Guthrie on right track but ABC culture is harder to change

ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie is doing the right thing with her plan to cut 200 middle management.

Managing Director of The ABC Michelle Guthrie.

ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie is doing the right thing with her plan to cut 200 middle management and service roles to make savings to pay for a $50 million creative content fund and boost regional coverage.

Her predecessor Mark Scott, an MBA who had been hired from Fairfax Media, was big on building layers of management.

Those layers protected him from ever having to make an editorial call, yet he was a success in taking the ABC’s content across multiple new platforms but at the price of increased centralisation in Sydney.

In the middle of the infamous Chris Kenny “dog f....r” saga, when Kenny was defamed by the Chaser boys and decided to take legal action, I tried to cut through all the ABC bureaucracy. I asked my ­lawyer to meet the team of lawyers from the ABC (and it was a team) to convey an offer from me.

As Kenny’s editor-in-chief I would head down to ABC HQ in Ultimo and sit in Scott’s office to thrash out a deal to avoid costly legal proceedings. It’s the sort of thing newspaper editors do all the time.

Not only did no such meeting occur, neither my lawyer nor I ever even received a reply. Kenny went on to be offered a cash settlement and the ABC met our costs. Their own must have been enormous, and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Guthrie’s other big idea last Tuesday was on the right track too. She wants to put more money and programming back into the regions.

This is surely a key requirement under the corporation’s charter which says the ABC must broadcast “programs that contribute to a sense of national identity”. This is hard when the corporation has for two decades been withdrawing from the smaller states and now has 53.6 per cent of staff living in NSW.

Its television programming and its talent increasingly reflect the values of Marrickville hipsters almost to the exclusion of regional Australians. Two decades ago the state-based 7.30 Report was a compelling current affairs player in local events across the nation, ­especially outside the Sydney-Melbourne-Canberra triangle.

When I was editor-in-chief of Queensland Newspapers, Brisbane daily The Courier-Mail, then the second-biggest selling broadsheet in the nation, and the Sunday tabloid, The Sunday Mail, the second-biggest selling paper of any description, could always count on the local 7.30 Report to follow and try to progress our political shops, and vice-versa.

The papers and the 7.30 host, David Margan, often co-operated on stories outside the southeast corner to help defray costs. This is important in enormous states such as Queensland and WA.

That all went out the window when Kerry O’Brien took over as host of a nightly bulletin broadcast out of Sydney. The payoff for the states was to be Stateline on Fridays, which was a soft imitation and has now been axed.

The ABC is even more important outside state capitals in smaller regional towns where ABC radio is often the best source of local breaking news, along with the local newspaper.

Television commercial news tends to be homogenised from the national networks with a couple of token local pieces in the nightly news.

So the basics of Guthrie’s plan look right. But as many critics pointed out last week, none of this addresses the cultural biases within the corporation that were embarrassingly highlighted the next day when the ABC celebrated Wednesday’s International Wom­en’s Day by getting as many women as possible to host regular programming.

It sounded just like juvenile ­tokenism because that is what it was. And it exactly reflected the corporation’s withdrawal into the values of inner-city Sydney and Melbourne over the past two decades with the honourable exceptions of Landline, Macca’s Australia All Over and Heather Ewart’s Back Roads.

Cultural change will be harder for Guthrie, her board and her new chairman, expected to be appointed soon, to address. Nothing has worked to date, including the appointment of conservatives to the board during the Howard years.

Another reason to doubt anything will change is the managing director’s stated concern that the ABC’s audience reach has fallen slightly from 71 per cent to 69 per cent. She told staff during her presentation at Ultimo on Tuesday that she wanted that to be 100 per cent. This might be a fair enough thing for an MD and a board to say, given all taxpayers contribute to funding our ABC. But I think it is wrong.

Scott used to call the corporation a “market failure broadcaster”. He was having a crack at the perceived bias of News Corp, which at the time was running tough, but fair and well deserved, coverage of the Rudd and Gillard governments.

It was a cute line but it was also true, and not in the way Scott meant. The ABC was always set up to be a market failure broadcaster. That is, to do things commercial broadcasters could not do ­profitably.

And in the present climate of stressed federal budgets, that is what some government will eventually have to insist on.

Why, for instance, is Guthrie signalling a renewed focus on digital media? As well as all the digital news sites already in the market we are about to see The New York Times set up in Australia, joining British sites The Guardian, the Daily Mail and the BBC in colonising our media.

What is the argument for expanding the already huge ABC digital platform when Fairfax, News Corp and the commercial broadcast sites are being cannibalised by Facebook and Google and face these new international news competitors?

Why is the ABC producing print magazines, including ones that carry ads? All this at a time specialist magazine publishers without taxpayer backing are struggling to survive.

The government should give the ABC specific KPIs based on a rewritten charter that takes our ABC back to what was envisaged originally and leaves the rest to market forces.

Who knows, but with a bit of political balance and the occasional conservative presenter, our ABC may even increase audience reach at the expense of Sky News, and conservative talkback radio stations such as 2GB, 3AW, 4BC and 6PR?

After all, it seems reasonable to assume many of these stations have attracted listeners and ­viewers vitally interested in current affairs who no longer feel an affinity for the relentlessly left-leaning national broadcaster. Those audiences pay their taxes too.

And as many politicians have observed, the plump ABC could learn about how to run a tight ship from Sky News, where a single camera and no make-up artists do just fine without the many make-up and behind-the-scenes production staff on Q&A, 7.30, The Drum and Lateline.