Andrew Bolt: Ita Buttrose should resign as Chairman from the ABC

The ABC shamelessly breaks the law, misuses public money and does hit-jobs on its enemies - now it’s time for its leader Ita Buttrose to resign.

The ABC is acting like a bunch of gangsters. It shamelessly breaks the law, misuses public money and does hit-jobs on its enemies.

Chairman Ita Buttrose should resign.

And the rest of the ABC’s board should also go for not doing their legal duty to stop the national broadcaster’s wicked bias.

How can the ABC let loose a reporter, Louise Milligan for instance, to cause such devastation – even praising her last week as one of our “foremost” journalists?

It was Milligan who painted the innocent Cardinal George Pell as a paedophile, on the ABC and in her book Cardinal.

Many ABC journalists joined this hysterical witch hunt, which eventually had Pell spend 404 days in jail. None defended him.

Yet all the claims pushed by Milligan eventually crumbled in court. The High Court made clear, seven judges to nil, Pell could not actually have committed the worst child-sex crimes Milligan described.

The ABC should have learnt a lesson about its bias, malice, groupthink and injustice.

Ita Buttrose should resign from the ABC. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

Instead, it allowed Milligan to destroy another conservative, Christian Porter, the then federal Attorney-General. She published claims by a mentally disturbed woman, who’s since killed herself, that Porter raped her more than 30 years ago when she was 16 and he 17.

Again, Milligan’s reporting was ferociously one-sided. She initially failed to mention details the woman gave that were false, bizarre or highly improbable. Nor did she reveal the woman’s own parents had concerns about the truthfulness of her claims.

Porter sued, and the ABC last week admitted these rape claims could not be proved even by the low standards of a civil case – the mere balance of probability.

But when the ABC settled with Porter and paid some of his legal costs, Milligan and her Four Corners executive producer, Sally Neighbour, still posted tweets suggesting they had won.

That so embarrassed managing director David Anderson that he reportedly apologised to Porter for the actions of staff he said he’d tried his best to control.

Yet now Milligan has produced yet another smear of a conservative – this time the Prime Minister.

Milligan, again backed by Neighbour, thought it a huge story that Scott Morrison’s wife has a close friend whose husband has nutty conspiratorial beliefs.

Seriously? The far-Left Crikey website pushed this guilt-by-association non-story for 18 months without a bite from the mainstream media. And no wonder.

At least this time the ABC – suddenly scared of pushing even the wimpish Morrison government too far – told Milligan and Neighbour to delay their story until they get a comment from Morrison. This news was promptly leaked to Milligan-friendly journalists.

There are examples of ABC journalist Louise Milligan’s reporting being ferociously one-sided.

So who exactly is in charge at the ABC?

Under the law, it should be the ABC board. The ABC Act is clear: “It is the duty of the Board … to ensure that the gathering and presentation by the corporation of news and information is accurate and impartial.”

But as Milligan shows, the reality is that ABC staff run the asylum. A cabal has turned the supposedly impartial national broadcaster we must all pay for into a soapbox for the vindictive Left. The ABC misuses some of our $1 billion a year of public funding to push a political line that is uniformly Leftist: global warming is catastrophic, Australia is racist, Donald Trump is a monster, conservatives are bad and Bruce Pascoe really is Aboriginal.

That’s why Labor and the Greens campaign to “defend” the ABC. They know it’s their ally.

And they’re right. Every host of the ABC’s main political programs is of the Left. Panels on ABC political talk shows such as Insiders, Q&A and The Drum usually have no conservatives or just a token one, and Liberals who do still go on Q&A are regularly jeered, heckled or interrupted. Meanwhile, the ABC smears its critics. It made columnist Chris Kenny of The Australian seem to be having sex with a dog. It called a conservative political candidate a “c…”. It bans speakers of the libertarian Institute of Public Affairs from The Drum.

Buttrose, as ABC chairman, must – by law – oppose this bias. Instead, she has encouraged it.

Asked if the ABC should include more conservative presenters, she smirked: “I certainly hadn’t thought Andrew Bolt would be a great fit for the ABC.”

This year she claimed public broadcasters like the ABC were needed to stop “Right-wing extremism”. No mention of Left-wing extremism.

To repeat: The ABC’s hijacking by the Left is against the law. The ABC’s smearing of conservatives is wicked. Its choking of public debate is undemocratic. Ita Buttrose must go.