The ABC's centre of gravity

There can be little doubt that things have improved at the ABC since the appointment of Mark Scott as Managing Director and the appointment of Maurice Newman as Chairman. A new broom has swept aside some of the egregiously obvious problems of bias and a more professional approach has supervened.

There have been new programs that increase debate, including the ill-fated, experimental Difference of Opinion to be replaced with a new Q and A program, based on the lively and controversial BBC Question Time. Media Watch is not as politically partisan to one side of politics. Paul Chadwick has been appointed as Director of Editorial Policies to try and ensure that the ABC fulfils its statutory obligations under the ABC Act to be accurate and impartial. In terms of balance and fairmindedness, Middle East correspondents Matt Brown and David Hardacre are marked improvements from the days of Tim Palmer and Peter Cave.

For anybody who believes that the taxpayer funded broadcaster needs to be impartial and accurate, balanced and fair, this is all to the good.

The two major issues for the ABC are those of bias and genuine diversity. The culture of the ABC is clearly left of centre. Bias has not been so much party political as cultural. It is often not deliberate but bespeaks taken-for-granted assumptions, mind-sets that are far from the concerns of the mainstream Australia that pays for the ABC and which in return the ABC is supposed to serve and be fair to in its range and content.

It is not the job of the taxpayer funded national broadcaster to act as a counterweight to other media or mainstream ideologies perceived to be too right wing by a staff whose centre of gravity is way to the left.

Why is it that the only intentionally liberal/conservative program on Radio National is titled Counterpoint? It is a counterpoint to a way of thinking that dominates the culture of the ABC in the taken-for-granted assumptions of the mentalities of the “people-like-us” who broadcast to other “people-like-us”. I think these recent observations by British journalist Nick Cohen about how things have changed in British cultural institutions is relevant to the ABC:

A contact at the BBC says that when the workers were the repository of radical liberal hopes in the Sixties, his predecessors encouraged working-class writers and directors. Now women and members of ethnic minorities have unparalleled opportunities, and that is a welcome advance, but the beneficiaries of the new order are always from the upper middle class. In the name of diversity, everyone is the same.

High cultural institutions that once dreamt of a proletarian uprising now treat the white working class as racists or squares. As Michael Collins, a rare modern example of a working-class intellectual, put it in The Likes of Us: “The vision of a multi-cultural Utopia needed its common enemy, and it was increasingly the tribe that played a major role in previous Utopian fantasies.” (The Observer, March 21, 2008.)

This noticeably homogenous class of inner city, tertiary educated social professionals, often referred to as the “chattering classes”, has an identity that developed together with mass tertiary education. While the old left emphasised economic reforms to help the working class, the new class focused on issues such as refugees, multiculturalism, reconciliation, civil liberties, and so on.

This new class of social professionals includes teachers, academics, public servants and welfare workers who adopt distinct ideological positions and values that serve as social markers for the new class. The “knowledge-class”, which includes ABC journalists, is an important segment within the new educated class who have more distinct values that increasingly set them apart from business and the general community.

I mention this not because I think that the ABC has no diversity at all, but because it’s a trend embedded within the institutional culture that will take a “long march” to reverse, this time in the opposite direction towards the centre. It’s a march that has begun from the top but needs to infuse its way to the bottom.

A recent Four Corners program, “Dangerous Ground”, broadcast on March 10, 2008, illustrates some of these issues. The program began with problems about setting up an Islamic school in Camden. Those against a Muslim school being set up are described in primarily racist terms. In the next suburb, according to the blurb, “Aussie-born sons of the Middle East bitterly complain of being treated like enemies in their own country. Now some community leaders”, the program blurb continues, “are warning of a nasty backlash due to the hostility that young men like these feel is aimed against them”.

The program is concerned that “counter-terrorism and security could actually be increasing the threat of breeding home grown terrorists. Erring on the side of aggression - just to be on the "safe" side - can radicalise and alienate the people who are targeted, analysts tell Four Corners."

An expert suggests that radicalisation occurs because of “young people feeling under siege from police and wider public. His fear is this could morph into an agenda for violent change”, Four Corners asserts. And finally, Four Corners suggests, “defeating terrorism presents not just a policing issue but also a challenge to core community values of pluralism and tolerance”.

No mention of Sydney Muslim cleric Taj Din al-Hilali and those more extreme than him or the impact of Muslim fundamentalism and propaganda, or the role played by police and security forces in protecting us from Muslim extremism. The only actors of any consequence for Four Corners are those who buy the narrative that the causes of Muslim extremism lie in the west. It is a problem of criminality, law-enforcement, poverty, and racist behaviour towards suspects of Middle Eastern appearance.

Of course there are legitimate issues here to debate but I am pointing to the one-sided narrative that suffuses this program and others, which does not take Muslim extremism seriously in its own right, but mainly as due to its exacerbation by us.

The ABC is not unique here. Consider the following comments about the BBC:

The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias, Andrew Marr, political pundit and BBC Political Editor 2000-2005, The Daily Mail, October 21, 2006.

It's not a conspiracy. It's visceral. They think they are on the middle ground, Jeff Randall, former BBC Business Editor, in The Observer, January 15, 2006.

Randall further commented on this in The Guardian (September 15, 2007), Randall said:

I think there's a streak of hypocrisy at the BBC. I said it when I was there: its definition of impartiality or the middle ground is not how many of us see it. That's why I'm contemptuous.

There is a liberal consensus. The BBC denies this but Andy Marr - who most people think is part of that liberal consensus - came out and said it. So it's not just right-of-centre people. When you're there, you can feel it, you can smell it, you can almost touch it.

In June 2007, a report commissioned by the BBC concluded that it failed to promote proper debate on major political issues, particularly single-issue causes, such as climate change and poverty, because of its staff’s inherent liberal culture. The report concludes that they should be more willing to challenge their beliefs, concluding, “There is a tendency to ‘group think’ with too many staff inhabiting a shared space and comfort zone”. Executives admitted at a 2006 staff impartiality seminar that “they would broadcast images of the Bible being thrown away but not the Koran, in case Muslims were offended” (“BBC Report finds bias within corporation”, The Telegraph, June 18, 2007).

Former New Statesman editor, John Lloyd observed, “The reflexes of the BBC, and of most broadcasters, are culturally and politically on the liberal-left, reflecting the leanings of the humanities-educated intelligensia in most states” (cited in, “Can We Trust the BBC?” by Robin Aitken, Contiunuum, 2007, p194).

One could easily substitute “ABC” for “BBC” in all this. It all goes to the issue of culture. That the Labor Party and the Liberal Party receive similar treatment on the ABC only demonstrates that there may not be cultural bias towards one mainstream party rather than the other. It is true that the ABC has criticised both sides over the years, but that may be because they are cultural liberals who are to the left of both the major parties, in the direction of the Greens.

The ALP has been the victim of the ABC while in government. During the first Gulf War in 1991, the ABC employed Dr Robert Springborg, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Macquarie University, as its expert commentator for The Gulf Report. In an article in the Melbourne Sun, Springborg had equated the modes of government of Saddam Hussein and Bob Hawke. Hawke’s decision to send ships to the Gulf was “every bit as much of a one-man show as is the country we may be fighting”. Hawke denounced the ABC’s coverage of the Gulf War as “loaded, biased and disgraceful” (Ken Inglis, Whose ABC?, p229).

Eleven years of the Howard government, a basically bipartisan Estimates critique in the Senate, and an ABC Board comprising conservative and centrist members has made some difference to all this. The much-mooted number of ideologically conservative members have not translated into a conservative agenda for the ABC. Nor has it impacted on the visceral culture of many among the staff. But the Board and the Senate Estimates hearings have made for more accountability for the public corporation to adhere to its charter and be more fair and balanced and not advocate for politically correct causes. These necessary changes have had to come from the top leadership down, so entrenched has the institutional culture been.

However, I am pleased to note that this culture does not dominate all parts of the ABC. In News and Current Affairs, PM is fair, balanced, impartial and very professional. I think that Lateline casts a wide net and is generally fair and balanced, as is The World Today. The ABC should not advocate causes left, right or politically correct but should be a repository for a genuine diversity of views in addition to being accurate and impartial.

If the ABC Board takes action on these issues, it is not “interfering” with the ABC but doing its job as required by the ABC Act on behalf of the taxpayers of Australia. Almost every organisation is run by a Board that leads and oversees the activities of that organisation. At least in the world as we know it, they are not run by workers’ collectives.

The ABC Act (1.a.i) obliges the ABC to broadcast “programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of, the Australian community”. The ABC Board has a vital statutory role here.

The ABC Act (8.1c) says “it is the duty of the Board … to ensure that the gathering and presentation by the Corporation of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism”. Genuine diversity at the ABC, reflecting a wide range of views and subject matter in line with the diversity of the Australian population, together with making certain that high journalistic standards are kept to are tasks that the ABC Board has a clear duty to perform effectively. As Tony Wedgwood Benn, British Labor Minister of Technology, put it in 1969: “Broadcasting [is] too important to be left to the broadcasters”.

I think there has been more recognition of problems and potential problems in relation to political bias, culture and genuine diversity at the ABC recently, and that the chairman and managing director deserve to be commended on progress in a positive direction. However, I think that the root cause of the problem is the culture and I am afraid that the reverse long march through this institution still has a long way to go.