Our cash pays for the ABC's comment

Barrie Cassidy

AS contemporary social media campaigns go, it was a very civilised affair. After the ABC's final Insiders program for the year, a handful of letters arrived at The Australian complaining of the program's bias.

The following day the trickle turned into a torrent that, three weeks later, is yet to abate. The letter from Ken Schmack in North Gosford, NSW, was typical, a cry more in sorrow than anger: "I have rarely missed Insiders since its introduction, but I have finally come to the conclusion that among my new year resolutions has to be one to give the program the flick. The pro-Labor, anti-Coalition bias exhibited by its presenter and, generally, two of the three guests has become ingrained.

"Given that the ABC is publicly funded and that not all taxpayers march to the drum of Labor and its increasingly scandal-ridden trade union movement directors, I believe the time is well past when a Coalition government should give serious consideration to privatisation."

If the ABC is not troubled by Mr Schmack's letter it should be, for The Australian's paying customers are also its paying customers. It is true that The Australian has to collect its own subscriptions while at the ABC the Tax Department does it for them. In next year's budget, however, the ABC's funding will be reviewed, locking in its main source of revenue for the next three years. Fingers must be crossed in Ultimo; the Treasurer will be looking for savings.

ABC management must be praying that it is Wayne Swan who rises from the dispatch box on the second Tuesday in May, not Joe Hockey, because they should be familiar with the historical pattern: the last two incoming Coalition prime ministers - Malcolm Fraser in 1975 and John Howard 21 years later - both moved quickly to slash the public broadcasting budgets.

Fraser relented after a strong campaign from staff and friends of the ABC and the chairman he appointed to wield the knife, Henry Bland, resigned in disgust. The backlash in 1996 was strong but less vocal, and Howard went on to win another three terms. Next time? We can only guess, but in this fiscally austere climate customer satisfaction matters, even at the ABC.

As so often in broadcasting, it is difficult to pinpoint why the December 2 edition of Insiders started the Ultimo Spring, if that is not too bold a term for this polite public uprising. Barrie Cassidy's panel - three experienced News Limited columnists as it happened - was not unusual. Without wishing to pigeonhole Malcolm Farr and Dennis Atkins, it would be fair to say that they are generally more forgiving of the government's frailties than

The Australian's Niki Savva, who found herself outnumbered on some issues, but a fair reading of the transcript offers no evidence of bias that would hold in a court of law.

From the reaction, however, it is clear that Insiders failed what one former ABC executive would have called the eyebrow test. Writing from retirement in 1981, Clement Semmler observed that even when questioning appears neutral and every contributor is given their say, the perception of bias in TV current affairs is an ever-present risk.

"Stance, tone, gesture, inflection, irony - even covert deprecation - can effectively alter the balance of an interview or a story," Semmler wrote. "I recall one compere of This Day Tonight who, by the twitch of an eyebrow, could successfully throw an item in the program hopelessly out of balance."

Semmler's book, The ABC - Aunt Sally and Sacred Cow, now more than 30 years old, provides an insight into a midlife crisis that helped form the character of the 80-year-old ABC as we know it today. Forty years ago, as Gough Whitlam was elected prime minister, a decade of internal struggle over public broadcasting purpose and practice was nearing an end. The defenders of the founding Reithian idea, named after the BBC's first director general, John Reith, had been in retreat since the death of the ABC's longest serving chairman Richard Boyer in 1961 and the retirement of its longest serving general manager Charles Moses four years later.

Boyer imagined the ABC as "an impartial clearing house of ideas and serene in the middle of our national life, running no campaign, seeking to persuade no opinion, but presenting the issues freely and fearlessly for the calm judgment of our people." A new generation of smart, university-educated recruits, impatient for social and political change, thought otherwise.

On one side of the divide was the news division, headed by former Queensland cattle farmer and policeman Keith Fraser. On the eve of the South African rugby tour in 1971, with the nation bitterly divided over whether politics should be allowed to infect sport, Fraser issued a stern memo from his Elizabeth Street office: "There are two sides of this apartheid business and it is our duty as ABC journalists to present both of them ... We have no charter at all to express editorial opinions, so let us stick to our job and report the facts with balance and good taste."

Meanwhile, in rebel-held territory on the other side of the harbour, at the ABC's now-demolished Gore Hill television complex, the This Day Tonight team was actively working for regime change, sharing its attacks between the McMahon Coalition government and the ABC's general manager, Talbot Duckmanton.

Academic George Shipp studied 87 TDT segments broadcast over four weeks in 1971 to find out where the program's sentiments lay. In Shipp's view, its coverage of the Vietnam conflict served only one purpose: "to demonstrate the immensity of human suffering caused by the war, the generally dehumanising effects it has had on participants, particularly the Americans." On the recognition and the sale of wheat to China, Shipp observed "nothing less than a campaign". On Aboriginal rights, "the TDT team clearly felt so strongly that it was on the side of the gods, that this was not a matter of controversy at all."

The tone of TDT producer Gerald Stone's response was familiar; he struggled to see what the problem was, apart from the grumblings of conservatives like Shipp in the pages of Quadrant. If the program was biased - and he did not concede that it was - it was because those who worked on it shared three basic assumptions: "We as Australians are not as free as we should be; we are not as well off as we think we are; we are not as good to each other and to outsiders as we claim to be."

Almost four decades later, a serving ABC chairman, Maurice Newman, was to famously describe this attitude as "groupthink" provoking the opprobrium of staff.

But on this occasion, at least, the science was on Newman's side. The notion of groupthink is well established: in the late 19th century, sociology's founding father, Emile Durkheim, called it "collective consciousness"; German social scientists called it weltanschauung - a world view; in the 1990s, Richard Dawkins and others began looking for an explanation through a new field of scientific inquiry, memetics, which purported to explain cultural evolution through the natural selection of attitudes, ideas and behaviours. Common sense tells us groupthink exists, for we know from everyday experience what Durkheim said was true: opinion is an eminently social phenomena.

None of this would matter if the world as seen from the ABC's studios resembles, more or less, the one the rest of the community wakes up to every morning. But for a substantial proportion of the population - let's call them conservatives for want of a better term - it is not. Semmler saw it coming from the 1960s, as the first generation of pioneering public broadcasters slipped off into retirement, creating openings for a generation of graduates with a radically different set of values: "On many subjects - abortions, divorce, censorship, drugs, immigration, promiscuity, the environment, war, capital punishment, penal policy, capitalism, education, social legislation - (they) are at the best, partisan opinions, and at the worst, the opinions of a small educated middle-class left-wing minority arrived with them ready-made - and most of their contemporaries with similar qualifications and career ambitions share just about all of them."

Again, this should not necessarily matter. These are, after all, smart people and an underappreciated subset of ABC professionals demonstrate every day that it is possible to sit behind a microphone without wearing one's hearts on one's sleeve. Indeed, before the arrival in 1961 of television current affairs, and radio current affairs six years later - looser, less scripted broadcast genres where integrity depends more on the discipline of presenters and producers than managerial constraint - even the most radically minded public broadcasters had little opportunity to express their personal view.

Now however there is a new genre of media, eagerly adopted by the ABC, that grants news and current affairs presenters carte blanche to tell us what they really think. On websites like The Drum and its broadcast equivalent, through Twitter and as guests on other presenters' shows, the convention that the presenter is a neutral umpire without an original thought to their name is under sustained assault. It places an impossible demand on the viewer or listener; which Cassidy are we watching today? The fair-minded, even-handed interviewer we know of old, or the opinionated ex-Labor staffer with strong views on the removal of Kevin Rudd? With no disrespect to Cassidy, it makes it difficult all round.

Until April last year, ABC journalists and presenters were in breach of editorial policy when they turned from being opinion brokers to opinion providers. Section 6.7 of the Editorial Policy document, drawn up in 2009, was clear: "It is not normally appropriate for regular ABC presenters or reporters associated with news or current affairs content to participate in opinion content."

Then, in a change that received little attention at the time, section six relating to opinion content was dropped in its entirety. The ABC issued a statement yesterday saying the intention was "greater clarity, cleaner language and a proper distinction between principles and standards on the one hand, and broader guidelines on the other." It went on: "Carrying opinions is within the proper role of a public broadcaster as it fosters debate. In fact, carrying opinions is one of the ABC's duties, provided that it is a diversity of opinions and the ABC can detail how we aim to ensure a diversity of opinions are represented. "

So The Australian's letter writers may have a point: if ABC presenters and journalists have appeared more opinionated in the last year and a half, it is because they have been given permission by their managing director, sanctioned, incidentally, by a board chaired by Newman.

Again, none of this would be of any concern if the ABC was a commercial company - in fact it would be welcome, for in a robust democracy, too much opinion is barely enough. Yet the opinion expressed through the auspices of the ABC carries privileged status; the government is using our cash to pay for comment. Not that the government necessarily gets the comment it would prefer. If it does, it is merely accidental, for as Paul Keating once put it: "We pay them more than the state of Tasmania. Do we get value for it? It's a moot point."

Keating's observation assumes even more relevance as Australia enters a period of fiscal austerity, when the demands rise to justify every dollar spent from the public purse. It may indeed be informative to read the views of Cassidy, Jonathan Holmes and the entertaining Annabel Crabb, regardless of whether one agrees with everything they say. But the ABC must do more than inform and entertain; it must justify, and then justify again, why people like

The Australian's erudite correspondent, Mr Schmack, should make an involuntary contribution to help ABC employees keep up with their mortgage payments. Civic purpose, rather than the side issue of political bias, should surely be at the front and centre of the public broadcasting debate.

Who decides the ABC's proper role? Not the public, and not the government, at least not under the loose legislation under which the ABC was established in 1932, barely improved by later amendments. Not the ABC board, which, as almost every retiring director complains, has very little power. As Billy Hughes observed when the 1932 Australian Broadcasting Commission Bill was being debated, appointing a part-time board of five and paying them a "beggarly pittance" would place broadcasting "in the hands of men who, ex hypothesi, are mediocrities". The institution would exert greater moral influence than the universities, yet every decision would be shunted on to the desk of the general manager: "The commissioners are to be mere puppets; their control is illusory."

What of the general manager, Mark Scott, who, under the legislation, is also editor-in-chief? How does he ensure that every program, blog or tweet is worthy of a taxpayer subsidy? In a nutshell, he does so with a light touch. In a speech in June, Scott complained that The Australian misunderstands the nature of public broadcasting. He complained that the groupthink theory, far from being scientifically based, was merely a "tickle-up from Rupert Murdoch's broadsheet."

"I must say it is a little difficult to know where to go with this, being lectured by The Australian about a certain narrowness in editorial perspective and a singularity in worldview," he said.

"At The Australian, they seem to think I should operate in the same way as their own editor-in-chief. I have no doubt that at The Australian, the senior editorial team run a tight news conference, with a clear editorial line emerging about the stories they will be pursuing, the people they are supporting, the agendas they are setting, the philosophy they are advancing. The paper executes accordingly, making Chris Mitchell, without doubt and for a long period of time, the most personally dominant editorial executive working in the country.

"The ABC is not like that. We are not a single masthead like The Australian. In fact I think the ABC is more like a large chain of newspapers or separate editorial products."

Many would-be defenders of the ABC will feel torn on this issue; reluctantly on the side of many of The Australian's letter writers, while deeply troubled at what this outbreak of dissent represents: an indication that the institution we once affectionately called Aunty may have lost its public purpose. The task facing Scott and his chairman James Spigelman today is much harder than Boyer's in 1945, when he accepted John Curtin's commission.

Boyer, like Reith, was a Calvinist and his articulation of the Reithian ideal was an impossibly romantic notion even then. Nonetheless, the ABC cannot survive in its current form without controlling the activist tendency that has held sway for four decades and returning to the high-minded goal of serving as a beacon trusted and respected by the nation as a whole.

Liz Jackson's interview with John Howard on Four Corners in early 1996 will forever be remembered for the future prime minister's admission that he yearned for a nation that was "relaxed and comfortable".

The most revealing moment, however, was the eyebrow moment; not political bias exactly, just a line of questioning that suggested that Jackson and Howard's battlers lived in two completely different worlds:

Jackson: To pick up on those words, comfortable and relaxed, do you think that's a dynamic enough vision to inspire Australians as they move into the next millennium? Do you think people think, 'Well, I want to feel comfortable and relaxed?' Is that dynamic enough for Australians?

Howard: I think ... I think people do want to feel comfortable and relaxed.

Jackson: They don't want to feel excited? You're making a pitch for the vote, John, certainly you're comfortable and familiar to people, but are you dynamic and enticing and exciting enough to take the country into the next millennium?

Howard: Well, that is a decision that the Australian public will make.

And indeed, it did.

Nick Cater is The Australian's Chief Opinion Editor. His book, The Lucky Culture, will be published next year by HarperCollins.