If America can slash funding to its ABC, why can’t we do it here?

Donald Trump is now preparing to slash some $1.7bn from public media funding. That’s an ABC-and-a-half delightfully subtracted from taxpayer outlay, writes Tim Blair

Imagine Australia without the ABC. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Think of all the money we’d save, and all the economic, cultural and emotional energy we could direct instead towards the positive and productive.

Also, think of all the ABC presenters who’d suddenly be able to reach much larger audiences just by shouting on public transport.

Everyone’s a winner. But now imagine how absurd it would be in 2025 to introduce a brand-new billion-dollar-per-year public broadcasting behemoth into our ABC-free paradise.

Not even the dullest members of the Albanese government would go for it. Possibly not even the Greens.

What would be the point of forcing a massive government-funded monstrosity into a media market already providing practically immeasurable freedom of choice?

President/CEO of National Public Radio (NPR) Katherine Maher and President/CEO of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Paula Kerger testify during a US House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. Picture: Drew Angerer /AFP

But here we are, stuck with the ABC simply because we’ve always been stuck with it. Suggestions of change at the ABC practically provokes acts of self-harm among those who believe the ABC must be permanent and eternal.

In that sense, it’s the solitary Australian institution about which our leftist friends are devotedly, unyieldingly conservative.

The ABC building in Ultimo, Sydney. Does a government-run media operation makes absolutely no sense in media-saturated 2025? Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

Meanwhile, actual conservatives – the right-wing kind – have largely given up on ever privatising or otherwise reforming the ABC.

Too difficult, apparently. Even though a government-run media operation makes absolutely no sense in media-saturated 2025, those self-harming screamers just keep winning.

Fixing the ABC is therefore impossible. Except that it isn’t.

Donald Trump’s modern and visionary US government is now preparing to slash some $1.7bn from public media funding. That’s an ABC-and-a-half delightfully subtracted from taxpayer outlay.

And it’s being done for the same sensible reasons that would apply in Australia to the ABC.

“These are not honest news organisations,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told a media briefing last week.

“These are partisan, left-wing outlets that are funded by the taxpayers, and this administration does not believe it’s a good use of the taxpayers’ time and money.”

Good call.

Leavitt was responding to a reporter citing the concerns of National Public Radio (NPR) chief executive Katherine Maher that funding cuts to her outlet would present “a real risk to public safety of the country”.

She’d presented exactly the same bogus argument often put forward by Australia’s ABC defenders. “Public media, public radio, public television, are a critical part of the emergency response plans of nearly half of the states in this nation,” Maher told CBS.
“If these types of emergency alerting go away, you will have fewer outlets to be able to respond in real time.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told a media conference ”these are not honest news organisations”. Picture: AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Yeah, right. And Australians still need the ABC to save themselves from bushfires and floods – despite the availability of instant phone and internet alerts. Sure they do.

It must be some genetic code thing among tax-funded broadcaster folk, because they all target the same narrow urban demographic. Maher’s own views fit right in.

“America is addicted to white supremacy and that’s the real issue,” she wrote in 2020. “White silence is white complicity.”

As in Australia, rural areas tend to be white, so they are routinely condemned as rednecks and yobs by sophisticated tax-fed journalists.

Right up until their cash is threatened, which is when the rural pity pleading kicks in. Five years on from trashing whitey, Maher now reckons her ridiculously niche ABC-style network is of vital importance to “communities where there are large rural communities, large tribal communities”.

She also claimed that “broadband service is not universal, and heck, cell-phone service is not universal” in these remote wildlands.

Maher was just making things up. Worse still for Maher and her mates, examples abound of NPR doing nothing for rural audiences in times of severe crisis.

When deadly flooding hit Kerrville in Texas earlier this month, NPR stayed with its regular programming. “Instead of providing local news, the NPR affiliate in Kerrville instead aired Morning Edition out of Washington, DC,” Dan Schneider of the conservative press watchdog Media Research Centre reported.

“That day, listeners to NPR heard that the just-passed Reconciliation Bill was an ‘abomination’ and that Trump is a liar.”

Sounds a lot like the ABC, doesn’t it? Likewise, protests against Trump’s public broadcasting cuts are of a similar hysterical tone to those heard in Australia whenever the ABC puts on its poverty jocks.

Paula Kerger, president of another funding target, the Public Broadcasting Service, said the $1.7bn reduction “goes against the will of the American people”.

Easily fixed. Just as in Australia, fans are welcome to donate.

Originally published as If America can slash funding to its ABC, why can’t we do it here?