Four Corners: ABC is better off without Justin Milne and Michelle Guthrie

Journalistic navel gazing can be tough but Four Corners viewers would be asking “what the heck are we paying these people for?”

The ABC is better off without former chairman Justin Milne and former managing director Michelle Guthrie.

Thanks Aunty. Although we have often given you a (deserved) hammering, Four Corners turned its cameras inward on the ABC to deliver a measured and compelling report on the astonishing management disembowelling that resulted in the sacking of the managing director in late September and the chairman falling on his own bloody sword three days later.

Journalistic navel gazing can be a tough gig but this effort would have had viewers unfamiliar with the September bloodletting asking, “what the heck are we paying these people for?”

In seeking to put their cases to the viewers, neither former managing director Michelle Guthrie (sacked) nor former chairman Justin Milne (resigned) convinced the audience.

Milne was not telling Guthrie to sack troublesome chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici, you understand, because he had prefaced a very forceful email with the phrase “in my view”. So it was just his viewpoint!

And Guthrie had no idea why she was sacked, despite receiving poor scores in a management review and despite being called to a special meeting and which she was read a prepared script and was given the services of an executive coach, who just happened to be a board member.

Clearly, the wounds on this two corporate prize-fighters were still raw months after the event.

You even felt sorry for them. But only for a moment.

Guthrie’s allegations of inappropriate physical behaviour by Milne (which he strenuously denies) to Guthrie at a restaurant provided the sensation but also the puzzle. The board was informed, but Guthrie did not want to make a formal complaint and the matter was not investigated.

And no-one emerged looking credible over the Alberici saga.

Guthrie received an email from Milne about “external career development” for Alberici, replied in the affirmative, but denied that meant she had discussed sacking the chief economics correspondent, whom the government “hated” due to her critiques of its policies.

Once, in a cruder media era, TV discussed the need to “bone” hosts.

Former ABC chairman Justin Milne, left, and former managing director Michelle Guthrie, right, during last night’s Four Corners.

Now, in ABC management speak, “external career development” has becoming the new “boning”.

Head of news Gaven Morris looked less like an ABC journalist and more like a politician desperate not to put his foot in it. The superb interviewing quality of Four Corners host Sarah Ferguson normally receives high praise, on this occasion she provided her boss maximum discomfort.

And at the end of the program, two stings in the tale.

Guthrie flagged to Four Corners, her reinstatement and possible return to the broadcaster. At which point, staff would presumably barricade themselves inside its Ultimo headquarters and take a match to the flammable building cladding that helped the corporation plunge to an unexpected $70m loss in the annual report.

And we are midway through November, yet this is the last Four Corners of the year. Budget cuts are already biting, it seems.

The villainous wraiths of the piece were the government, never interviewed, thin skinned and always ready to issue shrill complaints about ABC journalism and then slash its budget.

Through its absorbing narrative, the program showed an ABC chairman obsessed with his $500m Project Jetstream technology transformation, the big prize, that had to be secured above almost everything else. Even though, as the managing director pointed out, the government could not have been in less of a mood to shell out.

And it revealed a managing director blind to her own flaws, and in the end, with very few allies inside or outside the organisation.

The inescapable conclusion: Aunty is better off without both.