The knives are out for the ABC

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.