‘Disdain for the public’: Out-of-touch ABC exposed yet again in Laura Tingle affair

The debate about whether the nation is racist actually exposes the core difference in philosophy and accountability between Aunty and News Corp, or other commercial media.

Chief political correspondent for the ABC’s 7.30 program, Laura Tingle. ABC

Imagine you run a media organisation that has a guaranteed annual income stream of $1.2bn, a loyal staff of 4000, the support of the Labor Party, Greens, unions, academia and a host of leftist activist organisations, overseen by a largely sympathetic and impotent board, and you do not need to turn a profit or meet any KPIs, yet you cower from criticism and believe your organisation is being victimised in public debate. This is the persecution complex of David Anderson and the ABC.

“I think there are a lot of News Corp reactions, a lot of News Corp attention that the ABC gets regularly every week,” a sulky Anderson told Senate estimates this week before Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young interjected: “News Corp are obsessed with the ABC, aren’t they?”

“Yes, they are,” Anderson said, glumly. He looked and sounded for all the world like Neil from The Young Ones, with a buzz cut.

ABC managing director David Anderson. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Anderson would be happier if nobody had a view about the ABC. And its only scrutiny came from the leftist presenter of its own Media Watch program, Paul Barry. So timid is Anderson about criticism that he told me two years ago, on camera, in a buttonhole chat made necessary because of his repeated refusal of our interview requests, that he would happily join me on air if only he were invited. I followed up countless times, including this week, and he has never turned up – a media leader afraid to discuss his organisation in the media.

ABC journalists often criticise political, business and community leaders for refusing to make themselves available for interviews on matters of public interest, and rightly so. Yet this billion-dollar-a-year taxpayer behemoth thinks its accountability begins and ends with in-house interviews and an annual appearance at Senate estimates.

The Laura Tingle affair reveals much more about the ABC than the well-known green-left predilections of the 7.30 program’s political correspondent. It shows the broader staff disregard for the ABC charter, its defiance of management, as well as the board and management’s impotence in imposing editorial standards.

The public broadcaster is a staff-run collective. A succession of meek managing directors has ingrained this mismanagement style, and restoration of the position of staff-elected board director has formalised the arrange­ment. Even the writers of Utopia might have baulked at scripting the most blatant and embarrassing lapse in editorial standards for the staff-elected director as being slightly beyond satire.

Laura Tingle took aim at Peter Dutton's comments over cuts to migration.

But then Tingle probably won the ballot for the board seat precisely because she is such a senior and reliably left-of-centre commentator; the position is one of staff advocacy after all. (Do we think someone at the ABC is still searching for a mainstream or right-of-centre candidate? Have they checked Broome, Bourke or Ceduna?)

The ABC seems to have given up any pretence on bias, even after incoming chair Kim Williams made encouraging noises earlier this year. Tingle was publicly rebuked and “counselled” only after it became clear a public outcry demanded something – Anderson described this outcry as a “News Corp pile-on”.

If Anderson wants to understand the meaning of a media pile-on, he should examine ABC versus George Pell, ABC versus Christian Porter or perhaps ABC versus border protection and reliable energy.

He should stop sulking about others and improve the standards he oversees.

Instead, after allowing a leading long-time leftist operative and commentator, Phillip Adams, to host hours of nightly national airtime on Radio National for three decades, Anderson has replaced him with another leading leftist operative and commentator, David Marr. Imagine the giggles in the boardroom as they ignore their charter and take taxpayers’ money to run “their ABC” for their own ideological ends.

This provides laughs at Ultimo but insults taxpayers.

The ABC’s editorial policies clearly state it “has a statutory duty to ensure that the gathering and presentation of news and information is impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism”. The charter also demands it reflects cultural diversity, yet there is no ideological div­ersity among the ABC’s panth­eon of presenters and leading journalists. They range from impartial to hard left – so they cover one half of the spectrum, and the Marr appointment entrenches the drift.

New ABC chair Kim Williams ‘made encouraging noises earlier this year’. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

As we saw in parliament this week, the ABC can always rely on the Greens and Labor to defend the likes of Tingle and Marr, along with management. The further to the left the senators, the more vigorously they defend the ABC – they kind of give the game away.

On Media Watch, Barry is unlikely to take time out from pushing climate alarmism, bashing Israel, chastising News Corp and pulling the wings off flies to probe the colonisation of the public broadcaster by his ideological soulmates. Astonishingly, this week he criticised me and others for blaming bloodshed in Gaza on Hamas and focusing too often on anti-Semitism in Australia.

Here we have a taxpayer-funded media organisation spending millions of dollars a year smearing its commercial rivals in unhinged attacks yet cowering in the face of questions about its own operations. Taxpayers are yet to receive an explanation or apology for the millions spent arguing Donald Trump was installed by Vladimir Putin, pursuing Pell or on paying Louise Milligan’s private defamation settlement.

Short of the Coalition winning a whopping majority in both houses and growing some cojones, it will go on like this forever. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that future governments are given licence by frustrated taxpayers to constrict its funding.

The left was always going to populate institutions such as the ABC, along with academia and the public service.

ABC Media Watch presenter Paul Barry. Source: X

A bigger worry now is how the left influences capital as well, through the insidious ESG agenda and the way it is supercharged by union-controlled industry superannuation funds.

Paul Keating knew what he was doing. The ESG agenda would be a fascinating investigation for Four Corners. Perhaps they will get on to it just after they expose the poor productivity of public servants, the constraint of excessive bureaucratic red tape on the housing crisis and small business, and the impossibility of an affordable and practical renewables-plus-storage model.

That we know the ABC will never explore such topics tells us as much about the ideological bent of the public broadcaster. It is probably impossible to overturn this prejudice, it comes with the territory of government funding.

Better, perhaps, to concentrate on bite-sized pieces of reform. We might demand that a publicly funded broadcaster that has teams of people filling Instagram with dross might preserve suffi­ci­ent resources in broadcast news for journalists and camera crews to provide timely coverage of a news event like the Bondi Junction stabbings, which occurred 20 minutes from its Ultimo headquarters. We might even demand that the ABC focus on some important issues such as anti-Semitism. Perversely, this was something Tingle and her fellow travellers used to justify her claim that Australia is a racist country.

“But we clearly have an issue with racism,” Tingle said in a statement that rebutted her own organisation’s finding against her. “For some months now, for example, The Australian newspaper has been devoting considerable space to its alarm about a rise in anti-Semitism in Australia.”

For months Tingle and the ABC have largely ignored or played down the rampant anti-Semitism gripping the pro-Palestinian protests and the nation more generally. But under fire themselves, they latch on to anti-Semitism for justification, using the Australian Jewish community as human shields – it is perverse.

This debate about whether the nation is racist actually exposes the core difference in philosophy and accountability between the ABC and News Corp or other commercial media.

Tingle’s view shows disdain for the public who fund the ABC and to whom it should be accountable – at the ABC they take money from the public but they are not really answerable or connected to them.

Perhaps Tingle and her ABC colleagues tell themselves this allows them to make dispassionate assessments of our national psyche, to see the public for what they really are and to be frank and fearless about it. Or, more likely, it means they are detached from the audiences they are supposed to serve and it tempts them into setting themselves apart, identifying with a morally superior elite. You be the judge.

At News Corp the people who fund the journalism do so by free choice, we survive at the whim of subscribers, advertisers and viewers. The judgment of consumers provides ultimate and unavoidable accountability; if commercial media fails to fill consumer needs or resonate with people, it will fail – simple as that.

One model encourages a connection and understanding of mainstream values; the other lives off the enforced charity of the mainstream and allows people to isolate themselves in a protected world of permanent, unaccountable, public employment.

One model can survive only with diversity of thought and innovation; the other has guaranteed tenure that breeds groupthink and torpidity. They are polar opposites and are bound to clash in the culture wars. The question is whether, economically and culturally, we can afford both.