The ABC is destroying itself before our very eyes. In two hours of broadcasting on Monday night the public broadcaster surrendered any pretence of objectivity, intellectual integrity, honesty or high-minded journalism.
In the Four Corners program the ABC turned itself into a broadcasting version of New Idea. Louise Milligan, the same journalist who errantly pursued and vilified Cardinal George Pell before, during and after his wrongful conviction on child sex charges, turned her attention to the private sex lives of two Coalition ministers.
Nothing was alleged except adult consensual relationships, yet this was not only presented as something newsworthy but warranting scandalisation across what was once the ABC’s premier current affairs program. The only pretext for this story having any relevance at all was the fact the alleged relationships might have contravened the subsequent so-called bonk ban that was introduced in a fit of pique by Malcolm Turnbull when he was prime minister — and cost him his deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce.
Four Corners essentially allowed itself to be the vehicle for another Turnbull revenge attack on his own party. It was tacky, transparent, and tedious. You do not have to endorse the behaviour of these politicians to also hold that it is none of our business.
Notably absent from this trashy television was any reference to the many extramarital affairs conducted by Labor MPs, the historical sexual assault allegations against Bill Shorten that police investigated and decided not to pursue and which most media did their best to ignore, or the many extra-martial relationships that have and do occur between Labor and Greens politicians and press gallery journalists.
No, Milligan seemed only interested in acting as the pontificator on family values and puritanism when it came to the Coalition side. And bizarrely, she seemed to think there was some link that could be drawn between someone’s stance on same-sex marriage and their personal morality.
That the ABC allowed this program to go to air shows that nobody is in charge. Sorry Ita, we had high hopes for you, but your organisation is running off the rails.
After Four Corners we had another predictable episode of Media Watch, the most expensive and inaccurate weekly 15 minutes of television in this country. As usual, Paul Barry, used his platform to run an ideological and disingenuous rant against his perceived political and ideological enemies – right of centre politicians and News Corp media.
Without wasting too much time on his risible nonsense, let me just point out he ran a clip of me from Sky News and tried to convey the impression I had called the US election wrong from Washington. Yet the program edited out of the very clip he aired the opening words, “we still don’t know who will be president for the next four years” and also cut out from the same clip my other comments such as “we can’t say for certain who the winner will be … we won’t know who has won the election … we won’t get an answer tonight … whether it is a narrow loss for Donald Trump or a win … for the first time we have heard Donald Trump countenance the prospect of losing …” and so on.
Barry completely ignored my thesis that the media, including the ABC, had got it badly wrong by predicting a Biden landslide, and that the strong showing for Trump and closeness of the election, regardless of who won, reflected a victory for mainstream values against the so-called media elites. I wonder why he would ignore that debate – Barry is misleading every week in his jihad against News Corp.
This theme was maintained in an excruciating episode of Q&A that followed. In a typical ABC set up, they had Turnbull on the panel ready to amplify his prurient assault on his former colleagues. The discussion was also animated by another ABC commentator Jan Fran, and it diminished the ABC.
The public broadcaster’s moralising and character assassination proved too much for former Labor premier and foreign minister Bob Carr who wondered aloud why the ABC decided to ventilate juvenile and sexist allegations about Attorney-General Christian Porter’s “wild youth”. He asked which one of us wants to be judged on what we did in our teens.
But we saw the show really lose the plot when it took up the ludicrous push by Turnbull and former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd for a royal commission into News Corp. This vengeful proposal is driven by two men who are desperate to blame others for their own ruined careers.
The royal commission proposal is only taken seriously by the ABC, green Left politicians and News Corp’s media competitors. Taxpayers are funding a billion dollar a year national broadcaster which is seeking to undermine self-reliant, commercial media – viewed in this light, publicly funded broadcasting has mutated into a policy obscenity.
Yet, even faced with this bitter and delusional push, The Australian’s editor at large, Paul Kelly, found a reasonable response. He referred to the polarisation of political debate through a variety of media organisations and encouraged a broader debate about this, from all angles.
In response to this Turnbull ranted about physics and gravity, pretending climate policy is a binary and simple matter, and blaming News Corp for what he views as unsatisfactory climate change policies across the western world. He even worked bushfires into his impetuous tirade.
Turnbull shouted at Kelly, the nation’s foremost political commentator and historian, and suggested he should quit in protest against News Corp’s climate coverage. The former prime minister seems to think that what he considers the world’s gravest challenge, and what is certainly the world’s most complex policy dilemma, is beyond pluralistic coverage and broad debate.
This is what now passes for the public square, and this is what Turnbull has been reduced to (full declaration, I was his chief of staff in 2009). Kelly bravely and insightfully told Turnbull to his face that “you’re transferring your own political failures and you’re wishing to blame our company for them.”
It was ugly television and while Kelly was a paragon of wisdom and rational analysis, Turnbull was emotive and embittered. Yet it was the score-settling of the former prime minister that had dictated the tone and content of the entire night’s viewing on the national broadcaster.
For years I have been a vocal critic of the ABC but have supported it, resisting calls for its privatisation or abolition, and pushing instead for reform. Milligan, Barry and Turnbull proved on Monday night that it is beyond redemption.
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