The ABC’s fatal flaw? Irrelevance

ABC chair Kim Williams ahead of his speech at the Melbourne Press Club. Picture: Diego Fedele

ABC Chair Kim Williams appears to have bet the house on the return of the Albanese government. This bet is important because Williams’s pitch is for more funding – an almost implausible ask in the current economic environment.

If Peter Dutton were elected, he has indicated he would cut funding in line with his general promise to reduce waste. But not in the slash-and-burn style Sky News guests and Young Liberal conferences sometimes favour.

There is a significant cohort of conservative supporters of the ABC (among which, believe it or not, I still count myself) who argue that the ABC has an important role in rural and regional areas, and does valuable work providing emergency broadcasting and other services. Fine, says Peter Dutton. We’ll fund that. But he wants to perhaps limit what he might in his quieter moments describe (not without justification) as the inner-urban left-leaning nonsense.

That’s why Williams’s pitch – in his recent Melbourne Press Club address, he called it an “investment in democracy” – is firmly aimed at Labor.

The ABC, of a mind with its leader, is doing its best to assure a Labor win. Interviews and features are giving plenty of room to experts who agree with Labor or left-leaning policy. But not a great deal is afforded to experts – and they are not that hard to find – who can articulate an informed criticism of those policies.

The ABC’s Vote Compass tool also leans heavily left. The compass offers users a diagram that, based on the answers to a set of questions, purports to show their alignment on a political scale. Questions around anti-Semitism and social cohesion are notably absent.

The scale also maps the positions of political parties and, amusingly, the ALP is almost dead centre. The Liberal Party is much further away from the purported centre. According to this device, the Liberal Party is considerably more conservative and economically right than the Labor Party is socially left or progressive.

While hardly a scientific tool, the Vote Compass does make a bid for authority by announcing it has been developed “by political scientists”. It certainly seems to be an accurate representation of the world through the eyes of the ABC. As Gerard Henderson has pointed out in his Media Watch Dog column, Q+A, the ABC’s Monday night flagship-with-a-flagging-audience, is now promoted with an advertisement featuring two teals, two Labor MPs and only one Liberal.

Q&A host Patricia Karvelas.

All of this comes at a crucial moment. ABC ratings are in free fall with some critical audiences. Elections are a rare window to win them back. Generally, the ABC rates well during campaigns, as audiences seek out the journalists they trusted and regarded as authoritative in their youth. But legacy media is less and less relevant in this election, and social media ascendant.

Kim Williams is, of course, right that the ABC requires further funding if it is to continue to do what it is now trying to do, and do it well. The alternatives are to dramatically reduce what the ABC does – that is, to make painful cuts to its breadth of offer and remit – or to spread the budget thinly over the whole of its remit and sacrifice quality. Breadth or depth; these are the choices.

So what Peter Dutton hints at might be a solution – though not the one the ABC itself wants. Fund the things all Australians want and love about the ABC. And let nature take its course with the rest.

This may or may not happen after the next election. But the consensus is growing that the ABC is not living up to community expectations. It is failing to adhere to its charter, most egregiously in my view in relation to Israel and the Gaza conflict. Rising anti-Semitism isn’t just omitted from Vote Compass – it is under-reported across the whole ABC.

After every election a detailed study is undertaken as to whether the ABC has, in fact, been impartial. It generally comes to the conclusion that the ABC has been quantitatively fair. Whether it has been qualitatively fair is a different matter.

Hugh Marks was recently named new managing director of the ABC. Picture: NewsWire

For this election, the battlelines have been drawn. In my view, irrespective of the outcome, either the ABC gets its act together or its inevitable decline will be accelerated. In its desire to please the inner-city “woke”, it is not only failing its charter. Worse, it is boring its audience. The future for the ABC may not be death; it could be irrelevance. It can, and must, do better.

Joe Gersh is a businessman, lawyer and philanthropist. He was an ABC director from 2018-23