The knives are out for the ABC

In recent weeks both the Murdoch and the Fairfax/Rural Press media interests have made strident attacks on the ABC.

In January the chief executive of Sky News, Angelos Frangopoulos, issued a media release claiming that ABC’s new 24-hour TV news would be a “needless duplication” of services already provided. He was referring to the fact that the ABC service would be in competition with his company, and would offer viewers a choice. Sky News is part-owned by the Murdoch family.

He went on to argue that the ABC Charter restricted the ABC to providing “services that commercial broadcasters are unable or unwilling to provide”. This is a highly creative reading of the ABC Act. The Act not only positively requires the ABC to provide news services, but also stipulates that the ABC is to provide “innovative and comprehensive programs” (emphasis added). The use of the word “comprehensive” makes it crystal clear that the ABC is not intended to provide a service restricted to the scraps thrown away by the commercial media.

Also entering the fray from the Murdoch stable was veteran Murdoch executive Malcolm Colless. He wrote in The Australian last January that the ABC’s planned 24-hour TV news was “a taxpayer-funded declaration of war on commercial media outlets”.

This echoed James Murdoch’s earlier speech in Edinburgh where he said that the BBC is “unaccountable”. This implied that the BBC should be more tightly regulated, a claim that appeared to contradict Murdoch’s assertion later in the same speech that there was too much regulation of the commercial media in the UK.

Murdoch, whose media interests span several continents, went on to claim that the scale and scope of the BBC’s interests was “chilling”.

Interviewed by Karen Kissane of The Age, Greg Baxter, corporate affairs spokesman for News Limited in Australia said that “I remember us can’t ever arguing about (ABC) funding. They have been part of the landscape for 70 years."

Baxter may be too young to remember, but Murdoch press attacks on the ABC go back for more than 70 years.

In the first volume of his highly regarded history of the ABC, K.S. Inglis writes that Sir Keith Murdoch’s efforts to hobble the infant ABC radio news service go back as far as 1935.

Murdoch had interests in eleven of the sixty-five B class (radio) stations operating by 1935, and his tough line towards the ABC was plainly intended to protect both his newspapers and his radio stations …

Sir Keith Murdoch did not like the signs of independence in ABC News. Papers under his control began to call for a reduction in the ABC’s revenue from licence fees to stop it competing improperly with private enterprise.

By 1940 Murdoch had a partial victory. The Menzies government decided on a massive cut to the ABC budget, reducing the ABC’s share of the licence fee from twelve shillings to ten.

The Murdoch media were soon joined by the Fairfax/Rural Press group, whose chief executive Brian McCarthy took a slightly different tack, saying that the ABC’s Open Project could undermine the “excellent service” provided to rural communities by his company, and force the closure of some of his newspapers.

However it seems that Mr McCarthy was worried that his newspapers would be threatened by amateur journalists and storytellers from local communities.

ABC Open will provide the services of multimedia producers to help members of regional communities to tell their own stories. Margaret Simons, who has an excellent knowledge of regional media, commented in her blog, The Content Makers, that McCarthy’s outburst was “mostly tosh”:

For starters … There will be a heavy emphasis on training citizens in the use of digital media. All this is appropriate for the role of a public broadcaster. If it works well it will be community led and not the kind of thing that Fairfax Media has ever done or even look like doing in rural Australia or anywhere else.

Secondly, the ABC Open sites will not take advertising. The Rural Press part of Fairfax Media will retain its monopoly or at best duopoly … in many, many regional towns.

Thirdly, Rural Press-Fairfax Media looks a bit silly trying to take the high moral ground here. They have had rural Australia on a platter for many years. What is the result? Extremely patchy. There are some good local papers, but many that are laughably poor, lazy and complacent.

While it is not unusual for the commercial media to attack the ABC, there is a reason why attacks on public broadcasting are growing at this time. The global financial crisis is a significant factor, but there are more fundamental issues.

In blaming the ABC, or the BBC, for their troubles, the commercial media are missing the fundamental changes going on around them. In an earlier piece for On Line Opinion Tom Greenwell discusses the possibility of a post advertising age.

In his book The Chaos Scenario US writer and broadcaster Bob Garfield argues:

For the past four centuries, mass media were funded or at least subsidized by mass marketing, which piggybacked on what we now call “content” to issue messages of its own.

Like the eternal co-dependence of flowers and bees, this was an extremely convenient symbiotic relationship for those involved. Or if you prefer a more spiritual analogy, imagine the media yin coupled snugly with the advertising yang, a transcendent oneness yielding cheap and free content for all. Well, that’s over - or damn near. In the digital age, that time-honored symbiosis is coming apart.

Another US writer, Chris Anderson, takes the argument further. It is not simply the fact that there are other alternatives like DVDs or the Internet. It is not simply the fact that the Internet can act like a giant TiVo machine that can enable viewers to strip out advertisements. It is much more fundamental than that. The point is that these technologies can serve niche audiences much better than traditional broadcasting can. In his book The Long Tail Anderson writes:

The great thing about broadcast is that it can bring one show to millions of people with unmatchable efficiency. But it can’t do the opposite - bring a million shows to one person each. Yet that is exactly what the Internet does so well. The economics of the broadcast era required hit shows - big buckets - to catch huge audiences. The economics of the broadband era are reversed. Serving the same stream to millions of people at the same time is hugely expensive and wasteful for a distribution network optimized for point-to-point communications.

This is not to say that advertising is dead, or will die, but rather that the relationship between advertising and the mass media is changing.

While the Murdoch and Fairfax media have largely been about mass audiences the ABC and the BBC have always had a concern for niche audiences as well. As early adopters of the Internet, and by taking advantage of additional broadcast channels they have been able to serve both minority and mass audiences.

The government has not been deaf to the commercial media’s cries of poverty. Senator Conroy recently announced that commercial TV stations will receive a 33 per cent rebate on their licence fees in 2010 and a 50 per cent rebate in 2011. Commercial TV licence fees were $286 million in 2008-9. If licence fees had been similar in 2010 and 2011 this rebate would be worth more than $200 million.

While such government generosity is unusual, it can be justified on the basis that it is important that all three sectors of broadcasting, commercial, community and government, remain healthy and distinctive.

But the commercial media have not been content with millions of dollars in government rebates. They want to cripple the competition as well. That would be bad for diversity and bad for democracy.