Michelle Guthrie could actually make an effort to improve matters

Can our ABC be both one of the nation’s most valued and trusted institutions and a “punching bag’’ for critics of its political biases?

ABC Managing Director Michelle Guthrie speaks to the Melbourne Press Club in Melbourne last week.

Can our ABC be both one of the nation’s most valued and trusted institutions and a “punching bag” for critics of its political biases?

I think so. That seems to have been its position for decades. And probably fair enough, given taxpayers subsidise it by more than $1 billion a year.

Managing director Michelle Guthrie, who made the “punching bag” analogy last Tuesday in a Melbourne Press Club speech, has continued in the well-worn tradition of her predecessors. You have to go back to David Hill’s leadership from 1987 to 1995 to find the last successful ABC leader openly calling out mistakes by the news division.

No chance of Guthrie getting down in the trenches to deal with editorial problems the way Hill or any real editor-in-chief would. Yet her approach, and that of her chairman, Malcolm Turnbull’s friend Justin Milne, must be what the PM expected. It is the same sort of big business managerialist approach Turnbull brings to politics. It has not worked for him there and is less likely to work in the brutal world of media.

Even conservative prime minister John Howard could not make a dent in the ABC’s left-wing editorial culture, despite the appointment of his friend Donald Mc­Donald as chairman in 1996, McDonald’s successor Maurice Newman in 2006, and the board secondments of conservatives Janet Albrechtsen, Ron Brunton, Judith Sloan, Keith Windschuttle and Michael Kroger.

Guthrie’s speech was in ­response to the politically dumb motion passed by the Liberal Party’s annual federal council meeting in Sydney the previous Saturday to privatise the corporation. Never mind the Prime Minister immediately ruled out selling the ABC, this will be a live issue until the next election.

Just look at the reaction of this paper’s Chris Kenny, a strident ABC critic, to understand how dangerous this political misstep was. On his show on Sky News on Sunday night and in this paper on Monday, Kenny said the ABC would never be sold and nor should it be. Prominent critics on Twitter have furiously defended the ABC since as if the privatisation threat is real.

The corporation has been touting for 20 years polls showing strong support for the ABC, and Guthrie’s speech did too. To my mind these polls do not suggest the public approves of the ABC’s ­approach to political current ­affairs, although they may trust its straight news broadcasts.

Rather, such polls reflect the ­realities of free-to-air broadcasting. What serious television viewer would prefer the commercial networks’ reality-TV binge over the full range of brilliant BBC dramas available on the ABC? And the commercial networks no longer compete in serious political current affairs journalism.

Guthrie’s speech was the work of a leader in troubled times looking for support from below, and she got it. Even ABC Melbourne radio presenter Jon Faine, who had previously criticised Guthrie’s handling of the government, must have been happy.

Faine was voicing a concern among staff who are worried the affable Guthrie is not managing up to the government as well as she is managing down. The managing-up concerns are probably not fair. She spends plenty of time walking the halls of parliament but she seldom does interviews, while her predecessor Mark Scott did many.

A long view might suggest that today’s ABC, though burdened by breakouts on secondary channels by programs such as Tonightly, is not as institutionally hostile to the Coalition as it was in Howard’s time. Remember the battles ­between Kerry O’Brien and Howard on The 7.30 Report?

Leigh Sales and Chris Uhlmann brought even-handedness to 7.30, which Uhlmann later took to the main news program. But a couple of recent things have damaged views of the ABC within the government: the arrival of Andrew Probyn to succeed Uhlmann last year and the 2015 Zaky Mallah episode on Q&A.

Probyn was a good political editor for The West Australian newspaper but has not yet successfully made the move to television. A complaint by Communications Minister Mitch Fifield about his impartiality in a report on the timing of next month’s Super Saturday by-elections might be technically fair enough but I think Probyn is less partisan than many, and will improve.

Former PM Tony Abbott ­rightly criticised Q&A for allowing former terrorism suspect Zaky Mallah to ask an offensive question of Trade Minister Steve Ciobo in June 2015. Coming during ­Islamic State’s high-water mark globally, Abbott said the ABC was not on Australia’s side. Mark Scott said it was a public broadcaster but not a state broadcaster. The episode alienated many moderate Coal­ition members.

There is also a political complication influencing Fifield, who has now lodged six formal complaints to the ABC board this year. Fifield, a Victorian factional powerbroker, faces preselection problems in several seats stemming from challenges by the right of his party, mostly ABC haters.

I would give Guthrie credit for reforms announced last November. Putting extra resources back into the regions helps redress the 20-year drift towards Sydney and Melbourne. Her extra focus on ­investigative journalism and breaking stories is correct.

But Faine and ABC critic and News Corp columnist/Sky News host Andrew Bolt are right that she is too reluctant to be publicly interviewed. Insiders say Guthrie does not approve of using her organisation to defend her decisions. Maybe she should be interviewed more by Fairfax or News.

Guthrie could consider a couple of other strategies. Why not create some programs hosted by conservatives, something Scott hinted at 12 years ago? Guthrie and her board should make cuts to areas such as make-up and sending multiple reporters to the same job, like the royal wedding or the Singapore summit. Politicians know commercial media have cut this kind of fat. She should also ­ensure senior journalists do not ­involve themselves in culture wars on Twitter. It really makes their claims of impartiality ludicrous.

And she should never pretend audience reach is somehow proof the ABC is impartial. The News Corp tabloids have enormous reach but no one would say they are impartial.