Ita Buttrose: Don’t let ABC management seduce you

Don’t be duped by the love, Ita. What follows is gentle counsel from someone who has seen the internal workings of Aunty.

ABC chair Ita Buttrose. Picture: Hollie Adams

The ABC has gone gaga over Ita Buttrose. The woman who earned the nickname Queen Ita in the late 70s has had a promotion to messiah.

Don’t be duped by the love, Ita. What follows is gentle counsel from someone who has seen the internal workings of Aunty. Not just the seduction process, but how management snows the board.

The ABC’s wild embrace of Buttrose has all the hallmarks of a now familiar pattern of seduction. It doesn’t normally happen the moment a new chair or CEO is appointed. So that’s new. But it does happen. And like Stockholm syndrome, before you know it, after all those events schmoozing with ABC management and in-house celebrities, the selfies and so on, the new chair will have bonded so completely with ABC staff that they forget their role to lead them.

That’s what I saw up close over five years, two chairmen and two CEOs. Indeed, for the past two decades, ABC journalists and senior executives have a near perfect record of either seducing CEOs and chairmen or getting rid of the ones they couldn’t paralyse with their warm embrace.

Donald McDonald was the perfect candidate for seduction; he wanted to be loved and the ghost of Jonathan Shier was routinely dragged out as an excuse not to make waves at Aunty.

New CEO Mark Scott started with fine-sounding ambitions: introduce more diverse voices at the ABC, emulate a vibrant town square and no more of ABC’s defensiveness to criticism. Except nothing changed. Scott fell for the same seduction routine.

Indeed, it was common practice to seduce not just chairmen and CEOs but board members too. At ABC functions, staff often physically touched me as if to check I was real, and then they said “I didn’t expect you to look like this.” One whispered to me that she was sleeping with a conservative. The flattery is intended to make you feel so ensconced in their world that you wouldn’t dare risk ending up like Shier, loathed within the broadcaster. (Check the twitter feed of your board members, Ita, as a pointer of who has fallen for the magic, starting with your deputy chair, Kirstin Ferguson.)

As new chairman Maurice Newman challenged ABC journalists to be more curious, more open-minded. Fine words that triggered trauma and outrage among some staff. And zero change within the organisation.

The next chairman, Jim Spigelman, took a while to suggest the ABC look at mainstream issues such as electricity prices. And Aunty carried on as usual.

Ironically, given the messy way he departed, Justin Milne didn’t need seducing. When appointed chairman, he said there was no bias at the ABC. He told a private gathering that if the ABC skews one way, isn’t it preferable that it skews to the Left? Alas, that is not what the ABC Act says. The legal compact is taxpayers fund the ABC in return for a diversity of voices and impartial reporting.

Buttrose might want to remember that history for a clue about her future at the ABC. That, and a few other things I learned as a director.

Here is the first con. The lucky buggers at the ABC will point to the events of last year — a sacked CEO and disgraced chairman — as another dreadful crisis demanding another period of consolidation and stability. Codewords from staff and management to leave us alone to run the place.

Watch out for the make-work snow job too. It started early on during my time there. The ABC is legally required under the ABC Act to gather and present news and information that is “accurate and impartial”. Reading editorial reports each meeting, I noticed that journalists were never held to account for bias or factual errors. When challenged, management told the board there was a problem with editorial policies. The board would be entrusted to redraft the policies, keeping board members busy and making them feel useful. Meanwhile recidivist journalists stuck to their biases and kept making factual errors that miraculously all leaned one way — favouring a Green view of the world on everything from Israel to global warming to asylum seekers. It was a joke, with a wet-lettuce threat of counselling at most. But when the ABC board is not unified about its legal obligations, management snow jobs prevail.

Then there was the bias-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder con. Over and over again, management said that because both Liberal and Labor politicians criticise Aunty, we must be doing something right. Nonsense. It means the ABC skews to the left of Labor, tacking closely to that Green world view. Again, a pusillanimous board and a buttered-up chairman allowed that snow job to prevail.

Another dodgy trick was telling board members not to get involved in management issues. Except I wasn’t second-guessing producers. I was a board member with legal duties to ensure diverse voices and impartiality. Even when I asked for a list of salaries of ABC ‘‘talent” I was told that is not a matter for the board either. Wrong again. A board is entitled to all information about the corporation it leads. This arrogance and deliberate misreading of the law by management was not uncommon.

The other trick was to ignore my concerns about bias as culture war claptrap. I asked about the predictable choice of subjects by ABC hosts on TV and radio, their tone, the way they describe guests and the fickle nature of their journalistic curiosity. I asked why an organisation the size of the ABC, funded by taxpayers, has not employed a single conservative host on any TV or radio program. They saw a culture war. I saw legal obligations to taxpayers set out in section 8 of the ABC Act that require the ABC to “reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community”.

It is not enough to be diverse about gender, colour and ethnicity. Cultural diversity means reflecting the different views of Australians. To be sure, Tom Switzer has been a terrific addition, but his anti-Iraq war views made him the ABC’s almost-acceptable voice of conservatism. No other conservative voices have been invited into the bunker.

Buttrose should ask: why not? Different voices might be less theological about climate change, spend more time on what high energy prices mean for our future, speak for the 1,200 asylum seekers killed at sea, and raise questions about a jury verdict on George Pell last week. Different voices will also enliven broadcasting that has become predictable and boring.

Apart from the legal requirement, a new ABC chair might finally work out it is a strategic no-brainer to employ different voices at a $1bn taxpayer-funded media organisation to ensure its relevance and legitimacy. This is not a job application, by the way. (Though, with a tweak or two, it can be.) Buttrose may think that history won’t be repeated. She stood up to the likes of Kerry Packer after all. But gird your loins, Ita. Our ABC depends on you doing what no chair has done for decades: lead the organisation, rather than being led. ABC staff laughed at McDonald behind his back. They ignored Newman. Scott didn’t leave a mark. Neither did Spigelman. Milne left the wrong mark behind him. Guthrie crashed and burned. Don’t fall for your new friends at the ABC. Be chairwoman of our ABC, not theirs. Real reform requires hard work. The country will be eternally grateful.

Janet Albrechtsen was a member of the ABC board from 2005-2010.