ABC guidelines - one more skirmish in the culture wars

As I write this, Mark Scott, the Managing Director of the ABC, is speaking to the Sydney Institute, to announce a new set of Editorial Guidelines, negotiated between the Board and the organisation since he took over in May.

We can wonder at the use of the conservative Sydney Institute, at which Scott expects some “civilised” discussion, according to his speech. He is clearly saying that the new guidelines are a reaction to the ferocious criticism the ABC endures from the Right. Whether he is defying them or surrendering we will eventually deduce from changes in the schedule. Either way, the guidelines are not being announced in the presence of journalists.

Paul Keating has already denounced the thing, with his usual passion:

Yet the only apologia for this brazen interference by the Howard Government is the new whispered word balance, which decoded means - let’s hear more from us.

By the time you’ve read my account, you may agree that he has a point.

The current guidelines are still available here. In News and Current Affairs, the ABC’s mantra is accuracy, impartiality and objectivity.

7.2.1 The ABC is committed to providing programs of relevance and diversity which reflect a wide range of audience interests, beliefs and perspectives, presented in a wide variety of program styles.
7.2.2 In order to provide such a range of views the ABC may decide to broadcast programs which explore, or are presented from, particular points of view, such as documentaries and programs containing opinion and comment.
7.2.3 All programs containing factual content are required, in the same way as news and current affairs, drama, comedy and entertainment programs, to comply with all relevant editorial policies.

Sounds good to me. But independent filmmakers realise there is an anomaly. While Australian documentarians financed by a license fee are clearly and contractually bound by the editorial guidelines, acquisitions are not. What about Michael Moore? Or Outfoxed? Or Bruce Petty’s new film, Global Haywire? Or Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth? Do they have to be honest etc … or balanced?

What is to stop the ABC buying documentaries by ratbags? Recently, it broadcast an approving film about The Da Vinci Code. Ten minutes on cable will show you a host of programs that are simply superstitious. There is a policy hole here.

This is not too difficult. It is common sense that all documentaries on the ABC should adhere to high standards of factual integrity. It is easy to badge up individual programs so we can see they are being transmitted as contributions to a debate.

The ABC already uses global rules of diversity - “a wide range of audience interests, beliefs and perspectives” - so it is easy to think of external programs as part of a mix.

The ABC has now extended the editorial guidelines to cover all forms of production, which includes drama and comedy. As Scott said:

The policies sets out four main types of content the ABC produces: news and current affairs, factual and topical, opinion and performance - each with different requirements. And meeting these minimum requirements will be mandatory for all staff involved in the production of content.

We can imagine the frost in the air as the Chaser gang realised they were up for social control and ideological evaluation. Was the ABC to go on a national hunt for Right wing comedians?

It is noticeable that the documents explicitly mention satire. Staff have been reassured that “satire has a legitimate place in ABC content”, although “staff involved in satirical content need to consider the potential for satire to cause harm to groups or individuals and should refer upwards”.

I think the inclusion of drama opens up a new space, but we will wait and see what the judgments imply. The requirement is anodyne - “honesty, fairness, independence and respect” - but the independent sector will be fascinated to know what additional pressures are placed on script discussions.

I recently worked on an SBS program which neatly illustrates the broadcaster’s dilemma with the independent documentary community. The project follows three people who are terminally ill and advocates of euthanasia. It is made on public money. If I was an opponent of euthanasia, I would be pretty pissed off. It would be useful if the ABC could find some way to manage this situation in its new editorial guidelines.

Its solution is to invent something called “opinion” as a category of program, alongside news and performance. Here’s Scott’s description:

The new category of Opinion will be content presented from a partisan point of view about a matter of public contention. This content will be signposted as opinion and the impartiality test will be - over a period of time - has the ABC presented a plurality of views?

I don’t have a problem with the “plurality of views” test, which is inherent anyway in the existing guidelines. But the use of the “opinion” category is a bit peculiar.

I can imagine why the word came up. No less than four people on the ABC board were or are op-ed writers for the Murdoch press, and use their columns to run highly partisan rants. Brunton, Albrechtson and Windschuttle are prominent Right wing intellectuals, known for a hostile attitude to the ABC.

But I think it is a poisonous term, particularly as it is used by Right wing advocates in the press. The term doesn’t have any standards. That is “just your opinion”. You just vent what you think. Opinion is an alternative to facts, and indeed to argument. We are close to the idea of the Internet rant.

The board members clearly deliver a certain kind of material under that rubric of “opinion”. If they were writing an essay, or a proper argument, or reporting a conference, they would behave very differently. It would take longer, for a start, and they would find references, and assemble evidence, and change their minds in the presence of confounding facts.

It seems that “opinion” should refer to An Inconvenient Truth, but then the film is the complete opposite of “just an opinion” - it is a mass of facts. The objections to Michael Moore are not to his opinions, but to his facts. Documentary doesn’t deal in “opinion”, but the lived experience of real people.

In fact, these programs can be dealt with in a completely traditional framework, straight out of the existing guidelines. Is the fact set complete? True? Does it deal honestly with objections? If it doesn’t, it is a bad documentary, and shouldn’t be broadcast. It is not a question of whether its opinion should be balanced by a contrary view. There’s something odd going on, a kind of relativism. If a program has journalistic integrity, you can’t mount a contrary case, because it will fail the same test. Watch any episode of Four Corners.

In my euthanasia case, we ought to be able to show the film to fair minded conservatives, and have them agree that it represents a reasonable description of the arguments, and of the human consequences.

In this sort of situation, the problem is not primarily about the inherently opinion based nature of the film. It is actually about two other problems - the broadcaster needs to be prepared to spend enough money to make sure it passes my fair-minded conservative test, and programs should not be dumbed down and sexed up to make them entertaining. So I am not sure the opinion category gets to the heart of the question.

What is more, the idea that these programs are about debate is actually naive, or more probably disingenuous. In our euthanasia film, for example, the ultimate issues are not about a clash of ideas at all. We can pretend to be logical all we like, but the issue is really about power. There are enough people in our society agin euthanasia for religious reasons for governments to avoid the issue. We could each face a grisly death because these folk think that God wants it, and all their secular objections about processes and slippery slopes are just a smokescreen.

Talking about balance doesn’t work. Saying that depiction is “just my opinion” is nonsense, because the film is deployed to incorporate the layered information and experience to show that our description is convincing. You can’t make an equal documentary in the sector, because it would fail the journalistic honesty tests embedded in the existing editorial guidelines.

Mark Scott is also emphasising the notion of “impartiality”. Over time, an audience should not be able to perceive a bias or editorial line inside the ABC. Fair enough, though there are many values issues in which we strongly think the ABC should be partial to quality and not partial to degradation.

Reading slightly between the lines, “impartiality” here is not a judgelike position of distanced objectivity, in which the broadcaster is committed to a positive process of searching for the truth, but something a bit more namby pamby. He really means “diversity”, mixed up with the notion that the ABC should be “without fear or favour”. Hence:

The Editorial Policies now require the ABC to be impartial as a broadcaster and generator of content. As we assess the output of each of our platforms - for example, ABC TV, Radio National, local stations such as 702 ABC Sydney or 774 ABC Melbourne - there is now the expectation that there is platform impartiality. That there is a demonstrated plurality of opinion and perspective.

The big deal is plurality. What difference does this make to the independent sector? Scott is not entirely specific - he says something worrying but doesn’t crystallise his meaning:

This will have particular impact on our documentary production and acquisitions as well as content that is clearly designated opinion. We want passion and conviction. But passion and conviction that comes from the widest range of perspectives on the things that matter for all Australians.

“The widest range of perspectives”. I hope they fall back on the time-honoured panel technique, in which Gerard Henderson, as the only right wing pundit not on a government broadcaster board, can ramble on in his usual way while everyone else rolls their eyes. Watching him defend Fox broadcasting would be a delight in itself.

I presume the ABC, in seeking a range of “opinion” to purchase and license, is not going to find a bunch of whackos to tell us that Darwin was wrong, the earth is flat and our children are dying from vaccinations. If they do, a variety of interesting and powerful establishments will be after them with great joy.

I dare them to finance an Australian program denying the reality of the Greenhouse effect and increasing levels of CO2. Indeed, I dare an Australian filmmaker to make it.

SBS has tried to deal with this in a way which is actually pathetic. A strong film which leads the audience to feel sick about the invasion of Iraq is “balanced” by whatever it can find next week which runs the other way. From a ratings and audience point of view this doesn’t work, because the alternative films are so wussy.

The ABC and SBS already happily support a licensed Right wing filmmaker. His name is Don Parham, and I work with him on some projects, though we fight too much about politics to actually accomplish anything on a controversial film. He always maintains that he is neglected and discriminated against; I answer that he has made more films in Melbourne than most other filmmakers; he tells me it is more difficult for him; I tell him he gets more rope to deal in opinions than anyone else I know … and so it goes.

I think the problem is temporary. There are a pile of political documentaries at the moment from the US which are obviously polemical, but that bubble will collapse as soon as Bush ceases to be president. Unless they find and anoint another Bush heavy, in which case we will probably have more important problems to worry about.

Australian documentaries about political terrain are much more nuanced anyway. The President versus David Hicks followed his father on a journey. Sounds of War explored the Iraq War through music. Etc. As one former head of documentary at the ABC, Mike Rubbo, once put it very succinctly on a panel: “we don’t do agitprop”, and Australian audiences truly don’t want to be hectored, lectured, patronised and led on group hate sessions. (Like, for instance, a lot of Fox News.)

I suppose this piece is just a long journey to something obvious. The ABC and the independent sector are charting the great movements and dilemmas of the times. That, not balance and diversity, is the real importance of the work. The government of the day is out of touch, and committed to policies which are not historically or scientifically accurate, in which they are slaves to prejudice and superstition.

They don’t like funding a great machine for detecting the truth, and they invent the idea that there are other truths, equally important, that are being suppressed.

As a minor worker in that truth machine, this makes me very uneasy. Is my work to be suppressed so they can give the money to anyone who will lie at their bidding?

A couple of specific things from Mark Scott’s speech worried me.

But under our new editorial policies, we will be looking for further diversity of voices - ensuring the ABC is the town square where debate can flourish and different voices heard. I have encouraged the Director of Television to work with the Media Watch team to review their format and content next year to ensure there is more opportunity for debate and discussion around contentious and important issues. It is a popular program, has a loyal following and I hope, a long future at the ABC.

And next year, Jeff McMullen will host a new televised discussion program for us, “A Difference of Opinion”, that will ensure that on contentious issues of the day, there is opportunity for the full range of opinions and perspectives to be heard.

Perhaps Media Watch does deal in what Mark Scott would now call “opinion”. It certainly compares the work of reporters to an idealistic notion of good journalism. It is hard to imagine any example it raises which would survive the ABC’s editorial guidelines, even for internal programs.

But it puts its views directly next to the evidence, and adds more detail online. It judges, but we always know why, and it already asks its victims to defend themselves. Usually they just apologise and try to shift responsibility.

This is a sour note, on a show the ABC should defend as the public expression of the values it defends - and the only significant public commentary on the wash of lies, half truths, distortions, smears and bullying that passes for so much of our journalism.

Scott also made an interesting concession about a Four Corners episode:

Where there actually is bias in an individual story, it is often easy to detect. But at times, there are matters of tone - how a story is framed, issues to do with language and inflection that can convey a message beyond words.

It was the criteria used by ACMA - the Australian Communications and Media Authority - to bring a finding of against an ABC program in July. In the story, the right people were spoken to, all views were expressed, but ACMA found “the cumulative impact of the instances of subjective and emotive language over the course of the program was the principal reason that the program was not impartial”. I can understand how they reached that finding.

Scott could have added a few more facts about the program and the label of bias he used. In fact, the lack of these enveloping facts could be said to constitute the kind of deceptive reporting that both the old and new guidelines object to.

The program is the Lords of the Forest episode, about which the forestry industry brought 62 complaints to ACMA. Every single objection about balance, errors of fact, choice of interviewee, use of evidence, was refuted. ACMA made just two adverse findings. That the ABC review its notion of “timely” in relation to complaints, and that:

In the program, (which was 45 minutes in duration), the reporter uses emotive language such as “aggressive forest policy”, “voracious appetite for timber”, “indiscriminate blades of the woodchipper”, “turning forest giants into woodchips”…

… In this case, ACMA considers that in many instances, the program’s tone and choice of language was emotive and carried negative connotations against the forest industry.

The ABC argued that the language was either colourful but accurate, or reflected the pictures, or conveyed “the sensation of being on location”. Still, ACMA said the ABC “did not make every reasonable effort to ensure that the program was impartial”.

Bit tough really, when the ABC is trying to be punchy and lively and score some decent ratings.

Remember what Paul Keating said?

“…the new whispered word balance, which decoded means - let’s hear more from us.”

Looking for citations of Media Watch, I found an editorial in Quadrant which embodies so much of the paranoid thinking which underlies the reactionary critique of Australian media. It is not just the ABC they believe is evil - try the whole kit and kaboodle.