The ‘insanity’ that has infected the ABC

“Insanity” has infected the ABC after the departure of high-profile host Stan Grant. And the national broadcaster needs to own up.

COMMENT

The ABC’s response to crises is like the Cat in the Hat cleaning a house: It fixes one problem by creating a bigger one elsewhere.

The pink ring on the bath becomes a pink stain on Mother’s white dress which becomes pink marks on the rug and on and on until the whole landscape is so blighted it can only be cleansed by an apocalyptic explosion.

Thankfully the Cat and his alphabet of helpers survive and the house ends up back to normal. But the ABC seems to have forgotten what normal is.

Like most Australians I love the ABC. At its best its news delivery — in terms of resources and reach alone — is second to none. And when its reporters tackle big stories in a clear-eyed and genuinely impartial way they are formidable.

And of course if it wasn’t for the ABC Kids app millions of Australian children would be torching buildings and millions of Australian adults would be in psychiatric institutions.

But at this rate Aunty might need to check into one herself, because it seems to be experiencing a sort of schizoid corporate personality disorder.

In many ways this is as much the fault of social media mobs as it is of the public broadcaster but ultimately, as the supposedly responsible party, the ABC must be accountable for its own acts, not the devil that made it do them.

ABC Q+A host Stan Grant on his final show before taking indefinite leave. Picture: ABC

It is a bit like a flustered parent dealing with misbehaving toddlers. They might have started the fire but it’s the grown-up’s job to ensure the house doesn’t burn down.

And again, thank you for ABC Kids.

Because if there’s one thing I know about social media mobs it’s that you should never do what they say. As soon you cave into one you will be lynched by the next.

Instead organisations, like people, need a strong understanding of who they are and what values they have wrapped within a protective barrier of commonsense.

And all these qualities seemed to instantly evaporate when the ABC found itself having to deal with the fallout from the death of the Queen and coronation of the King and ended up flopping from pillar to post and making all the wrong decisions along the way.

It started of course with the blanket coverage and wall-to-wall veneration of Elizabeth II’s passing from this mortal coil, which clearly troubled its high-profile presenter Stan Grant. As an Indigenous man, he felt there was not enough acknowledgment of the Crown’s dark and often violent imperial and colonial past.

For any Indigenous person — and indeed many others — that is more than fair enough. And fair enough is exactly what the ABC should have said to him.

They could have simply said “Yep, fair cop” and commissioned a show or a series for him to expose these innumerable ravages. They could even have called it: “Underbelly: Empire”

You’re welcome.

Michael Rowland has been supportive of Grant in the wake of the coronation drama.

But instead the powers that be decided to overcorrect — as powers that be inevitably do — and turn the subsequent coronation coverage into an apologia for colonialism.

Worse still they roped in Grant to deliver this critique to an audience of hundreds of thousands and in so doing handed him the biggest hospital pass in Australian television history.

At this point, let’s just take a moment to apply some of that aforementioned commonsense.

Every single person who tuned into the ABC for the coronation was — by fact of that alone — either approving of, fascinated by or interested in the monarchy. And their reward for tuning in was a shit-canning of it.

Speaking of cans it is as though someone bought a tin of tomatoes at the supermarket and opened it up to find baked beans. This isn’t the fault of the tomatoes or the beans, it’s the fault of those who put together the product.

Likewise none of this was Grant’s fault and nothing he said was wrong. It was just the wrong place, the wrong time and the wrong way. Little wonder he felt like he’d been thrown under a bus.

But of course it didn’t end there. The ABC was subjected to thousands of complaints and the usual Twitter outrage and now had to embark upon the inevitable internal review and external probe and suchlike procedures that are only otherwise found in an operating theatre or online porn.

David Spears in protest over the departure of Q+A host Stan Grant. Picture: Twitter.

Again, ridiculous. The ABC could again simply have said: “Fair cop, next time we’ll do coronations and colonial atrocities in separate programs” but instead it had to collapse into an existential crisis.

And of course it didn’t end there either. Because Stan Grant was made the whipping boy of right-wingers and racists — as well as otherwise rational critics — and has now famously withdrawn from public life because he felt himself hung out to dry by ABC management.

And so now the ABC and its pantheon of power has belatedly unleashed a tsunami of adoration for the departing Grant after — let’s try to keep up — ignoring Indigenous perspectives on the Queen’s death, setting Stan up as a Coronation-killer, caving to a Kafka-esque review of the crowning, failing to defend Grant from the blowback he copped from their programming decisions and then finally swamping social media with the impression that any criticism of this binfire is racist.

Have I missed anything? Oh yes: Apparently the ABC is racist too. And I honestly don’t know if this last claim is a weapon wielded by the left or the right.

This is surely insanity. And it is an insanity infecting not only our national broadcaster but every facet of our national life. Hysteria has become our home.

I hope Stan is OK and I hope he comes back. And God-willing commonsense follows quickly thereafter.

Originally published as The ‘insanity’ that has infected the ABC