The ABC’s board and management have not made the sort of tough decisions media companies around the world have had to make.
Last week’s Five-Year Plan 2020-2025 reads like high-level jargon cooked up between the ABC marketing department and a commercial market research company to try to fool the federal government into believing real change is under way. It’s replete with motherhood statements about serving audiences but not strong on actual cuts.
A couple of headline decisions did manage to stir up the usual suspects, particularly the axing of the local ABC radio 7.45am bulletin. The board will be happy with the cover the adverse reaction gives it. But, as managing director David Anderson told News Breakfast hosts Lisa Millar and Michael Rowland on Thursday morning, radio listeners, especially those in regional Australia, will still get 10 minutes at 7am and five minutes at 8am.
An avid ABC radio listener, I generally catch the 7am bulletin on RN before the early version on AM. The 7.45am ABC local bulletin is largely the same with a couple of extra local and state news items. The cut will save little but the reaction will make it look like the board has made a tough call.
We do know management expects savings of $40m a year, 250 staff will be offered voluntary redundancy, ABC Life will be pared back and rebranded as ABC Local under a new editorial director, about 200 people from Sydney’s Ultimo ABC headquarters will be moved to the regions and the number of Foreign Correspondent and Australian Story programs aired will be cut.
Some of this is OK. ABC Life was introduced only in 2018 by the former failed managing director, Michelle Guthrie. It should have had no place under the national broadcaster’s charter and only served to anger commercial rivals struggling for revenue in the women’s and lifestyle magazines markets. Its launch was a dumb strategy politically that only made the ABC a bigger target.
The move back to the regions is right, especially at a time when regional newspapers are closing or moving to digital only. But cuts to news and current affairs revealed here on Thursday and Friday should be abandoned. Management would do better to axe several local comedies hosted by ageing hipsters.
What is needed is better news and current affairs and stronger editing. The board and management had already erred in the past decade by halving the World Today and PM, and axing Lateline. Foreign Correspondent has done an excellent job, especially in the Middle East and China. With Four Corners, it is one of the few ABC shows still breaking important stories, especially after the 7.30 program’s move to a magazine story format with less politics.
In my view, the national format for The 7.30 Report introduced more than 20 years ago was a mistake. It was better when former national host Kerry O’Brien was the Canberra leg of a state-based program that could focus on national and state issues. State news largely moved to Stateline on Friday nights in the late 1990s, but that program had few resources, did not rate and was axed in 2014.
Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher took the opportunity of the ABC’s plan to release the 2018 National Broadcasters Efficiency Review by former News Corp and Foxtel CEO Peter Tonagh and former Australian Communications and Media Authority regulator Richard Bean.
I know Tonagh well. He is just about the biggest brain I encountered in 24 years as a daily newspaper editor. It is important to remember here how large the ABC is. Although it has more than 4000 staff, full- and part-time, it buys in much content from local production companies and its best television by far — and the real reason many Australians still like it — is BBC drama.
The corporation runs four national free-to-air television networks (ABC 1, News 24, ABC Me and ABC Comedy) and four national radio networks (RN, NewsRadio, Classic FM and Triple J), nine metropolitan broadcast radio stations and 56 regional stations, six digital-only radio stations (Double J, ABC Jazz, ABC Country, ABC Grandstand, triple j Unearthed and ABC Extra). It also streams all its radio services and provides free iview television streaming. It runs a comprehensive online news service. It’s too big.
The Tonagh review in several places urges an increase in the corporation’s focus on its core business and jettisoning of non-core activities. It recommends reducing “terrestrial broadcast channels from four to two” so as “to allow greater focus on … high-quality Australian news, drama, children’s and indigenous programming on those two channels and online”.
The board should do this. There is no reason locally made drama, children’s television and Australian comedy cannot be accommodated within two networks. Only a decade ago a single channel ran all such programming. Staff have complained since former MD Mark Scott introduced the 24-hour news channel that it was a drain on resources. It is, and it is not very good at breaking news compared with SkyNews during the day.
Tonagh recommended more sharing of “support, back office and property services” with SBS. It suggested ABC and SBS “explore industry-wide opportunities for creating (or joining) a broadcast operations utility”. The newspaper industry is already sharing print plant facilities and pooling or outsourcing photographic services.
Tonagh correctly recommended modernising ABC work practices. This paper’s page one focus on Thursday on former economics correspondent Emma Alberici raises an issue: what has Alberici, a strong TV presenter, been doing since the controversy in 2018 over complaints by then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull about two of her stories? Where are former Four Corners host Sarah Ferguson and husband, former Q&A host Tony Jones? They are two of the ABC’s highest-paid journalists and were meant to be moving to China last year.
How do holidays and days off work for senior ABC presenters? Why is Fran Kelly’s RN Mornings hosted by Hamish McDonald on Fridays, giving Kelly a four-day week? Why do Four Corners, Media Watch and Insiders disappear for more than two months each year from late November to early February? How do so many hosts who enjoy that long break also get other school holidays off? None of this happens in commercial media, but in my 15 years running this newspaper we could never get an answer from ABC management.
So is the Coalition’s refusal to index ABC funding annually political? Of course it is, and of course in an era of collapsing private sector media business models the ABC is more important than ever. The real problem is not its cost, but its lack of impartiality. Strong news editors demanding higher standards would do more to protect the corporation than the flood of abuse by keyboard warriors on Twitter supporting the ABC. They only persuade the government that if the ABC is so loved by the left it must need to be reined in. As the National Party has said for decades, “the ABC is our enemy talking to our friends”.
BBC apologises to staff over Russell Brand sex complaints
Some employees had stayed silent about the behaviour of the comedian and actor because they believed he ‘would always get his way’, a BBC director said.
Questions about ABC platforming ‘radical fringe Jewish voice’
Jewish groups have questioned why the national broadcaster has chosen to platform and ‘mainstream’ a Jewish ‘radical fringe voice’, in its coverage of anti-Semitic events in Sydney.