Will ABC managing director Hugh Marks finally address lack of diversity?
The Canberra press gallery contains but a few political conservatives. Most Canberra-based journalists regard themselves as what, in private, they would term as progressive, meaning left-of-centre or leftists in fact.
Marks was successful in his previous role at Nine. But the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster is quite a different outfit.
At Nine, the task of management is to make profits and keep the share price as high as possible. At the ABC, management heads to Canberra every now and then with a begging bowl seeking for it to be filled with lots of taxpayers’ money. Moreover, unlike commercial media, the ABC has a guaranteed regular income flow.
Despite the calls by some ABC critics for the ABC to be privatised and sold off, this is unlikely to ever happen. The ABC receives strong support from the Labor and Greens parties along with the teals. It also has support among some rural-based Liberal Party MPs plus the Nationals.
Marks’s address to the NPC was bland at best and dull at worst. No doubt it was drafted by the ABC communications department which, for the most part, fails to communicate. Marks described his employer as “a precious national asset of a kind that you won’t find in many other countries”. How nice.
Marks also declared: “We are not beholden to political patronage or commercial investment or touchy advertisers. We are free for everyone.”
This does not say much for the journalism at, say, Nine.
In any event, Marks’s assessment can never be tested. We simply do not know how many Australians would support the ABC if they had to pay a subscription fee. Like, for example, the viewers of Sky News.
The BBC is primarily funded by a licence fee. It is illegal to watch Britain’s national broadcaster without making a payment. This means the British public has some autonomy with respect to the BBC, involving a “don’t-watch-don’t-pay” option. Australian taxpayers, however, have no such option.
In his 25-minute address, Marks made only one criticism of the ABC. He suggested the ABC should do more to own its mistakes, learn from them and do better. That was it. Yawn.
However, life became more interesting when question time emerged. The ABC’s Jane Norman was hosting the NPC event. She recently took over from the ABC’s Laura Tingle. This suggests an ABC-NPC entente. At the conclusion of the talk, Norman said, “Hugh, thank you for your address today.” It was as if your man Hugh were a bestie, so informal was the thank you. But, then, the ABC is very much a workers collective (or soviet) where the staff essentially run the joint – so, in a sense, Hugh is just another comrade.
Norman asked about the current controversy at the BBC over its Panorama program’s reporting about President Donald Trump. Marks suggested “they have been chipping away at that (the BBC’s) independence”. This overlooked the fact that the BBC has apologised to Trump for its misreporting of his January 6, 2021, speech.
Life livened up further when Marks took questions from Sky News’ Cameron Reddin and The Australian’s Jack Quail. Marks declared there wasn’t any comparison between the BBC’s report of Trump’s speech and that of the ABC in its Four Corners program of February 1, 2021. This was mere denial. The BBC’s report was more unprofessional than the ABC’s, but the ABC’s Four Corners report also contained errors.
However, Marks conceded that, as with the BBC, there were discussions in existence about the ABC’s reportage of transgender issues. Until this moment, there had been no recognition by Marks of any problems with the ABC’s programming.
But then Marks let his no-problems-here stance falter. He said the ABC “should provide program formats that enable different relevant perspectives to meet in a more of a town-hall format”.
The questions from the two News Corp journalists were directed at the ABC’s essential problem; namely, the lack of viewpoint diversity. For starters the ABC is a conservative-free zone, without a conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its main news and current affairs programs.
ABC management and some ABC journalists deny this, but no one has been able to name one such conservative.
Take one example. Rightly or wrongly, 60 per cent of Australians voted No in the 2023 referendum for an Indigenous voice to parliament. I cannot think of one prominent ABC journalist in Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra who would have voted No.
And then there is the lack of viewpoint diversity in so many ABC current affairs programs containing panels where everyone essentially agrees with everyone else in an essentially left-of-centre way. This is primarily because many conservative commentators have been cancelled by the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster while some others do not like appearing before hostile presenters and audiences.
That’s why so many ABC programs are so boring. Witness the final days of The Drum and Q+A.
The ABC’s current affairs were captured by the left in the late 1960s and early 70s by influential leftist Allan Ashbolt. This is referred to in KS Inglis’s semi-official ABC history titled This is the ABC (MUP, 1983). Ashbolt’s influence lives on beyond the grave.
On ABC Radio National’s Saturday Extra on November 15, presenter Nick Bryant interviewed the former BBC executive Roger Mosey. Both are left-of-centre types.
However, Mosey acknowledged that “there is probably some sort of bias or unconscious bias going on there (at the BBC) in the way it deals with Donald Trump”.
He said “the BBC has got a sort of benign, slightly paternalistic liberal drive behind it which doesn’t really reflect necessarily the countries we’re all becoming now”.
That is the problem with the BBC and the staff-controlled ABC. It appears that Marks has yet to recognise the ABC’s left-of-centre or liberal (in the American and British sense of the term) ethos.
Unless he does, don’t expect the ABC to be anything but a conservative-free zone lacking viewpoint diversity.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.
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It was very much a “home ground” event on Wednesday this week when Hugh Marks addressed the National Press Club in Canberra for the first time as managing director and editor-in-chief of the ABC.