I have heard rumours coming from inside the corporation that Ita Buttrose will at some point in 2024, resign as head of the ABC. What I suspect has happened under her quite tory tenure is that the ABC has been pruned of many things which are vital to it, and then has let other things deliberately wither. Furthermore given that she was picked by a Prime Minister who although probably didn't break the law, was certainly corrupt enough to break its conventions, her unsaid remit (as far as we know) has been one of deliberate degradation of the ABC.
The thing is that we should have expected this. Ms Buttrose came from a wildly successful career in magazines, including being captain of the ship at the Australian Women's Weekly, before retiring to become a mildly lovable elder stateswoman. This would have been fine except that running the ABC is absolutely not like running a business and putting a demonstratively tory leader in charge, has proven that Ms Buttrose knows keenly the price of everything but the value of nothing and certainly not the value of the ABC.
I will suggest that the ABC as an independent broadcaster, which is owned in commonwealth by us the people of the Commonwealth of Australia, can and does have a responsibility to hold the Government of the day to account. For this reason the ABC has been consistently attacked during its 90 years by both Labor, and UAP and Liberal Governments (functionally there has never really been a Federal Country/National Government). However, taking a stance of being merely anti-government and in the current case, clearly partisan, is bad for the corporation (which is the reason why Ms Buttrose was picked by PM Morrison to run it).
The ABC is an important thing for the Commonwealth of Australia to have, as the commercial media in this country, have backed away from doing actual journalism. Reporting the news with a half-hour bulletin is one thing but the commercial media in this country really does shy away from doing any kind of objective long form journalism. I note that tonight, which is an ordinary night of the week, there is no long form journalism on any of the channels from 7West, Nine Ent Co, Network Ten, or even SBS. Sky News Australia and ABC News 24 are dedicated news channels but even then, Sky News is a passing parade of sycophantic right-wing apparatchiks whose job it is to repeat the current company message of the day until the people who are watching believe it.
I think that the head of the ABC needs to be someone not necessarily with perception and insight but who believes that the corporation should still be there for its bicentennial in 2132.
The last four years have been particularly bad for journalism in Australia. The number of actual journalists on the ground who go out and collect the news has been decimated. Journalists do not for the most part attend council meetings, or even sit in parliament buildings as much; which means that they do not report on the goings on of government because they physically can not (because they do not exist to do so). The height of the pandemic proved this keenly, where we had a special kind of rollingly boring and yet critical pandemonium, where nobody really knew what was going on but and the press packs were tiny. You can now see the end effect of this in print media, where the number of pages produced by News Corp and Nine Ent Co is padded out by sporked press releases from various business and government departments, and where the columnists who actually do write longer pieces are almost always legacy employees.
Radio fares not much better. Long gone are the days when trains were full of people reading newspapers but even when people are in their cars, at least where I live in Sydney, there really only are three radio stations which have any real news content at all. These are ABC Radio National, ABC News Radio, and 2GB which is a Nine Ent Co station. 2GB is a kind of Sky News Lite, where hosts could very well easily rotate between Sky News and 2GB and nobody would be any the wiser.
To someone in want of sinking a nail, every tool is a hammer. Likewise when it comes to journalism, everything is that wee ickle section. News is News. Politics is politics. Finance is finance. Sport is sport. However, to deny that news or sport or finance is not political, is to deny reality. Finance is a competitive sport where there are losers and mostly those losers are the great general public.
I do not like the immediacy of reportage inside the Canberra Bubbles as though it was sport but the people who don't like democracy do. If you can reduce the news to just what is going on here and now with no context, then this is excellent at giving people the illusion that they are informed when in reality they are not. Yes it is important but there are many other areas outside the Bubble.
The real irony in the twenty-first century is that although the news cycle has sped up, media space has expanded to infinity because of both the internet and multi-channel services on digital media, that actual journalistic ability has shrunk. There is a flurry of activity when someone in power resigns and then the resulting speculation of who is going to replace them, but when it comes to the actual decisions being made and why they are happening, we get almost nothing.
The inherent problem with news is that both the news itself and the messages coming from government and business are often completely incoherent. With skeleton staffs to try and makes sense of the floating detritus of events that have happened but aren't quite of themselves actual news, we the general public are very much let down. This is excellent for the people in power, not just in government but also in business because they can act with impunity, safe in the knowledge that nobody can hold them to account because nobody knows what's going on. There is more to the news than simply running around and saying what is happening at this exact minute in time. In fact, in many ways that isn't that vital because the next minute something else is happening, and what we should have all learned from the pandemic and even tracking back well into last decade, is that a slightly longer view on the problems facing the nation is actually what is important. How soon is now? I might be the son and the heir of nothing in particular but even I need a slightly wider brief as an informed responsible citizen to know what's going on.
This last point is why I hope Ita Buttrose either resigns or is fired. It is increasingly obvious that she works not for the betterment of the ABC as a vital public asset, nor the pursuit of journalism as a vital public need. The axing of a central political journalism department and the personal removal o journalists on the say so of outside interested parties who do not like to hear the truth, is bad for both the ABC and democracy in general. I have tiptoed around three serious issues here but it seems that breaking events may force me to tip my hand.
On Monday, the union members who are staff at the ABC, passed a 125-3 no confidence motion in David Anderson as their Managing Director. The ABC Board meets today, and I think that given that various WhatsApp messages and emails, that the wider board has no other ethical choice sack this knave and then formally apologise to every single Australian for their editorial decisions and business actions which have followed (including the sacking of some journalists) in recent weeks in relation to Palestine and genocide.
Now that I think about it, the fact that the staff at the ABC, have sent strong and unequivocal message to their management, is necessary. As the ABC is a valuable public asset, then having it run by incompetent, racist and fully-captured leaders, is unacceptable if not unconscionable. Having the staff say to p David Anderson they have no confidence in him, is not a far step away from the staff themselves saying that they they have no confidence in the ABC. It is absolutely essential that the people who live in a democracy have an actually fair and balanced media.
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