Heads have rolled at the BBC. Where is accountability at the ABC?

Picture: NewsWire/ Gaye Gerard

Heads have rolled at Britain’s BBC in a display of accountability sorely missing at our own public broadcaster, the ABC. The ABC shares much in common with its British counterpart across the full spectrum of self-righteous causes, from Middle East politics to gender activism and a performative loathing of US President Donald Trump. The common theme is that agenda journalism has been allowed to sideline charter obligations and public duty for balance and objectivity. It is the malaise that comes from inept supervision and a workplace culture that allows ideologically minded staff collectives to call the shots.

BBC director-general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness were forced to quit because their reporters and editors had been regularly and wilfully confusing journalism with mindless ideological activism. The doctoring of speeches given by Mr Trump was the final straw. The BBC spliced together clips of two speeches Mr Trump made on January 6, 2021, when protesters stormed the Capitol in Washington. The speeches were made an hour apart. But they were dishonestly presented to give the impression that Mr Trump actively incited the protesters to attack the bastion of American democracy.

Similar shameless bias has been apparent in the BBC’s coverage of the two years of war in Gaza, not only in its reporting of day-to-day news events on its World Service, but also on its Arabic language service, which is hugely influential across the Middle East. As a leaked 19-page dossier by Michael Prescott, a former journalist and independent external adviser to the BBC’s standards committee, has revealed, coverage of Israeli suffering after Hamas’s barbaric October 7, 2023, slaughter of 1200 Jews conveniently failed to make it on to the Arabic language service. BBC reporting on transsexual issues had been captured by an interventionist specialist LGBTQ desk with extreme views that had led to a “constant drip-feed” of features “celebrating the trans experience without adequate balance or objectivity”.

All of the issues complained about at the BBC deserve forensic examination at the ABC. ABC coverage of events in Gaza has repeatedly accepted propaganda perspectives from Hamas without qualification. Sarah Ferguson’s three-part “Story of the Century” report for Four Corners on Mr Trump and Russian influence uncritically accepted the words of Democrat-aligned national security figures who knew all along the story was false, as it was later proved to be. The national broadcaster has misrepresented audio of gunshots in its war crimes campaigning, and been critically dismissive of independent reporting, particularly by this newspaper, about the dangers to young children posed by the existence of a default bias in favour of medical intervention for gender dysphoria. This has continued despite a growing body of evidence critical of gender clinics internationally.

In Britain, the pushback against the BBC is made obvious in the number of people who are refusing to renew their television licence payments, which go towards funding for the public broadcaster. In Australia, taxpayers do not have a choice but to cough up. The least they can expect is that those in charge of maintaining editorial standards for those forced to pay for the ABC service ensure they are properly served with honest reports, or they should follow the example of Mr Davie and Ms Turness and resign.