David Anderson was the least polarising managing director in ABC history. Perhaps that was the problem.
He is highly intelligent, loyal, well-liked and a team player, but he was a safe pair of hands at a time when what the ABC really needed was a leader who would not cop any moves to bastardise the key tenet of the public broadcaster’s highly cherished charter: that is, to ensure that the gathering and presentation of news and information is impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism.
“David was inoffensive but ineffective,” one ABC insider said on Thursday.
Anderson’s main failing, according to some senior figures who have worked closely with him over the past five years, is that he wasn’t able to adequately stamp his editor-in-chief’s authority upon certain programs – and certain journalists – that referenced the charter as an afterthought.
For all his faults, ABC chair Kim Williams calls a spade a spade, albeit with an eloquent turn of phrase.
And the blunt edict he issued in the days after assuming the chairmanship in March was something that Anderson himself should have yelled across the organisation’s newsrooms a long time ago.
“If you don’t want to reflect a view that aspires to impartiality don’t work at the ABC,” Williams said in an episode of the Fourth Estate podcast with host Monica Attard.
“I really think this is a very serious issue. This is a publicly funded organisation, it is a publicly accountable organisation, it is a respondent to legislation to the national parliament and it must always aspire to be as fair-minded in its work as it possibly can be.”
Anderson tried to convey that same ideal, but for whatever reason, a chunk of the ABC’s journalists wouldn’t listen. In an email to the ABC’s Parliament House bureau on Thursday, 7.30’s chief political correspondent Laura Tingle, who is also the national broadcaster’s staff-elected board member, expressed her gratitude to Anderson for bringing stability to the ABC after his appointment.
Tingle acknowledged “the immense toll that must have taken on someone who has often had to act as a human shield, or punching bag, for the national broadcaster”.
Kind words, but cold comfort for Anderson. The punches would have been easier to take if more ABC journalists had been in his corner.
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