in the top-five most-listened-to outlets in any timeslot apart from evenings, and though Radio National and ABC Newsradio both increased their share of the action they also both remained south of two per cent.
Oh, for a One Nation government: the party’s clearly stated policy is to abolish funding to the ABC, with the sole exception of its rural radio service, which would immediately slash more than two-thirds of the burden on the taxpayer.
Make its TV and capital city radio stations a subscriber-only service and we’ll see just how much Australians really ‘value’ the ABC. Something tells me the tiny cabal of inner-city Boomers who make up the ‘Friends of the ABC’ will struggle to keep the Ultimo luvvies in the lifestyle to which they assume they’re entitled.
