Word of warning Auntie - your slip is showing

Liberal spinner Graeme Morris is credited with observing that the ABC is "our [the Liberals'] enemies talking to our friends". How right is he?

This election the ABC will be painstakingly measuring broadcast time given to political parties in an effort to prove her balance. It won't be good enough for critics, but balance is a notoriously difficult thing to measure.

There's very little robust evidence of where the ABC sits just anecdotal evidence of the odd journalistic atrocity and the metrics of broadcast seconds.

Another approach to measuring point of view, and therefore bias, would be to look at a media organisation's audience, its views, and how well the media organisation meets them.

A 2004 study by Professor Clive Bean of QUT found that ABC viewers are more likely to be older, better educated, in a non-manual occupation, rural, politically interested, left-wing, and favour the National Party and Greens leader Bob Brown.

It makes sense. You can envisage an older country constituency weaned from Blue Hills and the Country Hour to Landline, being gradually replaced and overwhelmed by a younger, but not radically younger, better educated Woodstock generation tending to converge on some of the same geographical locations.

The Internet trail of the ABC lets us triangulate this research on television.

The ABC's Drum site runs a regular series of polls, undated, but with a new one appearing on average every two or so days.

This lets us appraise how the ABC audience falls on a number of key issues.

It has some limitations. The audience doesn't choose the questions, the Drum editor, after consultation with a select group, does.

This can be compensated for, because the polls tell us how many people have voted on each question. If the editor's choice is out of line with the audience's preference, one would expect a low response.

Which leads to another complication. Anyone can vote in these polls, so they will be stacked on occasion and therefore unrepresentative of the ABC audience.

A good example is that since Tony Abbott became Opposition leader there have been 123 polls and 277,276 responses. 5% of them on just one question - "Would you vote for Julia Gillard…?"

Acknowledging these limitations the issues which seem to most motivate the ABC audience are Asylum Seekers, Religion, Health, Politics, Corporate Behaviour, and the Environment.

This isn't what the audience says interests it. One recent poll asks the audience "What [one] policy would you like to hear more about this election?" 29% nominated the arts, followed by 18% the environment, 10% infrastructure and 9% health.

This poll also has an extremely high response rate of 10,233 votes, so it too has possibly been stacked, perhaps by artists' collectives crowding around someone's iMac.

It is certainly out of line with the preferences expressed by the community in other surveys. In July Newspoll reported that the most important issue was "health and medicare" followed by "education", "economy", "leadership", "national security" and "asylum seekers". No mention of the arts.

In our most recent comprehensive On Line Opinion political survey taken in mid-July, only one person out of 2,257 in the total un-weighted sample nominated the arts as an issue. Our top issues were the economy followed by climate change, health and education.

The responses to the ABC poll help to place the political allegiances of the audience and tend to confirm the dichotomy apparent in Bean's paper.

Concern about the arts and the environment normally denote left-wing allegiance, although conservative rural dwellers also have a keen interest in the environment.  Infrastructure is more to the right, and health back again to the left, but also indicative of an older group.

It's more nuanced than that, as the environmental questions show. Two-thirds of them are about climate change and climate change is a very good indicator of voting allegiance (also of age and education). Coalition voters are much less likely to believe it is real or substantially caused by humans, than Labor or Greens voters.

On this ground the Drum audience appears mainstream.

73% of the Drum audience believes that "climate change denial" is "extreme and out of touch", while 73% of those surveyed around the same time by Newspoll think climate change is "currently occurring". Not the same question, but the numbers are very close together.

70% of the Drum audience also appears to believe in an ETS, according to a question posed around October 2009. This also aligns pretty well with Newspoll which found the figure in September 2009 to be 67%.

But it's not so mainstream with a strong Greens contingent hidden in these figures. When asked if the Opposition's plans are better than the Government's only 37% agree, suggesting low representation of Coalition voters. 60% also believe that Kevin Rudd "deceived the Australian people about his position on climate change", suggesting a low representation of Labor voters.

But then in a message to legislators, and perhaps pollmeister editors, 62% believes the government is "too focused on tackling climate change and [is] neglecting other …problems".

There's a lot more that could be mined here, but my tentative thesis tends to confirm that the online Drum audience is not dissimilar to the TV audience Bean analysed and is slightly to the left. It probably over-represents Greens voters and under-represents Labor and Coalition, and it definitely over-represents the politically interested.

And does this audience and its attitudes say anything about the lean of the ABC, which is determined by it staff, not its audience?

It does. When you plot staff attitudes, represented by how often they poll an agenda item, against audience interest, represented by their average response, the correlation is weak at 0.2.

Yet, when you look at the top 6 agenda items only it is 0.7, which is strong.

When they concentrate the staff give their audience what it wants, and as that audience leans to the left, albeit with strong right-wing holdouts, that's where the organisation must be sitting.

Memo to Graeme Morris - it's your enemies talking mostly to your enemies.