The business of the ABC is content, and this is where reform should start

ABC chair Ita Buttrose. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Former prime minister John Howard was the last politician to try to reform the ABC. He failed.

Guardian Australia media writer Amanda Meade on October 30 retweeted a post noting it had been exactly 20 years since Jonathan Shier resigned as ABC managing director. Shier, his chairman Donald McDonald and conservative directors including Michael Kroger, this newspaper’s Janet Albrechtsen, anthropologist Ron Brunton and academic and Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle were all appointed under Howard.

They did not make the ABC’s journalism more balanced. Neither did former Australian Stock Exchange chair and Deutsche Bank MD and chair Maurice Newman, appointed ABC chair for five years by Howard in 2007. McDonald had been chair from 1996 to 2006 and in the words of one former director “was totally captured by the ABC”.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison must have expected more when he appointed Ita Buttrose to the role in early 2019. I did not, having worked at The Daily Telegraph in Sydney in the early 1980s when Ita was editor-in-chief. She was seldom seen in the newsroom.

Nor was it the slightest surprise a week ago that Ita came to defend the ABC against a Senate inquiry into the corporation’s public complaints mechanism. Pity is, Ita started the job promisingly, admitting she thought Aunty did have bias issues. It also has complaints issues as anyone who has tried the process knows.

Right on cue, as Ita was criticising the Senate hearing, her audience and consumer affairs department on Thursday finally accepted a complaint it had rejected over a report from October last year claiming in 2012 Australian Special Forces had murdered a bound Afghan prisoner because there was not enough room for him in an extraction helicopter. The former commander of November Platoon, Heston Russell, and 18 of his men deny the incident. The ABC’s source was an unnamed US Marine.

This column is a big consumer of ABC news, from the early RN edition of AM to the World Today, PM, the ABC’s main 7pm TV news bulletin, 7.30 and Insiders. Q+A is off the list except when Stan Grant is presenting. His program on China last Thursday week was excellent.

This column is also a keen watcher of Sky News. It has argued Sky After Dark often includes guests from the ALP and the Greens as well as from the Coalition. Despite the strong opinions of its hosts, Sky News broadcasts many views.

Former ABC director Michael Kroger. Picture: AAP

Former ABC managing director Jonathan Shier.

This is the diversity the ABC rejects. Ita said in late 2019 she wanted more ethnic diversity among ABC staff, who needed to look like the wider community. She has been less keen on diversity of opinion, surely the most important sort.

ABC journalists ignore their board anyway. This newspaper on November 21, 2019 quoted Ita ruling out “the creation of a staff climate advisory group”. Asked by Adelaide ABC radio presenter David Bevan why, she replied: “Because the ABC leadership team and the managing director (David Anderson) have thought otherwise.”

The Guardian’s Meade was sceptical. She reported on November 22, 2019 that “the staff move has not been stymied at all”. “Staff … are still planning to go ahead with the advisory group, with 77 people expressing an interest already. There has been no edict from above,” she wrote.

Indeed, the ABC is more obsessed with climate now than it has ever been. Last week, days after the COP26 summit in Glasgow proved the failure this column had predicted, ABC television and radio remained replete with criticism of Morrison and Australia for their alleged climate failings. The unwillingness of the world’s major CO2 emitters — China, the US, India and Russia — to increase their 2030 emissions reduction targets was largely ignored.

Still, viewers and listeners can find accurate climate coverage elsewhere. But howlers by Four Corners in its pursuit of Morrison’s alleged links to QAnon and reporting of wild and dubious allegations against Catholic Cardinal George Pell (also defamed by 7.30) and former attorney-general Christian Porter should not be forgotten.

Add to that list the ludicrous Sarah Ferguson three-part Four Corners “Story of the Century” on bogus Donald Trump Russiagate allegations, false claims about the late Labor NSW premier Neville Wran in the true crime special Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire, and inaccuracies in September’s two-part miniseries Juanita: A Family Mystery about the disappearance of Juanita Nielsen.

ABC chair Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson. Picture:

In private media, editors and executive producers lose their jobs for such mistakes. At the ABC, accountability rests with no one. What is to be done?

A quick read of the ABC Charter and the 1983 ABC Act makes it clear where reform should start. Critics think the charter, which sits in Section 6 of the Act, requires ABC reporters to be fair and balanced. Not so.

But Section 8 of the Act, Duties of the Board, says it is “the duty of the board … to ensure … news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism.”

Sections 9 and 10 deal with the duties of the managing director. The language lacks any sense the Act was drafted by people who knew how the media works. The Act needs a clear statement that the managing director is to act as the editor in chief of the corporation and be responsible for all decisions relating to content.

Former ABC director Kroger, twice a state president of the Victorian Liberal Party, believes the Coalition has wasted eight years failing to reform the ABC and is now paying the price as it openly campaigns against Morrison. Kroger says section 8 needs to be redrafted to give the board clearer guidelines and formalise director liability.

“You have to strengthen Section 8 because the directors are liable for the corporation’s behaviour, but what liability is that? If the Act has been breached directors face no penalty,” he says.

He also wants changes to Section 6 to clarify expectations of ABC coverage.

“For example, it could say the ABC must broadcast programs which (a) celebrate Australia’s democracy, (b) acknowledge the contribution of Australian servicemen and women over the decades, (c) celebrate Anzac Day, (d) recognise Australia’s alliances with other democracies, (e) recognise the role of small business, the mining industry and farmers and rural and regional Australia in the success of the Australian economy.

“The ABC needs to acknowledge and celebrate the country we are.”

In my view, the business of the ABC is content. The MD, the chair and the directors bring little to the table if they have no content background. As former Kerry Packer executive Trevor Kennedy wrote for this newspaper about the former Fairfax board more than a decade ago, its directors celebrate that they never talk content, but “content is the business”.

It is no coincidence former ABC journalist Chris Masters and media academic Rod Tiffen could see the flaws in Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire and its treatment of Wran yet ABC’s management and board could not.