ABC’s ‘perfect’ new chairman must start by telling the truth
The challenge for Kim Williams is that the national broadcaster has lost credibility over its many false reports.
Anthony Albanese was right to claim that Kim Williams’ credentials to chair the ABC board are so “perfect” as to be almost preordained. They are also politically unimpeachable; how could the right criticise the appointment of a former chief executive of Foxtel and News Limited, and how could the left take exception to a man with a storied career in the arts who also happens to be the son-in-law of the late Gough Whitlam?
Experience, goodwill and pedigree will be no encumbrance on Williams.
His main obstacle will be the self-righteous, staff-collective mentality, seemingly impervious to reasonable direction, and uninterested in charter obligations.
The dynamic is as obvious as it is intolerable. This broadcasting behemoth with a staff of 4000 consuming more than $1bn a year will not be bracing for new direction from an incoming chair but instinctively looking to control or defy him.
Williams has already spoken encouragingly about obligations for diversity, integrity, and impartiality. He has even declared the public broadcaster suffers from a culture that is “obsessively interior” (an observation redolent of my longstanding “their ABC” barb).
But what can he do about it? The chair-designate will be dolefully aware that the greatest tool at the board’s disposal has been denied him – the chance to appoint a hand-picked managing director.
Under outgoing chair Ita Buttrose, the board secretly reappointed David Anderson in April last year for an additional five years in his $1m-a-year position. This was announced four months later, only after details were leaked to The Sydney Morning Herald.
While Williams should be alarmed at this lack of transparency from the board and management he inherits, the more critical point is that he seems stuck with the deeply unimpressive Anderson, an ABC lifer who started off stocking kitchens and sorting mail in the Adelaide studios more than 30 years ago.
Unless, of course, the new chair and his board risk going down the tumultuous and costly path of undoing that appointment.
The latest stand-off between staff and management hinges on coverage of the Middle East. Bereft of editorial leadership, ambivalent about the cultural values that should underpin its own standards, the ABC habitually throws up these adolescent crises, where the staff use the organisation for ideological crusades and management seems either disinclined or unable to stop them.
Williams must convince this collective that to be objective and impartial the ABC must stand firm on some core values. Sound journalism needs to be unabashed about valuing democracy over anarchy, liberty over tyranny and accountability over intimidation.
Journalism does not need to be impartial between right and wrong. Impartiality cannot mean claims from the terrorist butchers of Hamas are given equal weight to claims from democratic, transparent and accountable Israel.
Likewise, reality must trump ideology and sanctimony in climate coverage, so that weather facts, energy capabilities and economic costs are given as much consideration as arbitrary global emissions-reduction goals.
Hysterical climate alarmism needs to be checked against weather records – stick to the science.
This does not happen at the ABC. Like most green-left media, it pushes emotion over rationalism, and it ignores known costs of Australian emissions reduction in favour of imagined benefits.
In Indigenous affairs, economic management, union power, education policy, gender issues, immigration settings and other areas, the ABC seems incapable of seeing problems and potential solutions from any perspective other than the progressive or fashionable one. This has become its central flaw, and correcting it first requires insight, then courage, and ultimately astute managerial adjustments.
After the announcement of his appointment this week, Williams turned up on Radio National Breakfast, the home ground of ABC groupthink. And he indicated a grasp of the problem, saying he would like the ABC to be “obsessively exterior in its focus, on audiences, on the nation, on the policy direction of the nation, on the intellect of the nation, and the creativity of the nation”. Fair enough. See issues from other perspectives, be open-minded, welcome a diversity of ideas, and think about alternative responses.
Williams told host Patricia Karvelas that “some aspects of the ABC have become bland”, and Karvelas then failed to press him on which parts. She might have proffered some options to test his reaction; could he have been talking about Q+A, local radio or, God forbid, Radio National, programs where conformity of viewpoint and predictability of perspectives are deeply ingrained?
We will see where Williams seeks to “de-bland” the national broadcaster. Still, it was alarming when he went along with the trope about News Corp “attacks” against the ABC. Instead of welcoming debate and public accountability – and telling the ABC to harden up – the incoming chairman identified with this paranoia, labelling some News Corp attacks as “fundamentally, unhelpfully, destructive”.
Really? If he wants to talk about “fundamentally, unhelpfully, destructive” attacks, Williams might want to investigate the ABC’s reporting of the ugly, unlikely and uncorroborated allegations that ended Christian Porter’s career, or its politicised coverage of the Brittany Higgins case, or the way that regional ABC defamed Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, or how taxpayers’ money funded the defamation payout from Louise Milligan’s personal Twitter targeting of a Coalition MP.
Williams will not be successful unless he can deal with these editorial and management missteps, and the culture that produces them. On RN he referred glowingly to Marty Baron’s Collision of Power – which recounts the author’s editorship of The Washington Post during the rise of Donald Trump.
Williams said he drew on the book for lessons in diversity and impartiality. “When you read it, you get a sense of just how complex these requirements are in a modern world,” he said. Complex indeed. The Post’s coverage of Trump obsessed over the man rather than the substance, a failing best encapsulated by its 2018 Pulitzer Prize, along with The New York Times, for coverage of the so-called Russiagate scandal. Those Russia conspiracy claims are now so discredited after the Mueller inquiry and Durham report that there have been calls for the Pulitzer to be recalled.
Russiagate stands as a cautionary example of ideological agenda-setting overriding plain facts. Along with the Post and the Times, the ABC was all in on Russiagate, producing endless coverage including a long-running podcast called Russia, If You’re Listening and an expensive three-part Four Corners series by Sarah Ferguson. This content lives on, freely available on iView and the ABC website – unadulterated and uncorrected.
So long as these monuments to journalistic folly remain uncorrected by the ABC, and so long as the ABC does not apologise to the public for the deception, the public broadcaster cannot seriously be committed to truth and objectivity.
There is a challenge right there for the new chairman.
How can the ABC hold current and future politicians and business leaders to the truth until it demonstrates its own commitment, however uncomfortable?
More Coverage
Settler-colonial ethos is our least worthy export
Like other Australians confronted with daft academic ideas, I blamed the US or France and ignored my own country’s contribution. It was easy, but unfair.
What have our universities become?
A lurch towards activism and a focus on funding have desecrated our universities. They should once again become safe spaces – for the getting of wisdom.