Des Houghton: ABC has fallen out of favour with everyday Australians
Animosity towards the ABC is running high. It’s fallen out of favour with everyday Australians, and it may be facing extinction. writes Des Houghton.
Opinion
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For decades I have defended the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. No more.
Today it reminds me of a wounded elephant, crashing from one crisis to another, and making the news instead of reporting it.
Is it any wonder the ABC has become increasingly irrelevant with steep declines in audiences across its radio, TV, and digital platforms?
An investigation by The Courier-Mail found the national broadcaster lost one million viewers or listeners in a year. It also found the ABC costs each Australian household more than the price of a Netflix subscription.
And four out of 10 Australians never watch, listen or read anything the broadcaster does. Occasionally there is a well-constructed drama series, but they are no match for the offerings on Foxtel, Netflix, or Amazon Prime – or SBS for that matter. I doubt if the ABC can win back its audience. In the UK, Netflix recently overtook BBC One to become the most-watched TV service. Meanwhile the coverage of sport on the ABC has declined abysmally. Australians are drifting to pay TV to watch everything from NRL to tennis and motor racing.
In news, arts and lifestyle programs I think the ABC is seen as a propaganda vehicle for the green-left, the teals, assorted feminist, gay, gender and transgender cults and unions. It regularly breaches its charter, although it doesn’t seem to give two hoots about the complaints.
An activist who invited me to speak at a rally wrote to say it was too late to save the ABC.
“It has become a bloated, rotting corpse that should be dragged out to sea and sunk,” he wrote.
Phew. Animosity towards Aunty is running high.
Many see the ABC as a place where conservatives and people of faith are routinely ridiculed or ignored. ABC news is anti-coal, anti-gas, anti-mining, anti-Catholic, anti-beef, anti-Dutton, anti-LNP and it seems to take pleasure in tearing strips off the nation’s great wealth creators like Gina Rinehart and Rupert Murdoch.
Aunty has fallen out of favour with everyday Australians, and it may be facing extinction. This thought would have worried me once, but it doesn’t anymore. It is reassuring to me that Sky News (where I am a contributor) protects the public’s right to know by presenting quality, fearless journalism that informs debate. Sky also offers a greater diversity of opinion, much of it I agree with, and some I don’t.
Along the bumpy road of journalism the ABC is starting to look like a niche provider. The ABC hasn’t yet woken up to the fact there is an international backlash against woke.
The ABC was allocated $1.138bn in the May 2023 federal budget for the 2023–24 year, and its expenses were $1.239 billion for the financial year, up $35 million on the previous financial year. We now live in a user-pays world, so why should those of us who don’t use the ABC have to pay for it? How about a paywall?
Perhaps it should be merged with SBS and made to accept advertising.
Every now and again groups angry with ABC spin present petitions to parliament. A recent one suggests it be defunded or sold off. “No matter what you tune in to from the ABC it is always the same propaganda stemming from Marxist ideologies that fill the air waves,” it said.
And another: “I am sick to death of the biased ABC and its taxpayer- funded media outlets blasting their one-way, single-minded woke garbage on the general public.”
The social scientists attribute the audience decline at the ABC to a softer news cycle, algorithmic changes on social media, and a decline in trust for the ABC.
I think there are other reasons. The incessant acknowledgments to country have become infuriating. And I think listeners and viewers simply don’t like the sound of the voices. The warm and caring tones exemplified by Caroline Jones have been replaced with snarls from activists. Perhaps Geraldine Doogue, Leigh Sales and Lisa Millar are the exceptions. Doogue, especially, remains my link to more pleasant radio days, but she exists now as a weekend bit player. I am enjoying Muster Dogs although there’s a little too much gushing from Millar.
And where did all the blokes go? Who has stepped up to replace Mark Colvin, Richard Carleton, Bill Peach, Ray Martin and Kerry O’Brien?
Michael Rowland? No. Jeremy Fernandez.? No. Joe O’Brien? No.
Nick Bryant is an impressive new voice on Radio National on Saturdays, but he is a former BBC foreign correspondent with little connection to Australia. His appointment begs the question: Were no Australians good enough?
The ABC in Brisbane seems harmless enough although I can’t remember when the newsroom broke an exclusive story.
The ABC now finds itself in more serious imbroglios that continue to damage the brand. Freelance journalist Antoinette Lattouf’s case against the ABC for unfair dismissal is bubbling away in the Federal Court.
Lattouf’s legal team alleges the ABC bowed to the pressure of a co-ordinated WhatsApp campaign from a group of Jewish lawyers to force her off the air because of her stance on the Israel-Gaza war.
The controversy around former commando officer Heston Russell burns bright. He is
demanding Communications Minister Michelle Rowland hold the ABC to account for a serious “editing error” where extra gunshots were added to a news report. Russell has requested meetings with Rowland and Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh as he seeks an unconditional apology from the ABC acknowledging he did not shoot at unarmed civilians from a helicopter in Afghanistan. And he has been critical of an inquiry conducted by the broadcaster’s former editorial policy director, Alan Sunderland.
Sunderland found that extra shots had been “inadvertently” added to footage but that there was “no evidence of any intent to mislead”.
Sunderland blamed ABC lawyers for failing to pass on to the editorial team complaints from Russell about the misleading edits.
Last year, the Seven Network’s Spotlight program revealed the segment had been edited to make it appear as if Australian Defence Force personnel had fired six shots instead of just one warning shot.
Russell and his platoon were not named in the Line of Fire stories, but the veteran says he was clearly the target. The ABC said the journalists Jo Puccini, Mark Willacy and Josh Robertson “had no role in the production and editing of the online video”. In 2023, Russell successfully sued the ABC in the Federal Court for defamation and was awarded $390,000 in damages plus legal costs over separate stories that included allegations regarding the death of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2012.
The Australian Monarchist League, meanwhile, is still seeking an apology after condemning the ABC for “hijacking” coverage of the coronation of King Charles III.
Originally published as Des Houghton: ABC has fallen out of favour with everyday Australians
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