Jonathan’s Year of Living Greenishly

As did many of us, ABC ratings nanoparticle Jonathan Green began 2024 full of hope.

Jonathan considers his quality to be greater than his quantity

In fact, so desperate for hope was fake news expert Jonathan that he ended up hoping for hope:

Can we hope perhaps for a happier new year? A year that delivers some measure of social and environmental justice … and maybe just a grain or two of hope.

— Jonathan Green (@GreenJ) December 31, 2023

Sadly for old Jonno, hope appears not to have arrived. Worse still, its absence has caused an agonising resurgence of Green’s unfortunate literary condition. It may be the apex of self-indulgence for an ABC staffer to churn out nearly 3500 words about the ABC:

It turns out that media might have been the wrong thing to call it. Maybe it was the message all along. It’s been almost 30 years since the second generation of the internet enabled a subtle shift that would transform global interaction: on social media we could talk to numberless strangers while remaining a stranger ourselves. If interpersonal familiarity had been the critical medium that enabled previous human discourse, social media made it possible for messages to make their way between individuals unencumbered by the necessity of introduction.

Get to the point, man. This is like a fox hunt without any foxes.

As networks were refined and multiplied, our awareness of the technology, algorithms and heavily invested corporate and political interests that increasingly swept messages unbidden to our attention diminished.

Excuse me. Just taking a quick break here. Please continue, Jonathan:

The social internet had that potential for a moment – all of culture and knowledge available to a suddenly connected, if unsuspecting, global community – but power and money combined to turn the digital world against us; or maybe it simply enabled our worst instincts.

Green and his kind adored social media its earlier forms – when it was a leftist playground in which approved “culture and knowledge” were shielded from reality. Good times.

The outcome is a world of media and information in which broad community has been sacrificed for isolated silos of determinedly held and self-defining opinion.

It’s always cute when rich lefty posers feign affection for the “broad community”. When Green watches AFL and cricket, he does so from the Melbourne Cricket Club’s members’ stand.

Media businesses are either stumbling forward in a state of constant and probably terminal threat, or finding ways to monetise, and thus facilitate, social and political disintegration. Result: a world of angry hostility in which truth has become negotiable.

Speaking of angry hostility and negotiable truth, here’s another reminder that Jonathan Green published the Alene Composta hoax. He now gets down to the serious business of defending the organisation that takes money from average wage earners and gives it to wealthy Jonathan:

In this country, as in a handful of others, we’ve had a row of sandbags set against the worst of it, a little bulwark of sense and seriousness: a government-funded national broadcaster. Thank heavens for the ABC.

Here we go. Brace yourself for an ABC staffer’s standard Adams-quality nostalgia fit followed by a history of the ABC that is even more boring than listening to the ABC:

My first media memory is of the theme to the ABC radio drama Blue Hills playing from the hulking walnut-veneered radiogram in my grandmother’s Adelaide living room.

The next sound heard by toddler Jonathan was the smashing of that walnut-veneered radiogram by a sledgehammer-wielding grandmother briefly capable of superhuman power due to her hatred of Blue Hills.

Oh, wait. That was my grandmother. God bless her.

There are motes hovering in the golden, low, light of dusk, the house just opened to catch the first breaths of a summer evening’s sea breeze.

We had some hovering motes one year. Needed a whole sack of 1080 to clear them out. Some 1600 words of ABC historical review later, Green finally arrives somewhere near the present:

ABC audiences are fragile …

Fact check: true. Also acceptable: weak, lame, pansyish, woke, scared, delicate and precious.

The ABC is obliged to produce content that is niche, regionally or culturally specific, sometimes esoteric, but is subjected to ongoing political and culture war pressure to justify its annual allocation of around $1 billion by creating robust audiences.

It’s a catch 22. If the ABC was a ratings behemoth those same critics would decry its subsidised advantage ...

Would we? I guess we’ll never know.

In the thick of all of this, the ABC would do well to return to the document produced when its legislative framework was revised in 1983, half a century on from its founding: the ABC Charter …

Key phrases here include “a sense of national identity”, “inform and entertain”, “reflect the cultural diversity” and “a balance between broadcasting programs of wide appeal and specialized broadcasting programs”. It’s an important document to read and to consider against what the contemporary ABC provides …

The contemporary ABC provides “a sense of national identity” via the divisive strategy of using Anglicised Aboriginal approximations as names for capital cities. The ABC “informs and entertains” by badgering, insulting and misleading. The ABC’s concept of cultural diversity ends where even moderate conservatism begins. And the ABC’s balance between “programs of wide appeal and specialized broadcasting programs” is severely compromised due to the ABC not having any “programs of wide appeal” at all.

Green also believes that the ABC Charter is …

… a ready rebuttal to the constant suggestion that the ABC is required by legislation to observe that coded idea of “political balance”, a euphemism deployed by those without the gumption to say out loud that they the resent the ABC for its failure to become a political entity shaped in the image of their own prejudices.

Not sure about anyone else, but I don’t feel it’s a test of courage to make that claim out loud. It’s just that it isn’t true. We resent the ABC using our money on a leftist campaign to undermine Australia. It’s always been that simple.

Prominent senior hirings within the content area suggest an eagerness to chase audience using the expertise of managers with commercial sector experience. Content, for example, is run by a man from Netflix. Radio has key managers who hail from Nova and Triple M. Maybe the numbers will follow, hopefully with a parallel commitment to the ideas and ethos of public-service broadcasting.

Many ex-commercial types are attracted to the ABC because it offers the same money (or more) but without the pressure of achievement. Low ratings? Not a problem.

Audience share will continue to be an elusive goal in a digital world in which ABC content has been winkled from the security of broadcast to the infinite scatter of atoms that jostle for attention on the third-party platforms of the media internet.

Or, as someone with an internal editor would have written: “Audience share will continue to be an elusive goal.”

How many shows fill the home screen of iview? How do you promote your offering to an audience that is not gathered in any particular place to hear your message? What kind of audience can be gained through search optimisation and building brand presence on platforms such as TikTok? All live questions.

Another is whether the ABC can find a way to be judged not just for the quantity of its audiences but for its charter roles of enhancing the culture and defining national identity.

Fetch grandma’s sledgehammer, children. The ABC demands some demolition.

As ABC director, Mark Scott used to talk about the ABC filling a role as a national “town square”. Perhaps in keeping with the slightly more foreboding nature of our menacing present, new corporation chair Kim Williams has been quick to offer the idea that the ABC is “the national campfire”.

I’d pay good money to see Kim Williams get a campfire going.

The sad reality of our moment is that many in media seek commercial advantage and the accretion of power by bringing uncertainty to their audience and promoting them to define themselves as hostile tribes.

The ABC is the counter to that model, a respectful town square in an atomised culture of closed doors and apprehensive conversation; a campfire that offers warmth, light and welcome.

It’s not a campfire. It’s a lithium-ion thermal runaway event, and it’s generating a Green-level cloud of leftist toxins. Subtract our taxes now. Let the ABC burn itself out.

(Via reader Jay)